in the classical fashion

I have decided to make the switch to classical music. I am fond on grand gestures, and hence from now on I will just listen to classical music. 

I have always had a wide-ranging taste in music, from Beethoven to the Beatles, from Edith Piaf to Neutral Milk Hotel. And while there is some music that I perpetually return to, overall I rather like to progress through the world of music, exploring and trying out new things. 

While you can mix in some different types of music, I cannot really manage my iPod on shuffle, with classical tracks appearing. They are at once too dense and too sparse to play in amongst pop, rock and jazz. So the solution is to just switch wholesale to classical. The benefits of this are that it is easy to build up a vast amount of classical music quite cheaply, you can buy virtually the entire works of some composers quite cheaply and there are plenty of 100 best style compilations, many remarkably inexpensive. My natural inclination is towards the music of the twentieth century, partly because I feel that I ought to take an interest in it, and partly because much of it is actually quite challenging to listen to. On a constant diet of classical music it is nice to have a mix of the more melodic and the more dissonant. 

I have sought to add in to my collections the composers that people I respect really rate, so Schoenberg and Mahler are in there, while I have also discovered a fondness for Vaughan-Williams. By mixing them up, the dramatic sounds more dramatic, the discordant more discordant. I have yet to find a fondness for Stockhausen, but I suppose anything is possible. 

There are a few issues with classical music, it does not entirely lend itself to playing on an iPod, because for many people the most important item of the metadata is who composed it, but classical MP3s seem to have avoided any consistency whatsoever on where the composer data is held. Another challenge with classical music is the the volume can shift dramatically, which is fine in a quiet concert hall, but where you are listening on headphones it can vary between inaudible and deafening. While headphones on a busy train mean that you miss little of the subtlety of a lo fi track, you do miss out on the depth of many classical tracks. 

Perhaps my headlong dive into classical music will prove shortlived, but for the moment, I press on in the classical fashion.