The transformative power of classical music |

I think I agree with his tenet that most people do not know that they like 'classical' music.

The thing is that, as with everything that is really worth it, it needs some effort to be able to enjoy it. For an incognoscenti, a Goya painting is just a picture, and sometimes not even a very good one, at that - it takes substantial knowledge, understanding and practise to see it as something more than that.

Although much of 'classical' music is easily accessible, one must do quite a bit of work to really appreciate it to the fullest. As with good novels, poetry, wine, food and women. Everything, really.

Another thing with classical music is that you MUST engage with it fully - it is not something you can listen to with half an ear whilst doing something else. Therefore you also need high fidelity sound and sufficient volume.

The thing about volume is crucial. I have this theory that 'classical' music lost a lot of traction because of the motor car and car radios. When radios were first installed in cars, cars were noisy and sound reproduction of radios was bad.

In music, for some strange reason they talk about the volume level as the dynamic range. In classical music, the dynamic range is substantial. So, driving along in a car with the radio's volume on normal, you won't even hear soft music. And when you turn it up so that you can hear it, you can pop an eardrum when the volume of the music suddenly changes, as it does with 'classical' music.

Also, the noise of the car filters out much of the overtones present in the voices of classically trained singers, especially in the lower frequencies. This is particularly bad for sopranos, where all the richness of their voices get lost in background sound and all you hear are the upper frequencies, making them sound thin and shrill. In short - you didn't hear at all what they really sound like.

Contrast this with the typical popular song:

There is no dynamic range - the volume is constant throughout.

The voices and the sounds are artificially produced (microphone, amplifier, electronics) and therefore not really altered by transmission through a substandard radio. What you heard during a live performance and what you heard over a car radio was pretty much the same.

The voices themselves are untrained and lack sonority, they therefore do not really loose anything in transmission. That doesn't matter, since the voices are also not really conveyors of emotion either - whether they sing about granny having died during the depression, or about winning the jackpot in Vegas, the voice stays essentially the same. This in contrast with 'classical' singers, were carrying emotion with the voice is paramount.

The point is that pop-songs are created to entertain within the constraints of the above limitations, and so do not suffer from them when produced in a hostile environment, such as a radio in a 1960's car. Whereas in the same environment, 'classical' music, having been created to utilise the full spectrum of possibilities, suffer horribly.

I could go on about this even more at some length, but I will desist for now. (Thinking here of some of the current trends in human behaviour, such as the need for instant gratification, trying to fit significant ideas into 140 character tweets, and so forth).

(A pity this fellow is still very uninformed about Mandela. For the moment, it is remains a worldwide phenomenon, unfortunately).