[Nicolai P. Zwar]

I did a short data visualization of how I view my personal music collection, partly inspired by Thor’s Landscape Analogy, which I thought was quite interesting. I compared my own collection to a garden, which isn’t so far away, though there are no composers (or any other people) in my garden. (I’m a hermit.)

But a garden as an image is not so easily done as a representation, so I did a data visualization of how I see my own music collection. I could probably populate all these “dots” with actual albums. 🙂

So at the center, there is the core… the albums that started it all, stuff like John Williams STAR WARS and CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF THE THIRD KIND, Jerry Goldsmith’s STAR TREK – THE MOTION PICTURE, POLTERGEIST, FIRST BLOOD, classical compositions like Debussy’s LA MER, Smetana’s MA VLAST, Stravinsky’s LE SACRE DU PRINTEMPS…

Then there are the many layers and branches, and eventually the outer fringes. By the very nature, this is also a visualization of how often one listens (or has listened to) to certain albums… some albums are played (or have been played) more frequently than others, be that they are easy to listen to, fit a certain mood, others are played less frequently. But they all nevertheless are very important.

Some music is dear to me but very intense. I mentioned Mahler… I have everything Mahler composed several times, and I know all his song cycles and symphonies quite well, they are great masterpieces, all of them, but it’s not a composer I constantly turn to. It’s for “special” occasions. Because it’s simply very intense music that demands full concentration for 90 minutes, and it’s also very dramatic and specific music, so I need the right time and the right mood for it. Nevertheless, I am very familiar with the work. So I’d place it somewhere at the core. But when I have listened to the 5th, it may be a long time, before I listen to the 5th again, and then it will probably be another recording than the one I listened to last. Sometimes, I become very interested in one particular composition, which I then “examine” (which is basically enjoying listening to) with many different recordings. About two years ago I had a phase where I listened a lot to Olivier Messiaen’s Turangalila-Symphony, I couldn’t get enough of it. As a consequence, I now have quite a good overview over all the recordings out there (most of them are actually good in one way or another), and of the maybe 40 or so recordings out there, 7 are in my own collection, so the work is definitely in the “core” of the collection, my first encounter with the work was over 25 years ago.

But for me, it’s about both the familiar and the unfamiliar, and they are equally important. I have often over the years bought albums in the knowledge that I may not be interested in them right now, but their time will come (and I was just about always right).