Featured Artist

Read about the Artist.
Click Here!

    Even brooding old Beethoven was inspired by the beauty he saw in nature. Listen to his Sixth (Pastorale) Symphony and you can imagine birds singing, villagers dancing, a thunderstorm and a shepherd’s thanks after the storm. You can also hear something more abstract in “Awakening of Cheerful Feelings Upon Arrival in the Country,” you can hear cheerfulness.
    The abstractions are broader than that because there is also an attempt to capture a general idealization of the simple, happy, spontaneous pleasures of people who live close to nature. With good portable music gear, take the Sixth Symphony for a walk in the fields, and feed your own hunger for simpler times by what you hear in your ear phones as well as what you see, smell and touch around you.
    It often helps the imagination to know the “story” of a piece of classical music, but sometime the music is composed just for the sake of creating beautiful sound with a variety of emotional effects, as with Mozart's Sonata for 2 Pianos.
    The effects are not just emotional. There is intellectual stimulation too, and even a theory that because of its order, symmetry, rhythmic patterns, repetition, ideal mathematical form, and harmony listening to classical music can make you smarter. Whether you believe this so-called Mozart Effect or not, there is no doubt that it can relax the mind.
    By classical music we do not just mean music of 18th and early 19th century Europe, roughly from Bach through Beethoven. We mean music that is architectural, using rhythm, melody, harmony, harmonic progression, tuning, and performance practice to compose expressions of musical ideas.
    In present times one way to get the classical feel in music is to listen to classically trained musicians singing contemporary popular songs, as with Andrea Bocelli on Amore.

To add a comment about a piece of classical music that created a joyful sound track to your life’s story
click here.