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Been enjoying Greig over the past week,...when I delve back to childhood the first pieces of classical music I vividly remember are definately - In The Hall of the Mountain King and excerpts from Holst's The Planets (Mars/Jupiter) - at 5 years old.
So many; no, too many years later I'm now choosing to re-visit Greig's music and enjoying the complete version of his music for Ibsen's Peer Gynt, which throws a shadow over the condensed but ever-green suites 1 & 2.
Additionally it was great to discover his three sonatas for piano and violin (Loveday vn & Casillas pn on Saga) - with his no. 3, being especially romantic & lyrical and well recommended if you haven't already given it a spin.
Looking back I can honestly say it was this first access to Greig and Holst which fueled the desire to get into classical music in later life.
Did you have similar expriences?
Follow Ups:
The complete movie.Saw it when I was 3 or 4 and just getting a grip on the difference between reality and fantasy. I was mesmerized, totally immersed.
Scared the living shit out of me. I awoke screaming for weeks. Dinosaurs, flames, and those stupid hippos in tutus dancing with leering alligators.
nt
Several early influences. Dad's 78 RPM gramaphone recods of Toccata and Fugue in D minor through this Quad 2 and Tannoy 12" DC speaker (mono of course) and Beethoven Pastoral SymphonyGood music teacher at school where I learnt little else. Still hear unknown pieces and guess the composer based on what I picked up then,aged about 9.
Visit to cinema with Granny to see Fantasia. Several pieces of lasting influence, but notably the (unknown to me at the time) Rite of Spring over the dreadful scene of the dinosaur extinction.
I guess I was two or three. My dad would stack the 12" RCA 78s up on the changer in the GE Console...I would dance and sing along. I can still picture the album cover with a kinda scary-looking nutcracker graphic...the records were broken long ago...I wish I could remember the orchestra and conductor.
nt
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I remember listening to opera in the car with my father when I was 5 and 6 years old, but the first significant piece was the 1812 Overture. At 10 I had a newspaper route and Mom and Dad refused to let me listen to my music on Sunday mornings while folding my papers. Classical, though, was acceptable sabbath fare. Finding most of their collection a bit sedate, I eventually stumbled on the 1812 and so for the next 6 months or so I listened to the entire piece every Sunday morning. To this day hearing it floods the old memory bank with the scent of newsprint.
yep. pre-school age or no later than first or second grade... but the impression was only that, being barely if at all familiar with lp's, a whole 'song' could be so long... i don't remember how many but i'm thinking four or five maybe even six rca numbered 45rpm singles on red, i think (maybe green... they color coded them according to style: pop comedy, classical, etc. apparently), vinyl.you'd stack 'em up on the spindle in order, play 'em, then flip 'em over and when the whole collection of a/b sides were finished, the full selection had played. no idea what it was i listened to, but it was definitely something of a symphonic nature.
See my post below. And now you mention it, I think the red records I listened to were RCA. From the dim recesses of my memory I think I see the letters on the label. Thanks for the memory. And I didn't know they color coded them. Interesting info.
I was fortunate to grow up in a country where even before FM we had a national radio service dedicated to the best in the arts and music, and we still have it.I knew about Bach before I ever sang his music.
but I guess the piece that really sticks is 'Jesu meine Freude' a Chorale by JS Bach. Which I sang in a cathedral choir before I turned 10, the same year I lost my father to cancer! here is a quite really high passage in it for the boy sopranos which I just knew I could not do.
Neddie, the choirmaster, knew I could. I will never forget the surprise of hitting those notes. Nor the sheer joy of singing them over the rest of the music in that huge space when we 'did it' a week later.
The other would be that great english anthem, "As pants the hart for cooling streams". Who wrote it I still do not know, andthere may be more than one setting.
- There used to be an aspirin-like product called "Vanquish", which used Beethoven's 5th Symphony "Dit-Dit-Dit-Dah!!" in its TV commercials. With people holding up two fingers in that old "peace" gesture...- One of the major networks used the beginning of the second movement to Beethoven's 9th Symphony in its evening news intro and exit.
- Stroh's beer did a commercial with a soloist playing beer glasses like a xylophone, with symphony orchestra.... An orchestra player seated near the glasses drank the beer out of one of the glasses, the soloist as a result then played a sour note, and the whole orchestra stopped...
- Playing with my mom's old Blaupunkt console radio, tuning to a classical station of the orchestra playing soft and quick, turning up the volume to hear it better, and then a loud passage rudely waking my mom up...
- A facial tissue (it may have been toilet paper) commercial where an orchestra player seated in front of the tuba place a tissue into the bell of the tuba, like a mute...
