Classical Intros on 8tracks

I suddenly developed a desire to produce single-composer samplers of about 90-100 minutes' duration and inflict them on the world in the form of 8tracks mixes. So far there's a couple each for Beethoven and Mozart, and also some for Bach, Schubert, Brahms, Debussy, Mahler and Sibelius. You can find them on my profile page. Those are the composers that informally top the list of favourite composers from my TalkClassical polls, of which I have said nothing on this blog. I really should do a set of posts on those polls, shouldn't I, but in the meantime some findings are here.

So far, after a few weeks, the 8tracks nixes haven't quite set the world on fire - not quite the right audience, really - but I'm intrigued to find that Mahler's had the most plays and likes (25 and 5, respectively). Are people specifically looking for Mahler, or was it the "symphony" tag that did it? I've added that tag to the unsuccessful Sibelius mix (1 play, 1 like!) to see if that makes a difference. More mixes to come, hopefully.

In a post about 20 months ago, I examined the success or otherwise of the mixes accompanying my (alas, currently dead-in-the-water) History of Classical Music through Recordings. It seems like a good idea to see where things stand now:

The October 2014 listens/likes in parentheses are followed by the July 2016 figures.

Part 1. Gregorian chant - (2,971 / 211) - 4,002 /250
Part 2. From chant to polyphony - (1,227 / 126) - 1,812 / 167
Part 3. Troubadours and trouvères - (464 / 56) - 771 / 76
Part 4. Troubadour influences - (243 / 27) - 328 / 38
Part 5. The 13th-century motet - (432 / 38) - 915 / 55
Part 6. Ars nova - (1,478 / 74) - 1,953 / 95
Part 7. Trecento Italy - (1,745 / 108) - 2,392 / 147
Part 8. Medieval England - (447 / 44) - 576 / 49

Part 9. The Burgundian school - (205 / 10) - 271 / 21

Part 10. Into the Renaissance (not done) - 1,015 / 38

The final mix has done well; again, maybe a tagging issue? Fascinating how parts 4 and 9 in particular have fared so poorly relative to the others.

What the kids are listening to these days

Astonishingly, I might have a new chapter in A History of Classical Music through Recordings pretty soon, so I thought I'd have a look on 8tracks and see who's been listening to the various mixes I've posted there. http://8tracks.com/nereffid if you don't know already. Obviously the first ones have been there longer so have had more exposure, but it's interesting to see the stats:

Part 1. Gregorian chant - 2,971 listens - 211 likes
Part 2. From chant to polyphony - 1,227 listens - 126 likes
Part 3. Troubadours and trouvères - 464 listens - 56 likes
Part 4. Troubadour influences - 243 listens - 27 likes
Part 5. The 13th-century motet - 432 listens - 38 likes
Part 6. Ars nova - 1,478 listens - 74 likes
Part 7. Trecento Italy - 1,745 listens - 108 likes
Part 8. Medieval England - 447 listens - 44 likes

Part 9. The Burgundian school - 205 listens - 10 likes

It's not surprising that Gregorian chant should prove the most popular - chillout music, study music, etc - though the fact that the following chapter is so much less popular suggests that many listeners don't bother exploring further after they've found this one mix they like. Similarly with the troubadours and their influences. But why do the Ars nova and Trecento Italy get so many plays? Perhaps it's the fact that "France" and "Italy" are tags?

The next chapter is titled "Into the Renaissance", so there may well be a whole new audience!

8tracks mix: Trecento Italy

At last I near the end of chapter 7 of A History of Classical Music through Recordings, which should appear on Music is Good soon. Here's the accompanying 8tracks mix.

Trecento Italy from nereffid on 8tracks Radio.

An Ars nova mix

Ars nova from nereffid on 8tracks.

Again I'm going to use A History of Classical Music through Recordings as my excuse for not blogging. This latest one took about a month - three days of good ideas, followed by two weeks of absolutely nothing, followed by a week of hard work. The post isn't up on musicisgood.org yet.

"A History of Classical Music...": progress report

The main reason I don't post much here anymore is that I'm spending my writing-about-classical-music time on A History of Classical Music through Recordings, part 5 of which should be up soon. So I'm not even going to promise a series of witty and insightful posts about the upcoming "Maestro at the Opera" or whatever it's called. However, let me interject at this point that the 4 minutes of Young Musician of the Year that I've seen so far made me want to set fire to someone at the BBC. Not everything has to be done like X Factor, for crying out loud. You don't need dramatic underscoring and dramatic editing of the judges' deliberations, in fact you don't need to turn it into a drama at all because this is a showcase for bright and enthusiastic young people with musical talent, not the fucking Hunger Games. In a word: Gaahh!

