Classical music is one of the hardest genres to surface through existing music apps.
Where an app may have an "artist" field, classical music will have "composer" and then for the performers it will have "orchestra", "conductor", "principal soloists". For an opera all of those are primary fields that could be considered "artist".
The variations of the data is huge, only last week I had to correct Tchaikovsky in my own data and looking at the variations I see online:
P. I. Tchaïkovski
Peter Ilyitch Tchaikofsky
Peter Tchaikovsky
Petr Ilitch Tchaïkovski
Piotr Ilic Tchaikovskij
Piotr Ilyitch Tchaikovski
Piotr Tchaikovski
Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky (this one is arguably most correct)
This is something everyone gets wrong, and yet whomever gets it right is going to help make it easier for people to find and celebrate classical music, and to expose more people to classical music.
Even if today you know that you love Beethoven's Symphony No 3... finding the best performance and recording is almost impossible, and if you do happen to stumble upon it on a streaming service getting back to it later (if it wasn't the only one in your recents) is difficult.
I'm really glad someone is investing in this, and it needs to be a different app / interface to handle this difference in metadata and in weighting of the fields. Capturing the intent of "oh, this person really just wants to search Gould as a principal soloist and weight the search that way" is far easier when you have an app that can provide a classical music perspective and filter over an existing library.
PS: Plex does this really badly too... whatever you do, don't let the Plex Music Agents decide the metadata, Verdi disappeared and had the metadata for Veridia which I believe is a rock band.
This is way off topic (and I apologize) but it’s remarkably hard to learn about classical music. Would you do me a favour? I’m a classical neophyte and struggle with composer/orchestra/conductor fit. Can you recommend any combinations that I need to hear??
Thus far, I think I like baroque and Bach makes me happy. I’m starting to think I love opera but I might just have a thing for Maria Callas. However, I’m open to any and all recommendations and will love the hell out of anyone who recommends anything. I prefer vinyl but I’ll buy an 8 track if it helps.
(Whenever I’ve asked HN for help, I’ve ended up with new favourite recordings of all time. Thanks to all the classical music lovers who have really enhanced my life throughout the years.)
> I’m a classical neophyte and struggle with composer/orchestra/conductor fit.
If you're new to classical music you really don't need to worry about this. Almost all available professional recordings are of high quality, and the differences between interpretations are relatively subtle.
What is important is to get a sense of which composers you enjoy. Classical music spans a large period of time with very different styles, so try a few well-known composers from different time periods to see what you like. I greatly enjoy classical music and I regularly attend(ed) concerts, but my interests are very narrow and I don't get a lot of enjoyment out of Mozart and Beethoven for instance.
In my opinion, classical music is best enjoyed when you devote your full attention to listening to the music, i.e. when you're not doing anything else (or something with a very low cognitive load, like walking/driving/etc). Focus on how the music makes you feel, but it's okay to let your thoughts wander off a bit.
I kind of disagree with this. For the post-Beethoven era, sure, but the standard way of playing Beethoven and before tends to be heavily biased towards an uninformed modern idea of what classical music "should" be, which is stodgy, slow, smooth, heavily refined, overcooked with crescendoes and decrescendos, and quite inauthentic. Almost as though it's shameful for music to be immediate and exciting at the risk of being unrefined. If you compare Furtwängler's[1] Beethoven symphonies to Christopher Hogwood's... one sounds like music for wealthy old people at a concert hall. The other sounds like music. (Don't get me started on the routine butchering of Bach...)
But that's just my opinion. The point is it really pays to try different conductors, performers and performances before the 1830s or so. I'm not sure why that time changes things, but I'd guess the romantic style that came after more closely aligns with artsy-fartsy performance practices, and that composers also became more careful about marking how their works should be performed. Anyway, trying different things is also a good exercise in developing personal taste, which is a key ingredient of music appreciation.
[1] I originally had von Karajan here, but I went back to have a listen and it wasn't as bad as I remembered. Substituted Furtwängler's inexplicably famous recordings, which sound like the entire orchestra took Valium: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3bOxcryX1VE . Compare to Beethoven's recommended tempo and historical style: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-Y07M8e5g-Y
I wonder if this is a similar effect as the “classic white marble” impression of Greek & Roman architecture - we have an entire aesthetic (both artistic and cultural) built off of the “purity” of the white marble remains; meanwhile it turns out in their time they were garishly colored and decorated because the Greeks and romans, like all other humans, actually enjoyed living in places and looking at things.
It's quite similar. There's definitely a "white marble effect" coming from the original sources, that tend to be a very barebone notation of the music with basically no indications on how to perform it. But we know from written discussions that creative improvisation was key to performance in that era, and regarded as the very peak of music instruction even more so than composition itself! Sometimes we get lucky and have more detailed sources, that tell us how some pieces might have been performed in detail.
Between the two examples, the historical style feels much more alive, vibrant, dynamic. There's a real energy there.
I went back to the Furtwängler version and it felt like what my mind feels like when my depression kicks in. It's flattened out and lethargic, like it's lost the will to live.
I'm no classical music connoisseur, I rarely listen to it. But the difference is night and day to my untrained ears. One is boring and the other captures my attention.
I went to a performance by the Seattle Symphony back when Gerald Schwartz was conducting and he managed to make Beethoven's 9th symphony sound dull. It was an impressive feat. He explained, for reasons I've forgotten, that he even muted the violins. I went to a second performance a few years later by the same conductor, and it was equally devoid of spirit. It was enervated by far more than just the plodding tempo.
On the other hand, John Eliot Gardiner's Orchestre Révolutionnaire et Romantique plays Beethoven on period instruments at the tempo the composer indicated, and it's absolutely gripping.
I was with you up until you mentioned Christoper Hogwood. Not that there's anything wrong with him just that that wouldn't be the first name to pop up in my head when I think music vs 'stodgy music for wealthy old people'. It makes me think what you're trying to say in so many words is that you prefer music played on period instruments using something close to the orchestra that would have been available to the composer in their own time. That would limit you to music from sometime before the mid 1800's since composers since then pretty much have had the modern orchestra we have today so 'period' orchestras would be anachronistic and not what the composer intended. If you like period orchestras you should check out recordings of the Philharmonia Baroque Orchestra in San Francisco. They also play 'Hogwood' style on authentic period instruments.
I have [this CD](https://www.allmusic.com/album/vivaldi-the-four-seasons-conc...) from 1990 of Vladimir Spivakov and the Moscow Virtuosi playing Vivaldi's Four Seasons. I have never heard a version of the Four Seasons that was so vibrant. Unfortunately I've never been able to find the exact recording on a streaming service, but I cherish that album.
As someone who doesn't listen to classical music, I'd say I prefer Furtwängler's recording to your other link. It sounds more epic, like an action movie, while the other one sounds more like the backdrop to some village festival. But I was surprised for sure how different the two sounded, and that's not something I had ever really considered before, so thanks for showing me this.
I totally agree with this. I used to listen to a lot of classical music (radio, vinyl, in concert). There seems to be something about the mid-20th century conductors where all their recordings are slow, ponderous and somnolent. Beethoven in particular, but many other composers get the same treatment. Hogwood's recordings are great. IMHO the best recording of Beethoven's 9th that I've heard is Leonard Bernstein's.
Lots of people recommend Gould in this thread. Check out the difference of the first invention in the link above with the first invention of Gould, and see what you prefer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vQot-jM6FSw
I don't have an opinion about whether anyone has butchered Bach or not, but, after listening to a half-dozen interpretations of the WTC (all on piano), I find that I like Zhu Xiao-Mei's the best.
It's indisputable that he was a virtuoso on the keyboard, but unfortunately he accompanied that with annoying humming that many recordings pick up way too much of.
I agree with this answer. I listen to classical constantly but still don't really feel like I understand it well.
What I did was just listen..listen..listen and then look for patterns in what I liked.
I love Vivaldi and Bach, but I tend not to love too many of the other "big names". Turns out I really love most anything from the Baroque period! And I literally just used that Wikipedia entry as a starting part to continue looking for more composers.
If you like Baroque keyboard music, try something like Scarlatti. It's a bit difficult finding good interpretations (I have a CD somewhere), but here's an example
> If you're new to classical music you really don't need to worry about this. Almost all available professional recordings are of high quality, and the differences between interpretations are relatively subtle.
