Popular Classical Music is Important for New Listeners

When I hear music like Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, Tchaikovsky’s 1812 Overture or Pachelbel’s Canon, I am usually tempted to turn the stereo off. It’s not that they aren’t beautiful pieces of music, but for a serious classical music fan, it is about the equivalent of hearing ìShe Loves You by the Beatles. In other words, I’ve heard them so many times that I can’t get anything new out of them.

Let’s start with a car commercial from a few years back where a bunch of guys ride by in a car, roll down the windows and start hurling water balloons at another guy. The song playing in the background is what I remember, because it was an aria from the opera Pagliacci, a great example of popular classical music that many people would recognize first as the music from that car commercial.

In this commercial, it shows different people preparing to eat food from another fast food place, and their chairs break as they sit down, or their buttons snap and fly off, all while that overture is playing. Another example of popular classical music being used as a theme song in a commercial is George Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue being used for United Airlines. It is funny, because this was one of the very first pieces of classical music that I ever heard, and it made me want to learn more about classical music.
With the fact that classical music is probably the least popular of all the major genres of music, I think it is important that the general public be exposed to popular classical music through such things as commercials.

No Comments

No comments yet.

Sorry, the comment form is closed at this time.