Post a controversial opinion

bach rules. he always will kinda.

this is gonna sound like the whole *you really have to SEE the actual painting in front of you* kinda thing from up top, but REALLY listening to music is something a lot of people feel uncomfortable doing. music is very utilitarian for most people and they like to do something else when its playing. but just sitting with your eyes closed or staring at the ceiling and listening to music is one way to learn how to appreciate classical music. actually playing an instrument is probably the best way. but its such a rewarding experience to follow a symphony or opera and listen to everything that's happening as it happens. with no distractions. its the best way to learn. and it involves just sitting there so its not too taxing. i taught myself to love classical music. but you have to want to put in the effort. which, i think we can agree, not a whole lot of people want to do. or not a whole lot of people feel like it's an important thing to do.

not that there is anything wrong with doing the dishes and listening to classical music. its a great thing to have around you. but even the old warhorses aren't wallpaper. they really reward deep listening.

all this thinking about music, just realized I shifted in my chair until I'm sitting on the front edge like I'm back in orchestra

I created a playlist of choral pieces I've either performed or heard multiple times that I use as lullaby music for my kids, mostly so that they have repeated exposure to it and imprint upon it as a Thing that is part of their lives. I know this could backfire on me and have them think of choral music as something you fall asleep to but it feels like the best/easiest way to put them in a setting where they are repeatedly saturated with pieces like Tallis's "Lamentations of Jeremiah", Bruckner's "Os justi meditabitur", Bach's "Singet dem Herrn ein neues Lied" and "Jesu, meine Freude", and Martin's "Mass for Double Chorus".

Uses of music, types of listening, endlessly big topics.

In college I took a music appreciation class (yeah I know) and the professor said that she can't stand background music; she physically needs to listen, so if it's on she can't do anything else. So people who think they're doing her a favor by putting music on are actually immobilizing her.

My wife has music on all the time. She can't read or work or sit without something playing; silence freaks her out.

Just about the only activity I can combine with music-listening is driving. Now that I almost never drive, I don't listen to music nearly as much. My main interest in music is playing it.

I think that I'm loosening up a little in how I approach classical. I used to have this presumption that, being musically illiterate, there was no way I was grasping the real substance of what was going on in the music. Of course, that isn't true. The classical music that I care about is made to be enjoyed by an audience of non-musicians, and there are amazingly talented musicians who have done all of the heavy lifting to make it available to be enjoyed. So it really is just a matter of listening and not worrying about having the right response.

jmm otm. It's perfectly acceptable to just let it wash over you if that's what you want to do.

im going to see the cleveland orchestra friday night, it's been at least 15 years since i've been? im excited

Severance Hall
ARTISTS
The Cleveland Orchestra
Vladimir Ashkenazy, conductor
Emanuel Ax, piano
PROGRAM
ELGAR - Serenade in E minor for String Orchestra
BEETHOVEN - Piano Concerto No. 1
ELGAR - Enigma Variations

Cleveland Orchestra is always awesome. We are so lucky to have them here.

marcos, if you're a classical/orchestra/opera fan, Cleveland Institute of Music has TONS of free concerts and recitals: https://www.cim.edu/concerts-events . Their student orchestra also performs at Severance a couple of times a year, always with a great program and their conductor is terrific. And they always do at least one large opera production a year; this year it's "Medea."

i really want to go see an orchestra, i haven't been since college

the thing that prevents me from going to see opera more often is the audiences you'll often find there, tbh

You do get some appalling people but, for the most part, it's much less snobby / elitist than it's perceived to be imo. It doesn't feel as universal as it is in Ukraine or Armenia or wherever but the majority of the audience, at least in the cheaper seats, tends to be relaxed, dressed-down, etc.

