Intro 2 -
A Serenade to Music

Rather than providing us with an aural breathing space, music is increasingly employed against our inner peace as, arguably, the most potent marketing tool for hitting the consumer unconscious. Surreptitiously, music sells cars, jeans, and café lattes. It is the uncredited soundtrack of the consumer era. But, Music has always served money and power.

Music also fuels popular culture. Why else would we spend so much money and time on it? Socially, it underpins and helps to define social groupings. It soothes stresses in foyers and obliterates peace in pubs; it anaesthetises hip pockets and shakes booties. It rocks the consumer world.

Don't believe me? Mute the volume on the TV and watch... Not much kick, is there? Wouldn't buy a thing on the basis of that effort!

Music is much more important than we give credit for. Words, as they should, fail to convey the intensity of pleasure that music can provide. The worth of music is not measurable or quantifiable.

Music is one of the most important of social forces. It may not have caused revolutions or stopped wars, but it has always commented, even predicted, the zeitgeist of times. As the direct language of emotions we use it all the time to regulate how we feel. It relaxes us after a day in the trenches. It excites us to dance. It pacifies us on the train, in the call waiting service and in the supermarket aisle. However, much more importantly, music has offered us something different, a connection with the eternal, an escape from the world. It is music and it is not like anything else.

More and more I fear we are losing touch with its special-ness as we consume it rapaciously.

Paradoxically, people are starting to demand something more from their music. Disenchanted with the endless recycling, of covers of covers of covers… Tired of the same sounds on the radio, people are listening more widely than before. You need look no further than some of the fads of the last decade: ambient, acid jazz, trance, lounge, dub reggae, world music, latin, Gregorian Chant. I think it is time for classical music to assume its proper place in people's CD collections.

However, it first has some serious consumer and social hurdles to clear. Few music shops know much about, or care much for classical music. The perception in these days of economic efficiencies is that it doesn't sell; It doesn't pull the chicks, the blokes, or the crowds.

The big record companies don't seem to know what to do with it. At best, they pillage it if they can see a buck. Every now and then, they have an unlikely hit, like the "The Three Tonners", "The Blind Baritone" or "Vanessa's Nubile Bach". At worst, they ignore it.

At some point our life we meet a musical mid-life crisis. The crisis is precipitated by the realisation that the music playing in the shops, on TV, and on the car radio is CRAP.

While you may rationalise that its only the scourge of the young, you will likely remember people of your parent's generation saying something vaguely similar. Switching the dials won't help you - only the "classic gold" radio stations carry the "great" music of your youth. Elsewhere, the music you grew up with has been long usurped. You have the terminal illness of popular culture – irrelevance.

Once you have fallen off the pop 'top 40' treadmill you find yourself in the musical wilderness... Your musical tastes no longer respond to the 'rubbish' of the day and so you enter the shadow-land of 'classic' rock, where the dreaded top 10 lists abound.
‘What’, you say, ‘people don’t listen to The Rolling Stones/Dire Straits/Led Zeppelin/The Beatles/Nirvana/U2… anymore? (Who can forget the horror of hearing Liam Gallagher paraphrase Lennon's famous remark to pronounce Oasis bigger than the Beatles? - Ironically, that outfit has since been consigned to the musical dustbin...)

However, within that kind of hyperbolae is some truth. Each new big act is bigger than the last, sells more units, tours further, fills bigger stadiums, and makes ever more outrageous claims to be enshrined at the end of musical history. That is, before history enacts its vicious revenge.

But it's over - Let's face it. You are no longer in the dominant demographic.

 Robbie Williams/Eminem/Beyonce/whoever/whatever sells more CDs/tickets/mp3s/is bigger than whoever-ruled-before-that. Rock 'n' roll's vaunted vitality and youthfulness is where the dollars and trendsetters are. If your listening tastes reside in the 'classic rock' era, you are several times consigned to musical irrelevance.

There are, of course, the exceptions. In this case, I think of those listeners who can undergo musical 'makeovers' and stretch their vanity with the Top 40. These are the music listener equivalents of Madonna, Tom Jones or... Cher. Chameleons, capable of blending to the tastes of the time. Nevertheless, one feels, despite the repeated makeovers, that the musical skin will eventually sag, the bones crack...

Classical music is another world. Having its origins in European churches, courts, or imperial palaces is hardly the stuff of a post-modern politically-correct, globalising, 21st century world.

It seems to have little to do with today's sensibilities. Schools don't teach it anymore. Music teachers don't know much about it, anyway. Why should they? They grew up on Radiohead and Matchbox 20!

Almost 50 years have passed since rock and roll reared its pimply, adolescent head. It has since grown up to create its own "classical" music. It is even taught legitimately at universites, a sign that it must be serious, after all. Technological advances have rendered most classical instruments obsolete, but, then, computers have practically rendered musicians irrelevant.

Nevertheless, classical music survives in spite of its dagginess, stodginess, and un-marketability. True, it has an image problem. Many of the nasty remarks about elitism resonate with some aspect of the reality. However, these barbs rarely have much to do with the music itself and could easily be levelled at any enshrined rock act.

Despite the comings and goings of jazz and blues and rock 'n' roll and pop and punk and grunge and techno and trance, people still listen and buy classical music. Classical listeners have not died out like dinosaurs. Governments and corporations still fund orchestras and operas. Significantly, many of the biggest rock acts of our day have toured with an orchestra to beef up the electrics. Orchestral sound still pulls the crowds, even if KISS, Metallica, and Elton John seem unlikely partners!

It seems to me that people DO want to listen to classical music. I think they are thwarted.

Thwarted by negative stereotypes and ignorance. Thwarted by the predominant paradigm of "modern is best". Thwarted because the Yanks didn't invent it, and don't support it, preferring their home-grown jazz and rock 'n' roll. Thwarted by short attention spans. Up to now, quite simply, people have been "too busy" for a music that lasts over 10 minutes, despite stray songs of Pink Floyd, Led Zeppelin and The Doors. (All "classical" music themselves).

Getting into classical music is not that difficult if you know what to listen to; if you are led into it the right way. However, self-starters find a dearth of good, down-to-earth information on where and how to start.

There is literally, centuries of the stuff to confront, recorded on truckloads of CDs. Most books on classical music seem to assume that you want the boring textbook treatment, rather than a guide for how to pull out the easiest music to listen to, to begin to make inroads into 800+ years of musical history. Classical music should be about the music!

This "resource" is written to cut into the thicket of classical music jargon and esoterica to pull out some of the musical treasure. I want to encourage you to take a moment and have a listen to something new. You obviously have some kind of interest in classical music - You're still reading this.

I hope that this website will provide you with a basic map of some better-known stars and galaxies in the Classical music universe. Most of all, I hope that you grow to love the serenity, the excitement, and the passion that is what all music is about.