What Do Classical Music and Claude Have to Do with Each Other?

Does anyone still listen to classical music?

Feng Tang says literature has a golden thread. I agree. Taste has levels too; that is simply true.

I first encountered classical music at university. In the dorm next door was an odd roommate we called Lao Mo. Before bed, he would take out a Sony CD player, put on his big headphones, lie flat on a hard bed, and play disc after disc of classical music. At the time I knew Mozart, perhaps Chopin—and I only knew Chopin because Jay Chou had released a song called “Nocturne.”

We understood nothing then and had no taste for it. We only made fun of Lao Mo.

He listened to the Beatles in the daytime too. I could not appreciate them then either. It took another five or six years before I could.

In today’s world full of AI, I started looking into classical music again because of my child. I hope he grows up with more choices than children’s songs and reaches a kind of awakening through listening earlier than his father did. I did not learn to enjoy the Beatles until university.

I asked AI to make the overall plan and recommend different pieces week by week. The first week brought three: Debussy’s Clair de Lune, Chopin’s Nocturne in E-flat Major, and Bach’s Air on the G String.

All three felt gentle and melodic—probably friendly to a beginner’s ears, the sort of music you can like immediately. My old self would only have said: they are all pleasant easy-listening pieces.

Of the three, I liked Debussy’s Clair de Lune most. It has such imagery and layers. My first reaction was the scene in Li Bai’s “Thoughts on a Quiet Night”: moonlight entering a room, a still lake outside. As the music moves forward, a light evening wind raises ripples. Around the two-minute mark, the feeling changes from motionless moonlight to moonlight on moving water, like a stream. You are in the room thinking of many things.

I did some reading: Debussy was born in 1862 and belongs to the late-classical, Impressionist period. Yes, the same Impressionism as painting. Debussy lived in the same era as Monet and Renoir, as well as Symbolist poets. Across the arts, the shared impulse was to stop faithfully copying reality and instead catch air, light, scent, and blurred feeling.

That is exactly how Clair de Lune feels:

You stand at the window. Moonlight falls. Nothing major happens in the room, but something inside you moves.

One small fact I enjoyed: Debussy’s full name was Claude Debussy. Claude is a common French and English male name. The father of information theory was Claude Shannon, and that is also where Anthropic’s assistant Claude gets its name.

Bach’s Air on the G String feels simpler and calmer, but you can hear a strong internal order. Steady, like time moving slowly. I first listened to a piano version, then learned that Bach had written it for strings, so I tried violin and cello versions too. It was the first time I fully sensed how differently instruments can feel. In particular, the dense, textured pull of the strings in Yo-Yo Ma’s cello version is something piano cannot express.

Chopin’s Nocturne Op. 9 No. 2 is the nocturne Jay Chou evokes in his song. For many people born in the 1980s and 1990s, it may have been their first route to Chopin and classical music. Jay Chou never names the piece, but it is the best-known of Chopin’s nocturnes. His following lyric, about mourning a lost love, fits the feeling perfectly: a room at night, one person, a quiet piano piece, memories returning—probably of love that has ended.

This is my first proper essay about learning to listen to classical music.

To return to the point at the beginning: I recently read Ethan Mollick’s “Choosing to Stay Human.” As AI grows more capable, what makes us human? We cannot chase results while forgetting process, or only chase efficiency. Many of our deepest feelings are formed through participation. So many beautiful experiences are inefficient: love, art, friendship, photography.

For example, listening to classical music.