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Fun Stuff => BAND => Topic started by: Thrillho on 28 Feb 2008, 09:33
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Okay people...
I am looking to get into classical. I have long appreciated the fact that classical is unlike any other type of music (if you so choose I guess you can separate all music into 'classical' and 'pop,' as the newspaper my parents buy does); I'm sure it has many of its own subgenres too, yada yada yada. I guess 'classical' isn't really a genre.
The point is, I'm finally looking to get into some myself. With elements of classical composition in some artists I like (The Mars Volta, John Coltrane) as well as my love of sweeping arrangements, strings, horns etc. on songs (Smashing Pumpkins, Hope of the States, Godspeed) I thought it was about time.
So I'm looking for recommendations. I'm loving the Gershwin stuff I have - 'Rhapsody In Blue' and 'An American In Paris,' which I'm sure will result in a chorus of 'duhhhhhhhhhhh' from anyone here who knows anything about classical - but what I'm looking for is more along the lines of Prokofiev's 'Dance Of The Knights,' I think that's the movement's name. A dark, minor chord, sweeping, discordant strings kinda thing. I suppose like Mars from the planets too.
Any recommendations?
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Rachmaninoff. Absolutely excellent stuff.
Also, Bach fugues are basically among the most musically accomplished pieces of creative work ever written.
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I'm big on Brahms and Shostakovich. Brahms was a master of counterpoint. His first three symphonies are rockin'. Shostakovich is probably more what you're looking for, though, he's another Russian, he's done everything from operas to soundtracks to concertos.
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Do you like big compositions or little ones? Like, thick, rich orchestral stuff or chamber/solo pieces?
In any case, try starting with Stravinsky. A very good place to start. It might be hard for you to find some chamber ensemble/solo pieces or more obscure works of his just because the popular stuff is so damn popular.
Actually, just look into the Russian stuff. . .Glinka onwards, dissonance is pretty popular.
While we're at it, did someone want to reup that Messiaen stuff in the mediafire thread? It's so good and I figure as long as we're enthusiastic. . .
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Big. I hate that kind of, microtonally-composed bloke-and-piano stuff. I definitely prefer bigger orchestras over say, a string quartet. Classical seems like a place where nothing is too expansive, too grand, and I like that.
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Mahler.
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You can't go wrong with Holst's The Planets or Vivaldi's Four Seasons or anything Wagnerian in terms of sweeping mood-pieces.
Stravinksy's The Firebird is good along those lines, as I recall.
Personally I just bought Lucia Micarelli's Music from A Farther Room and LOVE it. A good mix of classical and more modern arrangements... If you've ever wanted to hear Bowie and Queen covers done on a violin, pick it up.
I used to have some kind of Classical Anthems anthology CD set that was chock-full of dark, percussive classical pieces, but damned if I can recall any of them.
ETA: Aaaaha. (http://www.amazon.com/Simply-Classical-Anthems-Johann-Sebastian/dp/B00004SUVI) That's the one. Looks like Amazon is prepared to offer you a deal if you buy it alongside Thunderous Classics.
ETA2: Crap, now I can't get O Fortuna out of my head. It's like the Grandaddy of all emo songs. In Latin.
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Rachmaninoff. Absolutely excellent stuff.
I'm big on Brahms and Shostakovich.
Well, fuck, there go my answers.
Specifically, Rach's 3rd piano concerto (and all of them, frankly, but zomg the third) and Shosta's 4th/5th/7th/8th symphonies are essential. Feel free to post ITT/pm me for uploads, I have all the Shosta symphonies on here and pretty much everything Rachmaninov-related ever recorded (altho the Rach stuff is in dodgy quality in places).
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Rach is awesome. What exactly are the different sub'genres' of classical type music? Like baroque, classical, romantic etc etc.
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I highly recommend you check out Chopin and Debussy, or anyone else in the Romantic period. The Romantics are where it's at.
I also second the Stravinsky recommendation. The Firebird is amazing.
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If you want 'big' you want Wagner or Vaughan-Williams, ensembles, on the whole, peaked in size around the late romantic/early twentieth century, so you could also be looking at Tchaikovsky, Berlioz, Liszt, and Saint-Saens.
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Gustav Holst, The planets. Mars, Bringer of war is used in a lot of metal music actually.
