What piece of music made you a classical music fan for life?

[Bespin Copilot 10,514]

For me it was the Two-Part invention n° 8 in F Major by J.S. Bach, first heard in the ColecoVision Video Game "Looping" (1983)

Each time I arrived at the final level of the game and the music started, I found it superb.

It's much later that I've discovered that it was a piece of Johann Sebastian Bach.

This piece and the Brandebung Concerto n° 3 discovered on the cult "Switched-On Bach" LP made me a Bach fan for life.

[Code 000. Destruct. 0. 4,262]

My father played a lot of stuff but I couldn't identify one piece or moment based on many years of that. I first came to "classical" music on my own when I was around 7 or 8 when I became a Kubrick fan, having previously only been exposed to films with original music (which naturally also set me moving in a certain direction).

Anyway, I distinctly remember watching 2OO1: a space odyssey and being mesmerized, particularly by the music, particularly this piece. I couldn't understand what the hell it was.

This is the recording used there, and it's especially unearthly due at least in part to the recording quality - some of the higher voices are obscured and sound totally inhuman. What a strange and beautiful piece of music.

[Wojo 2,458]

The 1812 Overture, playing it in 8th grade County Band, made me a Tchaikovsky fan for life, and I rest followed accordingly.

[Brónach 1,321]

This thing

[Sharkissimo 1,977]

Stokowski's wonderful orchestration of Stravinsky's Le Sacre in Fantasia, when I was 3 or 4 years old. A simultaneous sense of fear and awe.

 

 

The piece is still my first love. I have a copy of the score I return to every now and then (with annoying musical notes written in pencil from when I had trouble transposing the instruments as a 16 year old), and still notice subtleties I glossed over before. My favourite recording is probably Stravinsky himself with the Columbia Symphony Orchestra in 1960. The tempi are all wrong and the performance isn't the best, but it's visceral yet transparent in a way others aren't.

 

[Thor 9,334]

I don't think it was any ONE piece. Besides, I'm terrible at remembering specifics anyway. My father was -- and is -- a classical music buff, so there was a lot of it around the house while I was growing up. Didn't care for it much at the time, and I didn't really discover it for myself after I had become interested in orchestral film music (well, actually the "LSO Plays Classic Rock" series prior to that). So I'm guessing my first serious exposure was some kind of programmatic music not too dissimilar from film music.

[Code 000. Destruct. 0. 4,262]

Stokowski's wonderful orchestration of Stravinsky's Le Sacre in Fantasia, when I was 3 or 4 years old. A simultaneous sense of fear and awe.

The piece is still my first love. I have a copy of the score I return to every now and then (with annoying musical notes written in pencil from when I had trouble transposing the instruments as a 16 year old), and still notice subtleties I glossed over before. My favourite recording is probably Stravinsky himself with the Columbia Symphony Orchestra in 1960. The tempi are all wrong and the performance isn't the best, but it's visceral yet transparent in a way others aren't.

Fantasia... good point. I can't remember which came first for me though, that or Kubrick.

[Jay 45,133]

I've never purposely listened to classical music in my life.

[Code 000. Destruct. 0. 4,262]

Yeah, it's so boring and unrelatable without any words!

[Omen II 1,297]

If I had to pick one piece, it would have to be this:

One of my older siblings had it and it became so imprinted on my brain that I still find it difficult to listen to the 'real' versions without my mind segueing to whichever masterwork came next in the RPO's Hooked On Classics track.

[mrbellamy 7,882]

I've always been pre-disposed to enjoying it from my love of film scores and playing trumpet in the school band, but I think what really inspired me to start actively looking for non-film orchestral music was playing Rimsky-Korsakov's Procession of the Nobles freshman year in high school orchestra. That was the most fun I'd ever had playing a piece of music at that point (probably still is, actually), and then I went looking for a recording at the library and decided to grab the 100 Fiedler Favorites box set for a crash course in classical music. Just kept listening after that.

Hearing Mussorgsky/Ravel's Pictures at an Exhibition soon after that was also a fairly big deal, and playing Firebird and Petrushka in orchestra among other seminal pieces made big impressions on me. And then I think the second movement of Ravel's String Quartet in F Major and Arvo Part's Summa for Strings were my personal gateways into chamber music, along with Williams' Harry Potter Children's Suite

[Romão 2,457]

The Alexander Nevsky cantata

[Code 000. Destruct. 0. 4,262]

The Alexander Nevsky cantata

Love this.

