Learning to Love Classical Music
Welcome to the latest edition of All the Music of All the World, our weekly series where we aim to share music worth being passionate about. Consider us a guide who can help you get the most out of your Victrola by giving you new music to listen to, or new ways to think about music you already know.
Like most of you reading this, I’d wager, I have spent virtually no time trying to listen to Classical Music. As an ‘80s kid, the genre always seemed stuffy—they wear suits just to PLAY it, for crying out loud—and sounded like background, lobby or elevator music, which is to say: antiquated audio wallpaper. The pioneering neurologist Dr. Oliver Sacks says that music we listen to in our youth can light up neural pathways in our memories, brainstems, and other parts of the brain, which is why music from your youth always sounds better to you than new music does. But that also applies the opposite way to genres you didn’t build a neural pathway for earlier in life too: It’s why your grandma couldn’t listen to hip-hop without thinking it’s “just noise.” And it’s why for most of my 40-ish years on earth, I’ve avoided listening to Classical Music, unless it’s the plot of an Oscar movie I found to be slightly overrated.
Through a variety of personal reasons we don’t have the space to really get into here—let’s say “personal loss” with a mix of “impending parenthood” crossed with “wanting to find my roots”—I found myself, on a quiet night a few months back, downloading Apple Music’s dedicated Classical Music app, to see if I could give Classical Music a real, earnest try. If you’re unfamiliar, Apple Music, apart from their normal Apple Music app, has an app built for the Classical Music sicko. It has to be the most comprehensive catalog and database of Classical ever created; something the library of Alexandria could only hope for. Through the app, it’s possible to search by composer, to search by orchestra, to search by conductor, and to even search by era. They also have a fairly comprehensive upload of the entirety of liner notes in many of the albums on app, meaning it’s possible to read at length about what you’re hearing, in the app, while you listen to it, something these music apps have lacked since they’ve existed.
Which is all well and good, right, but where do you start? Classical Music is, by its definition, the oldest music we have available to us, and in fact was the first music to take off when Victrola launched in 1906. Do you start with one of the guys everyone knows the name of? Bach, Beethoven, Mozart? Or the guy Bradley Cooper spent years making a super mid movie about, Leonard Bernstein? Or new guys like Dudamel, Yo-Yo Ma, or Disney scores, or Jon Batiste doing Beethoven? The possibilities are functionally endless, and really only hemmed in by your imagination or willingness to dig, which is part of the appeal for going on this Classical Music journey for me; it’s diving deep into a pool that’s over the Mariana Trench.
I can’t tell you where to start, but I can tell you where I did: with Jean Sibelius. The national hero of Finland, Sibelius lived from 1865 until 1957, which is seen as basically modern for Classical Music. He composed seven major symphonies and has a handful of other famous compositions. When I started listening to Sibelius, I basically just threw a dart and started listening to one of the first albums that came up. I listened to 15 minutes and felt nothing. I tried again; and it felt like listening to music in an elevator. I started to lose hope for my Classical experiment.
And then I found this album:
This is from the 1960s, when the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra, under conductor Lorin Maazel led the group through basically the entire Sibelius oeuvre. I finally understood the appeal: I felt like I was standing on a Finnish hill, watching the sunrise as the First Symphony rolled over me. The Fourth Symphony hit like a truck; listening to different instrument groups ride in and out of the action felt like watching a horse battle. For the first time, Classical Music felt like something meaningful, something impactful, and something I could actually relate to. I was building the vaunted neural pathways Dr. Sacks talked about.
That said, I haven’t gone past these releases; there’s too much to love, too much to keep discovering. But I’m open to try more, and I’ve found myself thinking about this music more than any other over the last few weeks. Which is to say, if you take anything from All the Music of All the World, it’s that you should allow yourself the kismet to discover new music you could love. The point of life is to keep trying new things, and that extends even to music that feels old fashioned and stuffy.
