[bellytimber]

OK, cool. Glad you like some of this music.

Advice: First, if you decide to devote even one hour of your life to learning about classical music, you are sooner or later going to cross paths with some of the kookiest and most committed snobs in the western world: Ignore them please, except when they're being just tremendously huge sissies, because then they're kind of funny. You have a food background right? It's not too different. In fact my pocket Venn diagram shows significant overlap.

Classical music can be as good as anything on earth, but there are a lot of pitfalls out there. Here are a few:

1) it's a super broad term. "Classical music" refers to a huge tangle of styles and categories and germans with syphilis covering like the last 600 years.

2) when it's bad it's really bad

3) and there sooo many kinds of bad. Bad composers. Bad pieces by good composers. Bad performances of good pieces. Bad recommendations of good performances of good pieces.

and no offense to anyone upthread--I think people generally gave you good advice here--but to the dude who recommended beethoven's late string quartets to CDC...are you freaking kidding me? Dude. I'm glad that you like them, and god knows I like them too (indeed I like most of your recs), but how can you recommend those in this situation--holy crap when smart seventh graders ask you for some good summer reading do you hand them [censored] Joyce? Gaah!

and my #3 above touches on one problem with simply downloading a zillion things from itunes...there are lots of crummy performances (of good music) out there. If you do a search for "1812 overture" on amazon you're going to get hundreds of different versions, and believe it or not this really does matter: some of the different versions and interpretations are essentially not going to sound like the same piece of music.

My advice:

first and most importantly, just keep paying attention to what you like. Unoriginal, I know...but there it is. Sometimes listen to the classical station on Sirius or whatever. (And actually, the classical music channel on your local cable TV is probably a better choice than the one on your local radio [as your radio station is pressured to play x% of obscure stuff, while your cable tv will have one option that's like "classical pops" or "classical lite"...probably perfect for you right now.])

I see that I went with the brackets within parenthesis there. Awesome.

so anyway just listen to some of these stations and maybe jot down a few of your likes/dislikes.

You might notice a pattern developing, maybe that you tend to like stuff with a full orchestra better than stuff played by a few instruments, or maybe that you wrote Tchaikovsky's name down four times, or maybe that you just heard one of those Beethoven late string quartets and it made you want to wash your mouth out with led zeppelin for three hours before you were ready for more Tchaikovsky.

once you have a few of these ideas, it's time to buy some music. Let's say for instance you wanted to get a version (or two) of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony. It's tough because there are hundreds--actually thousands--of performances of this work. So here's what I would do (in order of preference) to sort them all out.

a) buy a book. Lots of books exist that will have a blurb or two on pretty much everything in the entire classical canon, and they will give you reliable enough advice on which performances to look for. Most of these will also give you a little historical context, and maybe give you a few ideas for more music you might like. I'll give you specific book recs, but I read all these a decade ago so your best bet is to browse in the store. But there was a book by Parker "Building a Classical Music Library," and a book by Goulding with the snappy title "Classical Music." Neither of these is remotely perfect, but whatever.

2) go to the record store. Oh [censored] I forgot does Tower still exist? If it does, they often have a good classical department. Suck it up and ask the dude behind the classical desk if he has recommendations for a version of the William Tell Overture. You two will then have a charming ten minute conversation because he's an authentically nice & earnest guy who has been waiting for the last three weeks to prove to a guy like you just how big his brain is. And bonus, if you mention that you cook you will very likely get his phone number.

2b) if you're at the store and there's no classical guy working, look around for the store copy of the "Penguin Guide"...it will be this dog-eared paperback brick of a book filled with nothing but recommendations. The writing in it sucks--every piece of music will be "plangent" or "stentorian" or "seraphic" or "mephistophelian"--but it will do the job and you will feel somewhat cheerful carrying it around. I dunno, it has a good weight.

...in no time you will see that there's a core group of reliable orchestras, conductors, performers, and record labels that you can usually trust.

then you're off to the races. And listen man, we will eagerly welcome you to our tribe, our ninny nation, we are literally dying off at a rate of around 2% per day, just this morning I believe Mort from Cleveland passed away, polio FTW, Mort was the last guy in the USA who knew who Mendelssohn was.

And listen, like everything else in the world, none of this is even half as hard as it sounds during orientation. Just start with what you like and go from there.

representative example:
We could talk about this for a long time, but at the end of the day my favorite classical composer is J.S. Bach. In my opinion he's on the shortest list of incomprehensible geniuses that earth has ever offered up. But that said, I would not recommend (to you, to anyone) like around 2/3 of his music. Yeah. Bach is my favorite guy ever...and I honestly like less than half his music. (OK it's not totally fair, he was super prolific.) But it gets worse: of the 1/3 that I do like, I could only recommend at most like 1/2 of the performances. So now if you just walked up and snagged something at random from the Bach section, you're a 5:1 dog to grab something good. And to seal the argument, my favorite work of Bach's at the moment is a piano piece called The Goldberg Variations. But a) it took me like five years of listening before I realized how much I liked it; b) I would seldom give it to someone just starting out because it's not really user-friendly; and c) I own maybe twenty different performances of the Goldberg Variations, and of those twenty there are only two that I would take to a desert island. So [censored]! Here we have my favorite thing ever composed by my favorite guy ever, and I still can't recommend it to people without like three minutes of qualification. Classical music is a huge pain.

But it's also really wonderful so please ignore this post if I seem to be coming down too much in the camp of the pain.

Last thing: I don't want to give too much in the way of specific advice because it all depends. But I'll just name a couple representative composers from a handful of broad musical periods...so before you reject any giant chunks of classical music you're going to need to reject the best of these guys first.


BAROQUE
J.S. Bach

CLASSICAL
Mozart
Beethoven

ROMANTIC
Chopin
Rossini
Tchaikovsky
Grieg
Saint-Saens

LATE-ROMANTIC/MODERN (be careful)
Debussy
Copland
Gershwin
Rachmaninoff
Prokofiev

this is by no means a Best In Show list--I didn't even mention middle ages/renaissance or modern/postmodern--but it's just that if I had to guess, it sounds like you, CSC, are at first going to be drawn to music with terrific melodies, so these are some of the dozens of composers who might offer you that. Lots of people first enter into classical music through Tchaikovsky (think: The Nutcracker), and consequently there are lots of overripe affected pinheads walking around the world who like to give people grief for liking Tchaikovsky. Stab them with a fork in the neck. We hate them.

So I dunno, just stay true to what you like, and in no time you too will be distinguishing between a concerto and a chamber orchestra, between Schubert and Schumann, and dodging forks from multiple directions.

also if you're ever wondering how to pronounce someone's name, answers.com is usually pretty good

fwiw, the first thing I remember listening to was Peter and the Wolf by Prokofiev (Bernstein narrating)--I'm only mentioning it because it was a decent way for me to learn what each instrument kind of sounded like. Carnival of the Animals, composed by Saint-Saens, is also in this genre, and I think there's even a single CD that has both of these pieces (complete with the cornball narration of Bernstein) on there. Though I'll tell you what, the one with Gielgud narrating might be even better (...but then Gielgud doesn't narrate the Carnival of the Animals, and anyway, the CotA conducted by Dutoit is definitely performed better than either of those two, and with Dutoit you might even accidentally run into his version of Danse Macabre, which is awesome, and etc et cetera you get it).

yes, I love classical music. But then for the last three weeks I've basically listened to nothing but the Beatles and Zeppelin and Bob. I'm just saying please don't worry, I'm not trying to get you to commit to some major lifestyle decision here...I'll leave that to the dude I mentioned in the Tower classical department.

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