this is for connoisseurs (sp) of the baroque and romantic period music. whether your fav composer is russian, french, or chinese, post him (or her)here!
everybody loves tchaikovsky's 1812 overture.
some people like classical guitar.
I love symphonic poems.
my favorites are tchaikovsky's symphonies, berlioz, sibelius's symphonies, ravel, schumann, rachmaninoff's piano concertos, mozart's suites,
I'm currently listening to Dvořák: Symphony No. 9, Op. 95 in e, From the New World.
this is a very inspirational sounding piece with peaceful middle woodwinds and harmonic strings. it is highly dynamically contrasting and has explosive, as well as serene characteristics.
post your opinions on your favorite classical music

everybody loves tchaikovsky's 1812 overture.

It's my understanding that Tchaikovsky didn't like it at all. He felt it was forced and phony, but he was told to compose it so he did. Personally, I like it a lot. Don't ask me to analyze it, though.

perhaps you could share some more of your insight? I'm sure people are interested more in musical knowledge than whether or not I'm wrong or right.

Baroque and romantic seems like an odd combination to me, two extremes of the time spectrum. :)

I like the romantic and post-romantic period, basically music from the end of the 19th century onward. Not including opera. In fact I don't really enjoy singing except for rock and roll.

Ralph Vaughan Williams and Richard Strauss are my favorite composers. My favorite pieces are VW's "The Lark Ascending" and Strauss's "Metamorphosen."

But I appreciate a good many of the composers of the era, Chopin, Debussy, Ravel, Rachmaninoff, Tchaikovsky, Bartok, Prokofiev, Mussorgsky, Rimsky-Korsakov... the list seems endless. There's been a lot of great music composed in the last 125 years or thereabouts. Scheherezade, Night on Bald Mountain, Bolero, many of the really popular chestnuts deserve their popularity.

I'm not terribly fond of earlier "classical" music, especially the large orchestral pieces, I just seem to lack the enzyme to digest a very big helping of it. Pieces for quartets and other small ensembles or solo pianos seem to have more spirit. Although Mozart and Mendelssohn seemed to be ahead of their time.

I often go to the free concerts that are put on at the Smithsonian once or twice every week. Usually small groups or soloists but the resident orchestra plays about once a month. The performers are all top notch but the program is pot luck, whatever they feel like presenting. I've been exposed to some really astounding obscure composers as well as some really strange modern stuff.

My favorite recent program was coupled with the National Gallery's exhibition of French Impressionist paintings. The program featured four little-known composers of the Impressionist era from France and Belgium whose music could arguably also be called "impressionism." It was really stunning.

Yes I know I should pull out the program and name some names, but my filing system seems to leave something to be desired. If I can find it eventually I'll get back to you.

is your name after something in the muppets?
anyway, i have a terrible time remembering names of composers and pieces. ive promised myself to go to the library and get some books to help me learn about composers and such. i get much (if not all) of my music from the library. all of it's classical. i rip it to my computer, and I can't make heads or tales from one piece or another when i hear it. should i do this on an individual basis, like get a book about a composer, read his or her bio, and then read about a piece and listen to the piece? how do you recommend i improve my recollection of pieces?

I bought Saint-Saens' organ symphony/carnival of the animals at Borders. there were three additional pieces. one was Dance Macabre. i read in the litttle booklet that it was written after a poem about Death standing in an eerily queit graveyard, playing a violin, while skeletons danced around it. pretty cool, if you ask me, and the music was fantastic!

thanks for the great reply!

Is classical music actually good, or is it like the Coldplay of the 18th century?

Is classical music actually good, or is it like the Coldplay of the 18th century?

oh my goodness. what should we recommend him? I don't know what you can get off of limewire, you're probably not motivated enough to search around your local library, so try beethoven, mozart, bach, then try piano concertos and brass quartets and the like. classical music is the best that homo-sapien has been able to come up with so far so appreciate it! music like popular and coldplay is very simple and feelingless. when you have a backbeat and a four-bar phrase, you have little room for emotion and all that.

Is classical music actually good, or is it like the Coldplay of the 18th century?
Will people be listening to Coldplay in the 23rd century?

Any classical music you hear today has already lasted a few centuries. That means the really crappy* stuff was filtered out long ago. Admittedly, tastes do change over time. J. S. Bach was all but forgotten when F. Mendelssohn dug up his music and realised that it was sheer genius. Now he's an icon along with Gödel and Escher.

