Classical Music Queue
A couple years ago, I had the idea to keep a list of classical pieces I heard mentioned or referenced and then listen to that list at the rate of one piece a day. The idea behind this was that if those pieces were mentioned, they must be important or at least well known, so I'd do well to familiarize myself with them. I alternate going through this list with my Collection Audit project (in which I attempt to listen to my entire music collection every other year), and since I finished Collection Audit on 5 November this year, I re-started the CMQ on 6 November. I'll continue listening to it until 1 January 2018, when I'll start Collection Audit again.
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Musicological Analyses
That's probably too grand a description, but I try weekly to write a post about something I noticed in some musical piece. I post them here on Mondays.
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Notation!
This has been hit or miss and will probably continue to be so, but I've tried to post notation (or, failing that, chords) on this blog on Fridays.
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Scales
Since June, I've practiced a scale a day, cycling through the twenty-four scales in the order in which they appear in Bach's Well-Tempered Clavier. I also cycle through instruments: piano, bass, guitar in open D tuning, mandolin, and guitar in standard tuning. When I complete a cycle through all twenty-four keys, I play the scales on the fretted instruments a fret higher so I can cover different areas of the fingerboard.
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Lyres, Harps, and Cymbals
This changed form a bit over the course of the year. In January, I started recording a hymn tune every week (which itself was a project I did from November 2012 to January 2015 with the aim of strengthening my notation reading skills) and occasionally writing short posts about things I noticed in hymns and Bach's cantatas. At the end of November, I moved this project to Blogger and started a series of posts in which I find which Biblical texts are used in hymns and how they're used. I post the hymn tunes on Sundays and the hymn lyric posts on Wednesdays.
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Cover Projects
I have half a dozen projects where I try to learn every part to every song by a band (with some restrictions). I doubt I'll ever achieve that goal, but even the small efforts I've made have brought me a new appreciation for this music. As part of these projects, I developed a schedule in which I regularly listen to these bands' albums (when not doing Collection Audit, that is). The rate is rather slow though; I listen to only one album every Wednesday. In August, I added the Monkees to the projects I was already doing, and between that addition and acquiring some more albums from bands that were already included, I had to amend the lists (the new acquisitions are listed in bold). The schedule itself consists of a number of cycles within a cycle. I have a list of albums for each project (or sometimes categories within a project), and I cycle through the albums in each list and through the lists. It's complicated to explain, but it works pretty well. Here are the projects, categories, and lists of albums.
Verulam Cover Project
Primarily, this covers the Zombies:
- Begin Here
- The Decca Stereo Anthology, Disc 1
- The Decca Stereo Anthology, Disc 2
- Odessey and Oracle
- Odessey and Oracle (30th anniversary)
- Into the Afterlife
- Zombie Heaven, Disc 1
- Zombie Heaven, Disc 2
- Zombie Heaven, Disc 3
- Zombie Heaven, Disc 4
- New World
- As Far as I Can See
- Live at Metropolis Studios
- Odessey and Oracle {Revisited}, Disc 1
- Odessey and Oracle {Revisited}, Disc 2
- Breathe out, Breathe in
- Extended Versions
- Still Got That Hunger
For the last few years, I've recorded my own version of Odessey and Oracle (with missing and sometimes erroneous parts). I plan on doing that again in April (to coincide with the original release date, 19 April 1968).
In this project, I also include Argent:
- Argent
- Ring of Hands
- All Together Now
- In Deep
- Live at the Palace Theatre (which I compiled and wrote about here)
- Encore
- Circus
- Counterpoints
- Greatest: The Singles Collection
I combine albums by Rod Argent and Colin Blunstone (individually and together) into one category because there aren't as many of them:
- One Year - Colin Blunstone
- Ennismore - Colin Blunstone
- Journey - Colin Blunstone
- Planes/Never Even Thought - Colin Blunstone
- Moving Home - Rod Argent
- Red House - Rod Argent
- Classically Speaking - Rod Argent
- Out of the Shadows - Colin Blunstone & Rod Argent
- Live at the Bloomsbury Theatre, London, Disc 1 - Colin Blunstone & Rod Argent
- Live at the Bloomsbury Theatre, London, Disc 2 - Colin Blunstone & Rod Argent
- The Ghost of You and Me - Colin Blunstone
- On the Air Tonight - Colin Blunstone
APPStereotomy
This covers the Alan Parsons Project and the side-project Keats:
- Tales of Mystery and Imagination
- I Robot
- Pyramid
- Eve
- The Turn of a Friendly Card
- Eye in the Sky
- Ammonia Avenue
- Keats - Keats
- Vulture Culture
- Stereotomy
- Gaudi
- I Robot [Legacy Edition], Disc 1
- I Robot [Legacy Edition], Disc 2
- The Turn of a Friendly Card [Deluxe Edition], Disc 1
- The Turn of a Friendly Card [Deluxe Edition], Disc 2
Pendleton Sounds
The primary foci here are the Beach Boys' Pet Sounds and Brian Wilson's SMiLE, but I occasionally write about other Beach Boys music too.
