Saturday, June 12, 2010

THE CLASSICAL

I got this in the mail today.


Ten symphonies (and, apparently, some kind of lecture on Mahler) spread across a dozen discs. It was a pretty spur-of-the-moment purchase. I don't know much about Mahler, or classical music in general. I own very little of it:

- a complete set of Beethoven string quartets
- A few pieces by Morton Feldman (Symphony No. 2, Complete Works for Violin and Piano, Piano and String Quartet, For Bunita Marcus, Trio)
- Mozart's Requiem
- Goreçki's Symphony No. 3
- Bartok's string quartets
- Bach's Brandenburg Concertos
- some Elliott Carter (his first four string quartets, and a Nonesuch box compiling a bunch of stuff)
- Philip Glass's Koyaanisqatsi, Music for 12 Musicians, and Music with Moving Parts
- the Steve Reich box Phases

...and that's about it. Compare that list to the hundreds of rock, jazz, and metal albums I have, and it looks kinda pitiful. I feel a bit like a clownish dilettante looking at it. But it's not like I've been consciously avoiding classical. I've just had other music occupying my time, a lot of which I actually get paid to listen to, something that's extremely unlikely to ever happen where classical is concerned.

So anyway, I've got a pile of Mahler to listen to. I think I'm gonna wait till July, when some of my more pressing deadlines will have passed, and start digging in then.

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