[Romão 2,457]

Battle on the Ice did it for me It provided a quite smooth transition between film scores and classical music

[Jilal 662]

Works like the William Tell Overture (Rossini), Funeral March of a Marionette (Gounod), Swan Lake (Tchaikovsky), Symphony No. 40 (Mozart), Symphony No. 5 (Beethoven), Symphony No. 9 (Dvorak), Für Elise (Beethoven), The Four Seasons (Vivaldi), the Peer Gynt underscore (Grieg), The Planets (Holst), etc.

I listen more often to modern works nowadays, though.

I've never purposely listened to classical music in my life.

You definitely should! You'll find its often very similar in nature to film music, although usually, there is a lot more development. I think there are a couple of threads on where to start, here. Perhaps you should take a look at those?

[Romão 2,457]

Stuff like Peer Gynt or the Planets can be great entry points

[Jilal 662]

Yes, I forgot to mention The Planets. How could I forget?

[KK 3,310]

It's hard to pin it down to just one piece really. I know I was into classical music before I got into film music. But I think Holst was who got me really serious about it. I remember playing Holst's Jupiter in my second year at my high school orchestra. I had so much fun playing the piece and was in love with the music. My teacher, knowing I was trying to study music more earnestly, lent me a copy of his conductor's score to follow while listening. That was the first time I got into studying scores. That year was spent with a lot of Holst and Vaughan-Williams, who really started my formative years in my interest in orchestral music.

Some of the stuff that would always be playing on my iPod at the time.

https://https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nvoYHwYDYLA

Oh and going off Sharky's post, yeah there's nothing like going through the Rite score for the first time!

[Jilal 662]

I'm glad I started to study scores at a very early age - it really helps to know certain techniques of orchestration, transposition, etc. and to be able to read in all of the clefs at an early age.

It's the kind of stuff you wouldn't want to have to worry about later.

[Thor 9,334]

You're all so fancy-schmanzy.

[Code 000. Destruct. 0. 4,262]

You mean nerdy?

[#SnowyVernalSpringsEternal 11,811]

I don't like any classical music

[KK 3,310]

Now that can't be true!

[Romão 2,457]

Come on Steef, I really hold you in very high regard, but that can't possibly be true coming from a fan of Williams and Goldsmith

[Jilal 662]

Aye!

[#SnowyVernalSpringsEternal 11,811]

Sorry to dissapointed.

I'm a purist.

[Wojo 2,458]

I don't want Steef to listen to classical music. Like video games, I want to be able to enjoy some hobbies he has no interest in.

[mrbellamy 7,882]

I've never purposely listened to classical music in my life.

You definitely should! You'll find its often very similar in nature to film music, although usually, there is a lot more development. I think there are a couple of threads on where to start, here. Perhaps you should take a look at those?

Stuff like Peer Gynt or the Planets can be great entry points

One thing that I found to be a lot of fun as a film music fan, specifically, was looking through George Balanchine's Complete Stories of the Great Ballets and making a list of the famous ballets I wanted to hear, and also the ones I had never heard of before but that had interesting stories, and then reading them before listening. I wasn't that interested in watching the ballets but it was totally natural for me to simply imagine them as movies as I listened to the music, essentially the same experience as listening to a soundtrack away from the film.

[Datameister 2,559]

I don't listen to much classical music, but in a weird way, it was classical music that helped make me a film score fan for life. When I was growing up, my parents had a number of different albums lying around the house. Two that I discovered early on were Star Tracks (mostly Williams stuff, plus a great rendition of Courage's Star Trek theme) and the Williams/Boston Pops recording of The Planets. The rhythms, textures, melodies, and harmonies really spoke to me in these works, even though I knew very little about music or about where these pieces came from. As I grew up, I found that there's a lot more film music in this vein than there is classical music, so my interests veered in that direction. But I still love The Planets and anything classical that sounds rather filmic - Vaughan Williams, early Stravinsky, that sort of thing. (Yes, I know most of this stuff isn't technically classical classical, of course. I really can't get into much stuff from the classical period.)

[Gnome in Plaid 219]

Do film scores count? If so, "The Next Morning" from Home Alone. If you're strictly going by concert music, probably Beethoven's "Symphony No. 2."

[publicist 4,650]

'Peter and the Wolf'

[Marian Schedenig 11,313]

Star Wars - Main Title - Charles Gerhardt.

[karelm 3,259]

Mahler No. 2 and Stravinsky's Rite of Spring (introduced to me from Disney's Fantasia).

