Monday, March 15, 2021

A poet and music …

John Ashbery’s Music Library: A Playlist. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

When he died on September 3, 2017, he had a collection of over two-thousand recordings. (In 2018, independent scholar Alisa Goz spent a year creating an Excel spreadsheet containing all of them.) About one-hundred of these were of American popular music: Bob Dylan, the Rolling Stones, the B-52s, to name a few. The rest were Western classical music, though an eclectic and varied collection within that frame, representing all periods and all instruments.

Can’t say I share his fondness for Schoenberg. Webern I kind of like, and some Berg. 

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