Stop, Look and Liszten

FOR MANY PEOPLE, CLASSICAL MUSIC is an enigma, a vast world of high-sounding ideals and mystifying terminology. Because it is perceived as a bastion of snobbery and because it is complicated, classical music has a limited audience. As the works of many contemporary composers are inaccessible, and since orchestras incessantly perform the same repertoire, classical music has in recent decades stagnated into glorifying the past.

Fortunately, if the music composed today too often seems removed from anything most people can understand and appreciate, saying that the conventional repertoire has nothing to say to "modern man" is like saying Shakespeare has little to tell us about the human condition.

With classical music's snob appeal and the air of mystery that surrounds it, it is all too easy to get turned off by it, or to avoid cultivating a taste for it.

But you can learn about classical music. There's nothing very mysterious about it, or at least nothing more mysterious than great achievements in any type of art. You can decide for yourself, damn the "experts," which composers and pieces you like. Classical music won't bite.

Even after listening many times to works well-established in the classical canon, some will shrug and ask themselves what the fuss is all about. Such is life. But many people may find in the music of the classical "greats" something missing from other types of music.

That something is not necessarily profundity, though it might be. It might also be wit, or melancholy, or languor. Classical music is not, repeat, not all serious. Once you understand its language, or languages, it has a much wider range of expression than other types of music.

The name "classical" is itself misleading because it suggests that there is some type of unity to the pieces that come under the name. There really isn't, though there are certain traditions within classical music.

If you don't play an instrument, the only real way to go about learning about classical music is to go to concerts, listen to recordings, and secondarily, to read about it. Many people see classical music as an amorphous, uninviting mess because unlike many other types of music, it generally has no words to help you remember the melody. There is no substitute for listening, and listening intently.

IT WOULD BE RIDICULOUS TO TRY to summarize music history here, but it does seem appropriate to give a very general overview. For many people, classical music starts with J.S. Bach, who represents the apex of the baroque musical era.

Everything before Bach is often lumped under the vague title of early music, a flourishing subfield. Besides Bach, well-known baroque composers include Handel, Vivaldi and Telemann.

The end of the baroque era is generally demarcated at 1750 with the death of Bach, who is not to be confused with his many less talented progeny. After the baroque era is the classical period, the time of Mozart, Haydn and others who are said to form the first Viennese School.

Beethoven and Schubert and the last great classical composers and the first greats of the Romantic era. The Romantics include Schumann, Chopin, Liszt, Mendelssohn, Dvorak, Moussorgsky, Tchaikovsky and Rachmaninoff, many of whom were inspired more by small forms like songs or preludes than by symphonies and concertos, which pair a solo instrument and an orchestra. The classical and Romantic repertoire forms the backbone of the music played most often in concert halls.

Johannes Brahms deserves special mention as a Romantic who continued the symphonic tradition of Beethoven. Other Romantic symphonists include Bruckner and Mahler, who both wrote works of great beauty and very great length. Richard Strauss and Richard Wagner are other well-known composers of about the same time period.

After the Romantic era, itself complex and varied enough, there is really no name under which to group the various composers whose works have stayed in the active repertoire. In France, there were, as in painting, the impressionists, including Faure, Debussy, Ravel, Chausson and Franck.

In Vienna there arose a second Viennese School that included Arnold Schoenberg, whose earliest music is the most listenable, Anton Webern, and Alban Berg. Their music is often contorted and bizarre, with very strong dissonances.

Igor Stravinsky and Serge Prokofiev are two great composers of our century who are difficult to label. Other 20th century composers of note include the Americans Gershwin, Charles Ives, Samuel Barber, Copland, and Leonard Bernstein, all of whom have had some limited success entering the standard repertoire.

"Classical" music, as can be seen from the sheer number of composers, is difficult to make sense of, and any categorization is approximate and limiting. To try to comprehensibly describe in words the works of a composer, much less a group of composers, is an impossibility, for most classical music uses neither words nor images. In the end, the proof is in the pudding. Buy recordings of music you like and go to concerts where it is being played.

