The classical example of expecting another piece is when Maria Joao Pires performed in Amsterdam and only during the orchestra introduction figured out her mistake. See her reaction on Youtube [1]. As opposed to the article above, she hadn't performed this piece in over a year.
If (like me) you couldn't hear the conversation in English over the orchestra, I ran the subtitles through Google Translate — though the body language really has to be seen to truly appreciate what was happening...!
PIANIST: "I can't try it. Everything is at home. I didn't take this with me."
CONDUCTOR: "You played that last season. You will probably succeed. You know it so well."
It is! Music is particularly amenable to chunking. The structure of measures, phrases, sections, forms, and pieces lends itself to efficient memorization or perhaps musicians/composers select/write more memorizable music with this structure in mind.
You can remember music like that too. Take any song you've listened to many times - I'm pretty sure if someone changed one note, or one word, you'd notice immediately.
Of course, actually playing those notes while you remember them is harder...
Eventually, it becomes muscle memory. At least for me, I start memorizing pieces from high-level to bottom, but eventually once I played it from memory too many times, I struggle to remember or recall high-level concepts and phrases and other things about the piece. But once I sit down and put my hands on the keyboard, it all comes back as I play through muscle memory.
Classical music is supposed to be intense, albeit not necessarily in the "techno" sort of way. You really ought to play it fairly loudly (obviously not to the ear-damaging levels), and the recording needs to have a lot of dynamic range on it to capture it correctly. Classical music played and recorded correctly will use some intensity cues rarely used by modern music like dynamic range.
Where I think it tends to fall down for a modern listener (assuming good recordings, which is not a good assumption) is that it mostly dates from a pre-recording period, so it tends to draw out all of its ideas because it expects the listener can't just rewind and listen to the last few minutes again, and this is the only such music they may hear this month; in modern times this results in a lot of pieces overstaying their welcome. Sometimes by a lot.
For instance, Beethoven's Fifth Symphony is a masterpiece. No question. But... the first movement has a repeat bar around the entire thing. Straight up. Not even a bit of variation in the last couple of bars as often happens. Now, of course, a good conductor and orchestra will play it with some variation even so, it won't literally be simply the exact same sound twice. But even so, it's not something a modern composer is likely to do. (Modern music does do a lot of repetition, but not on this this timescale. Trance a bit, but even then I'd say, it's different; modern trance artists know the modern music playback setups and handle it differently, even if I couldn't exactly describe it. Plus the 5th is definitely not "trance".)
I've sometimes fantasized about going into some of the classical oeuvre and editing it a bit for more modern sensibilities, by doing things like taking out the repeat, and maybe even incorporating some repetition with variation back into the piece, but generally shortening it. Or just generally toning out the repetition in some of the pieces, like, the Moonlight Sonata. Brilliant piece, masterpiece, no question. And the first movement is about 7 minutes to play. In modern times, it's unnecessary long and repetitive. I just listened to it here before posting, and it's not even like it's constantly mutating and changing or anything... it's just, repeating its ideas several times. For the time, great. No sarcasm. I mean that. Today, a bit tedious, because we don't need our repetition built right into our music, we add it with our playback technology if we want it.
I criticize neither classical music, nor modern listening practices in this. I merely observe a significant mismatch. Both have their reasons for what they do.
Also when a lot of people think "classical" what they actually pull up in their mental inventory is "chamber music", which is actually generally designed to be flat and unobtrusive and perhaps even, yes, a bit boring, because it's literally designed to be background music.
One option I like is to listen to music by artists who have clearly been classically trained, but are not producing classic/academic music. Even when such an artist is in the depths of the most electrotechno music possible, seemingly as distant from "classical" as you can get, I still find there's a depth that an non-classically trained artist has a very hard time reaching. (Sometimes they do, but it's rare. Though when they do it's awesome, because that's a truly unique musical experience.)
(In this post I use the slang meaning of "classical" to include all the time frames and almost all uses of dedicated "orchestral" music. I'm not even trying to be precise about "Baroque" or "Romance" or arguing about modern orchestral music.)
I agree with a lot of this, but I can't let the comment that chamber music is "designed to be flat and unobtrusive" stand.
Of course there is a lot of boring chamber music, as there is of any kind of music. But chamber music is vast and contains some of the purest and most passionate music ever written.
A very few examples of some great chamber music (I've linked to some fun parts):
Beethoven String Quartet #10 (The Harp) - take a listen to a minute of the coda from the first movement. This music is exalted!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=exMaWKVcCEs&t=490s
I wish I had more time to link more here, but everyone should know that the best chamber music is thrilling, concentrated, joyful, ecstatic, anguished - just the best! Certainly not written as boring background music!
By dissing chamber music in that way, GP was falling prey to an unfortunate Hollywood stereotype that usually involves rich people and this piece of music:
So Mozart had a lot of emotional range, even in a period where sharp dissonances and tangled counterpoint were out of fashion.
A group of us chamber musicians has had a lot of success playing for people that don't usually listen to classical music simply by doing it in intimate bars and cafes. (Primarily, the Revolution Cafe in the Mission District of San Francisco.)
The fact that the music is long doesn't matter at all if you find people where they are and play with emotional conviction.
(I guess we've hit the depth limit so I'll reply to my own comment.)
