# A tiny listening diary for a week



## Xaltotun (Sep 3, 2010)

I decided to make a small diary a week ago, listing every piece of music that I listen to, for a week. The reason behind this was just curiosity and fun. This is what it looked like in the end:

TUESDAY

Sibelius - Violin Concerto (Segerstam)
Bruckner - Symphony #2 (Barenboim)
Schubert - String Quintet (Hagen Quartet etc.)
Beethoven - Symphony #9 (Vänskä)
Mahler - Symphony #9 (Bernstein)
Shostakovich - Symphony #6 (Barshai)
Rachmaninov - Vespers (Sveshnikov)

This was a nice day to listen to a lot of music. I studied for an exam on Wednesday so there was plenty of time to listen to some thought-provoking music. The Vespers was a soothing end to a day full of brain-wrestling.

WEDNESDAY

Cage - 4'33 (Xaltotun)

Music-wise, this day sucked.

THURSDAY

Mendelssohn - Symphony #3 (Karajan)
Beethoven - Symphony #4 (Vänskä)
Beethoven - Symphony #6 (Vänskä)

Not a lot of listening this day, but the "Scottisch" worked like a double espresso in the morning, and the "Pastoral" finished the day with a nice, thoughtful mood.

FRIDAY

Sibelius - Symphony #6 (Segerstam)
R. Strauss - Eine Alpensinfonie (Wit)
Schumann - Symphony #2 (Zinman)
Berlioz - Symphonie Fantastique (Davis)

Still, not a lot of listening. Instead of the double espresso, Sibelius' 6th worked like a glass of cold water. The Alpine Symphony prepared me to the task of climbing to the city centre, and the two other symphonies in the evening seemed to come with more questions than answers.

SATURDAY

Mendelssohn - Symphony #3 (Karajan)
Sibelius - Lemminkäinen Suite (Vänskä)
Saint-Saëns - Symphony #3 (Barenboim)
Bruckner - Mass #2 (Jochum)
Beethoven - Symphony #1 (Vänskä)
Mahler - Symphony #1 (Bernstein)
Palestrina - Missa Papae Marcelli (The Tallis Scholars)
Schubert - Sonatas 1, 2 & 3 for Violin and Piano (Kremer/Maisenberg)
Schoenberg - Verklärte Nacht (Juilliard Quartet etc.)

Now this is what I call a day of listening to music! The double espresso was still on my mind so I just had to take another cup of that sweetness. After that, a varied smörgåsbord of musical things was in order. I guess I repeated my Beethoven/Mahler comparision experiment from Tuesday, with different pieces. The Schoenberg was a perfect way to sail to the night.

SUNDAY

Allegri - Miserere (Tenebrae)
Schubert - Piano Quintet "The Trout" (Berezovsky etc.)
Mendelssohn - Piano Trios 1 & 2 (Ma/Ax/Perlmann)
Faure - Requiem (Dutoit)
Berlioz - Grande Symphonie Funebre et Triomphale ("The Wallace Collection")
Berlioz - Te Deum (Davis)
Sibelius - Andante Festivo (Sibelius)
Sibelius - The Wood-Nymph (Vänskä)
Sibelius - Symphony #4 (Oramo)
Sibelius - Tapiola (Oramo)

Making a musical change after the heavy rotation of symphonies during the week, only two symphonies played this day, and neither of them very "typical". The mood of the day was slow and stabile, and I cooked a nice meal by the sounds of Mendelssohn's Piano Trios. The evening was spent in a very contemplative mood.

MONDAY

Palestrina - Missa Assumpta est Maria in Caelum (The Tallis Scholars)
Palestrina - Missa Sicut Lilium Inter Spinas (The Tallis Scholars)
Bruckner - Symphony #5 (Wand)
Tchaikovsky - String Sextet "Memories of Florence" (Wiener Streichquartett)

Not a lot of listening today (and there will be no more, now that the baby is asleep), but it was OK, after the heavy listening of the last couple of days. Palestrina floated freely, Wand built a huge temple in Bruckner's 5th and Tchaikovsky brought a happy smile to my face with such juicy melodies and sentimentality.

