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Comment by sjg007 | Hacker News Reader

Classical music is 300+ years old. I also love Opera as do my parents and grandparents.

I think it is more about what gets played on the radio. The music is good and new. That tricks our brain into pursuing it.

Eventually each genre finds its own classics that basically capture most of the attention.

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Is the classical you all listen to all "top 40" "oldies" from folks like Bach and Beethoven or do you listen to anything reasonably new? I'm talking 20th or 21st century classical. Say John Adams or Kaija Saariaho, maybe?

That's the classical music that I enjoy that my mom can't stand. And that is the difference this is talking about.

The new stuff. My mom introduced me to Hindemith and Bartok.

"I'm talking 20th or 21st century classical"

I can't consider anything so recent to be "classical" -- it might imitate the style of older music, but to call that 'classical' makes the word basically meaningless, or that it's only a style (however that would be defined). To me, 'classical' means that it has survived and thrived across _many_ years.

> . To me, 'classical' means that it has survived and thrived across _many_ years.

Classical is either all of Western art music or a particular style within that body whose original heyday was between that of Baroque and Romantic; creating a third definition doesn’t aid in communication.

>To me, 'classical' means that it has survived and thrived across _many_ years.

I believe that would normally be referred to as a classic.

The music is classic?

Yes.

Classical music?

No!

I thought the same way and referred to modern classical music as symphonic music or composition. But a professor friend and composer taught me that modern symphonic music is referred to as classical music. Probably because the approach is a classical one, even if the composer is Stockhausen.

I am close to people who write and play compositions with these traditional orchestral instruments today and they refer to these pieces as “new music” although most people would hear them as “classical” pieces. Most people call a wide swath of several centuries of music “classical” but in the music world, there was technically a very particular Classical music period in the 1700s and early 1800s. When musicians today study at top music schools, no one there calls “classical” what most people outside that world call classical. They refer to the particular time period because they distinguish unique traits between each in the way we might distinguish fairly similar genres today. So, as I said, if some composer today comes up with a new concerto the people in that world call it “new music”.

I like modern classical.. some of it.

There is a radio show with some interesting modern classical I check out weekly. (They archive the shows on the wmbr site for 2 weeks.

https://wmbr.org/cgi-bin/show?id=6708

"it is more about what gets played on the radio. The music is good and new"

But is it good?

That's a matter of taste.

Do you think radio still matters?

For people who drive, yes. It does to me at least.

Most of the time when I'm driving, I'm streaming music. I'd be okay if my next car had no radio as long as it has Android Auto or CarPlay.

I find it super convenient to turn on one of the streaming radio stations such as WFMT in Chicago. It eliminates all of the organizational overhead of curating the music that I listen to, and it's good enough. I certainly hear a lot of stuff that I've never heard before.

Also, re streaming, I have a throttled cell phone service, so my data usage isn't unlimited.

I don't have unlimited data either, but have found that streaming doesn't seem to use up all that much data. I think it's something like 100MB / hour.

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