Agreed, but it's also important to understand that what's truly distinctive about Western classical music (as opposed to other music traditions) is it being a written art form first and foremost, with sheet music as the "standard" form for a piece and performance being subsequent to that. If you're "new" to serious/cultivated music, you really should start by learning to read the sheet music and follow along when listening to a performance. Everything else in music appreciation is downstream of that.
>what's truly distinctive about Western classical music (as opposed to other music traditions) is it being a written art form first and foremost
I find this hard to believe, music score can be copied down the generation with some degree of lost-in-translation, they might not be the full materialization of the composer's idea, some copier may write down their own idea on the sheets.
I would agree that music score is the only means of accessing composer's works for Western classical music, and thereby became the "standard". But this would also likely be true for other culture's music, and therefore it's not unique.
Related, I would recommend the book "1001 Classical Recordings You Must Hear Before You Die" [0]. The works are neatly arranged by chronological order, so you can easily discover new works from a period you like. And it gave me plenty of ideas just browsing it.
>best enjoyed when you devote your full attention to listening to the music, i.e. when you're not doing anything else
Reminds me of going to live concerts, and my guest being surprised that I spend most of my time with my eyes closed - so that I can focus on the music.
Bach: The Art of Fugue performed by Emerson String Quartet (Deutsche Grammophon)
Classical music rewards close listening, but orchestral pieces can be overwhelming to those who haven't trained themselves to listen closely. This is a good set of recordings to start with, as there are only a handful of performers, each with a distinctive sound.
Digression: once one has learned the pieces, this can be a good audio assessment tool. Some speakers over-amplify specific sounds. Some amps muddy certain frequencies or complex sounds. A string quartet performing similar melodies is a great way to notice this.
This specific album was the first that really opened my eyes to audio quality differences. If all four instruments are playing, I should be able to hear them. If all I can hear is the viola, there's something wrong with the system. Or, if I can suddenly hear all four where I couldn't before... These are significant differences, not minor ones.
From there, it was learning finer details. The first time I could hear the attack, sustain, and release of a note on a stringed instrument. Changing equipment and suddenly getting what "soundstage" meant. Etc.
This album also kept me honest when diving into the potentially incredibly expensive and super opinionated audiophile world. How does this compare to my personal system? Am I noticing anything I've not noticed before? Is anything missing? Do the answers to these questions justify spending money? Surprisingly, the answer most of the time to the last question was no.
I love the recording I have of Academy of St Martin in the Fields that has The Art of Fugue and Musical Offering (Philips, 1994). Both works are beautiful explorations of counterpoint. Especially MO if you read the story behind it. And the Crab Canon... Bach blows my mind. TBH I am no audiophile, but I like their performance. Have you heard it?
Others have recommended Mozart's Requiem if you like music with singing. If you haven't heard Robert Levin's completion, e.g. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=457pvjOo9Hw, I think it takes the cake.
For a neophyte, I think it's good to start with the war horses, for which there are lots of high-quality modern recordings.
- Bach Brandenberg concerti (I like the Netherlands Bach Society, they have tons of great Bach recordings on Youtube. If you're into Bach, highly recommend you check them out.)
- Goldberg variations (I like Glen Gould's later recording, but Kimiko Ishizaka is also a great libre recording, and Netherlands Bach Society has a great recording on harpsichord)
Personally I think watching videos helps bring the music alive in a way that listening to recordings doesn't. And maybe it's heresy to some, but I think modern recordings are, in general, a lot more pleasant to listen to.
If you like baroque music, I can't help but plug my own New York City-based ensemble (named after Bach himself), the Sebastians: https://www.sebastians.org I'm the group's harpsichordist and director.
Since you already like Bach, start by exploring his work!
Let's start with the Goldberg Variations, which are 30 variations on a theme set for the keyboard. Glenn Gould's 1955 recording is perhaps the best known recording of this work: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cwas_7H5KUs
For opera, I suggest starting with the Magic Flute by Mozart. There are so many good recording to choose from but why not watch the thing? It's meant to be a visual/audio format, after all! I suggest this recording of the Metropolitan Opera - it's what got me hooked on operas many years ago: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rjZfHFPIk7g
If you like Maria Callas, you'll love Italian operas. Why not start with the classic, La Traviata? I can't find any of Callas's performances online (aside from clips), but you may like this performance with Anna Netrebko: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JYGiRbDHr7k
Finally, a note on where/how to listen to classical music. I find Youtube to be an incredible tool for listening and for discovery. It's not necessary to dig back to vinyl or 8-track to listen to great performances - they've been remastered for CDs and lossless media.
But ultimately you want to listen to it in person. I'll never forget seeing my first opera in person (The Flying Dutchman). Or the time I scored orchestra seats for Sibelius's 4th symphony. Until the performances return, you might want to buy a ticket to an online performance on DG Premium, which is Deutsche Grammophon's streaming service: https://www.dg-premium.com/
Good luck and good listening!
EDIT: Alas, the Magic Flute performance I linked to doesn't have subtitles! Boo! Here's one that does, though it's not the classic Met production: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VPxrbeR5ZyE
If you'd like to explore the BBC Music Magazine's list of 20 greatest conductors might not be a bad place to start for orchestral music. The ordering may be a bit controversial but these are all great artists and the listing has some of their best performances.
One thing to look out for in baroque is original instruments vs modern instruments performances. Original instruments have a very different - leaner - sound. I find I much prefer them now. Someone like John Eliot Gardiner is amazing in original instruments Bach.
All of Bach is a project of the Netherlands Bach Society. High-quality recordings of the works by Johann Sebastian Bach are made freely available for everyone.
I second the Mahler recommendation, I haven't heard that particular recording of Mahler 2 but it's one of my favorite symphonies ever and I was worried I was going to get through this thread without even reading Mahler's name.
I'd also add Bruckner to the list (my favorites are 4 and 8, and since I like big brass section then the Chicago Symphony Orchestra recordings with Solti fit me well, although I realize many classical music purists will probably disagree with me there).
Thank you. I'd second Bruckner and the Chicago brass!
The Lucerne Mahler 2 is a great performance - but it's also special for other reasons: Claudio Abbado had previously been Chief Conductor of the Berlin Philharmonic but has diagnosed in 2000 with stomach cancer and had to stand down. After severe surgery he was able to return to conducting (I think for the first time) in Lucerne with an orchestra of musicians that were hand picked by Abbado from the world's greatest orchestras and chamber ensembles. So a hugely emotional event as well as a great performance.
The Schubert link demonstrates one of the real bugbears of classical music which is streamed or ripped using the usual online metadata database: "Death and the Maiden" is #46–49, presumably because it was tracks 46 to 49 in the boxed set. In reality, it is a 30 minute piece in 4 parts which is normally performed on its own.
You wouldn't normally listen to just one part ("movement") and rarely to more than a couple of pieces at a time. Classical pieces are usually numbered ("opus", abbreviated "Op.", which is Latin for "work"). Schubert is one of those composers who didn't number them himself. He died young of syphilis and left his manuscripts in a disorganised mess. They were sorted through by a guy called Deutsch, hence the numbers here are "Deutsch" numbers. Here, "Death and the Maiden" is D. 810.
The Italian after the Roman numerals for the movements are speed markings ("allegro" = "fast"), and this piece shows a typical progression: fast, slow, playful/fast, faster. They should be listened to in order, one after the other. The idea is that the music takes you through a sequence of moods, like courses in a dinner.
If you think you might like opera check out the René Jacobs' recordings of Mozart's Italian Operas on the Harmonia Mundi label: Cosi Fan Tutte, Le Nozze di Figaro & Don Giovannni.
In general as a beginner I wouldn't worry too much about finding the best recording of any particular piece. Once you start to develop some favorites then you can pick a few and compare. Streaming services make this a lot easier and cheaper than it used to be.
I don't know if I agree with that. The recording can make the difference between a transcendent piece and dogshit. For example if Beethoven's Fifth is played too fast, especially if there's not enough of a pause between the first two phrases... it just ruins the whole thing.
Hah, that's funny. I grew up with a super fast Karajan (perhaps to make it fit on an LP?), and have had a hard time adjusting to the slower tempo that most recordings have.
Personally, for me all Beethoven symphonies >= 4 are a treat. If you ever get the chance to see one live, go. It's overwhelming.
Youtube can be helpful when it comes to interpretations. With some luck, there's going to be music geeks recommending other versions, so you can click around and find one you prefer.
> If you ever get the chance to see one live, go. It's overwhelming.
