Classical Music anyone?
 

Anybody else ever listen to any classical music?

Favorite composer or piece?

I'll take Tchaikovsky.
Shostakovich and Gershwin as runners-up, I think.

We were sort of hoping our son would play the cello but he wants to play the drums.
:o


An album I highly recommend (which, actually, is not Tchaikovsky, Shostakovich, or Gershwin) is Vivaldi's Cello

I liked Tchakovsky a lot when I was younger, but have gravitated to Beethoven more over time among the romantic era composers.

On balance, however, Bach is the master for me. His work transcends conscious perception and connects with something spiritual and mysrtical that is very difficult to articulate.

The other night we went to the SF symphony to hear a program of all Mozart. This was a family oriented production (although unlike us, very few people acutally brought childern, to my surprise; must be a San Francisco thing). A feature of this concert series is that the conductor, Michael Tilson Thomas, talks about each piece beofer it is played in an informal but informative way. At one point he told this very long, involved joke, which was sort of amusing. But the part that I liked was one of the set-up lines. In the joke a musician dies and gets to heaven where he meets St. Peter. He asks St. Peter how all the great compsoers are doing in Heaven. St. Peter says they are doing very well. As an example, He says that Bach is living with his two wives and all his children and that he has taken to compsing 1000 voice fugues. St. Peter then comments that no one else really understands them but God seems to enjoy them quite a bit. The joke goes on to a punchline about Mozart having weekend passes to hell. Not a great joke, but I thouhgt it amusing and insightful that Bach was considered a composer of such quality and complexity that the comment that he might write music that only God would understand and enjoy could bne used as a premise for a joke among serious musicians. Very appropriate from my point of view.

Yes, I love classical music. Zeppelin, AC/DC, CCR, etc.

yo-yo ma. bach.

Hooked on Classics. :)

Favorite composer, at least for now (my favorite anythings seem to change with the seasons): Chopin. Trying to learn Rondo a la Mazur, beautiful piece. Far and away my favorite piano composer.

Also love Rachmaninoff. Piano Concertos 1, 2, 3.

Beethoven's 9th as far as entire symphonies go--but that's hardly a unique pick.

Lately have been loving listening to Tchaikovsky's Violin Concerto, i think it's Opus 35. Love the 3rd movement, listen to it almost daily.

I also really like Aaron Copland, esp Appalachian Spring.

Many, many others but those are current faves.

Percussion is a great instrumental family. :)

I'm officially jealous. They broadcast the San Francisco Symphony out here and it's clearly a world-class group. And I love Tilson-Thomas. All we have is the Oklahoma City Philharmonic which is, well, um...

On the other hand, we have lots of kids at the family concerts!

I'll always be a fan of the Romantic era. But my favorite Bach is probably Brandenburg...

They've got some great videos of Yo-yo Ma on Youtube.

A couple from when he was a little kid. Also the duets with Bobby McFerrin.


Yes, Creedence is good, too!

I'm particularly fond of Debussy ... my wife plays several pieces a lot.

We mostly only listen to classical on the Weekends -radio, itunes internet feeds etc. When I'm working on a design project I often prefer classical to other music.

Somehow, I never have appreciated Mozart very much. Learning the piano sonatas as a kid, I found it a lot of technical fluff. He does write some gorgeous melodies though.

There a lot of pieces that I love. These are the ones that I keep coming back to.
Bach- Goldberg Variations (love the way these evolve from a simple Aria that was originally a teaching piece.) Any of the unaccompained violin or cello partitias. Clean lines, sophisticated form and content, meditatively beautiful.

Beethoven- any of the piano sonatas, esp. the later ones. Also, the Grosse Fugue (string quartet)- talk about hearing Beethoven's inner demons in this one.

Chopin- (esp. the Ballades) the most pianistically friendly composer, I haven't met a pianist who doesn't love to play Chopin.

some Rachmaninoff preludes- though I find him to get a little bombastic sometimes.

love the harmonies in Debussy and Ravel

love the rhythmic energy in Ginastera

more technical fluff
 

Your comment reminds me of the scene in Amadeus where Mozart debuts his opera for his patron:

Emperor Joseph II says, "there are simply too many notes...just cut a few."

And Mozart goes half-postal and replies, "which few did you have in mind?"

Emperor's complaint is really funny, but so true...



As far as technical work goes, I love to see anybody tackle the Paganini violin concerti. It's not even like they're pleasant to listen to... it's just unfathomable to me that anybody can play that many notes at the same time.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gZAdgyTVMHc

Hey now, I am a big fan of Mozart. Which few notes, indeed? At the time and place Mozart was composing most or all of his contemporaries were engaged in wirting works full of cliches such as scale runs to a chrod or arpeggios repeated in different steps, etc. The audience expected, ney, demanded, these types of cliches in their music. THe genius of mozart lies, among other places, in the fact that he could deliver the expected cliches in an unsrupassed artisitc package.

