Classical I & II

...Music heard so deeply
That it is not heard at all, but you are the music
While the music lasts.
~T.S. Eliot

Two things about classical music. If you don't think you like classical music, please hang around anyway. They are short!

First, have you heard about the recent study that found listening to Mozart and Strauss can help lower your blood pressure?

Secondly, I'm sharing a quote from Tokyo’s Thriving Classical Music Culture, Part 1 by Josephine Yang. Apparently, if you have really good music education in your schools, your orchestras will thrive:

Tokyo is saturated with classical music. In just this city, there are EIGHT professional, full-time orchestras that total over 1,200 concerts a year: NHK Symphony Orchestra, Yomiuri Nippon Symphony Orchestra, Tokyo Metropolitan Symphony Orchestra, Tokyo City Philharmonic, Japan Philharmonic, New Japan Philharmonic, Tokyo Philharmonic, and Tokyo Symphony. Though the names are amusingly similar, each organization is separate and unique. In all of Japan, there are 1,600 orchestras (professional and amateur) — all in a country with a land area that’s smaller than the state of California but holds a population that’s about 40% of the United States! To put things into perspective, the United States would need about 38,000 orchestras to equal that percentage.

The last part of this piece is pretty exciting so I don't know whether it would lower your blood pressure, but here's a terrific performance by the top Japanese youth orchestra: