How did you find your way to 'classical' music?

[A Lark Ascending]

This question related to jazz has generated a few threads. Given the discussions going on in the 'what are you listening to' thread, I'd be interested to hear how people developed an interest in a music that is only marginally more popular than jazz.

Three questions (no need to answer all or any...just thought joggers)...

1. Did you grow up in a household with classical music around you?

2. Did you learn an instrument and experience classical music that way?

3. How does classical music relate to your love of jazz? A secondary interest, a primary interest (with jazz in second place) or part of the seamless web of music?

**********************

My own experience. I grew up in a household with no concept of 'high culture'. My dad had a genuine but untrained love of light classics, musicals and Sinatra/Crosby type music. So we had random reel to reel tapes with everything from Danny Kaye to Chopin favourites in the house. Being a forces family I was forever moving school so learning an instrument was never even considered. I do recall odd things from school - a bit of Falla's 'Three Cornered Hat', a bit of Grieg, I even sang in a choir very briefly and we did 'And the Glory of the Lord' from The Messiah.

Music only exploded into my consciousness in 1969 as first pop and then rock. I began to to hear snippets of Bach, Sibelius, Stravinsky in the prog bands of the time but every attempt to listen to the real thing bored me. Until one night I was listening to Yes vocalist Jon Anderson being interviewed and one track he played was the last movement of Sibelius 5. I was bowled over and borrowed a copy from a friend. It grabbed me straight away.

At that point I went off to university and started to pick up the occasional budget classical album. I was also forced to spend long holidays on an RAF base in Germany where the local NAAFI had little of the off-the-wall rock I favoured. So I started buying relatively inexpensive DG recordings of Sibelius, Mahler, Bruckner and Stravinsky. Isolated for a couple of months on this camp I started to really warm to the music. Back at university I had a friend who had grown up in a very different environment with an opera loving father. He introduced me to so much music - I can still recall the day he played me a Barbirolli recording of Vaughan Williams Tallis Fantasia and 5th - instant adoration!

The real tipping point came with the punk explosion from 1976. Rock ceased to have any interest for me and I started following up leads into jazz, folk and classical. Richard Strauss, Janacek and Elgar were early enthusiasms (I'd been to a few Prom concerts around that time). For some reason it was always the 20thC that grabbed me - though I bought records of Mozart, Schubert, Beethoven etc it always sounded like music at a distance (still does) where the 20thC music hit me right up front. I also started reading widely - magazines like Gramophone and the string of more popular titles that appeared (and vanished) in the 80s, composer biographies and, most influentially, books and radio programmes by Anthony Hopkins who brilliantly let you into the mechanics of the music without going over your head. I'd also credit the excellent BBC Music guides that could be purchased very cheaply - I do hope they get put online at some point.

The last great push came with the appearance of the CD. Classical music was quick off the starting block where it took much longer for (non-mainsstream) rock, folk or jazz to catch up. So virtually all my exploration from 1985 to 1991 was in the classical area. Jazz took centre stage again from '91 but in the last few years classical and jazz have been more or less in balance.

***************

So, over to you.

What drew you in?

Edited October 11, 2009 by Bev Stapleton

[porcy62]

Question one:

Yes, I grown up in a household with classical music around me. My parents were fond of classical music as well as literature. My sister and I grown up with R. L. Stevenson, Conrad, Calvino, Mozart, Rossini, Beethoven (just to name the fews I recall at the moment). Actually I still play my dad's classical vinyls with huge satisfaction.

Question two:

No, though my sister plays classical guitar.

Question three:

As seamless web of music. And as a natural interest and curiosity about art in general.

