Why most people dont like Classical Music

[Beyond Within]

I was thinking about this today...and I realized it seems due to several factors:

1. Most people dont have any musical training (or very little) so they cant appreciate music intended for an audience with extensive knowledge (like Mozart 'n stuff).

2. Classical Radio stations dont give any context to any of the works, so it usually doesnt have any meaning at all. For instance, they will play the second movement of Beethovens 9th, but none of the others. To me this is sacriledge, because the beauty in unity is completely lost.

3. Music has become conditioned as a passive experience i.e. backround noise. The best classical listening experiences are when your totally focused and "immersed" in the intricacy.

4. A lot of negative stereotypes are associated with it. That its only purpose was to make money from aristocrates. Or that all the listeners are pretentious.

5. Impatience: people dont want to listen to a piece many many times in order to fully understand it.

[Joy]

Originally posted by Beyond Within:
I was thinking about this today...and I realized it seems due to several factors:

1. Most people dont have any musical training (or very little) so they cant appreciate music intended for an audience with extensive knowledge (like Mozart 'n stuff).

2. Classical Radio stations dont give any context to any of the works, so it usually doesnt have any meaning at all. For instance, they will play the second movement of Beethovens 9th, but none of the others. To me this is sacriledge, because the beauty in unity is completely lost.

3. Music has become conditioned as a passive experience i.e. backround noise. The best classical listening experiences are when your totally focused and "immersed" in the intricacy.

4. A lot of negative stereotypes are associated with it. That its only purpose was to make money from aristocrates. Or that all the listeners are pretentious.

5. Impatience: people dont want to listen to a piece many many times in order to fully understand it.

1. In my circumstance I really don't have any formal musical training but I would daresay I love music and feel the emotions the same way (or close to it) that a professional musician may experience it.

2. I agree with you on this one. You really need to hear the entire piece performed not just one movement to get the full impact. Luckily my classical radio station always plays the music in it's entirety and also comments on it as well with loads of useful information.

3. I agree again. One thing I can't stand is when they use a classical piece in a commercial or movie (unless it has to do with the music itself). It just seems to trivialize it.

4. There does seem to be some negative sterotypes associated with classical music.

5. Many people are in deed impatient when it comes to listening to a piece in it's entirety. We do live in a world that always seems to be in a hurry. Pity, they're missing out.

------------------
'Truth and beauty joined'

[Amalie]

I suppose really it is a fact that some people just don't like classical music, incredible though it may seem to us.
I don't know whether there is any explanation for it, whether they have a missing classical music gene in their makeup, it is hard to say. I have certainly known people who positively loathe classical music and have said it all sounds like funeral music, whilst they carry on happily listening to all kinds of trashy ephemeral pop music. Obviously it is sadly only their loss. I don't personally try to persuade them.\ perhaps they are just not receptive to it, and seem to be content to live on the surface and don't want to confront the depths in themselves or their world.
I wonder if their is an elitist point here, classical music is simply better than any other kind of music and we don't often make that point for fear of causing offense, but it is a plain fact, and people that choose not to engage with classical music make a conscious choice to live in the shallows and not to grow and develop, which lets face it, is what life is all about or should be.
I believe that the human ear adapts and evolves to sometimes complex patterns of classical music.

Neitzsche cited that Beethoven discovered a chord in mankind that has been lost for many centuries. "a reverberation of a metaphysical string that was long silenced or even split apart; for example, when a person feels himself floating above the earth in a starry vault with the dream of immortality in his heart".



[This message has been edited by Amalie (edited September 24, 2003).]

[Peter]

I really don't have an answer to this one - you can find the most intelligent people (as well as the dullest!) completely unreceptive to classical music. What is a factor in preventing people from even making an effort is image and peer pressure. There are so many interesting characters in the history of Classical music so it should be possible to produce a factual as well as highly entertaining movie that would help with this - Why not start with Liszt? Surely he had everything that would appeal to young people? There was a dreadful film of Liszt starring Dirk Bogarde (even he ackowledged it was awful), we need something on an epic scale!

------------------
'Man know thyself'

[Chaszz]

Kind of an interesting aside to this thread: At a party recently I had a conversation with the wife of an old friend, whom I had never really gotten to know before. We got to talking about books. I was surprised when we shifted to talking about music to hear that she doesn't get it. Period. She has no response to any kind of music, even though she's intelligent, well-read, and loves other arts. No classical, no rock, no jazz, nothing. She is very conscious of being odd in this way, has an extremely music-loving husband, thinks she has a non-functioning gene and has passed it on to her daughter, now in college, who also wonders wistfully what all the fuss for music is about.

