I had my CDs organized by birth of composer and my son (when he was around 10) reorganized them by the color of the spine of the jewel case, which essentially means they were organized by label regardless of period, performers, or composer. It was a daunting task but I eventually got them reorganized by composer date of birth.
Best Ways to Organize a Classical Record LP Collection ?
Need advice and recommendations from AudioGon Classical LP Aficionados.
I recently acquired a large 30+ box Classical LP collection.
Feeling a little overwhelmed. :^(
Organizing Classical music is different from other genres.
Do you organize by Composer, their Work, the Performer, the Label, other .... ?
Can you please share your experiences, ideas, the pros and cons you found with each method.
I am hoping your information will help me to decide which method will work best for me.
Thanks
I recently acquired a large 30+ box Classical LP collection.
Feeling a little overwhelmed. :^(
Organizing Classical music is different from other genres.
Do you organize by Composer, their Work, the Performer, the Label, other .... ?
Can you please share your experiences, ideas, the pros and cons you found with each method.
I am hoping your information will help me to decide which method will work best for me.
Thanks
- ...
- 45 posts total
Very helpful posts - thanks. Hi Johnnyb53 I had my CDs organized by birth of composer and my son (when he was around 10) reorganized them by the color of the spine of the jewel case, which essentially means they were organized by label regardless of period, performers, or composer. It was a daunting task but I eventually got them reorganized by composer date of birth. That is quite a feat for a 10 year old. Imagine how you would of felt if he did that with your records and was manhandling them. I have the boxes on two floors now away from view. I am going to need more shelving ! I am trying to decide between the ease of flipping through the records (much preferred) over storing albums like books in the shelving. The many box sets are not a problem this way, but the singles; I know they just won't get played as much this way with me. They become archived and then lost. I want to see the whole album face when flipping through it. I think now my wife doing me a favor by pulling the Deutsche Grammophon singles, and filing almost two boxes was a mistake :^( ********************************** Hi Paulparsons - you said something that hit home with me. (btw - welcome to AudioGon as a poster) Yes, definitely organize by birth year of the composer. That way you can get a visual feel of the progression of centuries of music, and understand which composers wrote during the same period, and which ones influenced those who were born later. I have always been the type to listen to whole records regardless of genre. I want to get to know the music and artists and feel at times, the music that doesn't get air play, is many times the best stuff. So I feel the extra effort to do this would in the end bring me a lot more actual music enjoyment and learning enjoyment; getting to know the Composers and as you said, seeing how those that came later were influenced by those before. Thanks for links in your post. So I went to the website source and copied and pasted the referenced composer list into a spreadsheet. Holy Moly, 1100 friggin Composer entries !!! *************************************************** Bdp24 - Was thinking some more about what you said earlier about Longhair. You can see TV clips from the 1950s, in which what is now called Classical was then referred to as "serious"---as opposed to Pop---or "longhair"---a pre-Beatles term!---music) I'm not so sure about this Longhair comment. The Beatles. http://verygoodmusic.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/05/bands_the_beatles.jpg Beethoven http://assets.classicfm.com/2009/04/ludwig-van-beethoven-1233160023.jpg Bach http://cp91279.biography.com/1000509261001/1000509261001_1707045537001_BIO-Biography-17-Composers-Jo... So who has the longer hair? What is it about those B's ? |
Ha! I watched the documentary Anderson Cooper did on his Mother, Gloria Vanderbilt. Her second husband was conductor Leopold Stokowski, and there were some pics of him on stage, hair flying all over the place. I think that look was very common amongst conductors in the first half of the 20th Century, and may be where the term came from. Paul Parsons, what makes sense in having Bach, Beethoven, Brahms, and Bruckner next to each other on a shelf is the same as for having Count Basie in between The Band and The Beach Boys---I know where to find what it is I find myself wanting to listen to. My shelves are for storing, not for chronicling the progression of musical styles through history. I find myself wanting to hear a particular composer or composition, not a period in time or genre in general. To each his own! |
oh oh ...I am getting a funny feeling about this...... The thread appears to be taking on, dare I say it.....audiophile attributes. But with opinions that show real logic behind them. You guys are making this difficult. The smell of vinyl has permeated that side of the house's main floor. I think its causing some hallucinations. Maybe its because I'm allergic to mold. I think, deep down, my subconscious is making me want to make up for being a bad music theory student. Make my past teachers proud. So I printed this off https://s-media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/736x/d4/c8/9e/d4c89ead18950e7594d30e2f0ed3edda.jpg and stuck it on the large bookcase just installed. It made me feel ....good. Definitely not as extensive as Paul Parsons list. This one at least gives a glimmer of hope. Small steps..... But those B's really make it easy to start doing this alphabetically, don't they. And I have to admit. Those previously mentioned Deutsche Grammophon lps; those shiny yellow gleaming (though thin) lps, pulled earlier, now are temporarily together and taking up two slots in the bookcase; they look kinda cool with the sun hitting them. How ........tube like....... how audiophile ! Sundays Surprise Find. The Sound of Jazz - 1958 Columbia Six Eye. http://www.popculturesignatures.com/bihocobaauts.html No not mine. My copy is in much better shape; but it is not signed by Billie Holiday and Count Basie :^( Mono cartridge, well lack thereof, rears its head again. So how many records does it take to warrant getting one? need more coffee. |
CT- right. I think you have to ask what your purpose in organizing is. Is it so you, as the present owner of these records, can find them easily? Or are you interested in working at the Library of Congress? I get curation, and Paul is no doubt correct insofar as musical history is concerned, but it would seem you’ll be spending more time curating than listening. I reorganized about 12k records a while ago, while getting rid of several thousand and eventually adding quite a few more. With classical, which is only part of the mix, I segregated some by label- EMI ASD, Lyrita, Decca/London, RCA doggie and Mercury Living Presence; I then alphabetized a large quantity (by composer)- say 20 linear feet; I also set aside one shelf for typical audiophile warhorses, and another for what I consider to be banal audiophile crap, which includes some direct to disc, not limited to classical. This, obviously, has nothing to do with the rock/pop or blues/jazz/folk (which are organized alphabetically, except where some have been segregated by label). That still leaves me with thousands of records that have yet to be organized in any meaningful way, from old MHS and DG to mid-’80s Euro-pop. It’s sort of triage, in my view. I organized the stuff I was most interested in listening to, or was readily identifiable and it’s still taken years. Electronically cataloging with meta-data- a whole other thing. I like the fact that something like Discogs is basically already ’populated’ with the data (right or wrong), so you merely have to add the item to your collection, but are there similar "populated" databases that comprehensively address classical music? (I think of Discogs more for pop). Creating a database, with deep metadata from scratch, would be a huge endeavor. PS: Paul- welcome to the madhouse! |
- 45 posts total