recording milestone
Mar. 18th, 2006 11:01 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
calimacTime for a little meaningless celebration. I've reached a small landmark in my classical music recording collection: I now have music by 1200 different composers. 1202, to be exact. How about a few superlatives and statistics?
The composer I have the most music by is Joseph Haydn, the guy in the userpic on this post. There's almost 53 hours of his music here. That's different works of music, not counting multiple recordings of the same piece. I don't collect a lot of duplicates, but for Haydn I make an exception. There's one Haydn symphony (No. 44 in E Minor, the music Haydn wanted at his funeral) of which I have eight recordings. You might think I really like it, and you'd be right.
My database only measures time down to the nearest minute, so I don't know which of 70 composers who average 1 minute apiece is the bottom of the list. Many of them are represented by snippets on samplers or anthologies. The best-known of the 70 are Vincenzo Galilei (Galileo's father) and Anton Diabelli, who's there for the little waltz he sent out to fifty composers (including Beethoven, Schubert, and Liszt) asking for piano variations on it.
There are 21 composers of whom I have ten hours or more of their music. These include the only two composers by whom I have more than one complete opera, the unlikely pair of Richard Wagner and Arthur Sullivan. The other 19, in rough chronological order, are: Bach, Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert, Mendelssohn, Schumann, Bruckner, Brahms, Dvorak, Tchaikovsky, Carl Nielsen, Vaughan Williams, Prokofiev, Shostakovich, Henry Cowell, Alan Hovhaness, Malcolm Arnold, and Philip Glass. A fair summary of my tastes and their willful departure from scholarly consensus on 20th century greatness. There's another 215 composers of whom I have more than one hour.
Of my 1202 composers, 258 have written 864 different symphonies that I have recordings of.
230 of the composers are now living, so far as I know. Another 276 lived during part of my lifetime.
The earliest composer on the list is Euripides. Yes, I know. But I have this scholarly anthology set which begins with a stark little piece that claims to be a chorus from the Orestes of Euripides. The most recently born composer is an Italian, Daniele Gasparini, born in 1975, one of whose works is on the Masterprize 1998 disc.
Subdivided by the century in which they did most of their work which I have, I have 8 composers predating the 13th century, 12 from the 13th, 11 from the 14th, 25 from the 15th, 105 from the 16th, 88 from the 17th, 119 from the 18th, 221 from the 19th, 606 from the 20th, and so far 7 whose work that I have is from the 21st. So with over half my composers dating from within the last century or so, I'm pretty up to date by classical standards.
Subdivision by country is harder, partly because so many composers are native to one country but spent their careers in another. (Is Handel German, English, or perhaps Italian? I put him with the English.) And some countries demand to be lumped together. Very roughly, I have 206 British composers, 43 from the Low Countries, 127 French, 34 from Spain or Portugal, 123 Italians, 162 from German-speaking countries, 67 from various parts of Eastern Europe (mostly Czechs), 59 from Russia and its eastern ex-dependencies, 73 Scandinavians and Balts (the largest number Swedes and Danes), 239 Americans, 11 Canadians, 13 Latin Americans, 11 Aussies and Kiwis, 16 from East Asia (mostly Japanese), 10 Israelis, and the 7 composers on Kronos's Pieces of Africa CD. Using modern boundaries, a total of 29 European nations are represented, and 22 outside of it, if I've counted up correctly. The only European nations unrepresented are Bulgaria, Albania, Turkey (if that's in Europe), 4 of the Yugoslav successor states, Belarus, Moldava, Luxembourg, and the microstates. Yes, I have composers from Iceland and Lithuania, and they weren't all that easy to find, either. Maybe I should try to fill in the gaps. I know of a composer from Liechtenstein on record, I just don't have any music by him.
I haven't kept track of the number of women composers, but a quick count reveals 40 whom I know to be female. Half of these are living. Musical genius is rare enough, and needs enough of a favorable training environment to emerge, that I'm convinced that lack of opportunity is what suppressed female compositional genius in the past. Those few women who did manage to get through the gauntlet were, alas, mostly not very good. But sexism pushed down harder than genius could rise. In the last half-century or so it's been very different, and there's lots of great women composers out there. My most-collected are Ellen Taaffe Zwilich, Elizabeth Maconchy, and Stefania de Kenessey.
The composer I have the most music by is Joseph Haydn, the guy in the userpic on this post. There's almost 53 hours of his music here. That's different works of music, not counting multiple recordings of the same piece. I don't collect a lot of duplicates, but for Haydn I make an exception. There's one Haydn symphony (No. 44 in E Minor, the music Haydn wanted at his funeral) of which I have eight recordings. You might think I really like it, and you'd be right.