This must in some ways be a lonely existence. In terms of the present thread, it's just an extreme example that everyone's tastes are different and there's little accounting for them. It's also so interesting that I thought people here would be interested in hearing about it.

Although undoubtedly there are potential CM fans out there who are capable of liking it but don't get it because they haven't encountered it in a frutiful way. Perhaps Peter's idea of a film on Liszt might help.
Also a half-hour of music appreciation as little as once a week in school might do wonders, it did for me when I was young. In the U.S. at any rate, the arts are out the school window now, no time for anything except math and science to build better weapons, raise productivity and throw more people out of work.

There was a wild film on Tchaikowsky, "The Music Lovers", by Ken Russell, years ago. It was a little like Peter's idea of a Liszt film. Does anyone remember it?

Chaszz

[This message has been edited by Chaszz (edited September 25, 2003).]

[chicagomike]

Part of the answer is that our culture simply doesn't value classical music highly, so there's little incentive for most people to expose themselves to it or learn about it.

In part this is because classical music isn't contemporary, and it's not "hip" for American not to be up-to-date.

But in part it's because our intellectual leaders don't believe it is important that the general population learn more about classical music. This is reflected in the lack of musical training and music appreciation in our schools, and in the fact that, unlike in many European countries, classical music and opera are private, commercial businesses without the significant government subsidies which keep ticket prices low and make performances affordable for a wide range of people.

It's interesting to note that in some countries, such as Russia (and the old Soviet Union), classical music is central to their concept of "heritage," and the Russian composers are widely promoted through concerts, opera and ballet.

[Peter]

Originally posted by Chaszz:
[B]There was a wild film on Tchaikowsky, "The Music Lovers", by Ken Russell, years ago. It was a little like Peter's idea of a Liszt film. Does anyone remember it?

Chaszz

I have it on video and though like all Ken Russell a little bizarre (not as way out as his Mahler) it is very watchable. Who can forget the famous train scene with Glenda Jackson frantically trying to seduce Richard Chamberlain? !! Considered shocking at the time, I find it rather amusing!
I think Russell's best CM film was the one on Elgar.

Overall the best Classical music production that did most to attract young people was Amadeus, and though not always historically accurate it was hugely entertaining, and generally well acted especially on the part of F.Murray Abraham who played Salieri.

------------------
'Man know thyself'

[Amalie]

Originally posted by Peter:
I really don't have an answer to this one - you can find the most intelligent people (as well as the dullest!) completely unreceptive to classical music. What is a factor in preventing people from even making an effort is image and peer pressure. There are so many interesting characters in the history of Classical music so it should be possible to produce a factual as well as highly entertaining movie that would help with this - Why not start with Liszt? Surely he had everything that would appeal to young people? There was a dreadful film of Liszt starring Dirk Bogarde (even he ackowledged it was awful), we need something on an epic scale!

The most extraordinary thing I think, is so called intelligent people, professional people like lawyers and bankers who I see on the trian in the morning reading Harry Potter, or listening to what sounds like heavy metal music. I appreciate that there might be an element of people trying to unwind here and not taking life too seriously because they are under a lot of pressure at work, but I do get an overwhelming impression that these people really couldn't care less about classical music and what it has to offer and I find that both depressing and sad. That is quite apart from the millions of people in the UK. who watch soap operas of the most offensive kind and so I sometimes think if even these intelligent people are totally uninterested in classical music what chance the broad masses. Really speaking, should a grown adult, ie. anyone over the age of 21 be reading Harry Potter. I mean Lord of the Rings is juvenille stuff, but Harry Potter positively pre-pubescent.
My husband who is a lawyer (but doesn't read Harry Potter!), tells stories about fellow lawyers he worked with not many years ago who spent half and hour or more in the morning talking about football and who were utterly uninterested in anything to do with classical music. Of course that is not the whole story, but I think it does show that it is unlikely Beethoven and Co. will ever appeal to some kinds of people and leave it at that. Poor lost souls that they are.

[Steppenwolf]

Originally posted by Amalie:

Neitzsche cited that Beethoven discovered a chord in mankind that has been lost for many centuries. "a reverberation of a metaphysical string that was long silenced or even split apart; for example, when a person feels himself floating above the earth in a starry vault with the dream of immortality in his heart".

