# Within Seconds!



## ProudSquire (Nov 30, 2011)

Sometimes when I listen to a brand new work, within seconds into the music I think to myself, this sounds awesome and I think this trio, symphony, quartet or whichever piece of music I am listening to, is going to be awesome! And immediately my interest for it amplifies a thousand-fold and I can hardly wait to listen to it in its entirety. Of course, I have been bamboozled before, but most of the time my intuition turns out to be right.

This happened while I listening to Beethoven's _Piano Trio in B-flat major, Op. 97, "Archduke."_ I was listening to the second movement, at first the Cello starts things off and then the Violin joins in and a few seconds later the Piano enters, and when the Piano took over and the strings were playing Pizzicato, I thought to myself, this sounds wicked awesome and I could hardly contain my excitement! All of this was within a span of 40 seconds!  So, I went ahead and listened to the entire trio and my favorite movement so far is the third movement. :}

I was wondering if this has happened to anyone else, if so, please share! :tiphat:


----------



## Dustin (Mar 30, 2012)

Yes! It just happened right now with Stravinsky's Pulcinalla.


----------



## Woodduck (Mar 17, 2014)

Sure. And in fact it still happens every time I go back to the "Archduke," which I think is just one of the most "wicked awesome" pieces ever.


----------



## Pugg (Aug 8, 2014)

I had that with Haydn String quartet in B flat Op.70 no 4
The adagio made me Haydn fan all over again.:tiphat:


----------



## Richannes Wrahms (Jan 6, 2014)

Dustin said:


> Yes! It just happened right now with Stravinsky's Pulcinalla.


----------



## Balthazar (Aug 30, 2014)

There are many, but the one that comes immediately to mind (there was a thread on it today) is *Janáček's String Quartet No. 1*.

That angular theme that the cello introduces in the third measure made me sit up straight the first time I heard it. And it still does.


----------



## Becca (Feb 5, 2015)

I remember it happening to me with Herbert Howell's Suite for Orchestra 'The 5 Bs', also Douglas Lilburn's overture _Aotearoa_. and Christopher Theofanidas' _Rainbow Body_.


----------



## EDaddy (Nov 16, 2013)

I absolutely relate. I've had this same (most exuberating experience) upon first hearing Nielsen's 5th, first movement. I had never heard anything like it before. It was both foreign and immediately penetrating all at the same time; I was instantly enthralled. From the the opening violas that start the symphony off (with a tremolo-like falling minor third downwards C – A ostinato), followed five bars later by the entry of the two bassoons who present the theme, I was completely enraptured. From there the excitement only grew.

I also had a similar experience at the tender age of twelve when my mom first introduced me to Szell and Casasdesus's unsurpassed performance of Mozart's Piano Concerto #21. I thought I had died and gone to heaven. 

And yet again, upon my first hearing of Beethoven's 6th "Pastoral" in 8th grade (Ashkenazy), which is still to this day the summit performance of that work for me. 

And finally, with Schubert's 'Trout" Quintet, as played by Rudolph Serkin, Jaime Laredo, Phillip Naegele, Leslie Parnas and Julius Levine at the 40th Anniversary Marlboro Festival. I have yet to hear a version that surpasses it.

There have been other similar experiences over the years, but these are the standouts.


----------



## Chipomarc (Jul 18, 2015)

With out a doubt it was Beethoven's Violin Concerto and the second movement of his 7th symphony.

Always have to stay close to the volume dial during that allegretto movement.


----------



## EDaddy (Nov 16, 2013)

Chipomarc said:


> With out a doubt it was Beethoven's Violin Concerto and the second movement of his 7th symphony.
> 
> Always have to stay close to the volume dial during that allegretto movement.


It's a shame he didn't write more. Violin concerti, that is.


----------



## Chipomarc (Jul 18, 2015)

I remember looping over and over the 'Spring' largo movement of Vivaldi's The Four Seasons


----------



## Guest (Jul 31, 2015)

Ah.

I can feel a conclusion coming on. My friends warn me to be careful whenever I get this feeling. "Oh be careful, Michael. You're about to conclude something. It will probably be wrong!!" 

I love my friends.

So anyway, here's what it seems like to me. This phenomenon that ProudSquire has described is no more or less than the usual way I experience music. It is the norm for me. I'd love to play, in other words, but I'd have to list practically every single piece I've ever heard. And that would be impractical. I could play a "doesn't click right away for you" game. Yeah, that would be doable.

So if this is doable for y'all, that means that our experience of music must be quite quite different, something I've been noting on a couple of other threads. Sometimes I feel like that guy in the pool, surrounded by people dipping their toes tentatively in the water, shouting "Come on in! The water's fine!!"

What's more, all these toe-dippers are supposedly long-time members of the swim club....

So here, at long last is that conclusion I promised you--you didn't think I'd already articulated it, did you? 

If you can have experienced this phenomenon with a few pieces, then it is possible for you to experience it with many pieces. If you've jumped into the pool once or twice with pleasure, you need never have to do the toes-only routine ever again.

This is good news, I think. I didn't come here to splash around all by myself. I came here to splash around in a crowded pool. The crowdeder the merrier.