*that people could agree on, anyway. Hey, some people do like I. Stravinsky.

by the coldplay of the 18th century i now see that you mean is it trendy. classical music (in general), is anything but. it represents the grouping of musicianship and innovation spawned entirely out of deep feeling. there was much more to write about back then.. things were much more romantic, hence the name of the period. there is a classical music for anyone! not just the lame violin player (no offense intended). there is a type of music for metalheads just as much as there is for a ska afficionado. styles range, but seriously, don't expect what i think you're expecting. be openminded and remember that classical music has a lot more emotion and phraseingthan any popular mainstream song you hear today. enjoy!

oh my goodness. what should we recommend him? I don't know what you can get off of limewire, you're probably not motivated enough to search around your local library, so try beethoven, mozart, bach, then try piano concertos and brass quartets and the like. classical music is the best that homo-sapien has been able to come up with so far so appreciate it! music like popular and coldplay is very simple and feelingless. when you have a backbeat and a four-bar phrase, you have little room for emotion and all that.

I have classical music on my computer. I like Beethoven a lot, that guy had to have had some serious problems to make music like that.

But I'm just wondering what seperates, say, classical music from modern pop music. What's so great about it? Its complexity? Who's to say that classical music wasn't pop music for people two or three hundred years ago?

Will people be listening to Coldplay in the 23rd century?

Any classical music you hear today has already lasted a few centuries. That means the really crappy* stuff was filtered out long ago. Admittedly, tastes do change over time. J. S. Bach was all but forgotten when F. Mendelssohn dug up his music and realised that it was sheer genius. Now he's an icon along with Gödel and Escher.

*that people could agree on, anyway. Hey, some people do like I. Stravinsky.

yeah mainstream music today is trendy and will go out of style. i think it is the type of society we live in...there is much more ease in lifestyle today than there was back then... so much less to write music about.

I have classical music on my computer. I like Beethoven a lot, that guy had to have had some serious problems to make music like that.

But I'm just wondering what seperates, say, classical music from modern pop music. What's so great about it? Its complexity? Who's to say that classical music wasn't pop music for people two or three hundred years ago?

precisely my good man, but it was! and the reason we still like it is the universal emotion that in evokes in any functioning human. he wasn't necessarily screwed up, he mightve just had really great ideas. i think maybe the attitudes of people these days is not the right kind to make really good music...like we've fallen off of the shoulders of the musical giants of the past. im trying to stay openminded that there is good music still to be written, as i would one day like to write a piece. (my music theory sucks and im trying my best to understand :( at least im trying.)

Jazz is now hailed as really great, but it was popular shit music that elites turned their noses up when it first hit the scene.

classical music may be popular because it was discovered by people later on. (discovery is exciting!)
i like some jazz. i play alto sax and french horn.

bob Sorry to take so long to get back to you about the 1812 Overture. I accidentally bumped my sciforums responses into my spam folder...duhhhhhhhhh......

I have a small collection of Arthur Fiedler LPs that have notes on the back about each piece. I'll dig up the 1812 note later today. I can't see why the guy didn't like it. I put it on and cranked it, closed my eyes and just surfed along on every note, watching a small movie in my head. That's the biggest thing I like about classical is that there are no words to tell you what to picture in your mind's eye. I believe it's Hungarian Rhapsody No. 5 (I have difficulty remembering the names) that sounds (to me) like a Gangbusters-style car chase.

On a somewhat funnier note, I was listening to the piece that served as the basis for Procol Harum's "Whiter Shade of Pale". It's a beautiful violin piece and I was realllllllly enjoying it one morning when the toilet backed up. So there's this lovely string music flowing through the house accompanied by a toilet-plunger background (slork! slurk! slork! slurk!) and that wonderful smell... I just knew I had hit on something like modern art...;)

is your name after something in the muppets?Yes. "Fraggle Rock" was one of the greatest TV shows of the 1980s. It's available on DVD now.anyway, i have a terrible time remembering names of composers and pieces. ive promised myself to go to the library and get some books to help me learn about composers and such. i get much (if not all) of my music from the library. all of it's classical. i rip it to my computer, and I can't make heads or tales from one piece or another when i hear it. should i do this on an individual basis, like get a book about a composer, read his or her bio, and then read about a piece and listen to the piece? how do you recommend i improve my recollection of pieces?In your first post you named several composers that you like. They're all from the same period that I like: the Romantic and Post-Romantic eras, more or less the last quarter of the 19th century through the middle of the 20th. There were a lot of composers working in that era, just pick them up from a Google search and try some you haven't heard yet. I heartily recommend my two favorite pieces which I already mentioned, "The Lark Ascending" by Ralph Vaughan Williams and "Methamorphosen" by Richard Strauss. Don't pass up the fabulous compositions for solo piano, such as Chopin's études and the works of Eric Satie.

You didn't name anyone from before that era. If it's because you've listened to some older music and simply didn't like it, then forget about it. If you haven't heard any, then check out some of the most highly respected composers, including Mozart, Beethoven and Bach, and I would add Brahms and Mendelssohn. You mentioned the Baroque era, which is much earlier, then there's the Renaissance, the dawn of what we think of as modern music. I find that stuff pretty lame but a lot of people love it.

