My first sudden reaction of the night was that Till Fellner’s recording of Bach’s “Well-Tempered Clavier” would make excellent for the night’s editing.
My second sudden reaction of the night had to do with the amount of classical music in my collection. In my apartment, I generally listen to music in one of two rooms: my office, where the preferred format is digital and the playback device is my computer; and my living room, where the turntable and CD changer live. All of which means that, while most of the music I have exists in multiple formats, some can only be played in one room or another. And while some of the classical music I have might be well-suited to editing, iTunes (understandably) doesn’t default to a “search by composer” mode, which can make things problematic.
Alternately: take it away, Nico Muhly:
If you listen to a lot of classical music, you know what I’m talking about: whole CD’s, with each track assigned to a different artist. It’s like, Lorraine Hunt with the orchestra of the age of whatever. Lorraine Hunt + Random Tenor + That orchestra + That Lutenist whose name I forgot. Lorraine Hunt + That Lutenist + That Oboe d’Amore-ist whose name I forgot.
Exactly.
It’s funny, I have the same problem but with hip-hop records. It’s always “Main Artist Featuring Famous Singer + Other Rapper.” Our Wu-Tang and Jay-Z albums are a disaster. (Yeah, I’m totally boring and predictable with the hip-hop.)
Heather beat me to it about having the same problem with hip hop. Every song has a different artist metadata.
Agreed. This came up most recently with the Big Boi CD — though even the Big Boi mixtape that was up on his site had some pretty labyrinthine metadata going on.
Oddly, I’m experimenting with an iTunes configuration where “Composer” replaces “Genre.” This has its own pitfalls — notably, the subtly gutter-punk name of “Johann Sebastain Bach” that came up for one album.