One simple fact I find amazing about ‘classical music’ is that you really can’t exhaust it in this lifetime. You can make a dent in it, as I have, but it seems that you can’t really listen to everything that’s ever been recorded. Here’s what I mean: In my Dictionary of Composers (ed. by Charles Osborne), there are listings for about 180 composers. Assume each has five popular pieces of music to his name. By ‘popular’ I mean that you’d hear such a piece on a classical music radio station with some degree of regularity, or you can buy it on CD with a fair amount of ease, or your local philharmonic orchestra will perform it at least once every couple of years. This estimate I think is conservative; some of the major players as Bach, Mozart, and Beethoven easily have twenty or thirty or more such ‘popular’ pieces.
So, if you take the 180 composers and multiply that by 5 popular pieces per, that gives you 900 selections to choose from. Classical pieces tend to be fairly longer than contemporary music. Again, let’s be conservative and assume an average running time of 15 minutes per piece. After all, quite a few symphonies, such as those by Bruckner and Mahler, are well over an hour in length. 900 musical pieces times an average length of 15 minutes yields 13,500 minutes of listening enjoyment, or 225 hours. If your day job was simply to listen to music, eight hours a day, Monday through Friday, it would take you nearly six full weeks to get through all the ‘popular’ stuff once.
Say you really dig a particular composer. And say he really only has five ‘popular’ pieces. With a little bit of searching at your local libraries, or at online music sites, you can explore easily twenty or thirty more selections by that composer. Heck, Haydn alone wrote 104 symphonies. And you’re not going to want to listen to a piece just once. I have just under 200 CDs of classical music, a pretty good sample of the most popular stuff, I would think, as well as some eclectic pieces, and I still hear music on the radio that I jot down for future purchase. And of those 200 CDs, each has at least an hour of music, giving me 200 hours, or about five weeks’ worth of listening if I listened to everything once as a full-time job. Obviously I don't listen this way, so those 200 CDs form a good base that in reality provides a years' worth of listening without getting boring or redundant.
Some perspective? From 1963 to 1970 the Beatles released 13 studio albums – let’s say about 15 hours of music. From 1964 to 2005 the Rolling Stones released about 30 albums – perhaps 40 hours of music. Who else? Led Zeppelin, from 1969 to 2003 released 12 live and studio albums – let’s put it at 15 hours. Oh, forgot, Elvis. According to Wikipedia, the official number of albums released by the King is 71. So let’s put that at about 75 hours. If you listened to nothing but those four acts, that’s about 145 hours of listening, or, three and a half weeks doing it as a full-time job.
See what I mean about the seemingly-endless amount of classical material you have to explore? Yeah, I don’t like everything. Probably two-thirds of the stuff I do listen to on the radio or borrowed from a library I don’t really enjoy enough to buy. But the remainder are completely phenomenal, mind-blowing, shivers-producing stuff. Some of the symphonies alone of Sibelius, Dvorak, Bruckner, Beethoven, Haydn, and Brahms are worth the investment in time. Holst’s Planets, Wagner’s Ring music, Tristan und Isolde, Liszt piano work as well as his orchestrations, Charles Ives tone poems, Bizet, just about everything and anything from Tchaikovsky – again, all are well-worth your trouble. This morning I drove to my daughter's day care playing Prokofiev’s Peter and the Wolf for her, and it absolutely enraptured her as she asked one question after another. Hearing that was easily worth ten times whatever I paid for the CD.
So, if you take the 180 composers and multiply that by 5 popular pieces per, that gives you 900 selections to choose from. Classical pieces tend to be fairly longer than contemporary music. Again, let’s be conservative and assume an average running time of 15 minutes per piece. After all, quite a few symphonies, such as those by Bruckner and Mahler, are well over an hour in length. 900 musical pieces times an average length of 15 minutes yields 13,500 minutes of listening enjoyment, or 225 hours. If your day job was simply to listen to music, eight hours a day, Monday through Friday, it would take you nearly six full weeks to get through all the ‘popular’ stuff once.
Say you really dig a particular composer. And say he really only has five ‘popular’ pieces. With a little bit of searching at your local libraries, or at online music sites, you can explore easily twenty or thirty more selections by that composer. Heck, Haydn alone wrote 104 symphonies. And you’re not going to want to listen to a piece just once. I have just under 200 CDs of classical music, a pretty good sample of the most popular stuff, I would think, as well as some eclectic pieces, and I still hear music on the radio that I jot down for future purchase. And of those 200 CDs, each has at least an hour of music, giving me 200 hours, or about five weeks’ worth of listening if I listened to everything once as a full-time job. Obviously I don't listen this way, so those 200 CDs form a good base that in reality provides a years' worth of listening without getting boring or redundant.
Some perspective? From 1963 to 1970 the Beatles released 13 studio albums – let’s say about 15 hours of music. From 1964 to 2005 the Rolling Stones released about 30 albums – perhaps 40 hours of music. Who else? Led Zeppelin, from 1969 to 2003 released 12 live and studio albums – let’s put it at 15 hours. Oh, forgot, Elvis. According to Wikipedia, the official number of albums released by the King is 71. So let’s put that at about 75 hours. If you listened to nothing but those four acts, that’s about 145 hours of listening, or, three and a half weeks doing it as a full-time job.
See what I mean about the seemingly-endless amount of classical material you have to explore? Yeah, I don’t like everything. Probably two-thirds of the stuff I do listen to on the radio or borrowed from a library I don’t really enjoy enough to buy. But the remainder are completely phenomenal, mind-blowing, shivers-producing stuff. Some of the symphonies alone of Sibelius, Dvorak, Bruckner, Beethoven, Haydn, and Brahms are worth the investment in time. Holst’s Planets, Wagner’s Ring music, Tristan und Isolde, Liszt piano work as well as his orchestrations, Charles Ives tone poems, Bizet, just about everything and anything from Tchaikovsky – again, all are well-worth your trouble. This morning I drove to my daughter's day care playing Prokofiev’s Peter and the Wolf for her, and it absolutely enraptured her as she asked one question after another. Hearing that was easily worth ten times whatever I paid for the CD.
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