Switching to Classical Music is like Switching From Windows to Linux

''This just might be the geekiest thing I have written, but what do you expect? I’m a physics graduate student. I’ve gone through both of these conversions myself, and realized that there are some interesting similarities between the two, and that the kind of people willing to do the geeky one are probably pretty well suited to doing the musical one. So here we go:

It’s a deceptively different experience

Both situations involve switching to something which, on the surface, doesn’t seem too different from what you are used to, whereas in fact, both are radically different. For example, many people think of classical as basically long-winded and unstructured, especially compared to non-classical stuff. What you don’t realize until you’re well entrenched is that most classical pieces are structured around one of a few basic, but somewhat complex, underlying structures: sonata form, rondo form, etc. Identifying and understanding these forms is geek heaven. In a similar fashion, people new to Linux get a load of the tarted up window managers and see it as basically a free, slightly different looking, version of Windows. Of course, you find out quite quickly that that is just the very tiniest tip of the command-line based iceberg..''

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