"I Hate Classical Music!" Says Michael Fremer

Renowned journalist and analog expert Michael Fremer is the editor of TrackingAngle.com and an editor at large at The Absolute Sound.

Have you ever attended a classical music concert? The people in the audience are old! I mean really old. Not as old as people who attend an Eagles concert at the Sphere, but still old. Intermission looks like a fire drill at an assisted living center. I’ve heard people say, “What happens to classical music when these old people croak? No one will be left!” Of course, there’s always a new crop of old people arriving to take their place. If you are lucky, you might live long enough to eventually be sitting there, or at an Eagles concert.

Though new classical music continues to be written by young composers, most classical music is even older than the audience. No wonder young people don’t want anything to do with the old music—at least until they get a look at the super-hot concert pianist Yuja Wang, who is but one of many attractive young performers.

One reason classical music turns off many young people is the concert ritual: orchestra members are dressed up, the concertmaster walks on stage, then the orchestra does a tuning thing, then the conductor walks on stage. It can look canned and downright snooty, but it’s tradition. When you play a classical music recording, cleaning the record is the only tradition.

The whole “I hate classical music” thing is stupid and annoying. As annoying as this piece will be if you like and listen to a lot of classical music, because I’m not addressing you. I’m talking to the people claiming to not like classical music, but who do love it when they’re not aware they are listening to it, such as young audiophiles at hi-fi shows, many of whom also love Procol Harum’s “Whiter Shade of Pale” or Jethro Tull’s “Bourée”—both tunes with direct lineage to Johann Sebastian Bach, whose chord progression innovations form the basis of all popular music (granted the Tull and Moody survivors are also geriatric). Bach’s organ masterpiece “Toccata and Fugue in D Minor” is another pop piece, used forever around Halloween and played in haunted houses.

Everyone knows and loves the opening to “2001: A Space Odyssey”—the monkeys, the mysterious monolith and the spectacular fanfare—but what comes after that in Richard Strauss’ “Also Sprach Zarathustra,” not so much, though it’s a lovely and powerful piece of music that will make your system (and your heart) sing and is not at all difficult to musically follow and grasp.

Surely, you’ve seen “Fantasia” and know the dark, frightening “Night on Bald Mountain”—it’s an evocative piece of music perfect for year-round Halloween. A well-recorded version, which is most of them, is a stereo system show-off piece that delivers powerful bass, spatial depth, hair-raising dynamics, and ends with a peaceful, delicate evocation of a sunrise. A great version called “Night on Bare Mountain” is on the RCA “Living Stereo” demo disc The Power of The Orchestra with René Leibowitz conducting the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, engineered by the legendary K. E. Wilkinson. You might like everything on that record if you pick up a copy—and everything engineered by Wilkinson.

“Fantasia” fans can’t help but see Mickey Mouse trying to sweep up the damage he caused messing around with his boss’s magic spells and curses, but Mickey was not on Paul Dukas’s mind when he wrote “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice”.

Stravinsky wrote “The Rite of Spring” as a musical expression of “primitive life”. The “Fantasia” segment visualizes it as evolution and uses dinosaurs, nasty weather, and geological upheavals to express it. Your mind’s eye probably conjured up the images as you just read this, but can you remember what the rest of the ballet music score sounds like? It’s equally almost “heavy metal”-like.

There are some amazingly well-recorded versions of “The Rite of Spring,” including the Deutsche Grammophon Original Source series all-analog reissue with Claudio Abbado conducting the London Symphony Orchestra, that, if you’re not careful, can throw your woofer cones across the room.

If you dug Hans Zimmer’s dazzling movie music for “Gladiator,” why not give a listen to Carl Orff’s “Carmina Burana”? There are similarities between Zimmer’s soundtrack and “O Fortuna” from “Carmina Burana,” though it didn’t rise to plagiarism level. Everyone from Zimmer to John Williams grabbed at least a few dozen bars from Holst’s “The Planets”, particularly from “Mars, the Bringer of War,” and if you really want to hear where Williams lifted the “Star Wars” theme listen to Erich Wolfgang Korngold’s “Kings Row” soundtrack—a 1942 movie starring Ronald Reagan.

Boston Pops Orchestra conductor Arthur Fiedler released an album called “Classical Music for People Who Hate Classical Music”, which sounded like a good idea, but it features short excerpts instead of complete works, which defeats the whole purpose of the exercise, which is to get people to sit and listen to and enjoy an entire lengthy piece of music.

Beethoven had the right idea in 1804 when he started writing his 5th symphony. It begins with the most famous four notes in classical music that you surely know…spelled out as “ da da da daaaaaaaa”. So right away you’re in. From there he works magic with those four notes, keeping the ball in the air throughout the full symphony.

Most everyone knows Gershwin’s “Rhapsody in Blue”, usually paired with “An American in Paris”. Leonard Bernstein’s 1959 recording conducting the New York Philharmonic was how many young people back then dug into orchestral music and it works equally well today, as does the RCA “Living Stereo” version with Fiedler conducting the Boston Pops—another excellent recording, though marred by some tape oversaturation distortion near the conclusion. It’s the recording, not your turntable (though it can be both!).

Ravel’s sensuous “Bolero” serves as another great classical music introduction. It also works great when you want to introduce a date to classical music. The suggestive pounding rhythms of François Couperin’s harpsichord rondeau, “Les Barricades Mystérieuses” ("The Mysterious Barricades"), have been likened to wine-making grape stomping and alternatively as a double entendre related to virginity and subsequent deflowering. That’s how a 3-LP Vox Box Couperin solo harpsichord record (SVBX5448) was sold to me as a 20-year-old rocker. It worked. I came to love the whole set and still occasionally play it.

Musical genius Mozart was like a rock star in the 18th century and, typical of the occupation, died young at 35 but not before composing more than 600 pieces of music, including many that were scandalous, satirical, and Zappa-like outrageous, including "Ein musikalischer Spaß" (A Musical Joke) that mercilessly mocked less talented and untalented fellow composers and “Leck mich im Arsch”—you don’t need the translation from German to understand that title. “Eine kleine Nachtmusik” (a little night music) is another piece you most likely know without knowing it.

Speaking of Frank Zappa, he was heavily into classical music, including 20th-century modern composers like Edgar Varèse, who he began consuming while still a teenager. When asked in a “desert island” exercise for his one favorite disc, Zappa’s choice was the first movement of Béla Bartók’s Third Piano Concerto.

I almost forgot to mention Mussorgsky’s “Pictures at an Exhibition”—another familiar piece written originally for piano, later orchestrated and more recently turned into a pipe organ- and synth-drenched rock piece by Emerson, Lake & Palmer. Keith Emerson was way into classical music. If you know that version, why not try an orchestral version, such as the 1958 “Living Stereo” recording (RCA LSC-2201) with Fritz Reiner and the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. This record is guaranteed to sound better than most records in your collection!

If you are an “I hate classical music” audio enthusiast, or are ambivalent about it, I hope this will encourage you to give it a shot. While some new reissues and highly sought-after originals are costly, the under-$10 bins are filled with superb recordings and performances from the “golden age.”