[Larry Kart]

My mother and father both listened to classical music (my mother with deep love and understanding); they went to some Chicago Symphony concerts, later on were subscribers; my mother's younger brother was a good amateur violinist who might have been better than an amateur if he could have stuck with it (one of his childhood pals/fellow music students was Leonard Sorkin, eventually the leader of the Fine Arts String Quartet). I resisted at first on the basis of negative associations to Mantovani, Kostelanetz, stuff like that, which led me to think that anything with violins was sentimental glop, while jazz by contrast (this at about age 13) was anti-glop (among many other things), and to be anti-glop felt important in 1955. Things began to change when I listened to a Vox Box set of the Mozart String Quintets that was in the house. I just got what the music was about immediately -- I remember being particularly intrigued by how different in approach/manner the last three String Quintets were from each other -- and from there on it was clear sailing. A few years later, thanks in part to a knowledgeable friend, I got into "Modern Music," Second Viennese School in particular. Classsical and jazz interests remain in tandem.

[7/4]

Three questions (no need to answer all or any...just thought joggers)...

1. Did you grow up in a household with classical music around you?

Yeah. we had a piano, my sisters played. My Dad loved classical music, so it

was on the radio and on the stereo.

2. Did you learn an instrument and experience classical music that way?

Yeah. I took piano lessons when I was real young. I sang in the church choir until my voice changed.

But I think I took one or two classical guitar lessons when I was a teenager, the guitar

experience was much different.

3. How does classical music relate to your love of jazz? A secondary interest, a primary interest (with jazz in second place) or part of the seamless web of music?

seamless.

[jeffcrom]

I grew up hearing the classical music my parents played - they were partial to Beethoven. As a teenager exploring lots of different music, I used to listen to Beethoven's Ninth over and over - lying on the floor with my head between the speakers to hear all the details, since I didn't have any headphones. Around the same time I fell in love with Bach, and slightly later with Ives and other "newer" composers.

I played in bands in high school and college, and still love the wind ensemble music of Percy Grainger, Holst, Vaughan Williams, etc. I studied classical saxophone for four years in college, and it was a strange and kind of schizophrenic experience. I would spend hours practicing the Glazunov Concerto and the Creston Sonata when I wanted to be practicing the changes to "Comfirmation" and learning Ornette Coleman tunes. My classical music education gave me a really good grounding in technique and musical knowledge, but I do think it slowed down my development as a jazz musician. I did talk my teacher into letting me play some jazz on my senior recital. It was a strange concert - I played the Karg-Elert Sonata for unaccompanied saxophone, Leslie Bassett's very challenging Music for Saxophone and Piano, "Oleo," and Marion Brown's "Once Upon a Time."

Classical music is secondary to me only in that I listen to more jazz than any other kind of music. It's certainly very important to me, although my least favorite part of the repertoire is what most classical listeners consider its heart - the Beethoven-to-Mahler Romantic tradition. Most of the time, I'd rather listen to Bach, Stravinsky, or Stockhausen.

Thanks for this thought-provoking thread.

[Larry Kart]

Also -- and I'm sure many have had this experience -- the second movement of Bartok's for Music for Percussion, String, and Celeste made it clear to me fairly early on that classical music can swing.

[Jazzjet]

My Dad was a big classical music fan, although not so much for the later 20th century composers, and it was played in our house a lot. Being a child of the 60s, this tended to produce an opposite reaction in me and, for a while, it bored me stiff. Then, in about 1968, my Dad and I agreed to a deal where I would go along with him to a concert of 'Carmina Burana' by Carl Orff and he would come with me to a concert of Charles Lloyd ( with Keith Jarrett ). I like to think we both got something out of this. I know I did.

Having said that, classical music doesn't play a big part in my life now, although I can appreciate it on some level. I guess this is mainly because there is so much music to appreciate and catch up with that you have to prioritise.

[Stefan Wood]

Also -- and I'm sure many have had this experience -- the second movement of Bartok's for Music for Percussion, String, and Celeste made it clear to me fairly early on that classical music can swing.

Yes!

That and Rites of Spring.

[BillF]

I listen rarely to classical music, but find the following appeal to someone who's developed his musical tastes through jazz:

Stravinsky, especially L'histoire du soldat

Ravel: especially Valses nobles et sentimentales

Debussy and Ravel string quartets

Bartok: especially Mikrokosmos and other piano music

Hindemith, Mathis der maler

Bach: solo cello

[A Lark Ascending]

Thanks for the responses. Interesting to read the different ways people became involved and helps explain to some extent the different ways we react to this music.

