Breakthrough pieces

[max]

I don’t know if the following question was previously posted even though I’m sure it must have been many times but the question is what were the breakthrough pieces that made one preferential to classical music as compared to it’s more ubiquitous forms.

Also, if one first preferred the non-classical, what were the qualities in classical that forced the transformation? Not an easy question since it redefines it into what is meant by CLASSICAL aside from the age in which it was written which is fairly well defined.

In short, the question is twofold:

1: what turned you on?
2: what were the qualities that seemed to separate it from everything else?

[max]

Sorry! This was meant to be on the General Forum which I thought I was on!
I blame it on neuron deconstruction. It will be up to the Forum Meister to decide it's fate! 

[Mozart]

It has happened to me 3 times! Something is odd if you ask me, I am scared to start topics.

[max]

It has happened to me 3 times! Something is odd if you ask me, I am scared to start topics.

I just hope I never have to travel from Vancouver to Los Angeles. I'd probably end up in front of some kind of Mayan pyramid in Quatamala!

[71 dB]

1: what turned you on?
2: what were the qualities that seemed to separate it from everything else?

1: Elgar - Enigma Variations.
2: Stunning sophistication of musical structures and dimensions.

Did I understand the question?

[springrite]

Did I understand the question?

No matter. your answer would still be the same.

[Cato]

I think this is a fine topic for the General Discussion!

I have related the story here in earlier years, but my "breakthrough" piece was Smetana's Moldau.  Its opening minutes were played on the old Captain Kangaroo children's show in the early 1950's as the accompaniment for a nature scene showing how raindrops keep falling on my head and forming rivers eventually.

It took a few more years to discover the name of it at the library, but then I was off and running at an early age.  Smetana led to Dvorak, etc.   To be sure, my musical sense already knew - somehow - that the classical snippets used by Carl Stalling in the Bugs Bunny/Daffy Duck cartoons were on a higher level than the Teresa Brewer (RIP) songs heard by my parents.

Also helpful around the same time: references to Beethoven in the Peanuts cartoons!

[locrian]

I liked the movie A CLOCKWORK ORANGE, so I was brainwashed into liking classical.

[some guy]

I had two breakthrough experiences, one at around eight years old with a bunch of 78s from my father's half brother, some jazz, some classical snippets discs, sides one and four of Peter and the Wolf, and two kids' sets: Rusty in Orchestraville and Sparky's Magic Piano.

All I'd known up to that time was t.v. music. I don't think my mom has ever put on music just to listen to it. And my dad only infrequently. Here was something quite other, though I felt it simply as  "Oh, so this is what music is supposed to sound like." (To bring this in line with the thread, I guess I'd say that Rachmaninoff's Prelude in c# was the one piece that impressed me the most.)

The next breakthrough was much later, my sophomore year in college, which I spent in Darmstadt. In the local record store we frequented was an LP of Reiner's recording of the Bartók Concerto for Orchestra. That was much more genuinely (or at least ostentatiously) a breakthrough. I'd heard twentieth century music on the radio, Petrushka, Háry János, Taras Bulba, and of course I'd had those two 78 sides of the Prokofiev. But it was the Bartók that really did it for me. I realized that there was this thing called twentieth century music (these things as it turned out), and that was it for me.

Stravinsky, Carter, Varèse, Stockhausen, Mumma, Cage. And Oliveros, Shields, Kolb, Parkins, Kubisch. And all the rest. Oh, it's fun!

[Mozart]

1: what turned you on?
2: what were the qualities that seemed to separate it from everything else?

1) Beethovens 7th! I couldn't stand up after listening to it....
It was the first worked that I felt intensely through my body, and the start of my mature listening.


2) Hmm...tough to answer. I guess I made more of a connection to myself while trying to interpret the music than is any previous song I had ever heard.

[Catison]

I liked the movie A CLOCKWORK ORANGE, so I was brainwashed into liking classical.

Wow!  The same for me.  At the time I was listening to movie soundtracks all the time.  I heard 'the 9th' in A Clockwork Orange and decided I had to listen to it.  That was it.

[Renfield]

(Still haven't gone to bed, if you've been following my efforts from the "What are you listening to?" thread. )

What "turned me on" was the sound of a full orchestra playing, which to my synaesthetic mind (I see music as both colour/shape/flow, hard to describe) resulted in a most profound epiphany indeed. Though, interestingly enough, that "epiphany" occured to me when I was as young as two-three years old!

My parents and I would go on weekend outings, and the cassette player would be used to play European national anthems (out of all things) during the trip. Needless to say, I can still recite quite a few of them from memory, given a few of their starting notes.


Then, about 13 years after that point - and my only contact to this sort of music being the film soundtracks I avidly collected (or still collect), and of course the Looney Tunes cartoons, before that! - I decided to "persuade" (i.e. nag at) my parents to fund my purchase of Karajan's BPO 1963 Beethoven cycle...

I received it via post, hopeful that what I would hear would indeed be like the band-music I had ringing in my head for more than a decade (though I'd read a review or two on Amazon, before I decided on the purchase), and decided to start with the 5th Symphony.

"That was it."


Concerning the qualities that separate classical from "everything else", for me, they are mostly the rather hard-to-describe synaesthetic "qualia" which I tend to (strongly) receive from only music of the textural, structural and harmonic complexity of "classical music". In other words, it sounds special, and in a very literal way indeed!


(Ok, now, time to persuade myself to go to bed: "Go to bed, myself!" )

[Mark]

In short, the question is twofold:

1: what turned you on?
2: what were the qualities that seemed to separate it from everything else?

