How Would You Do It?
A download of the “top 100 classical pieces” has finally finished. It’s not an official collection (seeing as I can’t find it on Amazon, Wikipedia, etc.) Here’s the tracklist (NSFW warning: there may be some underwear-clad women at that link).
The thing is, all the information is in the filename. I want to organize this in some way. Is it important to you to have the opera that a certain piece is from? If so, where in the iTunes file information should it go? Some of the selections aren’t from operas, though.
What about the key that the piece is in? Put that in the track name too?
Would you keep the original titles? Or write the translated English titles?
I was planning on researching the years for each. What else?
Does anyone have a better collection of classical music that might convince me just to toss this one?
Comments
I strongly disagree with a lot of the choices here. Many pieces are left off, many don’t belong here, and many suffer without context.
Furthermore, like the best of any art form, a lot of these tracks require some explanation or context to the uninitiated or non-musician. You can enjoy them without the lesson, but you can’t fully appreciate what makes them great. A great example is Dvorak’s New World Symphony. You can listen to it and go “oh, that’s pretty.” And that’s fine. But you can read about how he wrote it after his first visit to America and became convinced that black music and native american music was the future of music. Then you can listen to the piece with an informed ear and pick up on what truly makes the piece great.
If you’d like, I’ll put together some of my favorite for you with some notes.
Missing composers:
- Liszt
- Ligeti
- Pendrecki
- Holst
- Bartók
- Gorecki
- Glass, Riley, and Reich
- Messaien
Do have collections by composer on your machine?
No, I usually have it listed by performer cause I may have, for example, the london philharmonic doing the four seasons as well as nigel kennedy doing it. I use the composer field to keep track of the composer. Though there may be a few that have the composer as the artist if I don’t know the performer.
Iiiiinteresting.
Didn’t want to give this another thread, but check this out:
The amazing Vitaly Dmitriev playing Bach’s Toccata and Fugue in D minor.
ON THE ACCORDION.
And it’s perfect.
AND OH WHAT FACES HE MAKES!
By the way, Paris, if you want to see some great intersections between math and music, read the definition of a fugue.
I cannot do the fugue.
Basically, you play your central phrase once by itself. Then you bring the phrase in again on top of itself in a dominant key. Then you just keep toying with bringing that phrase in and out or faking in and out in various adjacent keys or modalities. It’s super cool to listen to some of Bach’s fugues and realize that he just wrote, say, 8 random notes, and just applied a few formulas and came up with what he came up with.
Paris said:That joke was for Sam.I cannot do the fugue.
…..oh.
But I am happy to know about a fugue now.
I have a buttload of classical music and the tags for it are a disaster. I stopped trying to make them all match a long time ago. Some are listed by performer, some by composer, some by year, some by album, some are totally wrong…it’s ridiculous.
Also: no Liszt is a travesty. I can’t see the link because I’m at work, but I wonder if this is the collection I got a while back. Although I think that was actually 500 and not 100…
I keep meaning to clean mine up. I don’t know that I ever will. Though downloading “complete symphonic collections” and the like on what.cd is helping by allowing me to delete other uncategorized stuff.
The problem is that it’s so hard to figure out what the correct tags should be, how the hell can we know who performed what if it was tagged wrong a long time ago?
I have one song that’s got the artist listed as Beethoven, Mozart, Brahms, Bach, and someone else haha. I didn’t know those guys were in a band together.
right, hence my redownloading entire symphonic collections from reputable sources like what.cd. I just got the complete works of Ravel. It’s ver’ nahce.
I don’t have much Ravel! I recently got a Paganini collection that’s pretty awesome, although it’s got a lot of classical guitars in it that are, for lack of a better word, gay.
YOU’RE gay. I have all of Paganini’s classical guitar works and I love them.
Please tell me that’s an April Fool’s joke.
Why would it be? I play classical guitar.
Do you have a lute player to accompany you? Hahahaha oh man.
I’m sorry, I can’t listen to classical guitar without thinking of minstrels in those puffy little pants.
Rachel said:Do you have a lute player to accompany you?
I wish!