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.
