How to listen to classical music 1/99

Classical music is the best example of an acquired taste. It's something that requires an investment. But rest assured, you profit proportionally to how much you invest.

There are two kinds of people who don't like classical music:

1. A few seriously tried to learn to listen to classical music, but they really have a problem with it.
2. Most never tried it seriously, so in fact they could still learn. Usually they don't know how to start or how to continue.

If you want to start listening to classical music, this playlist of mine was created to be didactic. Mostly you want radio stations in which people talk about the music and play entire works (not fragments). In the UK that's BBC Radio 3. In Brazil that's Cultura FM de São Paulo. Elsewhere I don't know, it might not even exist. In Poland, for instance, there is more than one radio station for classical music but they are all square, with a very conservative and restricted repertoire, no comments on the music and they rarely play entire works. Just awful.

If you decide to learn to listen to classical music, what does that amount to? What lies ahead of you exactly? Let's answer this question. Sorry, the answer is long.

What it amounts to

More music than you expect

Most people today listen to less than a century of rock and pop music and little else. But classical music isn't just one more genre, it is a vast repertoire containing many, many genres. I mean, it has existed since the 5th Century. In practice we listen to about 8 centuries of music, with many revolutions in the genres and musical languages used.

That repertoire is probably larger than all non-classical musics combined. You'd need several lifetimes. But not all of it is good, no. The stuff that remains in the active repertoire tends to be the stuff that is really eternal.

It will be strange at first

You know the first 50 years of cinema history are full of masterpieces, naturally. But you feel it's harder to watch black and white films with mono audio (or even silent) and limited techniques than to watch contemporary high-res films with great sound and a contemporary cinematic language. However, the more you watch old Chaplin films, the less strange they seem to you. You can get used to them.

Something similar will happen when you listen to classical music. It will be quite uncomfortable at first. Each era will sound strange to you for different reasons. Each composer will feel strange for a while. In certain cases, individual pieces will cause bewilderment. But understanding will come. You must give it time.

Advice: quickly find something you like; stay with that composer, get to know him; start moving away from him both forwards and backwards in time, gradually.

My personal taste has gone through multiple revolutions. Musics that I detested on the first hearing, in time, became my favourite things in the world. This is a wonderful side of classical music: you do get smarter in your listening as you broaden your horizons.

You also lose a kind of temporal myopia. You gain perspective on your own time, by knowing what things were like in the past. For instance, children today are used to that robotic voice created by AutoTune, which enables people who can't sing to sell music, but sounds completely artificial. But they may react negatively to bel canto (opera singing), with its wide vibrato and focus on the loud side. But you see, there was never any whispering in opera, because the people at the back of the theatre paid for tickets too, so they deserve to hear something. Bel canto developed when electric amplification didn't exist, and it is the most natural way to sing such that everyone can hear you in the theatre. Those guys have to compete with an entire orchestra... For a while you may find it strange, but it's just one more thing that you can get used to, and then forever enjoy.

Listening is a skill to be developed

People used to know this: Listening is a skill that one develops through focused practice. People don't seem to know this anymore. That's because we live in a historically bizarre era: the era of entertainment, which only started in the 20th Century.

What is entertainment? Just cheap art. Leave your brain at the door, grab the popcorn, and forget the movie 5 minutes after it's over. Entertainment is the art that doesn't assume the responsibilities of art. Real art gets you thinking, it annoys you, it forces you to revisit the work, and often it forces you to change your opinion. Real art demands things of you, it gets you to do the work. Marketing departments feel that demanding things from the public is bad for sales, so they shun real art.

But how to develop your listening skill? Well, first of all, understand that...

Classical music is not background music

People use music as a sort of nice background noise for other noisy activities. Classical music is unfit for that purpose. It requires your attention and your silence.

When listening to classical music one absolutely must stop doing other activities that require the same neurons – the neurons used for language processing. No talking, no reading, no listening to audiobooks, no noisy environments, no programming, no scrolling on your phone. But yes, you can silently tidy up your room while you listen, it wouldn't likely interfere.

Why no noisy environments? Because classical music is normally expressive, in the sense that it has softer and louder parts. It is not abnormal, like the contemporary music that stays equally loud from beginning to end. Speaking softly versus screaming is an expressive device that should be used. The reason pop music doesn't... is because then pop music can be used as a distraction in noisy urban life: driving, commuting, working, etc.

If you use classical music like that, 2 things may happen:

1. An annoyance: you can only hear the loud parts, not the soft parts, because these get masked by environment noise.
2. A disease: by raising the volume you will absolutely, certainly, without any trace of doubt, lose your hearing. This is of course not limited to classical music. Any prolonged listening, to anything, at a high volume WILL cause hearing loss. It's no joke, just ask around yourself – you already know people who have hearing loss, but maybe they didn't tell you about it. Please do get informed about hearing loss.

Therefore, if you need background music, go ahead and listen to some sausage. Keep classical music for your personal temple.

Classical music is an abstract narrative

But why does classical music require focused attention? Because it's a plot.

Most classical music (but not all of it) is like a story. But the events in the story are abstract rather than specific. There are a number of stories that may fit the same piece of music. As if a story had been told, its events erased, but the feelings and atmospheres remained.

Classical music is also definitely not about lyrics, although these may be present. If you learn to listen to classical music, then instrumental music becomes meaningful to you. This is because music is the art of sound. Lyrics are an entirely separate art called poetry. If you currently dislike music without lyrics, then you'll be learning what the art of music is really about.