Especially in the cheap seats you'll find a lot of local performers more than willing to hip you onto whatever thing they've got going on in the next 3-6 months (at least that's how it works in Boston)

xxp and i just didn't have the ear for it then or something. i saw an undoubtedly dazzling performance of Mozart's Requiem during that time and I just wouldn't/couldn't let it into my heart. now i think, "i would really like to see that again, dammit".

go see andre rieu, he's like david lee roth

Mozart Requiem is super fun IMO. That first fugue is baller, simple enough to track all the parts but complicated enough to start wrong-footing your expectations of where it's going to go, particularly as it winds up to the climax and strolls into the Dies Irae. Plus, the Lacrymosa!

Rhapsody in Blue is better bedroom music than Barry White

Went to Beethoven 9 at Seattle Symphony a couple years ago and that was a hell of an experience.

go see andre rieu, he's like david lee roth

counterpoint: don't go see andre rieu, he's like david lee roth

Philistine comment: I generally don't like opera in English, because when you understand the words, you notice that they're often pretty dippy. In German or Italian or whatever I can more readily just hear the singing as musical parts.

This is true of all music with comprehensible lyrics, and is why I mostly listen to death metal or music in languages I don't speak. Or instrumental music.

wrong-footing your expectations of where it's going to go

Every few years I try to explain this concept to my wife and she just blinks blankly at me and says "whatever." She has loved music all her life, owns a thousand CDs, has written record reviews and worked in college radio and goes to loads of indie rock concerts and and and.

But if I start talking resolution or dissonance or key changes it just turns into Charlie Brownish whah whah whah wha wha wha. She hates classical music for what I suspect are reasons around cultural packaging. She says she doesn't get it, feels "judged" by it, thinks it isn't for her. She says she knows it's an irrational reaction but it is visceral and pretty much indelible. The only instrumental music she likes is Copland and the "Requiem for a Dream" soundtrack.

synthesis: i love David Lee Roth, and i don't want to watch him lead an orchestra

Mozart Requiem absolutely rules as a piece of music, not a controp obv. But it was Mozart who turned me onto classical when I was young and still held some very bad assumptions about music.

synthesis: i love David Lee Roth, and i don't want to watch him lead an orchestra

compromise: wolfgang van halen conducts a selection of viennese waltzes at rock in rio

andre rieu and his ilk are gross

didn't hans zimmer do a similar thing with live shows, including coachella or something?

Wolfieeeeee

XP not to steal my own LJ zing but:

Ilxor decries popular entrylev version of historically privileged art as "gross", film at 11

rieu is one level removed from the groups that do insanely well at corporate functions or w/e by doing orchestral covers of rock music

I have no problem with them existing, but the gigs that those groups tend to get make me sad

I like plenty of classical music, can't stand opera.

xp how the hell is it historically privileged, unless you mean in the 1600s? my middle school was pretty damn broke and if you didn't take the choir class, you took "music" which was basically music appreciation, got to hear all eras of symphonic music

i guess he's more like gallagher than dlr, really

imo there's a rieu <-> disney on ice comparison to be made

What dyou think historically means

Barely anyone contributes to the rolling classical thread, and it's always the same people. A microcosm of sorts.

Based on the events I've attended, I wouldn't describe classical audiences as predominantly "snobby" or "elitist" (or "rich") as much as "over 60". I don't really have any strong answer or solution in mind to the problem of the aging and declining audience. CBC (and by all accounts BBC) Radio spent decades trying to broadcast classical music to the general public before 'updating'.

I often hear the argument that the stifling concert hall atmosphere is the problem, that we should have more string quartets playing in pubs and audiences yelling and dancing and singing along during orchestral concerts. There are cases where I can see that working (it worked for Branca) but the thing is, I generally like having a quiet, studious space to listen closely to unamplified concert music with a wide dynamic range. I like being at a Muse concert too but I'm not sure a lot of the art music I like would come across as well if it were presented the same way. (I'm not sure modern concert hall conventions have as much to do with the privilege of the rich and powerful as with middle-class striving for culture/education/self-improvement btw?)