[#SnowyVernalSpringsEternal 11,811]

Star Wars - Main Title - Charles Gerhardt.

Brilliant.

But not classical music

[Jilal 662]

Define classical music.

[Naïve Old Fart 12,654]

"Jupiter". Andre Previn/LSO. End of.

[Jim 6,166]

Twinkle Twinkle Little Star

[Naïve Old Fart 12,654]

(breathlessly) "You...are...my lucky...star".

(breathlessly) "You...are...my lucky...star".

I recantly heard the Previn/lSO "The Planets" on a 5.1 DVD-A. Stunning!

[Brónach 1,321]

'Peter and the Wolf'

Oooh, yes

I remember

Peter and the Wolf

The Nutcracker

The Swan Lake

Le carnaval des animaux

A Saint-Saens clarinet thing I don't remember the name of.

Saint-Saens organ symphony

Beethoven's fifth symphony

Beethoven sixth (?) symphony

Pictures of an Exhibition

Scherezade

Overture of Khovanchina

Night on the Bald Mountain

In the Steppes of Central Asia

Die Zauberflöte

Carmina Burana

later maybe some Mahler

I'm probably forgetting something (you can probably imagine how these combined into different CD's lying around home). I remember trying a lot of my parents' CD's one after another for hours.

[Incanus 5,884]

My first conscious memory of being impressed by classical music must be Peter and the Wolf which I heard at school music class at the age of 7 or 8. Also Moldau from Bedrich Smetana's Ma Vlast, again heard first time at school.

[King Mark 3,907]

Beethoven Symphony 6. I was about 4 years old or something. I never developed into a full scale classical lover, only liking select pieces, but I'm pretty sure it laid the ground work for film music and JW

[Marian Schedenig 11,313]

Star Wars - Main Title - Charles Gerhardt.

Brilliant.

But not classical music

Well it's certainly not film music. This particular arrangement was never used in a film, nor was this recording of the concert suite made for a film at all. It also directly led me to listening to the music of Beethoven, Wagner, Bruckner, Dvorak etc. My first CD of my own was Williams' The Star Was Trilogy, my second was a Wagner compilation. The Star Wars suite has more in common with Grieg's Peer Gynt (which originally also wasn't concert music) than with, say The Lion King.

The medium a composition is written for isn't a genre, and it hasn't been considered one during the past few centuries. I don't see what's so special about film that should make a difference.

[Naïve Old Fart 12,654]

This thing

"We're gonna do "Pictures At An Exhibition"!

[Brónach 1,321]

Beethoven Symphony 6. I was about 4 years old or something. I never developed into a full scale classical lover, only liking select pieces, but I'm pretty sure it laid the ground work for film music and JW

I think something similar happened to me.

[#SnowyVernalSpringsEternal 11,811]

Star Wars - Main Title - Charles Gerhardt.

Brilliant.

But not classical music

Well it's certainly not film music. This particular arrangement was never used in a film, nor was this recording of the concert suite made for a film at all. It also directly led me to listening to the music of Beethoven, Wagner, Bruckner, Dvorak etc. My first CD of my own was Williams' The Star Was Trilogy, my second was a Wagner compilation. The Star Wars suite has more in common with Grieg's Peer Gynt (which originally also wasn't concert music) than with, say The Lion King.

The medium a composition is written for isn't a genre, and it hasn't been considered one during the past few centuries. I don't see what's so special about film that should make a difference.

Its film music!

[Score 775]

For me, it was a compilation of the "Four Seasons" by Vivaldi, "Toccata and Fugue in d minor" by Bach, "Eine Kleine Nachtmusik" by Mozart, and shortly afterwards I discovered Beethoven's symphonies nos. 9, 5 and 6. Then, I started to listen sistematically to everything I could find from these composers. And then, I moved on to all the rest.

[Bespin Copilot 10,514]

There was also this piece, that played on the VIC-20, my first personal computer.

Thomas Arne - Gavotte

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gA8Cq2os9QQ

[Marian Schedenig 11,313]

Speaking of chiptune Bach & Co, while Star Wars was the one work that single-handedly turned me, there had been years and years of formative music that prepared me for it, even if I mostly only started appreciating it consciously afterwards.

One of the first video games I played was this:

[Bespin Copilot 10,514]

A little bit of Beethoven in this classic one :-)

Yes this is my generation, we often discovered classical music in video games rather than discs!

[#SnowyVernalSpringsEternal 11,811]

Why has this suddenly turned into a video game thead?