But the scope of the feelings and atmospheres portrayed is much, much larger. You see, contemporary popular musics have rather narrow expressive ranges. For example:

• punk rock and hip hop focus on male self-affirmation: "I might seem menacing but I am right, here are the reasons". This is something that loses all its wisdom as soon as a guy has sex a few times. I mean, self-affirmation is kinda ugly, egotistical and unwise.
• bossa nova expresses an atmosphere of hanging out at the beach, just looking at the babes, being cool and feeling lonely. Again, rather narrow, you see.
• "romantic" music was always a current genre, gently talking about love. Somehow, since the ascension of hip hop, love is NOT a cool subject in pop music – violence is. Definitely a historic aberration.
• country music: I am not sure how to characterize, but definitely narrow in technique and emotional range.

Now depending on the symphony you hear, it might last an entire hour and contain an entire world of different feelings and atmospheres, sometimes in violent contradiction, so you don't get bored. It doesn't have to be a symphony; "Pictures at an Exhibition" would be a great example.

You need a time machine

Classical music is not music of the past. It continues to develop today. But to understand what happened in one era you have to know the previous one.

Rock and pop are not like that, not so much. They are sort of a reset in history, even though they do have their origins in other genres. The point is, they do not refer to their history, you don't have to know it to appreciate it. (In a few pieces you do.)

Classical music is much more historical. You have to use your time machine, place yourself at the time when the piece premiered. By knowing the music that came before, you know what was new about this piece, and what was old. You know what the innovation was, you can guess whether they were shocked or intrigued or whatever. The experts will find historic documents and tell you how the piece was received, what the critics wrote etc.

What if you don't time travel? Then classical music will be a shallow thing to you – you will think it is "beautiful". That's how most people hear classical pops today. "That was nice", they say. But "easy listening" is something else. Classical music was never beautiful; it was frequently shocking, "uglier" and "uglier". The music of one generation was never appropriate for the next generation (and vice-versa), exactly like today. Something always dramatically changed. What and why? That's what is interesting.

You will never understand classical music unless you time travel.

The genius composers of the past were tremendous inventors, and as such, they did quite strange things. You won't be able to understand what and why unless you get informed. I promise you, if you research the times, the composer's life and the piece, you will gain so much understanding and fruition. Figuring out the thing goes hand in hand with liking the thing.

You need proper equipment

I tried to listen to some Tchaikovsky on my iPad. I love Swan Lake, but on tiny speakers... it's annoying. In fact, it was unbearable. The reason is, the lower frequencies are missing. You get only the highs, so the sound is strident and aggressive and honestly, quite ugly. I am not speaking as an audiophile here, I am talking about an extremely palpable thing that everyone will feel.

If you listen to classical music on crummy speakers, I am sure you will give it up.

Classical music requires at least a good pair of headphones. Not those that come with your iPhone, no. Not JBL either, those are bad and expensive. Get good headphones. Or a good pair of speakers, that's even better.

Apple and other streaming companies have started to push surround sound for music in general onto their public. That's bull. It makes music worse, except for a very small portion of the repertoire, which was composed with surround sound in mind. Most music needs stereo, that's the best way to listen to it. The rest is a disservice started by marketing departments.

The golden age of equipment for listening to music was until the 80s, because they sold "Hi Fi" (high fidelity), which means, the sound that goes out the speakers is close to the sound that got into the microphone. That's the goal. Back then, people would listen to music together and discuss it passionately. But in the 90s, Sony, Philips and all those companies stopped talking about Hi Fi and started pushing "hyper bass". That's the beginning of the bullshit era, in which stereos were replaced by home theaters with 5 tiny speakers and one woofer, which by the way, create a nightmare of cables. Suddenly no home had a place for listening to music, that place was now for watching blockbusters. This is also a part of why you were never taught how to listen to classical music, either by your parents or by some friend.

Classical music doesn't want "hyper bass". The sub-bass you can hear in certain disco music (which sounds like a very low electric hum is singing) is not desired. That's the lowest sound humans can hear, there's no need to go that low. If the bass is too strong it will mask other frequencies, hiding detail, which makes things worse. For classical music, normal, common bass is fine, as long as it is present.

Best to buy CDs

These days, on streaming platforms such as YouTube, even classical music often has its dynamic range compressed until it looks like a sausage and sounds at the same loudness level all the time. This is horrible. I am seeing videos so compressed that the softest passages actually sound louder than the loudest passages – this inverts the original meaning. Why are they compressing? Presumably so you can listen to the thing on the speakers of your phone, or in a noisy environment. We already established you must do neither.

You should be the happy owner of quite a few CDs, if only so you can feel the difference. CDs do not use that compression, in CDs you hear loudness differences pretty much like in the theater. The sound quality is also higher, unless you pay for a really good streaming service.

CDs often come with a booklet which, if well written, can be very informative about the repertoire.

If you buy a CD, you can own it for many decades. If you pay for a streaming service, you own nothing, and your favorite music can suddenly disappear.

Do not buy compilations. Ignore "Best of Mozart", that's nonsense. A Beethoven symphony is equally good from beginning to end, and you need to hear the entire thing because the entire thing has a certain meaning. Buy only complete works, never just extracts. Listen to complete works, from beginning to end.

Summing up this post

Here is the advice you learned in this article:

1. Preserve your hearing for the future.
2. The repertoire is more vast than you imagine, but the best stuff is well-known.
3. You will find each thing strange at first. That's normal, happens to everyone. Insist and pass the initial hurdle.
4. Listening is a skill to be gradually developed.
5. Classical needs your complete attention, it's not suitable for the background.
6. It usually tells an abstract story. Keep track of the plot.
7. Listen to complete works, not extracts or compilations.
8. You need to research time, place, composer and composition.
9. You need proper reproduction equipment.
10. Buy some albums.
11. Do not listen to any music in noisy environments.

That's a lot of advice, but not enough. More is coming.