I’m replying here to a post by @MrCypruz in the Now Playing thread about how to listen to classical music. I didn’t want to derail that discussion. Since @perogie kindly mentioned me in a reply to that post, and to give you some suggestions, MrCypruz, I thought I’d share a couple of answers, for what they’re worth. My apologies for diverting readers away from ongoing discussions in this thread but this reply felt like a better fit here.
I’m reluctant to answer your question because I don’t have a sophisticated ear for classical music or much knowledge about it, and you may well have a far superior appreciation of it than me. So, the following is what I’d recommend to anyone new to classical music.
I wouldn’t worry too much about “how” to listen to classical music. Just enjoy it! As with any kind of music, it can be enjoyed on multiple levels, and you can delve as deeply down into these levels as you find rewarding and satisfying. It’s perfectly fine just to appreciate a piece of music because you love the melody, or because it matches the mood you’re in, or simply because it transports you somewhere happy. In other words, you don’t have to engage with it critically or think self-consciously about it as you listen, although that is a certainly a pleasure as well.
I don’t like subscribing to the notion that one kind of music is superior to another - this gets into thorny questions of definitions and discussions about the purpose of music - and I’m uncomfortable asserting or reinforcing distinctions between “high” and “low” culture. This isn’t the place for a fraught conversation about what culture is. My opinion - and it is only that, just an opinion - is that a good deal of music functions on both simple and complex registers and that a lot of classical music can provide more complexity thanks to its scale and ambition and sheer number of instruments and arrangements. I don’t think it’s controversial to say that you’re more likely to hear new things, on multiple listens, in an hour-long Shostakovich symphony than in a four-minute rock song.
I mention all this because classical music can be intimidating for newcomers who worry that, on top of the enormous amount of new music to discover, they’re supposed to have a refined palette to appreciate it properly. Again, you can delve as deeply as you like.
There’s a shifting line, for me, when it comes to putting in the time and effort to appreciate classical music. For some pieces I want to listen more studiously than others, and on some days I just want to have fun. I’ve not had the time - or the concentration - recently for classical music and I’m weeks behind on this thread. A single piece of orchestral music takes time to enjoy. When I hear something for the first time and find that I like it, I tend to listen to it over and over again, for as long as it holds my attention, and these repeated listenings enable me to hear new and interesting things. One thing I like to listen for are repetitions and variations of main musical themes.
Here’s a fun experiment (I hope): listen to the opening “Prelude” to Wagner’s opera Tristan und Isolde. (I know this is an opera and not purely orchestral music, but Wagner is famous for his long, mood-setting, and often glorious orchestral preludes that can last as long as a movement in a symphony). You’ll pick out the main theme quickly. Then, once you’ve heard it a few times and have become familiar with it, skip to the end of the opera and listen to the final sequence, the famous and rapturous “Mild und Leise.” You’ll hear a beautiful counterpart to the prelude, one that’s a sublime resolution to the prelude’s theme. They’re two sides of the same musical idea. They can be enjoyed as a half-hour diversion - as a nice romantic indulgence - or as part of an entire evening’s listen. If you sit down to the entire opera you’ll notice how Wagner weaves his main theme—which is about the purest, most ecstatic love that could ever exist—throughout the opera. It comes and goes many times, and each time it recurs, it will be either a reminder of what you’ve heard before or a slight variation on it. Gradually, over several hours, it moves towards its resolution, the tension building up all the while. It becomes mesmeric, and by the end, when you finally return to the Mild und Leise, the cathartic release can make for an incredibly rare and profoundly emotional response.