Notes From The Classical Room Register

How many of you out there are into classical music?

Of course, how you answer may depend on what is meant by “into,” and maybe what is meant by “classical” music.

But regardless of the particulars, it does seem that fewer and fewer people across generations are taking the time to learn about, listen to, or enjoy formal compositions in the Western classical tradition.

Now, I can only speak as an American who’s lived most of his life in America. Certainly in Japan, people my age seem to have a broad basic knowledge and interest in the great composers of yesteryear. And that’s probably true of various other nations. However, in America, classical music tends to be mentally filed away as:

1. Movie soundtrack filler
2. Music to play in the background as you study or work
3. Pretentious crap that elites pretend to like to seem better than you
4. A field of music that’s way too large, too complicated, and daunting to really dig into beyond a few famous snippets.

As for me, I fell into Category 4 for most of my life.

My minimal education in some classical works in elementary school had some profound emotional effects on me: the Aquarium theme from Carnival of the Animals suggested a gorgeous underwater paradise that I would visit in my daydreams; the wolf theme from Peter and the Wolf would sometimes haunt me as I tried to sleep at night. Most significantly, my family’s love of playing Handel’s Messiah for the Christmas season was a rare chance to relish a classical work in its entirety. But by and large my “education” was limited to incidental exposure as I watched movies with my family.

Then, when puberty came knocking, I got more and more into the edgiest sounds on the radio, and rebellion became the priority. First it was hard rock like Metallica, then it was Nirvana. Then it was Green Day and the Flaming Lips. Soon alternative rock radio was, like, for poseurs, man, and so I went deep into punk, goth, industrial, and lots of other genres that were musically and aesthetically quite removed from the compositions of yore. Take off your powdered wigs, people, and break out the Manic Panic!

But then college happened.

My hormones mellowed out some, but my curiosity never tired. As I soaked up more and more knowledge and culture, my deep love of punk mutated into a broader appreciation of outsider art and transgressive, confrontational music. Perhaps inevitably, some of that music turned out to be classical. The modern stuff at least.

It’s really not that far of a leap to go from the industrial clangs of Einsturzende Neubauten to the orchestral works of Krzysztof Penderecki. Both of them deal in oppressive, hellish soundscapes with lots of dissonance. And it’s not that far of a leap to go from the meticulous sound collages of Matmos to the musique concrete innovations of Pierre Henry. They both sound really interesting on headphones. So yay. I finally had a few CDs of modern composers in my collection, and I even liked a few of them.

In college, one huge source of musical education for me was my time spent working at Tower Records.

And I loved working the Classical room register, because it gave me tons of down time to read for my classes. But one thing this time made clear to me was how damn hard it was to determine what was a worthwhile classical CD, and what was not. For most popular music today, all you need to know is an artist name and an album title. Wanna try the Beach Boys? Get Pet Sounds; hold off on Little Deuce Coupe unless you become an uber-fan. Wanna try Outkast? Aquemini is when their weirdness really starts to come out; if you want more straightforward hip hop, get ATLiens. Sometimes you pay attention to the extra tracks and the audio quality of remastered re-releases, but it’s generally very easy to dig into this stuff.

With classical music, the equation is far more complicated. You have to consider the composer, the specific musical work, the conductor and the players, and the specific recorded performance.

Where to start? Even for the stuff I thought I might be interested in, like Stockhausen’s noisy works, I found that certain CDs I purchased turned out to be boring, or just sounded terrible. And I wasn’t sure if this was the composer’s fault, the conductor, or the recording engineer. I would sometimes ask customers in the Classical room for recommendations, but their answers made me more uncertain: some praised the sound quality of specific label releases, while others dismissed the same releases as inferior. If an album happened to be featured in a listening station I could explore before purchasing, but more often than not those stations were dedicated to jazz and vocal albums rather than classical. Remaining confused and cautious was clearly the more sensible option for me, and so I mostly stuck with my “simple tunes for simple people” ethos for the entirety of my time at Tower.

It was in graduate school when things really changed. But not because of my school situation; it was more the right time, technologically speaking. This was 2007, and online music options were starting to take off, but thankfully they could still be a bit experimental. I started to pay for a membership for eMusic, a site that allowed a monthly allotment of MP3 downloads per month. An interesting quirk of the site at the time was that downloading credit was not at all weighted by a track’s length. So a 60-minute track would count the same as a 30-second track. Obviously, I avoided the punk and hardcore tunes on this site, and skewed heavily toward longer tracks to get the most for my money.

And that’s when I decided to take some chances on classical albums, albeit ones that were condensed into just a few tracks to download. I certainly listened to samples before jumping into a purchase (another great innovation of the digital age), but by and large I was okay with taking some risks, since the cost of making a mistake had been greatly reduced.

As I collected more and listened more (and later streamed on Youtube), my understanding grew and grew. One of the first composers I tried to get into was Gustav Mahler, upon a passing recommendation from my roommate’s friend. The albums I got from eMusic led me to believe that I didn’t care for Mahler—too ostentatious, not enough raw emotion. I later learned that I simply didn’t care for that particular conductor’s take on Mahler. But I loved what Leonard Bernstein did with the same works, particularly Bernstein’s earlier recordings of them. And I just recently attended a live performance of Mahler’s 2nd Symphony that was downright raucous. So much raw emotion!

Despite my initiation into classical via modernist noise, in grad school I leaned most heavily into Baroque sounds, because it was the perfect salve for stressful times. But I also got a better feel for the Classical era, the Romantic, and even the best Modernist stuff. In between my formal academic studies in psychology, I listened and learned about what musical pieces I liked; what performances I preferred; what various composers brought to the table, and what stylistic trends marked the larger eras of composition. This informal lesson was a long time coming, but it finally came!

Although the ubiquity of online music streaming today does make me worry about the availability of obscure releases going forward, in general the format offers the perfect opportunity for curious-but-cautious listeners to explore a large body of sounds that they know nothing about. If you are currently daunted by the sheer vastness of classical compositions out there, not to mention the complexity of variables that affect how good or bad a recorded work sounds to you, there has never been a better time to just dig in for a while, and learn about what you prefer.

There is also no better way to enjoy a work than to hear it performed live in a well designed concert hall. I’m no audiophile, but the difference between live classical and recorded really is like night and day.

Even the best recording will flatten out a work’s various musical components, which in a concert setting sound consistently vibrant, no one sound ever dominating the others. So that’s a viable Step One for the curious as well; go to a show and see what you think!

Then again, it’s never going to be for everyone, except maybe in the context of a movie soundtrack. Even there, I’m impressed that these old works still have the power to move people. Heck, movie audiences are even being moved by modernist noise, even if they don’t even realize it.

And that’s pretty neat.

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