I thought today about an experience that might have laid some very early groundwork. Sometime around 1965/6 (I was about 10) I went with my family to a film in the Orchard Road cinema in Singapore city. The film opened with swirling clouds and a grand orchestral theme with horns up front; the camera gradually peered through the cloud to reveal a vast mountainous scene, finally zooming into a meadow where a woman was twirling around and getting very excited. Somehow we ended up with the LP which I played endlessly (on a 'Show'n Tell' machine!). Now, there's something of the Richard Strauss/Mahler in that overture and I just wonder if 8 years later my very quick adaption to that music might have had its seed in Richard Rodgers' music. I've frequently read the suggestion that the Mahler boom of the 60s and 70s might be related to a generation brought up on Hollywood films with soundtracks by emigre middle Europeans like Korngold whose style was from that same fin-de-siecle milieu.

*****************

Without knowing it at the time (early 70s), I think I was put off the more obvious starting points (Mozart, Beethoven, Brahms) by the way that it seemed to be music where you could hear the joins. The structure is relatively well signalled, the themes (in the more popular pieces I'd have heard) strongly etched, the repeats clear to hear. What grabbed me with Sibelius was the way the music just seemed to grow, bar by bar, without clearly demarcated sections (of course they are there, but not so clear to hear to an untutored ear). The opening of Sibelius 5 just sounded like a glacier moving slowly and mutating gradually.

A bit later Delius and Debussy grabbed me because of the way they would often throw up a delicious melody, harmony or effect and then not repeat it (or not without transforming it in some way). Even as a really inexperienced 14 year old listening to pop radio quite randomly I recall being annoyed by songs that did not vary the music from verse to verse. Repetition has neve been a thing I've taken to easily (one reason Minimalism has taken so long to appeal - the surface repetition has obscured the changes going on underneath, for my ears).

With Stravinsky, Bartok and Janacek it's the off-centre rhythms that have always thrilled me - either through unusual time signatures (and maybe prog-rock prepared the ground there) or the accenting. The connection with Monk is not hard to find and that music shares much (often derives from) some similarly of-beat folk musics. Regular beats - the rock 'dun-duh, dun-dun-duh', the drum machine 'dump, dump, dump, dump' - have always grated on me.

[BillF]

Bartok and Janacek it's the off-centre rhythms that have always thrilled me - either through unusual time signatures (and maybe prog-rock prepared the ground there) or the accenting. The connection with Monk is not hard to find

I still recall when I was sixth former managing to con a Monk fan into thinking I had a new Monk record by playing the opening bars of the second movement of Bartok's piano sonata!

[A Lark Ascending]

Bartok and Janacek it's the off-centre rhythms that have always thrilled me - either through unusual time signatures (and maybe prog-rock prepared the ground there) or the accenting. The connection with Monk is not hard to find

I still recall when I was sixth former managing to con a Monk fan into thinking I had a new Monk record by playing the opening bars of the second movement of Bartok's piano sonata!

Ha! But could you con a Bartok fan into believing that a solo Monk performance is a little known Bartok piece?

[jazzbo]

1. Did you grow up in a household with classical music around you?

Yes, definitely. My father played lots of Bach, Beethoven, Mozart. . . and Gershwin. And P.D.Q. Bach. This is the primary reason I've come to classical.

2. Did you learn an instrument and experience classical music that way?

No. . . . I learned an instrument as unconventionally as possible and never applied it to any classical music.

3. How does classical music relate to your love of jazz? A secondary interest, a primary interest (with jazz in second place) or part of the seamless web of music?

Part of my general interest in music, it falls behind jazz, and blues, and classic rock and Brazilian musics.

[BillF]

Bartok and Janacek it's the off-centre rhythms that have always thrilled me - either through unusual time signatures (and maybe prog-rock prepared the ground there) or the accenting. The connection with Monk is not hard to find

I still recall when I was sixth former managing to con a Monk fan into thinking I had a new Monk record by playing the opening bars of the second movement of Bartok's piano sonata!