- A three stooges scene with a violin player oblivious to the fact he was holding a saw instead of a violin bow...
- Those Bugs Bunny cartoons...
- My grandfather's love of Suppe's Light Cavalry Overture and Liszt's Hungarian Rhapsody No. 2...
- Prime time orchestral concerts on major network stations. Boy how things change...
I became aware of the classical music genre at age three (1965)... Didn't know it was called "classical music" until I think age five...
on my Dad's record player. They were beautiful. I'd listen to them for hours, or what seemed like hours, when I was 5 or 6. There were many pieces, but one I particularly remember is Schubert's Moment Musicale No. 3 on the piano. Played it for my students yesterday.Yes, I guess it is the music. Not much hi and little fi, but those records entranced me.
And yes, Bagsgroove et al, they were vinyl! Hoisted on my own petard.
eom
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Not exactly classical but John Williams did the music for the Superman movies. I was in middle school. This in part got me interested in orchestral music.
Jeff
In the great white "Al Quaida hoarding" north we have this monolithic socialist television station called CBC. The one beautiful thing They had when I was growing up was a kid's show called "Friendly Giant". Among the rooster in a bag and giant giraffe that talked to "Friendly", the giant, there was also a trio of small animals that played instruments. Every so often Friendly and Rusty the rooster would joing in to play trad jazz and the odd Baroque piece. I was very young so I never remembered specific pieces but I remember how quiet and calming it was to hear them. To this day I love Baroque and classical music. Of course now I always expect to see tiny instruments on all the small animals I see in the park but that's a different story.
Beethoven's Moonlight Sonata. Age 4 listening to Longine's Symphonette on the family radio. It was magical then, still is.
I must have been 6 or 7. I remember that it was thrilling
and maybe just a bit scary. Now I have that one on Reference
Recordings CD of Seattle Symphony. More Scary than ever.
It was hit in the UK charts when I was 10ish.
Decades later, thankfully, the film Amadeus was able to redress the balance and I can even enjoy a good rendition of #40 (Pinnock/ECO).Also, I remember that between programs on schools TV there was a one minute analog clock count down accompanied by Handel's 'Arrival of the Queen of Sheba'.
.... and if you know where he lives, tell me.I've been saving up ever since then to go and kick him in the balls, at a bare minimum.
Oh, it is good to hate sometimes.
* that is if no-one else with taste has yet done so.
Let's turn one of the most anguished movements in Mozart's output - into happy-happy joy-joy boppy shite
- another equally stupid attempt at crossover.
Timbo
...in the third or fourth grade. I had the player in my room. This must have been about 1960, when the 78 format was already obsolete.
played by a vintage music box at my grandma's home.
Despite the fact that my mother was a conservatory- and university-trained coloratura soprano and played European concert music for me since before I was born, most "classical" music generally bores me. That being said, I do remember being somewhat interested in "Peter and the Wolf" verrry early on.My satisfaction with European "classical" music since then has been quite selective and sporadic.
Aside from the Bugs Bunny and Lone Ranger background music tracks, and the background music on my "story" 45 rpm records, it was probably Saint-Saens Danse Macabre. I was maybe 8 years old. Our elementary school class was going to a kids' concert given by the local orchestra, and the music/choir teacher was giving us a preview of what they'd be playing. So he played us some version of this over an institutional record player while giving us the visual cues...skeleton playing the violin, etc. Got chills. Got bigger chills when I heard it in concert a short while later. This definitely engendered a taste for "macabre" themes in music for me. When my dad finally bought a console stereo a couple of years later, and ordered the obligatory Readers' Digest Music of the World's Great Composers set, I must have worn out the Hall of the Mountain King and other minor key works.
I was around six. But, in second grade, "Hall of the Mountain King" blew my mind.
Another early one around this time was Tchaikovsky's "Waltz of the Flowers" from the Nutcracker. It was the theme of a radio serial here back in the 1940's.At age 13 the school introduced me to Grieg's A minor Concerto which I scraped & saved up for, buying it one 78 rpm record at a time from a sympathetic record store lady. In those days our school had regular assemblies each morning and part of the ritual was to hear snippets of the classics. I can still remember my first exposure to Beethoven's Pastoral Symphony in that context. Such a shame schools no longer support classical music that way -> a general ignorance to this sublime form of emotional experience. Unfortunately the modern stuff just plain irritates me and puts me on edge.
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on an 8-track tape in my Dad's car on the way to school when I was in first grade. Had heard alot of stuff before that I'm sure (my folks were/are music buffs), but that's the earliest memory I have. The 1965 Rubinstein version of the Nocturnes still strikes a chord with me.
