How and Why Did You Get Interested In Classical Music?

[mar208]

Continuation of a topic I began earlier re is there any relation between education and a liking of classical music. But I am very interested in how people got interested in classical music. I just remember my first year of college and prior to attending my very first day of classes I just happened to hear, and I don't know where, probably on the radio, Mozart's 4 Horn Concertos and that was it for me. When I hear that now, I think of that day way back when, when I was on my way to college full-time after having gone two years nights at another school.
In my previous topic I in no way meant to even remotely suggest that having a PhD was a prerequisite for liking classical music. Nor were there any disparaging remarks aimed toward those who did not go on to ten years of graduate work. It was just a question. But now my question is a little bit less "controversial"

[dave b]

I too began just by hearing some on the radio, not having even known anyone who liked classical. Had no real exposure to it but one day someone had it on and I ended up listening to it more and more. And I am a complete novice compared to most people on these boards. I only have maybe 50 or so cds and want to keep learning more about it. But when I listen to oldies and jazz and big bands and easy listening for awhile, I always return to classical music as the most relaxing and enjoyable music around.

[Mark]

You'll quickly find that this topic has been raised dozens of times around here. And I don't think we're any closer to discovering any correlation between the backgrounds of each of us and our reasons for liking classical music. Nonetheless, I'm happy to retell my own tale ...

I was eighteen years old, living in a two-bedroom house with a family of seven people (I slept on a floor for 13 years), and working in a warehouse to earn a pittance. On Sunday afternoons, I used to listen to a local radio station, and a programme called (oddly enough) 'Forum'. It was light music, instrumental and a certain amount of classical. The presenter was a teacher of one of my brothers.

That early exposure made me realise I liked what I was hearing - I also liked rock and dance music, but classical spoke to me in a different way. So I bought my first four classical CDs: a cheap boxed set containing the 'best of' Mozart, Bach, Beethoven and Tchaikovsky. It was the music of the last of these great composers which eventually captured my imagination - and I proceeded to buy the complete music to the ballet, 'Swan Lake'.

Now, some 17 years on, I am exposed to everything from Gregorian plainchant to ultra-modernism, and I enjoy a good deal of Western Art Music from the last 1,000 years. Why else would I have acquired close to 1,600 CDs of it?

[orbital]

My main interest is in music, not classical music. That's the genre I happen to listen to more than any other for the last 2-3 years, but it is safe to say that music, as a whole, is the most important thing in my life.

I have not been exposed to classical music at all during my childhood and early youth. My father was a musician before he got married, he used to play the double-bass (in a rock band in the 60s) and was educated in violin.  By the time we were growing up, me and my brother got  exposed to jazz music which was playing in our house all the time. Actually I can't remember a single instant where my father was at home and there was not any music playing in the house. But it was jazz all the time. All types from all dates and all regions. I carry on the tradition. There is always music playing in the house, no matter what we do. I feel physically uncomfortable if I can't hear music.

Being a product of the 80s, it was cheesy pop music then heavy metal for me up until late 90s. My wife, with whom we were living together back then, might be the biggest influence for classical music for me when she introduced me to CM. She used to listen to classical music almost exclusively. I remember buying her heaps of classical music cassettes for her birthday. My first serious exposure therefore, was my wife's favorites: Mozart (to whom i could never get close), Bach organ music (which I traded for other music by him) and Beethoven (symphonies initially, slowly morphing to SQs and select piano music)

Classical music, in its definite reign over me,  started with one of those Chopin Magical Moments or-something-like-that CD that we got just to have a romantic evening one day. About a month into that, I got the Complete Chopin by Idil Biret, and a month later a Beethoven SQ set. I have not completely grown out of that phase  since those pieces are still my very favorites. I have expanded a bit in other directions, alas not as much as I'd like to have.
I thought 400-500 CDs would be all I'd ever acquire, and I did stop once I got there, but my plan did not mention downloads -only CDs , so I buy and share downloads at an alarming rate still.

[Ephemerid]

mar208, oh, that wasn't "controversial" and its worth exploring that topic. 

