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7 Reasons Nerds Should Listen to Classical Music

I have a sort of grandish dream, which is, that all of this wonderful communication potential the internet gives us will lead to an upswing in the popularity of classical music, due to what I think is an incredibly ripe - but untapped - audience.

This sleeping crowd of not-quite-yet classical music enthusiasts is the staggeringly huge population of educated, technology-obsessed young people (as the lingo goes, I guess) who push the bleeding edge of the online world: the nerd.

We’re (yes we, as a physics grad student I’m way, way up there on the nerd scale) the perfect new audience. Here’s why:

  1. We love discovering and understanding how things are put together. Classical music is a perfect genre for this - each piece is written in one of many basically standardized forms, sonata form, trios, rondos, theme and variations, and so on. However, these forms are stretched and contorted and copied and pasted into very different beasts by each composer. Understanding what they’ve done and why is, well, a lot of fun.
  2. We like classifying stuff. Kind of related to the first point this, but it goes way further than just the particular form a movement is in. Each piece can be a sonata, or symphony, or concerto, or oratorio, or something else entirely. Each composer’s output is indexed with opus numbers (or something else if they’re extra special) and each piece has it’s own home key. Understanding what all this really meant and referred to was a huge part of the experience for me.
  3. We love hearing new music. One of the reasons that online music sharing has taken off to such a magnificent extent is the innate attraction we seem to have to music. On pretty much any web-forum you’ll find dozens of threads devoted to people trying to find new music recommendations based on their current tastes, and hundreds of responses to those requests from people eager to spread their favorite groups to others. We are very open to hearing new pieces.
  4. We love intellectual stimulation. Nerds are the kind of people who will do math for fun, because it’s intellectually satisfying. This is an area in which classical music kicks arse, compared to most popular stuff. A symphony is a story. You can listen to it as background music (which is probably what most non-classical people do when they hear classical) or you can try and follow it’s themes and motivation all the way through. While this is blindingly hard at first it’s amazingly satisfying after you listen to a piece ten times and suddenly it jumps out at you. It’s a very similar feeling to when you finally get a physics or math proof.
  5. We already have some exposure to classical. I often see posts on classical boards in which people will refer to music which thy really like from the soundtrack of a computer game. Symphonic scores are also very prevalent in films disproportionately popular in the online world, such as the Lord of the Rings trilogy, all of which are sneakily leading people toward the world of classical music.
  6. We like having long and detailed discussions/arguments about stuff. Particularly when there is adequate potential to show off knowledge about arcane topics. Classical music is hugely fertile ground for this. We can argue about whether Beethoven’s Op.130 string quartet is better with or without the Grosse Fugue as the last movement, or why on earth there are all those enigmatic Wagner quotes at the end of Shostakovich’s 15th symphony, or… well, you get the idea.
  7. We like open source stuff. You can walk into a music library and pull out a full orchestral copy of any of Beethoven’s (or anyone elses) symphonies. You can follow along while listening and discover all kinds of subtleties in the piece, or you can write your own software to analyze it or synthesize it. Anyone can put on a performance of a piece, and sell it, without fear of getting their asses sued off. In fact, one of the most satisfying things about classical music is being able to hear many different interpretations of a piece.

That’s all I can think of right now (especially since my supervisor is sitting just opposite at me and I need to get back into the optics room before she asks what I’m doing…) but I bet there are others. I’d love to hear more suggestions.