This is an important aspect of classical music (like any other music) that's easily missed. Even the finest recordings don't capture anything like the feelings of experiencing a live performance up close. The acoustics, the sense of space, the tension and urgency of mistakes and recoveries (which are barely tolerated in modern professional recordings, as lovely and "perfect" as they try to be).
If you have a chance to get to the symphony, or a string quartet recital, or a polyphonic vocal ensemble in a cathedral, take the opportunity! I guarantee it sounds different, often more vibrant, more real. (Not that this stops me from collecting tons of recordings, which are great too, just a different beast.)
Yeah that's true but if you stick to the major labels and performers you're very unlikely to hear a performance that bad. IMO worrying too much about this as a beginner is a distraction.
But once you start to develop some favorites then hearing different takes can add a lot of enjoyment I agree.
You don't have to worry about reading the whole thing. Read through Bach and Mozart (and maybe Beethoven) to begin with. You'll get a feel for the historical background, and mention of their major pieces. Then, you go listen to the pieces.
I know these are pianists, but a good number of the great composers were some of the foremost pianists of their time.
Supplement a composer you've read about with a YouTube video or two, and their entry in Wikipedia, and you're off to a great start.
I asked a classical-loving friend this same question and she gave me a wonderful Spotify playlist that I can share if you're interested[1]. I also condensed it down to my own favorites if you'd like that as well[2].
[1]: Turns out I'm unable to share her playlist, but...
Ever really loved a classical piano song? No? Maybe you just don't like the controversial new way we've been tuning pianos for the last ~200 years.
Check out the 1/4 comma meantone version of Mozart Fantasie KV397 [1] which you can compare to equal temperament. (Please note this piece was unfinished, and the final section is believed to have been written by someone else.)
My secret love is Chopin Ballade No. 4 Op. 52 in unequal temperament [2]. Last year this video had ~4k views. I may be responsible for 1k and it's now ~8k views. You can compare a good ET version Krystian Zimmerman [3].
Jacob Collier has referred to Equal Temperament as a "hoax" [4]
BBC Radio 3 has a whole series about this called Building a Library. There’s a UK retailer called Presto that annotate their stock with the different endorsements too - they sell digital files as well, if you’re not in the UK. Then it’s really about learning what you like. Personally, I’d start by period: broadly, Baroque (Bach, Vivaldi etc), Classical (Beethoven, Mozart etc), Romantic (Debussy, Ravel). The periods have identifiable styles and can be a good way to introduce yourself to the nuance of the compositions. Finally, there’s a question of instrumentation: whether you prefer orchestral, vocal, chamber, solo etc.
Sounds like a lot of work, but remember it should be fun! It’s new music, a bunch of which you’ve probably never heard before. Have an open mind and dive in!
Also, assuming you have access where you live and the means, live music doesn’t have to be prohibitively expensive. Check out the programs at your local concert halls and go down to hear some music.
Presto is fabulous, CDs, SACDs, mp3s; 30s samples for most of the stock, if you order the CD you get immediate access to the mp3 ...
Not affiliated with them at all, but they were a lifesaver during the lockdown (without Schoenberg to get drunk to, who knows how I would have made it through)
If you have an iPad, Deutsche Grammophon's apps are a great intro to the intellectual and emotional complexity and nuance of some key classical works. They have apps for Beethoven's 9th, Vivaldi's Four Seasons, and Liszt's Sonata.
With Beethoven's 9th, while you are listening it visually syncs the original manuscript and score, a visualization of where in the orchestra different instruments are playing, and includes analysis of the performance and intention of the parts. It also lets you switch between four different performances of the 9th by the Berliner Philharmoniker, so you can compare and contrast interpretations over the years.
Seek out any Bach played by Glenn Gould. The incredible thing here is that Bach left sheet music but sheet music of the age did not include time, so the music has to be interpreted. The "Goldberg Variations" are this interpretation by Glenn Gould (a pianist).
I'd throw in Beethoven's 3rd and 5th Symphonies.
I'd also throw in something like Verdi's Rigoletto and Rossini's Barber of Seville.
In my past I owned a record label which specialised in pop, rock and folk music. I had to learn classical like I had to learn jazz. But the thing that made this easier for me was the realisation that there is far far more rock / pop than there is classical or jazz. It can be intimidating but you only need an entry point to get you started. Whatever that is will be personal to you, but the best advice anyone can give is to just listen.
Just to extend this point: My understanding of the topic might be far off as I haven't ever learned music under a teacher. But to me there's great deal of interpretation even with tempi marks that even good students just aren't thinking.
I sometimes enjoy watching masterclasses of players with wealth of experience.
Andres Schiff is one of the most famous ones. Also Maxim Vengerov the violinist. Anyone that hasn't seen one masterclass should look up on youtube if that sound remotely interesting.
Besides tempo, at Bach's time, dynamics (loudness) weren't usually written down.
But there's always a lot of interpretation involved, even today. The score is a very rough model of the music, akin to jotted down notes outlining a novel. Or like a manuscript for a film.
I had great success with Robert Greenberg's series on music and music history. I started with How to Listen to and Understand Opera which is available on his site (https://robertgreenbergmusic.com/download/how-to-listen-unde...) and The Great Courses as well. If you want a preview shoot me an email.
He adds lots of fun history to go with it. Bach's Goldberg Variations was his greatest financial success "The Count presented him with a golden goblet filled with 100 louis-d'or." and he was obsessed with coffee. Coffee cantana by him as well.
If you like Bach you might want to learn to listen to polyphony: the form of music in which multiple melodies are played simultaneously while forming an harmonious whole. I recommend looking & listening to videos of Stephen Malinowsky (smalin on youtube), particularly his older videos with less visual clutter. Each color is a separate melody. Initially and you should try to focus on just one melody, then see if you can easily switch your focus to an other one. Then see if you can listen/focus on two melodies at the same time, then three... https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL81D26D4A47388279
In general I would not worry to much about the performer, but it might be interesting to listen to different interpretations of the same piece, particularly from composers with very idiosyncratic styles. On youtube, Ashish Xiangyi Kumar (https://www.youtube.com/c/AshishXiangyiKumar) has videos of pieces (mainly piano solo) interpreted by different artist.
Youtube used to be a treasure trove for discovering classical music. Listen to a piece/composer you like and you'd get quite good suggestions to go from there, often from lesser known composers and rare recordings.
These days those have mostly been scrubbed from Youtube and if they're still they're they're pretty undiscoverable since the suggestion algorithm is so bad now.
I've made an opinionated playlist for some friends that you may enjoy. It includes my favorites from the past few years, and has a semi-decent range of composers/time periods. I will keep adding to it.
It's very much a personal thing. As time goes by, we discover composers and pieces we want to return to over and over. At that point, you'll probably prefer some performances of particular pieces (conductor, orchestra, soloists, tempos, tame or wild-eyed) better than others. For example, some conductors will rush through something (to get it over with?) while others will work hard to make you feel every phrase, hear each instrumental solo.
This all takes time ... and will probably change over time for you. Try to make mental (or paper) notes when you really like a performance. Some conductors are really good in certain periods, but are flat in others.
In the past few years, I most enjoyed Christian Thielemann's conducting of the Beethoven symphonies. Pretty hard to go wrong with the Vienna Philharmonic ... before Brahms, that is. OTOH, Karajan ruins everything. ;->
Fwiw, I have learned a lot by listening to classical radio in the background every day.
Some of the great stations (imho -- KDFC in SF, CPR Classical Colorado, King FM in Seattle, Portland's station) have outstanding DJs who talk about the composers, soloists, conductors, orchestras, time period, etc.
IDK if this makes it more approachable, but one of my favorite things to listen to of all time is Vivaldi Recomposed (Max Richter). It's the four seasons, still a mini-orchestra but with modern sound techniques. I find it haunting and beautiful and I listen it all the time when I'm working. Has good pacing ups and downs, reminds me of the old Sim City building music
Whenever I hear something I like, I write down the piece and the conductor/orchestra.
They helped me find all sorts of good recordings and compositions that I otherwise wouldn't have listened to. For some reason, for my whole life I thought I didn't like Brahms. But the third time that I heard some breathtaking piece, thinking "what is this??", and then finding out it was Brahms, I realized my mind had been changed.
For modern performances Stefan Jackiw soloing for Max Bruch’s Scottish Fantasy is my favorite piece of music. And you can fortunately watch it on YouTube. I’ve listened to a number of recordings and no others compare, not even Heifetz’s. I’d listen to Stefan Jackiw perform just about anything though, with any orchestra - something about his playing enchants me.