Ha! But could you con a Bartok fan into believing that a solo Monk performance is a little known Bartok piece?

Probably, with a carefully selected couple of bars from Thelonious Himself, say.

[randyhersom]

Rock fan enjoying Santana, Stevie Wonder and Steely Dan starts buying Creem and Rolling Stone, then Crawdaddy, Stereo Review and High Fidelity. An article in one of the last two has a list of budget releases, and the obsessive collector in me starts to explore and covet. Nielsen's Fifth and Sibelius Seventh soon become favorites and the middle movement of Bruckner's Ninth actually rocks. Jazz is kinda happening in parallel here with Miles Davis, Keith Jarrett and Oregon discovered through Rolling Stone. Back and forth between genres ever since, unlike Bev I still enjoy simple beats and often delight in the somewhat crude.

PS to answer the first two questions. Dad liked semiclassical music and light swing, Lawrence Welk was on every week and I was rather rebellious about that as the parents were quite vocal in their criticism of the rock music I loved. It took some time to be willing to listen to anything he might like. I failed on four different occasions to stick with guitar, trunpet, piano and drums and playing classical music was never one of my goals.

Edited October 12, 2009 by randyhersom

[rockefeller center]

It was always present at home, church, TV.

3. How does classical music relate to your love of jazz?

Which love? Jazz sucks.

[paul secor]

I had no real exposure to classical music for more than 63 years. Began listening seriously about four months ago with much appreciated help from a friend. I'm just beginning to find my way - only about 30-40 recordings in my collection. I know that my previous listening - jazz, blues, country, ethnic, pop, whatever - has affected the way I listen to classical music and what I hear in classical music. For example, I tend to pick up on individuality in performers and conductors at least as much, perhaps more, than I pick up on compositions. At the same time, I'm finding that my classical listening - even as limited as it's been -has affected my other listening. I find that I listen more attentively to all music since I began listening to classical music.

Come back to me in five or ten years - if I'm still around - and I may have something substantial to offer.

[Dave James]

I'm with Paul. A recent convert. In the past when I've experienced bouts of hard bop fatigue, I've usually turned to more outside jazz or gone back to straight rock and roll. The last time this happened, about six months ago, it coincided with another passion of mine, German history and WWII. I had seen a program on the History Channel that dealt with the women who were closest to Hitler. One of those was the niece of Richard Wagner, Hitler's favorite composer. That led me to some exploration of Wagner's music which I quite enjoyed. Then a couple of months ago, I had occasion to investigate a website called Pristine Classical. To make a long story short, I began downloading some of the music they had available but with more of a focus on lesser known composers like Bruckner, Delius, Borodin, Sebelius and the like. Strangely enough, I've found it quite compelling. My beef with classical was always tied to the lack of improvisational opportunity. All you had to do was play the notes as they were written. Come to find out, that improvisation does exist in the form of the conductor and the various orchestral voicings he has at his disposal. I think I'm hooked.

Up over and out.

[Guest Bill Barton]

1. Did you grow up in a household with classical music around you?

Yes and no. My mother was an accomplished singer, pianist and organist with a fair amount of "traditional" training. She was involved more in church music than in classical music per se. I can recall hearing a few things that might be termed "light classical" when I was growing up: Rimsky-Korsakov, the 1812 Overture (okay, that's probably not "light" ) and so on, but no Bach, Mozart, or the other usual suspects. My maternal uncle built and repaired organs and traveled throughout the Northeast working on pipe organs. On a number of occasions I went with him on jobs. Some of my first memories as a child are of crawling around inside the pipe chambers and being fascinated by the physical complexity of the instruments as well as by the sounds. He was a pretty good organist himself and usually played J.S. Bach to test the instruments after he had worked on them. I'll always remember the fact that he could not play without a metronome running! Otherwise, the pop music of the day (1950s) and country-western were the predominant sounds around me.

2. Did you learn an instrument and experience classical music that way?

No.

3. How does classical music relate to your love of jazz? A secondary interest, a primary interest (with jazz in second place) or part of the seamless web of music?

