I love listening to classical music but How can people just be like “yeah that’s Nocturnes Op 9 in B- Flat”? Is it just straight memorization from exposure? Or is there a method to figuring it out?
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Yes, it’s just memorization / recognition.
Don’t forget how many of us are (amateur) musicians who took years of music lessons. We’ve *played* many of those pieces, either on our own or in high school band/orchestra. Do you really think I’m going to forget a piece that I practiced for 30 minutes a day for 6 months straight and then performed at a recital that my grandma attended?
Second, there are a small number of classical pieces that are extremely popular that you hear over and over again. If you found some list of the 25 most recognizable classical music pieces and you listened to all of them 10 times and memorized their names, that’d cover a huge fraction of the ones that someone recognizes on the radio, in the background, etc.
Finally, once you know a bunch of pieces, you can often recognize composers by their sound. That is sort of the trick to it. I can make an educated guess that a particular piece is Chopin or Bach even if I don’t recognize the exact piece, because I know enough Chopin and Bach to recognize their unique sound.
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