For those who care, there’s a list below the fold of what I bought from iTunes last night based on recommendations in the previous thread. For those who don’t care so much about that, let me just note that trying to buy classical music on iTunes really is as annoying as everyone says– as dozens of people have noted, it’s hard to find specific pieces because they list everything by the name of the performer, not the composer.
Even more annoying, though, from my perspective, is that many of the more important pieces are album tracks only. For example, they have approximately fifteen different versions of “Rhapsody in Blue” but most of those are only available by buying an entire album of other stuff. For somebody like me, who isn’t actually loooking to own the complete works of Gershwin right now, this is incredibly annoying. At least they did have one or two available as single tracks– the Mozart clarinet concerto that several people recommended seems to be impossible to obtain by itself, so I gave up.
Anyway, the stuff I purchased:
- “Rhapsody in Blue,” obviously.
- “The Planets” by Holst. The whole set was available cheap, and it’s one of those pieces that lots of geeks seem to assume you know, so I figured I might as well buy the whole thing.
- “The Rite of Spring” and “The Firebird” by Stravinsky. Again, both together available cheap, and one of the movements only as an album track.
- “Symphony 9 (the New World)” by Dvorak. Again, lots of people assume you know what this sounds like.
- “Symphony 1 (Classical)” by Prokofiev. A couple of recommendations for this, and it’s short.
- “Appalachin Spring” by Copland. I think I have heard most of these. but so many people plugged it that I might as well.
- “New York Counterpoint” by Steve Reich. This has the potential to be intensely annoying, but we’ll see.
That’s six and a half hours worth of stuff total (including the previous round), so that ought to keep me occupied for a while. Thanks to all who offered recommendations.
If you can’t find the clarinet concerto on its own, you might try the Oboe, Clarinet, and Bassoon Concertos all on one CD. All of them are excellent.
if you have time/money for DVD’s (as opposed to iTunes) – get Bernstein’s Young Person’s Concerts DVD. Some works are better understood once you get a clearer explanation of what the composer’s aim was, particularly Mahler, Stravinski, and Shostakovitch.
Berlioz’s “Symphonie Fantastique” is much more interesting after properly hearing its “psychedlic drug trip” origins (not that Berlioz took any, but it was written to describe some poor artist who did). 🙂
beyond that, the only thing i’d suggest that you didn’t have listed here would be Debussy’s La Mer and other orchestral works (“Images”, “Nocturnes”, and “Prelude a l’apres”).
Interestingly, the earliest work you have in there is the ‘New World’ from 1893. Nominally, most of these are part of the classical canon, but you have missed out on all Baroque, Classical & most Romantic.
Following up on Daksya, was it just coincidence or had you heard a lot of the classical and romantic pieces before?
In the end, it takes a lot of time to find out what exactly you like best. Discovering this huge amount of lovely music can be quite exciting. Good luck!
Incidentally, this sort of thing — trying out music you don’t know if you like — is what subscription services are ideal for. $10, and you can download all the classical music you want. Yeah, if you like it, you need to keep paying a subscription fee to keep it around (or just buy outright the stuff you really like), but it’s impossible to do exploratory listening for cheaper. Legally, anyway.
Following up on Daksya, was it just coincidence or had you heard a lot of the classical and romantic pieces before?
Coincidence, basically.
I have no idea what the start and end dates of any particular period are, nor what the composition dates of any of the pieces I chose were (iTunes only has the recording date).
I mostly picked pieces which had been recommended for some specific reason that I could easily identify, rather than pieces that were just included in the middle of a long list of stuff, or thrown out with no explanation. That ended up being more mdoern stuff (I guess), probably because the people recommending more modern stuff felt a need to justify their recommendations.
But “coincidence” is probably a concise way to say that.
I don’t know if you can easily get tracks from these sites onto your ipod (the Smithsonian site seems kind of annoying and we don’t seem to have Naxos access here), but check your local library:
Naxos
Smithsonian global sound
(links only work from a specific campus)
Maybe good for further listening research.
(botched html on last post — sorry)
I don’t know if you can easily get tracks from these sites onto your ipod (the Smithsonian site seems kind of annoying and we don’t seem to have Naxos access here), but check your local library:
Naxos
Smithsonian global sound
(links only work from a specific campus)
Maybe good for further listening research.
For whatever it’s worth, you’re missing out on the mostly widely listened to eras in classical music.
If you want to listen to whole pieces online, you can subscribe to the Naxos site (www.naxos.com) for $10 / year. Its a good way to see what you like.
There is a great archive of contemporary American music with whole pieces available online at http://artofthestates.org/
Good choices 🙂 I would listen to the Reich piece more than once- you have to get your ear used to it- otherwise it does come off as annoying and you miss the underlying coolness of it all (I swear it’s there). I also like Rhapsody in Blue… how can you not like Gershwin? He’s fantastic- a kid here at school played one of his concertos and it was the most entertained by a conerto that I have been in a long time.
Can I also suggest that when you listen to these, really listen to them. It is tempting to treat classical music as “background music”. While it can serve that purpose just fine, the pieces are a lot more interesting if you pay attention to what’s going on in them (which, by the way, gets easier the more experience you have with it).
Along those same lines, do yourself a favor and invest some time to attend some live performances. In a live performance, it’s a lot harder to treat it like background music. Sure, you spend some time thinking about how uncomfortable the seats are, but you can also spend some time really following what is happenning in the music.
One last suggestion. Your list of works is almost all for large ensembles. I think the inclination to recommend big orchestral works is natural — if someone is not excited by classical music, you want to recommend something big and dramatic. However, there is some chance that you will like chamber music. I would try Dvorak’s Dumky Trio, any of Beethoven’s String Quartets, and any of Schumann’s piano works. Note that you can see/listen to some great chamber music for free at the college’s excellent concert series.
No specific tunes to recommend, but for future such music requests you might include a link to The iTunes Music Store Link Maker website. This site allows anyone to search for an artist, album, or song on the iTunes Music Store even if they don’t have iTunes installed. It then provides them with the HTML to create a link to the music store from which one can download said song. For instance, here’s a link to one of Aaron Cass’ recommendations:
Emanuel Ax, Yo-Yo Ma & Young Uck Kim – Dvorak: Cello Concerto – Piano Trio “Dumky”
I don’t know that it’s available on iTunes, but see if you can find Short Ride In A Fast Machine by (the other, according to my mom) John Adams. Very nice.