Let’s talk collections and listening habits!
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Every single day it makes me happy!
That is the highest level of accomplishment a sound system can hope to achieve, so everything done right.
Indeed, most computers don’t have a CD/DVD devide anymore – I had to buy an external one for my new computer, too.
Yes, my last few computers did not have a CD/DVD device anymore. However, that’s actually (for me) a good thing, because I don’t need to have one built into my laptop (which I sometimes take along, doing writing, presentations, etc.). External CD/DVD/Bluray drives tend to be better than built in ones anyway, don’t cost a lot, are easily connected when needed. I just got a package from Quartet Records with some CDs, so now I’ll just connect my LG drive, rip them with EAC, and then put the drive in the drawer again.
Still need to buy an external CD drive. Also needs to play DVDs and Blus, and burn. Somehow haven’t been able to prioritize it.
Mark, you should repost those composition remarks of yours in the «Have you composed any music?» thread, as Malte suggests. Just so that they aren’t buried in this niche one about collection minutiae.
External CD/DVD/Bluray drives tend to be better than built in ones anyway, don’t cost a lot, are easily connected when needed.
I don’t have a laptop, but same with my Mac Mini. I also have a LG drive which didn’t cost a lot indeed (I have CD/DVD only as I don’t use/have BluRays at all). I also primarily use it for reading as I rarely burn media anymore.
I rarely burn media myself either, but the drives I use all theoretically could. I think most stand alone drives you buy nowadays are capable of burning, though I’m not sure.
I think there is really no drive anymore that cannot burn. (Btw, have actually a Verbatim drive, my monitor is an LG)
A question: Are any of you a completist of any composer or artist?
It’s been a long way…. but I think, as of today, as far as I can tell,… I have all feature film scores Jerry Goldsmith ever composed. In one form or another. That does not mean I have all Jerry Goldsmith albums ever released, or all editions of all albums, or the original tracks of every feature film score (some I have in new recordings, like THE SALAMANDER, which has not been released otherwise), but it’s sort of a historic date for me. From my first “own” Jerry Goldsmith “Original Motion Picture Soundtrack” (it was POLTERGEIST) to today, where now every film score he ever wrote is in my collection. So in that sense, it is “complete”. Great Scott!
That’s cool, Nick.
I reached that point myself, for Williams, Elfman and Goldenthal a few years ago (around 2015). But of course, then there were more releases subsequently (both new and archival), and that’s when ordering CDs had become a hassle. So they ended up on my neverending want list instead, and many have become rare and super expensive. As we talked about in the “How complete is your collection?” thread, we all define these parameters differently.
Yes, I did an FSM thread once, Completionist Collections, with the same idea, and of course, everyone defines these parameters differently.
I don’t think I have ever paid outrageous “collector’s prices” for any CD… I bought them either at regular prices or cheaper sales prices or traded them.
Nic(k), that is quite an achievement indeed. I expect that my following point has been covered (I’m here so infrequently), but… how do I word this… what percentage of those Goldsmiths do you not really like? Isn’t it inevitable that if you have ALL of a composer’s scores, you’re going to dislike at least some of them? How often do you listen to those titles, or are they just like “books read once”, which sit on the bookshelves for the rest of our lives?
Goldsmith might be my favourite film composer, but I have very little interest in his scores after around 1990, and thus haven’t bothered buying them.
Cool! Goldenthal I think I also have fairly complete with one version at least but even with concert works this is of course far easier… I have a lot Goldsmiths in various forms but it is far from complete. Well, there is something to look out still 😉
Nic(k), that is quite an achievement indeed. I expect that my following point has been covered (I’m here so infrequently), but… how do I word this… what percentage of those Goldsmiths do you not really like? Isn’t it inevitable that if you have ALL of a composer’s scores, you’re going to dislike at least some of them?
Well, considering that you basically asked the same question at the FSM Forum, I give you basically the same answer here, with some slight adjustments to fit the way you asked the question here. 🙂
I should start with pointing out that way back I never set out to have a “complete” Goldsmith collection. When I started, many years ago, with my POLTERGEIST LP — my 8th LP, my 4th “Original Motion Picture Soundtrack,” and the first Jerry Goldsmith score in my collection — the very idea of owning any composer “complete” was entirely out of reach. I was a 14-year-old kid with limited means and practically no information about such things.
