I was this close to divorcing music. Our relationship was rocky at best, held together by nostalgia and habit, and a far cry from the intense love affair that blossomed 25 years prior.

I would go weeks where the only music I encountered was emanated from my infant daughter’s toys. One day as I started the commute home and dialed up another episode of Radiolab instead of DJ iPhone Shuffle, I asked myself, “how did we get here?”

Like almost everyone else that just turned 30, the genres of music I identified with up until now are either a mockery of themselves or in their death throes. With nothing new to get excited about, the old stuff starts to lose out to all of the other things demanding my attention.

I need an intervention.

Similar to my (so far) successful strategy to up my reading game, I’ve decided to switch gears from Metallica to Mozart.

I can listen to classical music while I code whereas this doesn’t seem to live well in the background, and I’ll feel a little less weird exposing my daughter to this than this, at least for the next few years.

Unfortunately I haven’t found as great of a tool to guide my musical discoveries as I did for literature. Instead my plan is to start with a breadth first search across 13 composers in chronological order, only listening to their symphonies or other major works. Afterwards, I hope to have developed a preference for a few, and will dive deeper into their catalogs.

The composers that made the cut are:

  1. Johann Sebastian Bach (1685 - 1750)
  2. Franz Joseph Haydn (1732 - 1806)
  3. Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756 - 1791)
  4. Ludwig Van Beethoven (1770 - 1827)
  5. Franz Peter Schubert (1797 - 1828)
  6. Frederic Chopin (1810 - 1849)
  7. Wilhelm Richard Wagner (1813 - 1883)
  8. Giuseppe Fortunino Frencesco Verdi (1813 - 1901)
  9. Johannes Brahms (1833 - 1897)
  10. Gustav Mahler (1860 - 1911)
  11. Achille-Claude Debussy (1862 - 1918)
  12. Igor Stravinsky (1882 - 1971)
  13. Aaron Copland (1900-1990)

Am I making a huge mistake by leaving your favorite composer out? Let me know!