- Pet Sounds
- SMiLE - Brian Wilson
- The Pet Sounds Sessions, Disc 1
- The Pet Sounds Sessions, Disc 2
- The Pet Sounds Sessions, Disc 3
- The Pet Sounds Sessions, Disc 4
- The SMiLE Sessions, Disc 1
- The SMiLE Sessions, Disc 2
- The SMiLE Sessions, Disc 3
- The SMiLE Sessions, Disc 4
- The SMiLE Sessions, Disc 5
- SMiLE (from NPR)
10538 Orchestra
Along with Electric Light Orchestra, this also includes the recent album credited to Jeff Lynne's ELO:
- No Answer
- ELO II
- On the Third Day
- Eldorado
- Face the Music
- A New World Record
- Out of the Blue
- Discovery
- Time
- Secret Messages
- Balance of Power
- All over the World: The Very Best of Electric Light Orchestra
- Alone in the Universe - Jeff Lynne's ELO
Beatle Audit
This one - obviously concerning the Beatles - is structured a bit differently. Along with the regular cycle of albums, I listen to a single album every week during non-Collection Audit years. This year, I'll be listening to Beatles for Sale every Tuesday, so it's not included in the schedule:
- Please Please Me
- With the Beatles
- A Hard Day's Night
- Help!
- Rubber Soul
- Revolver
- Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band
- Magical Mystery Tour
- The Beatles, Disc 1
- The Beatles, Disc 2
- Yellow Submarine
- Let It Be
- Abbey Road
- "Free as a Bird" single
- Let It Be... Naked, Disc 1
- Let It Be... Naked, Disc 2
- Past Masters, Volume 1
- Past Masters, Volume 2
- Anthology 1, Disc 1
- Anthology 1, Disc 2
- Anthology 2, Disc 1
- Anthology 2, Disc 2
- Anthology 3, Disc 1
- Anthology 3, Disc 2
- Live at the BBC, Disc 1
- Live at the BBC, Disc 2
- On Air - Live at the BBC, Disc 1
- On Air - Live at the BBC, Disc 2
- Live at the Hollywood Bowl
- LOVE
Manufactured Monkees
For now, I'm focusing on the first four Monkees albums and the soundtrack to Head:
- The Monkees [Deluxe Edition], Disc 1
- The Monkees [Deluxe Edition], Disc 2
- More of the Monkees [Deluxe Edition], Disc 1
- More of the Monkees [Deluxe Edition], Disc 2
- Headquarters [Deluxe Edition], Disc 1
- Headquarters [Deluxe Edition], Disc 2
- Pisces, Aquarius, Capricorn, & Jones, Ltd. [Deluxe Edition], Disc 1
- Pisces, Aquarius, Capricorn, & Jones, Ltd. [Deluxe Edition], Disc 2
- Head
I also have a project within this project: each month, I'm going to try to figure out the bass part for a song on Pisces, Aquarius, Capricorn, & Jones, Ltd. (just because I think they're great). There are thirteen songs on the album, but "Peter Percival Patterson's Pet Pig Porky" doesn't have any instrumental parts, so there's one part for each month of the year.
As part of this project, I'm also watching the episodes of The Monkees television show on the 50th anniversaries of their original air dates.
As part of this project, I'm also watching the episodes of The Monkees television show on the 50th anniversaries of their original air dates.
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All the Times We Had
This is the first new project for 2017. A couple years ago, I started wondering what would happen if I listened to one album every week for a year and tried to learn as many of the parts as I could. Listening to one specific Beatles album every week within my Beatle Audit project is sort of related to this idea, but I want to do something outside of that. So I'm going to listen to Ivan & Alyosha's All the Times We Had every Friday. All of my cover projects concern themselves with older bands, so I wanted to do something a bit more recent. On 1 March, I might start reading Dostoyevsky's Brothers Karamazov, too. Apparently, that's where the names Ivan and Alyosha come from, and I want to see if there are any connections between the book and the music.