Years and decades passed, and I accumulated a lot of Jerry Goldsmith along the way. I should note, though, that a “complete” collection was still never my intent. I didn’t adopt a “completionist” mindset, didn’t maintain a checklist, didn’t hunt down the missing links (no, LINK I already had).
However… not too long ago, partly prompted by the upcoming English translation of the French Jerry Goldsmith book, I happened to go through his filmography and noticed there were fewer than a handful of scores I didn’t own. At that point I decided to get them… what the heck, I’d come this far, might as well. I was just a few albums away from closing the gap, and thought: “might as well.”
I mean, I had all of Jerry Goldsmith’s feature film score except for three or four scores, and all but one of them were easy and cheap to get, so I thought “what the heck, might as well finish it”. It was just “completing” something that was already 98% complete anyway.
But back on track: there’s a few things to take apart here, and one of them is “liking”… You asked “what percentage of those Goldsmiths do you not really like?” I mean, what does that mean, to “like” something. For me, “liking” is more than just saying “it’s pleasant to listen to”. I do not think at all that it is a given that ALL composers wrote “good” and “bad” things. That’s just not so. There are no “bad” compositions by composers I really enjoy, there are no “bad” compositions by Beethoven or Mozart or Mahler for example. Not one. Sure, there are some I enjoy more than others, but none of them fall below a certain standard. But to answer your question in more detail: So far, I like all of Jerry Goldsmith’s scores… except for one, ANGIE… I’m afraid I haven’t managed to like that one yet. 🙂
But back to “liking”. What is “liking” music even. I’m not even sure. Which is why sometimes these forum questions are quite interesting, because they lead you to think about things that are seemingly “obvious” (we’ve all said we “like this or that piece of music), but that are not “obvious” at all once you try to articulate what they actually mean. So I’ll give it a shot.
I’m composer oriented, or perhaps artist oriented. So if I really like a substantial amount of work by someone I consider a genuine artist, I tend to be interested in what else they have done, and it’s usually a worthwhile undertaking. So once I “like a lot”, I tend to “like all”, because I find something worthwhile, revealing, and interesting in their works. It moves from “ah that’s great to listen to” to “what was Goldsmith up to here?”.
Because here’s the thing: genuine artists have almost always something genuine to say. Not occasionally, not in their “good periods”… consistently, across the span of a career. Sure, some may write throwaway compositions that are not of wider importance or interest, but once you are interested in an artist, you find even those failures interesting, sometimes very much so. The artistic intelligence that produces a masterpiece doesn’t simply switch off when the film is drivel or smaller or the inspiration less glorious.
Which brings me to something else that deeply interests me, and that isn’t really about individual albums at all. I like to “hear” the big picture. I want to hear where a composer came from and where they went. The arc. The whole trajectory. So I’m not just looking for “ah, this score is rather nice and that one isn’t quite as strong.” That kind of cherry-picking tells you almost nothing about the artist, and quite a lot about your own mood on the afternoon you pressed play. Mind you, I find a “cherry-picking” approach perfectly ok if that’s what you want. It is just not my own personal approach to art.
The most obvious composer illustration of this, certainly one of the most extreme, is Gustav Mahler, who happens to be one of my favorite composers. You can, of course, take each symphony on its own terms. Many people do, perfectly happily. But once you have encountered the COMPLETE output, the individual works transform into something else entirely. They become chapters in a single, extraordinarily long argument. The song cycles and symphonies totally interconnect, and earlier compositions contain the seeds for what is explored later. The Ninth echoes things planted as far back as the Wunderhorn songs. The Sixth seems almost to be in dialogue with the Fifth. Long-range structural thinking, across not just movements but DECADES. These arcs are simply invisible if you are only sampling. And I find these arcs in many composers, especially when I have more than casually focused on their work.