Also, I think one has to put his light opera and popular work (for example the SF Symphony chorus perfromed a canon that was called something like "You Assinine Martin" which was full of very explicit scatological jokes) in a separate category from his concertos , etc., which are all in a different catefogry from his serious opera and liturgical works. His unfinished Requiem Mass is sublimely beautiful and has not one note too many. Similarly, Don Giovanni is also superb and not unduly technical or contrived.

Don't forget, Mozart was a young man, leaving this incredible ouevre without ever reaching the age of 40. Heck, I didn't even quit using 'pull my finger' jokes with my kids until I was older htan that, so who knows what he might have accomplished had he been pernmitted to linger longer in this life?

Sometimes listening to Mozart I get the feeling that he worte some of the things he did becasue he could. No other reason, just becasue he could and no one else could and it was fun and he would have been bored otherwise. He was, musically, that far beyond most everyone else.

Mozart's great.

Nobody's going to try to argue with you about his genius, his compositions, or his body of work as a whole.

And obviously, technical fluff does not apply to all his work, as you delineated.

I don't know if you ever played any instruments, but FarrahWaters and I were (I think) speaking from experience as students...

For me, I would get to these passages and there are so many notes, arpeggios, embellishments, that it felt like it was detracting from the piece, the melody, the phrasing.

Sometimes I wonder if, similar to what you said, he was bored and sort of playing jokes on the rest of us...just to keep himself interested.

Oh sure, now you throw my lack of real keyboard skills in my face. Just joking.

I play a little keyboards but I could never manage anyhting by Mozart. My son, however, is a reasonably talented pianist and has studied numerous pieces by Mozart and CHopin and Rachmaninoff, etc. I rarely tired of hearing Mozart while he was working on them, but sometimes Rachmaninoff got a little tedious, to be honest.

I don't think he was playing jokes on us, I think he was keeping himself happy; we were incidental. I have noticed that most kids, especially boys, that study the paino somewhat seriously love to play the fast stuff. The faster the better. It is a form of youthful exuberance. I think Mozart may have been like that. His music fairly screams youthful exuberance. I will certainly not tell you your opinion is incorrect, but only that I don't share it with respect to the large majority of Mozart's music.

I like Handel and Vivaldi a lot.

What about opera? I've always loved Orff's "Carmina Burana". I may be Orff's only fan. Everyone else I mention it to says "ewww, you mean that song from the exorcist?"

Well if your COMPUTER keyboarding skills are any indication...

Kidding! kidding! Well, mostly. :)

You're ahead of me on the piano, anyway. I can't play at all. I used to pretend to play viola, but that was a long time ago, in a land far far away...

My son might be joining the Mozart camp. His very first favorite piece was the overture to Marriage of Figaro.

I'll do my best to get him back to the Russians, though.


I can't believe even your kids get to see the SFS. That's just not fair.

Carmina Burana rocks.

Especially if you translate the Latin. It sounds all spiritual but really it's about beer and women.

Oh, and if you like Vivaldi, you HAVE to have Vivaldi's Cello CD. Absolutely stunning.

I've often wondered how much classical music was inspired by beer and women.

I know, my typing is horrible and I refuse to bug the IS people to let me download the spellchecker. Your assessment is about right, however, my keyboard accuracy, whether a piano or a computer, is apporximate at best.

Ah, to be young and pretentious again. ;) I remember in my youth listening to Arthur Rubenstein albums and going to movies with subtitles. It was quite a relief when I reached the age when it was safe to seek out entertainment I enjoyed, rather than entertainment I was supposed to enjoy.

I enjoy this opera as well.

I learned to enjoy all the operas written by Vincenzo Bellini because of serving a mission in Sicily. Bellini is from Catania, Sicily, Italy and is 2nd in popularity there to only the Pope. He's considered a master of the Bel Canto opera. (I'm not sure what that means in the musical sense, but it's Italian for "beautiful singing".)

As for composers, my favorite symphony is Dvorak's New World Symphony.

I pretty much love anything that Franz Liszt has written, especially Liebesträume No. 3, Hungarian March to the Assault and, of course, Hungairan Rhapsody #2, which we all know and love from Bugs Bunny cartoons.

Grieg has a lot good stuff too. "In the Hall of the Mountain King" rocks. He also looks a lot like Mark Twain, so he has that going for him.

