Classical Convert

Initial Steps In Understanding A New Piece

One of the things I always try and emphasize to people unfamiliar with classical music is the long, long process of getting to grips with a piece. I don’t know if everybody experiences this, but for me it takes significantly longer to “understand” even just one movement of a symphony, compared to music of other genres. I really have to slog away at a piece, listening many times over, before it starts to make sense. I think it’s a combination both of the extended length, and of the subtleties and complexities of the form.

While introspecting into the appreciation of my latest classical insinuations, I’ve been trying to identify some of the stages of understanding in the acclimatization process.

One of the most important milestones is becoming familiar enough with the piece that you can routinely identify where you are in the music. That is, having a vague awareness of all the little musical episodes, and approximately which order they come in. Initially when listening through a piece there are particularly strong melodies or musical textures which I can latch on to without really knowing anything about the piece. After a few listens I start to get a feeling for the musical structures around these catches, and anticipate them. For me this is stage one of understanding a piece. It’s somewhere around this point when I’ll be able to whistle a few snippets of the melodies.

However, at this stage most of the rest of the music sounds sort of blurred. I hear the music as a string of the standout sections mentioned above, connected together by material which is confused and not very interesting. The next stage of understanding is when melodies start magically popping out of these mires, when instead of a jumble of instruments playing pleasant but pointless interconnecting bridges, these sections start to crystallize into understandable forms. Each instrument seems to pull apart from the others, and melodic strands are illuminated like dewed gossamer. I think that’s stage two.

The rest of my stages will have to wait for some more introspection.

Tags: beginners, classical music, how, listening, movement, music, understanding

A Short Review of Naxos Radio

Well, I caved into yet another temptation (that’s the only way to deal with them, don’t you know) and spent the ever so princely sum of $20 for one years worth of access to naxosradio. It’s a classical music streaming service from, unsurprisingly, naxos, the much beloved, progressive and (best of all) cheap classical music label. While I have a few gripes about it, I basically love it. I’ll try and explain why:

The Good

• Variety - 81 channels of classical music goodness, each targeted toward a specific (and in some cases slightly arbitrary and esoteric) subgenre: British music, 20th century orchestral, romantic chamber music, etc.
• Quality - It’s streamed at 64Kbps which sounds very decent with my headphones at work (you can try it out for free to hear what the quality is like if you think 64Kbps sounds too low for you, you might be pleasantly surprised). It definitely sounds better then standard FM.
• Continuity - They play one CD from their catalog after another, no advertising, no talking. It makes for a very different experience from a regular radio station because you get to hear several meaty pieces from one composer, instead of multiple small-scale pieces from lots of different ones. This is great for getting to know each one well - especially valuable when you are trying to identify new composers that you like.
• Variety… again - There are a lot of composers on there who I had never heard of, particularly the extremely modern ones. Naxos is good at that. If you are especially interested in the up-and-coming classical heroes-to-be, this is a real bonus. Today I discovered Balada.

The Bad

• Media player - You need bloody windows media player to use it, which means I’m completely screwed at home, where I exclusively use Linux. I know this affects a minority of users, but it’s very frustrating and offputting for those of us who do use it.
• No skipping - You are stuck with their streams, just like a radio station. If you notice that they just played a CD you really wanted to hear, well, tough luck. Related to this is the fact that you can’t pause the stream, so if you need to run off somewhere you’re not gonna be able to pick it up again later.
• Dodgy interface - Now this is something which they could fix relatively easily. When you first start listening to a channel you get a nice window which shows the playlist with the current track highlighted. However, as the tracks change, the highlighting does not update. You have to click on an “update” link (which is weirdly slow), and then scroll down through the playlist again. Euggh.
• No liner notes - I have a real penchant for these. It’d be awesome if you could just click somewhere on the interface and it’d give you a commentary on the piece. It would be really great for beginners. You could even have different levels of notes, from a brief overview to a detailed commentary on the musical structure. Oh, I can dream. (Edit: actually, there are liner notes, you just have to get them in a roundabout way)

The Ugly

Oh come on, you weren’t expecting me to pull that hackneyed reviewing trick were you?

The Conclusioney

Totally worth it if you are around a computer for long periods of the day, and want to explore all kinds of composers you didn’t know existed, or learn the more famous pieces by the more famous guys in more depth. It’s way better than the regular radio - mostly due to hearing 60 minutes of an individual composer at a time, instead of mostly 10-15 minute pieces. Highly recommended!