Monday, December 1, 2014

Some Improvements

1) No playlist and no regret.

2) Classical composer/artist names have been normalised. I counted 284 different spellings of Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky, and 23 names of Choir of King's College, Cambridge. Thousands of duplicate classical artist pages have been merged. You can search for Rachmaninov and still find Sergei Rachmaninoff (also try CPE Bach, DSCH).

3) Composers' pages start to make sense. The Popular section (which used to be playground for spammers) now becomes a nice introduction for casual listeners. See Robert Schumann:


And the discography is easier to browse now without all the "Tender Classical For Study" stuff. Leonard Bernstein and Benjamin Britten are good examples.

Can you guess which composer page was this?


It was Gabriel Faure. But it could just as well be any other composer, since they all looked like that.

Now the page is slightly more useful, with the wonderful Stephen Cleobury – Fauré: Requiem & Messe Basse at the top.


There's still so much to improve, but the below 50 composer pages are already great starting points for people who want to get into classical music or explore a bit more. Comparing to these changes, all the playlists I've done before are really nothing.

Johann Sebastian Bach
Béla Bartók
Ludwig van Beethoven
Hector Berlioz
Georges Bizet
Johannes Brahms
Benjamin Britten
William Byrd
John Cage
Frederic Chopin
Aaron Copland
François Couperin
Claude Debussy
Guillaume Dufay
Antonín Dvořák
Gabriel Faure
Giovanni Gabrieli
George Frideric Handel
Franz Joseph Haydn
Unknown Artist
Orlande de Lassus
Franz Liszt
Guillaume de Machaut
Gustav Mahler
Felix Mendelssohn
Claudio Monteverdi
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
Johannes Ockeghem
Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina
Sergei Prokofiev
Giacomo Puccini
Henry Purcell
Sergei Rachmaninoff
Jean-Philippe Rameau
Maurice Ravel
Gioachino Rossini
Domenico Scarlatti
Arnold Schoenberg
Franz Schubert
Robert Schumann
Dmitri Shostakovich
Jean Sibelius
Johann Strauss II
Richard Strauss
Igor Stravinsky
Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky
Ralph Vaughan Williams
Giuseppe Verdi
Antonio Vivaldi
Richard Wagner

Enjoy and share the music.