Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is intense, and I don't listen to classical music regularly.
Classical music is supposed to be intense, albeit not necessarily in the "techno" sort of way. You really ought to play it fairly loudly (obviously not to the ear-damaging levels), and the recording needs to have a lot of dynamic range on it to capture it correctly. Classical music played and recorded correctly will use some intensity cues rarely used by modern music like dynamic range. Where I think it tends to fall…
> Classical music played and recorded correctly will use some intensity cues rarely used by modern music like dynamic range.
A little context here. People sometimes make value judgements that classic music (or recordings of) is "better" because it uses a greater dynamic range.
The reason popular music uses less dynamic range is because we listen to it in noisier environments. Classical music is intended to be listened to in quiet rooms with a lower noise floor. There, even when the music gets very quiet, you can still hear it. Popular music is designed to be enjoyable in a car, at a party, while banging pots and pans and cooking dinner, through earbuds on the subway. In those environments, if the song gets quiet, it gets completely drowned out by the ambient noise. So producers compress the dynamic range by making the quiet parts louder. That way you can always hear it.
But, if you push the low dynamics up above the noise floor, by definition, you have reduced the dynamic range.
> is that it mostly dates from a pre-recording period, so it tends to draw out all of its ideas because it expects the listener can't just rewind and listen to the last few minutes again
I think the other half of this is that when you rely on the brains of human performers as your storage device, repetition becomes a lot more valuable. It's much easier for a group of performers to play an hour of music if that's six ten-minute repetitive pieces than if it's twelve distinct five-minute works, each with its own melodies, motifs, etc. The former just compresses into less data in the brain.
> modern trance artists know the modern music playback setups and handle it differently, even if I couldn't exactly describe it.
A big part of how dance music "works" is that it uses a lot of timbral variation throughout a song. So even though it may be the same melody you heard earlier, the sound itself will be different. Classical music does this by changing dynamics and rhythm. But, to be danceable, those need to be fixed. So, instead, dance music changes the tone itself, which is easy to do since the sounds are synthesized. This is why you have all of these filter sweeps, LFOs, etc. going on.