Anybody a classical music fan here

[Manifestor_of_Light]

16. Too many to list.

Classical player here as well, on two instruments. Started piano lessons and learned to read music at age five.
Started violin lessons at age ten. My piano teacher was also a violinist which is quite unusual. Took both lessons from him from age 7 until high school graduation, ten years later.

Was in orchestra in junior high, high school, college and later community orchestras.
Also like opera when they put the words up over the stage in English, some jazz and old rock 'n roll. Basically anything from the sixties through the mid to late eighties. What I call geezer rock, because the original guys still touring are in their sixties and seventies.

Most pop music today sounds really vacuous to me. Saw a band called Echosmith open for Sting last weekend, and they were good. They actually played good acoustic guitar and didn't overdo the distortion. They even knew about triplet eighths against quarters!!

I love to tell people about music and say "Listen to this, this is good stuff!!" of whatever kind.

I played so much Bach when I was young. On the violin, you have to play lots of baroque and classical stuff (Bach, Handel, Mozart) to get your technique nice and clean and they won't let you play any of that sloppy Romantic stuff. Because I played too much Bach when I was young, it felt like my brain was dipped in alcohol. Just too sterile. And the amount of expression you can have is strictly limited in classical music. At least in the baroque and classical periods. Some Beethoven has too much verticality and not enough horizontal movement. Too much chord structure and not enough melodic movement. I do enjoy Beethoven's Sixth, Seventh and Eighth Symphonies.

I'd rate some other people higher than Beethoven. Like Schubert and Dvorak. The late Beethoven string quartets are supposed to be the height of something or other, and I listen to them. I've seen manuscripts of some of them and they look unplayable.