Month: January 2020

Mozart: finis!

Posted on by hjr

Today would have been Mozart's 264th birthday... and, quite by chance, it happens also to be the day that I've finally finished the first draft of the new Dizwell catalogue of his works.

The last few vocal works have now been excerpted and incipits found for each of them, so that makes 674 incipits prepared, uploaded and applied to the database, along with 635 40-second audio excerpts for most items. (The difference between the two numbers is that there are a handful of works that are now known to be 'not by Mozart'. For those, I've applied a 'blank incipit', but not bothered with an audio excerpt: simple maths tells you that there are 39 such works). [...] 

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Mozart: A Progress Report

Posted on by hjr

Having begun the process of re-cataloguing my collection of Mozart music just before Christmas (see the previous blog post), I thought it about time I posted a bit of a progress report. Naturally, what began as merely an exercise in re-naming things (for example, 'Requiem, K626' would become 'DZ 02082 Requiem' using the new Dizwell numbering scheme), rapidly became a full-on musicological cataloguing process... since I needed a good list of 'new names' with which to rename my music files to begin with.

As I hope the graphic at the left of this blog post indicates, I'm now about half-way through that cataloguing process. That is, if you visit the new catalogue, you will see green '+' buttons next to each listed composition. Click one of those, and for about half of the listed works, a 'hidden screen' will appear that shows a score of the first few bars of music for the piece (an 'incipit', from the Latin for 'Here begins...') and contains a link to an extract of an audio recording of the work (all extracts last for 40 seconds and are presented as 128kbps MP3 tracks, so are not 'hi-fi' quality). [...] 

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