As I write this, I've long been aware of the virtual explosion of 20th century classical music from the time period when I first catalogued the compositions/albums that I had, and realized that I hadn't even scratched the surface of the body of 20th century classical compositions, and the similar explosion in the number of noted classical composers.
One way to visualize this explosion is to first look at the number of
pre-20th century composers (perhaps a list of 200-300 names) that I posted earlier in
#10, and then begin to scroll down the
list of 20th century composers. That latter list is over 3300+ names in length(...!...).
I don't know about you, but I have to say that I only own a
very small fraction of that list of 3300 (i.e., at least one composition by each named composer), perhaps 0.5 percent of the composers listed, or less.
This becomes a problem when trying to catalog physical discs on the shelf. What I've done is to group this 20th century music by approximate date of composition, and within that group, the approximate schools of style (e.g., impressionistic, neoclassical, atonal/12-tone, and post-romantic, etc., etc.). This is the only way that I see to arrange discs on a shelf.
But having an app-based player that can sort instantly (
#16) in many different formats, by genre (classical, of course, for this thread), date of album, date of composition (if I wanted to fill in those DB fields), performing artist(s), makes the job of sorting trivial.
I find that this classical body of music is so overwhelming in size (more than I could listen to in the remainder of my life) that I've stopped trying to systematically fill in my library for the different musical periods and schools of compositional style, and just began to follow my nose, so to speak.
One other point I should mention:
As I upgraded the fidelity of
my playback setup over time, my tastes in music began to expand. In particular, I found that as I systematically reduced the phase growth in each of my loudspeakers,
my interest in 19th and 20th century classical music began to come into its own. While I always enjoyed the music of these time periods in live performance (as a music major at University), I found that recordings of these musical periods would immediately lose my attention.
But once
I found the sensitivity of my listening preferences to phase distortion (strangely), I found that I could now put on hi-fi albums of 19th-20th century orchestral recordings, and then couldn't walk away or stop listening until the entire album was finished.
Perhaps you have experienced this sort of phenomenon in your listening preferences, but I was not aware of this phenomenon until it actually occurred in my listening room for the first time.
YMMV.
Chris
