Get Into Classical

There are a bunch of reasons that you might get put off listening to classical when you first start. Some things seem like a really big deal initially, but before long you’ll adjust and get acclimatized, and before long you’ll be wondering how you managed without them:

• Understanding a piece isn’t trivial – It takes much, much longer before you get familiar with a piece, compared to popular music. Britney makes sense about halfway through a song; Berg’ll take about twenty listens before you even begin to get it. This is probably the hardest thing to deal with when you seriously start with classical. All the rest of the remarks I make on this page contribute to this one. It’s like the granddaddy of classical challenges.
• Remembering melodies is much harder compared to pop – Alright, with some composers this is much easier then others (Mozart is piss easy, Shostakovich can take a whole swathe of listens). Popular songs are designed to zap right into your head in an almost psychic fashion – you can pretty much hum a melody as soon as you’ve heard a couple of bars. Classical melodies are way longer, and there are often a whole bunch in a piece: two big ones which come up all over the place but are constantly changing around, and lots of little connecting ones.
• The amount of stuff going on is overwhelming – There are sections where you’ll have the violins playing one melody, the cellos and violas a different melody, the basses playing an accompaniment, the winds and brass doing something else, and a bunch of different percussion. It’s hard to keep track of it all. After a while you’ll be able to mentally separate out and join back together individual sections.
• The dynamics can be extreme – That is, things get loud and quiet really quickly and dramatically. Dynamics is the technical term for that. Most non-classical stuff pretty much stays at one particular volume, with maybe a couple of stops and starts thrown in for oh-so dramatic effect (like that one song by Garbage). Classical will go from pindrop quiet to eardrum bursting out of your head loud before you even begin to reach for the volume control. Initially you’ll probably get really frustrated by this and be constantly reaching for the remote control. I know I did.
• The pieces are looong – Well, yeah, but so is an album. The difference is you can’t flip classical back and forth and put it on random anymore like all the cool iPod kids do. A movement is the basic unit, and those are anything from five to twenty-five minutes long. And really, you need to listen to a piece all the way through, except when you need that one-movement hit, but that’s like, 3.91% of the time.
• The music sounds too cheesy – Some romantic stuff is excessively lush (Rachmaninoff I’m looking at you) and I personally find it pretty tough to get into. Some of you will, or already do, love it. I prefer it when…
• The music sounds too dissonant – Some modern stuff is full of weird combinations of notes which people will complain just sounds like garbage can lids clanking/cats wailing/people dying.
• The instruments all sound the same – It takes a while before you can easily pick apart what you are hearing, and until you get enough exposure to orchestral texture, things tend to kinda blend together. Listen to a few quartets (well, not too early on perhaps… small scale pieces are harder, somehow) and you’ll be able to tell the strings apart much better.
• The violins sound too shrill – It could be a bad recording… or it could just take a while to get used to. The idea of a violin concerto, or – god forbid – violin sonata freaked the hell out of me at first. It’s still tougher then the cello or piano for me to listen to.

You’re not alone if you have issues with any of these, but don’t let them put you off your music, because they won’t be a problem for very long.