Author: The Classic Note Editorial
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Classical Music in Jesse Stone Movies: It’s One Brahms Record
If you came here for a list of ten cues, I have bad news first. Across the nine Jesse Stone films made between 2005 and 2015, there is exactly one piece of classical music the story stops to listen to:…
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Classical Music in Modern Movies: What Directors Actually Use
Every couple of years a film shoves a two-hundred-year-old piece of music back into people’s ears and the same question goes round: what was that? Here is the answer for eleven modern films — the exact scene, what the director…
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The Best Recording of Vivaldi’s Four Seasons (and One to Skip)
There are more than a hundred recordings of Vivaldi’s Four Seasons in print, and they do not sound like variations on a theme. They sound like arguments. Put the 1959 I Musici version next to Il Giardino Armonico’s 1994 one…
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The Best Recording of Beethoven 5 (and the One to Skip)
Four notes. Three short, one long. Every conductor alive has an opinion about them, and almost none of those opinions match. Beethoven’s Fifth is the most recorded symphony there is, and it’s also the one where two excellent performances can…
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Classical Music for a Funeral: 12 Picks, and 2 to Skip
You are almost certainly reading this with a form in front of you and a deadline measured in days. So the list comes first and the reasoning comes after. The short answer Take these three if you take nothing else.…
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Classical Music That Sounds Like Metal — 8 Picks by Subgenre
Most “classical music that sounds like metal” lists work by picking loud pieces. Big brass, minor key, timpani, done. The trouble is that nobody actually listens to “metal.” They listen to doom, or thrash, or black metal, or whatever Meshuggah…
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Classical Music for Workout Playlists: 12 That Work, 3 to Skip
Search “classical workout playlist” and you get Barber’s Adagio for Strings and Clair de lune, which is how people end up walking on a treadmill at the tempo of a funeral procession. The problem is not that classical music is…
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Classical Music in the Hannibal TV Series: 10 Cues That Matter
Hannibal Lecter has had a Bach problem since 1991. In The Silence of the Lambs, the Aria from the Goldberg Variations plays while he takes apart two Memphis policemen, and ever since, “cannibal listens to Bach” has been shorthand for…
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Classical Music for Autistic Children: 11 Picks, 4 to Skip
If you want one piece to try tonight, make it Satie’s first Gymnopédie: barely three minutes on two chords rocking back and forth, no crescendo, no sudden entrance, nothing that pounces. That last part is the whole selection rule here.…
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Vivaldi’s Winter in John Wick 3: The Cue Not on the Album
The Continental has just lost its protection, John Wick has one hour before the hotel stops being neutral ground, and Winston’s answer to all of it is to pour himself a glass of wine and have Charon open the armory.…