Our oldest daughter plays the viola. It cost me a rather significant amount of money to pay for her lessons - mostly because her teacher plays in the Utah Symphony but gives us a break because she is a neighbor of my in-laws - but I feel it's money well spent because she really enjoys it and has enough talent that her teacher recognizes, as the girl had to audition in order to be a student.

As for family entertainment, the Utah Symphony has what is called "Casual Thursdays" where you can show up in shorts and a tee shirt if you want and catch a performance. Lots of families take advantage of this. It's nice to not have some stuffed shirt (blouse really, as it's usuall some blue-haired older woman) who believes kids should not be there - just because the baby projectile vomited all over her backside. But that's a story for another post.

Hey, if you daughter has any talent in the viola, you might be able to make your money back, playing in a string quartet in weddings and so forth. A good viola player is very hard to find.

On the other hand, I guess you live in Utah. Maybe Mormons are too cheap to pay for a string quartet at their wedding. :)

I take offense at this. The performers I like are way more pretentious than Arthur Rubenstein.

Add me to the list of Vivaldi fans. I also like Beethoven (4, 5, and 9 especially), Mahler's fifth (great to write to), Mendelssohn, Bach, Mozart.

I have some recordings of the "dark" stuff, like Carmina Burana and Bizet, but I haven't listened to them in a long time. Maybe I'll break them out today. It's cold and the leaves are swirling off the trees.

I have to echo Farrah here.

Good viola players are IMPOSSIBLE to come by. Most are converted violinists.

If she keeps it up, she'll have a nice college scholarship and immediate job offers.

Yay for the young violist!!!

LOL! I know I am. ;)

My father-in-law paid for a string quartet at our reception. Of course, ours is the only reception at which I ever remember a quartet being there.

That's my understanding as well. As long as she enjoys it, I'm all for her playing as long as she wants. And it never hurts that there is a good chance for me not having to pay for school.

It takes a lot of work to be as cheap as I am. :)

Geeze, this thread reminds me of just another intellectual pursuit I don't have time to pursue.

Vivaldi is very nice; easy to listen to and typically wonderful baroque melodies. But to me he seems like the appetizer before the main course. We listen ot the four seasons and a few other vivaldi works at home a lot becasue the kids like many of the themes. But he never quite rises to the level of challenge and interest, for me, that Bach's best work does.

This is all subjective, of course, as Vivaldi's work has held well over time, so no one can go wrong listening to him.

As a music idiot, knowing nothing more than Zepplin, BTO, CCR, Beattles and a few others, are these composers considered much by you afficianados?

I like Mozart, even though to an outsider his music appears cluttered.

I like Tchaikowsky, the one with the cannons.

Debussy seems cool, but I have no idea why.

Brahms is nice and Bach is very German.

Handel? Christmas time seems to be a must.

There were some Frenchmen, but I purposefully forgot the names. There, unless Van Halen counts, I've exhausted the lexicography of my virtually unlimited knowledge of classical music.

Although, if somebody explained classical music to me in an intellectual format, together with the progressions and their reason for being, it is difficult for me to become interested in it, unless I'm sitting in Paris or Vienna.

How does one acquire the requisite knowledge of the musical objectives of classical music in short order?

Classical Music for Dummies. ;)

But seriously, my problem is I love classical music (I love all music, well except for country) and I listen to it all the time--not because I want to be able to participate in conversations like this one, but because I find it to be one of the greatest forms of artistic expression ever. That said, I don't know a whole lot about who wrote what and when, and what it's called. I can hum right along with a lot of classical stuff, but couldn't tell you which opus it is or in many cases who wrote it. The only reason I know any of that stuff is because either I have listened to it on my computer or on Dish enough (where the labels accompany what you are hearing) or because I play/have played it.

There's so much out there, and so many things to learn about the different time periods, composition styles, biographical information, etc that I'm usually just content to listen/play and enjoy.

Is classical music an intellectual argument, a political argument, a feel good expression, an exploration of sound, what is it?

It seems in some discussion long ago that certain classicists established a criteria and then others spent time tearing them down, but I know little of music theory and its execution.

I thought certain keys are meant to convey a certain ambiance, but perhaps not.

The one with the cannons is 1812. You'd probably also like Marche Slave.

The Frenchman might be Saint-Saens..

Incidentally, even "serious" music academicians recognize the genius of John Lennon. Most university schools of music even offer courses on his compositions now...

As far as how to acquire the background/academic knowledge. I have no idea, most of us just suffered at our parents' insistence that we learn something musical, and now we get to pretend like we know what we're talking about...

Personally, I spend about 90% of my time listening to classic rock. But I will always love classical music and wish that I had the talent/discipline to be performing with a symphony somewhere.

