the rix mix

Quick survey reveals these composers as most represented in my CD library:

Ludwig Beethoven (by far the winner, he really is my fav composer)
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
Joseph Haydn
Charles Ives
Dmitry Shostakovich
Ralph Vaughan Williams
Steve Reich
Sergey Prokofiev
Johannes Brahms
Gustav Mahler
Olivier Messiaen

Would seem to indicate a fairly conservative taste. Except that I do have a large amount of "experimental" & "modern" music on CD & LP, some of it quite rare. I'm not a big baroque fan, & in that period I'm drawn more to Handel & Vivaldi than to Bach, although I have & love Karajan's mammoth Mass in B Minor. I have less Debussy & Ravel than I thought, not enough Faure & Satie. I have all the Stravinsky I want. Somehow I picked up a lot of Aaron Copland, & not even the music by him I'd like to have. Never really warmed up to nationalists like Grieg & Dvorak, though I love the Russians & the peculiar Moravian Leos Janacek, & am fond of Bartok. I have a surprising number of vocal music CDs, opera singers, masses, oratorios, even a live Wagner's Gotterdamerung (on 4 CDs) & a 2 CD collection of Leopold Stokowski's selections from The Ring mostly recorded in Camden NJ in the early 1930s, & an opera by Nino Rota, who composed the scores for The Godfather & La Dolce Vita. About 6 years ago I went through a phase with vocal music similar to one I went through in my early 20s when I force fed my ears string quartet & chamber music until I learned to appreciate it (& eventually prefer it to orchestral music). Now I think my attraction to small ensemble classical was driven in large part by a desire for lean, no frills music that wasn't being satisfied at the time by rock, jazz, or even country. I was delighted by the rise of punk, reggae, & "outlaw" country in the mid-70s.

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