The world of classical music is a place where idealism reigns, where good conquers evil and love conquers all, where you always get a second chance, where everything comes out right in the end, and where you can have your cake and eat it, too.
Classical music is one of the few living arts. It continues to exist by being constantly re-created, live, before an audience. Unlike the visual arts, classical music envelops you in real time and comes to life before you; unlike literature or theater, it can be understood equally by speakers of any language — or no language; and unlike dance, you don’t need to look good in a leotard to perform it.
Classical music is a place to come to for pure enjoyment, for solace, for upliftment, for spiritual transcendence, and — if you follow our suggestions — for less than 25 bucks.
Discovering What Classical Music Really Is
For the purposes of this book, classical music is the music composed in the Western Hemisphere during the past few hundred years (not including recent pop and folk music). It’s the music generally composed for an orchestra or combination of orchestral instruments, keyboards, guitar, or voice.
The fact is that classical music is just as entertaining as it ever was. But these days, it’s become much less familiar. That’s all. After you become familiar with this art form, it becomes amazingly entertaining.
Figuring Out What You Like
Not every piece of classical music will turn you on right away. And that’s perfectly okay.
First of all, some pieces are, as we euphemistically say in the classical music biz, more “accessible” than others. That is, some have beautiful melodies that you can hum instantly, whereas others, on first listening, sound more like geese getting sucked through an airplane engine.
See what you like best at this very moment. There are no right or wrong answers; classical music is supposed to be fun to listen to. The trick is to find out what’s most fun for you.
www.dummies.com/go/classicalmusic3e. Each is a musical masterpiece, each in a different musical style. The track list includes pieces from the Baroque style (roughly mid-1600s to mid-1700s), the Classical style (mid-1700s to early 1800s), early Romantic style (first half of the 1800s), late Romantic style (second half of the 1800s), and more modern, often deceptively chaotic-sounding style (20th century to the present).
Does one piece appeal to you more than all the others? If so, begin your exploration of classical music by delving into other works in that style or by that composer.
Or, if you love them all, fantastic! Our job just got a lot easier.
The Seven Habits of Highly Effective Composers
Despite the incredible variety of styles within the world of classical music, certain consistent qualities make great music great. These sections examine seven of those qualities.
Their music is from the heart
www.dummies.com/go/classicalmusic3e and you’ll see what we mean.)
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart was an incredibly facile composer — melodies just bubbled out of his head effortlessly, and his pieces reflect that ease. Igor Stravinsky was a strictly disciplined, calculating, complex character; ditto for much of his music. Although their personalities were incredibly diverse, these composers wrote great music in a way that was true to themselves.
They use a structure that you can feel
Great pieces of music have a structure, a musical architecture. You may not be consciously aware of the structure while you’re listening to a great work; but still, you instinctively feel how that work was put together. Maybe the piece follows one of the classic overarching musical patterns (with names like sonata form or rondo form, which you can read about in Chapter 3). Maybe it just has a musical idea at the beginning that comes back at the end. In any case, we’d be hard-pressed to name a great work of music that doesn’t have a coherent structure.
Recent studies at the University of California show that students who listen to Mozart before an exam actually score higher than students who don’t. (Of course, we suspect that these students would’ve scored higher yet if they’d actually studied before the exam.) As you listen to a piece by Mozart, your brain apparently creates a logical set of compartments that process this form. These compartments are then useful for processing other kinds of information, as well. Classical music actually does make you smarter.
They’re creative and original
You hear again and again that some of the greatest composers — even those whose works sound tame and easily accessible to us — were misunderstood in their own day. Not everyone could relate to the compositions of Ludwig van Beethoven, Johannes Brahms, Gustav Mahler, Richard Strauss, Claude Debussy, Stravinsky, or Charles Ives in their day. (Actually, that’s the understatement of the year; the audience at Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring actually rioted, trashing the theater and bolting for the exits.)
The reason for this original lack of acceptance is unfamiliarity. The musical forms, or ideas expressed within them, were completely new. And yet, this is exactly one of the things that makes them so great. Effective composers have their own ideas.
Have you ever seen the classic movie Amadeus, which won eight Oscars including Best Picture in 1984? The composer Antonio Salieri is the “host” of this movie; he’s depicted as one of the most famous non-great composers — he lived at the time of Mozart and was completely overshadowed by him. Now, Salieri wasn’t a bad composer; in fact, he was a very good one. But he wasn’t one of the world’s great composers because his work wasn’t original. What he wrote sounded just like what everyone else was composing at the time.
They express a relevant human emotion
Great composers have something important to say. They have an emotion that’s so urgent, it cries out to be expressed. The greatest pieces of music (any music, from rock to rap to today’s chart-topping hits) take advantage of the ability of this art to express the inexpressible.