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Canons and discovery
Jan. 7th, 2006 09:53 amHere's another one of those "ten classical albums for newbies" lists.
While I love me some Beethoven's Ninth and Carmina Burana, I do wonder whether this sort of canon-first approach even works. I tried to go the "classical music for newbies" route for years and there were some pieces I liked well enough, but I never really felt confident about digging deeper until I met Sam. What she did, more or less by accident, was introduce me to some specific subgenres that had a more immediate and visceral appeal to me than the standard canon (19th and 20th century wind-band music, in this case), to the point where I became just a little bit of a connoisseur and actually cared about the differences between different recordings and arrangements. Once you've started to specialize like that, it makes you more confident about branching out to other things. I'm still not hugely knowledgeable about classical music today, but I don't feel as if it's something foreign to me.
I think this is also part of the reason why forced readings in high-school English class aren't very effective at getting kids interested in literature. Being forced to read the canon will get you some exposure to the big picture but it usually won't give you the feeling that a little piece of this world is yours.
Unfortunately, that feeling is inherently something it's hard to arrive at systematically; it's hard to see how to contrive to discover something special to you. People sometimes ask me to recommend good science fiction to them, and I had the idea a while back of coming up with a sort of multi-canonical list, of good or important books categorized by style or subgenre; so that instead of reading the whole canon of Books Everyone Should Know, you start with a more depth-first exploration of a piece of the world that has a chance of appealing to you more individually. But even that is probably hit-or-miss.
While I love me some Beethoven's Ninth and Carmina Burana, I do wonder whether this sort of canon-first approach even works. I tried to go the "classical music for newbies" route for years and there were some pieces I liked well enough, but I never really felt confident about digging deeper until I met Sam. What she did, more or less by accident, was introduce me to some specific subgenres that had a more immediate and visceral appeal to me than the standard canon (19th and 20th century wind-band music, in this case), to the point where I became just a little bit of a connoisseur and actually cared about the differences between different recordings and arrangements. Once you've started to specialize like that, it makes you more confident about branching out to other things. I'm still not hugely knowledgeable about classical music today, but I don't feel as if it's something foreign to me.
I think this is also part of the reason why forced readings in high-school English class aren't very effective at getting kids interested in literature. Being forced to read the canon will get you some exposure to the big picture but it usually won't give you the feeling that a little piece of this world is yours.
Unfortunately, that feeling is inherently something it's hard to arrive at systematically; it's hard to see how to contrive to discover something special to you. People sometimes ask me to recommend good science fiction to them, and I had the idea a while back of coming up with a sort of multi-canonical list, of good or important books categorized by style or subgenre; so that instead of reading the whole canon of Books Everyone Should Know, you start with a more depth-first exploration of a piece of the world that has a chance of appealing to you more individually. But even that is probably hit-or-miss.