Another vote for Classic FM - my go to radio station in the car - I think they have international presence.
A big advantage of them only playing small sections of a work is that you get more exposure to different composers from many eras. Certain tracks repeat a lot due to their popularity.
I have always loved to find new music and John Peel and Andy Kershaw very enormously helpful in exploring different areas. The biggest influence however was Late Junction on BBC Radio 3. This was over two hours of music five nights a week and they played a vast range of styles, pretty well everything except mainstream pop and mainstream classical.
I used to record the programs on mini disc and play then in the car travelling to work. I downloaded the playlist and marked the ones I really liked and transferred them to CD. By the time I stopped I had recorded over 150 CDs of great music. Now on my NAS drive.
Now I find the forum is great for finding great new music (thanks Seakayaker for many of them) plus of course the streaming services. Now I have so much music to listen to it is hard to find time to hear it all, but that’s a good problem to have!
Yes - Late Junction was supremely eclectic. From what I regarded as rubbish to extremely good and interesting stuff - and lots of surprises.
Another vote for the wonderful Late Junction. I used to record Andy Kershaw’s show on minidisc and listen later, the Swedish Elvis anyone? And Bob Harris when he used to do the midnight show for two or three hours on a Saturday night, which was also taped onto minidisc, played many interesting things.
I am happy to investigate any new music and found my way into opera for instance many years ago. And country music which my father used to play and so I disliked on principle. I have tried with Hiphop and think that Kendrick Lemar has produced some astonishing music. I can’t play it on rotation (or in the car!) but I do understand the power and grace of it.
That said, I don’t like everything or listen regularly to lots of it. I can’t bear Rachmaninov or Bjork but I will give anything a go. But like all art I have got to the age where I can be honest with myself and say what I don’t like.
What I find I struggle with these days is listening to things where the artist is to me or has been morally reprehensible. even where I might have listened to their music before. It might be very simple but I do! But that might be very off topic and therefore a discussion for another place.
I think of music as a learning process (no different in principle than wine tasting or science). Any worthwhile genre of music tends to have deeper layers that are not immediately accessible and sound like noise on first hearing. So it tends to be a good idea to start with the older music that leads up to the newer forms. In jazz, for instance, it probably isn’t a good idea to start off with recent avant garde or free jazz, but to familiarise with more early examples. Swing such as Armstrong (hot fives and sevens), Basie (complete decca), Lester Young (complete Aladdin recordings) could be some good choices and progress from there through bebop and hard bop and cool… Also a lot of modern forms of jazz are based on the same standards just used in somewhat different ways and often comment on those older songs and techniques.
Done those sorts of things. Still really can’t take freeform or avant garde jazz.
And I find those swing jazz styles unpleasant, so getting in that end doesn’t work.
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