I'm glad you brought up Nietzsche again. Recently I have been immersed in Nietzsche - Nietzsche and also Wagner (sometimes together! reading Birth of Tragedy WHILE playing Tristan und Isolde on my CD player). I have also been listen a lot recently to the last two movements of Beethoven's 5th. The 3rd movement to me seems to express a heroic stuggle ... a solitary, heroic man bravely fighting against fate and struggling onward defiantly, almost like climbing a mountain through the wind and rain ... and THEN! behold! he comes to the top of the mountain, the clouds part, the sun shines through, and the triumphant 4th movement bellows forth! It reminds me a lot of Nietzsche's Will to Power, and I can see why he regarded Beethoven as one of the forerunners of the Ubermensch.

Back to the subject of this thread, I sometimes think that classical music, despite what people say, IS out of step with modern society. Completely. But that is a bad reflection of modern society, NOT classical music. Art is symptomatic of the health of a society which produces it ... our society is pretty crazed, neurotic and warped ... rap music is the natural symptom of such a screwed-up society. Classical music however is the symptom of a prosperous age with a healthy society. We do not have that anymore. Classical music speaks of serenity, and the climate of modern life is anything but serene.

(On a side note, Amalie, I note with interest your husband is a lawyer. Is he a barrister or solicitor? And in what area does he practice? I am a law student in London, at Lincolns Inn, and I am training to be a barrister. )

[Peter]

Originally posted by Steppenwolf:


Back to the subject of this thread, I sometimes think that classical music, despite what people say, IS out of step with modern society. Completely. But that is a bad reflection of modern society, NOT classical music. Art is symptomatic of the health of a society which produces it ... our society is pretty crazed, neurotic and warped ... rap music is the natural symptom of such a screwed-up society. Classical music however is the symptom of a prosperous age with a healthy society. We do not have that anymore. Classical music speaks of serenity, and the climate of modern life is anything but serene.

Well I agree society is pretty screwed up, but when has it really been otherwise? You can't pretend that the era of Classical music (in the strict sense - 1750-1830) was 'healthy'. It was a period of bloody revolutions and wars combined with the most terrible social inequality, slavery and disease. The prosperity applied only to a very tiny minority.

------------------
'Man know thyself'

[Amalie]

Originally posted by Peter:
Well I agree society is pretty screwed up, but when has it really been otherwise? You can't pretend that the era of Classical music (in the strict sense - 1750-1830) was 'healthy'. It was a period of bloody revolutions and wars combined with the most terrible social inequality, slavery and disease. The prosperity applied only to a very tiny minority.

Yes of course, Beethoven wrote in the age of revolution and he wrote for the elite and wealthy patrons. It is true that in a material sense people had less in general than they do now, but the odd thing is with the notable exception of France, society in Europe was remarkably coherent, stable, and spiritual in often non-religious ways. Society today in the west is insane, dangerously unstable and in many ways quite inhuman in the sense that there are precious few shared values, no common culture with a progressive degradation of everything spiritual and immaterial.
People like Mozart and Beethoven, like the scholars of the middle ages, who where ever they came from, all spoke and wrote in a shared language, ie. Latin, took it for granted that among the aristocracy at least, there was a shared culture which meant that they could speak in musical terms to one another in intelligable terms.
That sort of society is of course, virtually extinct. The west has become in effect Balkanized, that is split off into thousands of pieces and sub-cultures, many often within the same country and now that all the eggs have been smashed the pieces cannot now be put together again. Of course, the hope is that like minded individuals listening to the greats of the past will, like the survivors of some great cataclysm composed, as Auden said, of Eros and of Dust, exchange messages like ironic points of light in the darkness.

*******************************************


In reply to Steppenwolf.
My husband is a Property Lawyer in London and is presently writing a book on Shakespeare's history plays.



[This message has been edited by Amalie (edited September 25, 2003).]

[Joy]

Originally posted by Peter:


Overall the best Classical music production that did most to attract young people was Amadeus, and though not always historically accurate it was hugely entertaining, and generally well acted especially on the part of F.Murray Abraham who played Salieri.

This film was pretty entertaining and I saw it when I was young and enjoyed it much although I did see through it's flawed bits.
Luckily I knew enough about Mozart's life to distinguish between the true and false parts. I only hope that when other people see films such as these, meaning biographies, it would be nice if they knew somewhat of the person's life beforehand so they can separate the true parts from the false. I agree that the actors did a great job.