Learning a bit of music history will give you a roadmap. By placing a composer in the time line of the evolution of western music, you will have a scaffold to frame your listening and other learning. When you hear something you like (or don’t like) look at when the composer was working and who they studied under. Then explore a bit about that time period and the artistic aims of the composers of that period. Listen to what you enjoy and to music adjacent (by time and school) to what you enjoy.
This might not be what you are looking for (and, indeed, it doesn't quite answer your question), but it has had a meaningful impact on my quality of life
May I recommend Leonard Bernstein’s series Omnibus.
> Whenever I’ve asked HN for help, I’ve ended up with new favourite recordings of all time.
What are your favorite recordings? I’ve been listening to a lot of Bach myself lately, but I am also a neophyte. I got into Bach via the Modern Jazz Quartet’s John Lewis’ interpretations of the Well Tempered Clavier. Bach has been a trip.
I do it this way: Find some piece you really like, then find an interpretation you really like.
I think that's actually the way it should be. People tend to hype this or that conductor or sound, and there is certainly merit to it, but I think it is even more a matter of taste than the actual music.
Once you really like a certain symphony, you will listen to it many times. Then, you will have some opinion on how things should be played to excite you, make you happy etc.
Min/maxing composer/performance dyads based on reputation is probably pretty nonsensical, even if it is nerdy fun. For example, there are some pieces I really like, and I acknowledge that Karajan is "the man", but his recording simply doesn't give me the right vibe to enjoy the music compared to some obscure conductor I found somewhere on an old compilation CD.
One last thing:
I personally do not enjoy Bach, much of Mozart, Vivaldi or "Classical"/Baroque music.
There is a whole world of stuff beyond that, however, and some of it is very different. Bruckner, Mahler, Brahms, Tchaikovsky, Dvorak, Mendelssohn.
In fact, the first thing I recommend is usually Dvorak 9th Symphony "A new World". Its second movement (Largo I think it is called) is eye-wateringly beautiful, but it also doesn't turn off people who get bored by Bach, Mozart, Vivaldi et al (like me).
As someone with just a touch of classical knowledge from high school band and such, I’ve truly enjoyed and learned a lot from the Classical Classroom podcast (https://classicalclassroomshow.com/).
The piece that first got me interested in classical music was Arthur Rubinstein playing Beethoven's 5th Piano Concerto (the "Emperor Concerto"). I recommend that piece, but I particularly recommend Rubinstein's performance.
Watch Disney’s Fantasia (both of them). They’re a bit of a who’s who of classical music and a good jumping board to find more stuff. The first one is also an animation tour de force (the second is pretty damn good too, but not as groundbreaking)
i am not sure it's a good beginner piece... the music was playing second fiddle to the animation.
> Many found fault with Stokowski's rearrangements and abridgements of the music. Igor Stravinsky, the only living composer whose music was featured in the film, expressed displeasure at how in Stokowski's arrangement of The Rite of Spring, "the order of the pieces had been shuffled, and the most difficult of them eliminated", and criticized the orchestra's performance, observing that the simplification of the score "did not save the musical performance, which was execrable"
If I may add my own recommendation — Ralph Kirschbaum's 1993 recordings of Bach's cello suites (blue cover). My entire Spotify subscription is basically "let me listen to this one album, please. Thanks."
I would recommend going to live concerts.
Classical music is about emotional communication between humans. A live performance is a much richer human communication channel than a recording. The moment in time is unique and not reproducible. My greatest emotional feelings were while live listening or self playing. I always remember them.
Back in the good old days of mp3s I decided I wanted my library to be as 'accurate' as possible with its metadata. I spent a lot of time manually editing metadata.
Tchaikovsky was stored as 'Пётр Ильи́ч Чайко́вский'. As you might expect, this turned out to be a bad idea on many levels:
* No searching
* Always ends up on the top/bottom of alphabetically sorted lists
* Took much longer to work out which artist it was because I'm not fluent in Cyrillic
* The Microsoft Zune's fonts did not support most non-ASCII characters (this was a big one!)
That being said, I was young and it looked cool, so I kept it :)
I did the same thing back in the day in iTunes with Japanese artists etc. But iTunes had comment and "Sort Artist" and "Sort Title" fields that solved your first 2 problems and the iPod supports the same set of unicode as the Mac, so it worked out pretty well. It also helped teach me Japanese!
People complained about the bloat in iTunes, but at times all those features did come in handy! I'll miss the depth of features once Apple finally ends up replacing the Mac music app with a port of the dumbed-down streaming service they have on iOS.
The iTunes service/app in Japan also has a bad habit of automatically converting western artist names into their Japanese transliterated equivalents (eg. Billy Joel → ビリー・ジョエル) despite me not asking for it. Some tracks in your library would get the metadata converted while some other tracks (probably ones ripped from CDs not found in iTunes Match's database) stay as-is, hence both notations end up in the database, making a mess. Really wish it wouldn't do that.
I hate when automatic translation is creeping into software or websites without a way to stop it. In particular since a few month youtube decided it was ok to list video on its home page with translated titles. As I browse videos in 3/4 languages, it became hard to know what language a video will be it. I did some change on language preferences in my account but it didn't really solve the problem.
Please don't bring that to Apple, and yes I am also frustrated that this happens. Unfortunately, it's in the whim of the publishers, and I wish that if your device is in English, it should just use Latin letters, but ultimately it's Apple vs Publishers.
I won't be shocked if other services do show Latin letters though, Apple has negotiated the agreements literally 10 years prior everyone else in a period where everything except iTunes was physical and you don't want to change the contracts as much as possible, so the status quo.
That's why it makes sense to own classical music rather than rely on a streaming service that will change, come and go (like in this case). In my case I listen to a lot of opera, I have one or two reference recordings for each opera, and I exclude the recitative which aren't really music or interesting when you just listen.
Actually I go further, I think those into art should always express that through ownership.
Books go out of print or the translation varies. Films are unavailable if they're not one of the top grossing films, and even if they are then they can be unavailable (i.e. Disney exercising artificial scarcity over historical titles).
I own and ripped over 6k CDs into FLAC a long time ago, and still a good number of these are not available on streaming services even though they were major releases in the UK in the 1990s and 2000s. Why? Because the coverage of EPs, Singles, B-sides, and some variations of albums (Japanese imports with extra tracks) isn't represented by Spotify, Google Music, Tidal, Apple, etc.
The only way to ensure you can enjoy something in the future is to own it today.
For me, music, video and book streaming / digital rental fills a different problem space - discovery before ownership.
You make a good point. If you come into an appreciation of certain genres of film or music, and the items you want are out of print, your options are to find the content on the secondary market or acquire pirated copies.
I am always more than willing to pay for content, but what is one supposed to do when what you want is out of print and there are no viable secondary market options?
I have a really serious problem, but I spent more than a decade trying to find a copy of REM’s (Hib-Tone) Radio Free Europe 45. That quest led me to dig through some of the sketchiest crates on the planet before I finally gave up and ordered a copy on eBay.
To this day, it remains one of the possessions I love most. The hunt and all the crates I dug through add a mythology that beats the actual product. The mix is really good and shows Mitch Easter at his absolute best, but the hunt is worth even more than the artistry.
That’s all a long way of saying if there aren’t any secondary market options, keep digging. You’ll eventually find it and the story will be worth more than the recording.
I hear you. I wish there were more places to dig through sketchy crates! All of my favorite used record stores have vanished and the joy of finding a rare item in a crate is harder and harder to find.
This is the only way if also if you're into underground i.e. dance music. Private torrent trackers are the only way to acquire vast swaths of music, many of which was even quite popular at the time of its release.
Also helpful are YouTube, SoundCloud, and if you want to listen to contemporary music, things like NTS radio.
It makes me sad that young people today growing up on Spotify simply cannot find out about most of the music I grew up with, or most of the music that excites me coming out today, unless they go "off road."
I grew up in a small town in the 90's, and dance music was just something you sometimes heard in the background of movies. Getting into underground music back then would have meant driving a couple hundred miles.
I'm not clear - are you saying most tunes you grew up with+new releases that excite you aren't on youtube? or that you think youngsters aren't clicking outside spotify?
Maybe it's just the genres I'm into but between youtube and soundcloud (+ a bit of bandcamp) maybe 95% of underground music new or old that I look for is available. Knowing it exists in the first place is a step of course but once you find something good both sites seem pretty good at suggesting similar tracks.