Goldsmith operated along similar lines. His career was long, his range considerable, and his thematic and harmonic preoccupations surface and resurface across scores that, at first glance, might seem entirely unrelated. An original idea of orchestration that appears in one context quietly reframes something you heard ten films earlier. An orchestral texture he experimented with, perhaps just tentatively in a lesser-known score becomes, two years later, the foundation of something genuinely extraordinary. You only perceive this if you have the full picture. I know not everyone listens to film scores like that, that’s ok.
There is also the question of what the “lesser” works actually reveal. Not every composition by Jerry Goldsmith is a masterpiece, certainly not, that’s accepted, but the works that fall flat on their nose are still frequently where the most interesting creative risk-taking is legible. A composer who is technically and aesthetically ambitious will sometimes fail in ways that are far more instructive than a safer composer’s successes. You see, or perhaps better “hear”, the attempt. You see what they were REACHING for. Strip those works out of the picture and you lose precisely that dimension of the artist’s mind. So I want them to be included in the big picture.
The major works of any great artist, of any great composer, meanwhile, gain considerably in depth when placed against what surrounds them. A masterpiece understood in isolation is like a mountain viewed from the base: impressive, certainly, but you have no real sense of the terrain. Everyone knows Beethoven’s 9th, sure, but it’s his far lesser known “Choral Fantasy” that was part of the way to get there.
In my view, there is of course often a “canonical “greatest hits” version of any composer, and that is always to some degree a distortion. The pieces that became famous became famous, sometimes rightly so, because everything comes together, for example Beethoven’s 5th or 9th, Goldsmith’s STAR TREK – THE MOTION PICTURE and CHINATOWN, Morricone’s THE GOOD THE BAD AND THE UGLY, ONCE UPON A TIME IN THE WEST, these are the “hits” where everything’s “perfection”, but they just tell part of the artistic journey. Serious engagement, or perhaps at least the way I engage with artists and composers, means bypassing that distortion and encountering the actual body of work on its own terms. Which frequently turns up surprises. Strengths in unexpected genres. A chamber piece that outshines the celebrated orchestral work. I love FIERCE CREATURES, for example. On its own terms, it’s a lovely, charming piece of chamber music. Much better than the film it was written for (thought I think it has some very funny moments).
So no, I don’t approach a complete Goldsmith collection, or a complete any other composer collection, thinking “I wonder which of these I like and which I won’t like.” I’m not much for cherry-picking, my approach is more like: let me see the full picture.
How often do you listen to those titles, or are they just like “books read once”, which sit on the bookshelves for the rest of our lives?
As noted on FSM, which is why I’ll just do a more or less copy-and-paste job here, that’s actually an interesting question, and when I think about it, it implies that a music collector cares to have only the music in his collection that he then repeatedly listens to. I’m not sure that is a sound premise. In fact, I am sure that is not a sound premise by now. For many reasons. I mean why have a music collection at all? You can listen to most of it in the highest quality without having any personal “collection”.
I’m with Umberto Eco, who once famously said (about books, but it’s also true for music): “It is foolish to think that you have to read all the books you buy, as it is foolish to criticize those who buy more books than they will ever be able to read. It would be like saying that you should use all the cutlery or glasses or screwdrivers or drill bits you bought before buying new ones.” That’s how I see this. (I have THE NAME ON THE ROSE in my bookshelf… and have read it twice. Will I read it a third time? Maybe, it’s a great book.)
My music collection is a curated garden full of possibilities. There are the cornerstones, the albums that I’ve heard countless times and which made me fall in love with music, the very familiar parts of my center trees, where I know every branch and every root and the way it smells in the spring, and from these trees, the collection grew to contain many compositions, many composers, there are plenty of albums in my collection I have not (yet) listened to at all, there is unfamiliar and undiscovered country in my collection. So it’s a great wonderfully curated garden with the cozy and familar places rooted in the center, and brooks and bushes and woodland going in all kinds of directions from there, until I am even within my own curated garden in undiscovered country, with new plants and bushes that have come there in time.
