The Case for Classical Music: Why Every Man Should Learn to Listen
Start with a confession: “classical music” is a terrible term. It is an umbrella that covers 700 years of Western composition — from the medieval polyphony of Hildegard von Bingen to the modernist atonality of Schoenberg to the minimalist meditations of Arvo Pärt — and implies a homogeneity that doesn’t exist. Bach and Stravinsky are both “classical composers” in the same way that Chaucer and Cormac McCarthy are both “English-language writers.” The category is too large to be useful without subdivision.
But the term is what we have, and what it names is real: a tradition of composed music that has been developing, arguing with itself, reinventing its materials, and producing works of extraordinary density for seven centuries. And almost every man in the modern world has essentially no relationship with this tradition.
This is a loss, and an unnecessary one. Classical music is not difficult to access. It is not for a particular class or culture. It is not required listening that you approach as an obligation. It is, at its best, among the most intense and rewarding aesthetic experiences available, and the claim here is simply that you should try it — properly, with attention, with the right entry points — and see what happens.
The Neuroscience
The brain on classical music is a well-studied subject, and the findings are more interesting than the cliches suggest.
The “Mozart Effect” — the idea from a 1993 study by Rauscher, Shaw, and Ky that listening to Mozart temporarily improved spatial reasoning — was widely misreported and subsequently overstated. The effect was real but modest and specific: it applied to a very particular type of spatial task, lasted about 15 minutes, and worked for any music the listener enjoyed, not just Mozart. The media turned this into “Mozart makes you smarter,” which it does not, and the subsequent backlash against the Mozart Effect has unfortunately made people more skeptical of the genuine neuroscience of music than they should be.
The genuine findings are more substantial. Stefan Koelsch at the Free University of Berlin has shown that music processing activates the limbic and paralimbic systems — the brain’s emotional core — in ways that speech does not. Music reaches emotional processing through a route that bypasses the verbal-analytical systems, which is why music can produce emotional states that are difficult to name or explain. The sadness of the Adagio in Barber’s String Quartet is not a sadness you can translate into words without losing most of it.
Daniel Levitin’s work at McGill has documented the dopaminergic response to music — the “chills” that people describe when a piece of music hits them unexpectedly. This response involves the same reward circuitry as food, sex, and psychoactive drugs, but with a distinctive anticipatory component: the brain rewards you for correctly predicting what comes next in a musical sequence, and then also rewards you for being pleasantly surprised when it doesn’t. Music engages prediction at every scale — the next note, the next phrase, the recapitulation of a theme, the resolution of a harmonic tension that has been building for twenty minutes. The complex temporal architecture of classical music means there are more layers at which this anticipation-reward cycle operates than in almost any other form of music.
For musicians — and to a lesser extent for attentive listeners — the brain changes over time. Musicians show greater cortical thickness in auditory regions, larger cerebellum volume, and stronger connectivity between the two hemispheres. These are structural changes, not just functional ones. The brain of someone who has been seriously engaged with music over years is physically different.
The History: Knowing Where You Are
Classical music is a conversation. Each composer is responding to what came before, arguing with it or extending it, sometimes both simultaneously. Knowing even the rough outlines of this conversation makes listening richer.
The Baroque (roughly 1600-1750)
Johann Sebastian Bach is the mountain at the center of Western music. Every composer who followed him worked either from his example or in reaction against it. His output is staggering in both quantity and quality: the six Brandenburg Concertos, the forty-eight preludes and fugues of The Well-Tempered Clavier, the Mass in B minor, the St. Matthew Passion, the six Cello Suites, the Goldberg Variations. All of it organized with a mathematical precision that is simultaneously architectural and profound — the fugue as the art of developing multiple melodic lines that are independent and interdependent simultaneously.
The Cello Suites are the best entry point for most men. Recorded countless times, most definitively by Pablo Casals beginning in 1936 (Casals is said to have practiced the suites daily for twelve years before he performed them publicly), they are complex without requiring any theoretical knowledge to appreciate. You are simply experiencing a single instrument organizing time into something that feels inevitable.
Handel’s Messiah — performed every Christmas and increasingly treated as ritual rather than music — is worth hearing in a serious performance for what it actually is: an oratorio of considerable dramatic power, with choruses (the Hallelujah is the most famous) that earned standing ovations because the music actually demanded them.
The Classical Period (roughly 1750-1820)
Haydn and Mozart established the forms — the symphony, the string quartet, the piano sonata — that Beethoven would explode. Mozart’s particular genius was melodic: he could generate melodies of perfect naturalness that also contained harmonic complexity invisible on the surface. His piano concertos (especially 20, 21, and 23) are the place to start; his late symphonies (35-41) are among the most concentrated pleasures in all orchestral music.
Beethoven
Beethoven is where the conversation changes. Before Beethoven, a composer worked within conventions established by the tradition and the patron. Beethoven worked within himself, and when convention didn’t serve what he needed to say, he changed it.
His nine symphonies are the most studied nine pieces of music in the tradition. The arc from the first (which sounds like a very good student of Haydn) to the ninth (which took seventeen years to write, which he heard only in his imagination because he was completely deaf, which ends with a choral finale that had no precedent and has not been equaled) is the most dramatic individual creative development in music. The third symphony, Eroica, written when Beethoven was confronting his encroaching deafness, is where the change becomes audible: it is simply longer, more structurally ambitious, more emotionally complex than anything written before it.
