What's in a name?
Quite a lot, if you think about it. I kinda mentioned this yesterday and want to write about it. While it's true that Shakespeare's rose would still smell sweetly if we called it a dungbomb, I heard a podcast from Scientific American the other day where the reporter quoted the late Stephen Jay Gould, that in biology, when you name something, you are expressing a theory about it. In the biological field of taxonomy, the name of a thing designates what its relationship is to the entire universe of known living things. Perhaps it's part of human nature, or even the nature of rational thought, to categorize, sort, and classify the things we encounter.
Plato spoke of these categories as existing independently of the things themselves, the famous forms, and posited that the rational mind merely discerned how the real things in our world merely "shared" the essence of these ethereal forms. I think most of us would find this preposterous, but it does illustrate a central problem of Western Philosophy: what is the rational component in our perceptions? What is its source and how do ideas interact with the physical world? I certainly can't answer that today, and I'm getting pretty boring, but I enjoy the woolgathering.
So, what do I find fascinating about the problem of naming and classification? I think it's the fact that the possibilities are endless. It's like a puzzle that you don't ever have to finish--and there's no final, correct solution. Even better, the way you organize things can give you new insights into the world itself, discerning new relationships with new categories. To me, this is where most epiphanies and inspirations come from.
Here's the relevance to yesterday's post: I have to organize my extremely large CD collection or I would never find anything! It's a common problem for serious music lovers like me and how you organize the recordings says a great deal about what's important to you and how you came to your love of this hobby. My music collection is first split by media type: vinyl, compact disk, and digital files. This is a distinction that I make unwillingly and is only for the sake of storage! Still, it says something about me that I'm willing to let a distinction that isn't musical become my first level of organization, rather than find a way to interweave these media. For the sake of this discussion, I'm going to ignore the digital media organization--computers make it too easy to change the organization at the click of a mouse and mine is hardly static.
After I separate my CDs from my vinyl, the next level of organization shows that I am both a child of the rock'n'roll/hip-hop era and a classically-trained musician. I separate "Classical" music out from what I think of as "Not-Classical". While I often refer to the "not-classical" as "pop" music, I mean that in the sense of popular, or vernacular, music and not "pop" in the sense of Top 40 or the traditions of that business. My pop collection includes jazz, hip-hop, rock'n'roll, R & B, traditional folk, and ethnic/indigenous music (I'm sure I'm leaving out some genres from that list, but the important thing here is that I resolutely refuse to make those distinctions). When I go to music stores, I actively resent how they sub-categorize both the classical and "pop" sections (even on-line stores are guilty--probably more so). I refuse to make any additional distinctions in terms of genre, style, culture or any such foolishness. It's sheer folly, in my opinion, to try. When you make the narrower distinctions, artists are more likely to come along and make a complete mess of your efforts by combining rock and jazz or ethnic styles with R & B.
I tend to favor acts that don't narrowly follow the tenets of a single genre in pop music, or classical, really, so my next level of distinction is artist and each rack of CDs is sorted by artist. This has its own pitfalls, too, but shows how my theory of music works! After all, should I classify Elvis Costello differently from Elvis Costello and the Attractions? What about duos/trios/quartets where each musician receives equal billing? What if the pop disk has more than one act featured, such as compilations? And who is the artist on a classical CD? The composer? The ensemble? Soloist? Conductor? So I made some decisions on these matters that are not always consistent, but definitely begin to show some of those theories. Yes, if Elvis Costello is the primary artist, it gets sorted as Elvis. If the artists get equal billing, I sort under the artist whose name comes first on the album cover (exception for Kai Winding, the trombonist, who comes first because I'm usually not as interested in the other artists--and I reserve the right to apply this practice to other artists). I know this gets a bit arbitrary and rigid, but saves me much time trying to make what I see as somewhat meaningless decisions. Pop music then gets sorted alphabetically by artist. Like the music stores, people who perform under real or assumed, but recognizable as conventional, names are sorted by last name (Elvis Costello under "C", and not his real name, MacManus; Madonna under "S" and not "C" for her last name, "Ciccone"), while acts that aren't names are sorted by the name--minus any articles like "A" or "The". This doesn't always work since some acts have people's names, but the act is really a band named for a member--or worse, a person who isn't in the band. I get a bit arbitrary here and then never make the decision again. So Ted Leo & The Pharmacists is sorted under "T", but The Reverend Horton Heat is under "H". I'd probably reverse those two if I did it again, but who really cares as long as all the disks by an artist are together? Oh, and compilations all get filed under "Various Artists".
I define the classical artist as the composer. This is the way the music stores do it on CDs with only one composer, although I found that the bit of putting compilation CDs separately, then defining what is or isn't a recital CD that should be sorted under the soloist is a serious waste of energy. When I have multiple artists on the disk (oops, I meant composers), I just select the work whose track or tracks are the longest duration and determine that the CD shall be filed under that composer... I'm not 100% consistent on this. After all, if I have a CD where there are, say, 15 tracks by one composer, all between three and five minutes long, but there is a single six-minute track by a different composer, I'll probably file the CD under the more numerous composer who takes up an hour of the CD running time. Yes, last name first. This is much easier than trying to decide that one work on a CD is more "important" or "better" than the others and deserves to be used for the putative artist designation.
After I file my pop CDs or records under artist, I usually then sort by the title of the disk. If you have an artist like Seal, who has two CDs without title, I call them eponymous and file them in chronological order. I have tried chronological order for some of my disks, usually when I have a fairly complete collection from the artist (like Public Enemy), but I've really discontinued that since you never know when an artist will disappoint you and stop putting out good stuff (see: Public Enemy). With classical, I also sort by title, but based on that same longest work (by duration) artist logic. The hard part is when the work is something like all of the composer's symphonies or all of his string quartets, but then I also struggle with whether I file things under "C" for "Concerto for Violin", or "V" for "Violin Concerto". I usually just choose one, choose the other some other time, and live with the situation.
So why discuss this today? Because I wanted to explain yesterday's CD review where I mentioned that my CD titled "Mexico" is filed as Hebert Vazquez instead of the Arditti Quartet like a music store would--and to justify why Mr. Vazquez gets the pride of artist designation when there are five other composers represented on the disk...
CDs listened to today:
- Meyer Kupferman: Concerto for Cello, Tape, and Orchestra, disk 2
- Modest Mouse: Good News For People Who Love Bad News