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The Well-Tempered Clavier
For Christmas, I got a recording of Bach's Well-Tempered Clavier (both books), which I'd been looking for for months. I'm frightfully unfamiliar with it (I have only Rod Argent's recording of the C minor prelude and fugue [BWV 847]), so to familiarize myself, I'm going to listen to one prelude and fugue every day for a week. 1-7 January will be the prelude and fugue in C major, BWV 846; 8-14 January the prelude and fugue in C minor, BWV 847; and so on. Since there are forty-eight preludes and fugues and fifty-two weeks in the year, it'll be a bit short of a full year of the Well-Tempered Clavier, but I'm hoping it'll be the same kind of sub-conscious edification that listening to the Brandenburg Concerti and the Orchestral Suites was when I listened to those daily in 2015.
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Piano Practice
Related to my nearly-daily listening to the Well-Tempered Clavier, I'm going to start consistently practicing piano again. From June to August this year, I went through the book from my beginner's piano class in college (James Bastien's The Older Beginner Piano Course, Level 1), but I got stuck once it wanted to teach me how to use the damper pedal (which we never got to in my class). I didn't have a pedal, so I certainly couldn't learn to use one. I got one for Christmas though, so I should be able to start going through both Bastien's book and Teach Yourself to Play Piano by Palmer, Palmer, and Manus (in which I ran into the same problem but earlier than I did in Bastien's book).
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Music Biographies
I have a number of music biographies (or similar books) that I haven't read yet, and - depending on how bogged down my reading list is - I might start them on the birthday of their subject:
- 5 January - Sam Phillips: The Man Who Invented Rock 'n' Roll - Peter Guralnick
- 9 January - Light & Shade: Conversations with Jimmy Page by Brad Tolinski
- 3 February - Felix Mendelssohn and His Times by Heinrich Eduard Jacob
- 2 March - Little Girl Blue: The Life of Karen Carpenter by Randy L. Schmidt
- 15 March - Good Vibrations: My Life as a Beach Boy - Mike Love with James S. Hirsch
- 21 March - Johann Sebastian Bach by Hannsdieter Wohlfarth
- 7 May - Johannes Brahms: A Biography by Jan Swafford
- 24 May - Chronicles, Volume One by Bob Dylan
- 30 May - Benny Goodman and the Swing Era by James Lincoln Collier
- 15 June - Edvard Grieg: Diaries, Articles, Speeches edited and translated by Benestad & Halverson
- 20 June - I Am Brian Wilson - Brian Wilson with Ben Greenman
- 26 September - Gershwin: A Biography by Edward Jablonski
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FAWM (February Album Writing Month)
As usual, I'll be participating in February Album Writing Month, in which the challenge is to write a fourteen-song album in the twenty-eight days of February. Last year was the first time in a number of years when I didn't complete the project, so I'm hoping for a better result in 2017.
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Mendelssohn's Symphonies
I don't quite remember how I came up with this project, but because there are an equal number of weekdays in April this year and five Mendelssohn symphonies, I'm going to listen to one symphony every week day for the whole month: Symphony No. 1 on Monday, Symphony No. 2 on Tuesday, and so on.
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Funk & Wagnalls' Family Library of Great Music
After my grandfather died, I inherited his 22-LP collection of Funk & Wagnalls' Family Library of Great Music. For the last few years, I've listened to this annually. Usually, I start on 10 May, and the records last until the end of the month.
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Odessey and Oracle Reading List
1 June marks the 50th anniversary of the first day of recording for the Zombies' Odessey and Oracle, so I'm going to read some books that had some influence (however slight or tangentially related) on the album:
- Chapman's Homer (The Iliad and The Odyssey)
- The Tempest by William Shakespeare
- Macbeth by William Shakespeare
- Brief Candles by Aldous Huxley
- Making Music on the Organ by Peter Hurford
I'm also going to re-read Claes Johansen's book about the band itself: The Zombies: Hung up on a Dream.
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50/90
In addition to FAWM, I'll be participating in 50/90, which is the same conceit, just a longer time-frame. The object is to write fifty songs in ninety days, from 4 July to 1 October. In the same way I didn't complete FAWM last year, I didn't do so well in 50/90, ending up with only six songs, none of which I was too keen on.
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In October, I challenged myself to learn thirty-two parts (or sections of parts) for songs; I completed the month with thirty-six. For the last couple weeks, I've kind of fallen into doing the same thing again, learning at least one part a day. It's something of a nebulous project, but I want to continue to regularly learn parts to songs that don't fall under the umbrella of my cover projects. Often, learning parts to songs has given me insights that I wouldn't have had otherwise.
I'm sure a few other projects will spring up now and then throughout the year. It's equally possible that I'll falter with some of these or even abandon them altogether, but at least I have some goals to work toward.
