An insomniac, I often spend much of the night listening to music. In order not to disturb my wife, I put ear pods on and spend hours lying in the dark listening. Lately, I have discovered the pleasure of using a one-word search term on Apple Classical – the word “complete.” Not so very long ago, recordings were limited in their duration by the media they were recorded on – LPs when invented gave a certain meaning to the term “long playing” that has long since become outdated. CDs are limited to 80 minutes. But now, with streaming, albums can go on without limitation.
Apple Classical has become my go-to streaming platform for nighttime listening as there are a large number of albums with a duration that will last through most of the night. I enter “complete” and see what pops up. The complete symphonies, complete piano music, complete preludes, complete nocturnes, complete string quartets of just about any composer, streaming for hours on end. Recent listening has included the complete piano works of Satie, Debussy, Faure and Ravel (I was in a French mood for week or so); the complete string quartets of Haydn, Shostakovich and Myaskovsky; the complete symphonies of Franz Schmidt; the complete violin sonatas of Heinrich Ignaz France von Biber. And, yes, I often drift off to sleep in the middle, while the music goes on, often to delightful musical dreams.
It is regrettable that there is not nearly enough time in a lifetime to cover more than a small fraction of the great music that is out there. But I’m working on it.