Nano Note: Going Baroque
Although I do not yet own a Red Nano, I have already begun compiling an iTunes playlist entitled “Red Nano,” and when it gets big enough to fill 8 Gs, I’ll see to it that the name makes sense. The “Red Nano” playlist is comprised almost exclusively of instrumental works from the Baroque. I’m building it up by effectively dumping every Baroque-period CD that I own — and I own quite a few — into my new computer. In idle moments, I move things around, so that, when I’m done, I won’t be listening to two concerti grossi by Heinichen (a contemporary of Bach and Handel) in a row. Not to mention the dozens of Scarlatti sonatas that Scott Ross selected for his three-disc anthology, drawn from a colossal recording of all of them.
Now, here’s the interesting thing: I stopped playing these CDs years ago. Age, I suppose, made it too much of an effort to go to the CD shelves, select a disc, and then play the whole thing. I don’t want to listen to seventy-odd minutes of Purcell’s Trio Sonatas. I’ll bet that Purcell himself would have objected to the overexposure. We’re told that Bach would have been surprised to learn that anyone, much less thousands of rapt listeners, would sit quietly through the playing of all the Goldberg Variations — surprised, but probably gratified. As for listening to all six Cello Suites in a row, though, I expect he’d complain.
When I was a freshman in college, I already knew enough about music to land the music programmer job at the campus classical radio station. My predecessor, a computer major, had ingeniously devised a program that printed out, for our Program Guide, the full names of compositions and performers that were typed in abbreviated form on punch cards. It was a crazy idea, and I junked it (and so would you have done, after your third hour in the basement of the Computer Science building, surrounded by pasty, unsocialized geeks), but the experience left me with permanent reveries of computer programs that would wondrously turn my record collection into a juke box, never playing two works by the same composer in a row. I dreamed, at the radio station in Houston in the Seventies, of a computer program that would do my job. Such marvels still lie in the future of AI, but with the iTunes playlist I’ve found a perfectly acceptable simulation. And I’m listening to stuff that I haven’t heard in years.