Start with the fifth symphony (you know the opening, everyone does — but the entire forty-minute piece is what that opening is promising), then the seventh, then the ninth. Then the late string quartets, which are the most interior music he wrote and the most difficult to access but the most rewarding when you have the context.
The Romantic Period (roughly 1820-1900)
Schubert died at 31 and left more music than most composers produce in a lifetime. His song cycles (Winterreise, Die schöne Müllerin) are the deepest exploration of longing and loss in the vocal repertoire — a man’s voice and a piano, exploring emotional territory that opera can’t reach because it keeps things too theatrical. Schubert is the composer to hear when you have lost something.
Brahms, Schumann, Mahler, Bruckner — the Romantic tradition produced the largest orchestral forces, the most elaborate structural ambitions, and the most unabashedly emotional music in the tradition. Mahler’s symphonies — enormous, hour-long works for vast orchestras — are the summit of late Romantic ambition and the most explicit attempt to put a complete worldview, a complete emotional history, into musical form. His ninth symphony, written as he was dying and never heard in his lifetime, is his farewell to life and among the most moving things any composer has written.
The 20th Century: The Argument with the Past
Schoenberg’s development of twelve-tone technique — a method of composition that abandons the tonal hierarchy of keys that had organized Western music for 300 years — was the most radical rupture in the tradition, and it still divides listeners. Twelve-tone music (and its descendants, serialism) can sound, to the uninitiated, like organized noise. What it is, in fact, is a music organized on different principles than tonality, and it rewards close listening in proportion to how thoroughly the listener has internalized the conventions it’s departing from.
The better entry point to 20th century composition for most men is Shostakovich, whose symphonies and string quartets were written under Soviet totalitarianism and whose engagement with political reality gives his music a moral weight and an emotional directness that is immediately accessible. His fifth symphony — written after Stalin’s denunciation of his opera Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District — is a work of tightly controlled anguish that the Soviet authorities mistook for capitulation. It is not capitulation.
Arvo Pärt and What Came After
Arvo Pärt, the Estonian composer born in 1935, developed in the 1970s a compositional style he called tintinnabuli (from the Latin for bells) — a method of extraordinary simplicity that produced music of unusual stillness. His Spiegel im Spiegel (Mirror in the Mirror), written in 1978, is eight minutes of piano and violin that seems to contain nothing and holds everything.
Pärt is the composer most likely to be a genuine revelation for men who have never listened to classical music. His music does not require theoretical knowledge. It does not require familiarity with the tradition. It requires only the willingness to be still for long enough to let something very quiet become audible.
Other contemporary composers worth knowing: John Adams, whose operas and orchestral works (Nixon in China, Harmonielehre) are the most politically engaged serious compositions of the past forty years. Sofia Gubaidulina, whose instrumental music seems to operate in registers of spiritual inquiry that secular Western music rarely reaches. Johann Johannsson, whose score for Arrival introduced many people to the aesthetics of contemporary classical composition without labeling it as such.
How to Actually Start
The wrong way: Sitting down with a playlist labeled “Classical Music Essentials” and working through it like homework. Nothing in classical music reveals itself to inattentive listening, and attentive listening to music you have no context for is difficult to sustain.
The right way: Start with one piece, hear it multiple times in full, in silence, without doing anything else. Then find out something about it — who wrote it, when, under what circumstances — and hear it again.
Specific starting points by type of listener:
If you already love rock or metal: Beethoven’s fifth and seventh symphonies. The structural logic is similar to what rock does — tension, release, climax — but executed with orchestral complexity. Shostakovich’s fifth for the darkness.
If you already love jazz: Ravel’s piano concertos, which were directly influenced by jazz. Then Debussy’s piano preludes — impressionism is the harmonic tradition that jazz drew from most directly. Then Fauré’s Requiem for something completely different.
If you love hip-hop’s texture and rhythm: Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring, which is a work of rhythmic complexity that shocked Parisian audiences into a riot at its premiere in 1913 and which still sounds more alive than most contemporary orchestral music.
If you want the most direct emotional experience: Schubert’s Winterreise, in a recording with Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau (the greatest Lieder singer of the 20th century). Twenty-four songs about a man’s journey through a winter landscape after a love affair has ended. Put it on in the dark. You will not forget it.
If you want to understand what classical music is structurally: Bach’s Cello Suites, then The Well-Tempered Clavier, then Beethoven’s piano sonatas. You are following the development of musical logic across a century.
The Argument
Classical music has been dismissed as elite, as irrelevant, as the cultural territory of a class that no longer exists in the form it once did. Some of this dismissal is sociologically understandable: the concert hall as institution has not always been welcoming, and the cultural gatekeeping around “serious” music has served to exclude as much as to include.
None of this changes what the music is. The Goldberg Variations do not care who you are. Beethoven’s late quartets do not require a particular income or education. What they require is time and attention — resources that are available to any man willing to commit them.
The case for classical music is not that it will make you sophisticated or improve your social standing. The case is simpler: that a tradition of seven centuries of composed music, produced by some of the most intelligent and emotionally serious people in the history of human civilization, contains experiences that no other form provides in quite the same way, and that you are missing something real by not encountering it.
You have enough time to begin. Begin with something small. Begin with Pärt’s Spiegel im Spiegel, or Bach’s first Cello Suite, or Schubert’s Lied der Mignon. Hear it once with full attention. Then hear it again.
The rest follows.
Further reading on Playboy-X: