Margaret Mikulska wrote:

>We are talking about beginning classical music *lovers*, not apprentices to
>the post of Keeper of the Canon.  (Who in the world added "received" to it,
>btw?) For listeners, there is no "heartland", no obligatory repertory one
>must go through, no basic repertory - the nice thing about any art is that
>to appreciate it, you can start ANYWHERE.

I wholeheartedly agree.  Classical music is meant to be fun first even if
this doesn't sound too serious.  But it can be fun, too, to be systematic.
What I found most rewarding beginning listening to classical music was
going my way through a historcially ordered anthology.  A fantastic and
recent one to listen to is "Millennium.  Klangreise durch 1000 Jahre Musik"
(Millennium.  Journey in sound through 1000 years of music).  It is a
project by Deutsche Grammophon in 12 CDs containing mostly short pieces or
movements presenting by top artists.  Little but interesting commentary
leaves much space to think about the music by yourself.  For whom it may
concern here are the contents of the 12 CDs, a kind of canon if you like:

(The CD titles are a bit arbitrary as you may notice)

CD 1 - 1000 - 1500 From Gregorian chant to Early Renaissance (Gregorian
Chant, Hildegard von Bingen, Guiot de Dijon, Leonin, Perotin, Carmina
Burana, Petrus de Cruce, Adam de la Halle, Pilippe de Vitry, John
Dunstable, Guillaume de Machaut, Guillaume Dufay, Josquin Desprez,
Johannes Okeghem, Francisco de la Torre, Heinrich Isaac)

CD 2 - 1500 - 1700 From the Renaissance to the Age of Baroque (Joan
Ambrosio Dalza, Pierre Attaignant, Hans Neusiedler, Nicolas Gombert,
Alonso Mudarra, Thomas Tallis, William Byrd, Thomas Morley, Orlando di
Lasso, Giovanni Pierluigi Palestrina, Giulio Caccini, Giovanni Gabrieli,
John Dowland, Claudio Monteverdi, Michael Praetorius, Samuel Scheidt,
Heinrich Schutz, Johann Pachelbel, Dietrich Buxtehude, Arcangelo Corelli,
Jean-Baptiste Lully, Henry Purcell, Marc-Antonie Charpentier, Giuseppe
Torelli)

CD 3 - 1700 - 1750 The climax of Baroque music (Tomaso Albinoni, Johann
Sebastian Bach, Antonio Vivaldi, Francois Couperin, Georg Philipp Telemann,
Giuseppe Tartini, Giovanni Battista Pergolesi, Georg Friedrich Handel, Carl
Philipp Emanuel Bach, Domenico Scarlatti, Franz Xaver Richter, Friedrich
II.  von Preussen "Der Grosse")

CD 4 - 1750 - 1800 The Vienna classical period (Johann Georg
Albrechtsberger, Johann Stamitz, Joseph Haydn, Christoph Willibald Gluck,
Johann Christian Bach, Johann Adolf Hasse, Antonio Salieri, Luigi
Boccherini, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Ludwig van Beethoven)

CD 5 - 1800 - 1830 The way to Romantic music (Ludwig van Beethoven, Johann
Nepomuk Hummel, Niccolo Paganini, Gioacchino Rossini, Franz Schubert, Carl
Maria von Weber, Hector Berlioz, Frederic Chopin)

CD 6 - 1830 - 1865 Belcanto, Liebestraum and Wiener Walzer (Vincenzo
Bellini, Gaetano Donizetti, Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy, Robert Schumann,
Michail Glinka, Giuseppe Verdi, Johann Strauss Vater, Franz Liszt, Richard
Wagner, Jacques Offenbach, Charles Gounod, Johann Strauss Sohn)

CD 7 - 1865 - 1880 Romantic Classicism and national music (Johannes Brahms,
Max Bruch, Richard Wagner, Giuseppe Verdi, Modest Mussorgski, Bedrich
Smetana, Georges Bizet, Peter Tschaikowski, Edvard Grieg, Anton Bruckner,
Charles-Marie Widor)

CD 8 - 1880 - 1900 Farewell to Romantic music (Jacques Offenbach, Anton
Bruckner, Johannes Brahms, Camille Saint-Saens, Gabriel Faure, Erik Satie,
Pietro Mascagni, Peter Tschaikowski, Giuseppe Verdi, Jules Massenet, Hugo
Wolf, Antonin Dvorak, Richard Strauss, Claude Debussy)

CD 9 - 1900 - 1910 Between the epochs (Giacomo Puccini, Edward Elgar,
Gustav Mahler, Nikolai Rimski-Korsakow, Sergej Rachmaninow, Jean Sibelius,
Fritz Kreisler, Charles Ives, Claude Debussy, Arnold Schonberg, Sergej
Prokofjew, Richard Strauss)

CD 10 - 1910 - 1930 New sounds and old tunes (Igor Strawinsky, Arnold
Schonberg, Alexandrer Skrjabin, Max Reger, Manuel de Falla, Ottorino
Respighi, Sergej Prokofjew, Eduardo di Capua, Hans Pfitzner, Alban Berg,
Leos Janacek, Giacomo Puccini, Kurt Weill, Maurice Ravel, Franz Lehar,
Anton Webern, Bela Bartok)

CD 11 - 1930 - 1950 America - exile and home (Bela Bartok, George Gershwin,
Hanns Eisler, Darius Milhaud, Dmitri Schostakowitsch, Samuel Barber, Carl
Orff, Paul Hindemith, Joaquin Rodrigo, Kurt Weill, Aram Khatchaturian,
Richard Rogers / Oscar Hammerstein, Aaron Copland, Richard Strauss, Olivier
Messiaen, John Cage)

CD 12 - 1950 - 2000 The music of the present time (Heitor Villa-Lobos,
Luigi Nono, Leonard Bernstein, Francis Poulenc, Gyorgy Ligeti, Benjamin
Britten, Hans Werner Henze, Alfred Schnittke, John Williams, Pierre Boulez,
Witold Lutoslawski, Toru Takemitsu, Krzystof Penderecki, Philip Glass,
Andre Previn, Hilliard Ensemble / Jan Garbarek)

Robert