Beethoven may be more punk rock than you
When I was in elementary school, I thought classical was the dullest thing in existence. I had this Czechoslovakian piano teacher who was really into theory and doing things as they should be done and introducing young kids to classical ASAP, which is swell, but I couldn’t always understand his accent and I didn’t like to read music, so my lessons were pretty much a confusing mess. My fault – not his. When I was around ten, I noticed that my younger brother was advancing much faster than me, so I did what any sulky pre-teen with a nagging superiority complex would do and immediately quit. I played the clarinet for a couple of years and had an apathetic stint with the guitar, but I stayed as far away from classical as possible because – as everyone knows – classical is the stuffy, pretentious stuff that librarians are made of and no one under the age of forty should have anything to do with it.
The problem with this assumption is that most of the people who make it have never really heard classical. It’s one thing to dismiss a genre or sub-genre of music as “not your thing” if you have a fair sample (the sound of salsa music makes me want to go into a sensory deprivation tank for a few hours) but it’s another to dismiss more than three hundred years of radically eclectic music as dry and meaningless when you’ve only heard a symphony or two. I made this mistake, and I still regret it.
I became interested in rock music when I was twelve-ish. I wanted to play the stuff I was listening to but I wasn’t especially fond of the guitar, so I decided to play the piano again. My new piano teacher (who is still my piano teacher, but also my friend, mentor, and sometimes therapist) indulged me in some Radiohead, but she also made me play classical on the side. I think I played a few Beethoven sonatinas and half of a Bach prelude before I was fully and irrevocably hooked. I did not want to play rock music anymore. This is because, as it turns out, you can only go so far in rock music before you’ve done everything that there is to do. There are a few song-writers who are clever enough to make their music worth playing around with, but only a few. Classical, on the other hand, is an infinite universe of theory and art and experimentalism. You never stop learning.
I still listen to rock music around eighty percent of the time but I don’t have the same reverent devotion for it that I did when I was thirteen – my angsty lyric-doodling and promotion photo collages have become a thing of the mostly past, sad to say. As a musician, I have been forced to recognize that classical is where it’s at. Chopin preludes do much more for me as a pianist than anything by Nirvana or Hole ever did. They take more work, more time, more thought, and more patience, but they have an incredible pay-off. I’ve learned that I become myself most when I am either writing abstract prose or playing classical music. The second outlet didn’t exist for me until around two years ago. Most musicians I know are forced – at some point – to come to a grudging respect for classical because it has that universal effect on people who work with it.
But if you are not a musician or even if you are, you might find that classical is inaccessible and boring and not worth your time. This does not mean that you are unsophisticated or unable to appreciate great art. It also does not mean that you should not try classical because when you do, chances are good that you’ll find some pieces or composers who appeal to you. I don’t like Brahms or Mozart because their patterns and grandeur drive me insane, but I worship Beethoven, Bartok, and Chopin because I like cacophonous, sometimes discordant, but always beautiful melodrama. My taste in classical music is more over-stated and perhaps “flamboyant” than my taste in modern music, but the two share parallels. There is a lot of different stuff in classical music, but there is also a lot of “same” stuff that you may recognize from modern music. There are catchy hooks, crazy instrumental solos, underlying beats, and minor-key melodies that you can funnel your teenage angst into with the best of them. And in this case, the best of them may mean the composers themselves, who were neither always happy nor entirely square.
The composers that we think of as ancient cultural relics who wrote genius songs and then went to sleep at a reasonable hour were very much into partying, alcoholism, and fashion trends. They were angst-ridden white boys not unlike Fall Out Boy and Panic At the Disco, except for that they refrained from wearing eyeliner and wrote extremely complicated symphonies instead of three chord songs. They lived fast, died young, and some of them even left pretty corpses (according to a sociology professor I had last semester, that is the penultimate goal of any rock & roll musician). Many of them were rich, but some of them lived in poverty. They were not always the founts of privilege that we assume they were. They composed popular pieces as young teenagers, they composed beautiful pieces as they went deaf, and they composed revolutionary pieces on their death-beds.
Classical music is the intense soundtrack to hundreds of wildly diverging lives. Don’t be so sophomoric as to assume that there is nothing relevant to modern life left in such a genre.
Listen to it with the volume way up:
Totally agree. And I prefer Beethoven or Chopin, too, composers like that, because Mozart is too lighthearted for me to feel properly into it. Anyway, after I passed my theory exam, for a while I couldn’t help but identify whatever chords I heard or noting down mentally what key the music was in. Not that I succeeded every time though. Now I like music that have classical undertones. Failing that, it just needs a proper melody.
I love this post, you don’t seem like a total amateur who pretends to like classical music just to sound cool and “sophisticated”. It took me awhile to like classical music. Like you said, you have to find what you like. I also don’t care for Mozart in any type of instrumentation. Beethoven symphonies and piano pieces are great. Chopin piano pieces are amazing, enough said. I personally love some Brahms, try listening to Intermezzo Op. 118 No. 6, I swear it makes me cry. Dvorak and Tchaikovsky symphonies are wicked. And oh my goodness, Rachmaninoff piano pieces are to die for. Although I don’t care for Mozart, I really love listening to Haydn or Scarlatti. And I like Bach depending on the piece. Aaahhhhh, classical music is amazing, sorry for the spew of random opinions, you got me going.
By the way, I feel like you may have a liking for the band Muse. I find them similar to Rachmaninoff, Chopin, or Beethoven in some ways. In some of their newer albums, they even throw in a Chopin piano waltz, or they will practically copy Rachmaninoff pieces into the song. The have sweet piano parts, you should listen to them.
Good post!
You’re totally right! I played the piano at a music school (8years) and recorder (11years) and even I hated all the lessons and concerts so much now I’m happy I’ve ever done this. It really gives you the education you would never get anywhere else. And who says you can’t play for example in a rockband besides attending music school? You can beat all those “musicians” with your skills!!! :D
Thank you for your comments!
@Aim – aah, I envy you, I can’t ID chords to save my life. Well, maybe C and my favorites like E minor and A minor. But not most of them. I love classical undertones in modern music too. :’)
@anotherteenagegirl – I’ll try that Brahms! I haven’t truly heard enough to fully judge him, and I’m always into giving artists a second try. Rachmaninoff is amazing (I knew Elliott Smith was my favorite song-writer forever when I saw a video of him playing some Rachmaninoff) and I sporadically love Bach too. Oh, and Muse is great. I enjoy them, especially Black Holes and Revelations-era stuff.
@tamafan – that’s how I feel about my early childhood lessons. And I agree! I love the idea of using one’s classical background to make top-notch rock music. There’s so much possibility.