----------



## ArtMusic (Jan 5, 2013)

ProudSquire said:


> Sometimes when I listen to a brand new work, within seconds into the music I think to myself, this sounds awesome and I think this trio, symphony, quartet or whichever piece of music I am listening to, is going to be awesome! And immediately my interest for it amplifies a thousand-fold and I can hardly wait to listen to it in its entirety. Of course, I have been bamboozled before, but most of the time my intuition turns out to be right.
> 
> This happened while I listening to Beethoven's _Piano Trio in B-flat major, Op. 97, "Archduke."_ I was listening to the second movement, at first the Cello starts things off and then the Violin joins in and a few seconds later the Piano enters, and when the Piano took over and the strings were playing Pizzicato, I thought to myself, this sounds wicked awesome and I could hardly contain my excitement! All of this was within a span of 40 seconds!  So, I went ahead and listened to the entire trio and my favorite movement so far is the third movement. :}
> 
> I was wondering if this has happened to anyone else, if so, please share! :tiphat:


This is perfectly normal with great pieces of work - the consistency which this happens with Beethoven's "Archduke" over time, is a signal of greatness, and the listeners are ultimately the winners. So is the piece for its own posterity's sake. Pure and simple.


----------



## Tedski (Jul 8, 2015)

When I was 19 and home on leave from the Air Force, my mother was playing some classical records when she said to me, "Listen to this one. You'll like it." It was the DGG recording of Carmina Burana (Carl Orff) with Janowitz and Fischer-Dieskau. When the stereo started blaring out O Fortuna, I was hooked "Within Seconds."


----------



## leroy (Nov 23, 2014)

Yep one of the best things about music is the feeling that "this piece is amazing!" upon first hearing any piece of music. It is worth reading the book "This is your Brain on Music" by Daniel Levitin to explore this concept further, I haven't read it in a while but I do remember one of the key concepts is that when your brain hears something that reminds it of something it loved in the past that will tend to stimulate that "wow" moment.


----------



## Guest (Jul 31, 2015)

It's a regular thing with me; most recently Penderecki's 3rd String Quartet. Haas' limited approximations sticks in my mind as a "wow" too..


----------



## Weston (Jul 11, 2008)

This rarely happens to me, but I think it's fantastic that others enjoy this phenomenon. I often find the openings of works to be over dramatic or overly stately or just overdone in other ways, trying to grab my attention. Not always but often. I do enjoy all the posturing, but it's when the music moves beyond it that it really starts delivering for me.

Off the top of my head, Stravinsky can be the exception to this. He is one of those "within seconds" composers, like an author who carefully crafts the opening sentence of a novel. All of that is subjective of course. Where I find the opening to Stravinsky's Symphony in Three Movements to get right to the point on the first glissando note, others may find it as overly dramatic as I find other composers.


----------



## KirbyH (Jun 30, 2015)

Oh gosh, that's what happened with me and Mahler.

One night when I was still in high school I was listening to the CSO broadcast my local NPR station carried (yeah I was that kid) and they did Mahler's First. Up until that moment I had never heard a note of Mahler; as soon as those clarinets came chugging in at the starts, I didn't move until it was finished an hour later.

And that's how I got to where I am now, up to my ears in Mahler cycles and all sorts of other wonderful noise.


----------



## Clairvoyance Enough (Jul 25, 2014)

My fondness for any piece always begins with that sensation, though it may not happen until long after the first listen. I used to believe in listening to something several times before making a judgement, and in trying to unlock my affinity for something with more attentive listening, which I still believe is necessary for behemoths, but most of the time it just doesn't work; wherever that intuitive affinity for the "character" of a piece's sound is absent, persistence is bankrupt for me.

Since noticing this my preferred method of music exploration is to skim through a playlist of several dozen tracks and note the ones that elicit an immediate impression within the first minute or so. In light of recent discussions I'd recommend that method to anyone who dislikes jazz in particular. It's both frustrating and satisfying to angrily dismiss twenty Coltrane solos and then land on one that, despite sounding more or less like the duds, hits the spot for some reason.


----------



## brotagonist (Jul 11, 2013)

It happens to me a lot. Some pieces, but not all, will just grab me by the b---s and not let go. Other pieces take a while. It is wonderful to be tickled this way, musically speaking, of course ut: but I find it an unreliable indicator of lasting appeal. When I'm searching You Tube for new fancies, I think I too often rely too heavily on this sensation or, rather, the lack of it, that I might be inclined to too hastily dismiss my next discovery. Usually, I think this sensation occurs when a piece coincides with a certain feeling that I have come to relish in another piece, so I think the quest for it might actually act to my detriment, by steering me to only one type of satisfaction.


----------



## Guest (Aug 1, 2015)

Well, there seems to be thinking about music, and there seems to be thinking about thinking about music.

And, of course, there's the thinking by listening to music.

The latter will get you results within seconds.

The first two will get you long threads on classical music boards.


----------



## Blake (Nov 6, 2013)

some guy said:


> Well, there seems to be thinking about music, and there seems to be thinking about thinking about music.
> 
> And, of course, there's the thinking by listening to music.
> 
> ...


I'd go further in and say there's listening without thinking. That always seems the most enjoyable. Thoughts take up space, why not devote that space to the music? It doesn't take much, and the rewards are aplenty.


----------



## Arie (Jun 19, 2015)

That happened to me with a lot of Beethoven's works. I can say it happens all the time to me, but most of the times, for works not by Beethoven, the 2nd, 3rd, 4th movements put me off. - the excitement that the 1st movement creates is hardly maintained throughout the symphony.


----------



## Lord Lance (Nov 4, 2013)

*Yup*

Mahler's Second. Raff's Duo for Cello and Piano. Bruckner's Ninth's Third Movement.


----------

