At Virtuoso, we believe a basic knowledge of classical music is essential for anyone today. We say it at every opportunity, and it's the reason the app exists: we built Virtuoso to make classical music easier to get into and to help as many people as possible learn the basics.
But "essential" is a strong word, and repeating it isn't an argument. So in this article, we'll set out our case: what our arguments are and why we think this knowledge matters now rather than just belonging to another century.
Most of us have been there at some point: the conversation turns to classical music, and we have nothing to add. It might be at a fancy party, over lunch with colleagues, or at a friend's wedding, the kind of place where admitting you don't know much about it feels a little awkward. In moments like that, you wish you did.
And you never know where that knowledge will come in handy. It might be a quiz game, or a date at the cinema when a piece starts playing, and you know what it is. Or an advert with music you like and would want to hear again, if only you knew what it was.
Knowing the basics means you can join in: place a name, ask a question, or say what you think. Classical music has a reputation for being posh or exclusive, but it isn’t. Anyone can learn the basics, and doing so is one of the quickest ways to round out a general education. And when the topic comes up, you can take part if you want to, or step aside with confidence if you don't.
You often hear people say, "I don't like classical music." Keep the conversation going, though, and it usually turns out that "classical music" means two or three pieces they've heard somewhere along the way, with no context and no idea what they were listening to.
Classical music is a tradition several centuries long, with a dozen famous names, hundreds of lesser-known ones, and thousands of pieces written for different occasions, halls, and instruments. Saying you don't like all of it is like saying you don't like modern music and meaning Taylor Swift, Moby and Metallica at the same time.
Not liking classical music is completely fine. But it's worth being honest about where the "I don't like it" comes from. Often it isn't a verdict on the music at all. It's a way of saying, "No one ever showed me where to start."
That's a different problem, and a much easier one to fix.
So what happens when someone does show you?
Put on Vivaldi's Spring, the first of The Four Seasons, and you'll probably know it within seconds. It's bright and pleasant, the kind of thing you've heard in hotel lobbies and while waiting on hold.
Now listen again, knowing that Vivaldi published each concerto with a short poem, probably his own, and marked its lines into the score. The trills near the start are birds singing. Later the music darkens for a thunderstorm. In the slow movement, a goatherd sleeps in a meadow while the violas play his dog barking.
The music hasn't changed, but you're no longer hearing pleasant background sound. You're following a story, and waiting for the dog.
That's the difference a little knowledge makes. It doesn't ask you to like more music. It makes the music you already hear more interesting.
If you're interested in history, art or architecture, classical music is already part of the picture, whether or not anyone mentions it. For centuries it was written for the same churches, palaces and cities as the paintings and buildings, often for the same patrons. Knowing one without the other leaves half the story out.
Take a visit to Notre-Dame in Paris. Most people come for the stone and the stained glass. But while the cathedral was still being built, around 1200, composers there were writing music for it. Some of the earliest music in the classical tradition that we can still perform was made for that building.
History works the same way. Beethoven's Ode to Joy has been the anthem of the European Union since 1985. Without the music, you see a flag and a ceremony. With it, you know the tune comes from a symphony about all people becoming one family, composed by a composer who was by then almost completely deaf.
So if knowing about art and history matters to you, classical music isn't an extra subject. It's a missing part of the one you already have.
Filmmakers, writers, and advertisers rarely choose a classical piece at random. They pick it because it already carries a meaning, and they count on at least part of the audience to know what that meaning is.
Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey, released in 1968, has a scene in which a spacecraft slowly docks with a rotating space station. The music is The Blue Danube, a waltz Johann Strauss II wrote in Vienna in 1867. If you know it, you see what Kubrick did: two machines in orbit, turning around each other like a couple on a ballroom floor.
If you don't, it's still a beautiful scene with a pleasant tune. You just miss the idea.
The more of these pieces you know, the more often you'll notice the soundtrack saying something, too.
You've probably heard that it does. The idea goes back to 1993, when a short paper in Nature reported that college students did better on spatial reasoning tasks after listening to 10 minutes of Mozart's Sonata for Two Pianos. Their scores rose by the equivalent of 8 or 9 IQ points, and the effect was gone within 10 to 15 minutes.
That last detail got lost quickly. Within a few years, shops were selling Mozart CDs for babies, and the governors of Georgia and Tennessee arranged for newborns to go home with a classical CD. The term "Mozart effect" took off, even though the researchers hadn't used it themselves.
Then other scientists tried to repeat the experiment, but many couldn't. The largest attempt took place in Britain in 1996. The BBC asked schools to take part, and more than 8,000 children aged 10 and 11 each listened to 10 minutes of one of three things: Mozart, pop songs including Blur, or a talk about the experiment itself. Afterward, they did spatial reasoning tests. On one of the two tests, the children who had heard pop music did best.
Researchers called it, half-jokingly, the Blur effect. The most likely explanation is the simplest: people do slightly better on a task right after listening to something they enjoy. For 10-year-olds in 1996, that was more likely Blur than Mozart.
So no, classical music won't raise your IQ. That's why none of our reasons above depend on it.
Less than you might think. You don't need to read music, play an instrument, or memorize which century belongs to which era. Most people who feel at ease around classical music can't do any of that either.
Think about how you know Shakespeare. You probably haven't read all his plays, but you know who he was, roughly when he lived, and what Romeo and Juliet is about. That's enough to catch a reference, enjoy a film adaptation, or decide you'd rather not sit through four hours of Hamlet.
The same level works for classical music: a dozen composers you can roughly place in time, a handful of pieces you can name when you hear them, and a basic idea of what a symphony, a concerto and an opera are. With that, the dinner conversation, the film soundtrack and the cathedral all start to make sense.
Everything beyond that is up to you, and depends on what you find you like. If you're not sure where to begin, we've written a guide on how to start listening to classical music.
That basic level is exactly what we built Virtuoso to give you. The app takes you through the best-known pieces and composers in classical music, explains what makes each one matter, and shows how the tradition fits together, a few minutes at a time, with the music playing as you learn.
You don't have to love all of it. But it's worth knowing well enough to decide for yourself.