I’m gonna do my best to explain what I mean here. I’m not a musician, but I love listening to classical music. As I’m listening, sometimes I count along with the beats in my head or pretend to conduct the music. It’s always really clear which beat is the downbeat, even with a solo instrument and even if you don’t start the piece from the beginning, but I don’t understand why? What stops you counting the from the 3rd beat instead of the first?
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Now I’m not a classically trained musician, I’m self taught on guitar and bass but I’ll try to explain.
Often it is easy to intuitively know which beat is the first in a bar because the music is composed such that an accented note or a chord change occurs on the downbeat. Think to something like a simple rock beat, often starting on the kick drum and alternating with the snare every beat while a riff or the chords start playing on the first kick. This makes it easy to intuitively know simply by hearing, without needing to think hard about which beat is the first.
However, this intuition is partly built on the common trends we hear in most music with the song (or main melody) beginning on the downbeat. Some people may find it hard to intuitively start counting from the first beat of each bar if the song starts with an anacrusis (a pickup bar, with the composition beginning part way through a bar on the upbeat, before the downbeat).
Examples of anacrusis can be found in songs like “Sex on Fire” by Kings of Leon, “Drive My Car” by the Beatles, or “Invaders Must Die” by the Prodigy (sorry, no classical examples).
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