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Listen to The Rite of Spring by Stravinsky. People rioted when it was first performed due to how unconventional it was at the time and he ran from the stage crying. It was that awesome.
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Rach is awesome. What exactly are the different sub'genres' of classical type music? Like baroque, classical, romantic etc etc.
They're not really genres, they're more of time periods than anything else. You could just wiki it.
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Listen to The Rite of Spring by Stravinsky. People rioted when it was first performed due to how unconventional it was at the time and he ran from the stage crying. It was that awesome.
Well, that and the violent dancing.
Anyways, on to classical music. There was a bunch of good stuff posted in the mediafire thread like a week or two ago. I would definitely recommend Shostakovich and Stravinsky. Kalinikov is amazing too, but he doesn't have that much stuff, seeing as how he died at 35. Most other romantic composers would suit your style. Anything Brahmmes, Tchaikovsky, Chopin, or Berlioz. Some of the Mahler Symphonies are amazing: I am quite partial to the 3rd (you know, being a trombonist). I would look into some impressionistic composers as well, such as Debussy and Ravel.
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Brahmmes
Brahms. Not trying to be pedantic, but dude is going to be using some search engines, hypothetically, so he's got to spell these things right.
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Haha, yeah
I think I took the "es" from his first name and tacked it on to his last name
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Rach is awesome. What exactly are the different sub'genres' of classical type music? Like baroque, classical, romantic etc etc.
They're not really genres, they're more of time periods than anything else. You could just wiki it.
True dat, but I preferred to get an opinion from people who I know are experts about the music before consulting wikipedia.
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Baroque is so different though. . .
Actually, they are all pretty different. Hm. I definitely wouldn't call them "genres" but there were certainly such different sounds and such an evolution in "classical" music over time. It would be plausible to dislike baroque but still like modern classical, or vice-versa.
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In the past century, there has been some different "sub-genres"
You know, like minimalism, aleatoric music, neo-classical, and neo-romantic.
But before that, there wasn't really anything that really could be classified as different sub-genres.
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Not being nitpicky, but most people probably think of classical music as being pre-1930, which was before a lot of the radical experimentation that gave us other genres.
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Bach's Matthew Passion is pretty amazing. It's also pretty long and, by Baroque standards, rather grand in terms of the ensemble--two choirs, an orchestra, an organ or two. It's around 3 hours long, but it incorporates a pretty varied array of song styles, from the grandeur of the opening "Chorus" to the chromatic oddness of "Ach Golgotha." Get one of the recordings that's on period instruments, though, since Bach is pretty specific about what's playing what and several of the most important instruments in the passion (the two types of oboes he uses and the Viola de Gamba, particularly) have fallen out of use. Also, though you said you preferred larger-scale works, Bach's organ music is totally metal.
Stravinksy is pretty awesome, his Symphony of Psalms and Mass are less dissonant and percussive than his earlier, more famous compositions mentioned above, but they are really, really good and pretty musically interesting.
Dvorak has to be one of the most accessible classical composers ever. You probably know at least one movement of From the New World aka Symphony no 9 already. The rest is also good. Also in this category: Beethoven. The ninth symphony is a hell of a lot more than the "Ode to Joy." Driving back from Wild and Wonderful West Viriginia with my girlfriend listening to it has to be one of the better moments of my life.
Wagner's Tristan and Isolde is great if you don't mind music that feels like a bunch of really dissonant chords refusing to do what chords are supposed to do. If you prefer a melody, though, it's probably not what you're looking for. I can't decide if I love it or hate it, probably both.
Mozart's Requiem is really, really good, though not strictly speaking all Mozart.
I'm also really into Renaisance music, but that's not everyone bag since it's frequently so consonant as to strike many modern ears as boring.
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Wagner's Tristan and Isolde
Lol, my clarinet teacher used to get drunk to the Liebestod (lovedeath) movement with her Juilliard friends. That's always what I think of when people mention that.
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Lol, my clarinet teacher used to get drunk to the Liebestod (lovedeath) movement with her Juilliard friends. That's always what I think of when people mention that.
