Friday 3 September 2010

4'33" Playlist: Karajan, Strauss, and ... Cage

John Cage's birthday falls on Sunday - as it happens, the day before mine. (I once remember looking in a 'Composers' Diary' and being a little crestfallen to find that the only composer I had even heard of who shared my birthday was H Balfour Gardiner, he of the purple-hued 'Evening Hymn'. My mother has Wagner...) Alex Ross has therefore created a playlist from his iPhone of tracks lasting four minutes and thirty-three seconds. Here is mine (you can click on it to enlarge):




This makes me realise how long it is since I added anything to my iPhone. It always seem too Herculean a task, but some day I really ought to make a little progress...

Despite the sawn-off titles, the identities of most tracks are pretty obvious. For anyone who might be wondering, the Handel cantata is 'Ah! crudel nel pianto mio', the Bach cantata is no. 108, ‘Es ist euch gut, daß ich hingehe’ (aria, ‘Mich kein Zweifel stören’), and the Haydn symphony is number 46, in B major. I am not sure that I should have guessed Strauss would appear most frequently of composers, nor Karajan of conductors. Composer and conductor appear together no fewer than three times, in tracks from Rosenkavalier, Ariadne, and Don Quixote... Chance?