One of my many life goals is to be familiar with classical music. Part of this involves listening to and recognizing great works of classical music.
While I could build my collection of classical music one CD at a time at 12 bucks a pop, I have chosen instead to collect for free. To this end, I have spent several hours over the last week exploring Classic Cat, the free classical catalogue, downloading mp3’s, and organizing them within my mp3 player.
I just finished working on my collection of Bach. Johann Sebastian Bach was an incredibly prolific composer, with over 1100 works to his credit. Thanks to classiccat.net and dozens of performers who have made their recordings available online, I can listen to hundreds of those works at any time.
As of right now, I have complete collections of:
- Inventions and Sinfonias (BWV 772-801)
- Four Duets from Clavier-Ubung III (BWV 802-805)
- French Suites (BWV 812-817)
- The Well-Tempered Clavier (BWV 846-893)
- Six Little Preludes (BWV 933-938)
- Five Preludes from the collection of Johann Peter Kellner (BWV 939-943)
- The Goldberg Variations (BWV 988)
- Brandenburg Concertos (BWV 1046-1051)
That’s 106 works right there–but I have at least portions of 290 pieces.
Do you listen to classical music? There’s really no excuse not to when the music is so readily available for free. Check out Classic Cat and try some–for starters, I recommend Johann Sebastian Bach’s Brandenburg Concertos or Antonio Vivaldi’s The Four Seasons (listed as Spring, Summer, Autumn, and Winter on ClassicCat.) Try it. I think you’ll like it.
On 06.09.08 – 10:50 pm
Davene said:
I have a degree in music, so yes, I listen to classical music. :-) I do not, however, listen to as much now as I used to when I was in college! The listening room in our library was one of my very favorite places on campus. :-)
As always, I’m amazed by how ambitious you are!!!
On 06.10.08 – 7:13 pm
Rebekah said:
A degree in music? What do you play? (I’m assuming you have to play to major in it–unless there’s a purely music history major out there.)
As you can perhaps see from my list of goals, I aspire to be musical but have a long way to go–I’m currently stalled in Faber’s Level 2 piano books!