Easy Guide to Appreciating Classical Music | Lifehacker

classical music it gets a bad rap that's mostly just because people aren't familiar with it I mean you can immediately tell the difference between Kanye and Madonna but if I ask you who wrote better operas Verdi or vogner you might be completely lost I mean I was I'm Nick Douglas and I too want to appreciate classical music more but it can be hard to know where to start so I'm here to ease your apprehension and help you find classical music that you'll actually love contemporary pop music has it

easy because we can appreciate most of it with little to no effort the forms and the genres were used to hearing are highly consistent in structure and tone so we're all familiar with verse chorus verse chorus of bridge chorus understanding and appreciating classical music starts the same way it's about understanding structure context and the trends and having a healthy dose new patients first some vocab will help songs have lyrics pieces are just music pieces can be songs but saying pieces wil

l help you sound a lot smarter most classical music is cataloged using opus numbers opus is just Latin for work and it's noted with an O P some composers have specific catalogue systems named after the people who invented them Mozart's works use K V Bach uses bwv so when you see Chopin opus 9 number 2 Nocturne in e-flat that means it's Chopin's 9th cataloged work the second movement in that work the pieces of Nocturne which is like a genre a piece typically invoking a nighttime mood and the key

or a foundational scale of the piece is E flat major now none of this makes it easier to remember some of these very long titles naming pieces didn't catch on until much later and many of the names we associate with famous pieces like Beethoven's moonlight sonata were just nicknames given by fans the credit specifically for that one goes to 19th century music critic Ludwig well stop the opening movement invokes Airport visiting by moonlight the primitive landscapes of lake lucerne if you can't r

emember which opus is which use your imagination and assign your own memorable titles to your favorite pieces it'll give you a more personal connection to the music and will help you articulate what kinds of moods images you're hearing we have to talk in broad strokes because we have over 600 years of music to cover but in general there are five periods of classical music medieval baroque classical romantic and modern unless you're into glory and chance we could skip over medieval music for now

the most useful place to start is with the granddaddy himself Johann Sebastian Bach or Bach senior or the master of views cool so what's a few simply put it's a music structure that was most popular in the early 1700s and composers like Bach wrote hundreds of these to show off experiment and I have fun it's a very technical staple of music it can be very mathematical and formula driven so it really helps to know the formula by and large a few bounds like this first a musical subject is introduce

d [Music] than other voices echo the subject then there's an exploration section that develops on the subject more broadly [Music] until we return to the subject in the recapitulation the recap [Music] when you listen to a few decipher what the subject is since the point of a fugue is to weave that musical idea into as many different combinations as possible it might not be apparent on the first listening so be ready to keep things on repeat understanding the structure and intention behind class

ical music makes appreciating and enjoying it so much easier so tune in to your imagination and settle in for some mind-bending music and check out our life hacker Spotify playlist for a starter pack of excellent Baroque pieces