How to learn to understand classical music? Another interesting opinion ...

This is amazing, but for some reason they consider boring serious classical music against the background of the monotony of modern pop music. Let's see why this happens? First of all, those who argue that it is impossible to listen to classical music, most likely never really came into contact with academic music.

And it's not even that they do not have the basics of a special musical education. Just in order to learn to understand classical music, you need to be ready for intellectual work, to resist the ordinary, and this is not what many want today.

Modern pop music has become popular because it is, in the overwhelming majority, lightweight music - as a rule, it does not make you think. And yet, the direction of this article does not boil down to finally saying: “Classics are masterpieces, and modern music is just good for the trash” - of course not! In the history of culture and art and for modern musical creativity there must be a place and it will be! Moreover, there are real masterpieces in modern music.

Young people do not know what to do with classical music just because they haven’t explained it to them! More than once I met young people with remarks: “Bach? Oh, horror, this is deadly boring!” But if they only learn to understand classical music ...

Learn to understand the classics? Just start listening!

And this is actually the case! And it is not necessary to immediately acquire a stack of musicological books! The main thing is to start listening. And here there are rules, following which, you will discover a new amazing world!

• Newbies in the classics can not listen to everything. For example, the music of the twentieth century is better reserved for later. The newborn is not fed meat at once! So here - starting with the XX century, you risk getting a wrong idea about it.
• Everyone knows the composition of the top three most famous classical composers - Bach, Beethoven, Mozart. Start with them - they are clear to everyone! Just do not start with the largest and most complex pieces. Choose!
• From time to time, you can include opera arias (for example, arias from operas by Verdi, Puccini, Tchaikovsky), and even whole operas. It is always very beautiful and accessible music. Just try to look for recordings in a language you understand - many famous foreign operas are performed in the original in Italian, German or English, but you can almost always find them in Russian as well.
• Before listening to the opera, read its fabulous summary to be aware of the stage situation. It will be great if you have a libretto in your hands, that is, the text of the opera - all this is also very easy to find. Instead of the libretto, you can hold the clavier of the opera in your hand, in which there are not only all the words, but also musical parts.

If you decide to learn how to listen to classical music, then Russian composers Glinka, Rimsky-Korsakov, Tchaikovsky, Rachmaninov, Taneyev, Sviridov and many others will most likely delight you.

The concept of classical music: imagery and abstract

How to learn to understand classical music, to understand it and love it? Classical composers created music under the impression of any images, plots, philosophical studies and life experiences. In some works, even a novice will hear the phenomena of nature: the sound of the surf, the cry of seagulls, a thunderstorm, and even social portraits: an organ-grinder song, a knight's serenade, and even troopers. The famous Carnival of the Animals by Saint-Saens cycle is to some extent a piece of music about nature.

Program and non-program music

All music is conventionally divided into three broad categories:

1. vocal music and vocal and instrumental;
2. purely instrumental music;
3. theatrical music.

Instrumental classical music in turn is divided into software and non-program.

Program music has a name (for example - Winter, or Pilgrims, or Starry Night, etc.) or the content stated in words. Non-programmed music does not communicate either one or the other.

The program includes those works that have some kind of non-music overtones. Program music, as a rule, defines the content even in its title, and we can only capture and perceive the sound associations that the composer wanted to convey.

Non-programmed music is much more complicated due to its abstractness. It is intended for a more serious, prepared audience. But it is also more interesting, more mysterious. She gives a huge scope to the imagination. The areas of non-programmed music include, for example, fugues — polyphonic works in which you need to be able to hear the themes and follow their development, or symphonies without a name — musical intonations, the philosophical meaning of which must be solved.

Learning to understand classical music is given to those who really want it, who listening, can think, catch associations, look for new impressions. Try and succeed!

The author - Olga Felitsiani