"Seamless web" sums it up for me. Nice phrase, Bev... My interests are very wide-ranging. It was only later in life (early 20s as I recall) that I became interested in classical music. Pop culture was probably the gateway, as one of the first classical albums I ever bought was Also Sprach Zarathustra after hearing that unforgettable intro in 2001 A Space Odyssey. Nietzsche and R. Strauss... A bit of a stretch in those days. Before long Charles Ives and Morton Subotnick entered the picture, among others. My interests in jazz (and non-idiomatic improvisation) tend to veer toward the left-wing as do my interests in classical music. But I do have a particular affinity for early music, baroque and the (mostly) French impressionists. The "jazz" section of my recorded music collection dwarfs the "classical" section but there are times when all I listen to for days on end is classical, most often J.S. Bach, Italian baroque, Alan Hovhaness, John Cage (the prepared piano stuff just kills me), Henry Cowell, Lou Harrison, Satie, Stravinsky or Messiaen.

[A Lark Ascending]

Thanks again for taking the trouble to respond everyone. Really interesting.

I don't think I answered part 3 myself. Whilst I enjoy jazz and classical equally, I'm not sure I swing between them seamlessly. There's something different (though equally valuable) about them, akin to moving between two neighbouring but very different countries (France/Germany?).

The obvious difference is that most jazz, however subtly, emphasises rhythm and puts it up front (the famed 'swing'); where a lot of classical music just implies a rhythm (there are obvious exceptions in both cases). Valid approaches, both.

Oh, and (mercifully) they don't 'trade fours' in classical music.

I tend to pick up on individuality in performers and conductors at least as much, perhaps more, than I pick up on compositions

I'm quite the opposite there. I've never got into comparing versions of pieces, preferring to explore compositions I'm unfamiliar with.

the 1812 Overture

Thinking back, we had a recording of that on two sides of a '45. I think I knew it off by heart in my early teens. Affected an intense dislike of Tchaikovsky from my late teens, but have come to love the symphonies in recent years (I was so much older then,...)

it coincided with another passion of mine, German history and WWII.

There's a connection between history and music for me too. My main historical area for many years was the 17thC yet I never cared for the music of that time (Purcell or William Lawes do not seem to evoke the turbulance of the English Civil Wars). When I started teaching I had to cover much more recent history and that coincided with my growing interest in 20thC classical. I'd say my interest in Soviet Russia and Weimar Germany has been coloured by hearing Shostakovich, Weill etc (as my interest in the Civil Rights Movement has been spurred on by jazz, blues, etc).

Edited October 13, 2009 by Bev Stapleton

[blind-blake]

1. Did you grow up in a household with classical music around you?

Yeah, my dad was into classical music in a big way. Every Sunday morning for my old man, it was the New York Times and classical music (and maybe a little Alan Sherman, the Weavers, or the Red Army Chorus thrown in for good measure). I never really learned to appreciate it, though, until I was an adult, although I listen to a lot more 20th century stuff than he ever did. Sometimes I'll listen to something that rings a bell (I never knew the titles of any of his records), and it will bring back some really nice memories.

2. Did you learn an instrument and experience classical music that way?

Nope. Wish I had now.

3. How does classical music relate to your love of jazz? A secondary interest, a primary interest (with jazz in second place) or part of the seamless web of music?

I go through phases with music. Sometimes jazz is all I listen to; sometimes its classical; at other times it might be a mixture of the two; and then I might throw in some rock, blues, reggae, world, folk, and/or country that catches my fancy.

[doneth]

I was crazy about every kind of music, had to hear everything, from the time I was playing on the kitchen floor while my mother had the radio on. I was drawn to something with color, many years later realizing that I was listening to arrangements, and individual musicians effectively improvising, doing something more than just playing the notes; but it was always a seamless web: it was all music. In the late 1940s - early '50s there were still big bands on the radio; then Fats Waller was an early favorite. I liked Percy Faith in the early 1950s; in retrospect I was already looking for classical music. When I was in my early teens in the mid-1950s I discovered that I could take records out of the library, and I was done for.

