I’ve been wanting to get into classical music lately, what’s the classical music equivalent of an album...

There is a composition, which can be broken up into different forms or genres.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_musical_genres_by_era

some random examples:
>Piano concerto for an orchestra with piano obligatto
youtube.com/watch?v=UGldgW6mDnY
>Symphony for a orchestra
youtube.com/watch?v=keXPClVJGrc
>Toccata for keyboard/harpsichord
youtube.com/watch?v=Fa2U4XF5X48
>Madrigal for 5 voices
youtube.com/watch?v=DVlU7iQfffE
>Mazurka for the piano
youtube.com/watch?v=2JrFB5tOQbc
>Saltarello, a dance
youtube.com/watch?v=sLVDzm4kuTU
>String quartet
youtube.com/watch?v=4WWUgtG00hY
>Mass for 4 voices
youtube.com/watch?v=BRfF7W4El60
>Fantasia and fugue
youtube.com/watch?v=Fl_SlzkF6UM

Long form pieces. Le Tombeau de Couperin by Ravel is effectively an EP (six movements, 20ish minutes). Bach's Suites also reach that level. So, that's a start. Then you get much much longer works, but the gist is roughly the same. There's other examples. Schubert's Winterreise is over an hour of music, split into 24 songs for piano and voice. In fact, it's easy to call it a double album. It pretty much is one.

The thing is, looking at a work like, say, the extremely well known Symphony No. 9 by Dvorak. It has a consistent idyll throughout, but the pastoral sense doesn't need to be slow (i can be). The first movement is agitated, but that agitation can be both nice and so intense it's troubling. The second movement is pensative, the third is a dance. The fourth is a grandiose funeral march.

Your best bet is thinking of it as a journey, rather than a consistent emotion throughout. Even when it does exist (Winterreise is a show of despair), it's presented in every way possible. Self-deception, misery, bitterness, anger, suicidal tendencies and every other way that a bad breakup could take.

fpbp

>usually has a similar musical theme throughout.
Except 90% of albums are a bunch of singles plus some filler chucked together. Concept albums are barely a thing.

fuck it, just go listen to bach
youtube.com/watch?v=3FLbiDrn8IE

>similar musical theme means a distinct narrative story

That’s not what I’m talking about retard, I mean how an album will generally have a similar style or sometimes mood or some thread bringing it together

>what’s the classical music equivalent of an album?

The literal equivalent is what's called in classical music "opus", which just means publication. For instance, Chopin's nocturne op.9 no.2 is the second "track" on his 9th "album". Make sense?

Honestly, start with Chopin. He's literally God tier but also highly accessible to the layman. Pull up playlists of his nocturnes, waltzes, mazurkas, and later on the scherzi, ballades, and other works.

It's not a great idea to start with Beethoven symphonies or any other large work because it's a lot to take in for virgin ears at once. The benefit to starting with Chopin is that not only are his themes highly accessible, but his forms are relatively short and will not be tiring to absorb. Remember to not try too hard when listening to new music, because 80 percent of the magic happens subconsciously. After a few listens of something you will suddenly go "woah, that part is fucking AWESOME" because it will have had some time to marinate in your head.

Start with Chopin and just dive in. Good luck.

>The literal equivalent is what's called in classical music "opus", which just means publication. For instance, Chopin's nocturne op.9 no.2 is the second "track" on his 9th "album". Make sense?
I feel stupid that I didn't think of it like that earlier.

The piece is the smallest unit you can get the experience of a "whole cohesive work" in. They very in length and number of movements in the same way that albums, stand along singles and eps very in length and number of tracks.
Sometimes performers arrange albums with multiple pieces that fit nicely together. For example it's very common to see the string quartets of Debussy and Ravel played together as Ravels was very inspired by Debussys. However they both stand on their own and you don't need to hear one to appreciate the other.
In short Beethoven didn't expect you to marathon a whole compilation album of all his late string quartets though. That might be a fucking amazing experience if you have the stamina for it but you should listen to what makes you happy. Don't get so caught up in trying to worry about what the performers or composers had in mind. If you enjoy one movement of a symphony, go ahead and listen to it by itself. Nobody whose opinion is worth listening to will care.

Attached: DebussyRavel.jpg (400x395, 29K)

Classical works are built on themes, motifs, etc. and are composed around a particular subject matter or mood. If anything they are more focused and consistent than albums in popular music.

Go with Bach's Goldberg variations or the well tempered Clavier (sometime called piano)

classical.net/music/rep/lists/rom.php

Attached: beginnerClassical.jpg (2050x568, 550K)

Most albums don't have a theme or "thread" to them, though. The "album" started out as a collection of music, usually singles - the first Beatles album was literally a "best of" of their singles. "Album" is just a collection of music at it's basis. A lot of the time, the band and producer will cull songs that don't fit the "feel" of the album, and move tracks around to balance them out, but you're looking for something that doesn't exist, really, and has no equivalent in the classical eras.
There's no perfect starting point for classical. Just start listening, and when a piece gets your attention, dive deeper with that composer. The one that did it for me was the Four Seasons by Vivaldi, as a kid. It's THE bog standard, go-to "classical" piece for movies and symphonies, and it's still a great piece. I dove deeper into his work, and that led in some other directions with his contemporaries. Then I tried some other eras - Mozart is a great place to start in his era.