Where was I? Oh yes. It turns out people have been composing music for literally hundreds of years and apparently it's now possible to examine individual aspects of this activity and discuss them in an average of 1,200 words so that other people can read about them. And you can also create 8tracks mixes for each one, which gives me an excuse for a blog post:

Unsurprisingly, the Gregorian Chant one has had the most listens. How will the Ars Nova fare, I wonder? That'll be Part 6, before we move on to trecento Italy, then England, then back to Burgundy... According to the current plan, Part 22 will see the beginning of the Baroque period. After that - well, I won't get to that point for another year or so. Plenty of time to struggle with how much Bach to include. In the introduction to my history I noted that chronologically based beginner's guides tend to rush through medieval and Renaissance music, one example being 1001 Classical Recordings You Must Hear Before You Die, which devoted just 26 recordings to pre-17th-century music. I'm hoping to have 110 or thereabouts. I won't stretch to 1,000 by the end - in fact I don't know how many I'll have. Maybe 300, maybe 500. In terms of number of chapters the structure I've devised so far keeps approximate pace with one of my models, the Canadian radio series Music and Western Man, which would mean that the year 1600 isn't far from the halfway mark; the Norton A History of Western Music would put it about one-third of the way along, whereas for Richard Taruskin's Oxford History of Western Music it represents only about one-fifth of the journey. Either way, by trying to offer some sort of equal-time approach across all of musical history I'll have some interesting challenges ahead as I move from a situation where I'm focusing on finding important but little-known music to include, to one where I have to decide what well-known music to ignore. Or, to put it another way, the 13th-century Carmina Burana has been included, but should I bother with Carl Orff's much more famous version?

8tracks mix: Nereffid's Guide Awards 2011

Here's a single mix created on 8tracks: one track from each of the 16 category winners.

Nereffid's Guide Awards 2011 from nereffid on 8tracks.

8tracks mix: Awards 2010, part VII

November? Seriously? Ah well, here it is at last - the two Living Composer categories. Refresh your memory of the awards here. Now sit tight and wait for the 2011 awards!

8tracks mix: Awards 2010, part VI

8tracks has been screwing around with its embedding process again, it seems. Anyway, here's the Opera and Opera Recital winners and runners-up from way back in January.

8tracks mix: Awards 2010, part V

You never know, I might get these done in time for next year's awards.

This is the Solo Vocal and Choral categories - same as before, one winner and four runners-up in each.

8tracks mixes: Awards 2010, parts III & IV

At last! Here's the Concerto, Symphony, and Orchestral winners and runners-up, split between two 8-track mixes. As a bonus (well, OK, as a way of making up 16 tracks from 15 albums) there's an extra Gershwin track thrown in.

8tracks mix: Awards 2010, part II

Here's the second selection of winners and runners-up in the Nereffid's Guide Awards, this time from the Solo instrumental and Chamber categories.



(side note: I have 21 followers on 8tracks now - yay!)

8tracks mix: Awards 2010, part I

Here's the first of six planned mixes covering all the winners and runners-up from this year's Nereffid's Guide Awards. This one covers the Medieval/Renaissance, Baroque Instrumental, and Baroque Vocal categories. Your first listen, before it becomes randomized, follows the order of albums as they're listed in the blog entries below.

8tracks mixes: Celebrating Hyperion

Here are two 8tracks mixes: 20 selections from some of my favourite Hyperion albums.





Hmmm... 8tracks has changed the appearance of its embedded player. Doesn't look so nice, does it?

Wilhelm Friedemann Bach

It's never easy being the eldest son of a genius. Just ask Julian Lennon or Barry Einstein. The very first thing you need to know about Wilhelm Friedemann Bach, even before you know his dates (1710-1784), is that he was Sebastian's favourite and that he didn't seem to have the temperament to live up to his father's expectations. Well, how would you feel if when you were twelve, your dad composed the first book of The Well-Tempered Clavier for you? The long and the short of it is that Friedemann never proved as successful as he could have been, having trouble keeping jobs, and he died in poverty, having already sold off his share of Sebastian's inheritance. I think in terms of familiarity he'd rank third among the Bach sons - after Emanuel and Johann Christian but before... uh... Zeppo... But musically, where does he sit? It's hard to say. I mean, any expert will tell you it's hard to say. Sometimes he's definitely a Baroque composer, sometimes a Classical one - within the space of a single composition, indeed. Is this why he's harder to get a handle on than his better-known and more easily characterized brothers? Does his wavering between two styles reflect his personality - honouring his father's legacy while also trying to escape it? To find out, you should see the movie Cry Friedemann, starring Roy Scheider.

