Holst’s Mars from his Planets Suite. It may not be loud-intense the whole time, but it’s consistently intense and pushing that 5/4 meter hard. It’s written to musically symbolize the god of war, so it’s intense. Yeah, it gets quiet here and there, but it’s still intense and powerful between the unusual meter, minor key, and bellicose sentiments.
If you want loud and frantic throughout, try Khatchaturian’s “Sabre Dance” (although there are some quiet bits even so).
Personally I’m a fan of the “The Battle on the Ice” movement from Prokofiev’s “Alexander Nevsky”, which starts out very slow and quiet but builds gradually to a frenzy; even without the original film visuals (and despite the fact that the lyrics are nonsense), by the time you get to the loud fast bit you’ll want to grab a battleaxe and smite a few foreign interlopers.
Ditto Grieg’s “Hall of the Mountain King” from “Peer Gynt” - starts low and slow, builds gradually to a big finish.
And if all else fails there’s always “Carmina Burana”.
People have been finding ways of making music since we had vocal chord with which to sing, and hands with which to drum. I would think that it is the rare person who does not enjoy music, rather than vice versa.
Keep in mind, it was only very recently that we had music on demand. Prior to not much more than a hundred years ago, if you wanted to listen to music, you had to go find someone who was playing music. Music was not taken quite so much for granted as it is today.
^^^ what I came in to post.
Snag Leopold Stokowski’s “4F” London Symphony Orchestra recording of Scheheradaze, crank those speakers to the spinal-tap 11, and cue up the fourth track. Don’t forget your heart medicine.
Thanks for the feedback all. I’ll check out some of the other pieces mentioned. Maybe I’ve just been listening to the ‘easy listening’ section of classical music.
Also, check out this link for an example of what an orchestra can do (admittedly, helped a LOT by the vocals):
Adiemus Songs of Sanctuary-Adiemus - YouTube. Maybe a comparison will better convey what I’m missing from the classical music I’ve heard so far.
Classical music is a detailed painting compared to pop music being like a cartoon.
Not hating on pop music, just pointing out that it is much simpler, with less detail and texture. (I do like cartoons too)
When you listen to classical, the “boring bits” are the parts that are introducing the themes. They are there for you to see as the setting in which the more complex melodies will fit into. The themes will become more complex over time, often culminating in several variants on different themes all being featured at one time. That’s the part that you think of as exciting.
For an example, take this piece, Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata.
It start out pretty slow, very slow, in fact. Now, if you want to skip to the exciting bit, skip to the third movement. She’s pounding all over that piano at speeds that don’t seem humanly possible. And it is a very fun movement. However, if you do not listen to the first two first, the ones that set it up, while you will be wowed by her speed and skill, it’s really just notes that she is playing. Without the context of the first two movements, it looses meaning. You probably will enjoy the 3rd on its own, but I think you would more so having allowed the composer to set the scene first.
There is also the emotional part of the music. It is supposed to affect you emotionally. It does this by changing tempos, keys, textures and complexities. It is supposed to raise you up to a climax, then back down again. This is a far more complicated, though very arguably more important part of why the whole thing is not just one big Flight of the Bumble Bee, so I don’t know that I feel up to going into as much detail on that aspect at this time.
Yet, despite your assertion, it’s true that people used to talk during Opera performances. An innovation of the theater was to turn off the lights to convince people to pay attention.
I made no assertion to the contrary.
I was only responding to your assertion that “only the rare person would have really appreciated the music for the music itself.”
Sometimes. But I’d hardly call the introduction to the theme of the first movement of the Eroica boring.
Can’t believe I’m the first to quote the immortal P.D.Q. Bach:
“Fast is good. Loud is better. Fast and loud is best.”
OP, have you listened to any of Rossini’s Overtures? Particularly the finale to the William Tell Overture?
Samuel Barber’s Adagio for Strings is one of the most intense pieces I can think of. It’s not loud, fast, or energetic but it is 8 minutes of intense.
The listener has to participate to feel this intensity. Ever since the 1950s, music fans have become lazier and and expect to sit back and let the music do all the work. “It has a good beat and you can dance to it.”
Or Ravel’s Bolero, which isn’t terribly fast or loud but it is very intense, building up all the way through. There’s a reason it’s often compared to sex.
Ah, me. Holst’s Mars.. The Moonlight Sonata. Scheherazade. Bolero. Sabre Dance.. My SDMB friends are constantly cracking the musical chestnuts.
Here, burst something new into your ears. Arnold Bax’s 1921 tone poem Tintagel — based on the castle in Cornwall in which King Arthur was born.
“The subject is worked to a broad diatonic climax (for brass and winds; over by the 2:30 minute mark) and is followed by a long melody for strings which suggest the serene and limitless spaces of ocean.” Towards the end the castle theme comes back. You get the castle wallop shortly in, and then again at the end. The balance is just perfect. An exquisite piece.
Soft -->Loud gives a piece dynamics. Like a Nirvana or Pixies song.
Thank you. That’s exactly what I was thinking of, but didn’t quite know it.
Okay, listening to that piece made many others’ point that variation, ebb and flow are needed to enjoy the intense parts. However, the slow parts often give no real hint that they’re going anywhere. There are small peaks and dips, but no feeling of momentum.
I’m with you there. IMO, the best ballads all came from rock/metal bands.