Funnily enough, my "prelude" to my first actual exposure to classical music was when I was seven years old when Star Wars came out.  I liked the movie & consequently wanted the soundtrack.  But when i was kid I had all sorts of records, like the soundtrack to Dr. Zhivago and some other things-- I never really differentiated between different kinds of music-- I just liked it all (I had a tendency to prefer instrumental music however).  I had Tchaikovsky's Nutcracker also but didn't even know it was a certain kind of music called "classical"-- I just liked it-- I was quite oblivious to musical genres LOL  

When I get a bit older I discovered that the sort of thing that John Williams was doing had been done even better (much better!) by others for over a couple hundred years!  (a funny side-note: I used to think "Symphony No. N" meant the "Nth symphony ever written"-- in other words, Beethoven wrote the 5th symphony of all the composers in the world LOL -- I was a strange kid!)

Beethoven's 6th symphony & then the Fantasia soundtrack ( yeah, I know!) were my first exposure to classical-- my dad happened to have Beethoven's 6th and Mozart's 40th & 41st on cassette-- not that he listened to it, but I'd take it away in my room to listen to.

I also loved Carl Sagan's "Cosmos" series & got the soundtrack that which had a lot of classical music on it as well (not to mention Bulgarian folk music and other goodies).  But then I discovered Bach (I must've been 12 or 13 by this time) and I fell in love with Bach.  I've never looked back since!    That was the moment of truth for me.

After that came lots of trips to the library for records, cassettes and reading up on all these composers (no internet back then! ).  And as if life wasn't hard enough for me in junior high & high school, my love of classical only made it more difficult for me-- but my love for classical was far more important than "fitting in."  

Later I went to uni majoring in music composition (didn't finish though ) but by the time I had gotten there I already knew a fair amount of theory & was somewhat familiar with some chunks of classical music (Stravinsky was my hero in my college days).  

I don't think I could live without classical music in my life!  

[Ephemerid]

I want to add that where most parents would scream at their teenager kids "Would you turn that noise down?!?!" at the sounds of Van Halen, for me it was Stravinsky.  I think I drove my parents crazy! 

[Don]

My father was a violinist who listened to much classical music; same for my favorite uncle.  So, I was listening to classical from an early age; also played piano and clarinet.

[Anne]

Our 3 children were in high school and I had time on my hands.  Lately it had seemed like whatever came up in the household, I knew the answer to the situation.  I also had the distinct feeling that I had been there and done that.

While in one of those moods one day, I asked myself what subject did I know absolutely nothing about?  The answer came back "opera."  I headed to the library and began burrowing in their stacks.  They even had machines to borrow and complete operas to watch!  The first opera I watched was Aida.  From there, I never looked back.  A wonderful man offered to help me.  When I had learned about 1/2 of the operas, another person offered to help me with non-opera classical music.  I am indebted to both of them forever.  Also I am still learning.

[Haffner]

Ritchie Blackmore's Rainbow, Ulrich Roth ('70's Scorpions), and Deep Purple originally got me into Beethoven and J.S. Bach. Yngwie Malmsteen got me to listen to alot of Paganini, Perlman, Menuhin, Stern. The movie "Amadeus" made me discover Mozart and J. Haydn, and after that the Ring des Nibelungen...well, it's obvious ain't it?

[c#minor]

ever since i was a little tot, i assume around 6 i heard the haunting sounds of fur elise. I learned the classical little beginning to it as soon as i could get my sister to sit down and teach it to me. From then on i was hooked on piano music. I loved Beethoven with a passion, his put sonatas put me in awe and they are still my first love when it comes to classical music. Then when i was about 16 i heard 1812 Overture and thought it was the greatest thing ever, how little i knew. From then on i have been broadening my horizons though i will always go back the the Beethoven sonatas, still the consistent favorite.

[DavidW]

I bought a couple of tapes-- one was the best of bach the other lvb's 1st and 2nd.  They got me hooked and I started listening to more and more music, first by tapes then later by cds.

[not edward]

My mother listened a lot. By the time I was two, apparently, she'd learnt that she could shut me up for 100 minutes or so by playing the two Brahms piano concertos back to back. She gave me a thorough grounding in the rep from Mozart to Shostakovich (anything before WAM or more radical than Shosty was not included).

I also played piano and violin as a kid. I was actually a pretty decent violinist, and could play the solo parts of the Tchaikovsky and Dvorak concerti by 13, though not *that* well. However, another thing I inherited from my mother was a tendency to early-onset arthritic joints, & by the time I was 15 playing the violin for more than about 10 minutes was extremely painful. So I pretty much quit, and in fact barely listened to "classical" music for much of the next 10 years.

