Dispatches from my year of classical music

Including why Shostakovich reminds me of jazz fusion

I discovered plenty of amazing music this year, though much of it was classical music and thus quite old. From ages 13-22 I devoured an unfathomable amount of rap music and I remember talking with an older family friend at a Christmas Party about it. He didn’t care much for rap music, but said “you know, different music resonates in different seasons of your life.” It’s a somewhat simple point, but I hear him saying that quite frequently in my head.

I did Apple Music’s equivalent of Spotify Wrapped and my most-played artists were Daniel Barenboim (various Beethoven works, mostly as conductor), Artur Schnabel (his seminal Beethoven piano sonata cycle, the first in recorded music), and Quartetto Italiano (early Beethoven string quartets, Op. 18)

If anything, this under-counts my classical listening, as a ton of it came this year on YouTube watching both live performances and videos synced to the scores. I can only half-read music (a proud former percussionist), but it still helps me track the form and flow of a piece, its dynamics, the way melodies repeat or bounce from instrument to instrument. God bless the accounts that upload those time-synced videos, particularly those like Ashish Xiangyi Kumar who add some time-stamped commentary.

The volume of music, particularly popular music, that I consume is down from its peak ~5-10 years ago, especially from my college radio show days (when I ended up with a funk/soul/disco playlist of just the cream-of-the-crop songs from each album I listened to that was around 1,000 songs long).

I used to chew through new albums, constantly listening in the background to something new. I mostly can’t work well with music in the background these days, with the exception of more functional and minimal techno/ambient/classical, and even then I mostly avoid doing so. Listening these days is less of a constant multi-tasking item and more likely to be the main show.

This all represents a pretty big shift for me and my listening habits. It’s the culmination of lots of active work to understand this music, helped along by trips to the local symphony, and it’s been unbelievably rewarding.

My favorites

As evidenced by the most-played artists above, most of my classical listening was Beethoven, as I slowly read and listened through Norman Lebrecht’s Why Beethoven: A Phenomenon in One Hundred Pieces (though I’ve put it down for a few months now). Robert Greenberg’s Great Courses work, How to Listen to and Understand Great Music, has also been huge for a general introduction to the canon, from Gregorian Chant to Bach to 19th century opera and beyond. I don’t love all of the music he covers. Renaissance choral music, for example, bores me. But even then, it’s helpful to know the general vibe of different eras and what future composers were building on and reacting against.

And there are surprises in there. For example, some music from 1100-1300 resonates for me more than the Romantic music of the 1800s and 1900s. Leonin and Perotin worked at Notre Dame around 1150-1230 and are two of the first composers of Western sacred music who said “what if we had multiple voices, but had them not sing the exact same thing?” They also helped invent new forms of music notation to help capture this. This stuff still sounds cool! In part because it’s pretty harmonically simple in a satisfying way, kind of like popular music.

Besides Beethoven, I’ve gotten the most mileage out of Haydn and Bach. Mozart has often bored me, but I’m learning to like it some (as I wrote about recently). Haydn, his contemporary, still feels more dynamic and engaging to me.

Romantic music has been another slowly-acquired taste, as much of it feels schlocky and schmaltzy to me, but Rachmaninoff is excellent and Brahms’s Intermezzi piano works have broken through recently. I’ve long loved Chopin’s Nocturnes and Schumann’s Davidsbundlertanze, so there’s definitely more romantic piano music to enjoy.

More recently, I’ve loved Shostakovich’s 24 preludes (Op. 34), his string quartet no. 15 (which I found via Danish String Quartet’s Prism series), and I’ve begun to explore his early symphonies. I went to Spoleto Music Festival in Charleston and his Trumpet and Piano Concerto kind of stole the show, particularly with its goofy cartoon Western galloping trumpet part in the 3rd movement (if you open the video below it’ll open to that part). Shostakovich was a piano player in a silent cinema in Russia, so it’s an intentional tribute to early film music:

Each of the Shostakovich pieces I’ve heard have a kind of balance to them, a combination of modern playfulness and willingness to break the rules, but they’re still tethered to structure and more legible emotion.

This is a tough balance and it reminds me a bit of the history of jazz. By roughly 1965, avantgarde jazz musicians had broken all the rules: any instrument can play any notes at any time in any relation to each other. Coltrane’s Ascension was a watershed moment of a successful mainstream jazz artist jumping headfirst into the avantgarde and it’s a good example of how this music sounded by 1966.

YouTube comments are hiding much of the world’s best music criticism

After you’ve broken all the rules, what do you do? Well, some artists figured out that you want to add some back in again. Jazz fusion is one of these genres that emerged from this impulse. Miles Davis (and others like Tony Williams) basically said “we can do whatever we want melodically on top, but let’s have a real grooving rhythm section to tie it all together.” It’s tough and even the most advanced musicians can’t capture that perfect balance of structure and chaos consistently. I’ll listen to an album by, say, Weather Report, and be thinking “this is fine..” and then BAM they’ll nail the balance on a song like “125th Street Congress” (below). It’s the same experience of seeing free improvisers bumble through this stuff live, periods of searching, transcendence, and then more searching.

How I listen

In addition to doing more focused listening than in the past, I often listen to classical radio in the car and try to guess what composer or era they’re playing, with uneven success. It’s a nice way to apply my knowledge that I learned from Greenberg’s course.

As with almost all music, seeing it live is better. Like I said above, I traveled for the Spoleto (mostly) classical music festival in Charleston and saw some great stuff: Haydn’s The Creation, Beethoven’s 3rd, Mahler’s 5th, plus some well-curated chamber works. Our local symphony director has a soft spot for Romantic music and he’s helped turn me around on some of it.

I do need to get better at re-listening to classical albums to let them sink in via osmosis in the way that I often do with popular music, rather than focusing and giving them one thorough listen and then moving on to the next. I realize I’m often expecting them to fully land or not in that one listen. But many of my favorite popular music albums didn’t click on the first or second listen and I need to make room for the same experience with this music.

I am, though, starting to see the benefits of giving that kind of focused attention to a canonical corpus and returning to it periodically. I’m developing a decent knowledge of Beethoven’s 32 piano sonatas. On classical radio, I heard a spellbinding recording of the third piano sonata, second movement by Lang Lang (below). It’s my favorite movement of Beethoven’s early piano sonatas, in the era when he still mostly sounds neat and Mozart-y. But this movement is a sort of foreshadowing of the deeper emotional territory he would mine later in his career.

That Lang Lang recording led me to hear it anew and revisit it and sample a few other versions of it, including Gould’s ridiculously slow take. A recent post from Dean Ball about the evolution of the piano and how it influenced composing and classical music inspired me to listen to some of Ronald Brautigam’s recordings of the sonatas (below) on the pianoforte (the first version of the modern piano that Beethoven was composing on). Side note, that essay is a great intro to the development of the piano and romantic piano music and it’s also a great essay on AI...

Long story short, I’m starting to see how and why classical music fans circle similar material and savor different recordings over the years and am excited to set myself up for a lifetime of listening. My goals for 2025 are:

• Finish listening through the Norman Lebrecht Why Beethoven book,

• Continue regular trips to the Symphony, particular to dig into Brahms, Mahler, and other Romantics I’m still working on appreciating,

• Check out more Shostakovich,

• Listen to more albums by groups like the Danish String Quartet or Vikingur Olaffson, where a performer is as focused on curation as performance.