It's a loose collective called Classical Revolution, plays 1st & 3rd & 5th Mondays, been going since 2006. I'm only there occasionally these days; I might show up August 19. Starts at "8:30", often actually later, goes till 11:30.
The evening typically starts with a group that actually rehearsed and then devolves rapidly into the closest thing you can have to a jam session when you're playing notes off a page. Whoever shows up decides what to play on the fly from our collective piles of sheet music. It's a risky format—some nights are great, some less so. :)
> For the time, great. No sarcasm. I mean that. Today, a bit tedious, because we don't need our repetition built right into our music, we add it with our playback technology if we want it.
That's a really interesting take. Nice
> Moonlight Sonata...
Funny you say that, it's on my inspiration list that I want to turn into trance.
I think the trouble though with using non-repeating classical piano into trance is that the intensity and syncopation is just so widely different. As an example, check out Chopin's Etude Op. 10 No. 12 "Revolutionary"... one of my favorite pieces, but how the hell do you turn that into dance music? It's just so wild and chaotic.
I just took a listen (specifically spotify:track:0Z1vYjhlHvomaTl2VWGLrd), and I think there's something there you should pursue. Truly. The first 15 seconds could be stripped down and the scale part (sorry, I lack the terminology) to only the parts needed to agree with the second voice that comes in, and repeated a few times. The syncopation of that second voice would work great when laid over the beat. Then the mood gets darker and the theme is re-asserted. This would be the "meat" of the track. The entire time, all of the fluttery scale stuff gets stripped only to those spare notes which are needed to harmonize with the higher "voice" and carry the theme. I obviously don't have the chops, but this is a great, great idea.
It's wild and chaotic, but it doesn't need to be. Chopin has these wild scales to drive the piece along, but you've got a beat.
> Where I think it tends to fall down for a modern listener (assuming good recordings, which is not a good assumption) is that it mostly dates from a pre-recording period, so it tends to draw out all of its ideas because it expects the listener can't just rewind and listen to the last few minutes again, and this is the only such music they may hear this month; in modern times this results in a lot of pieces overstaying their welcome. Sometimes by a lot.
What a great point, I hadn't considered this before though it's completely obvious. A lot of fans of classical music though (like myself) still prefer a live performance, where I certainly don't mind hearing a da capo of Beethoven's Fifth at all!
> Classical music played and recorded correctly will use some intensity cues rarely used by modern music like dynamic range.
A little context here. People sometimes make value judgements that classic music (or recordings of) is "better" because it uses a greater dynamic range.
The reason popular music uses less dynamic range is because we listen to it in noisier environments. Classical music is intended to be listened to in quiet rooms with a lower noise floor. There, even when the music gets very quiet, you can still hear it. Popular music is designed to be enjoyable in a car, at a party, while banging pots and pans and cooking dinner, through earbuds on the subway. In those environments, if the song gets quiet, it gets completely drowned out by the ambient noise. So producers compress the dynamic range by making the quiet parts louder. That way you can always hear it.
But, if you push the low dynamics up above the noise floor, by definition, you have reduced the dynamic range.
> is that it mostly dates from a pre-recording period, so it tends to draw out all of its ideas because it expects the listener can't just rewind and listen to the last few minutes again
I think the other half of this is that when you rely on the brains of human performers as your storage device, repetition becomes a lot more valuable. It's much easier for a group of performers to play an hour of music if that's six ten-minute repetitive pieces than if it's twelve distinct five-minute works, each with its own melodies, motifs, etc. The former just compresses into less data in the brain.
> modern trance artists know the modern music playback setups and handle it differently, even if I couldn't exactly describe it.
A big part of how dance music "works" is that it uses a lot of timbral variation throughout a song. So even though it may be the same melody you heard earlier, the sound itself will be different. Classical music does this by changing dynamics and rhythm. But, to be danceable, those need to be fixed. So, instead, dance music changes the tone itself, which is easy to do since the sounds are synthesized. This is why you have all of these filter sweeps, LFOs, etc. going on.
Another interesting example of technology dictating music style is that in the early days of recording, we could easily pick up horns and voice, but not guitars or other string instruments. This is why earlier recordings basically never used guitars- we literally had different instrumentation to accommodate for this shortcoming.
I do much the same in a different medium. I direct Shakespeare, and one of the first things I do is take out a lot of redundancy in the script.
That's a different kind of redundancy, since it's not just repeating the same words. But writers of the period tended to emphasize things for an audience who wasn't always paying attention: theaters were noisy and busy.
Shakespeare also tended to expound on themes in a way modern audiences enjoy less. Not every word Shakespeare wrote was gold, and audiences use to the timing of movies prefer that you move the plot along in two hours rather than three to four.
I can tighten focus on themes that are important to me, and cut out things like jokes that aren't funny any more or references that are lost. Audiences greatly enjoy the result, without having to be extensively taught to like Elizabethan theater.
I think this describes a lot of reasons why 'classical classical' music 'sounds' very flat, emotionally, to me, compared to modern music. I do generally enjoy a lot of 'neo-classical' music tho, so I think you're probably very much right about why.
Also, this music is very familiar to us. Imagine hearing it for the first time, with an audience who, like you, has never heard anything like it. Beethoven was radical, his music sounding strange and extreme to many listeners. You might want to hear the movement again.
While can't comment on whether it is as repetitive, I would point out that the commonality between baroque and pop music are their simplicity and emphasis on chord changes at their core.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fS64pb0XnbI