Resarching Classical Music
Finally, I got good directions for my classical music journey on Reddit.
It’s been a couple of days of Idagio, and so far I’m happy. Not only the service offers lossless FLAC files, but it’s also built especially for classical music, with recordings indexed by composer, soloist, orchestra, conductor, and more. The phone app allows offline downloads for when you don’t have reception, which happens to us New Yorkers often when riding the Subway. Somehow, I’m not surprised the company is based in Germany.
The rich selection and the organization finally got me to start understanding how classical music is cataloged. As it turns out, there’s a reason why it’s hard to locate a specific works unless they are famous. One challenge is how big of a time period we mean when we talk about classical music: 300 years, give or take, and that’s counting only the three most famous periods (Baroque, Classical and Romantic). Another challenge is the lack of a system to keep track of different works until later on. If you’re curious, I’m expanding on this in my wiki. This section is still very much a work in progress (like most areas of the wiki) as you’ll notice right away.
As for the image above: I combined photography with a recent interest in slice of life and art (thanks to Adam, who introduced me to the concept). I decided to explore with GIMP instead of Prisma on my phone. I hope to focus my technique and combine more color with drawing-like photo manipulation. The picture has a couple of areas I’m pleased with (the black spots on the reddish brown toward the bottom right, the metallic tones of the right ear cup’s dome) with some that still require work (the white background to the right, lack of details on the cloths of the upward facing left ear cup). For now, it’s not a whole lot to look at, but it’s a good start.
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Reply to this post on Mastodon or you can always email me: taonaw<at>protonmail<dot>ch (for GPG, click the lock icon on the navbar to the left).