I start with a confession. This week has lacked progress on many things that needed doing besides listening to classical music. I have bike club business to do, actual paying work to do for my Notre Dame author, bathrooms to clean, emails to write, vacation plans to work on, and so on and so on. But I’ve done very little of those in favor of listening to lots of classical music as I prepare my list of my 100 favorites. In other words, in the musical words of Joe Walsh, “…I’m lazy, but it takes all my time” (“Life’s Been Good,” 1978).
In my defense, working on this music list has been combined with great progress on the addition to my bucket list that I made last week. Various web sites have been teaching me how to use Excel 2010, and I can now add data (i.e., information about musical pieces) with no fuss as well as automatically number rows (so cool), switch columns, and sort my data by composer or date of composition while preserving the number assigned each piece so that I can later re-sort them back into place from 1 to 100.
The hardest thing to do in Excel that I really need to do is move entire rows up and down so that I can change my mind about the order of the pieces by most favorite. The websites I have visited to learn how to do this concede that Excel fails in not having an easy way to do it. Each move takes three or four steps. I’ll keep looking for a better method, but if anybody out there knows an efficient hack for moving rows, please let me know!
As for composing my list of top 100 classical pieces, the hard thing is that I know many pieces by tune but not by composer or name of the piece, and the only mnemonic I know is “this is the symphony that Schubert wrote but never finished.” (You’ve got to have studied music to know what that sentence means. I know Elaine knows!) Thus much searching has been involved. One favorite stayed on my list under Mendelssohn for days before I found it was actually composed by Brahms. Oops.
Classics in my list largely come from the nineteenth century. After a week of listening to violins and oboes, however, last evening I reached back to 1984 and watched another type of musical classic—This Is Spinal Tap. I had never seen this mockumentary before, and I think I kept Bob awake on the couch as I laughed hysterically at the band’s antics and the songs that are so bad they are good. I wonder if Beethoven ever had to deal with exploding drummers?
The most apropos moment in the viewing was hearing Boccherini’s Minuet being played on the electric guitar in the metal song “Heavy Duty.”
Hahaha! The Boccherini needed to be put on my list, and I might have never found it had I not watched the movie. The moment also has an effect on my list of top 100 rock songs, because the insertion of a classical piece in a hard rock song brought to mind a favorite of mine, Muse’s “You Belong to Me,” which contains as an interlude the Saint-Saens aria “Mon Cœur S’ouvre à Ta Voix” (1877) sung by lead singer Matthew Bellamy in French. Muse as a band was probably inspired in part by Spinal Tap, in fact, if it comes down to it. I cannot now include Muse’s song in my top 100 list and retain my dignity!