How many composers in your collection?

[Don]

I have a question for those with large collections. How does having several hundred composers available to listen to affect your relationship to their music? Can you evaluate, understand, or appreciate 1000 composers in the same way you do 100?

No problem - I just take them one at a time.  Lately I've been listening to the music of Boris Goltz.  Once I feel that I fully understand and appreciate his musical idiom, I'll move on to a different unfamilar composer.  Patience is the key.

[Todd]

How does having several hundred composers available to listen to affect your relationship to their music?

That's a good question.  For me, I am very interested in relatively few composers and listen to a lot of recordings of their music (Beethoven and Bartok jump immediately to mind), and I have a pretty good grasp of what I like in terms of interpretation and what the music means to me.  For "new" composers I have to go through the same process of familiarizing myself with their works that I did with my current favorites.  Sometimes they become favorites (eg, Szymanowski and Enescu several years ago, and more recently Nancarrow and Balada) and sometimes not (eg, Reger, Blitzstein, Ferneyhough).  Of course, even if a composer isn't generally my cup of tea, it often pays to try new works from them.  I may never quite get inside the music the same way, though.

[some guy]

I have a question for those with large collections. How does having several hundred composers available to listen to affect your relationship to their music? Can you evaluate, understand, or appreciate 1000 composers in the same way you do 100? Or is it just up to individual capacities? I would think that I couldn't listen to so many different composers the same way I listen to the limited number I have, which I can imagine increasing by a factor of 2 but hardly by a factor of 10.

Well, you asked several questions there, but I think I can do them all with one answer, how'd that be?

When I started out, I only knew a dozen or so, and spent the early years getting more pieces by the dozen I liked best. And each new composer would get the same treatment: me buying as many of their recordings as I could find. (I remember Nielsen and Gerhard being particularly difficult to find in the LP days.) As I discovered new composers, my interest in the older ones would diminish, but only for awhile. What I've found overall is that pretty much everything gets better the more I listen, the more people I have to listen to. The more people I like, the more people I like. (You understand that I've been using "new" to mean "new to me," though generally I have gone forward chronologically as well, being now right around today. I go to concerts of mostly world premieres, in some cases of pieces that were finished the day of the concert. And while there's a pretty sharp drop off at 2006 in my collection, I do have many privately recorded CDs of music from the past 18 months or so.)

In brief, I used to enjoy Ligeti enough to buy several CDs. But after several years of Klaus Huber and György Kurtág and Helmut Lachenmann and Chaya Czernowin, among others, I go back to Ligeti pieces I once found kind of dull and enjoy them thoroughly. And just imagine how easy and pretty Schoenberg and Carter and Boulez sound after decades of Marclay and Karkowski and Merzbow. No really. Imagine it.

[Lilas Pastia]

I think it's a question of relating a composer's idiom to a sub group, with some sub-groups part of a larger group, etc. So none comes as an entity unconnected with any other previously known composer (or genre).

[drogulus]

     some guy, your description matches up with my experience pretty well. I just can't imagine the whole process a whole order of magnitude larger unless I live to be a hundred or so and give up all other activities. That means speeding everything up, and I can't imagine doing that or wanting to. So, it seems clear that the process of comprehension and appreciation is not exactly the same for everyone. I can't begin to imagine that my recent absorption and reevaluation of Britten, a recent example, could have taken much less time than the weeks it has taken, though if I had a long waiting list of unheard recordings that might change my behavior.

     I've always bought recordings singly and listened to them immediately, though not always repeatedly. Sometimes I come back a year later, after reading something here perhaps, and begin a thorough immersion. This would indicate that the pattern of the individual just might be set with shopping and buying habits. The size of a collection may depend ultimately on whether you're the shotgun or sniper rifle type, and the listening habits follow from rather than determine what you look for.

     

No really. Imagine it.

     OT, (it's my thread ) but I never find it difficult to listen to these composers. I just note that I react differently to what I hear, and that the desire to relisten goes missing. Boulez doesn't sound ugly to me, in fact it's very much the opposite. The difference is in how (or whether) the music is retained in memory. Some kind of reconstruction goes on in the imaginative process to create the illusion of "meaning" (or meaning, if you like). Without this the music would be inaccessible to the emotional equipment used to tell you you want to hear it again.

    Alternative answer: You can't make me. 
   

[some guy]

Haha, I know I can't! Your description of your reevaluation of Britten reminds me of my experience with Sibelius back in LP days (moving along from 78s, where I started). I'd heard and liked the warhorse, Valse Triste, but a couple of other things left me completely cold. So I went to the big downtown library in Sacramento, loaded up on all their Sibelius LPs, and a week later was a big Sibelius fan.

It was a great lesson to have learned. From then on, I was never bothered if I didn't "get" something right away. Or even after repeated listenings. I knew that if it were to "click" it would click, and if it didn't, "Oh, well."

And Lilas, you articulate exactly what I had tried to do but then just gave up on. So thanks for stepping in there with that!

