no man is an island

Recently, I was weeding my nonfiction shelf, and in a shoved-behind spot where I hadn't seen it in ages, I found this little volume, sized to fit in a pocket, with a dust jacket in terrible shape, which makes sense--I remember my father bringing this home from the swap shop at the dump when I was a kid, probably in one of the early years I was taking violin lessons, and I leafed through it, but never read it then, and that's happened several times since, as I rediscovered it, leafed through a few pages, and then discarded it. This time, I decided to read it cover to cover (or, well, read the full text of Grabbe's work, there's an extensive collection of recommended recordings at the end and I had no intention of just reading a list of record names). And then, once I'd done so, I discovered that I didn't really feel that I'd done so, because there were too many pieces in the book that I'd never listened to.

So, I spent a solid week listening to 100 symphonies, concertos, overtures, tone poems, and whatever other technical names there were for varying pieces in this book, and ended up having a lot of opinions on what the book chose to include and not include, as well as discovering some things about my personal taste, and what thoughts I had seemed way too big to go into one of my usual book review posts, so ... here we are?

( I can't believe I essentially gave myself a homework assignment and then wrote an essay about it. )