"Musical
compositions do not inhabit certain
countries, certain museums, like paintings and statues. The Mozart
Quintet is not shut up in Salzburg: I have it in my pocket."
-Henry Rabaud, French composer and conductor
There used to be no difference between pop music and what we today call classical music. Mozart's famous 'Magic Flute' opera (which was really a 'Singspiel' - a forerunner of broadway) was written for the ordinary people. People used to go to the opera and the ballet and the symphony to be seen and to chat with friends, and maybe to watch what was going on in between. In Italy, the opera was for the commoner basically what the movies are for us today (it probably helped that they actually understood what in the world the performers were singing).
Modern classical audiences are accustomed to listening to concert programs with works by composers at least half of whom are dead, please and thank you. This development is recent - less than 200 years old, in fact.
When Johann Sebastian Bach took up his post at the St. Thomas Church in Leipzig, he burned all the manuscripts of the composer who had been there before him. He didn't do this out of spite or because he was just a nasty guy, but he more or less expected the same to happen to his work after he died. And indeed, while his keyboard works were still played by composers and some performers, many of the big works that he is loved for today were more or less forgotten about. Not until some eighty years after his death did a twenty-year-old Felix Mendelssohn start the Bach revival by conducting a (heavily edited) performance of Bach's St. Matthew's Passion. One important thing had happened between Bach's death in 1750 and Mendelssohn's performance in 1829 - Beethoven. Beethoven happened.
Ludwig van Beethoven is often cited as the first composer who intended his compositions to be remembered far beyond his death, and indeed his shadow hung over every composer after him who tried to write symphonies. Ludwig van Beethoven started the tradition of Classical Music as we think of it (which is ironic, considering that he was actually the tail end of what we call the 'classical era') in which performers bow down to the shrine of the composer and audiences maintain a church-like, reverent silence.
Music is allowed to be fun. Even classical music is allowed to be fun (if it wasn't, I would stop pursuing it as a career right now). And once you get used to it, it really can be a whole lot of fun.
So I want to help introduce people to classical music. I'll try to lay out cultural and historical background of pieces to help understand them, I won't go into too much theory, but maybe a bit here and there just to explain why composers composed a certain way. I've grown up loving classical music, and I do feel like I have it in my pocket. I want to help other people put it in theirs.
Oh, and once in a while I might do a verbal splat concerning my thoughts on music. The thoughts are usually all over the place, so the splats could be messy. Just so you're aware.
