classical_music_for_the_ignorant_but_interested the repeater unhinged listen god; i'm going to educate you. yes, sit right there on the little carpet and i'll tell you a story about brahms. see, first there was bach back in the late 1600s or something like that. he was a baroque composer. he wrote the tocotta and fugue in d minor for organ that everyone associates as scary music and jesu joy of mans desiring and some other famous stuff that maybe even if you don't know what i'm talking about you would know if you heard. my violin professor says he's the father of jazz and i think he might be right. he did some cool stuff with cross rhythms and chord progression that no one else was doing at the time. then in the late 1700s this guy beethoven came around. he bridged the gap between classical and romantic music. he invented the symphony form that the romantics like brahms used. his music is actually sometimes considered romantic because he was very emotive. he was deaf for most of his career and his late works were designed without performer limitations in mind. many composers of the 19th century were afraid that they could never compare to beethoven and brahms was one of them. he spent almost 20 years writing his first symphony because he wanted it to be absolutely perfect. but at a time when all his contemporaries were experimenting with program music that had extra-musical associations and flashy writing brahms wanted to stick with absolute music and wrote concertoes with interplay between the soloist and orchestra and not just to showcase a virtoustic display of craziness. in his time, brahms was thought to be boring and tame by most except a few people that saw his true genius. so the way i kind of look at this whole thing is bach started it beethoven expanded it and brahms finished it off. and he finished it off quite nicely. 010615 ... 010618 what's it to you? who go blather from