Based on the events I've attended, I wouldn't describe classical audiences as predominantly "snobby" or "elitist" (or "rich") as much as "over 60".

Based on the events I've attended I would describe them as sparse.

It's notable that a high proportion of the younger people going to the ROH seem to go in for the 'champagne and eveningwear' thing - while most of the traditional audience doesn't. idk if that's because of a perceived need to 'fit in' with a largely fictitious archetype or because a lot of moneyed twenty-somethings find the idea of that largely fictitious elitism appealing.

Either way, the fact that you could take a family of eight to the Kyiv opera for the same price as a seat in the gods in London goes a long way towards explaining why you don't get as many kids.

I think that the barrier isn't snobby audiences or incomprehensible music, it's an attitude that has been sold since Caruso started recording that classical and opera is real music, intellectually stimulating and personally improving, and if you don't get it then well, you can't be trying hard enough or maybe you just aren't up to the job. Meanwhile pop and rock are cynically churned out genres, junk food for the masses, etc. This was the dominant view in multiple places up until relatively recently, and is still out there, radio four had an "a point of view" entirely along these lines just a couple of years ago. The popularity of classic fm has somewhat challenged this, but has posed other problems perhaps.

i don't know who is going to replace the oldies in 20 years. maybe their will be a baby boomer classical boom. sometimes i think about just including a classical album with every purchase at my store. maybe i can make some future fans. i went to a book store the other day and they had tons of used classical records out for sale and i found 3 great john cage records, a philip glass record, and an awesome copy of arvo part's tabula rasa. near mint german ecm pressing. no hipster would have gone through all those records to find them. classical records are somehow plague-like. maybe its just because people are used to seeing beat up stuff at yard sales and at thrift stores. but that doesn't account for CDs. i don't think i've ever sold a classical CD to someone under 50 in 8 years. and i get a pretty brainy crowd!

in the u.s. there used to be more interest in the virtuoso. even young people could have told you who van cliburn was. and people had their faves like they had their fave baseball players. it has been a selling point SINCE caruso. but now maybe someone knows yo yo ma and....not much else. bernstein with his kid stuff was huge. he definitely made future fans.

I could've told you who Clayderman was!

http://i.imgur.com/iaCWbAH.jpg

it's an attitude that has been sold since Caruso started recording that classical and opera is real music, intellectually stimulating and personally improving, and if you don't get it then well, you can't be trying hard enough or maybe you just aren't up to the job.

I feel like there would be more of a classical audience if this attitude was still as widespread as it was in the early 20th century. A lot of people will check out indie rock or IDM or Bob Dylan or Miles Davis records for roughly similar reasons: because they are acclaimed or respected and have some sort of cultural cachet attached to them (or people will try bizarre diets or workouts or read Joyce or go to a Picasso exhibit).

I mean, more and better widespread public education in the Western musical canon would be my answer if we really wanted to expand the classical audience. Idk if that will happen, though. Outreach programmes are definitely a good idea.

^^^ I agree with Sund4r.

it's interesting to note that the classical performers who seem to get the most hipster kisses are the ones who are also performers, people like Max Richter, Nils Frahm, Olafur Arnalds, or groups that are filed in that more ambient/post-rock genre even though they could easily be considered classical (if they were old men from Europe.)

even young people could have told you who van cliburn was

He's the one with that "Brown Eyed Girl" song, right?

Sund4r - perhaps I presented this view as too evangelical and not enough grumpy old twat. This is the example I was thinking of, it's enough to put anyone off classical music - http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b06mv4js

are you aware of Scruton in general tho CaAL? cos he's not worth taking seriously as a critic or human being

and i'd argue that his aestheticism is bad faith, derived from his general political outlook and essentially performative

I am, I even saw him talk as a sixth form politics student and have despised him ever since. But this is the sort of thing that puts people off, still.

_even young people could have told you who van cliburn was_


He's the one with that "Brown Eyed Girl" song, right?