Why Do We Do This? (of course, not all of us do)

[Beef Oven!]

Just been listening to the Végh Quartet's Bartók string quartet #2. Was a time when I only had 2 sets. I now have 15! I am musically illiterate and don't know a rising fifth from a rissole. So why? I play all of them throughout the year, though.

There is someone on here who has over 20 Alpine Symphonies!!! Why!!?

Petrushka and I have bought Bruckner 8 (for example) about 80 times between us! Why!!?

Although I'm big on Wagner, I only have 14 ring cycles. Until recently I used to listen to a Ring in a day (how much I took in is another question).

I seem to buy a new Sibelius cycle each year. I have 23.

I know I'm not the only one who has this fetish.

Please, someone provide a rationale.

[french frank]

Rationale or explanation?

[Beef Oven!]

Rationale or explanation?

I don't know the difference!!

[Joseph K]

I agree!

I used to be not too keen (for myself) or bothered about people judging particular versions or performances of works. I'd be more interested in spending my money and time on discovering new music rather than loads or even more than one version of a particular work. My youthful mind was concentrated on 'the work' and its composer whereas the more versions you get, the more it's about the performers.

I got burgled a few years ago and lost every CD I had with me in that room, which was basically my whole jazz collection plus a fair amount of classical and rock. Fortunately I still had/have loads of CDs of classical music at my mum's. I have of course replaced quite a bit of what was lost, although some of it was more or less irreplaceable (e.g. CDs from the limited edition complete Miles Davis on Columbia box set).

Anyway, although it was tragic to have lost that I'm at the point with buying CDs (or music - but I don't download or stream) that I've more or less stopped. Most my spare time is spent practising guitar and I have by no means listened to all the CDs I already have. I mean, I have only dipped into my complete Mozart box set! Will I ever listen to it all? Who knows. Especially when I want to practise guitar a minimum of four hours a day, practise counterpoint, maybe even a bit of composition... But now, checking out different performances is much easier with lots now being on youtube.

[Lat-Literal]

Just been listening to the Végh Quartet's Bartók string quartet #2. Was a time when I only had 2 sets. I now have 15! I am musically illiterate and don't know a rising fifth from a rissole. So why? I play all of them throughout the year, though.

There is someone on here who has over 20 Alpine Symphonies!!! Why!!?

Petrushka and I have bought Bruckner 8 (for example) about 80 times between us! Why!!?

Although I'm big on Wagner, I only have 14 ring cycles. Until recently I used to listen to a Ring in a day (how much I took in is another question).

I seem to buy a new Sibelius cycle each year. I have 23.

I know I'm not the only one who has this fetish.

Please, someone provide a rationale.

You probably have a greater enthusiasm than many for specific pieces of music. I think you are interested in going into music more deeply and in the nuances of interpretation. When not being described as the poster child for hippies, Joni Mitchell has been compared to a wide range of individuals from Richard Nixon to Marilyn Monroe. You don't want to see Joni just as you see Joni but to hear how others see her and decide which ideas best suit you. Your process is also helpful in developing an informed and detailed orientation around the world of classical music. The 23rd Sibelius cycle will have drawn in a wide range of new components - a musician, for example, who was previously not very well known to you which in turn can lead to a journey along another spoke in the structural wheel.

I'm for breadth rather than depth. No doubt I could be accused of having a shallow interest in novelty. Certainly it isn't necessary for me to have even one version of the full works by anybody as to do so would be to remove the mystery. Also, when I discover the weaker works or the ones which don't suit my overall impression, that disappoints me. And I don't like the sense of ending that comes with knowing it all even in one version or on one level. My process too leads to a myriad of unexpected connections but I think that the structure that I find is principally an outline and my own angle rather than how it all works. It's an extension of the top tens I did when I wasn't content with what the order of selling happened to be. I accepted parts of that, before acquiring or discarding other parts. So I wasn't having to stand wholly outside the way things were or to take them fully on board but choosing to find a structure in which accommodation in both directions was partial.

But then the play wot I wanted to write wasn't the one where one character was seen in different ways by different people. It was one in which new people would enter the stage throughout the play and every one of the characters the audience thought they had just about worked out on character suddenly and unequivocally became one of the other people.

Everyone left the theatre completely bemused but agreed that there must have been some sort of structure.

[Alison]

My mum used to say it was the fear of 'missing out' on something.

[Beef Oven!]

I agree!

I used to be not too keen (for myself) or bothered about people judging particular versions or performances of works. I'd be more interested in spending my money and time on discovering new music rather than loads or even more than one version of a particular work. My youthful mind was concentrated on 'the work' and its composer whereas the more versions you get, the more it's about the performers.

I got burgled a few years ago and lost every CD I had with me in that room, which was basically my whole jazz collection plus a fair amount of classical and rock. Fortunately I still had/have loads of CDs of classical music at my mum's. I have of course replaced quite a bit of what was lost, although some of it was more or less irreplaceable (e.g. CDs from the limited edition complete Miles Davis on Columbia box set).

