Stretching the envelope

[LeMartinPecheur]

A recent charity-shop purchase of a CD of Ellen Taaffe Zwilich's music provided the mild unlooked-for pleasure of extending the range of my shelves' alphabetical run of composers, which previously went from Adams to Zemlinsky.

For a little while I even thought I'd reached ultima Thule in the Z direction (unless Teresa Zylis-Gara has ever taken up the compositional pen seriously). But meticulous research reveals that a composer called Zywny exists (don't know if there's an all-Zywny CD yet though).

In the A direction I certainly need some Abel and will have to watch out for discs of Aagesen, according to the 1980 Grove.

Does anyone know of further outliers? I fear that somewhere there just must be a (Scandinavian?) composer called Aa.

Roehre: one for you???

[LeMartinPecheur]

Cancel Aagesen - there are two song composers called Aagaard! But to win the coconut they must have a full CD in their name.

Amazon shows a Wojciech Zywny having just a track or two on an unavailable CD. So no coconut for him yet

[Il Grande Inquisitor]

I don't go as far as Zwilich, but have recently stretched the reaches of my operatic alphabet, taking delivery of Die Geisterinsel by Johann Rudolph Zumsteeg.

[Petrushka]

Best I can do in my collection is Carl Michael Ziehrer who just manages to beat off the challenge from Zemlinsky.

[Serial_Apologist]

Best I can do in my collection is Carl Michael Ziehrer who just manages to beat off the challenge from Zemlinsky.

Wot - no Zimmermann, (Bernt Aloys, that is)??

S-A

[LeMartinPecheur]

IGI: Zumsteeg is very good - beats Zemlinsky - but I'm amazed by the number of composers even deeper into the Zs. Don't know how many of these can muster a CD but how are we on Zwart, Zweers, Zwetkow, Zwyssig, Zygmuntowski, or Zytowich?

Has anyone got a contender for the very first composer on the CD shelves? Komei Abe, Japanese composer b.1911, is the the earliest I've so found found listed on Amazon. Karl Abel is relegated to second

[Roehre]

Roehre: one for you???

Aa, Michiel van der
Zykan, Otto

[LeMartinPecheur]

Aa, Michiel van der
Zykan, Otto

Oooh Roehre: there's a tricky one! I'd spotted van der Aa, but does he go under A or V??? Grateful for Zykan - he's new to me.

[verismissimo]

Just can't compete. Disregarding odds and ends, my orchestral "library" stops at Zemlinsky, opera at Zeller, chamber at Wolf and instumental at a paltry Widor. Must try harder.

[Roehre]

Oooh Roehre: there's a tricky one! I'd spotted van der Aa, but does he go under A or V??? Grateful for Zykan - he's new to me.

under Aa, as Beethoven is Van Beethoven, and he does go under B, doesn't he?

[Suffolkcoastal]

I've got quite a bit of Zwilich's music, also the Zweers symphonies. At the other end my collection of recorded music starts with Evald Aav, only one piece though! The only letter I don't have any music under is X, I don't have any Xenakis!. Last year the library at the University where I work, transferred all its Tchaikovsky books to C, their argument was that is how Harvard classifies them!!! To find Tchaikovsky one now has to look before Chopin! I told them they were being silly and perhaps in that case they should also move Chopin to S and Janacek to Y for example.

[Roehre]

Last year the library at the University where I work, transferred all its Tchaikovsky books to C, their argument was that is how Harvard classifies them!!! To find Tchaikovsky one now has to look before Chopin! I told them they were being silly and perhaps in that case they should also move Chopin to S and Janacek to Y for example.

SFC, this seems to be an international convention now, as not only Harvard classified Tchaikovsky under C, the German Musik in Gesellschaft und Geschichte (2nd edition [9+17+2 vols - 1996-2008], the German Grove's if you like, though not an Encyclopaedia but a Handbook by design) does so too .
The jusitification is, that in Russian this composer's name begins with a C (with a top-down accent circonflexe on top of it, btw, but I cannot produce such a thing on this computer I'm afraid), and that all composers' names should be ordered according to the spelling of their names in their mother tongue.

[Suffolkcoastal]

I expect they'll then have a variety of spellings according to local dialect! When I learnt some Russian a few years ago the letter Chai (which looks like an X) actually is pronounced almost with a TCH the 'T' is very clipped, but again seems to vary according to regional pronounciation.

[Roehre]

I expect they'll then have a variety of spellings according to local dialect! When I learnt some Russian a few years ago the letter Chai (which looks like an X) actually is pronounced almost with a TCH the 'T' is very clipped, but again seems to vary according to regional pronounciation.

But standard spelling is AFAIK independent from the dialects spoken, or am I wrong?

[Suffolkcoastal]

But we could get into further muddier waters in that Tchaikovsky is a Polish family name, so I wonder how its pronounced in Polish and of course pronounciation changes over a period of time. So changing long-standard spelling can cause lots of problems, perhaps those who decided on this change shoould actually leave things as they are.