My family wasn't particularly musical, but my dad paid lip service to classical music: I picked out a box of 45s at Radio Doctors in Milwaukee around 1950, Horowitz playing Schumann's Kinderszenen; my dad was pleased when he bought it for me, saying 'That's the kind of music that doesn't go out of style.' He didn't listen to classical himself (or anything in particular), and it is interesting that that kind of automatic respect for high art has almost disappeared nowadays.

I never learned to read music or play a note.

I heard short snatches of classical pieces on Mercury 7" 33rpm samplers. I liked the big tune from Brahms' 1st symphony, and was surprised when I took that out of the library that the whole piece didn't make any sense to me. I had to work at it, listen to it over and over until it began to come together, and gradually the learning became easier. I do not know how I knew that the effort would pay off. I next learned that a great deal was down to the performers, just as in jazz, and that a great performance effectively swings, lifting the notes off the page and making them dance and sing. A symphony tells a story, using tones instead of words, and each performance tells a slightly different story, just as in jazz.

So much music, so little time.

Edited October 15, 2009 by musicbox

[A Lark Ascending]

Interesting observations, musicbox.

My Dad also had an automatic respect for classical music (though he'd never have used the term 'high art'), always ribbing us for listening to pop instead of 'the classics'. I think in his case classical music was a sign of upward mobility - he came from a pretty impoverished, dysfunctional family but was shot through with a need to better himself. Having left school at 12 or 13 and gone straight on the farm, he spent his military career just trying to build a stable, nouveaux-middle class lifestyle - the story of so many in the post-War years. Classical music gave that sense that he was part of what he aspired to. His love of light classics was genuine but there was no 'cultured' understanding - and I know when I got an interest he pretty quickly became as scathing about Stravinsky and Mahler as he'd previously been about Pink Floyd or Led Zeppelin!

I know exactly what you mean about learning your way into the music by playing the records again and again. I can distinctly recall sitting down with Mahler 6 one afternoon and writing down a sort of plan of what was happening - when themes reappeared etc. In the end I'd roughed out some idea of structure - it was a while yet before I got to understand what things like 'sonata form', 'first subject', 'recapitulation', 'rondo' etc meant. But I'd worked out that this music was put together according to some sort of system and was not just 'one damn note after another.'

[The Magnificent Goldberg]

Haphazardly, I think.

We didn't have a record player until I was fifteen, and getting into R&B. But there was a fair bit of classical music on the BBC Home Service, and even on the Light Programme, in the fifties. So I heard the popular things. And there were music classes at school - not to teach us to play, but to appreciate.

I started getting some classical music after hearing the MJQ/Laurindo Almeida version of the Rodrigo Concierto theme, and also their version of Villa-Lobos' Bach Braz #5. So I got the full Rodrigo concierto and one of the Bachiana Braz LPs. I bought a bit of choral music, too - which I thought was dynamic - Bernstein's Chichester Psalms; Elgar's Dream of Gerontius; Orff's Catulli carmina; Liszt's Via Crucis and Penderecki's St Luke Passion.

But it was all just pretty nice music. It didn't GRAB me.

Then I started hearing 19th C French chamber music, first the Debussy & Ravel quartets, then more of their other work, and Faure, Hindemith, Satie, Lekeu. Then moved onto larger French stuff, and smaller - I really got into Ron Smith's recordings of Alkan and songs of people like Poulenc & Duparc. I bought other stuff, as well - Brahms & Bach cello suites, and other stuff like that. But it didn't get me. So in the end, I decided I just liked French classical music because it was supposed to be entertainment; artistic entertainment, but in the end, showbiz. Then I couldn't afford to pursue everything, so I flogged all but one LP, which I do play sometimes, so I didn't get distracted from Soul Jazz.

I certainly DIDN'T regard French Chamber Music as part of a seamless web with Big Jay McNeely and other honking tenor players Or Gospel music, Soul or blues. Maybe because I never really went in for modern jazz all that seriously.

MG

[BillF]

I certainly DIDN'T regard French Chamber Music as part of a seamless web with Big Jay McNeely and other honking tenor players

MG

Quotation of the week!!!