| Subscribe via RSS

First steps

The most important thing to remember: It will take many, many listens before you understand a classical piece in the same way that you do popular music. When you’re just starting out you should be aiming to listen to a piece all the way through around six or seven times before you start to make any sense of it. Don’t be disheartened - the reward will be more than worth it.

  1. Select some music - Clearly, the first thing you need is a piece to listen to. There are several approaches to take. Some people will like the idea of choosing something they are already familiar with, such as Beethoven 5 (da,da,da,dum) or 9 (the Ode to Joy). You might instead decide to read up on the characteristics of certain periods or composers (Page coming soon!) and choose a recommended piece. In general it’s a good idea not to try something really difficult (like the atonalists or minimalists) because you’ll probably just be horribly put off classical music for another five years. A good choice would be a solid romantic (not in the sense of gooey and girly, but in the classical music era sense) symphony, for example Beethoven 7, or Mendelssohn 4, or Tchaikovsky 6.
  2. Choose your recording - Once you decide on your piece, you need to get hold of it. Get a good performance. If it’s a horrible performance it’ll be roughly equivalent to listening to a popular piece over bad radio reception, with the equalizer settings constantly changing in random and horrible ways. Read reviews before you buy. (I get all of my CD’s used on Amazon, which has a good user review base) There are a lot of excellent recordings, and price does not necessarily imply quality. One of the cheapest labels, Naxos, is also one of the consistently quality ones.
  3. Listen (a lot) and learn (a little) - Now that you have your recording, listen to it endlessly - at work, on your iPod while walking, in the shower, everywhere. Listen to it six or seven times before even considering giving up your new career as a classical music connoisseur. Listen to it all the way through, no cheating - it’s a journey and the movements need to be heard in that order. Read the liner notes if you have them, if you don’t (for example, if you’re listening on iTunes) google for the name of the piece along with “program notes” which should give you examples of the pamphlets they hand out at concerts for the piece. These might go into way too much detail for you with crap like: “…he modulates to the subdominant in the exposition…” but don’t stress over these parts. Just get a feel for what kind of emotions the composer is conveying, and maybe what was going on in his life when he wrote it.
  4. Gather your thoughts - Now that you’ve listened to the whole piece through seven times you’ve probably begun to understand the prominent melodies, hopefully this kind of came as a surprise. You might have noticed that instead of meandering around and doing lots of pretty-pretty stuff which is kind of what most people expect, the music actually deliberately goes somewhere, and tends to return back to where it started. You also might notice that these long, complicated sounding movements actually just contain two big, important melodies.
  5. Listen more selectively - Probably the tunes are finally sticking in your head in the same way that popular pieces do. Weren’t expecting that, were ya? You might well think that one movement is good, but you don’t really get the others so much. That’s fine, listen to that one movement on it’s own a few times. Then try listening to the whole thing through again. You’ll probably start to like the bits you didn’t like before more, once your head and heart warm up to the style.
  6. If it sucks (but it won’t), try again - If you really can’t stand it, it if just sounds cheesy or predictable - try it once more, but with a different era. If you chose something romantic (Beethoven, Tchaikovsky, Mendelssohn, for example), try Bach instead, or Stravinsky. I’ve got some descriptions of the different composer’s styles so that you can get a bit more guidance.

Congratulations! You’re well on your way to being a classicalholic. Hmm… does that sound lame? I can’t tell, it’s too late at night and I had a huge dinner of hot-pot at my supervisors house so my brain don’t work proper.