# An Introduction



## Navvy (Mar 20, 2009)

Hi everyone, thought I'd introduce myself. My name is Brian and I live in Ottawa, Ontario. I've only started listening to "Classical" in the past couple weeks. I've had a bit of an odd evolution inmusical taste. I listened to hip-hop through high school, then got into folk music in university, that morphed into traditional music and I dabbled in the tin whistle and wooden flute for a couple years and finally I started listening exclusively to folk rock. Then I was driving somewhere a couple weeks ago and scanning the radio, fell on some classical and decided it was something I should make the effort to get into.

Well, I downloaded a "50 Essential Classical Music" album from iTunes and listened to that for a couple days, found a couple pieces I liked and looked them up. Turns out all the pieces that caught my attention were Bach, so I purchased Julia Fischer's Violin Concertos and have been listening to Concerto for Two Violins 50 times a day for the past week or so. It's great fun. I found it really interesting that I could listen to a selection of classical music and, without knowing anything about the tunes or classical music in general, pick out 5 or so Bach compositions as my favourites.

So, obviously there's more than enough Bach for me to try to get through (especially at the pace I'm going), but I'd love recommendations on other composers with similar complexity and ornamentation (late baroque correct?). I listened to a bit of Vivaldi, but the pieces I heard were a bit too playful for my taste. 

Anyways, happy to be here!


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## hdk132 (Mar 18, 2009)

Welcome! It's great that you have gotten into classical music. Bach is a great place to start. Make sure you listen to his Magnificat (in D) and his 6 Cello Suites. From Bach you might try going into Hayden or Mozart. IMO Bach is pretty unique, and yes he is late baroque. Hayden is early classical and Mozart is mid classical so they are logical steps. Hayden wrote an unbelievable number of symphonies, I'm not going to try to reccomend any, but his chamber music is pretty good too (trios and quartets). For Mozart, check his piano phantasies and his symphonies (No. 40 perhaps). 

The ornamentation you hear is just baroque style, earlier composers such as Corelli are actually going to have more because the 2nd time through a passage the musitian is expected to improvise around the melody. I fully support your dislike of Vivaldi . Stay away from Teleman too. You may like Handel, I never developed a taste for him myself but he does have some good stuff. You picked up a "complexity" in Bach: that's exactly right, and that is totally unique to Bach. He writes with this extraordinary logical flow in his music. This is particularly evident in any of his fugues and his violin Chicconne (sp?).

Hope this is of help. Have fun in your listening!


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## marval (Oct 29, 2007)

Hi Brian,

Welcome to the forum, glad you could join us.


Margaret


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