Arts & Manners: The Ideal Collection

A lonesome cowpoke in central Montana has written to me as follows: “Dear Bill—I love good music but don’t know anything about it. I would like to have a collection of records but they’re expensive and there are thousands to choose from and I don’t know where to start. Tell me how to proceed.”

Criteria begin to emerge. If the budget is limited, then we should select recordings of music that is not available otherwise. The standard works can be encountered, nay, one must labor to avoid them, on standard radio broadcasts and in the course of a year at the local philharmonic society. My friend’s record collection will not, therefore, include the nine symphonies of Beethoven. If the budget is limited, each piece of music acquired must be of the sort that you can listen to again and again, with renewed and possibly altered appreciation at each listening. So we can exclude the instrumental stuntmen. The collection must be nevertheless a microcosmos; we shall desire a display of music in its historical dimension, a taste of the major composers, some fine example of the major solo instruments, some examples of the principal forms (opera, chorale, sonata, symphony and so on), a fair spread of nationalities. . . . Quite a question from this cowpoke!

WR

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William F. Rickenbacker

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A lonesome cowpoke in central Montana has written to me as follows: “Dear Bill—I love good music but don’t know anything about it. I would like to have a collection of records but they’re expensive and there are thousands to choose from and I don’t know where to start. Tell me how to proceed.”

Criteria begin to emerge. If the budget is limited, then we should select recordings of music that is not available otherwise. The standard works can be encountered, nay, one must labor to avoid them, on standard radio broadcasts and in the course of a year at the local philharmonic society. My friend’s record collection will not, therefore, include the nine symphonies of Beethoven. If the budget is limited, each piece of music acquired must be of the sort that you can listen to again and again, with renewed and possibly altered appreciation at each listening. So we can exclude the instrumental stuntmen. The collection must be nevertheless a microcosmos; we shall desire a display of music in its historical dimension, a taste of the major composers, some fine example of the major solo instruments, some examples of the principal forms (opera, chorale, sonata, symphony and so on), a fair spread of nationalities. . . . Quite a question from this cowpoke!