Classical Convert

Ranking Beethoven

Remember that post from Monday where I kindly provided you with a crap-load of Beethoven videos on YouTube? Well since all those videos were posted at around the same time — two years ago, yeah it took naive little ol’ me that long to find them — you can get an angle on how popular each of Beethoven’s symphonies are, relative to one another:

Rank	Symphony	Views
1.	No. 9	4426281
2.	No. 5	3914515
3.	No. 7	2769380
4.	No. 3	1292489
5.	No. 6	873106
6.	No. 4	281157
7.	No. 8	265051
8.	No. 1	238895
9.	No. 2	216598

Interestingly they seem to divide into three chunks. The big three are 9, 5 and 7, all with comparably high views of 3-4 million. Next come 3 and 7, with large but significantly less views, closer to one million. Rounding it up are the less popular four: 4, 8, 1, 2. All with less than 300,000 views each.

The top five do not surprise me — however the separation between the top three and the next two do. Especially number 6. I would have thought that would be up there with number 7. Maybe that’s because my personal ranking of the top five is: 6, 7, 5, 9, 3.

Also interestingly (but unsurprisingly) there are about four times more views for the first half of No.9 than there are for the second half. Number five is even more pronounced (eight times more!) — perhaps because most viewers just want to hear the famous beginning.

Tags: beethoven, classical music, popular, symphonies

Unbrokenup Beethoven

Now I’m not *exactly* the first to find these — 870,083 happy campers got their noses in before I did — but the novelty of full-length classical music vids has yet to wear thin. Here’s symphony No. 6 ‘Pastoral’:

And dancey No. 7:

And No. 4:

And the in-betweeney No. 8:

There are also some chopped ones:

• No. 9 (part 1, part 2)
• No. 5 (part 1, part 2)
• No. 3 (part 1, part 2)

And the two everyone kinda ignores:

• No. 1
• No. 2

Hoorah! Beethoven symphonies for everyone!

Tags: beethoven, classical music, symphonies, youtube

Terzetto

This was on NPR during one of my beloved musical-accompaniments to falling asleep on top of the duvet a few weeks ago. In the interim period between over-then and over-now it had been sitting around as a note in my phone, quickly keyboarded out before all the sleepiness slipped away. Despite a total wipe of my phone, and a huge amount of hauling and installing furniture, my little nighttime notation managed to shove itself back into attention a couple of days ago: “dvorak terzetto”.

Dvorak I’ve never been crazy about. He seems too suspiciously late romantic. This is sneakily chromatic, though. It’s got some crunchy off-key sections. It reminds me a bit of the late Beethoven quartets. It’s also got a pretty sweet name — turns out a terzetto is like a trio, except instead of the plain-salted violin/viola/cello it’s configured violin/violin/viola. Which is, uhhh, pretty awesome I guess. I was hoping for a definition involving giant metal dinosaurs or something, but two violins is cool too.

The L.A. Phil. have liner notes about the piece here. And there are like ten different version on eMusic.

Tags: classical music, dvorak, terzetto, youtube

Moved

Ok! I’ve got internet dripping off of my eyelids again. I’ve got music streaming wirelessly from the ‘office’ aka ‘north wing’ aka ‘disaster recovery zone’ into the living room, courtesy of the software titan we love to hate: Microsoft. Yeah, I’ve been a hardcore free-software lovin’ flower child for the last ten years, but now that there is an XBox sitting underneath the TV it requires about three clicks and a few wireless password entries to get everything pumped out there. It makes me feel dirty, but it works so nicely.

Unfortunately it makes you feel that MP3/Classical culture clash like BAM.

Still, we had piping hot, fresh Saint-Saens plummeting into the room during our introductory househeating meal of eggplant parmesan and freshly picked cherry pie. Good old Saint-Saens. He’s the bloke that got me into the genre. We were actually listening to the very piece that did the dirty, the 2nd piano concerto:

But the one I really like is the 4th. Anyone got any hot youtubings of that one? It’s so sparse, I love it. It’s like Shostakovich CC2 (another fave), in that there are rarely lots of groups of instruments playing at once. I remember intially thinking “what a waste of an orchestra!”, like if you’re paying ‘em all to sit there playing you wanna get the most bang for your buck. Everyone, full blast, all the time. Now I relish these unpopulated pieces. They’re pensive, cautious. The phrasing is more like equations in a quantum mechanics textbook than the bloody emissions of a sore heart.

Tags: classical music, saint-saens, streaming, xbox, youtube

Comp. Abbrev.

Yo what up! I’ve been, like, slightly in absentia recently due to retrieving G from deep within the midsts and/or mists of graduation. Now she has been plonked back in this area code for good, for now. Hoorays all round. Good job.

Despite the near weekly gap in posts, there was some vigorous commenting on my dubious abbreviation of Tchaikovsky from last Thursday’s post, in which some of the regular commenting crew (thanks dudes) shared their abbreviations. So far we have:

• Prok
• Rach
• Shosty/Shost
• Tchaik

for the Russians. Extrapolating this, does anyone use Strav? Or, errrr, Khat? Or… RimsKors? (RiKo?)

I feel like the Russians get extra special abbreviation priveleges, because their names are so syllable-heavy. And unwieldy, at least for non Cyrillic mouths. The abbreviations are actually practical, since it saves about ten minutes everytime you type or say the shortened version. So far the only (potential) non-Russian name abbreviation has been Wolfy for Mozart, which is an affectionate shortening instead of a timesaver.

So, any more meandering around out there?

Tags: abbreviations, classical music, composers, names