By now, I would find a music collection were I already know and have actually repeatedly listened to everything in it pitifully insufficient. For me, a music collection is now about options, about possibility, not about familiarity. But will I listen to MR. BASEBALL again at one time in my life? For sure.
And as I said… theoretically: why buy music at all anymore? Most of it is available at the highest quality on streaming services like Qobuz. So why bother? We do it nevertheless.
Goldsmith might be my favourite film composer, but I have very little interest in his scores after around 1990, and thus haven’t bothered buying them.
And there may be others who are saying the 90s is their favorite phase by Jerry Goldsmith. Personally, I think he wrote masterpieces during his entire career. I think a score like HOLLOW MAN (not a very good film, I’m afraid) for example is as good as any Goldsmith has ever written.
Many people seem to dismiss, for example, ALONG CAME A SPIDER, as a by-the-numbers score, so much so that I actually I didn’t bother with it until a few years ago, when I got a copy, and I found it surprisingly original and inventive, it had one of the most startling openings of any Goldsmith score… very spooky, avoiding melody, instead sneaking synthesizers that lured in the dark, ready to attack. Great stuff.
Good post, Nick. It does touch on some of those “composer collection history” things I talked about in the Horner thread, but whereas I talked more about the nuts and bolts and sheer evolution of it all, you talk more about the psychology behind it. Which is also interesting. I definitely subscribe to your idea of the “arc” (and especially when it comes to composers to whom I have a completist relationship). It’s such an essential part that often gets minimized in importance.
When you’re not a completist, however, but still like a composer very well, it’s somewhat different. You can choose to have a selection of representative titles, to get a circa grasp of the “arc”, or you can choose just to have titles you like. I find that this differs a bit between the various composers I like.
Wow, great post and I generally can relate to that. If I like a composer I like to explore more. Not necessarily as extensive like with probably Goldsmith as I there is certainly a time issue. But I am not a completist per se.
I’m with Umberto Eco, who once famously said (about books, but it’s also true for music): “It is foolish to think that you have to read all the books you buy, as it is foolish to criticize those who buy more books than they will ever be able to read.
Great famous quote. My minimum goal is actually to have heard every score I have at least once. Which is not yet true actually as there are some downloads I bought I haven’t but I will 😉
You can choose to have a selection of representative titles, to get a circa grasp of the “arc”, or you can choose just to have titles you like. I find that this differs a bit between the various composers I like.
Yeah, for sure. I don’t really take notes and go about this with a completionist attitude.
As I said, it never occurred to me to go for a “complete Jerry Goldsmith” collection… he was just such a prolific composer, and lots of things weren’t even released when I started on my journey, so that was never an idea that crossed my mind until not too long ago when I realized that I was almost complete already anyway. So I just crossed out the “almost”.
Gee, makes me wonder if there are any other composers in my collection that are “almost complete”. 😀
If you find out, go here!
By the way, I can’t remember if you wrote about this earlier, but what’s your ratio of digital files, CDs and LPs in your (now complete) Goldsmith collection, Nick?
I don’t have a catalog, but it’s a bit like these nested dolls.
Every Goldsmith score I have on LP I have also on CD, because I managed to upgrade all my LPs with CDs over the years.
Every score I have on CD I also have as digital files, since I have transferred all my CDs to ALAC anyway.
So my “core base” is always digital. Digital is 100%. (By digital I mean lossless CD quality or higher, no lossy files.)
So remaining question may be: how many Goldsmith scores do I have digital only? Not too many. I don’t have a list actually, but most Goldsmith scores I have on CD. There are a few, like Intrada’s BLACK PATCH, where I supported the Kickstarter but opted for the digital download only (I normally now opt to get both, but their first Kickstarter campaign made that double the cost, so I have that only in high-res from Intrada directly.). Also MATINEE, RANSOM, HIGH VELOCITY I have as digital downloads only (via Qobuz etc.). Not sure how many more there are, but not a lot. I could check.
Also, I’ve got Leigh Phillips restorations of Goldsmith’s earlier TV work on digital (through Kickstarter support etc., Qobuz, etc.), but also got the “General Electric” CD from Intrada later on. But some of it I only have as files, but that’s all TV stuff.
