Dont Listen to Classical Music Read It
on a show of hands
how many people here enjoy listening to
music
probably the majority of us right and
because we enjoy listening to this music
i think the majority of us here have
probably heard of things such as youtube
spotify or even tick tock to listen to
this music
right whilst going to work going to the
gym or studying
i think we can all agree that music has
a very special place within
many people’s hearts now using your best
recollection skills i want you to ask
yourself
when was the last time that i looked up
the genre
classical music for personal enjoyment
has it been fairly recently or has it
been a while
and if it’s been a while ask yourself
why so
now you can argue that in today’s
fast-paced materialistic society
classical music can have a kind of hard
time fitting in right
if you ask any teenager today if they
enjoy
listening to classical music for
personal enjoyment
do you think the majority of them would
respond with yes as a sign of approval
probably not and i think you can also
argue that popular culture is constantly
changing right
so classical music won’t always be the
most popular musical genre
and that’s very true but i think a lot
of people enjoy looking back
to music from their past right from
their childhood like the beatles are
still fairly proper right
and they’re they were like from what the
1950s or so right
and i think a very common opinion today
is that
people don’t listen to classical music
because it’s not relatable
it’s boring it’s too complex for people
to understand
but i think this argument is very flawed
because
classical music was written for people
300 years ago who had the same
intentions
as us today to enjoy music that’s the
same purpose
so today let’s try something new let’s
try to portray classical music in a new
light
by tearing down the scary facade of i
don’t understand classical music
in order to reveal the beautiful
interiors that this art subject has to
offer
but before we begin i’d first like to
elaborate on the history of
western music
the four most major uh
history periods of history within
western music are the baroque period
from around 1600 to 1750 which saw the
rise of popular artists
such as js bach and george trevor candle
next we had the classical period from
around 1760 to 1820
and this period saw the rise of famous
artists such as mozart
beethoven haydn next we have the
romantic period
from around 1800 to 1910 and this
appears on the rise of very tumultuous
characters such as tchaikovsky
and grieg and schumann and finally
we have impressionist post 20th century
period music which saw the rise of
composers
such as ravel and wc so you can see
that the history of western music is
actually quite broad
and i think the term classical music is
used to denote a very broad range of
music
and i think we overuse it in a way
that’s not entirely accurate
because classical music actually is
specifically for the period of the
classical period
and today we’re going to focus on a
piece and this piece is going to be
specifically from the classical period
so i think the majority of people here
today have probably heard of the piece
of beethoven’s moonlight sonata if you
haven’t heard of it
it’s this very slow and melodramatic
piece
and just from hearing the title what do
you think this music is going to sound
like
well i kind of told you already but
let’s look deeper
i want you to ask yourself what does
this music
tell me as a person and what ideas do
you think this music
is telling me right and i’m going to
play a small excerpt for you
and i want you to listen
[Music]
so what did you hear well you probably
heard a lot of things right
but i think one of the biggest things
that probably everyone here
heard was data of repetition and
repetition of course is the repeating of
musical notes and here at the beginning
of this piece
we hear the repetition of a three-note
melody
and that three-note melody is g-sharp c
right and this three note matter pattern
is repeated throughout the piece right
it might be changed a little bit
and at first i think it kind of just
sounds
maybe like a little bit of background
music right just
butter and butter it might not sound
very important at first
and we also have this intuition that
this three-note pattern
has a sort of like makes a piece sound
quite sad right
and these ideas are all correct but
let’s look a little deeper
let’s imagine we’re listening to
beethoven’s moonlight sonata as if
we’re opening like a very famous novel
right
or we’re looking at some very famous
painting right for example
let’s imagine we’re looking at this
painting here
right um this painting what do you see
in it
probably see a lot of things right you
see maybe is that a moon in the
background
maybe it’s the sun and we also have this
body of water
and we have this lighthouse right
and if we imagine we’re looking at this
painting as if we’re
listening to this music do we find any
parallels between the details
in this music in this painting for
example
if you look at the tides in this
painting and we think about our music
do we see tides in our piece
well let me think about a tide what does
a tide look like or sound like when i
look at a body of water
well i think tides are like very
repeated right they’re like
in like waves right and i also think
they’re very repetitive right
do we see that in our music
maybe i think so right we have that
through normality it’s like
it’s very like it’s like a buoy right so
could beethoven be trying to portray
this idea that these three nope patterns
are supposed to be representing water
maybe but let’s look even deeper let’s
think about the other melody in this
piece right
we have this these long chords of