So, to the naive Nereffidian ear, what does Friedemann's music sound like? You know what, it sounds like a mix of Baroque and Classical. For every cantata aria that could have been swiped from one of Sebastian's lesser-known works, there's a slightly unsettling Empfindsamkeit keyboard fantasia (see! I know big musicology words!). Most intriguing of all is the first of the 12 Polonaises, which has a certain swing to it and sounds for all the world like it was written by a late-20th-century composer with a love of jazz who decided to write a Baroque pastiche. By and large I find the best of Friedemann's work in the keyboard music, though overall his music can be likened to the proverbial box of chocolates.
If I were to suggest just one album of WF, I would pick two: Maude Gratton on harpsichord (Mirare) and Anthony Spiri on a Steinway (Oehms). Both play a selection of fantasias, sonatas, and fugues, while Gratton also throws in a handful of polonaises.
Listen for yourself: here's an 8tracks mix containing 12 highlights from the albums I've been listening to over the past week.

An introduction to Ernö Dohnányi

For the last ten days or so I've been listening to a lot of the music of Hungarian composer Ernö Dohnányi, the 50th anniversary of whose death fell this month. He's not an especially well-recorded composer; ArkivMusic lists 145 recordings (compared with, say, 222 for Delius, 301 for Dowland, and 1,742 for Dvorak). All I'd heard of him was the Variations on a Nursery Song for piano and orchestra, which has the most hilariously anti-climactic entry by the soloist, and a couple of solo piano pieces. So, with his anniversary, I decided it was time to take a proper listen. This is an opportunity that rarely arises - we build up our knowledge, and our music collections, in a haphazard way most of the time, so it's unusual to have the chance to immerse yourself in the works of a hitherto unknown composer.
Born in 1877, Dohnányi first made an impact aged 18 with his first piano quintet, which was admired by Brahms, and he was one of the finest pianists of his day. He was chief conductor of the Budapest Philharmonic for 25 years and director of the Budapest Academy from 1934 to 1941, when he resigned over government anti-Semitism. After the war, he fell foul of the communists, and he moved to the U.S.
I suppose you could call him a conservative composer, or at least not a ground-breaker. Bartók, whose music he championed, was only 4 years his junior but you'd never confuse the two. Having listened to quite a bit of Dohnányi's chamber and orchestral music now, I can say I enjoyed it without ever being blown away by it. But given my general tastes, that's not surprising. I certainly found enough fine music to easily compile an hour-and-a-half 8tracks mix, which is I suppose all that any composer can ask from posterity - I'm being facetious, but you know what I mean, don't you? Some composers, for various reasons, fall by the wayside, and I think a great way of getting them (back) into our consciousness is the well-put-together compilation album.

8tracks mix: Nereffid's Guide Awards 2009

Here's two mixes, each 8 tracks long, with highlights from each of the 14 Nereffid's Guide Award winners. Wait a second, Nereffid! I hear you bellow. Twice 8 is 16, not 14! Well done, this is absolutely correct. There's two from the "NMC Songbook" seeing as they're so short, and two also from Bernstein's Mass, seeing as it's the Recording of the Year.

Part 1 covers Chamber, Living Composer - Vocal, Baroque - Instrumental, Opera, Choral, Concerto, and Medieval/Renaissance.


Part 2 covers Orchestral, Opera Recital, Solo Instrumental, Solo Vocal, Living Composer - Instrumental, Baroque - Vocal, and Symphony, and ends with the Recording of the Year.

8tracks mix: Les Introuvables de Nereffid #3

11 tracks, 50 minutes.
I discovered that it's a nuisance forgetting what's in these mixes, so I'm including a track list this time - in the comments.

8tracks mix: Les Introuvables de Nereffid #2

Here's the latest 10-track mix from 8tracks, if you follow me. This doesn't just include music from "This week I listened to" - there's a couple of tracks from that Classic CD cover disc I wrote about, and, why, there might be some Hans Hotter in there as well.

This one's nearly an hour long. Enjoy!

8tracks mix: Les Introuvables de Nereffid #1

I've been experiencing the joys of 8tracks, a "mixtape" site that allows you to create and listen to user playlists. It's all free and legal, and a great way for me to make public some of the music I've been posting about here. What I'm going to do is, every few weeks I'll create a new 10-track playlist based on the most recent things I've been listening to.
Now, 8tracks has to jump through various hoops to make things legal, such as no mention of the actual tracks in the playlist before you hear them, and a limit on the number of times you can skip to the next track. This is all fair enough. In that spirit I won't give a detailed playlist here either - hey, it's part of the fun of being DJ'd to. To get a reasonable idea of what's in the playlist, all you need to do is look back over the blog. The last couple of weeks' music aren't in this mix - wait till the next one!
The runtime's not much over 40 minutes.