
A Layman’s Intro to Western Classical Music - Roccan
https://quariety.com/2018/04/28/a-laymans-intro-to-western-classical-music/
======
xrd
The most interesting thing so far about this for me is the bizarre twitter and
Facebook sharing buttons that dance around the page, following some strange
beat. Wtf.

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myf01d
I discovered this website
[https://classicalmusiconly.com/](https://classicalmusiconly.com/) on a SHOW
HN post several months ago. Really nice for anybody who's interested in
classical music

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noyesno
See also: Joining the dots (Steve Hobson) and Inside Music (Karl Haas).

The latter also has/had a great radio program “Adventures in good music”
introducing different aspect of classical music. You can find some of the
episodes at the internet archives:

[https://archive.org/search.php?query=Adventures%20in%20good%...](https://archive.org/search.php?query=Adventures%20in%20good%20music)

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millettjon
The podcast Meet The Composer is also excellent.
[https://www.npr.org/podcasts/528124256/meet-the-
composer](https://www.npr.org/podcasts/528124256/meet-the-composer)

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jacquesm
In case this interests you, then this is also neat:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gt2zubHcER4](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gt2zubHcER4)

Bernstein, The greatest 5 min. in music education

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GuthL
This intro seems to be very close to the Yale coursera course on Western
Classical Music, which is the most amazing Coursera course I ever took. For
anyone without musical culture, this is the place to start:
[https://www.coursera.org/learn/introclassicalmusic](https://www.coursera.org/learn/introclassicalmusic)

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wrongc0ntinent
Schönberg was Austrian.

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KaiserPro
music from the middleages is a pretty hardcore way to start.

I grew up on tallis, byrd et al, with a huge amount of baroque (Purcel), but
it wouldn't be my place to start.

Bach, Beethoven, holst, bernstein, Vaughan Williams are much better places to
start

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alistoriv
It's a bit silly to say that people only started moving on to new chords
/after/ Wagner.

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contourtrails
Start with Mozart, move to Beethoven. Wrapping your head around classical
styles is easier when you directly compare the Classical and Romantic styles
since they are quite different. That gives you a foundation to understand
other forms.

~~~
maroonblazer
Close. Start with Palestrina, then Bach, then Mozart.

~~~
acjohnson55
Palestrina is an interesting suggestion. That makes sense from a perspective
of chronology and the development of the form, but Bach and Mozart have a big
advantage of familiarity. I've heard Palestrina's music in university classes,
but I can't recall any of it at the moment.

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antimatter
Can anyone recommend a good classical playlist on Spotify?

~~~
mLuby
[https://open.spotify.com/user/mluby/playlist/2N8jJpqY5hf9hqp...](https://open.spotify.com/user/mluby/playlist/2N8jJpqY5hf9hqp5BBBemz?si=PEmOJMeaTbifsCNE8dkNMQ)

I'd suggest finding one that shows the name of the composer as artist rather
than the performing orchestra.

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p15
An excellent introduction to this topic is a lecture series called “How to
Listen to and Understand Great Music” by Robert Greenberg.

It’s very rich in detail but Greenberg also makes it accessible and fun.

It’s available for cheap on audible and from “the great courses”.

~~~
riffraff
thanks a lot, I was going to ask about suggestions on this vein. The audible
at 14$ with membership looks like a very good deal too.

I have effectively no knowledge or understanding of classical music, and it
seems there is no obvious way of learning other than "just listen to a lot of
it".

Ok obviously that works, but I'd rather have an equivalent of SICP or CTM :)

~~~
yomly
Maybe one of the books that might be an SICP type book could be The Classical
Style by Charles Rosen but I'm not sure how accessible it is to a
nonmusician...

I found biographies helped build my appreciation of the music. A good one will
cover both the personal life of the composer and their musical development
(which are often intertwined), with some light commentary on specific works.

Something I love doing these days is witnessing the evolution of the composer
by listening to their works across their life. At least for Mozart, Schubert,
Beethoven and Chopin I can say that I personally detect this maturity in their
late music that experiments more with chromaticism and harmony. The late music
also tends to have a slightly more conservative sense of emotion which I feel
must be some reflection of how people's emotional range develops as they get
older. (early Chopin is this sentimental romantic adolescent, while late
Chopin has this refinement and grace about it)

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bwang29
One thing I never quite understood was - are today's rock / pop music in any
way related to the development of classical music or branched off from it? It
seems like classical music keeps developing into the post modern era and is
still being experimented and toyed with but without many new instruments
added, while the other type of music can be lumped into "non-classical" and
has their own separate branches of development. It's surprising to me that
some form of music similar to art rock or pop was not developed in the 1400s,
was it because the technologies to create some of the instruments weren't
available?

