USB DONE RIGHT: Two magic boxes that let computer audio ...
USB DONE RIGHT: Two magic boxes that let computer audio ...
USB DONE RIGHT: Two magic boxes that let computer audio ...
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So you have, or plan to have, a<br />
classical music collection of at<br />
least several hours’ length. And<br />
you are going to serve your<br />
music from a <strong>computer</strong> using the popular<br />
iTunes or something similar. This will<br />
be fun!<br />
Once your hard drive starts to load<br />
up with music files, you can stream your<br />
music through the house, send it to<br />
your high end DAC, control it from an<br />
iPod. You can play all your music files<br />
in some kind of order, or you can play<br />
them all at random. If you want to hear<br />
specific pieces you can look them up in<br />
your software’s index, but if you want<br />
anything like a musical program, you’ll<br />
have to make playlists.<br />
The main index already has the<br />
capability of finding music by artist, by<br />
album and by composer (and by many<br />
other perhaps less useful criteria too,<br />
such as length and bit rate). A playlist<br />
makes it possible to group your classical<br />
music by period. That’s something you<br />
might want to do, since in principle the<br />
Software<br />
Classics and<br />
Then Some<br />
music of a given period shares certain<br />
characteristics. If you know one favorite<br />
composer’s music is in the style of the<br />
Romantic period, another Romantic<br />
might please you too.<br />
Of course, then you have to understand<br />
something about the musical periods.<br />
Baroque, Classical, Romantic: who’s<br />
in which, and why? My own decision<br />
to use my <strong>computer</strong> as a digital source<br />
brought me up against a need to know.<br />
If your classical collection, by accident<br />
or design, includes only the Big<br />
Three — Bach, Mozart and Beethoven,<br />
listed in chronological order — <strong>that</strong>’s<br />
okay. You still have a heck of a lot of<br />
classical music to listen to. (Not to mention<br />
the immense number of recorded<br />
performances of their pieces.) Your<br />
classification task is easy, though: you<br />
can just drag them all into one playlist.<br />
Call it “classical,” why not?<br />
But if you want to leave room to<br />
expand, you can start off right now by<br />
by Toby Earp<br />
putting Johann Sebastian Bach into<br />
another section and calling it “Baroque.”<br />
Leave the others in “Classical.”<br />
How’s <strong>that</strong>? First we had everything<br />
by the Big Three in Classical, and now<br />
we’ve split off Bach to a separate period<br />
— but the others are still Classical!<br />
It’s true <strong>that</strong> we are only considering<br />
small-c classical music here. When<br />
the term was first used, in the mid-19 th<br />
Century, it meant the pre-Romantics.<br />
Today “classical music” means basically<br />
all “heavy” or art music dating from the<br />
invention of a practical way to write it<br />
down. Within classical music, though,<br />
there is a Classical period, and <strong>that</strong> is<br />
where Mozart and early Beethoven are<br />
considered to belong.<br />
All through setting up an iTunes<br />
classical music library based on style and<br />
period, we’ll be concerned with distinguishing<br />
musical styles more specifically.<br />
We would do the same thing with jazz,<br />
dividing it up into swing, bebop, cool<br />
jazz, Dixieland and so forth, then perhaps<br />
subdividing a bit more: swing and<br />
big band swing for example.<br />
So <strong>let</strong>’s start by describing the Classical<br />
period within classical music. After<br />
<strong>that</strong> we’ll swing back to the forerunners,<br />
then jump ahead to more recent times.<br />
We have to remember, though, <strong>that</strong><br />
just because a period ends and another<br />
begins, <strong>that</strong> doesn’t mean <strong>that</strong> either the<br />
music of earlier periods, or music written<br />
in the style of earlier periods, did not<br />
remain popular.<br />
Like all changes in musical style,<br />
the Classical was a modernization of<br />
what had come to seem old-fashioned to<br />
many. From about 1750, an association<br />
was made between the ideas of classical<br />
Greece, expressed two thousand years<br />
earlier, and the new development of<br />
“natural philosophy”: the first steps<br />
toward what would become modern<br />
science. There was a confidence <strong>that</strong><br />
the workings of the universe could be<br />
discovered, via an orderly approach, to<br />
be structured in an orderly and logical<br />
way. Music, in its turn, became more<br />
clearly structured. Instrumental music<br />
began to be divided into movements<br />
ULTRA HIGH FIDELITY Magazine 63