I bought some more sheet music yesterday; all from Henle so all with the distinctive blue covers, so I will skip the photos for this.
- Brahms Opus 76
- Brahms Opus 119
- Liszt Sonata in B minor
- Brahms Ballades
I have bought a crazy amount of sheet music and that doesn’t include the pieces I also pull from IMSLP to whom I intend to give some money soon. I know deep down that until I get past the necessary block I have with one of the exam pieces I am learning, I will not do anything more than tip away at bits of these collections. I bought the Liszt Sonata – a piece I never expect to even start learning in its completeness simply because I love the second movement.
But it’s nice to dream and I Feel No Guilt about this. However.
I need to tidy the sheet music into some sort of usable system so that I can find it more easily. This involves bookshelf reorganisation. I dread it, I already have piles of actual books around the place. The oldest sheet music I possess is in Ireland and the oldest that I have here is my copy of Rach II which I bought in about 1988. So it’s like, 35 years old. I take care of my music and even my exam books are in pretty decent nick given that they cost one or two pounds also around 35 years ago variously. Yes I know it seems crazy that someone working grade 4 or 5 also bought Rach 2. But I like dreaming of the possible and I’m never going to forgive the people who focus on how hard something will be instead of how motivated I am. I still can’t play bits of it but I totally get lost in it when I am working on pieces of it just for the pure pleasure of doing so. The journey matters not the end. Anyway, I digress. The Liszt cropped up on Igor Levit’s latest album; I have quite a few bits of Liszt that were bought to be read rather than played. A bit like Islamey by Balakirev. I’m not even going to try. Okay. Back to the objective.
I have a mix of music: a lot of so called classical – basically written 100 or more years ago – and more modern stuff like Tiersen, Arnalds and Einaudi. I’m going to write about Einaudi after I am done with this. I bought mag boxes to store them in because they are mostly not hardback and the music can be fragile and when you don’t have a lot of it, mag boxes keep it somewhat safe. Now I am thinking that the alphabet is going to have to be my friend and that I will just have to sort that way. But I want to keep a mag box aside for the kind of loose single piece sheets and also for the Grade 6 and Grade 8 piano pieces. Currently the 6 is cluttering my piano. I want to declutter my piano but that’s going to be challenging as I’ve all sorts of tools and notes there. I also have the free stuff that came with the piano (stuff that includes Burgmuller and Chopin plus a couple of collections of Various). So there needs to be a collections section as well. I also tended to sort by publisher which was fine when most of it was Henle. Most of it still is but I’d prefer to sort by composer now that a bit more Barenreiter is coming in and I bought the Chopin Institute’s issue of the Chopin Sonatas.
So I’m writing about doing this instead of doing it which is…an interesting bit of procrastination.