Do you know 1000 pieces - really?

[Dave2002]

I started to wonder whether I could really remember up to 1000 pieces - significant ones, not just odd songs. Easy, I thought - symphonies, concertos, string quartets, sonatas etc. Obvious - start with symphonies - Haydn, then Mozart, so you get around 150 straight up, but then it starts to get harder. 200 is fairly easy, with a few of the usual suspects - Tchaikovsky, Mahler, Bruckner, Brahms, Schumann, Sibelius, Schubert and of course Beethoven.

Then switch to concertos, and Mozart provides 27 piano concertos, and quite a few others so 40 is fairly easy. Again, Beethoven, Brahms, Sibelius, Elgar, Dvorak, Tchaikovsky Schumann etc. push the figures up, though it's not so easy to get up to 100 of those, unless of course you throw in Vivaldi or Telemann.

String quartets - surely with Beethoven, Mozart, Haydn and Shostakovich plus a few more we can get 100 of those too.

So now we have perhaps 400 pieces we might know, or be aware of, to some extent.

Sonatas? Yet again Beethoven, Mozart, Haydn give us a tranche of sonatas - piano, violin and piano, cello and piano, so 100 sonatas is possible.

Getting to 500 is thus not too difficult, but 1000? Probably only feasible by adding in very obscure works, and/or Segerstam symphonies.

OK, we can add in operas and oratorios, and Mozart, Handel, Vivaldi, Haydn, Verdi, Wagner and Puccini should easily get us over 50.

That still seems to suggest that the core repertoire which most of us might claim to know is well under 1000 pieces. Clearly there are over 1000 pieces, but most of us only know a fraction of what's been written.

[antongould]

In my case a lot less than 1000 sadly; as has been discussed before the ability to remember/recall music varies dramatically and I sit at the very lowest end of the scale - if I had to guess at how many I'd say 50-60 I could say "yes that is...................." and maybe another 200-300 I recognise but cannot for the life of me remember what they are!!!

[vinteuil]

Scarlatti will give you 555 sonatas for a start

[Eine Alpensinfonie]

I think in my student days, I was accumulating knowledge at such a rate that I might well have come close, but since then, work has intervened and I am less clear on distinguishing between (e.g.) some Mozart piano concertos.
I suppose I would have to sit down a make a list...

[cloughie]

Bach BWVs and Mozart Ks go a long way towards it.

[BBMmk2]

Or even a liszr EA?

Noone has mentioned the works of JSB yet? All those cantatas, other choral works, chamber music etc....

[Eine Alpensinfonie]

But "knowing" something surely means identifying it positively with little hesitation.

[Pabmusic]

...Clearly there are over 1000 pieces, but most of us only know a fraction of what's been written.

Of course you're right. But I did a quick, very unscientific, survey, with these results:

1. I have about 3,500 CDs, of which I guess about 1,500 are accounted for by duplications of works (that is, most of the contents of about 3 CDs in every 7 are duplicated). That leaves about 2,000 discs where the major pieces are not duplicated. Take away about 300 discs of Pink Floyd, Led Zeppelin, Peter Gabriel and Rolf Harris (plus several others), and that leaves about 1,700. So it is likely I 'know' more than 1,000 works, in the sense that I've heard them at least once.

2. A glance through one book (the All Music Guide to Classical Music) which has separate entries on 4,000 works - or so the blurb says - suggests I do not know perhaps 1 in 3 of the entries. But again, I'm using 'know' to mean 'heard'.

3. I have played in, perhaps, 250 concerts and conducted a further 60. I'd estimate those figures to represent 1,200-1,800 pieces (many of the earlier concerts would have had 10 items or more and many would have been played more than once), and I would have known those pieces very well indeed.

4. I have written programme notes (and other descriptive stuff) for at least 150 events - a total, perhaps, of 400 pieces that I know well.

So you see it is possible to know 1,000 pieces if you've been closely involved with music for at least 45 years.

[Panjandrum]

I started to wonder whether I could really remember up to 1000 pieces - significant ones, not just odd songs. Easy, I thought - symphonies, concertos, string quartets, sonatas etc. ..

Surely you're omitting other important genres:

Overtures
Ballet scores and other incidental music
Sonatas for two instruments
trios
Quintets
Sextets
Septets
Octets
Nonets(OK,OK etc)
Suites (eg Sheherezade)
Fantasias
Variations
Solo sonatas for other instruments
"Other" works (eg Des Canyons aux etoiles; Ameriques;Atmospheres)

I think several thousand is probably more likely.

[John Skelton]

Surely you're omitting other important genres

All the glorious music written between around 1100 CE and the beginning of the C18 seems to have disappeared, too.

[Roehre]

That still seems to suggest that the core repertoire which most of us might claim to know is well under 1000 pieces. Clearly there are over 1000 pieces, but most of us only know a fraction of what's been written.

In the German and Austrian monasteries alone there are some 100.000 unpublished scores of 16-19th C music gathering dust. Any of the larger publishing houses has between around 1000 and 10000 different pieces of music available (though there is some doubling with out-of-copyright works). Every year this corpus of music increases by some 1000 works (conservative estimation, that is). So, we don't live to even only hear more than approximately 0.0001 %, let alone know those pieces.

Now listening and collecting for slightly over 40 years, my collection consists of some 47.000 pieces (without doublings approximately 35.000- as there are hardly works which are represented more than twice), of which I think I know approximately 1000 - 1500 very well indeed, and able to identify the composer of approximately another 15-20.000 straight away, leaving a staggering around 15.000 of which I recognize not immediately either composer or work .
Another 5000 or so I manage an informed guess which turns out to be correct, leaving some10.000 of which I haven't a clue when at random played for me These works mostly but not exclusively are 17th and 18th C
Thank goodness for my database

[Pabmusic]

In the German and Austrian monasteries alone there are some 100.000 unpublished scores of 16-19th C music gathering dust...Thank goodness for my database

So much easier with a computer! I'm hoping that more Dittersdorf (for one) will emerge. He wrote over 120 symphonies, and the few we have are such fun that one keeps hoping...

[Dave2002]

Surely you're omitting other important genres:

Overtures
Ballet scores and other incidental music
Sonatas for two instruments
trios
Quintets
Sextets
Septets
Octets
Nonets(OK,OK etc)
Suites (eg Sheherezade)
Fantasias
Variations
Solo sonatas for other instruments
"Other" works (eg Des Canyons aux etoiles; Ameriques;Atmospheres)

I think several thousand is probably more likely.

I agree, but I think you may find that even if there are very many such pieces, very few are generally known, or by those who we would consider to be major composers, and they don't bump figures up too much. Of course there is the long tail phenomenon, so you can get almost any large number of pieces if you go obscure enough.

You can crank up quite a few more if you consider collections such as Haydn's pieces for baryton. Of course also there are many pieces by JSB and Scarlatti, but how many of us listen to more than a small or modest fraction of their works?

[Pabmusic]

I agree, but I think you may find that even if there are very many such pieces, very few are generally known, or by those who we would consider to be major composers...

Are you really suggesting we shouldn't count pieces by composers we would not consider 'major'?

[vinteuil]

. Of course also there are many pieces by JSB and Scarlatti, but how many of us listen to more than a small or modest fraction of their works?

... Dave, Dave, Dave

Never misunderestimate the listening habits of fellow boardees!