Fun with my iPod

[jwinter]

Greetings to all!  Life has been busy with kids and work over the past few months, so not much time for posting.

After my old Creative MP3 player died, I recently acquired one of the new 160 gig iPods, and have been happily geeking out by transferring and listening to lots of old CDs, classical, pop, blues & otherwise.  A marvelous contraption for taking full advantage of a big CD collection (plus you can even watch cartoons on it, so life is doubly good!).

A game that I've been playing for about a week now is "Name That Piano Trio."  Piano trios have always been my favorite sub-genre of chamber music -- there's just something about the easy interplay between piano-violin-cello that appeals to me; more possibilities than a straightforward piano sonata, easier to follow (to these ears) than a string quartet, quintet, etc.  Over the years I've amassed piano trio recordings from many composers (Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, Mendelssohn, Brahms, Schubert, Schumann, Dvorak, Rachmaninov, Shostakovich, must be others I'm forgetting).  (A huge percentage of those are from the Beaux Arts Trio, BTW, as close to a sure thing in music as I've ever come across).

Anyway, I've plopped all of my piano trios into a playlist and shuffled all the movements as background music while I work and do other things, and have had great fun trying to guess the composer (and in a few cases the work, but I'm not that good yet) within the first few bars.  I'm finding it to be a simple yet highly effective way to contrast the various composers.  It's instructive to see how each approaches the same forces, and while sometimes the choice is obvious, at times I've been pleasantly surprised at how wrong I can be (pleasantly surprised because it generally means that whatever stylistic assumptions I've made about a composer are incorrect, or at least not universal, which means that there are still great musical riches out there yet to be explored).  Oddly enough, the one I get wrong most frequently is Haydn -- he will frequently conjure up a melody that makes me think of the romantics like Schubert or even Schumann.

I've also greatly enjoyed mixing up the music of Chopin in a similar way.  Listening to 2 discs of Nocturnes straight through can be a bit wearisome (more so depending on who's playing, but I digress).  But by putting all of those nocturnes, mazurkas, etudes, etc. into a playlist and shuffling, it's like having a never-ending recital at one's fingertips.  The short pieces contrast with each other much more effectively across genres than within, imo.

Has anyone else had a similar experience, where having your music on an iPod, computer, etc., has allowed you to enjoy it in different ways from conventional CDs, records, etc.?

[karlhenning]

Fabulous to have you back in the fold, jwinter! Let the fatted clam be chowdered! 

[jwinter]

Thankee kindlee, Karl!

[Cato]

Looks like a great way to play Name That Tune!

Enjoying music in new ways: once, decades ago, under the influence of a good 4 bottles of Barq's red pop, a friend and I played dueling record players, with one playing Wagner's Ride of the Valkyries and the other tolling Tchaikovsky's 1812 Overture.

If we had published this, we could have become the mavens of the Experimental Music Scene of Upper Dayton View.  Classical cuties with heavy bank accounts would have fawned over our creativity.  

Unfortunately, everything remained subjunctive, mainly because the expectation exceeded the result!

[Brian]

Yes indeed! I love using iPod playlists. I have one of all music for string orchestra, a "piano album" of obscure music I wanted to introduce my pianist friends to, and all sorts of other things. Once I put the thing on "shuffle" and got 70s pop, Beethoven, and Arab folk music all in a row. The juxtaposition sounds weird but in practice makes each piece really stand out.

You're right indeed about Chopin as well...

[Kullervo]

I listen to all my music on the iPod (my computer makes too much noise, so I turn it off). Often if I don't feel like listening to an entire CD I will listen to pieces by a composer from various discs, or will mix pieces from different composers. I never use shuffle, though.

[Gurn Blanston]

My version of this is to make huge playlists (up to 800 tracks). WinAMP shows my files (about 22,000) in alphabetical order by performer, so I make a playlist of A - B, C - E, &c. I never choose more than one work from any "album", so the variety is tremendous. Like right now, it is the Stravinski "Petrouchka" by the Montrealers, next is Prokofiev "Lt. Kije" also by the Montrealers, but from a different album, and then Rachmaninov Piano Trio by the Moscow Rach Trio. After that, some Corelli, Mozart & Händel. This has the great advantage of having me play stuff that i haven't thought about in a while, and I even found some that I hadn't listened to at all yet!   

(I can't do the shuffle thing though, it upsets me...



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Now playing: Montreal SO / Dutoit - Stravinsky Pétrouchka Pt 1

[12tone.]

I heard Ipods have a mind-control device inside 

[mahlertitan]

You know, a little off topic here, but i thought that you would want to know this. There is a mp4 player, made in China that plays "APE" formats as well as "Flac" or other formats. I never used it, and just recently discovered it.

here:
http://youtube.com/watch?v=gocttaE6ZYk

http://www.dapsta.com/oppo/oppo-v5-luna/prod_4.html