~~~
jonjacky
Today's rock/pop music is a direct descendant of classical music. The
similarity to baroque sonatas and concertos is the clearest - that is why Bach
Handel Teleman etc. make the easiest path into classical music to someone
familiar with modern rock/pop. Baroque music has the same structure as modern
rock/pop - a tune on top of a chord progression. It's a running joke in music
circles that Pachelbel's Canon in D sounds familiar the first time you hear it
because its chord progression appears in countless modern pop tunes. The basic
baroque ensemble is like an unamplified rock band without drums. There is a
rhythm section called the "continuo" constisting of a bass instrument like a
cello or viola da gamba or bassoon - that's like the bass guitar - and a
chordal instrument like a harpsichord or organ or lute or theorbo or ...
that's like the rhythm guitar or piano or organ. Then there is a violin and/or
flute or other melody instruments - that's like the lead guitar and/or
saxophone or singer. The continuo part was usually written in a notation
called 'figured bass' that was analogous to modern chord charts. Besides that,
the soulful singer songwriter goes back at least to the medieval troubadours,
but appears in essentially modern form with the lute song composers of the
16th and 17th century - the model here is John Dowland, who in addition to
composing a lot of melancholy songs, also composed some guitar-god-like solo
instrumentals. And, this lute music was typically published in a tabular
notation a lot like modern guitar tab.

~~~
alistoriv
Not to downplay the influence that the classical music tradition has had on
popular music, I think it's incorrect to say that rock and pop are direct
descendants of classical music. Rock music, for example, is very clearly
directly descended from folk music traditions.

~~~
jonjacky
Sure, rock is also directly descended from folk, and other genres too. Musical
genres can have several different direct ancestors.

------
mrleiter
I tried getting into western classical music several times, but always
aborted. I find it really difficult, as it is so diverse and complex, yet
beautiful and satisfying at the same time.

Its vastness is astonishing and is the main reason why I always stopped. Where
to start? Why? How does it all connect? There are so many more angles to
western classical music than one would think.

So thank you for this! I will try again.

~~~
yomly
There are a couple of ways to cut it up, for instance you could segment by:
Mood

Form

Period

Instrument

For me, I started with solo piano mainly, and some light chamber music and
worked through periods (at a natural rate rather than any rigorous scheme). I
found solo piano somewhat easier to analyze by ear and deliberately stayed
away from things like symphonies as they were way too complex to appreciate to
a depth that I am personally inclined.

Once I developed an ear for periodic styles and musicianship, it became
natural to branch out into orchestration and more composers.

In terms of solo piano works that are famous:

Bach Goldberg variations/preludes and fugues/english and French suites

Mozart piano sonatas k310-333 are decent.

Beethoven piano sonatas pathetique, moonlight, les adieux, appassionata,
waldstein (maybe also hammerklavier)

Chopin nocturnes, waltzes, preludes and sonata 2

Debussy - arabesques, suite bergamasque, piano pieces, preludes

That would be a starter :)

~~~
mrleiter
Thanks! :)

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adamnemecek
I'm working on an IDE for music. IDE: Windows notepad = my thing : normal
DAWs. Sign up here if you want to be notified when it's ready

[https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1-aQzVbkbGwv2BMQsvuoneOUPgyr...](https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1-aQzVbkbGwv2BMQsvuoneOUPgyrc6HRl-
DjVwHZxKvo)

It uses novel models of tonality that will make you productive. Write 10
albums in the time of 1. It doesn’t dumb anything down, it actually let’s you
explore the entirety of the musical space. (Goes beyond tonality).