Do you know where to buy FLACs for classical music? I would love to pay money for good quality music to put on my computer without having to buy physical CDs.
I've been pretty happy with qobuz. If you're looking for something particularly rare then they might not have it but I've never had an issue finding the standard stuff with them.
Of course it always makes sense to own recordings, but I find it either ludicrously expensive or unimaginably boring.
Going by my streaming history, if I owned the recordings I listened too I'd have a full CD shelf for the late Beethoven Sonatas. The same again for the Concerto's, perhaps two for the Symphonies. I've just spent £150 at IKEA just to hold the basics of Beethoven, before I've even got the CD's!
Of course the alternative is to only listen to my 'preferred' interpretations, which is the unimaginable boredom. Zimerman's ballades are too dry, Perahia's too wet, Horowitz's too unorthodox, Ashkenazy's too uneven; but I'll listen to all of them again and again and again. I'm not picking a favourite here. I'd forget Chopin before I pick one.
Finally, so what if my streaming service comes and goes? I just go somewhere else.
I know it's not the same thing, but I like to stream classical radio some times. Obviously, it's curated instead of user-selected, but as a casual listener I'm more inclined to trust someone else's taste. WQXR has a few different streams. I'm partial to New Sounds.
I would argue that this argument extends to any music. The top 40 will probably never vanish, but unless you're totally happy listening to only that, there will always be library churn - unless that library lives in mp3s on a backed up hard drive.
Similarly, browsing for Jazz (and some other genres) on streaming services really killed the main way I learned about music growing up. Usually you'd look at an album's liner notes, see who was playing what instrument, and go find more records that that person played on. To give an example, I might have been listening to John Coltrane's Blue Train record, really loved the trumpet player, and have gone and found some Lee Morgan records.
I hate to admit it, but Spotify has made me lazy when it comes to music discovery, to the point where the only way I get excited to find new things is by digging for vinyl at a record store. The services feel built for passive entertainment consumption, not discovering and learning about new art.
I wonder if there's anything that ties in data from Discogs to what you're playing on Spotify, think that'd make a difference? I realise it'd be prone to incorrect matches.
I find jazz has a similar problem: there may be a band leader but usually each instrumentalist is of note, and there is no way I am aware of to track each performer in an ID3 or APE tag.
Consider for example the Cannonball Adderley album "Somethin' Else" [1]. The album artist is Cannonball because he led the session, but he is in no way the 'author' of the entire album. The performances of Miles, Hank, Sam and Art on their respective instruments are what make the album what it is. In addition, some of the tunes are 'standards': "Autumn Leaves" is by Kosma and "Love for Sale" is by Porter, although I suppose this info could be stored in the ID3 composer field on each track.
I would love a way to track performers across all my jazz albums and be able to see which albums different people performed on.
I've found similar problems with a bunch of group names. For instance, I want to listen to more Gerry Mulligan, specifically Gerry Mulligan and the Concert Jazz Band, which had a Complete Verve recordings album that I got from the jazz collection at my university's music school, but Spotify and Apple do not have. They did several other albums and Mulligan had other groups (trios, quartets, etc) but they're hard to correlate together. Many of the jazz greats were in the boat where they performed on a lot of things that wouldn't list them as primary artists, but that's how you need to find them to find 95% of their work -- especially in instruments like my favorite: trombone. Band leader vs band members doesn't even have an ID3 field to the best of my knowledge without just sticking them all into the artist field. Compound that with the amount of jazz out there in the no-copyright state (because of age or racism or both in the distant past) that only exists in a collector's collection as a 45rpm stamping with low-ish quality and it turns out that there's a lot of missing music from pre-1950 or so.
It'd be great if there was a music service that somehow incorporated the metadata in something like the Allmusic database. Say for example, while listening to an album, you could click on any side member and easily access any other album they'd played on. Same with songwriters, or album producers, recording engineers, etc. You can get all or most of this manually, but tied into a listening interface would be pretty slick.
That said, I don't know how much of a market there'd be for this
There is, sort of; it's called Roon, and IIRC its interface can do exactly what you're describing. Back when I was a subscriber, its equivalent of a "daily discovery" list would frequently come up with things like "Highlighted Performer: Drums McDrumface" and create a playlist of every song in my library McDrumface played drums on.
The downside with Roon is that it's not actually a standalone music service; it's sort of like a software-only version of Sonos or Bluesound, letting you aggregate your personal library and (extremely) select streaming services and send sound to any Roon client device (a computer or mobile device running Roon software or, in some cases, directly to hardware that supports Roon's transport protocol). And, it's still a subscription service -- so you're paying $10/month for great metadata, that multidevice playback system, and an "audiophile" music player. I subscribed for a couple years, but decided I really couldn't justify it.
I very much agree; particularly as I may wish to hear particular bassists and they are usually not listed as the band leader.
It would also be useful to able to add multiple tags, both "jazz" and "post bop", for example.
That's unfortunate to hear... Accurate metadata matters to both the artist and the consumer, as you experienced yourself. I feel the need to shamelessly chime in with this because of how random this is, seeing our name on Hacker News: I'm one of the founding guitarists of VERIDIA and yes, the music is rock.
And then trying to play a playlist on "shuffle" will mess up the ordering of the movements of the pieces, and on "auto" it will just keep playing the same 3 most popular pieces but by various principal soloists or something.
We worked with Primephonic on the development of the platform, and this was one of the topics that got a lot of attention. In this talk about the app architecture [1] a former team mate touches upon the datamodel briefly.
It's even dumber than that. Want to listen to Brandenburg Concerto No. 5? You'll find an album whose track names start with "Johann Sebastian Bach -- Brandenburg Concertos -- BWV No. XXX" and because the strings are cut off by the UI, you can't see which one is which.
It's such a nuisance in choral music as well. There are about 1 million canticles, by hundreds of composers, to hundreds of settings, sung by hundreds of choirs, scattered across hundreds of albums. Good luck finding anything even slightly off the beaten path.
Apple Music currently doesn't even get this right within the same album. I've added a Beethoven piano concerto recording from Apple Music to my library, which at some point was suddenly split into two albums:
The albums spontaneously splitting is not limited to classical music. It has happened several times that an album I had added to the library got replaced by a dozen best-off albums containing 1-2 songs each.
As an Apple Music subscriber, I welcome the acquisition, and hope that problems like these will be reduced, and I can listen to the 4th concerto in one go again.
As a fellow Apple Music subscriber, I regret to confirm the "Apple Music currently doesn't even get this right within the same album" as a common problem across all genres. :) My personal library really isn't very big, but it still shows what I call "metadata drift": you add an album that has 12 tracks, and eventually notice that while your library still contains those 12 songs, somehow there are now only six tracks on that album, with the other six tracks replaced by versions on various compilations (and if the data gods are feeling particularly mischievous, maybe a live version).
Also got the Album splitting with one Album from Genesis. On top of that, Apple Music deletes tracks from my library, claiming it has no license - but those tracks were ripped from CD, no idea how I could get them back, I do still have the original files on my Mac.
Many years ago I was a huge fan of Music Brainz. I found a mis-named album info one time, submitted a request with changes to correct them, was rejected out of hand for an innocuous reason, and never went back. Which is too bad. As an idea and as a model, I love it. But you need the right culture/tool as well.
I know nothing about Music Brainz, but isn't it inevitable that something with humans involved will sometimes have errors? Is there such a thing as a restaurant that doesn't sometimes get a customer's order wrong, or a team of website moderators (paid or unpaid) who don't occasionally make the wrong judgement call, or a piece of software that occasionally had a bug that wasn't spotted in QA?
To go from being a "huge fan" to refusing to use it after a single mistake seems a very extreme reaction, unless that incident caused you to look into it more and discover that they're constantly making similar mistakes.
For something like restaurants there's often enough competing options to let a single mistake sour you to a place and choose alternatives in the future, but even then it a restaurant I was a huge fan of messed up a visit of mine I'd most likely give them another chance unless they literally didn't care care that something had gone wrong suggesting it's likely to keep happening.
edit: Also curious about what their rejection reason was that led you to describe it as "innocuous", seems an odd adjective to include without context.
musicbrainz takes a hard line on the correctness of metadata and will preferably use the original names of composers, bands, etc. that includes cyrillic, kanji, and even symbols like david bowie's "".