Some members of a chamber music ensemble visited our class and explained what counterpoint was and played some Bach. I found the counterpoint fascinating and Bach is still my favorite composer.Later, in college, I had no interest in classical vocal music until I was dragged to a performance of the Mass in B Minor and sat about 15 feet from the singers. The beauty of the sopranos' voices was a revelation.
- Hunt
During the Fifties, one got an excellent education in classical music on Saturday morning cartoons. Mighty Mouse was actually very operatic!
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Swan Lake at ~17.
...at around the age of three. I can't say that I think as much of them now, though.
My father loved Grieg and Sibelius. My parents had an old LP of Grieg's Peer Gynt Suite and I remember asking them to play the Hall of the Mountain King over and over. I loved how it sped up. I was probably about 4 or 5 and that's my first recollection of a classical piece that really made an impression on me. I still like it.
steve
nt
I was as old as 14. I had heard lots of classical music before, but that piece hooked me, and a young romantic was born!
Interestingly, mine was Beethoven Violin Concerto at ten
years old, it sounded very analytic and then I tried to
listen more and see if I could make sense of it, and I
started to become mesmerized.
Peter & the Wolf; I was 8
... because I was just thinking about this. It was the summer between third and fourth grade, so I must have been about eight or nine. It was a hot day, and my friend and I were lolling aroung the house, complaining that there was nothing to do. My friend's mother, who was a music teacher, said something like, "well, why don't you listen to some music." So we lay down on the cool floor tiles, with our heads toward the stereo speakers (this was about 1965) and our eyes closed. Out of the speakers came a Bach violin concerto. In my mind I could see a gleaming waterfall, the water moving and splashing off the rocks in time to the music, and I felt this great joy.I didn't immediately get into classical music though. Those were the days of the Beatles, Stones and Dylan, and I loved rock as a teen and college student. Later I got into jazz, and finally came 'round to classical. Never forgot the Bach...
101 Strings. I was somewhere around 8 years old
First was Holst "The Planets" around age 7 or 8 then "1812 Overture" shortly after. Curiosity led me to other Tchaikovski (5th) and Prokofiev pieces which I still love today.
Recognised the Blue Danube when I was 3. (Mum played the LP)Picked out the "Ode to Joy" melody from Beethoven's 9th and sang it when I was 5. It was also first full Symphony I had listened to.
I credit the Mahler 6th symphony (the Leinsdorf/BSO recording on RCA) for getting me into classical music in a big way. It struck me like a bolt of lightning when I happened to catch it on the radio in the mid/late 60's. (I was in my early teens.) I haven't looked back since, and now have accumulated well over 200 recordings of Mahler symphonies in my collection. I had grown up listening to mostly rock 'n' roll, but we had a few classical records at home, mostly popular stuff like the Nutcracker Suite and the Sorceror's Apprentice (Milton Cross narrating!).
About six I layed on the living room floor listening to Dads copy of Scherazade over and over. My first live orchestra came at 7 years old. The Denver Symphony playing a concert for elementary schools. On the program Scherazade. I was hooked.
There are too many candidates. The Grieg Peer Gynt Suite is one of them, I must say. Some I remember are:Victor Borge--or doesn't he count?
Spike Jones, Nutcracker Suite, Pal-yat-chee, William Tell Overture (Beetlebaum), Der Fuehrer's Face. and other things.
Deems Taylor, Through the Looking Glass.
Tchaikowsky, Theme and Variations.
Suppé, Poet and Peasant Overture. The arts with the dark, solemn chords thrilled my boyish soul.
Franck, Symphony in d minor. Monteux, of course. My mother really liked this piece sometimes.
Tchaikowsky's 6th Symphony, another of my mother's favorites.
Rachmaninoff, 2nd Symphony.
Un di felice and Parigi O cara from Verdi's La Traviata, sung by Gigli and Caniglia.
Vesti la giubba from Pagliacci. Caruso, of course.
____________________________________________________________
"Nature loves to hide."
---Heraclitus of Ephesus (trans. Wheelwright)
definitely counts! I'm still looking for someone's version of the Albeniz Tango in D that's as good as his. Had it on a beaten up old LP a couple of decades ago. Also, a friend of my brother's who knew Borge said no one could play Clair de Lune like he could.
First Movement of the Fifth by Beethoven. I was aged 11 or 12, wenn we studied it at school. I then bought the CD myself and later the other symphonies by Beethoven. Grieg, Brahms, Tchaikovsky, Mahler, Bruckner, Wagner & Straus came some time later. *lol*
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