Music Geek

Sir Ludwig von Köchel’s Chronological-Thematic Catalogue of the Complete Works of Wolfgang Amadé Mozart was published in 1862. It lists Mozart’s work in chronological order and stands as the supreme reference to Mozart’s music. Although appended a few times--because some music geek discovered some flaw in the original--Köchel's guide has remained the standard. This explains why all of Mozart’s pieces are accompanied by the letter K and a number.

Mozart’s wrote his first piano sonata in C major when he was 18. K.279 is the catalogue number, which means he had already written 278 pieces of music before this. His last piece was the Requiem in D minor, K. 626. As we all know, he died young. He was 35.

I pass on this little historical aside because I am in the process of putting all of my music on my laptop. I will give away all of my CD’s and my stereo when I have completed this task. We have all played the game of deciding which one record we would take to a desert island. I have a similar dilemma as I have only a paltry 25 gigs of hard drive space allocated for my music. It can’t all come with me.

As of this writing I have over 26 hours of Johann Sebastian Bach and probably an equal amount of Mozart. I don’t listen to Rock but I will throw a few of my old CD’s on just for nostalgia.

It has been fun listening to a broad selection of music, as I have been in a rut of only putting on piano music for a long time. I enjoyed hearing some of my favorite Salsa and Brazilian Samba tunes that I almost forgot I had lying around.

I can’t believe what a geek I’ve been about organizing all of this stuff on my computer. I use the Realplayer Realjukebox application as I find their new player lacks some of the great features of the old one. I love the playlists where I can put all of Mozart’s slow movements in one file to listen to when I am falling asleep or drinking coffee in the morning.

The best part about this whole thing is that I won’t have to spend an hour putting CD’s back in their cases after having people over. Point and click from now on.