Music

Rachel has crowned me king of budget classical CD's. I like classical music and I would buy it even if those CD's weren't so darn cheap, but it helps that I can buy twice as much music for a quarter of the price, compared to popular CD's.

• CD's are probably less expensive to make than vinyl LP's. I don't know that for a fact, but it seems likely. The physical disk is so inexpensive that software companies send them out as junk mail. Once a producer gets a decent digital recording, CD's can be reproduced dirt cheap by computers.
• Most classical composers are dead and their works are in public domain. No royalties.
• Budget classical CD's are mostly recorded by lesser-known (to us) European artists, who work for peanuts, relatively. Is this exploitation? Yes, maybe, but I think they make some money from the process (If not, why do they keep doing it?); the artists get international exposure and we get good, cheap music. Looking at this from another angle, American production and marketing costs are probably way too high.

Most budget classical labels offer only a basic set of works. (You can get as many performances of The Four Seasons as you want.) Naxos certainly seems to be the cream of budget classical, the best of the cheap, with selection beyond the usual. Sony Infinity also seems quite good. I have also been pleased with Seraphim, Point, Amadis, Pilz, and others.

• J. S. Bach
• Beethoven
• Dvorak
• Vaughn Williams
• W. A. Mozart (mostly later works)
• Haydn (Josef and Michael), particularly Josef's chamber works
• Vivaldi

Sorry, but I am not crazy about opera.

I suppose this makes me sound aesthetically reactionary; however, I also like Grateful Dead, Steeleye Span, Traffic, Clancy Brothers, Dave Brubeck, Laura Nyro, Ian and Sylvia, Bob Dylan, Lyle Lovett, Glenn Phillips, and Townes Van Zandt. Maybe I am stuck in the past.

Some time ago, NPR asked listeners to submit concise -- 50 words or fewer -- essays on "Why I like classical music." I did not respond, but the invitation made me think.

Music is the natural language of emotion; it seems to reach our hearts more directly than does any other communicative medium. Maybe we can trace this to primitive origins of hearing. Classical music appeals by its sounds to our emotions, and by its structure to our perceptions of order. Classical music shows that we can create works both beautiful and rational; it blends and reconciles our Apollonian and Dionysian modes.

If we feel fragmented and confused, in Robert Ardrey's words "dry leaves tumbling before unimportant winds," what could comfort us more?

This, I suppose, concurs with observations that "Mozart makes you smarter." I speculate that hearing and internalizing classical music's structured complexity reinforces our ability to perceive structure in life's complexities. What does this imply about the effect of other music with repetetive rhythms, simple melodies, and crude lyrics? I'm not sure I want to go there.

I have trouble hearing either beauty or structure in much "modern" classical music. I accept secondhand the premise that such structure exists, but I doubt that most people can hear it without training (or straining). Musical beauty is harder to judge, residing as it does in the beholder's ear and cultural bias. If I may judge beauty by emotional effect, then much modern music seems ugly to me. Perhaps many thoughtful composers, shocked by two world wars and countless other modern barbarities, can write only chaotic, barbaric music. I give thanks for Leonard Bernstein, Aaron Copland, and other inspiring exceptions to this dismal rule.