Taste or time?

Firstly, a big thankyou to NickM for contributing a bootful of vinyl to my musical education. All the records have now arrived safe and well in sunny Devon and I'm looking forward to making a start on them.
While staying with my parents over the weekend I had a quick look through the lot with my father (as the boxes were in his hallway I thought it only fair) and was surprised, and pleased, to find that only one of the recordings appears in either of our collections. What was even more pleasing was the number of recordings that we had intended to investigate but had never got around to. (My father has earmarked at least a dozen that he would like to borrow straight off.) There are still more that will be completely new.
While driving back down I did start to wonder why this was. Did we (Nick and I) have completely different taste or is it down to time (and money) ?
An obvious example that came up was English choral music. I simply haven't listened to much. There are English composers that I like, but I've never been drawn in by it. At the same time there may well have been things I heard that put me off - I sometimes find song in English a bit too ernest.
Also this set of records are overall a bit later - more of a twentieth century bias - than I generally listen to (and I'm not a nothing before/after 1800 person).
The only conclusion I have reached so far is that looking at classical music through someone else's record collection can be a refreshing experience; it gives a different point of view and demonstrates, if demonstration were needed, what a diverse area this really is.

ps Nick - sorry not to have had more time, but I did get to Bromley without any problem and was on time at the station, thanks again.

 

Taste or time? A bit of both, I've always thought. I've found many different things have kickstarted an interest I never had before, or at least never knew I had before. In my (in)capacity as a very amateur violinist I've come across a lot of things over the years that I mightn't yet have got round to otherwise - scraping my way through Dutchman a while back got me properly started on Wagner, for example. (It's also helped confirm the prejudices I already had - if I ever have to sit through bloody Haydn's bloody Creation again it'll be too soon... )

Attending concerts at random or flicking on the radio can do the trick; hearing most of Szymanowski's 2nd Violin Concerto on the radio in the car a few years ago was a revelatory experience for me and I went straight out the next morning to buy the CD. I'm hoping that some day I'll suddenly 'get' Mozart; perhaps that's an age thing

 

It was good to meet you on Friday, Robert, and I'm pleased to hear that you and the records arrived home without incident. The wine was very nice, thanks, and didn't survive Friday - we're still working on the fudge!

What you have doesn't reflect my current preferences; I have held back about 30 discs which I (irrationally) couldn't bear to be parted from, and of the LPs you have, about half form a snapshot of my tastes when aged 17-20 - you can tell which from the dated labels. There are many works which I was potty about then, but hardly ever think to play now. I don't listen to much Sibelius these days, Mahler has given way almost entirely to Bruckner, and Puccini - well, I don't know what I ever saw in him. Not that these "rejected" composers are any less good than they were, of course; but music heard too often when in the heady days of a new and passionate musical relationship does eventually get worn out. In my case, Elgar's cello concerto is quite played out. In addition, I have come to accept that as my tastes gradually change, some music reaches the natural end of its limited "lifespan" - purely for me, that is. This is good, because it means that I might yet cotton on to all sorts of music which so far I have not found terribly inspiring (Purcell, Telemann, Handel, Schumann, Brahms piano music, anything before Monteverdi...).

I just wish that secondhand CDs fetched prices closer to those of new ones. Then I'd be more inclined to do what I really ought to do and clear out my overlarge collection from time to time.

 

I've been thinking about taking up the viola. I wouldn't be starting completely from scratch, but it's likely to be quite a while before I've progressed far enough to be able to play (even the viola parts of!) works by my preferred composers. So for quite a while I'll be playing music by composers I wouldn't choose to listen to - Haydn, for example. While I expect to enjoy playing their music, I'll be pretty surprised if this makes me any more disposed to listen to a CD of it.

 

I'd agree entirely - the Mozart and Haydn string quartets are great fun to sit down and play with a like-minded group of people IME. Likewise the early Beethovens, though the dexterity-challenged like myself have to work quite a bit harder at those - another formative experience was spending rehearsal after rehearsal with my quartet puzzling over the cross-rhythms in the Scherzo of Beethoven's Op. 18 no. 6 (B flat). I don't think we ever quite got it right .

The Classical quartet repertoire, for me, really is the archetype of "players' music" and doesn't sit quite so comfortably in recitals somehow. Nor would I put on a CD of Haydn or Mozart quartets for pleasure - in fact I'd struggle to even if I wanted to because I've only got one, and even then I don't think I've ever listened to it all the way through...