Music you listen to while reading? Preferably instrumental

Stars of the lid. Doesn't fit every book but then again does anything?

>don't pretend you can retain anything from both mediums
You've missed the point.

...

Smetana's Ma Vlast
Duke Ellington

you could probably listen to anything at low volume and it could be good reading music.

>It is perfectly ok to use it as background music while reading
Ok fine, my post was a only a suggestion even if it came as "dictatorial" and parted from unmentioned assumptions. My main assumption was that the listener has intention to absorb a piece completely. Do whatever you want but my point is that, while also focusing on something else, you are likely to miss many subtleties that the composer intended. Listening to music while browsing the internet is almost the same as reading a book but only in lesser form, and a lot people (including myself) do this without problem. But you can't deny that plenty of classical pieces (what I've found, based on my experience, is that this applies to most classical, whatever era it may be from) DO require full concentration or, at the very least, repeated listening (e.g. Mozart's Jupiter, Mahler's symphonies, a lot of 20th century) for a full understanding of the piece. Especially when the piece in question uses very non-standard musical elements.

>Don't project your inabilities onto everyone else.
If you have great concentration and retention abilities, then cool, but I don't think it's likely that what I've said doesn't apply to a lot of people, if not the majority.

>Furthermore, although I was definitely not really concentrating on the music at all, I could tell what I enjoyed and wanted to go back and listen to again when I would only be listening to it. I even found some of favorite compositions in just this way.
You're proving my point. You had full retention of the book but only a general notion of what the music was about. There's a "workaround" for this, yes, but you can't pretend the issue wasn't there from the start. Some pieces are very dense (like Bach's fugues) or subtle (most Adagio movements) in nature and could easily be dismissed if not paid attention.

Of course, there's different degrees of what I'm saying. You can listen to Vivaldi while doing almost everything and retain a lot from him, I'm not going to deny that, but don't kid yourself and say that listening to Contrapunctus 7 while reading a passage from Aristotle is an easy feat. Most popular music works better as background music because of the repetition and/or (most of the times, excluding some Jazz) simple instrumentation.

tl;dr: you can enjoy classical "normally" but if you want to get the whole of it then don't multitask.

youtube.com/watch?v=2L-lA0xqzKo

>You see, those terms are very vague.
A lot of Haydn's symphonies play with the listener's expectations, a lot of Beethoven has quotations from past movements in unexpected ways, Bach's manic Counterpoint is dense, Mozart and Chopin often slip some variation(s) of the main theme(s), and plenty of Schoenberg, Stravinsky and Scriabin use non-repeating forms (what Schoenberg referred to "musical prose"). If you're focused on something else and listening for the first time, you are likely to miss many of these things. And, yes, some pieces are easy listening but, more often than not, even the most banal violin concerto has some of the qualities mentioned above (And the more you are educated on music theory, the more things you start looking for, but this is obviously not a requirement).

Pastoral, Beethoven.

Bach's Cello Suites
Beethoven's Late String Quartets A Minor Op. 132 is a particular favorite.
Op. 131 in C sharp minor is pretty too
Ysaye's violin sonatas
Miles Davis Blue in Green
Bill Evans Peace Piece

>Brian Eno
My man.
His ambient are great for reading, but not anything else.
His seventies quartet of rock albums are GOAT.

Other than the loud beginning the rest is really nice and not distracting at all

Unsurprisingly though one shouldn't actually listen to it when reading Thus Spoke Zarathustra

youtube.com/watch?v=IFPwm0e_K98

Ok, I think we're on the same page now. Yeah, of course you're not going to grasp the subtleties of the music while reading, you're not going to appreciate it the same as listening to it alone. But I don't think OP was talking about trying to get everything out of both simultaneously as that would obviously be impossible. I took it more as a request for good background music, and classical can certainly be that. I will also reiterate that while I definitely didn't pick up on everything in a composition while reading, I absorbed enough to know that it was something I wanted to make a note of to listen to later when I would give it my full attention. For example, this is how I discovered Bartók, now easily among my favorite composers.

Anyway, thanks for the discussion and sorry if I came on a little strong in my initial response to you.

Damn, one digit away from a hat trick of dubs in this thread...

>and classical can certainly be that
Yes, I just wanted to point out that there's more to classical than a superficial listening. It pisses me off when I see videos like "best classical studying music".

>For example, this is how I discovered Bartók, now easily among my favorite composers.
Bartók works great for this because his development sections are usually different than the rest. His violin concerto no. 2 is a favorite of mine among other of his works.

>Anyway, thanks for the discussion and sorry if I came on a little strong in my initial response to you.
this is Veeky Forums lol, if you piss people off you need to be prepared on being in the receiving end, no worries.

Cheers.

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