# approximately how much you listen to composers?



## jani (Jun 15, 2012)

So how much approximately how much you listen to composers?
For me its 70% Beethoven and 28% of other big name composers like Bach,Mozart, Tchaicovsky and Sibelius and the rest two percent is works by not so known composers.


----------



## PetrB (Feb 28, 2012)

I rarely dip into the common practice repertoire these days, but I am of an age closer to antique than you, I know.

What I listen to primarily, and this is the bulk in a very high percentile, is 20th century and newer contemporary, and a bit at the other end of that spectrum, baroque (not Bach or Vivaldi) and earlier repertoire.

I do still opt for Mozart and Handel at times.

I don't know how many times I've listened to (and / or followed with score) the Beethoven symphonies, quartets. As a pianist, I had learned several of the Beethoven sonatas, at least one of the Concerti (the fuzzy memory showing just how long ago it has been but have read through and played through them all more times than I care to count. [Add: ditto Bach keyboard partitas and WTC I & II; Mozart sonatas, fantasias, concerti, Chopin, etc.]

I've never cared for Tchaikovsky, Sibelius, etc. (with all due respect and admiration) and whether deliberate or by a happenstance tuning into my local classical FM, have kind of had my fill of the later romantics as well, with Mahler an exception.

But maybe this listening profile is not so startling a set of preferences after a lifetime of study, being in and studiously listening to classical music from the age of five or so


----------



## Ingélou (Feb 10, 2013)

I spend half my time listening to traditional folk music; of the half spent listening to classical music, I'd say eighty percent is spent listening to early music through baroque. Most of that is 'exploring', at present, so it's not usually Bach, Handel or Vivaldi, though it is sometimes. I like French baroque, but couldn't say how much of it I listen to. Of the non-early/baroque things I listen to, there are no trends. It's usually me checking out a link that some kind TC member has provided, and thereby I have discovered good music I'd never have thought of for myself. 
But sometimes I'm in a 'non-listening' phase, as at present...


----------



## PetrB (Feb 28, 2012)

Ingélou said:


> But sometimes I'm in a 'non-listening' phase...


Without the sad emoticon -- indeed, sometimes the ear and mind need a break from all music listening, or everything gets stale.


----------



## mmsbls (Mar 6, 2011)

Over the past 3 or so years I have primarily (> 90%) spent my time listening to new works. Those works could be modern/contemporary or older, but they are new or at least unfamiliar to me. The vast majority of those works are 20th century or later since that is the period I listened to the least earlier in my life. During the past year, I have several times decided to spend more time listening to favorites from Renaissance through contemporary, but I seem to always slip back into exploration mode. I assume at some time I will curtail this exploration and focus more on works I know I love, but apparently that time has not yet come.


----------



## Blake (Nov 6, 2013)

From Medieval to Modern Avante Garde. I'm really all over the place pretty evenly. The past few days I've had a real sweet spot for Medieval and Renaissance. Ancient Mediterranean, Traditional Persian and Indian, etc... - it's amazing how fresh it all still is.


----------



## aleazk (Sep 30, 2011)

XX/XXI centuries in all of their variants: 90% or more.


----------



## Itullian (Aug 27, 2011)

Classical/Romantic 90percent
the rest earlier


----------



## Ravndal (Jun 8, 2012)

As Vesuvius said; Im all over the place!

Though, at the moment I'm in a Schubert phase. I came from Bach.


----------



## shangoyal (Sep 22, 2013)

About 3/4 of my time goes to my favourite composers: Bach, Beethoven, Mozart, Chopin, Haydn and Schumann. The rest I spend discovering new composers to me like Bruckner, Tchaikovsky, Debussy, Josquin.

When I am in a non-listening phase, I listen to a Bach cantata.

EDIT: forgot to add Schubert!


----------



## hpowders (Dec 23, 2013)

I'm kind of a manic listener. I get hooked on a composer and it's like 24/7 for weeks, then I'll start on someone else.

Right now it's Haydn.


----------



## Guest (Apr 6, 2014)

About 60% composers.


----------



## Itullian (Aug 27, 2011)

hpowders said:


> I'm kind of a manic listener. I get hooked on a composer and it's like 24/7 for weeks, then I'll start on someone else.
> 
> Right now it's Haydn.