We've had this topic before, certainly, but never phrased quite like this - you've encouraged me to answer anew.

Your first question is easy to answer. It all began with a cheap (£10) four-CD set of 'Best of ... ' discs of Beethoven, Mozart, Bach and Tchaikovsky. Before buying it, I knew that I liked the sounds made by a string orchestra, as I'd heard string accompaniments on pop/rock albums, TV and in films. I turned first to Beethoven, and the 'Moonlight' Sonata's famous first movement - a piece I knew well because the music teacher at my junior school would play it often. But old Ludwig didn't bite hard for me at that point, and it was Bach that I warmed to most.

Listening more to the four CDs, I discovered that Mozart (who I'd heard was 'the greatest') just didn't reach me. Much of his work still doesn't; it was only last year that I properly began to appreciate his art. And so to Tchaikovsky: my 'key in the door'. His 1812 Overture, the finale to Swan Lake, and the first movement of his First Piano Concerto blew me apart. Here was big, bold, emotional music which, as an 18-year-old who'd never been even vaguely trendy, I responded to with greater enthusiasm than I could've mustered for the music enjoyed by my peers. I bought the complete music to Swan Lake shortly after that, and my journey began.

As to your second question, I'm not sure that I thought back then in terms of qualities separating classical from other forms of music, so I'll answer as I understand things now. Form has a big part to play. I tired, eventually, of repetitive, four-minute love songs (great though many of them are on their own turf), and quickly got bored with electronic dance music, too; it was longer, which I loved, but it didn't fulfil me in the way a symphony or string quartet could. The 'war' between classical and non-classical raged in me from age 18 until 33 (just last year), when classical finally emerged the victor. This forum played a huge part in cementing that victory, though I couldn't see that until I'd been here for a few months.

What do I 'get' from classical music? A respite from words (songs/opera/choral works excepted, naturally), which is great for me as I'm a professional writer. Last thing I want is a book to read, so music is what I almost always turn to in preference. Classical also fulfils what I think of as a fundamental (perhaps spiritual?) need in me: music is like nourishment, and I've been known to miss meals so that I could finish listening to a work without interruption. Lastly, collecting classical CDs is the closest I've ever come to a recreational pastime - as a child, I drew and painted (I may again, someday), but as an adult, I collect, listen and enjoy. It's not a bad life, really ...

[Renfield]

Since Mark mentioned it, perhaps I should add that in that first "haul" of classical, I didn't order the Beethoven symphonies alone:

Tchaikovsky's "Swan Lake" suite (with which I was already very vaguely familiar) and piano concerto (the Richter/Karajan, which I still love), Rachmaninov's 2nd piano concerto, and works like Mozart's 38th symphony (even though I'm no "Mozartian") all played a part immediately after the "baptism of fire" that was Beethoven and his symphonies.

But then again, I suspect something similar applies to almost all of us. And I'd by lying if I didn't admit it was finally Mahler, and more than a year after the "Beethoven" incident, who truly "pulled me in" past the brink of "eclectic listener", and into the mad and twisted realm of "collector and enthusiast" of this music; of "our" music.

[gmstudio]

For me, it was a $1.00 cassette of The Rite of Spring that I bought when I was 15. (I still have it:  Moscow Radio Symphony Orchestra/Fedoseev - Melodiya, released by Vox Cum Laude.)  I bought a whole handful of $1.00 cassettes just to fill up my wall rack and played them occasionally as background music while doing homework.  One day I unwrapped this puppy, put it on, and commenced with my geometry homework...about halfway through the first side I was sitting there staring into the speaker ... "what the hell is this?"...I was hooked from that moment on...

A few months later, The Rite was also the first Dover score that I purchased...now, 100+ some Dover scores later, I'm even more hooked...

[Renfield]

For me, it was a $1.00 cassette of The Rite of Spring that I bought when I was 15. (I still have it:  Moscow Radio Symphony Orchestra/Fedoseev - Melodiya, released by Vox Cum Laude.)  I bought a whole handful of $1.00 cassettes just to fill up my wall rack and played them occasionally as background music while doing homework.  One day I unwrapped this puppy, put it on, and commenced with my geometry homework...about halfway through the first side I was sitting there staring into the speaker ... "what the hell is this?"...I was hooked from that moment on...

A few months later, The Rite was also the first Dover score that I purchased...now, 100+ some Dover scores later, I'm even more hooked...

Heh, starting with The Rite of Spring! Stravinsky would be proud.

[DanielFullard]

Good question and a toughie.

Well my route into classical music was simply starting with nothing, no education about it, no real exposure to it. Then I was gradually becoming aware of it when I was 17-18 and started listening to Classic FM (whatever you say about the station it serves as a good primer for people who are similar to I was an curious). I heard a piece on the "Evening Concert" about 3 days into listening and it blew my mind. No idea what is was but I recall lying in bed listening to it and thinking "wow" and from there it started.

Also, got into Opera very much the same route. I heard the odd "soprano" or such like and decided to delve deeper. And then feel in love with Opera which is now my main passion in music. Carmen and La Boheme were the two that then started my obsession.

Big helps in easing me in have been...Classic FM, Radio 3, Artswolrd TV, Performance TV Channel and a few books.

[BachQ]

1: Elgar - Enigma Variations.

So that's what started it all ........

[BachQ]

you've encouraged me to answer anew.

Well, how lucky we are ........

[Mark]

Well, how lucky we are ........

I'm not saying I'm Jesus. That's for others to say. 0:)

Daniel, I agree that for all its weaknesses, Classic FM can indeed be a good starting point for beginners. It certainly helped me in the early days.