/classical/

Rachmaninoff edition.

This thread is for the discussion of music in the European classical tradition, as well as classical instrument-playing.

How do I get into classical?

This link has resources including audio courses, textbooks and selections of recordings to help you start to understand and appreciate classical music:
pastebin.com/NBEp2VFh

thanks indian child

Joyce was famous for his contrarianism, so that when Wagner became popular and no-longer avant-garde Joyce felt that he could no longer publicly enjoy his music. Very often he would praise Wagner in the company of Wagnerites and criticise Wagner in the company of anti-Wagnerites. But that Wagner exerted a lifelong influence on Joyce is undeniable.

By 1920 his library included fifteen books by or about Wagner and many others in which Wagner figures importantly. Only Shakespeare occupied more space on Joyce's shelves. In addition to the five individual operas already mentioned, his collection included a book of librettos (now lost), volume 1 of Ellis' translation of the Prose Works, the notorious Judaism in Music, the widely read Letters to August Roeckel, a two-volume edition of letters to Minna Wagner, and five studies of Wagner or introductions to his work, including the aforementioned Perfect Wagnerite and Nietzsche's The Case of Wagner and Nietzsche contra Wagner.

Finnegans Wake has more references to Wagner than any of Joyce's other works, because in it Wagner's Tristan and Ring become fundamental structural elements for the whole novel. While in A Portrait and Ulysses there are only references to Wagner in connection with the vitalist philosophy of Stephen Dedalus which comes almost directly out of Wagner's Feuerbachian writings, and parallels what Joyce wrote as a young Wagnerian in 'Drama and Life'. In Exiles too there are references. But the 'theme' of Tristan und Isolde, and the overarching cyclical plot of the Ring, are everywhere in Finnegans Wake.

Very often he would praise Wagner in the company of Wagnerites and criticise Wagner in the company of anti-Wagnerites.

Oops, meant to say other way around.

I recommend more Rossini to everyone

greatly appreciated wagnersister

classical

no riffs lmao

not /classical/, try instead

Let's look at sometimes maligned or shirked figures in classical music: Franz Joseph Haydn and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. Both, among academics, are considered to be among the greatest composers of all time. Among much of the public, however, they are known more for making "easy-listening" parlor tunes or music for babies than for creating high art. It's inarguable that the raw emotional content in Beethovian symphonies or Schubertian lied is much more accentuated than the comparably subtle piano concertos of Mozart or string quartets of Haydn, but people often forget that the former two wrote their best music 15-30 years after the latter. Beethoven is as much a contemporary of Haydn/Mozart as Radiohead a contemporary of Zappa.

Comparing these two groups is not fair, then. Instead, we should compare Haydn and Mozart to their actual contemporaries: names like Vanhal, Stamitz, Hoffmeister and so on. You've probably never heard these names in your life; or, if you have, it wasn't a particularly impressive work that you heard. That's because these composers were very focused on formula while Haydn and Mozart were focused on moving forward. Haydn in particular is almost entirely credited with nurturing the symphonic form into what it's been known for up to this day, whereas Mozart was known for (comparably) rather avantgarde tendencies in shifting around form and harmony. Once again: there is no comparison between what is accomplished in Mozart's Clarinet Concerto and the myriad of Clarinet Concerti by Stamitz.

What we see then is that, even in the most tuneworthy of composers, there must be innovation; ever since Beethoven, innovation has been an absolute component of "classic composer status". Wagner, Debussy, Stravinsky, Bartok, and Schoenberg were all innovators the same as Haydn and Mozart. There is not a single Common Practice composer who is fondly and widely remembered solely for their enjoyable melodies, and not for their innovations.

schubert has more riffs than altars of madness