------------------
'Truth and beauty joined'

[Joy]

Originally posted by Steppenwolf:


I have also been listen a lot recently to the last two movements of Beethoven's 5th. The 3rd movement to me seems to express a heroic stuggle ... a solitary, heroic man bravely fighting against fate and struggling onward defiantly, almost like climbing a mountain through the wind and rain ... and THEN! behold! he comes to the top of the mountain, the clouds part, the sun shines through, and the triumphant 4th movement bellows forth! It reminds me a lot of Nietzsche's Will to Power, and I can see why he regarded Beethoven as one of the forerunners of the Ubermensch.

I really enjoyed your interpretation of Beethoven's 5th second half. I agree with you! Powerful stuff. The way part of the third movement just lulls you into a state of calmness and then explodes with the power of the 4th movement. Makes me want to put on my CD and listen right now!

Also I'm kind of glad that classical music doesn't really appeal to the masses because then I probably wouldn't have liked it. I never was one to join the crowd! I usually don't enjoy what is 'in' at the moment be it music, movies, or fashion. Just always was a nonconformist I guess.

------------------
'Truth and beauty joined'

[This message has been edited by Joy (edited September 25, 2003).]

[Peter]

Originally posted by Amalie:
Yes of course, Beethoven wrote in the age of revolution and he wrote for the elite and wealthy patrons. It is true that in a material sense people had less in general than they do now, but the odd thing is with the notable exception of France, society in Europe was remarkably coherent, stable, and spiritual in often non-religious ways. Society today in the west is insane, dangerously unstable and in many ways quite inhuman in the sense that there are precious few shared values, no common culture with a progressive degradation of everything spiritual and immaterial.
People like Mozart and Beethoven, like the scholars of the middle ages, who where ever they came from, all spoke and wrote in a shared language, ie. Latin, took it for granted that among the aristocracy at least, there was a shared culture which meant that they could speak in musical terms to one another in intelligable terms.
That sort of society is of course, virtually extinct. The west has become in effect Balkanized, that is split off into thousands of pieces and sub-cultures, many often within the same country and now that all the eggs have been smashed the pieces cannot now be put together again. Of course, the hope is that like minded individuals listening to the greats of the past will, like the survivors of some great cataclysm composed, as Auden said, of Eros and of Dust, exchange messages like ironic points of light in the darkness.

*******************************************

Sorry Amalie but I think you're looking back with rose-coloured spectacles - by 1848 much of Europe (not just France) was engulfed in revolutions which threatened to break out also in England. And why? because it wasn't the utopia you descbibe, but a world of great hardship, cruelty and injustice when a man could be hanged for stealing a loaf of bread to feed his starving family. It was a world which depended on slavery to build empires and for the riches provided by the industrial revolution - a world in which children as young as 9 were set to work in the most dreadful conditions. A world in which women had no rights and could be legally raped and beaten by their husbands. It was also an age of great drunkeness and debauchery (especially amongst the aristocracy and personified in the king). It was also a world without anaesthetics - especially relevant as I was at the dentist yesterday!

Our society today has many faults, but going back to the 18th/19th centuries is not the answer. We need to build on the social reforms we have achieved, and most importantly to truly improve education (not the false and cynical manipulations that we see today which will betray a generation) and yes there needs to be a cultural and spiritual reawakening. Music should be part of the curriculum - the value of this was realised by the ancient Greeks - truly our politicians are living in the dark ages.

------------------
'Man know thyself'

[Trev]

I have been reading the messages on this site for a few months and have eventually got round to "composing" my first post.

I'm sure we can all complain about the general lack of appreciation for "classical" music these days. It saddens me when I think what people are missing and I fail to see how even the music of Beethoven can be completely unappreciated. I assume that my utter failure to understand how anyone can remain untouched by Beethoven's music is felt, with equal and opposite conviction, by those who claim it means nothing.

Some people like sugar in tea, I hate it, though I cannot help thinking that this comparison trivialises what music has to offer. If someone tells me they do not like classical music – I accept it, even if I do not understand it, though I cannot help thinking they are the poorer for it.

I am not being judgemental, or saying that I am superior to anyone, I just know what a wealth of pleasure and emotions I gain from classical music and what I see many people missing out on.

I have broad musical tastes but NOTHING comes close to the effect Beethoven’s music has on me. Why me and not others?

TVR