Classical music aficionados: Go away. This article is not for you. Instead, it is for everyone who sees classical music as a private club and who feels they’re standing outside the clubhouse. It’s for those who have been to one or two orchestral concerts but are still not quite sure what they’re supposed to be getting out of the experience. It’s for those who like the sound of a few classical pieces but want to move beyond Mozart’s “A Little Night Music” and Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony and the flower duet from “Lakme” — trust me, you’ve heard it; look it up — and take a deeper dive into the repertoire. But concert programs list unfamiliar names, without much guidance into how to choose between them, and when you type Mozart into Spotify you get a wall of tracks, many of them different versions of the same thing. For anyone who relates to any part of this description, here’s a field guide with a few points to keep in mind as you exercise your classical muscles and seek out which territory, in this wide-ranging field, feels most like home.
1. Classical music offers something on a large scale. Not many art forms offer you something as big as an orchestra concert: 100 people playing pieces that can last half an hour or more. These pieces offer an experience of time you don’t get in many other art forms; music that starts in one place and finishes in another, bathing your ears in big sounds along the way. To start with, just try identifying some of the different things you hear.
There are a lot of journeys to choose from. Pick one of the nine Beethoven symphonies, and add to your plate gradually, choosing from the smorgasbord of the Western canon: Brahms’ Second; Tchaikovsky’s Sixth, Mahler’s Fifth; Bruckner’s Seventh, and into the 20th century with Shostakovich’s Fifth. Or, start from the 21st century and work backward: from Higdon’s Concerto for Orchestra to Bartok’s; from Philip Glass’ Fifth to Gloria Coates’s First.
2. There’s a lot more to classical music than orchestra music. Don’t think you’re stuck with orchestras, though, if that’s not your thing. The term “classical music” is an inaccurate catchall for everything from solo piano works to Gregorian chant to contemporary instrumental sextets with electric guitar. For orientation purposes, start with some of the traditional smaller ensembles — three or four musicians playing together, classical music’s equivalent of a rock band. Most familiar is the string quartet: You can spend hours with canonical works such as Beethoven’s set of 16 and Shostakovich’s of 15, or dive into sets by living composers such as Elena Ruehr and Jefferson Friedman. Then there are trios: string trios, like Mozart’s stunning Divertimento in E-flat; or piano trios, written not for three pianos (a common misconception) but for a piano and two stringed instruments. Schubert’s two are among my favorites, and I bypass Robert Schumann’s in favor of the nice one by his wife. Or check out the instrumental configurations in some of the seminal works of the 20th century: the septet Stravinsky used in “L’histoire du soldat;” the quartet of clarinet, violin, cello and piano that Olivier Messiaen used in “Quartet for the End of Time,” written while he was in a German prisoner-of-war camp in 1940; or Steve Reich’s “Music for 18 Musicians,” which helps define and explode the term “minimalism.”
