In the Time of Spotify, what do you do with 2,500 compact discs?
For many years I reviewed classical CDs. It was the Nineties, when CDs surged onto the market, largely propelled by remasters and reissues of great performances by the major record labels and an urge to re-record everything – for better or worse – using new digital technology. I have a set of six beautiful solid cherry CD shelves that hold just about all of them, and they line up to make a wall display of all this loot.
After moving to a new condo, the unpacking of all these CDs made me realize that many are simply life lint: Something that fell into my home and never got swept out. I held onto many simply as reference volumes to prepare for concert reviews before the days of music on demand.
As I pulled them from the boxes to arrange them on the shelves, I sat there staring at a Mahler symphony in my hands and thought, I will never play this. The time had come for the great winnowing, which also was a revelation of how my personal tastes have changed.
Out with the bombastic Romantics and late Romantics, with exceptions for the handful of works from each that I just might play again. Lie in your grave and whine to yourself, Herr Mahler. Take all the time you want in heaven, Herr Bruckner. Go be tedious among friends, Messrs. Walton and Vaughn Williams. Be as dour and cheerless as you like, Herr Brahms. Farewell to those who have suffered from overexposure: Tchaikowsky, Dvořák, Mendelssohn … and all those fringe players are the seams, from Arensky to Zemlinsky.
After the sorting, the CD cases revealed how my tastes have changed. Gentler Baroque and Renaissance sounds have replaced Romantic fever. The limber French have nudged aside the heavy-handed Austro-Germantic gang. The voice has supplanted the orchestra. When I need some energy, there’s the Modernists an d the Haydn quartets. I have found that symphony orchestras do not fit well in my house, but there’s always seating for charming chamber works from the likes of Ravel or Poulenc.
The shelves reveal my tastes of today:
- Haydn chamber works (my default)
- Bach keyboard works
- Berlioz in toto
- The Soviet giants, Prokofiev and Shostakovich
- Anything Anne Sofie von Otter has recorded, from Bartok to Weill
- Schnittke, a personal affliction of sorts
- Schuman the Human, when it’s time for some Germanic soul
- Verdi and Wagner, the twin towers of opera, when it’s time to sizzle
In truth, most of my favorite recordings are on my Spotify playlists, but the wall of CDs are sort of a life trophy … or talisman. Looking at them is reassuring.
Whenever we look through a family album of old photographs, most of us ask "Who is this?" not "Who was this?" Photographs are always present tense, and so are all the elements of life the enrich us. This blog considers music, film, books and other communications that call out to me always in the present tense.