So I noticed ........


----------



## Guest (Apr 6, 2014)

I do a good job spreading my listening attention across my collection. My listening habits therefore are pretty well represented by how my collection is constructed. 

Here are some stats:

Medieval ................ 1.5%
Renaissance .......... 2.3%
Baroque ................ 6.2%
Classical and Romantic:
- symphonies ........ 10.8%
- orchestral ........... 17.8%
- concertos ........... 15.4%
- opera ................. 3.6%
- choral, etc .......... 3.8%
- lieder ................. 1.6%
- solo piano .......... 10.1%
- other chamber .... 25.5%
Modern ................ 1.0%
Non-Western.......... 1.0%

I have about 1000 hours of music in my collection now, so each 1% corresponds to about 10 hours of music. I have another 60 or so hours of music mothballed, about half of which is opera (e.g. Wagner's The Ring), and the rest duplicates.

I have all the big name composers, with Beethoven the single largest (6.5%), followed by Mozart (3.9%) and Bach (2.7%). But I like to explore lesser-known composers at least as much as the big guns. I have at least an hour of music from 189 different composers.

Compared to others my collection is skewed away from modern stuff (Schoenberg, Messiaen, etc) and towards late romantic chamber music. My big fear is that one day I will tire of all that romantic chamber music.

Going forward, I want to selectively build up my modern collection. Lord knows I have enough chamber music, and I feel positively oppressed by all those damn symphonies and tone poems.


----------



## hpowders (Dec 23, 2013)

Itullian said:


> So I noticed ........


Ha! Ha! That's why I put Beethoven on hold. I listened so much for weeks and weeks that I've over-played him.

Just one of my idiot-syncracies!!! 

Now I'm spending all my listening time comparing each Haydn London Symphony among Bernstein, Szell and Davis performances.

What a life!!


----------



## Bulldog (Nov 21, 2013)

Bach's about 50% of my personal listening; the rest is a pretty even mix from baroque to 20th century with only a smattering of modern works. I also get to hear music that my wife likes; she's the eclectic one with preferences for folk, blues, middle east, Irish (the list goes on).


----------



## Serge (Mar 25, 2010)

I could listen to Bruckner for about half a year without a break. Which I currently do.


----------



## Weston (Jul 11, 2008)

Eclectic should be my middle name.

I listen to 50% classical -- all genres and time periods evenly with the possible exception of art song and opera, though I wouldn't rule those out either, and 50% non-classical which includes rock, folk, jazz, a bit of electronica and even ambient or new age, but no pop, rap or country.

I guess I don't skew the results in any way.


----------



## senza sordino (Oct 20, 2013)

My listening is spread over 250 years of musical history. In my collection the median year is about 1910. (I used an excel spreadsheet so this calculation is easy). And most of my collection is standard repertoire, nothing too obscure. I listen to all my music; music I bought 25 years ago still gets played, and does music bought 25 hours ago.


----------



## StlukesguildOhio (Dec 25, 2006)

That's virtually impossible for me to answer. I suppose I could tally up all my CDs and come up with a percentage of the whole that each composer represents... but then again, some composers are played more than others. In spite of the fact that Bach, Beethoven, and Mozart... followed by Haydn, Wagner, Schubert, Handel, Strauss, Debussy, etc... account for a large portion of my music collection, I have recordings by hundreds of composers... spread out over history from Byzantine Chant to music composed within the last year... and not even counting Jazz, Blues, and other non-Classical genre. Quite honestly, I doubt that Bach... quite certainly the composer by whom I own the most music and who I play the most... accounts for even 10% of my listening... perhaps not even 5%.


----------



## Dustin (Mar 30, 2012)

Luckily for me, I'm still in the early stages of exploring classical music(started listening late 2010) so I always have a different daily gumbo of composers. Although like Hpowders said, I will sometimes get hooked on a composer for a few days or weeks. Lately it's been Handel. Chopin, Beethoven and Mozart are a few composers who I've heard almost all of their works so I've cut back on them a little, but by no means am I even close to burnt out on them.