There are ways to make this work better or ways around it:
I remembered stumped onto an Amsterdam based classical music streaming service a few weeks ago that has a landing page explaining why they do per-second streaming subscription fee share with artists instead of the per-track share, which I think also makes a lot of sense for classical music.
Some googling seems to suggest that's Primephonic but I'm not 100% sure about it (since they took down all their pages).
Roon provides the best classical music experience I've seen (better than when I tried primephonic previously) - there are still some papercuts, but generally it handles normalizing classical metadata well
> Where an app may have an "artist" field, classical music will have "composer" and then for the performers it will have "orchestra", "conductor", "principal soloists". For an opera all of those are primary fields that could be considered "artist".
Yeah, this is maddening. Although in many ways it's not isolated to classical - the whole standards for tagging and the presentation thereof are woefully inadequate for any case where you want to be able to have a soloist or multiple composers but be able to find the same composer/songwriter regardless of who they've worked with, or featured artists in hiphop, or...
I can understand that back in the MP3 days of the late 90s/early years of the century it was "a good start" but the lack of any meaningful improvements is woeful.
Yup. What I really want is to be able to browse by composer, then work, and then show me all the performances (regardless of whether a whole album or part of an album), and let be sort/filter by popularity, trending, new, and performer.
I'm honestly pretty surprised the metadata problem hasn't been solved by now. Even if the labels are providing it in an inconsistent format, cleaning it all up to 99.9% consistency seems like it could be done fairly efficiently. The universe of the names of classical composers and performers isn't that large.
The way voice assistants behave with classical metadata is just terrible, too. Once I naively asked Android Auto to play Act II from Carmen, and it proceeded to recite all of the metadata from the record, which went one for a good solid minute.
"OK, playing 'Act 2, Chanson, "Halte-là! Qui va là?", by Georges Bizet, José Carreras & Claudine Coster & Isabelle Karajan & Alain Hitier & Maria Laborit & Berliner Philharmoniker & Herbert von Karajan & Georges Bizet ..."
Since this thread will attract classical music fans... anyone want to offer what they think are the all-time greatest recordings of particular pieces? I'll start, Murray Perahia does the definitive recording of Moonlight Sonata Mvmt 3:
A lot of companies have been investing in this for a while now. Primephonic (which Apple just bought) is only one example. I use Idagio, and I'm very impressed with the quality of the metadata and the search function.
Correctly naming performers in different writing systems is just as difficult for non-Classical genres. E.g. this week I listened to a track whose title was given (on Amazon) as "Set The Fire To The Third Bar [feat. マーザ・ウィンライト]".
I've been giving Qobuz a whirl for technical listening, and they have a very intentional approach to classical music. I'm a bit of a newbie, but I did receive the recommendation from other listeners.
Such an enlightening comment. This is why I come back to HN, I had no idea why it was so hard to discover classical music (and I've experienced that pain point myself)
Ah. Well, they're all the same person. Or rather... the same persona. So we know they're a unique person... or persona. But what is identity anyway?
What do I mean? Richard David James went by several different aliases. They're all the same person. But not the same persona? Maybe.
Couldn't Pac-Mac by Power Pill just be considered Aphex Twin's work? I'd argue, sure.
But Brad Strider's work, which is really just Richard again, is in my opinion significant enough from the rest of his work, can you group them together? Discogs still does, and that makes sense to me.
> Primephonic is no longer available for new subscribers and will be taken offline beginning September 7. Apple Music plans to launch a dedicated classical music app next year combining Primephonic’s classical user interface that fans have grown to love with more added features. In the meantime, current Primephonic subscribers will receive six months of Apple Music for free, providing access to hundreds of thousands of classical albums, all in Lossless and high-resolution audio, as well as hundreds of classical albums in Apple Music’s Spatial Audio, with new albums added regularly.
This is utter insanity. I understand acquiring, and "sunsetting" the acquisition when it makes sense, blocking new user signups, and heck I'd even say its pretty cool that they're planning on releasing a totally separate experience for Apple Music classical listeners.
But why shut down Primephonic before this new experience is ready? It just pisses off the already niche and hesitant customer-base you've announced you're trying to court!
This reminds me a lot of Dark Sky from a year or two ago. It was my partner's favorite weather app... until Apple bought the company and promptly announced they were killing it.
Unlike Primephonic, Dark Sky is still a functioning website and app to this day. I presume it will only be sunset (ha!) after iOS 15 and Monterey reach general release.
I just tried searching it by name in the Play store and it did not come up. Apple might have backpedaled on the deprecation timeline for existing users but the initial announcement was basically telling Android users to get lost, so we switched to other apps shortly after.
They gave a 6 month free subscription to Apple Music. I was one of the Primephonic subscribers. I’m really bummed about this as I don’t like Apple Music (and I even work for Apple!), prefer Spotify for “regular” music, and want my classical to have a proper focus and giant catalog. The major streamers just are so basic when it comes to classical, in selection, discovery, playlists, etc. I don’t want pop classical, I want the good obscure stuff.
Sad day as a user…
Update: I didn’t see the part where there’s going to be a new dedicated app. That makes me feel better in the long run. That wasn’t so clear from the email that Primephonic sent this morning.
Given the delay on basic and simple features between WWDC and iOS releases; I find it hard to believe they’ll launch a completely new music experience app in 6 months.
It seems very plausible that it'd be the Primophonic app, just rebranded into looking first-party Apple. Just like what happened with Workflow becoming Shortcuts a few years ago.
Exactly. If you gave people hope that it'd stick around for an indefinite amount of time you'd just have more discourse about "Apple could shut it down any day now" and you'd slowly dwindle subscribers anyways.
The most interesting thing about this is that Apple's pre-announcing that they're going to be launching a dedicated classical music app. Presumably it'll be very closely based on the current Primephonic app, and worked on by the same developers.
This has some close parallels to Apple buying Workflow and turning it into their now-platform-standard Shortcuts app. It's still being worked on by the original developers, too.
Shortcuts has been given fairly high priority in all Apple's recent OS releases, particularly as it ties into their home automation ecosystem, and it's resulted in surprising bursts of popularity. E.g. last years "#aesthetic" complete-homescreen-customization boom was entirely based on using Shortcuts as a hack to customize app icons.
It's been honestly weird to see such a relatively high profile part of the OS being run as a mostly-independent subsidiary like that, particularly given Apple's notorious control-freak ways. Them expanding the approach like this rather than just cramming it into Music suggests that they think it's working well for them...
The FAQ indicates that they're providing a pro-rated refund for all current subscriptions.
Like a number of other commentators, I'd never heard of this service despite being a fan of classical. If they can improve the state of classical on Apple Music -- playlists, metadata, discoverability, etc -- then I'm sure the founders are thrilled that they're going to have far more of an impact than they were having.
I’m also a Primephonic subscriber. Been using it everyday for the past 8 months. Let’s be honest, their mobile app sucks. I’m using iOS but willing to bet on their Android app sucking equally.
That said, I’m paying them for the giant catalog, good curation, and a dedicated streaming service just for the classical genre. Realistically I think these will stay with Apple’s acquisition. So in the long term I’ll probably be happy.
On the other hand, their decision to shut down the app before the alternative is launched is disappointing and unacceptable.
i think as far as streaming / discovery apps go primephonic was ok, esp considering their probably miniscule dev team. bandcamp is also just so-so.
but both of them are head and shoulders above any apple made media player. beggars belief how the most rich company of the world can't put together even a mediocre music app on their own vertically controlled OS/hw product.
Presumably this was an acqui-hire. The people who wrote the Primephonic app would then be expected to write the one for Apple, likely based on their original codebase.
I remember when Apple bought SoundJam MP [1] and turned it into iTunes (and later renamed Music) so this is a familiar story. Apple has a chance at a fresh start with this one. I’m willing to give them a shot at it. If they mess it up I can always cancel the sub.
Could also have been a purchase for their licensing or metadata. It sounds like Primephonic has put a lot of work into all of that, and if Apple wants to get into classical then it'd make sense to throw a tiny-by-their-standards amount of money at a known-good metadata set and accompanying licenses for the music.
(Though I agree, it'd be kind of silly for them to not let the people they've acqui-hired keep on working on the "new" app in their ___domain.)
i also think this is the case, as the user base must be tiny still (esp when looking at the comments here, even classical music fans didn't know about it. i found it through the "inside the score" youtube channel)
The existing iOS app is programmed by approx < 2 devs. They have an Android app which Apple will quickly shut down. The infra can be run by < 2 ops too.
