I was thinking about my post yesterday on the massive amount of classical music to sample and I don’t think I conveyed what I originally wished to. Yes, there are thousands of hours of listening in the genre of classical music. But isn’t there also for rock? For jazz? For country, and just about any other fairly-well established musical taste? What exactly was my point in the post yesterday?
There’s no way to measure how many hours of listening there is for any genre – indeed, it’s probably impossible to satisfactorily define any particular genre. I used ‘classical music’ to encompass baroque, classical, romantic, and modern instrumental orchestral music, as well as opera and other various forms of vocal music. That’s a huge umbrella. Equally huge would be all the numerous styles covered under ‘jazz’ and ‘rock’ and other genres of music.
So, let’s stay away from the pure quantitative. That’s an impossible route to go, and yesterday I talked about that before my mind really understood where it wanted to go. What I did want to say, I think, is that I compare classical music to a vast, unexplored and open frontier.
In 21st century America we are exposed to a lot of music. Day to day, we mostly hear stuff that falls into the rock-hiphop-country umbrella, sometimes jazz, and occasionally, in movies particularly, classical. Advertising, I’ve noticed, tends to use a lot of classical music, at least for producers that want to push a “sophisticated” or “upper-end” vibe. On the whole I don’t think my culture is really exposed substantially to classical music. And that’s what really excited me a little over ten years ago when I made my first forays into the field. The exploration of the unknown.
It’s really quite overwhelming when you decide to truly investigate classical music. See this post on my tips for beginners. Now, the point I want to get across is that it doesn’t end there. It can never really end. There’s so much. There’s five hundred years of music there. There’s at least 180 composers, representing at least two continents and probably two dozen nations, to explore. There’s a whole slew of styles – symphonies, concerti, opera, and choral to name the most obvious. After a decade of getting firmly established in the basics, I could move on and spend a year investigating the works of Dvorak, then the next year the compositions of Sibelius, then Haydn, then Puccini, Verdi, Wagner, Tchaikovsky, etc, etc, for the rest of my life, and never grow bored.
That’s why ‘classical’ music attracts me so.
Oh, and those stuffy-sounding names above are really quite interesting. Tragic, inspirational, crazy, enlightened, those composers run the gamut from intensely shy school teachers to suicidal manic-depressives to master showmen to millionaire wheelers and dealers. Many died young before their promise was fulfilled, many lived colorfully well into their 80s. But more on these men who fascinate me to no end in the next few days …
There’s no way to measure how many hours of listening there is for any genre – indeed, it’s probably impossible to satisfactorily define any particular genre. I used ‘classical music’ to encompass baroque, classical, romantic, and modern instrumental orchestral music, as well as opera and other various forms of vocal music. That’s a huge umbrella. Equally huge would be all the numerous styles covered under ‘jazz’ and ‘rock’ and other genres of music.
So, let’s stay away from the pure quantitative. That’s an impossible route to go, and yesterday I talked about that before my mind really understood where it wanted to go. What I did want to say, I think, is that I compare classical music to a vast, unexplored and open frontier.
In 21st century America we are exposed to a lot of music. Day to day, we mostly hear stuff that falls into the rock-hiphop-country umbrella, sometimes jazz, and occasionally, in movies particularly, classical. Advertising, I’ve noticed, tends to use a lot of classical music, at least for producers that want to push a “sophisticated” or “upper-end” vibe. On the whole I don’t think my culture is really exposed substantially to classical music. And that’s what really excited me a little over ten years ago when I made my first forays into the field. The exploration of the unknown.
It’s really quite overwhelming when you decide to truly investigate classical music. See this post on my tips for beginners. Now, the point I want to get across is that it doesn’t end there. It can never really end. There’s so much. There’s five hundred years of music there. There’s at least 180 composers, representing at least two continents and probably two dozen nations, to explore. There’s a whole slew of styles – symphonies, concerti, opera, and choral to name the most obvious. After a decade of getting firmly established in the basics, I could move on and spend a year investigating the works of Dvorak, then the next year the compositions of Sibelius, then Haydn, then Puccini, Verdi, Wagner, Tchaikovsky, etc, etc, for the rest of my life, and never grow bored.
That’s why ‘classical’ music attracts me so.
Oh, and those stuffy-sounding names above are really quite interesting. Tragic, inspirational, crazy, enlightened, those composers run the gamut from intensely shy school teachers to suicidal manic-depressives to master showmen to millionaire wheelers and dealers. Many died young before their promise was fulfilled, many lived colorfully well into their 80s. But more on these men who fascinate me to no end in the next few days …
No comments:
Post a Comment