Oh I hate to be picky, but it is the "1812 Overture." For some reason, this piece is almost always paired with "Marche Slave" on recordings, at least back in the day, lathough nowadays you are as likely to see it with the nutcracker suite as naything (which I don't get; a ballet with a celebration of a victory in war? ANything to sell a cd, I suppose).

As to the French guy, I would agree that it is probabyl Saint-Saens. Not too many other French guys get much push here. In fact, right now I can't think of any, but I know there are some.

I agree that Lennon (as well as Lenin, but that is another category) had a certain genius, but I disagree that many music academicians would put his body of work anywhere near the category of great music like Bach or Mozart, etc. Lennon, IMobvioulsyNsoHO, was noteworthy for his creative approach to pop music, his combination of meter, instruments, etc., and some very catchy tunes while avoiding the sappy lyricism of McCartney (but also probably not achieving the same level of success with melody) but he did not advance the form or content of music in any truly significant way and, after all, was simply writing pop tunes. I think most schools "study" the Beatles for the same reason they "study" other facets of pop culture, becasue it puts butts in the seats, generates some PR and keeps people supporting their departments. Geez, am I becoimng a grouchy old fart or what?

Don't misunderstand; I love the Beatles and have defended them many times, but they ain't Beethoven.

As to Arch's question, I have no idea how to learn this stuff. I am not even sure how I did. I guess I really didn't so my opinions should be taken with little seriousness.

Arch asks if music is intellectual, political, emotional, sonic or something else. The answer is an unequivocal Yes. It is all those. Understanding how or why is part of the fun of learning more abotu it, as well. Most of all, however, it should be enjoyed. As wiht all things, the more you learn about it the more of it you will enjoy. So, enjoy!

So, would it be thread-jacking to ask what all you classical music lovers consider to be your favorite movie featuring classical music?

A couple of mine:

"Together" is a great movie about a young violin prodigy and his teacher. Highly recommended if you like Tchaikovsky's Violin Concerto in D, Opus 35 as much as I do. It's a Chinese film, watch it with subtitles.
http://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/together/about.php

Shine--if you haven't seen this movie yet and you claim to like classical music, then you're missing out.

Those are probably my top two.

Yay! Thread-jacking! Please do!

Now we'd have to know if you mean a regular movie that uses classical music in its soundtrack...or just a movie (like Amadeus) about music?

In the case of the latter, I'll take Red Violin. Except the music is actually newly composed "classical' music. Haunting, too.

In the case of the former, there's the classic scene from 2001 Space Odyssey set to the Blue Danube Waltz. I'll have to think on what my actual favorite is, though...

My favorite use of classical music in a movie is the climactic scene in Man Facing SouthEast (or maybe it was SouthWest) which was a foreign film (brazilian perhaps? It is a pretty old film) involving a guy at an insane asylum who claims he is from another planet and eventually convinces the other asylum 'residents' that he is and even causes some of this doctors to wonder, even though he looks normal and really does nothing unsual. at the end there is a scene choreographed to the 'Ode to Joy' portion of Beethoven's 9th which is utterly joyful and fantastic and liberating. You have to see it to get it.

Ironically, another of my favorite moments is from "Immortal Beloved" where a young Beethoven runs to a local pond to attempot to escape and abusive home and as he floats in the pond beneath a starry sky with the stars reflected in the pond the soundtrack plays the Ode to Joy. In general that is a great movie using Beethoven's music very well.

Amadeus is very good, too, as long as you realize that it is primarily fiction and, if you are of a certain age, as long as you can get past the fact the Pinto is supposed to be Mozart.


Edit:

Here is a link for the first movie: http://us.imdb.com/title/tt0091214/

Of course it's the 1812 OVERTURE....
Are you trying to be difficult???
:)

And yes, teaching classes on the Beatles is absolutely about increasing enrollment in music history classes. Nobody said they were Beethoven. BUT, if you listen to later Beatles...They were incorporating string quartets (beginning with Eleanor Rigby) when the Beach Boys were singing about surfboards.

But then, on the other hand, even Chumbawamba incorporated Clake's Trumpet Voluntary into Tubthumping, so maybe there's not so much to that kind of thing after all...

Ok, point taken, i was being too difficult.

The Beatles were very innnovative, but really only when compared to the big bopper or buddy holly. Moreover, take it a little easy on the BEach Boys, Maybe few illustrate the fine line between genius and insanity as well as Brian Wilson who, as he sank into the despair of a drug induced depression that would not leave until decades had passed and then at a terrible price to his menatl health, managed to prodcue a truly remarkable album in Pet Sounds. Good Vibrations compares very well to anything the Beatles did. Also, many of the innovations that the beatles employed, such as the use of strings, were assists to one degree opr another, from George Martin, their prodcuer.

I get knocked down . . . I like CHumbawumba.