My (Non)Classical Music and the Future of Poppy Pop
July 7th, 2007 Posted in classical music
Since I spent a good proportion of the first section of my life not really listening to classical music at all, I have a pretty decent chunk of my music collection devoted to that genre. Well it’s not really a genre is it, kind of more a genre-absence or something. You know what I mean though. Lets see how much classical versus non-classical I have:
“Classical” = 20 Gigabytes
“Modern” (well, I had to come up with some kind of directory name) = 18 Gigabytes
I’ve managed to amass more classical music in the last three years than I managed to collect non-classical in the previous 10 years. I’m doing pretty well, I reckon. It’s reassuring, exciting and slightly intimidating that I still have a reasonably long time to discover all kinds of musical gems over the rest of my life. I want to be able to identify every movement of every reasonably major work of every reasonably major composer. Not too big a goal is it?
I think it’s easier to build up classical quicker than non-classical though, as every CD I get is pretty much filled up right to the brim with quality music, whereas tonnes of the Non-C (saying non-classical all the time is so bloody unwieldy) CD’s are around 50 minutes or so in length, and a good proportion of those 50 minutes ain’t that great.
That’s a big difference for me between C and Non-C music, with the former you frequently get 4o minutes of engaging, ten-out-of-ten music, whereas that hardly ever happens with the latter. I’d have trouble thinking of ten non-C albums which I think are universally superb – which I would regularly be happy to listen all the way through to.
Maybe that”s a reason why the CD selling industry is dying a slow death. Instead of people being obliged to buy albums crammed full of filler just because they want the two decent singles which bracket all that rubbish, people now can download those two singles online. I doubt it’ll be too long before the poppiest popstars purely release online singles, and don’t bother with albums at all anymore.
