When I noticed that I had an extra mp3 player that wasn't being used after a brief analysis I decided to load it with my favorite classical music. I didn't have a voluminous classical collection, but I had enough to keep a player full and varied so that things wouldn't get boring.
There's quite a variety of pieces in my player: chamber music, sonatas, opera excerpts, symphony excerpts (not the whole thing, never), baroque pieces, musique concrete, horn trios, etc. I've also included the early synthesizer works of Wendy Carlos, Ruth White and Daphne Oram, as well.
Formatting classical music to an mp3 player is a lot different than formatting rock or jazz tracks because some pieces go over the five minute mark. The whole point of an mp3 player is to keep the tracks brief and keep things moving, so to speak. I'd rather have the three best pieces from Mussorgsky's Pictures At An Exhibition than have the entire works. Brevity is your friend.
Some of my favorite pieces on my Longhair mp3 player include:
1. Joan of Arc At The Stake - Arthur Honegger. Imagine a German composer writing an opera about the great Joan with the libretto in French! I don't think I've ever heard an opera sung in French, and it's such a beautiful language for opera. Honegger's melodies are so gorgeous and fluid for an opera, too. This is definitely a must listen. 2. Paganini's Violin and Guitar Sonatas. Who knew Paganini wrote sonatas for guitar instead of piano? The guitar beautifully complements the wildly athletic violin passages Paganini is so notorious for composing, and the melodies are absolutely exquisite.3. Debussy's Solo Piano Pieces. I never knew Debussy lived long enough to record his own solo piano works, but yes indeed, it's there for your enjoyment and he’s quite an excellent pianist.
4. Wild episodic symphonies performed by Eugene Ormandy like the Don Quixote Suite by Richard Strauss, dramatic washes of strings like shifting dunes of sand, or Harry Janos Suite(Kodaly) with its nutty circus sounds or Lt. Kije Suite by Prokofiev, quirky carnival-like UPA cartoon show sounds.
6. Then there are the quiet woodwind and horn chamber pieces from Paul Hindemith (who even wrote a tuba sonata that's pretty wild), Johannes Brahms, and Aram Khachaturian.
7. If you liked the nightmarish, horrific music from Stanley Kubrick's film The Shining, may I suggest the works of Iannis Xenakis, Krysztof Penderecki, or Edgard Varese's dark masterpiece Deserts. Great, disturbing melodies.
8. After listening to all these works, I must confess to a fondness for French composers above the rest, composers like Maurice Ravel, Francis Poulenc, Camille Saint-Saens and Claude Debussy. They have the best feel for melody and their rhythms move much smoother then German and Russian composers. There's less rigidity and formalism in their pieces.
Anyway, beauty is in the ear of the beholder, you might find Rossini preferable to Varese or Charles Ives preferable to Bizet. But give these guys a spin, you might find yourself in the middle of the night lying in bed hearing their haunting melodies playing over and over in your head.
All artwork by the legendary Al Hirschfield.
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Two weeks ago I dreamt Jackie Kennedy drove me to a farmer's market on the corner of Pico and Robertson in a sumptuous Cadillac. The streets were filled with thousands of people milling around and shopping. Mrs. Kennedy parked in the opposite direction of traffic, and handed me a large sheaf of bills and told me in her sexy, seductive voice to get quarters for the parking meter. I looked down at the sheaf of bills and they were all hundreds. I left the car and wondered how I was going to get coins out of a hundred dollars. The rich they are a funny peoples.
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So, a website called QuoteFancy has two quotes of mine, probably culled from Goodreads, up on their site with some jazzy artwork. This is, as Frankie would say, koo-koo.
