USB DONE RIGHT: Two magic boxes that let computer audio ...

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