What did I learn from this experiment? A lot, I think. First of all, making a diary of this sort changes your listening habits, no matter how hard you try to avoid that. The perciever always changes the percieved, as they say! Also, it is now evident that there is no "regular" listening week for me, nor can there be any meaningful statistics drawn from this diary. The week before, I listened to totally different things. It seems that this week, I returned to the question of the symphony, and had a lot of fun with it. Also, it seems that when I'm home, I'm listening to much more music than when I'm not (I know, this is no rocket science, but at least now I have a sort of scientific proof to this "truism").

Then, why to make a thread about it? Well, TC is my only "social media", so I'm just showing a tiny bit of me to you guys. All comments (& insults about my musical taste) are welcome!


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## Celloman (Sep 30, 2006)

You like Sibelius, no?

That's a lot of music to listen to in a week! I did pretty poorly by comparison.  I think it looked very balanced. Some Renaissance, a little Classical, plenty of Romantic and 20th century...you've got good taste! Nothing to complain about here.


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## Kevin Pearson (Aug 14, 2009)

Since you are from Finland it would just be plain wrong to not have some Sibelius in your weekly diet (one of my favorites). However, you had a varied and well balanced listening week. I don't know if my week would be as balanced because I've never really looked closely at my musical patterns, if there are any, and I'm pretty sure I probably don't get a chance to listen to as much music as you were able to in a single week. At least not usually, but I might be surprised if I actually did a diary. Thanks for sharing!

Kevin


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## Guest (Aug 27, 2013)

I might have to do one of these...

Edit: Is this all the music you listened to or just all the classical music?


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## HaydnBearstheClock (Jul 6, 2013)

I like the music-as-food metaphors .


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## Xaltotun (Sep 3, 2010)

arcaneholocaust said:


> I might have to do one of these...
> 
> Edit: Is this all the music you listened to or just all the classical music?


This is all the music I listened. I don't listen much non-classical these days... although yesterday, I did listen to some Pearls Before Swine (Balaklava) and Rome (Flowers from Exile).


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## Guest (Aug 28, 2013)

Neato. I started my diary today


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## Weston (Jul 11, 2008)

I assume this was the unaccompanied vocal version of 4' 33". 

Though there are a few chamber pieces, I notice a marked preference for large orchestral. I sometimes get in that mode too, and have to remind myself I enjoy chamber just as much.

I would try a diary, but I blaspheme by listening on random play most days, scrambling individual movements with non-classical pieces. On weekends I sometimes find time for deeper listening.


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## Guest (Aug 29, 2013)

I'm just going to make note of classical pieces. I listen to 80-90% classical nowadays and no one wants to see Beethoven mixed with something like Angelcorpse :/


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## Guest (Sep 14, 2013)

http://theelectricdoomsynthesis.blogspot.com/2013/09/classical-music-listening-diary-93-to-99.html so I'm piggybacking on this thing until I find the mental energy to get off my *** and write something worthwhile.


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## Guest (Sep 16, 2013)

Xaltotun said:


> I returned to the question of the symphony....


There's a question of the symphony? I did not know that.

What is it?


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## ArtMusic (Jan 5, 2013)

Xaltotun said:


> I decided to make a small diary a week ago, listing every piece of music that I listen to, for a week. The reason behind this was just curiosity and fun. This is what it looked like in the end:


Good solid repertoire, there mister!


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## Guest (Sep 16, 2013)

Not to grapple with Celloman or Artmusic personally or anything. (Truly.)

But really--what has good taste or solid repertoire have to do with it?

Those concepts are omnipresent in every discussion of classical music, but they both seem so entirely alien to any experience I've ever had with music. 

I dare say if I made a diary of a week's worth of listening (a thing I would never do), it would be full of Lidholm and K.K. Null and Janacek and Prokofiev and King Crimson and Cage (which would be a good listening day for me) and Ferreyra and Groult.

Any of that good solid repertoire? Any of that bespeak my excellent taste?

Probably not. But even if it did--point is, I will have listened to a lot of really fine stuff that makes me happy. (I will probably have listened to a lot of stuff that I've never heard before, too, and about which it is possibly too soon to know if it will ever make me happy. Except insofar as listening to new stuff, to unfamiliar stuff, makes me happy generally.)

Truly, when I'm listening to music, I'm not thinking of myself; I'm not thinking of you; I'm not thinking of theory or history or aesthetics. I'm listening to music. It's enough. It's more than enough. But that's just me....


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