[gomro]

     I don't want a poll. It should include composers represented by a single work, all media inclusive. If you only know approximately, give your best estimate. I know something like this has been done before, though I don't recall seeing it. Anyway, it will be interesting to see how various peoples collections are by composer, as opposed to how many performances of the same work they have.
   
     BTW, if this is inappropriate to General Classical Music, I ask the moderator to please move it to where it belongs. Thanks.

There are 140 composers in my MP3 folder, but I'm sure you could quadruple that and not be anywhere close to the number I have on vinyl/CD. I notice, just offhandedly, that I have never ripped any Feldman, Lindberg, Takemitsu, Korte, Kupferman, Szymanowski, Kabalevsky -- well, you see what I mean. 

[Lilas Pastia]

I've never even heard of Korte and Kupferman  . But then I suppose we all have our niches of special interests. That's one of the main reasons I'm a member here. So many fascinating discoveries !!

[drogulus]

There are 140 composers in my MP3 folder, but I'm sure you could quadruple that and not be anywhere close to the number I have on vinyl/CD. I notice, just offhandedly, that I have never ripped any Feldman, Lindberg, Takemitsu, Korte, Kupferman, Szymanowski, Kabalevsky -- well, you see what I mean. 

     Soon (meaning a few months, perhaps, since I'm not in a hurry), I'll have every composer in my collection ripped to the archive, minus new acquisitions, and they will go in quickly once the backlog is finished.

     

[Dundonnell]

666. Which is actually a rather scary number

[Dundonnell]

Oh, thank goodness...it's actually 667! I have just bought a CD of orchestral music by Mikolajus Ciurlionis which I haven't yet catalogued.

Phew!

[drogulus]

   

666. Which is actually a rather scary number

     I've decided to go for 200 composers, a goal I'll never reach, so I don't have to worry about what happens if I do. 

     

Oh, thank goodness...it's actually 667! I have just bought a CD of orchestral music by Mikolajus Ciurlionis which I haven't yet catalogued.

Phew!

     The asteroid that was due to hit the Earth just blew up harmlessly.

   
     

[The new erato]

No problem - I just take them one at a time.  Lately I've been listening to the music of Boris Goltz.  Once I feel that I fully understand and appreciate his musical idiom, I'll move on to a different unfamilar composer.  Patience is the key.

Seems very similar to what I do, though I seem to have 3 - 5 simultaneously on my plate for a period of 3-4 months up to a year. Last year it has been Røntgen (as well as some explorings into Dutch music in general), Sallinen, Ligeti, d'Indy (and some other French romantics), some Schoenberg, and I feel Tippett may be coming on. Some of these I'm still exploring. I often do explore "around" a composer, that is I listen to his less known contemporary or compratiots writing in a similar idiom and find that very rewarding. I also have periods where I do unfamiliar works by a composer I know reasonably well, had a period here I bought lot of Beethovens less familiar works and listened to them.

Haven't heard of Goltz though.

[Don]

Seems very similar to what I do, though I seem to have 3 - 5 simultaneously on my plate for a period of 3-4 months up to a year. Last year it has been Røntgen (as well as some explorings into Dutch music in general), Sallinen, Ligeti, d'Indy (and some other French romantics), some Schoenberg, and I feel Tippett may be coming on. Some of these I'm still exploring. I often do explore "around" a composer, that is I listen to his less known contemporary or compratiots writing in a similar idiom and find that very rewarding. I also have periods where I do unfamiliar works by a composer I know reasonably well, had a period here I bought lot of Beethovens less familiar works and listened to them.

Haven't heard of Goltz though.

Neither had I until Music & Arts sent me a complimentary copy of a Goltz disc they will soon be releasing.

[DavidW]

Only dozens, but I might not be typical of the whole group because I've only made a small handful of cd purchases over the past couple of years.  I would prefer to discover different music by streaming radio online and save the cd purchases for music I already know that I'll love.  This is of course completely different from a couple of years ago when I was in grad school.

[karlhenning]

Berlioz, Shostakovich and Henning are the essentials, anyway, David 

[springrite]

I have no idea how many composers I have in my collection. Just this morning, I put on an Aquarius CD and, to my surprise, I have a Cambodian composer in my collection! Ung's music is very good!

[Sean]

1067

Ha ha (a joke partly on me with my dumb life).

Here're my files, once again-

http://www.box.net/shared/msy3l7zhnd

http://www.box.net/shared/isfjzp1ljy

(I have hardly any CDs today though.)

[Josquin des Prez]

I just counted my folders (all my CDs are ripped on my hard drive and sorted by composer) and it comes out to about 540, and yes, i've listened to all of them, if only briefly. Most of them are just the product of exploration. Eventually i plan of narrowing down to about less then a dozen of composers per era.

[drogulus]

     I'm not systematic, so a whole century can go by with no composer in it. I'll fill in the larger blank areas eventually.