Rumors of my death are greatly exaggerated

Not my death! No, that's classical music talking. I just read a fascinating essay by "Ben" on substack. It's hard to excerpt, so here is a big chunk:

In addition to doing more focused listening than in the past, I often listen to classical radio in the car and try to guess what composer or era they’re playing, with uneven success. It’s a nice way to apply my knowledge that I learned from Greenberg’s course.

As with almost all music, seeing it live is better. Like I said above, I traveled for the Spoleto (mostly) classical music festival in Charleston and saw some great stuff: Haydn’s The Creation, Beethoven’s 3rd, Mahler’s 5th, plus some well-curated chamber works. Our local symphony director has a soft spot for Romantic music and he’s helped turn me around on some of it.

I do need to get better at re-listening to classical albums to let them sink in via osmosis in the way that I often do with popular music, rather than focusing and giving them one thorough listen and then moving on to the next. I realize I’m often expecting them to fully land or not in that one listen. But many of my favorite popular music albums didn’t click on the first or second listen and I need to make room for the same experience with this music.

I am, though, starting to see the benefits of giving that kind of focused attention to a canonical corpus and returning to it periodically. I’m developing a decent knowledge of Beethoven’s 32 piano sonatas. On classical radio, I heard a spellbinding recording of the third piano sonata, second movement by Lang Lang (below). It’s my favorite movement of Beethoven’s early piano sonatas, in the era when he still mostly sounds neat and Mozart-y. But this movement is a sort of foreshadowing of the deeper emotional territory he would mine later in his career.

I think that classical music is a small, though aesthetically powerful, niche that some as in this essayist, only discover later in life. It is fascinating to me that so many who do explore classical music keep coming to the same very short list of composers: Beethoven, Bach, Haydn, Shostakovich. True, you can broaden out in a host of directions--in my case I have been exploring Bruckner--and I was pleased to see a real tribute to Léonin and Pérotin in this essay. But Beethoven, Bach, Haydn and, somewhat surprisingly, Shostakovich, are the bread, butter, meat and potatoes.

Classical music's fortunes, based on sales statistics, go up and down over the decades but it seems that there is a 3% core audience that is always there. At the moment, however, they are not much interested in avant-garde, post-modern or other progressive musics. Some 20th century composers such as Prokofiev, Stravinsky, Shostakovich and Bartók seem to have inched their way into the core canon and three cheers for that. Ten years ago I was saying to pianists, why don't you play the Shostakovich Preludes and Fugues? It seems this is slowly coming to pass.