I predict most of the dev team will be looking for a new gig soon... shame as they were a great bunch!
And the original apple music app was based on Beats Music as well! I‘ve heard the theory that they bought Beats for that, and the music industry contacts, which seems wild, but maybe?
People say this, but I've never really been vexed by the apps they provide until relatively recently. I'd like the interface to be speedier, for example.
The biggest gripe that I've understood from other people is around classical metadata, which I agree iTunes and Apple Music have done a bad job with, just like most every other service that doesn't focus on classical. I'm not a big consumer of classical, so it doesn't bother me very much, but I can see how it would be a BIG deal for people who listen to exclusively or mostly classical recordings.
OTOH, I'm encouraged that there exist niche services that focus on the classical market. I hadn't heard of this one, but in one of my periodic attempts to Listen To More Classical I had a subscription to Idagio for a while, and found it generally pretty great.
I don't think I'd agree with that dire an appraisal. iTunes was a good music app for a fair number of years, particularly on the Mac. It started to lose its way as it was asked to do more and more things, but I don't really think it fell off the cliff until they started integrating Beats Music into it. (IIRC, a lot of Apple Music's crazier UX ideas were present in some form in the pre-Apple Beats service, and subsequent iterations have just been different flavors of crazy. The metadata handling/matching, which has come up in this thread given how important that is for classical music, also got a lot worse post-Beats.)
Personally, I hope the Primephonic developers don't just develop a new classical app for Apple, I hope they work on the Music app, too.
In the beginning, iTunes never worked well once you had 10k+ songs. The user flows weren't designed to navigate large libraries, and it also slowed to a crawl.
And it always felt like straight up malware on Windows with all the QuickTime update prompts.
My library was never that big, but I knew people who had ones at least that size and didn't have any complaints, although given your last sentence it may be relevant to note they were all Mac users. The three-column browser view seemed to work very well for "drilling down" in collections, at least for me. (That browser's actually still in Music, even though it's unnecessarily hidden under the Songs view.)
> It always felt like straight up malware on Windows with all the QuickTime update prompts.
I'm not positive QuickTime was the source of an awful lot of Windows iTunes' badness, but I have strong suspicions. :)
The three pane view was pretty good for my large-ish library (~15k songs) and I didn’t have stability issues. But I wasn‘t there in the beginning. I guess it had at least a good stretch somewhere in the middle.
swinsian is what itunes should have been from the start. after it became the homescreen for all the i-devices it never had a chance to be a usable music player...
It will be interesting to see if others are similarly taken off the table. I've been tremendously impressed by the Berlin Philharmonik app, for instance; they've made a subscription service available on nearly every platform (AppleTV, iOS, Android, and even including the random Sony BluRay player I got for $35 on Amazon). The music is live-streamed with HD video like you were there in the hall.
Have folks seen other classical apps or venues with a savvy approach like this?
I have been seriously considering paying for the Berlin Philharmonik subscription/access. My main use-case would be to listen to their archives of performances.
Do you recommend it? Also, does it allow you to "buffer" (save offline) some content at all?
It's pricey but I like it. I like the archived performances too. It does let you play some content offline. It has let me feel a bit more cultured when locked in a garage for a year and a half working on a startup during a pandemic!
I can second this. I’ve been fairly impressed with Idagio in the years I’ve been using it. My only real gripe with it is that it used to be much easier to glance through a composer’s works by genre when looking at the composer’s page. Now that feature is buried a couple of menus down. Otherwise, the audio quality is good for a streaming service, and the catalog is extensive.
(At one point they were testing a feature where you could compare recordings of the same piece. It would effectively allow you to switch between pieces at the exact same moment in the particular passage you were listening to. It was great, and I’m sad they never rolled it out. That feature alone would have made the app worth the monthly subscription.)
My gripe is the 1/2 second pause between tracks, even when they're supposed to blend together, like between 3rd and 4th movements of Beethoven's 5th. Otherwise it's awesome.
I'm hard of hearing. The problem I have with Idagio is their low audio level - much less than e.g. Apple Music. I don't see any good reason for that - I don't need to be protected from myself. I finally cancelled - I couldn't hear the music. Currently, I like Tidal a lot. They have a video of Nemanja Radulovic / Bach's Toccata and Fugue in D minor which is stunning.
When I tried Idagio about a year ago their catalogue consisted of “second rate” labels for a large part. There was some DG/Harmonia Mundi/Sony but mostly releases by lesser known labels. Is that still the case?
Congratulations to the team! I had great fun working there and the knowledge of classical music within the team was astonishing. Most staff are musical in some way - Friday afternoon drinks was occasionally an orchestra with singers! A very unique experience :-)
"We are working on an amazing new classical music experience from Apple for early next year, but unfortunately, the Primephonic service will be taken offline starting September 7. You may continue to use it at no charge until then."
Wow, that must be pretty annoying for subscribers! The service will go away starting September, with no timeline on replacement except a nebulous "early next year" (probably June?). Why not just keep the old thing up until the new thing is ready? Acquihires are gonna acquihire, but for an audience Apple is hoping to court to their own streaming service, this feels like a pretty big own goal.
Off topic, but possibly a gem for fans of classical, renaissance, etc. I've been listening to concertzender for 15 years or so, for free (though I've donated).
Spotify is pretty cringe with Classical music. I love certain pianists, certain composers, that's easy to find... but if I hear of a new piece on forums or word of mouth, YT always surfaces better classical content.
Spotify, any joe schmoe decent pianist can record 99% of the repertoire, that doesn't mean they're expert or virtuosic at the standard classical fans expect. The result is you may have to wade through many obscure albums and artists until you find a name you trust or even recognize. It seems Spotify is limited in it's algorithmic handling of popularity and reputability in it's search function.
Combine with YT being a visual medium where you can see the challenges and tribulations and manual work, YT has a big edge on Spotify in classical IMO.
I don't think this should be allowed to happen. This is like when Amazon bought Goodreads and Abe Books, they own the whole ecosystem. Abe languishes in features that if they weren't owned by Amazon, would get fixed immediately.
Whoa nuts. I was a beta tester for Primephonic streaming v1 back in 2017. For context, Primephonic was a spin out from the classical music label Pentatone. Primephonic initially focused on hq downloads (circa 2015), cataloguing and recommendations before moving into streaming and launching apps ~2018.
This is fascinating that they are already announcing that they will release an app specifically for classical music. It is rare for Apple to pre-announce software. What would be other examples?
The closest parallel I can think of is actually very very close - when Apple acquired Beats they didn’t hide the fact that they would be turning it into a native steaming music service. They even announced that they’d continue to support Android.
Could be licensing agreements that allow the licensors to void or renegotiate terms upon a change of control. When they re-release it as Apple Classical Music it will have so much marketing behind it that the existing user base won't matter.
> Primephonic is no longer available for new subscribers and will be taken offline beginning September 7. Apple Music plans to launch a dedicated classical music app next year combining Primephonic’s classical user interface that fans have grown to love with more added features.
Why would they buy the service just to kill it off for at least four months?
Copyright is probably not that big of a deal, given that it's classical music, and the userbase will probably dissolve in these months. So why spend the money?
> Copyright is probably not that big of a deal, given that it's classical music
Ahem, cough, you've just made the understatement of the century there !
The legal situation regarding music goes waaaayyyyy beyond basic copyright.
It highly specialist field there are lawyers who do nothing but music rights all day, every day.
Google is your friend, but as a very basic outline, you have to consider:
- The use of the recorded music (and hence the rights of the record companies and the performers)
- The use of the composition and lyrics
- Distribution permissions
And, of course if you are not the end-user but the operator of a streaming service then this will likely add not remove complexity.
Whole big books have been written on the subject (e.g. Kohn on Music Licensing at a mere 1636 pages). I'm not even going to begin to try to summarise it - especially as IANAL anyway !
Likely just an acquihire. I love classical music and never heard of Primephonic, so the user base was probably not that significant, at least by Apple standards.
As someone who almost exclusively listens to classical music, popular and obsecure composers, I am glad someone is trying to create a better experience for people like me.
Spotify is terrible for classical music. It just treats it like pop music structure with albums and songs as the top level hierarchy. Then it keeps shuffling things around randomly and the saved pieces I have gets disorganized.
It is a bit better with Apple music but still there's a huge room for improvement here.
Classical music is the best thing I've discovered in my life. It gives me so much inspiration and happiness. It touches my heart in way nothing else does. It's truly magical in that sense.