The rest I have at least on one CD, even if I have also other masters. For example, I have EXTREME PREJUDICE on LP, and on Intrada CD, but I also bought the 2021 Intrada high-res release from Qobuz when it was only like 7.49€ (it was later much more expensive and eventually withdrawn, though I don’t know why).
I do have multiple copies of several Goldsmith scores, still quite a few actually, despite even giving away or trading away quite a few of them over the years.
For example, I have just about every Jerry Goldsmith release of BASIC INSTINCT (not by intent, but it just happened to come out like that)… The Varèse Sarabande CD, the Prometheus CD, both 2CD releases by Quartet (even though they are 100% identical musically), and the LP release of Quartet, AND the digital download from Qobuz (which is also 100% identical to the 2CD releases).
I have CHINATOWN twice on CD and on LP, same with TWILIGHT ZONE – THE MOVIE… and more…Yes, great posts. Thanks Nick! I know the Umberto Eco quote, “but” (in “inverted commas”) I think it’s only applicable to people who live in libraries, or music stores, or toolsheds, or sweets factories. Yes, we now have “virtually” (in “inverted commas”) everything at our fingertips… but – and this is just my personal feeling – I don’t want and I don’t need access to it all. It’s too overwhelming. I haven’t heard a tenth of those Brahms pieces you didn’t mention, and I can’t find it in my head to make room for all of them, or all drill “bits” (as they are apparently really called), or all decaffeinated new sugar-free Licorice Buggaboos. This may be moving onto a different area, but as what’s left of my life becomes “increasingly shorter”, I’m feeling the need to let go of everything, to become more austere, living on my memories, especially of that time in 1982 when I shared a cheese sandwich with Ingmar Bergman in his kitchen. He had no books or music players. Just a table and two chairs.
that time in 1982 when I shared a cheese sandwich with Ingmar Bergman in his kitchen. He had no books or music players. Just a table and two chairs.
I don’t have books or music players in my kitchen either.
…WHAT? You visited Ingmar Bergman in his kitchen?!?
Visited? I thought he broke in. And then noticed there were neither books nor music to loot. So he took some cheese and bread but not all.
Jeez, you guys are so gullible. I didn’t actually have a cheese sandwich with Ingmar Bergman in his kitchen in 1982. He had a cheese sandwich in my kitchen. No wait, it was Ingrid Bergman. She had a cheese sandwich with me in 1982. We spoke about how Jerry Goldsmith didn’t actually marry her after he had seen her in Spellbound, and about how my apartment was very austere, devoid of Spellbound LPs, and lacking appropriate bread for the cheese.
I think there were no books and music players in Ingmar Bergman’s kitchen because they were in one of his other houses, as he had several. And a private cinema. 😉
Yes, great posts. Thanks Nick! I know the Umberto Eco quote, “but” (in “inverted commas”) I think it’s only applicable to people who live in libraries,
That’s actually how imagine my ideal home… like a library….
I love being surrounded by books.
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).
Interesting. So kinda inwards-out, whereas mine was more vertical. It’s interesting how the center is connected to the fringes via various pathways, as listening to works can move you in either direction.
Yes, that’s a bit the idea, which is why I made the garden association earlier too, it’s somewhat organically grown… I like one composer, and from there, branch out and find commonalities in some other composers, which I may then also like, and then branch out again from there, and so on… and of course, sometimes something is dropped in somewhere from nowhere.
In the early 1990s I read two books that proved pivotal in my life: “What to listen for in music” by Aaron Copland and “How to read a book” by Mortimer J. Adler (in the revis. These books “unlocked” pretty much all music and all books for me. While I already enjoyed and had film scores and classical recordings at that time, Copland’s book introduced me to a lot of works “to seek out” and enabled me to really “listen” to any new piece of (classical, that’s the books orientation) music. Likewise Adler’s book, while I already enjoyed reading, encouraged me to tackle (and not be afraid of) any great book on its own terms first and on my own, and not to rely on CliffsNotes etc. These two books did a lot to further my so called “liberal education”.
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