An Introduction to the Podcast… with a little music.

The Music

The Words

Hello everyone. Welcome to an Introduction to the Classical For Everyone Podcast. 500 Years of Incredible Music. And here are a few very brief examples of that music. Let’s start with something for an orchestra…

A: Beethoven 6^th Symphony

Here’s a little bit of film music…

B: Shostakovich Music from Hamlet

And now some three hundred year old keyboard music…

C: J S Bach Aria from The Goldberg Variations

And something from only a few years ago…

D: John  Adams The Chairman Dances

There’s really quite a lot of classical music out there. And if you’ve ever been curious… or explored it for a while once upon a time… or just quietly wondered what all the fuss was about… then the Classical For Everyone podcast is for you. No expertise is necessary. All you need are ears. My name is Peter Cudlipp and I’ve loved classical music for as long as I can remember and that enthusiasm led to a radio show called, not surprisingly, ‘Classical For Everyone’ and now… I’m after a bit of a bigger audience. If you enjoy any music at all then I’m convinced you can enjoy classical music. You don’t have to… and you don’t need to… but there really is some amazing music just waiting for you to discover or to rediscover!

And here is some more music…

E: Mozart Piano Trio

And something a little louder…

F: Gershwin Rhapsody In Blue

Alright. A bit more about the podcast.

Each episode will focus on a particular theme. It might be an instrument. It could be a composer, a country, a city, a performer or any one of a hundred ways to connect an hour of incredible music. Five episodes are already out in the world... one on music inspired by Landscapes, one devoted to woodwind instruments… one about the French composer Maurice Ravel… one featuring six incredible women composers and one about composers who wrestled with turning  the sea into Music. And there are more on the way. There are also three what I’m calling mini-episodes, each about ten minutes long where I talk about some of the possibly vexing questions for a listener new to Classical Music like… ‘Are conductors actually important?’; ‘Why does the word ‘sonata’ keep turning up?’ and ‘Why is almost everything in Italian?’.

Speaking of Italian…

G: Mozart Don Giovanni “Fin Ch'Han Dal Vino”

There’s a way to present classical music that doesn’t make the listener feel like an uninvited guest at a dinner party. I think you can enjoy this music in the simplest and most direct, unmediated ways without the nervous sense of inadequacy that bad music appreciation teachers and some radio broadcasters seem to trigger. Classical music can give enormous pleasure. It can impact your mood… accompany you in joy, support you in sadness, transport you out of the mundane, at times it can even challenge your understanding of what it is to be alive… or it can  just give you something very nice to hum.

There really is something for Everyone.

So… Welcome to the ‘Classical For Everyone’ podcast. I really hope you enjoy it. And by the way, the full credits for all the music played in this Introduction are at the show’s website… classicalforeveryone.net. But, in brief, I played you music by Ludwig van Beethoven, Dmitri Shostakovich, Johann Sebastian Bach, John Adams, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, George Gershwin and to finish, here is some Ross Edwards.

H: Ross Edwards Guitar Concerto