Better Call Saul did that for a lot of people when an episode opened with Chuck playing "Sicilliene" by Fauré - a couple of people asked me who that was, and I pointed them to Fauré, and they liked what they heard, so now they're diving deeper into that era of classical - if you like Fauré, you'll probably like a lot of Romanticism. There's a youtube clip of 4 hours of his piano music that i put on in the background when I'm working on stuff, or getting life shit done. It's great stuff. Classical is hard to jump into blind, but once you start finding a few pieces to hang onto, it gets less overwhelming. You're talking about a LONG history of music to explore, you have to take bite sized chunks, or take some music history classes at a local college to start getting a hang of what era is what, what the music was, what the different forms were, etc. It's a lot to take in.

Reminder that recommending Bach is the best way to make people HATE classical music.

?? What the fuck are you arguing?

Pretty much. People with no exposure to it want more dynamic stuff, like the Four Seasons, or the William Tell overture. Anything a big city orchestra warms up with is usually good to get people started with, or a thematic piece like The Nutcracker, which has a bunch of movements that most people have heard before, and don't know where it came from.

This.
Bach is my favourite composer but you gotta lube the normies up first.
Jazz nerds should listen to Rite of Spring and rockists to Music for 18 Musicians.

the album format does not apply to most of classical music. the only classical albums that work as albums are modern classical, compilations of minatures (i.e. every Chopin nocturne, every Rach prelude, every Brahms quartet, etc), or a pair of long form pieces, usually symphonies or concerti
here's the progression for listening to Bach
>ew he's so boring and dry, please give me something emotional like Canon in D
>those fugues are kind of cool
>ew he's so boring and dry, please give me something interesting like Scriabin
>HERR! HERR! HERR! Unser HeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEERRRRSCHER!!
>only his organ and violin stuff is worth listening to
>only his lute stuff is worth listening to

Yeah I guess the “musical thread” aspect isn’t really important. A better way to phrase it would be “What’s the classical music equivalent of an album, as in modern musicians release albums as digestible units of music containing multiple songs. How did classical composers release and organize their compositions into digestible units of music containing multiple songs.”

>How did classical composers release and organize their compositions into digestible units of music containing multiple songs.”
They didn't.
You're trying to force the square world of classical composition into the round hole of the modern music business. It won't ever fit.
Classical composers "release" equivalent would be premiering an opera or symphony or sonata, or throwing a smaller private concert for more intimate pieces, like quartets. They didn't sell their music, so much as they got paid when it got played, and they get a portion of the admission price - Mozart made a ton of money early on, putting on concerts of his work.

Imagine if, today, you wanted the new Tool album...but recorded music didn't exist, so to hear it, you had to go see them in concert. That's what it was like. Classical music, in it's original era, was used differently, there was no radio or recording or anything else - if you wanted to hear Mozart, you had to go see a symphony play it. Or, if you were wealthy, you could pay Mozart for the sheet music to one of his works, and learn it yourself. (That's how a lot of classical music sheet music survived, private collections of sheet music)

Classical composers didn't sit there and think "I have 10 pieces here, how can I package this?" It wasn't how it worked. Those smaller pieces were either integrated into larger pieces, or just played as stand alone works, or...never performed, and are only studied now, because they survived.

An album.

Yeah that's true, I guess I just thought composers would have some album type way of releasing their sheet music but I guess that only because I'm trying to look at it with a modern perspective.

>Classical composers didn't sit there and think "I have 10 pieces here, how can I package this?"

Brainlet, ever heard of programmatic works? Chopin's etudes, preludes, Schumann's Fantasy Pieces, Scenes from My Childhood, etc, etc, etc. I mean, ANY opus with multiple pieces is an example of a composer "packaging" multiple pieces, even if it's just 2 nocturnes or 3 intermezzi. Opuses were old versions of albums. In the 1800s, everyone in the middle class and up had pianos. Chopin puts out a new opus, and everyone would go over to their local shop and grab it, go home and open it up and play. That's the same fucking thing as going and getting the latest Zeppelin LP or the latest iTunes release.

Based

Is there a chart or some article that lays out how to get into Bach? From what I've read it becomes that situation where it clicks and everything changes. How does one approach this?

Download a composer's complete discography to get into him

Most of the opus numbers Chopin himself used were chronological ordering, any gathering into an "album" format was done after his death. Opus numbering is NOT in any way equivalent to an "album", which is a modern product, invented to sell albums on LPs.
Do some research before you reeeee at someone in anger. Oh, wait, it's /mu, the home of the triggered autistics.

How? Stick to one musician's renditions? I use soulseek and downloading composer's "discography" (classical discography's aren't clear cut) is always a mess

I don't even know how to respond to something this stupid. Don't have kids.