----------



## science (Oct 14, 2010)

For the past 2 months I've been reviewing a lot of the basic repertoire 

- which means more of Monteverdi, Vivaldi, JS Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, Chopin, Schubert, Verdi, Wagner, Brahms, and Stravinsky than usual 

- and less of everything else, but especially Renaissance, modern, and contemporary stuff, than usual. However, within those eras I've listened to at least as much Josquin, Prokofiev, Britten, and Penderecki as I usually would, and a lot more Hildegard and Sorabji than I usually would. 

In terms of non-classical listening, I've been listening to more country than usual, trying to get through a box I purchased a few months ago, and so I must've listened to a little less rock, blues, and other stuff than usual. I think I've listened to about as much jazz as usual.


----------



## HaydnBearstheClock (Jul 6, 2013)

hpowders said:


> I'm kind of a manic listener. I get hooked on a composer and it's like 24/7 for weeks, then I'll start on someone else.
> 
> Right now it's Haydn.


muahaha!  
----------------


----------



## Ravndal (Jun 8, 2012)

But I do listen to 90% piano music


----------



## HaydnBearstheClock (Jul 6, 2013)

science said:


> For the past 2 months I've been reviewing a lot of the basic repertoire
> 
> - which means more of Monteverdi, Vivaldi, JS Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, Chopin, Schubert, Verdi, Wagner, Brahms, and Stravinsky than usual
> 
> ...


Basic repertoire with no Haydn? science, don't make me enter your 'fully surrendering my own judgment' thread .


----------



## HaydnBearstheClock (Jul 6, 2013)

For me it's about 60% J. Haydn, and the other 40 spread out amongst a group of composers going from the baroque to late romanticism. Baroque - Telemann, Bach, Handel; Classical - W. A. Mozart, Michael Haydn; Romanticism - Beethoven, Schubert, Chopin, Liszt, Schumann, Grieg, Rimsky-Korsakov, Tchaikovsky, etc.


----------



## Headphone Hermit (Jan 8, 2014)

as per StLukesguildOhio (post #20) but delete all after "and not even counting ..... "


----------



## GioCar (Oct 30, 2013)

hpowders said:


> I'm kind of a manic listener. I get hooked on a composer and it's like 24/7 for weeks, then I'll start on someone else.
> 
> Right now it's Haydn.


So do I, usually sharing my listening time (not 24/7...) between two composers.

Now it's Bach (cantatas) and Villa-Lobos.


----------



## science (Oct 14, 2010)

HaydnBearstheClock said:


> Basic repertoire with no Haydn? science, don't make me enter your 'fully surrendering my own judgment' thread .


Well, he's in there, but I'm only 2 months in and I haven't gotten to him yet. There are a lot of pretty big things I haven't gotten to yet.


----------



## ComposerOfAvantGarde (Dec 2, 2011)

Over the past few days I have listened to things like The Cranberries, Karnivool, Kaizers Orchestra, Arrested Development, Miles Davis, Chick Corea, Kynan Robinson, Mustonen, Sibelius, Rautavaara, Westlake, Sculthorpe, Andrew Aronowicz, Webern, Ravel, Wagner, Pärt, Nyman, Brahms, Adès, Alex North and music by my peers and I (nice mix of jazz, world, easy listening and classical) which were compiled onto a CD as part of a school project. Generally I try to keep a fairly equal amount of listening to different composers and styles....but every now and then (depending on what I feel like) I would gravitate towards one style or composer which I would listen to more than others. 

Quite shocking that this time I have been giving little attention to anything pre-Brahms.


----------



## ComposerOfAvantGarde (Dec 2, 2011)

I even listened to a great young group called Sleepy Man Banjo Boys. I must remember not to leave out bluegrass....


----------



## Crudblud (Dec 29, 2011)

Currently my listening time is spent almost entirely reviewing my own work in progress. I've probably listened to less than 10 hours of other people's music in the past few months.


----------



## Nereffid (Feb 6, 2013)

Listening on my own, it's all classical. Judging by what I've been downloading this year so far, about five-sixths of the music is by dead composers. But some of them have been dead longer than others.


----------



## Celloman (Sep 30, 2006)

Roughly 20 to 30% of the music I listen to I am hearing for the first time. I try to listen to a healthy mix of 18th, 19th, and 20th century. As far as genres go, I listen to about 90% Classical and 10% Jazz.
No Rock/Pop for me!


----------