Never heard of this service before and I'm quite bummed that I hadn't stumbled on it earlier. I'm a huge fan of classical music and this would've been a treat to me.
I wish they partnered with not just apple but also spotify and other streaming services by licensing their tech. This way they'd reach more people and not just apples user base.
I hope this will, through rivalry with Apple, push Google to up the maximum quality of their audio streams on Youtube Music.
There was a significant decrease of quality since they migrated from Google Play Music (the difference can be heard especially with a good audiophile setup), and I hope they can undo that.
This is great news! Spotify, Apple Music, Pandora etc are designed for pop music (Which I listen too as well) but which has specific conventions that don’t necessarily apply to other types of music (e.g. for a lot of work, “shuffle” doesn’t make sense at the granularity of a track).
It's great news for everyone except current primephonic subscribers... who are being locked out of the app immediately, with the promise that something maybe equivalent will be available next year with an apple sticker on it.
I'll mention Idagio. I subscribed for a year and liked it well enough. But then I subscribed to YouTube, so that there would be no commercials, and for $11/month I get to watch and listen to all the classical music I want, plus many other kinds of music that Idagio does not offer.
I never thought I'd be writing these words, but once you pay to get rid of the ads, YouTube becomes and very deep inventory of classical concerts.
I've been wishing for one of the major services to take classical seriously for decades. This is probably good news and one fewer sub I need to maintain.
There are only two decent streaming platforms for classical music: Naxos and Youtube. This is unlikely to change in the near future. I doubt Apple will find it worthwhile to develop another once(/if) they gain enough expertise to understand what they're getting into.
i am not an audiophile but for classical music, and esp full orchestras very good headphones and flacs are the order of the day. i dont think it's a good idea to to lossy compress classical music...
Classical music isn't a uniquely difficult challenge for compression and AAC at 256kbps is plenty unless you've chosen to spend countless hours teaching yourself to hear incredibly faint, inconsequential artefacts. Don't do this. It is a stupid thing to do; all you achieve is increase the likelihood of being disappointed. And it makes it more difficult to enjoy the music without instinctively listening for quality cues.
Besides, there is far more "lossy" degradation of music in having a faint source of noise in your listening environment.
Treat claims by people that they can hear the difference with scepticism. I never doubt their sincerity, but it's unbelievably easy to fool yourself with audio signals. Expectations become reality, even when the signal is identical.
Plenty of modern music has just as much—if not more—complexity in high frequencies and with stochastic noise where lossy compression tends to experience the most challenges. The main reason everyone is offering lossless now is because the bandwidth and storage saved using lossy compression is no longer meaningful if you have access to a giant pipe capable of streaming Netflix in HD for hours.
I hope Apple keeps the Maestro stuff in whatever they do carrying over Primephonic. It’s a real-time commentary about the work you’re listening to. What to listen for, composer’s mindset at the time, how it relates to other works and so on.
That is cool! We get the Apple+ bundle with everything, and the new 3D spatial sound that they support with some audio media is very nice. I hope that they release more new classical music with 3D spatial sound support.
Back in the day I used to buy CDs for clasdical music. Best purchase was Schiff's well tempered. I guess I'm going to buy more from now on. It's hard to own anything nowadays.
I buy boxed sets of classical CDs precisely b/c I want to truly own the music and to have a high-quality backup. I also like the books that frequently accompany boxed sets.
There are two downsides though: 1) they take up a lot of space and 2) I spend a lot of time correcting metadata. dbPowerAmp's CD ripper, though, helps a lot with the metadata problem.
Definitely! We would be more than happy to offer you curated playlists, unlimited access to 1.5 Million tracks in CD quality, a selection of exclusive concert videos in HD, personal recommendations and podcasts!
As a fan of Classical music and Apple Music (the service, if not the app), I am on board. I've trialed a number of the dedicated services, but could never justify the added cost. I feel like Spotify's focus is on being the app for young people, which is all well and good, but not of much interest to me. If Apple wants to build a coalition of different types of listeners, they are meeting me where I am.
Interested in seeing how the separate app plays out. I agree with the limitations of the current Music model, but wondering about support for my existing library (especially iTunes Match content). Feels especially odd on mobile to have one more player.
I am depressed because I am very much into classical music yet this post is how I found out there was a streaming service targeted towards classical -.-
Apple Music is now becoming an experience totally unlike any other, what with this, lossless audio, spatial audio and the whole AirPods ecosystem -- nothing else compares. When this classical service comes out I think it might be the last push I need to drop Spotify, because even though I'm not an audiophile, I want to be able to accurately find and curate classical music.
I gave up on it after the free trial. The search extremely shitty for anything except popular Western music, and oh the recommendations! You like some Shiv Kumar Sharma? How about also trying $random_hiphop_dude?
YT Music has its flaws, but there is simply nothing that comes close to music discovery there.
I second this. YTMusic has amazing recommendations.
I am though more excited about the lossless and high-res lossless playback. I have a nice DAC and Sennheiser HD6xx that provide amazing listening experience in Apple Music. I have never found any other service that provided high res bollywood music. not even torrents!
i have the whole setup but i cannot tell the difference. Their dolby demo kind of seems like its something but i honestly don't listen that actively to notice.
I miss 'discover weekly', collaborative playlists , spotify curated playlists, on repeat ect.
Not sure if ‘discover weekly’ does more, and there are still huge unexplored areas of music recommendation, but the weekly recommended playlists on Apple Music have been wonderful for me. I add music to my library faster than I can listen to it at this point, and I’ve discovered bands in my 40s that I hold as close to my heart as those I discovered as a teenager.
I treat claims that people can hear differences between lossless and high bitrate lossy compression with scepticism. I do not doubt anyone's sincerity, but it's unbelievably easy to fool yourself with audio signals. Expectations become reality even when the signal is identical. What you expect changes how you listen; and how you listen changes what you hear.
For me it is the discography view that Spotify has. They buried it in the most recent update, but I recently found that none of the competition has it.
That and it turns out that Apple's windows software is still a bit of a dog after all these years.
They've got a good selection, but the Siri search leaves a lot to be desired. "Hey Siri, play Beethoven's 5th." "Okay, here's Beethoven, Symphony Number 6, Movement 3, Allegro Whatevero." ???
Yes, Siri does tend to prioritise song names over album names. I've learned to say "Siri, play the album The Getaway" so that it plays the whole album.
For those looking to stream their own music, MinimServer is a UPnP music server that specializes in displaying the correct info for Classical music: https://minimserver.com
Not affiliated with it, but I used to run on it on my NAS. It's multiplatform as well (written in Java).
Never heard of this service but that is great news. Browsing and navigation has always been a bit clunky for classical on Apple Music and other services.
Incidentally, worth noting Apple Music has other stuff like spoken word poetry.
We are blessed to live in an age with such unparalleled access to the finest products of culture.
I am curious to better understand to what extent Apple’s scale allows them to focus on Building The Best Music App instead of the race to the bottom type incentives of competitors like Spotify who are now trying to Build The Best Way To Capture Your Time Through Audio Content.
Can you share more details about that work? Curious as someone who works with Max and Csound regularly for personal musical projects but not in any sort of professional capacity.
As someone who use and like the app, now it will no longer be on Android. This really sucks. Those companies both Apple, Google and Amazon should be heavily regulated.
Where an app may have an "artist" field, classical music will have "composer" and then for the performers it will have "orchestra", "conductor", "principal soloists". For an opera all of those are primary fields that could be considered "artist".
The variations of the data is huge, only last week I had to correct Tchaikovsky in my own data and looking at the variations I see online:
This is something everyone gets wrong, and yet whomever gets it right is going to help make it easier for people to find and celebrate classical music, and to expose more people to classical music.Even if today you know that you love Beethoven's Symphony No 3... finding the best performance and recording is almost impossible, and if you do happen to stumble upon it on a streaming service getting back to it later (if it wasn't the only one in your recents) is difficult.
I'm really glad someone is investing in this, and it needs to be a different app / interface to handle this difference in metadata and in weighting of the fields. Capturing the intent of "oh, this person really just wants to search Gould as a principal soloist and weight the search that way" is far easier when you have an app that can provide a classical music perspective and filter over an existing library.
PS: Plex does this really badly too... whatever you do, don't let the Plex Music Agents decide the metadata, Verdi disappeared and had the metadata for Veridia which I believe is a rock band.