My database only measures time down to the nearest minute, so I don't know which of 70 composers who average 1 minute apiece is the bottom of the list. Many of them are represented by snippets on samplers or anthologies. The best-known of the 70 are Vincenzo Galilei (Galileo's father) and Anton Diabelli, who's there for the little waltz he sent out to fifty composers (including Beethoven, Schubert, and Liszt) asking for piano variations on it.
There are 21 composers of whom I have ten hours or more of their music. These include the only two composers by whom I have more than one complete opera, the unlikely pair of Richard Wagner and Arthur Sullivan. The other 19, in rough chronological order, are: Bach, Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert, Mendelssohn, Schumann, Bruckner, Brahms, Dvorak, Tchaikovsky, Carl Nielsen, Vaughan Williams, Prokofiev, Shostakovich, Henry Cowell, Alan Hovhaness, Malcolm Arnold, and Philip Glass. A fair summary of my tastes and their willful departure from scholarly consensus on 20th century greatness. There's another 215 composers of whom I have more than one hour.
Of my 1202 composers, 258 have written 864 different symphonies that I have recordings of.
230 of the composers are now living, so far as I know. Another 276 lived during part of my lifetime.
The earliest composer on the list is Euripides. Yes, I know. But I have this scholarly anthology set which begins with a stark little piece that claims to be a chorus from the Orestes of Euripides. The most recently born composer is an Italian, Daniele Gasparini, born in 1975, one of whose works is on the Masterprize 1998 disc.
Subdivided by the century in which they did most of their work which I have, I have 8 composers predating the 13th century, 12 from the 13th, 11 from the 14th, 25 from the 15th, 105 from the 16th, 88 from the 17th, 119 from the 18th, 221 from the 19th, 606 from the 20th, and so far 7 whose work that I have is from the 21st. So with over half my composers dating from within the last century or so, I'm pretty up to date by classical standards.
Subdivision by country is harder, partly because so many composers are native to one country but spent their careers in another. (Is Handel German, English, or perhaps Italian? I put him with the English.) And some countries demand to be lumped together. Very roughly, I have 206 British composers, 43 from the Low Countries, 127 French, 34 from Spain or Portugal, 123 Italians, 162 from German-speaking countries, 67 from various parts of Eastern Europe (mostly Czechs), 59 from Russia and its eastern ex-dependencies, 73 Scandinavians and Balts (the largest number Swedes and Danes), 239 Americans, 11 Canadians, 13 Latin Americans, 11 Aussies and Kiwis, 16 from East Asia (mostly Japanese), 10 Israelis, and the 7 composers on Kronos's Pieces of Africa CD. Using modern boundaries, a total of 29 European nations are represented, and 22 outside of it, if I've counted up correctly. The only European nations unrepresented are Bulgaria, Albania, Turkey (if that's in Europe), 4 of the Yugoslav successor states, Belarus, Moldava, Luxembourg, and the microstates. Yes, I have composers from Iceland and Lithuania, and they weren't all that easy to find, either. Maybe I should try to fill in the gaps. I know of a composer from Liechtenstein on record, I just don't have any music by him.
I haven't kept track of the number of women composers, but a quick count reveals 40 whom I know to be female. Half of these are living. Musical genius is rare enough, and needs enough of a favorable training environment to emerge, that I'm convinced that lack of opportunity is what suppressed female compositional genius in the past. Those few women who did manage to get through the gauntlet were, alas, mostly not very good. But sexism pushed down harder than genius could rise. In the last half-century or so it's been very different, and there's lots of great women composers out there. My most-collected are Ellen Taaffe Zwilich, Elizabeth Maconchy, and Stefania de Kenessey.
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no subject
Date: 2006-03-18 09:05 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-03-19 12:32 am (UTC)That is a lot of music! In an area that I am nearly completely ignorant about. I keep telling myself that I need to learn more about classical music, but I am so biased in favor of voice and interesting lyrics that I keep avoiding it.
no subject
Date: 2006-03-19 02:43 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-03-19 02:44 pm (UTC)Hary Janos
Date: 2006-03-19 03:41 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-03-19 03:47 pm (UTC)But the great art song writers - Schumann, Schubert, Brahms, and Wolf - are a good place to start. By musical theatre standards, their masterpieces are character songs - the Soliloquy in "Carousel" more closely approaches the feel of art song than any other classic musical theatre song I can think of - and if you listen to them from that perspective it may reach you.
Or, you could just go talk to Leslie. Classical vocal music is her field.
Re: Hary Janos
Date: 2006-03-19 04:32 pm (UTC)In brief, the opera is a story told by an old bum about how he, Hary Janos, single-handedly defeated Napoleon and saved Hungary. The recruiting song, "Toborzo," is my favorite number. Note that as the story begins, there's an orchestral rendition of a sneeze, which denotes that the story you are about to hear is absolutely true.
I'd love to see a production of it.