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.