You don't seem to be interested in vocal music, and I'm not either. Opera is now regarded as "classical" music and is given the same respect as symphonies, but when it was written some people dismissed it as simplified music written by great composers for the unsophisticated masses. There are a lot of compositions for choirs.

There has been a lot of music written in the 20th century, for orchestras, string quartets, solo piano, etc., that is not regarded as "classical" by the music snobs but is certainly not "pop." I have a really wonderful woodwind quintet named "AGORT" by John Downey that is about as strange as the music of The Mars Volta, but since it's not written for a rock and roll band most fans of avant-pop will never hear it.Is classical music actually good, or is it like the Coldplay of the 18th century?"Classical" music refers to the time and instrumentation. Generally it means anything written before your parents were born (whenever that was for you), for a traditional orchestra or a subset of orchestral instruments like a string quartet with piano, brass quintet, etc. It can also be for a solo piano but whatever it is it has to satisfy the music snobs that it is not "popular" or "folk" music. For anything written since the creation of ragtime (the precursor of jazz) it has to absolutely not be jazz, much less one of its descendants like rock. In other words, "classical" means what people who make it their business to define such words want it to mean. Gershwin's "Rhapsody in Blue" is now teetering on the edge of being called "classical," but in its time that would never have happened.

The "classical" period in music spans about half a millennium and a huge diversity of forms, so it's unlikely that even the most devoted pop aficionado could dismiss all of it as analogous to Coldplay or gangsta rap or country and western or Dixieland or... pick your favorite narrow genre to hate. Most rock and rollers secretly enjoy Ravel's "Bolero" just as most opera and symphony devotees secretly enjoy Crosby, Stills and Nash. Practically everybody who is serious about music and not just a trendie or a Friday night dancer likes the Beatles and Mussorgsky's "Pictures at an Exhibition."classical music is the best that homo-sapien has been able to come up with so far so appreciate it! music like popular and coldplay is very simple and feelingless. when you have a backbeat and a four-bar phrase, you have little room for emotion and all that.It doesn't matter whether you have the backbeat and blues infrastructure of rock and roll or the more traditional form of Cole Porter and Barry Manilow; popular songs are short and there's only so much you can cram into a short song. Comparing the pop ditties of any era to the longer pieces of the same era or another era (whether a symphony or a concept album by Pink Floyd) is bogus. It's music created for two different purposes.Will people be listening to Coldplay in the 23rd century? Any classical music you hear today has already lasted a few centuries. That means the really crappy* stuff was filtered out long ago.That's what "classical" means, obviously. Something that transcends its time. It's hard for popular songs to do that because they are usually deliberately crafted to appeal in a more topical way that won't connect with people in another era. It's very likely that some of the Beatles' songs will endure for many generations, just like some of Stephen Foster's 19th century songs did, and at least one pop tune that some musicologists say goes back to the Crusades: "Greensleeves." (How does a lady get green sleeves? By lying on her back in the fields after following an army.) Every "folk song" was written by somebody and was once a pop tune. My money is also on Pink Floyd's "Dark Side of the Moon."*that people could agree on, anyway. Hey, some people do like I. Stravinsky.I like Stravinsky and I'm not exactly an elitist. What's wrong with Stravinsky?But I'm just wondering what seperates, say, classical music from modern pop music. What's so great about it? Its complexity? Who's to say that classical music wasn't pop music for people two or three hundred years ago?"Classical" is the wrong word and derails the discussion. We're really talking about symphonies and other long pieces. They just have more substance than pop songs so there's more to hang onto. As I said, some of the landmark rock "concept albums," which at 45 minutes are as long as a symphony, with their own continuity, dynamics and thematic richness, may be among the "classics" of the 23rd century. Nektar's "Recycled," UK's "In the Dead of Night," Jethro Tull's "Aqualung."yeah mainstream music today is trendy and will go out of style. i think it is the type of society we live in...there is much more ease in lifestyle today than there was back then... so much less to write music about.It seems to me that life gets more complicated with each new era.

Right now I'm on a small Beethoven kick. It's long overdue.

In the meantime, I probably would have, a few months back, given a fairly mundane answer. Dvorak, Grieg, and there's a Rachmaninoff piece that my classically-trained musician friends can't stand, and I don't know the name of it. But of late, I've fallen for Phillip Glass. His string quartets are amazing, at least as performed by the Kronos Quartet. Though not fully-blown minimalism, the hints are all there: Glass' oft-ridiculed modernist minimalism does actually sound to derive legitimately from proper theory. (Don't ask me to write that paper, though.)

Beyond that, a nod to Shostakovich, whose work I'm still becoming familiar with.

