a musical list

[calimac]

A post on Swedish and Finnish food over at athenais's mutated in comments (my fault) into attempts to list Scandinavian and Nordic composers, and inspired me to dig into my recordings database and see how many composers from different countries I have music by.

My definition of country is a bit ad-hoc (I list all the British nations separately), and I tend to class composers by where they spent their adult careers rather than, as most music encyclopedias do, by their land of nativity, but here's the list, with a few of my particular favorites from the more popular countries:

284: U.S. (Copland, Cowell, Hovhaness, Glass)
187: England (Vaughan Williams, Arnold, Sullivan)
133: Italy (Vivaldi, Respighi – no, I don’t like Italian opera much; why do you ask?)
127: France (Saint-Saëns, Ravel, Poulenc)
96: Germany (Bach, Schumann, Mendelssohn)
68: Austria (the king of musical countries: Haydn [the guy in my icon], Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert, Brahms, and Bruckner)
53: Russia (Shostakovich, Prokofiev, Tchaikovsky)
36: Czech Republic (Dvorak, Janacek, Martinu)
33: Spain (Boccherini, Scarlatti: yes, I know they were born in Italy, but they lived & wrote in Spain)
24: Belgium (Susato)
21: Sweden (Atterberg, Berwald)
19: Denmark (Nielsen, Gade), Netherlands (Dopper)
17: Finland (Sibelius, Sallinen)
14: Canada, Hungary, Japan, Scotland
12: Poland
11: Israel
8: Australia
7: African countries (total), Ireland, Norway
6: Mexico, New Zealand, Switzerland
5: Argentina, Estonia, Wales
4: China, Greece
3: Georgia, Latvia, Ukraine
2: Armenia, Iceland, Lithuania, Romania
1: Belarus, Brazil, Chile, Cuba, Korea, Luxembourg, Portugal, Serbia, Slovenia

Comments

[athenais.livejournal.com]

I am thoroughly enjoying the thread in both musical and food direction! Anyway, I thought it was funny that you said you tend to like either the music or the food of a country. I've never found that to be true for myself.

I have a list of the music on my iTunes at www.lucyhuntzinger.com, and that is as close as I come to any sort of database of my owned music. I never replaced most of my records, which were largely classical, when the prevailing media went to cassettes, and I still own only 100 or so CDs, mostly pop music. I played the living daylights out of my lps, so there was no point in keeping a record player, for me. I'm sure you've always taken good care of your records.

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

I think the music-food dichotomy occurred to me at one of two points:

1) while I was enjoying dinner in a New Orleans creole (what's usually called "cajun", if incorrectly) restaurant - one of my favorite cuisines in all the world - while having miserably to listen to the affiliated music, which I detest; or

2) while wallowing blissfully in damp, depressing Russian music, when suddenly to my mind comes the image of a bowl of borsht.