When I came back to listening, it was through Mahler, Schoenberg and Berg (something of a change in taste), followed by large quantities of the 20th century rep (Lutoslawski, Schnittke and Ligeti being the three that convinced me of the value of contemporary music).

Then I started to explore backwards until I'm at a point where I listen to much of the mainstream rep as well as the 20th century stuff I grew to love.

[c#minor]

By the time I was two, apparently, she'd learnt that she could shut me up for 100 minutes or so by playing the two Brahms piano concertos back to back

If only that was my family!!!! What a wonder that must have been!

[Xenophanes]

I began hearing classical music from my early childhood.  My mother played piano pretty well, and my father, though he couldn't carry a tune, listened mostly to classical music.  Every Saturday afternoon, of course, there were the Metropolitan Opera Broadcasts sponsored by Texaco.

Even preschool and early grade school, I remember such things as Bolero (we wore out the 78 record) before we could even read), Tchaikovsky's Theme and Variations in a chamber arrangement, Franck's Symphony in d, Rachmaninov's Second Symphony, Brahms 1st and 3rd Symphonies, Suppe's Poet and Peasant Overture, Deems Taylor's Through the Looking Glass, Victor Borge, Spike Jones, and singers such as Caruso, Gigli, and Pinza.

During our teen years, we liked Jussi Bjoerling, Jan Peerce, Leonard Warren, the Mussorgsky/Ravel Pictures, Mozart's Requiem, Puccini's Tosca and La Boheme, Verdi's Rigoletto, and such like. We also had very good music available on FM and some good outdoor concerts.

In retrospect, it was somewhat limited. I knew little keyboard music, chamber music, choral music, and not really very many symphonies.

When I was at university (amazingly, they put me in the choir with all those music majors--possibly because my brother was a music major), we did Handel's Messiah, which I had never heard before, and some works by composers I knew little about such as Honegger and Poulenc.

Once I got out on my own, I continued singing in various choral groups and started to build up a decent collection of recordings. 

[Symphonien]

We had a couple "best of" CDs hanging around of Chopin and Mozart that I liked, but it was not until a few years later that I became seriously interested in Classical music. After playing piano for a few years, I watched the movie Shine and subsequently became fascinated with Rachmaninov's 3rd Piano Concerto. And so it was through Rachmaninov that I first really got into it (his piano concertos & Rhapsody on a Theme by Paganini), after that I discovered other Romantic composers - my first CDs are bought were Tchaikovsky's Symphonies 4-6 and Dvorak's 8-9. Then Beethoven's complete symphonies, etc... Since then, I have expanded in both directions but with a particular focus on symphonies (hence my username, in German because I was obsessed with Karajan's Beethoven "9 Symphonien" cycle at the time). Although nowadays, not necessarily symphonies, but I've become obsessed with 20th century and contemporary music, which comprises the majority of my listening.

[BorisG]

Attending symphonic concerts with parents and classmates.

[Kullervo]

Nobody in my family is overtly musical, so I came to it myself. At about 10 or so, I fell in love with Star Wars, and subsequently got the soundtracks which I must have listened to hundreds of times, lying on the floor with my head next to the boombox. After that, I listened to radio pop up until about age 14, when I discovered Radiohead. From Radiohead I moved onto electronica artists like Aphex Twin, and from there to more abstract electronic music like Morton Subotnick. By this time I was 19, and working at Tower Records in Boston, where, perusing the Classical room, I discovered Messiaen, whom I had heard of through a friend. From Messiaen I moved to Debussy, and from then on there was no going back.

[Ephemerid]

Nobody in my family is overtly musical, so I came to it myself. At about 10 or so, I fell in love with Star Wars, and subsequently got the soundtracks which I must have listened to hundreds of times, lying on the floor with my head next to the boombox.

You too, eh?     (of course, I dunno-- you might be referring to Episodes I, II & III, in which case makes me feel old  )

[Kullervo]

You too, eh?     (of course, I dunno-- you might be referring to Episodes I, II & III, in which case makes me feel old  )

Nooo, the originals. The soundtrack for Empire was, and still is, my favorite of the three.

[Haffner]

Nooo, the originals. The soundtrack for Empire was, and still is, my favorite of the three.

Really cool stuff. My teacher brought in the original Star Wars soundtrack back in 1977 (I was in the 5th grade). This was before I'd seen the movie, and I was pretty wiped out by it. It actually helped prepare me for Wagner.