As mentioned earlier, I never delved into much classical music. Now I’m ready.
I’ve been thinking about it a lot as I’ve been frustrated with the glut of rock and pop. Classical music, in contrast, has an aura of finiteness I find comforting. That is, there’s a fairly well defined canon of composers and recordings, and plenty of discourse about them to guide me.
I’m craving two things in music — attributes that, to my ears lately, rock and pop offer in meager portions.
The first is melody. My sense is that most songwriting today starts with a piecing together of chords. Melody follows from there, and as a result it can be quite static.
The second thing I’m after is structural variety. The absence or very sparing use of repetition. After a while, verse-chorus-verse starts to feel like a hamster wheel, even when sometimes there’s a bridge thrown in.
In short, more complexity and ingenuity is what I’m after.
As I explore, I’ll keep a diary of considered reactions to individual classical pieces, posting them occasionally on this blog. The goal is to keep them concise and impressionistic and not too cerebral. There are to be very few sidetracks into anything like analysis.
Several guides will aid in my quest for classical music knowledge and appreciation. Foremost is the excellent “That Classical Podcast,” which will prove to anyone that classical fans need not be snobbish or even, shall we say, mature. There’s also “The New York Times Essential Library: Classical Music” by Allan Kozinn, which reviews 100 important recordings and lists 100 more. And there are the reviews from various periodicals like American Record Guide that I’m turning up by the dozen in the course of a little research project I’ve got going. (More in that in, oh, 2025.)
Your recommendations, dear reader, are also most welcome.
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