Beethoven, Bach, Vivaldi, Chopin — classical music is the oldest layer of my listening. Before there was rock, and before there was a camera, there were symphonies: an architecture of sound built for generations, not for a season.
I listen to it differently than to rock: without hurry, and never as background. A Chopin piano concerto is for me a landscape of the soul — Polish, autumnal, impossible to fake. And Beethoven reminds me that the greatest works are sometimes born in a silence others could not bear.
In the field I think of it like mountain weather: vast, patient, indifferent to fashion. A photograph survives if it is true; a symphony has survived two hundred years because it was true from the first note.