Anyway, although it was tragic to have lost that I'm at the point with buying CDs (or music - but I don't download or stream) that I've more or less stopped. Most my spare time is spent practising guitar and I have by no means listened to all the CDs I already have. I mean, I have only dipped into my complete Mozart box set! Will I ever listen to it all? Who knows. Especially when I want to practise guitar a minimum of four hours a day, practise counterpoint, maybe even a bit of composition... But now, checking out different performances is much easier with lots now being on youtube.

I too was initially disinterested in versions or performances and was focused on discovering new music. Then, one day I was listening to a BaL in my car in a car park in the early 90s, waiting for one of my kids to come out of a judo comp and the Borodin 2s I heard blew my Naxos recording out of the water and I realised that there's many ways to skin a cat! That was the beginning.

Coincidentally, I have dug my acoustic guitar up and I'm determined to practice 2 hours per day. Listening to loads of Roy Harper is both motivational and dispiriting at once!

[Beef Oven!]

My mum used to say it was the fear of 'missing out' on something.

I think your mum has hit the nail on the head. At least as far as I'm concerned. I hate missing out, or at least thinking I'm missing out. Psychology is scary! Scarily accurate

[Alison]

I think your mum has hit the nail on the head. At least as far as I'm concerned. I hate missing out, or at least thinking I'm missing out. Psychology is scary! Scarily accurate

Good old mum.

[cloughie]

Good old mum.

For me I think, in some ways quite worryingly it goes back about 53 years when I realised that, yes I liked Beethoven, I liked his symphonies but Erich Kleiber's interpretations were very different to Otto Klemperer's, Beecham's interpretations of a lot of things sounded different. Berlioz SF (BPO Van Otterloo) was really good, then I heard Argenta's with that added Gallic charm. For a while I probably replaced LPs with a less worn copy, but a different version but then a lot of my LPs were passed to me by my Father as he upgraded his collection, but gradually the collection accumulated. Also I had the opprtunity to compare with Dad's recordings and the buyer's bible in those days was the EMG Art of Record Buying backed up by the reviews in the Monthly Letter! Yes I was hooked and the collection grew. Then I had an addiction to Tchaik 4 and the number of versions of that grew and the rest, as they say, is history.

[Petrushka]

Good old mum.

My own mother was bemused as to why I was putting the same pieces on my Christmas wish list year after year and I tried to explain it and this is something like it came out though here fleshed out a bit.

The music is the same, the same notes are played in the same order but each recording is not the same at all!. There are, in fact, a whole host of highly complex variables at play from the conductor's interpretation of those notes to the weather on the day, the mood of each individual player, the historical time of recording and the skill or otherwise of the sound engineers. HIPP has since thrown in yet another set of variables.

Added to this is the 'ideal' interpretation that exists in our heads which can never actually be realised.

I used to have the belief (never put to the test!) that I could tell within a few bars which recording was being played, by which orchestra and which conductor. I've got many more recordings now than I had then but I still think I could do it with, for example, the opening trumpet in Mahler 5.

I've got 60+ recordings of the Beethoven 9, around 40 of Mahler 2 and multi multiple versions of most of the Bruckner and Mahler symphonies yet still I buy more!

I'm not sure why we do it but the above explanation is the best I can do.

Is there a psychologist on the Forum?

[Eine Alpensinfonie]

There is someone on here who has over 20 Alpine Symphonies!!! Why!!?

Poor thing! Only 20+. My collection's nearer 90.

[EdgeleyRob]

.........the 'ideal' interpretation that exists in our heads which can never actually be realised..........

That's as good a reason as any Pet so that's my defence.
I'm not bad as some on here,except when it come to Vaughan Williams.....and Mendelssohn......er and Alkan,oh and Elgar.

[ferneyhoughgeliebte]

There's the danger that, if you only have a single recording of a work, then that recording "becomes" the work. Any work worth its salt has a multiplicity of opportunities that are clear from studying the score, but which no single performance can reveal. Multiple recordings of the work reveal more of those multiple facets - they're essential to a fuller understanding and appreciation of it.

[Serial_Apologist]

In my own case, having an extra version of a recording tends to hinge on some passage not being played to my satisfaction, but I keep the recording since it satisfies in most other ways. Usually I settle for the one that for me ticks the most boxes, and then dispense with the others, so I guess I don't really fit the image of hoarder. I wonder if the phenomenon could be a projected form of perfectionism. Projected in the Freudian sense of projecting onto others aspects of oneself one would like to realise to ones highest ideals, but which, for reasons of lack of abilities right across the field of interest, thus become a non-fulfilled quest that has to be repeated over and over again until one thinks one has found that unfulfilled aspect, and exorcised the projected ideal by acceptance of ones limitations. This would explain things if the repeat recordings are of the works that are of greatest importance to oneself, for whatever reasons.