Learn more about Classical Music

and so far (I think I’m roughly halfway through) I’ve tranferred 268 tracks onto my MP3 player. The composers are both old and modern, so far:

Bach
Bernstein
Beethoven
Brahms
Britten
Copland
Elgar
Gershwin
Liszt
Puccini
Mozart
Rachmaninov
Shostakovich
Vaughan Williams
Vanessa Mae

I also had the inspiration to borrow music from the library to save me a small fortune on buying stuff new. That way it only costs a few pounds at a time!

I’m really enthusiastic about this goal, because I forsee it not only as the opportunity to learn something new, but for reclaiming a part of myself that got lost somewhere in my childhood and has remained rather deprived and underdeveloped ever since.

My mum’s side of the family is very musical- her Dad was a conductor and she got a scholarship to study piano and violin at the Royal College of Music in London as a child. I grew up with classical music and always had a piano in the house although I never really wanted to learn particularly. Before my exams this summer I started listening to classical music whilst writing essays finding that it helped me concentrate, and then got enthused to look through a lot of the music I used to listen to (got hooked on Verdi’s Requiem!)

There’s so much to learn about classical music that apart from continuing to reacquaint myself I wasn’t really sure where to start since I have no technical knowledge whatsoever. I saw that lots of people here ordered the “Classical music for Dummies” book which looked quite good, and I’m burning a copy of the CD to my MP3 player as I type. It should be a good way to start off, and then hopefully when I’m at Uni I’ll know a little more about which type of concerts to seek out…