"Classical" Music

Yes, I do listen to classical music regularly. My car radios are tuned to a local classical music station, and when I am sitting to read or to compute, out come CD's. I am a very amateur organist, so love to hear the organ works of Bach, few of which I can come close to playing. Also the choral music of Buxtehude. Then, in another era, there's Mozart ... insuperable. On and on the list may go. I hope we in the churches can continue to nurture a culture of appreciating the classics, despite the contemporary whiz-bang that is now so common.

 

you left out Chopin...perhaps because most is piano oriented I'm assuming. Have you seen the youtube with the Handel's Messiah in a food court at the mall. Now I will look for it & post it. Thats bringing Christ to the people.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SXh7JR9oKVE

 

For some reason I'm becoming more and more appreciative of the arts and humanities in general - along with an interest in promoting classical education ("the classics" - Homer, Shakespear, Latin, Biblical Languages, etc.).

 

Handel's Messiah covers the entire panorama of the Gospel set to glorious music. As you say, a great vehicle for presenting the Gospel to an otherwise reluctant crowd.

 

I'm a public school music teacher. I bring classical music to small children everyday, and teaching them to listen critically with discipline is a very rewarding thing, since most of our music today is made especially for consumers.

I love the works of Mendelssohn - he's my favorite, probably. Also, Schumann, Schubert, Beethoven, Handel, Haydn, a bunch of the Russian guys, Chopin, Copland.

As far as solo literature, Schubert wrote a piece called Die Allmacht. Go to youtube and find the version by Fischer-Diskau. It's the most beautiful vocal piece.

Mendelssohn's Elijah would be the piece I would want on a desert island.

 

That video was great!

 

Ja..... I am very glad to hear that. It was the teachers that gave me the appreciation for diverse music that I have today. When I was in NYC, Id spend my lunch hour in Tower Records (now out of business) a big music distributor & I'd buy the Philips "Set Your Life To Music" cd's with Beethoven, Bach , Mozart (for the mind, for meditation, for the morning) etc & play them to my then young son who now plays Alto Sax & Guitar & Base (plugged & unplugged). He really got a kick out of Aaron Copeland (the American school of composition) "Fanfare for the Common Man" but now as he's grown he listens to the noise called Rap. The wife was a DJ @ Miami University in her wayward youth so she likes allot of contemporary rock. Im looking at putting in a great sound system into the house ....have plans all drawn up ....I'm a bit of an audioplobe.

Note for the holidays, may I suggest .... A Charlie Brown Christmas / Vince Guaraldi and Trans-Siberian Orchestra (Christmas Eve & other Stories) & of Course the King; Nat King Cole Christmas Song- classic. Great Stuff!

 

I love it as I have like sixteen CDs of them. As it is soothing and all of that. Like about Mozart, Beethoven, Bach, etc.

 

Smetana's Moldau is by far my favorite "classical" piece.

The most beautiful tune ever written is Shenandoah, and my favorite pop song of all time is John Denver's Country Roads. (But Johnny Cash's The Man Comes Around is creeping up on that despite its literary offenses.)

But . . .

A little classical music goes a long way. If I lived in the days before radio and recorded music, I could probably sit enraptured for two hours. Now two minutes is a stretch.

On a desert island I'd save my batteries.

 

Classical is all I ever listen to, well some oldies now and then but Rachmaninoff's piano concerto 2, Mozart's Eine kleine Nachtmusik and anything ABBA.

I'd guess about 80 percent of our cds are classical of one sort or another.

 

I like Bruckner's symphonies, Elgar's music, and most baroque music, particularly Bach. Having played the double bass, I also like music by such people as Dittersdorf, Dragonetti, Bottesini and Koussevitsky, who all wrote concertos for that instrument.

 

I can listen to classical music, but I am more given to Broadway music such as Phantom of the Opera. I have attended 14 live performances of this show.

Cheers,

Jim

 

Archangel, I attended the original in London and I tend to compare the North American presentations to it. Nothing compares to Michael Crawford and Sarah Brightman.

Wife and daughter saw the last American performance in Atlanta, Georgia and they thought the singing was flat, but still enjoyable.

One of the last performances in Toronto, the lead singer was the head of a rock group. I was skeptical at first, but came away pleasantly surprised and quite pleased. He did a brilliant job.

Cheers,

Jim
Forgot to mention that rock singer was Paul Stanley of KISS.....unbelievable, innit.

 

Many of my favorites have already been mentioned, but some have not: Bach, Handel, Mendelssohn, Beethoven, Chopin, Rachmaninoff, Tchaikovsky, Copland, Samuel Barber, Virgil Thomson, among others. My father's family had several musicians, so music has been part of my life as long as I can remember. Classical was and is a big part of that, but so is popular, rock, jazz, blues, and early American shape-note.

One thing I would suggest you remember is that all music was written in a cultural, social, and political context. And, as [URL="http://composersdatebook.publicradio.org/]The Composers Datebook[/URL] reminds us, "All music was once new." Some of our great favorites now were panned by the critics when they were premiered. Consider Shostakovich writing in the Soviet Union; Copland's "Fanfare for the Common Man"; Tchaikovsky's "1812 Overture". These are but a few examples. This music was not written in a vacuum. In many cases it involved great risk to the composer. Rachmaninoff escaped to the US. When the pianist Vladimir Horowitz was allowed to return to Russia to perform a series of concerts, the demand for tickets rivaled any rock star in this country. Our Nashville Symphony recently returned to the Schermerhorn Symphony Center which was heavily damaged in the May floods last year. It was viewed as another step in the recovery process for the city. So remember that there is more going on here than just music.

Tim Reynolds