Bob Okay! Finally found it! This is from the back of "Great Moments in Music Volume 11: Overtures", Arthur Fiedler and the Boston Pops Orchestra (Time-Life Records, 1980). It's not where I got the description of "forced and phony". I think that may have been from elsewhere, but it carries the gist:

Peter Ilyich Tchaikovsky (1840-1893) wrote his 1812 Overture as a concert piece, and was always embarrassed at its immense popularity. He thought it was "very banging and noisy" and reported that "I wrote it without much love, on which account it is probably not of much artitic value." The public has always disagreed.

Lately I've been listening to Schubert's Impromptus. Beautiful piano pieces you can close your eyes and lose yourself to. Right now I'm listening to 899/4. Inspiring stuff. He was inspired by Beethoven and Mozart. You can definately hear him striving to reach those dizzying heights. I think he sometimes achieves.

Amazing how much stuff this guy did in a short amount of time. Another genius lost to Syphilis!

Crap! How could I forget? Cage, 4'27". Greatest piece of music ever performed.

To wander a bit in another direction, and for those of you who have heard it, when Metallica performed with (I believe it was) the San Francisco Symphony, do you feel the genres enhanced or detracted from one another?

For a long time I've wanted music that would evoke the underlying lift of a flying swarm of blackbirds. Orlando Gibbon's instrumentals come the closest, that I've found. A group called "Phantasm" has a decent recording of some of them, called "Consorts for Viols".

If one thinks of "modern" music as freeing itself from the tyranny of the measure and the bar lines, Gibbon's stuff is interestingly modern. ;)

The most telling live performance of my attendance was a piece called "Odegan Taiga", essentially composed (I believe) by Kaigal-ool Xovalyg and performed by Huun - Huur - Tu at the Cedar Cultural Center in Minneapolis a few years ago.

There is a recorded version, which is bland and simplistic compared with that performance. Audiophile level sound quality is absolutely required - don't bother trying to hear that piece on an IPod.

I don't know quite what to make of it, as far as classification. It seems to belong in "classical" somehow, in its ambitions. The group's stuff is usually filed under "folk" or "world" music, and much of their repertoire is folk.

To wander a bit in another direction, and for those of you who have heard it, when Metallica performed with (I believe it was) the San Francisco Symphony, do you feel the genres enhanced or detracted from one another?I was totally underwhelmed. The Big Band era proved that an ensemble can do a great job with jazz, of which rock is merely a subgenre.

But I think the music has to be written for the instrumentation that is to be used. The Moody Blues proved that that works, "Days of Future Passed" was written for rock band plus symphony orchestra forty years ago. Or at least rearranged, as so many great pieces from "Pictures at an Exhibition" to "Rhapsody in Blue" have been, both from solo piano to full orchestra.

I thought the orchestra was not up to the task and neither was Metallica. Frank Zappa was a Compleat Musician; he understood orchestras and symphonically-oriented musicians and was able to get the best out a collaboration. I don't think that either Metallica or the conductor or arranger of the SF Symphony had the required skill to prepare music that was destined to sound great in an enthusiastic but somewhat clueless collaboration.

There was too much duplication of parts: the strings and two or three other sections playing the same notes as the lead guitar, four other sections mimicking the rhythm guitar, etc. That's a symphonic technique for obtaining a particularly subtle and exquisite texture. Metallica's music is pretty short on subtlety so for me it fell flat. They should have broken it up more, let the band play more or less by itself and then cut out and have the orchestra break in, a la Moody Blues. In order to facilitate that they should also have written some new music specially for the orchestra.

But they tried and it was a good effort. The next attempt by the same people or somebody else will be better. It was fun.

anything in any period except 20th century because 20century is crap

How's this:

I'm definitely into the Romantics, but I'm more of an everyman with like, Bach, Handel, then Mozart, Beethoven, Chopin etc, but then Debussy, Satie, Rachmaninoff, some Tchaikovsky, Bizet, etc. I've strained my right triceps and shoulder going hard out on the Rach lately. I'm going to have to watch those fff parts.
And modern stuff is like, a rearrangement of the older stuff, there are plenty of modern songs that borrow shamelessly from the Romantic era, which I claim is where Jazz comes from, after Eastern European and African/New World music got together in America.

I mean, when you look at the music, there are patterns you can see, as well as hear when you learn to play the stuff.

But that's just me.
With my A-90 in the corner.

Jazz is now hailed as really great, but it was popular shit music that elites turned their noses up when it first hit the scene.

Then again some people do learn their mistakes and try to learn from them while others never do, do they?

J.S. Bach and Beethoven are the two greatest composers, the Old and the New Testament. Both have composed music of such spiritual intensity... the 9th, the 5th, the Brandenburg Concertos, the Goldberg Variations, Kreutzer, Pathetique, Hammerklavier, Well Tempered Clavier and i could tell many more... simply astounding... the violin concertos, the sonatas, the quartets....

I try to listen to as many composers as i can, but i'm more into the Baroque.

Aren't you all forgetting about Vivaldi?