Scheherazade and Festive Overture are both great examples of what I was missing. Both have a continuous sense of movement, and we’re not agonizing over each note/chord/passage or bobbing about aimlessly (i.e. rise and fall of intensity but no real change).
Okay, so I guess my question becomes why aren’t those the songs that come to mind when most people think of classical music rather than Beethoven, Mozart, and the rest? How did the exposition-development-recap formula come to embody classical music?
The full answers to those questions take up several books. The short answer is that certain things that were popular at key points in musical development stuck and became considered the “norm” by association. For example, 19th-century sensibilities for informing what the 20th (and 21st) century view of classical music is. The whole Bach/Beethoven/Brahms thing was a shorthand for composers who wrote works easily palatable to the general public (specifically the concertgoing middle classes), in the same way that “Shakespeare!” has become the byword for quality highbrow theatre even among people who have never seen a Shakespeare play performed live.
Sonata form(exposition-development-recapitulation) was an expression of the classical aesthetic in the mid-to-late 18th century, which valued balance, symmetry and rigidly-defined structure. F J Haydn gets a lot of credit here for codifying the form for symphonic works, and Haydn had an enormous influence on Mozart and Beethoven, the other heavy hitters of the period in terms of symphonic writing (and also on Johann Christian Bach who also taught Mozart, but there’s an endless digression there). Before Haydn there weren’t really “symphonies” in any meaningful coherent sense (I am generalizing wildly here for brevity); dance suites were more common (see for example the Brandenburg Suites). Haydn’s structures, using the popular aesthetic of the time, set the benchmark for the form. Mozart used it a lot, Beethoven used it as a starting point but pushed the boundaries waaaaaaay out by the end of his career (I mean, a freaking chorus!), and of course the 19th century composers each expanded the form (and the orchestra) in their own ways, until you reach the Mahlerian monstrosities of the turn of the century (and then it all goes very weird).
In general, all I can say is that if your experience thus far runs to the Karl Jenkins/John Rutter school of classical music, you have a long and wonderful journey of discovery ahead of you. You will not like everything you encounter but if you’re at least open to trying different things you will occasionally find new things to love.
And finally - if you think *Adiemus *is intense, the scene at the end of Alfred Schnittke’s Faust Cantata where the Devil comes for Faust will blow your mind. Fun, intense and seriously creepy all at the same time (also, the lyrics are kind of gross).
It’s all a matter of taste, and of what you’re used to listening to.
I find that over the years I’m listening to heavier and heavier, and slower and slower classical music, and enjoying it more and more. I’m enjoying music now that I would have thought very boring 10 or 20 years ago, and I’m hearing more of the subtleties and intricacies of it than I could hear before.
As you listen to more classical music your tastes change.
Personally, I find both Adiemus and the Faust Cantata boring, and too much like pop music. I love John Rutter (the beautiful simplicity of his piece at the royal wedding keeps going round in my head), and I’m listening to composers like Monteverdi, Gabrielli, and Tallis that I couldn’t have listened to for 2 minutes a few years ago.
So tastes are different, and tastes change depending on what you regularly listen to.
It was written that way because a lot of people like and appreciate the quiet parts. In the past, people didn’t have the short attention spans we have today. Before recorded music, many people used to play and sing music regularly at home themselves, so they had a greater appreciation for that kind of music, and a better ear for music than most of us do today.
If you go back to the 16th century, even highly popular Elizabethan music like madrigals are too complex, both in music and lyrics, for people to listen to today. Today, most people are not used to listening to singing with several different overlapping voice parts, so we can’t hear it well. People can’t separate out the different voices and harmonies. Most music today is simple, loud, repetitive, and ‘exciting’ (I would say ‘boring’) today.
I don’t think anyone has **ever **accused Schnittke of being “too much like pop music” before. 
I love evocative classical, which can be delicate and shimmery and not just crashy and boomy. Although yes, I have an abiding love for the passion and intensity of the the pieces we’ve been discussing.
Anyway, having said all that,
I think some of the reason that there’s a lot of bland backgroundish classical on classical stations (and sometimes on concert programs) is that for a long time classical has been “the music you’re supposed to like”, it’s mostly been social-politics-free (unlike rock, for instance, which was politically offensive to many folks of my parents’ generation, or rap, to give another example), and a vast ocean of it is conveniently royalty-free public domain thanks to its age. If you add “bland and unlikely to offend many folks’ tastes”, you’ve got something close to a least common denominator sonic entertainment product. In my opinion, lots of folks of a certain ilk will (or used to) listen to classical but didn’t particularly want to be affected strongly by it, they wanted inconsequential mild stuff, pretty fluff. Oh, I should add that among those folks were many of the ones paying the classical composers to write their stuff back in its heyday. (It’s not a new phenomenon, in other words).
IMHO it’s the forms and structures of classical music that are its genius. They’re how you can have a long piece of instrumental music that can stay interesting throughout, because it actually goes somewhere; it has a “plot”; questions are raised and answered.
To fully understand and appreciate what’s happening at any given moment in a well-structured piece of classical music, you have to remember and relate it to what came before, and to anticipate what’s coming after. And that’s a lot easier to do once you have some familiarity, either with the piece itself, or with the form and style and language it’s written in.
Without that, the piece of music just becomes a series of isolated moments, one of which you may enjoy because it’s intense or beautiful or catchy, the next of which you may find boring because it’s not.