That's one way to spend an evening. Somehwere on Youtube there is a video of a bunch of folks that went to my college (St John's College Annapolis) getting drunk and listening to the Requieum. One of them, Cameron Healy (the dude that played Sunn O))) and Pig Destroyer before the film society's movies) can be heard exclaiming as to how metal it is.
Speaking of using Wagner as a soundtrack to debauchery. I know that it's technically about such things, but Tristan is one of the last things I'd ever want to listen to while having sex. Perhaps it is the lack of slap base or, your know, chordal resolution--some of us don't like 4 hours of foreplay. At least most of the time.
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Properly, what you're talking about is referred to as 'Concert Music', or it was when people cared to make a differentiation and when John Cage et alia were making music that was neither pop nor jazz, but looking forward from the (relatively) traditional European sound.
Alvin Lucier is a genius, one of my favorite pieces of all music is I Am Sitting in a Room. Up there with 'Marquee Moon', even!
Also, La Monte Young and his cohorts (incl. future ex-VU John Cale) made some great loud shit in the sixties and have, on occasion, continued to do so.
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if the venitian snares My Downfall (ost) counts as classical music, its my favorite
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Stravinsky and Berlioz. Seriously. Their stuff is amazing. As is Mussorgsky. Rites of Spring, Symphonie Fantastique, and Night on Bare/Bald Mountain respectively are amazing pieces.
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This is a local classical station where I live, and the link to listen through their website.
http://www.wguc.org/listen/streams.asp
I keep this station on at my desk at work. I don't know squat about classical, but when they play something I like, I just wait for them to tell me what it was. They were on a big Prokofiev kick recently, which was pretty cool.
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Cincinnati type, eh? I used to listen to WGUC all the time, except for Sunday morning, when I listened to "Fine Arts Music" on WEBN.
Good times.
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Yeah, you're right. I completely forgot that WEBN used to play classical. It was Mr. Wood himself doing that show, if I'm not mistaken. Boy, have times changed at that crappy station.
Oh, and you used post# 666 to reply to me. Should that concern me? :evil:
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Ummm, well, I wouldn't be worried, I had no idea what post it was.
However, let me put a little bitty hex on you: 29A16. How's that?
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Shosta-fookin-kovich, baby! 8-) Symphony No. 10 particularly. I'm also sorry I came late to the Britten party - the man's breadth and depth of ideas and how well they're timed are still incredible. From the concert I went to yesterday, go for "Les Illuminations" for soprano voice & orchestra
Also:
- Messiaen, e.g. "Vingt Regards de l'Enfant Jesus" (solo piano), "Illuminations of the Beyond" (orchestra), "Les Couleurs de la Cité Celeste"
- Colin Matthews "Fuga" (the pace is so frenetic that it actually sounds like it's freewheeling into every new section. He also orchestrated Debussy's Preludes for piano beautifully (many of which are stunning and incredibly varied anyway), kinda with a bell-like clarity to it.
- Oliver Knussen (he blends the dissonant and the tonal stuff extremely well, often with a bit of humour attached)
- Arvo Part, e.g. "Fratres"(there are several different versions that exploit different lineups - Stars of the Lid played one a few months back (http://www.last.fm/music/Stars+of+the+Lid/+videos/3800175) and another was featured a few times in There Will Be Blood), "Tabula Rasa"
- Boulez - "Le Marteau Sans Maitre" (post-tonal, highly organised craziness for alto singer and tuned percussion, viola, flute, guitar)
- Takemitsu, e.g. "November Steps" (heavily informed by Japanese folk structures and to some degree, jazz)
Also Beethoven, Chopin, Debussy, Stravinsky.....pretty much anything they've done.
Speaking of using Wagner as a soundtrack to debauchery. I know that it's technically about such things, but Tristan is one of the last things I'd ever want to listen to while having sex. Perhaps it is the lack of slap bass or, your know, chordal resolution--some of us don't like 4 hours of foreplay. At least most of the time.
:lol: Indeed.
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Cincinnati type, eh? I used to listen to WGUC all the time, except for Sunday morning, when I listened to "Fine Arts Music" on WEBN.
WEBN played classical? ...Really? Man. I kind of wish they would go back to that, but it'd interfere with 92.5's Breakfast with the Beatles.
If you're in the mood to conquer something, Wagner's Ride of the Valkyries is probably the best song for it.