right and these octaves are very ominous
sounding right kind of mysterious like
you don’t know what’s out there right
and we look back to our painting we
could uh assume that the light in the
sky could be the moon
if we think about the moon isn’t it kind
of like ominous to see this like
bright thing in the sky at night time
when everything should be dark
but suddenly we see this huge thing in
the sky right
so maybe this these long cords could be
representing the moon
and then we have this high melody right
[Music]
and if we think back to our painting
once more and we look at the lighthouse
doesn’t the lighthouse kind of like
imagine like make you
think about like hope right light
represents hope right
so now that we have all these details
what does this mean
well out of this presentation what i
want to show you
is that classical music is more than
just notes
i think a lot of people see classical
music as a bunch of random notes that
i don’t know some composer put together
and they stop and they sound nice they
put them all together and they sound
whoa very pretty right
but that isn’t the case because
classical music is so complex
we have different nuances such as
dynamics which are the changes in
magnitude of sound
we have articulation which is like how
you play specific notes
and you have phrasing and you have
different like ideas you want to portray
right
in fact if you listen to any great
artists today any orches or any
orchestra in general
and you listen to how they’re listening
to their playing what you’ll notice
is that there’s not one orchestra that
sounds like another
there might be similar right some
artists may try to exhibit things that
are very similar to other artists
but in general each artist is very
specific and they’re very different from
one another
and these the ideas that they try to
portray are very much like that
of like stories and now that we have
our ideas our small details let’s try
to put our small details as if they’re
like little images and let’s try to
stream them on one long string
and let’s see if we can observe any
patterns of development
okay i’m going to play that excerpt for
you again i want you to listen this time
and think about if you think hear
anything different
[Music]
so
do
[Music]
so was there anything different about
this times hearing
maybe maybe he hurts me different or
maybe he didn’t
and that’s okay if you didn’t because
that’s not the point of this
presentation
the point of this presentation was to
show you that classical music
is much more than we think it is it’s so
much more complex
and what i personally want you to feel
is that
there are different ways to listen to
classical music
in my way of course is not always the
best way
you could argue that it’s not it’s not
correct there’s it could be a
completely false like idea right and
what i recommend to you
you may use but you might not use also
but what i’m trying to show you from
this presentation are these three ideas
number one listen to melodies not just
those of main melodies but supporting
ones
and whilst you listen to these melodies
i want you to think about your emotions
right because a lot of music
encapsulates emotion
and while some music may not have that
much emotion that’s okay
but for the majority of music i think
there is some or one piece of music that
probably connects to every person within
this world
and finally be attentive to players
the thing that makes classical music so
much more different from
every other other genre is that it
demands
people to look at how the musician is
playing right
classical music demands us audience
members to watch the person who’s
playing
and seeing what are they trying to say
out of their music
right and of course this is not one
one two three step thing you can just
manage to follow and
you might not follow it you could argue
it’s not correct but i think it’s a very
interesting way
to begin seeing music to begin seeing
classical music
specifically and of course i can’t force
you
to start loving classical music or start
listening to it
but i will encourage you to start giving
it a chance an opportunity
to start thinking about hey why don’t i
just start listening to classical music
and see if i like it i might not like it
but
at least i should try and see and listen
right and you might not ask michael
why should i listen to class music in
today’s modern sense still like what
else what
what other things is are beneficial
besides just listening to
classical music from my own personal
benefit well
there’s so much more and in today’s
world there’s a lot of problems one of
them being
the current pandemic of copen19
you see right now lots of musicians
are suffering from unemployment and in
fact
a study done in 2014 by the league of
american classical orchestras
found that there were over 1 in 224
classical orchestras out there in the us
and they generated
what they found what they generated was
that these orchestras generated
up to 1.8 billion towards our us economy
i think that’s a pretty significant sum
and now
because of the current crisis a lot of
these musicians cannot come together
as groups and spread music for us
and that’s a big problem because
classical music depends
on audience members and when audience
members don’t show up
they don’t have anything to play they
can’t play for anyone
but that’s where you and me you and me
come in
we can start listening to classical
music
when after this pandemic finishes or
maybe when it or maybe not right now
we if we start listening to classical
music we give class and
classical music a bigger chance we
extend its legacy
far beyond ours into the future
generations
to those even maybe cyborgs now isn’t
that an
interesting thought thank you
you