No one can tell you what music to like. It is all up to you. If you don't like one composer or one piece, then try another. There's hell of a lot to try before you can say in all honesty that you've tried "classical" music and don't like it.

Concerts are the best way to experience music, but to become acquainted with it, recordings--cheaper than most concerts, and playable around your schedule--might be better.

Classical recordings are difficult to choose because there are so many of them, sometimes even of the same pieces, and it makes a great difference which recording you buy. You can buy everything from 70-year-old recordings, painstakingly transferred from old 78 r.p.m. records, to monophonic recordings of the 1950s, to stereophonic, to the latest digital recordings.

For many pieces there are lots of different performers to choose from, and sometimes two artists can make the same piece sound entirely different. And then there are the questions of sound quality, disc quality, not to mention price.

Deutsche Grammophon, RCA, CBS, London, Philips, L'Oiseau-Lyre and Angel are among the labels whose main line recordings you can trust for sound and disc quality. You should expect to pay in the neighborhood of $8 for a top-quality main line record or tape that is not on sale.

Most of these companies also have bargain lines that generally have worse sound and are made with lower quality raw materials. Among the best lower-priced lines--great ways to get to know music--are RCA's Gold Seal (as opposed to its high-priced Red Seal), CBS's Great performances Series, and its Masterworks Portrait series. These often cost in the neighborhood of $5 and include generous quantities of music.

There are many cut-rate labels of suspect quality, where either sound, material or performance is poor. Although these labels may seem like bargains, you should avoid them. Among these are Allegro, Vanguard, peters, Turnabout and Murray Hill. The top quality Nonesuch recordings are fine, but the sound of the company's low-priced records is often not up to par.

The best way to get high quality recordings for low prices is cutouts. These are recordings that a record company has decided to delete from its catalog, often because they want to make them available only in compact disc. Places like the Harvard Coop sell hundreds of them for about half the price of other recordings. They require rummaging through--there is much tripe among the treasure--but they often reward patience. Records' liner notes, by the way, often provide interesting information about the composer, piece and performers.

Compact discs are the latest technological breakthrough, and by all accounts they appear to be here to stay. New recording techniques have allowed engineers to record the sounds instruments make in exact numbers (thus a "digital" recording) and reproduce those sounds more or less exactly. CDs, almost twice as expensive as good-quality records and cassettes, eliminate the static and wear and tear of other sound reproduction media.

Many record companies have been reissuing pre-digital ("analog") recordings in CD form. Many of these old recordings--some date back 50 years--have considerably better sound quality than they did on record format, and the fact that the recordings themselves are being reissued often means that they are high-quality performances. For the time being, though, CDs are still a luxury item, and many college students are waiting for a post-graduation job before buying a CD player.

WHICH ARTIST'S PERFORMANCE TO buy is a matter of taste, which cannot be explained but can most definitely be cultivated. If there's a piece you really like, try to listen to another performance of it. You may be shocked by the difference. Classical music lovers swear by certain artists' performances of certain pieces or certain composers.

Christopher Hogwood, the artistic director of Boston's Handel and Haydn Society Orchestra, has attracted a veritable cult following on the basis of his remarkable baroque recordings. Herbert von Karajan, the conductor of the Berlin Philharmonic, is renowned for his Beethoven and Brahms, though his latest recordings have been disappointing.

Arthur Rubinstein, the late pianist, made dozens of superb Chopin and Schumann recordings, and the very much alive pianist Jorge Bolet has recently come out with an already legendary series of Liszt records. Violinist Itzhak Perlman has demonstrated his mastery over his instrument's repertoire.

Cellist Yo Yo Ma, at the ripe old age of thirty-some-odd years, is already considered one of the greats of the century. Leonard Bernstein, an acclaimed Mahler conductor, recently inaugurated a cycle of that composer's symphonies. Conductor Andre Previn's Rachmaninoff, it is widely said, is the most sumptuous and melancholy. And the list goes on.

But in the end, you are the final judge. All this piece aims to provide is advice to help you get a grounding so you can develop your own taste and make your own judgements. There's a big world of classical music out there, and entering it needn't be a traumatic experience.