Right now writing music in a DAW is surprisingly time consuming. Too much
clicking, not enought exploring. I’m trying to change that.

~~~
pierrec
That definitely sounds interesting, but I'm also a little blazé at this kind
of announcement. I have vague recollection of seeing this kind of ambition
multiple times, and zero recollection of seeing any of them concertize. I
guess there is a lot of hidden difficulty in the task.

I'm also not sure about that IDE analogy. IDEs and advanced code editors are
basically notepad with lots of extra features that increase productivity, at
the cost of added complexity and some extra learning effort. Meanwhile,
current DAWs can already be _very_ complex and hard to learn fully, because
they already have a million features to boost productivity in various ways. So
if current DAWs are "notepad", I'm not sure I want to know what an "IDE" even
looks like.

Because of that, I wouldn't belittle the existing tools so much. Several DAWs
are deeply scriptable and extensible, on top of the plethora of rapid-workflow
features they possess. This can get you pretty far in terms of creative
productivity.

That being said, I'm sure there is a world of unexplored workflows and musical
frameworks, and I want to see more people digging into that. But when you
casually say you're going to pull a revolution out of nowhere, you can expect
grumpy replies like this.

~~~
adamnemecek
> That definitely sounds interesting, but I'm also a little blazé at this kind
> of announcement.

I can't blame you and if I were you I would be a bit skeptical too.

> I have vague recollection of seeing this kind of ambition multiple times,
> and zero recollection of seeing any of them concertize.

Which ones for example? You are right, it's problem that people have been
trying to solve however most of the proposed solutions were either very
academical or very specific. They weren't trying to help you with composition.

> I guess there is a lot of hidden difficulty in the task.

There is however I like to think I've managed to remove quite a bit of it.

> I'm also not sure about that IDE analogy. IDEs and advanced code editors are
> basically notepad with lots of extra features that increase productivity, at
> the cost of added complexity and some extra learning effort.

Don't strain the analogy. It's a music composition software that tries to help
you.

> Meanwhile, current DAWs can already be very complex and hard to learn fully,
> because they already have a million features to boost productivity in
> various ways. So if current DAWs are "notepad", I'm not sure I want to know
> what an "IDE" even looks like.

Here's the thing, most of current DAWs are for editing of sound. Cutting,
mixing etc, they have surprisingly few features that are related to tonality
and composition. And Sibelius and all that sucks a stiff one too. How many
DAWs actually understand the concept of a scale and how many understand this
concept "productively". Ive tried all of them and they are all terrible for
this. E.g. if you have 10 tracks playing a chord, and you want to change said
chord, you have to go through all the tracks and change the notes manually.
That's very annoying.

Not to mention that all current DAWs have terrible, terrible interfaces. I can
go for hours on each of them and why it sucks, so pick one, I'll try to tell
you why I hate that particular one.

> In any case, I wouldn't belittle the existing tools so much. Several DAWs
> are deeply scriptable and extensible, on top of the plethora of rapid-
> workflow features they possess.

I don't want to script things. I want a tool, not a toolkit. And not all
things are scriptable. And I also want really good visualization and fast
workflows. And you can't really build new UIs.

If you want to talk about this more, send me an email (it's in my profile), I
can talk about this for hours.

~~~
TheOtherHobbes
Have you seen Orb Composer?

[https://www.orb-composer.com](https://www.orb-composer.com)

I don’t think it’s outstandingly great, but it suggests a lot of people are
going to be moving into this space.

The problem is automated composition is incredibly unpopular with pop writers
- they’d rather use samples anyway - and academic composers would rather do
their own thing the hard way.

Most people are very concrete thinkers. IMO the number of people who can
handle the kind of musical abstractions you’re talking about is tiny.

~~~
adamnemecek
I haven’t no. It’s somewhat similar but very different actually.

I wouldn’t call it automated composition either. My thing isn’t too abstract I
think.

Edit: I've looked at the sw now and I also hate it. Terrible UI, seems to be
stuck in the 18th century as far as music theory goes, etc etc. and they want
700 eur for this?

