Features tips on how to start a classical music collection

Discover how much fun classical music can be!

Are you baffled by Bach? Bewildered by Beethoven? Befuddled by Brahms? Relax! This friendly, funny, easy-to-understand guide gives you the score on composers, instruments, orchestras, concerts, recordings, and more – and shows you just how enjoyable and rewarding classical music can be.

More than 60 minutes of music, including excerpts from Bach’s Well Tempered Clavier

• Beethoven’s Symphony No. 5 • Brahms’s Symphony No. 4 • Tchaikovsky’s Symphony No. 6 • Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring, and more from recordings by Ian Hobson, pianist and conductor, Sinfonia da Camera and Sinfonia Varsovia

Plus MP3 versions of the excerpts you can play on your PC, Mac, or portable player

Discover how to:

• Distinguish the different styles of classical music
• Attend a live concert in style
• Know the instruments in an orchestra
• Understand rhythm, intervals, and other fundamentals
• Build a fabulous classical music library

The more you know about classical music, the more you love it. Now, thanks to "Classical Music For Dummies," you can achieve a whole new level of insight into both the composers and the compositions that have made classical music one of the great accomplishments of humankind.

"Classical Music For Dummies" doesn't assume that you have a degree in musicology -- or even that you took a course in music appreciation. Rather, the multimedially gifted David Pogue and renowned conductor Scott Speck explain classical music in terms you can understand, and they describe musical elements so that you can hear them for yourself.

A reference you can dip into at any point, "Classical Music For Dummies" covers such topics as The various forms that classical music takes -- from symphonies to string quartets What goes on behind the scenes and on stage to fill a concert hall with great classical music How to recognize, by sight and by sound, the many instruments that make up an orchestra The nuts and bolts of classical music -- from rhythm to harmonic progression Plus, "Classical Music For Dummies" comes complete with a CD containing over 60 minutes of masterpieces compiled especially for the book. The CD also includes a demo version of the Angel/EMI Classics For DummiesTM multimedia interface to try out on your Windows-based PC or Macintosh computer.