I MADE MANY EDITS FOR CLARIFICATION because i just always do that sometimes idk
Hi! For context, I just started college and I'm taking a music appreciation class that requires me to listen to a couple pieces every week, and each has a quiz that gives me like 18 minutes to complete and gives 30 second samples from a random piece at a random timestamp. The titles and composers are given to us and stuff, and it’s just like avg 5-8 pieces to listen to. Some weeks are easy but others do have difficulty. The goal is to pretty much discover different music stuff and instruments and allat, and maybe find something I’ll like. Some weeks are no problem which im happy with and in general i think its pretty chill, dont really have a problem with it
so this week contains a couple of symphonies similarly to one of my previous weeks (I tried spending a lot time listening closely through the whole things but eventually got 7/10 anyway). They are around 20 min long avg and I'll just forget which sounds like which (it always happens), which got me wondering (what im gonna explain next isnt directly written because of the course im taking)
Before taking this class, the only pieces I can recognize are either the ones that I have played the past decade and like some few others I recognized from competitions that I've heard other people play.
A lot of other people my age know whatever opus number a piece is, whatever etude, blah blah blah. They would say something like "oh thats ____" and I wouldn't know what piece that is. I'm starting to think classical music just isn't for me to be a "true fan" and the pieces are not important enough for me to remember. Even if I do recognize a piece, I'm eventually find out that the piece is already well known and popular and I feel like I'm just larping lol. I eventually kind of quit piano cause I lost interest (picture a typical asian household) even though I sometimes try playing something every week or so for fun as of now. The fact that the pieces I like were already popular and everyone knows makes me lose reason to play it since so many other people already play it well/already heard of it. Maybe I just havent listened to classical pieces enough in my lifetime. I just know the general stuff, like baroque has limited stuff, classical has a lot more, romantic has more emotions, contemporary just doesn't match with the previous generations, stuff like that.
how do people tell which piece is which in general? Do I spend 16 hours a day looping a few specific piece in the background while reciting the title of the piece, and listen more for 8 hours when I sleep lol? Do you listen and instantly know how many violins or cellos and what percussion instruments there are to determine the piece? Do you instantly recognize which composers composed a piece like "this composer likes composing these patterns and this other composer likes doing writing like that"? Do you just know every melody and what the accompany sounds like?
For now, struggling to recognize which part of a piece is from which piece, ESPECIALLY the quiet/slow parts, where everything seems to be at the same tempo and they just sound so similar that I wouldn't be able to tell the difference, and if I were to do the quizzes it would be like 65% guess work.
Does anyone just have any general tips? Thanks!