You know if these guys were alive today, they’d love Radiohead.
Baroque jams: Your new iPod playlist
Rock me, Amadeus
Five symphonies everyone should know, by Tarnopolsky (“This is like choosing between your children.”).
Beethoven’s “Symphony No. 5”
Mozart’s “Symphony No. 40”
Mahler’s “Symphony No. 5”
Prokofiev’s “Symphony No. 5”
Tchaikovsky’s “Symphony No. 6”
Classical stuff on Kahane’s iPod
Bartok’s “The 6 String Quartets” (Takacs Quartet)
Thomas Adès’ “Piano Quintet” (Thomas Adès and the Arditti Quartet)
Beethoven’s “Symphonies 3 and 8” (Minnesota orchestra, Osmo Vänskä conducting)
Steve Reich’s “Music for Eighteen Musicians”
Ever try to download Mozart’s “Requiem” from iTunes only to have the search come back with 150 versions from different orchestras? When the results include names containing “academy” “Sir” and umlaut-filled German words in their title, you give up and go back to cranking the “Lollipop” remix. We picked the brains of three classical music experts to find out how someone who knows nothing about the genre can begin their overture.
So, is classical the new (old) hip thing? New York-based composer Gabriel Kahane says at a typical concert at New York’s Kitchen, featuring music by young composers such as Nico Muhly or Bryce Dessner from The National, “you’ll see hardly anyone over 40.”
“And, I feel like I’ve seen kids in Bushwick starting to dress in Vienna-Konzert chic lately,” he jokes.
Kidding aside, you can learn a lot about classical music online. And unlike blindly shelling out money on iTunes, a lot of it is absolutely free!
“There’s massive amounts of classical musical stations on the Web,” says Matias Tarnopolsky, artistic administrator for the New York Philharmonic. He likes WQXR, WFMT in Chicago and BBC Radio 3.
A lot of DJs are even mixing contemporary and classical music more. Terrance McKnight, host of WNYC’s “Evening Music” often goes from Radiohead into Mozart.
“All the music we listen to today has its influences from classical,” he says. “On my program, I show the direct correlation between music from the 1600s to music that’s being written today.
... I’ll say something like, ‘Oh, you heard this ground bass in Third World, now check out the ground bass in this music by Pachelbel that was written 400 years ago.’”
So, Mr. McKnight, what should we download?
“Just choose any [recording]. There’s 800 years of music, you have to start somewhere.”
