It's getting close to that time of year again, where I query my Giocoso database and analyse what it is I've been listening to during 2024.
Sticking to a tried-and-true format, I can report that I listened to 3,022 unique recordings this year, which altogether played for a grand, cumulative total of 72.19 days.
The 3,022 recordings were of music composed by 482 different composers and performed by 950 unique 'distinguishing artists'.
Examining those headline numbers in a little more detail, we see the following for the range of genres played (durations shown are in days):
| Genre | Duration (Days) |
| Ballet | 1.48 |
| Cantata | 1.63 |
| Chamber | 3.95 |
| Choral | 7.37 |
| Concerto | 7.77 |
| Film - Theatre - Radio | 0.63 |
| Keyboard | 2.89 |
| Opera | 17.13 |
| Oratorio | 2.58 |
| Orchestral | 6.61 |
| Quartet | 1.16 |
| Symphonic | 18.88 |
| Vocal | 1.82 |
There's been a lot more opera played this year than last (17 days this year, a mere 8 days in 2023); but symphonies and general orchestral works have been played at roughly the same pace as before. String quartets got played approximately half as often as last year.
The top fifteen composers this year (again, judging by the total cumulative play-time received by each) were as follows:
| Composer | Duration (Days) |
| Gustav Mahler | 4.59 |
| Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart | 3.87 |
| Anton Bruckner | 3.82 |
| Johann Sebastian Bach | 3.22 |
| Ludwig van Beethoven | 3.04 |
| Antonio Vivaldi | 2.76 |
| Benjamin Britten | 2.27 |
| Dmitri Shostakovich | 1.75 |
| Joseph Haydn | 1.71 |
| George Frideric Handel | 1.55 |
| Richard Strauss | 1.48 |
| Antonín Dvořák | 1.31 |
| Franz Schubert | 1.27 |
| Giuseppe Verdi | 1.20 |
| Peter Ilich Tchaikovsky | 0.98 |
Mahler tops the 2024 list, having been only the 7th-most played composer in 2023. Mozart also rose in the ranks: 9th last year, 2nd this year. Vivaldi also had a good year: 6th this year with nearly 3 days' of playtime, whereas in 2023 he was 15th in the list with just over a single day's play. These ranking changes mostly reflect the fact that I'm driving down the proportion of my collection 'not yet played', which is now around the 4% mark: getting the percentage lower means playing composers I've previously deliberately under-played, which invariably means composers with large numbers of compositions to their name. In practice, this has meant previously under-playing Mahler, Bruckner, Beethoven, Bach and Mozart ...and that's now being addressed, resulting in their getting much more play-time. This means that I can comfortably predict that 2025 will be the year of Bach and Beethoven!
It is interesting to note that the top 15 composers together account for 34.82 days'-worth of playing. The remaining 467 composers thus account for 37.37 days of play between them all. That means that, between them, the top 15 composers account for 48% of all plays: last year, they only represented 39%. This year has thus seen an increased concentration of plays by a few composers (Mahler, Mozart and Bruckner being the biggest culprits).
In terms of performers (or 'distinguishing artists' as they are called on this website), the top fifteen (ordered by their number of plays, rather than by duration) for 2024 were:
| Distinguishing Artist | Count of Plays |
| Masaaki Suzuki | 89 |
| Adam Fischer | 44 |
| Charles Mackerras | 37 |
| Antal Dorati | 36 |
| Łukasz Borowicz | 31 |
| Rumon Gamba | 28 |
| Otto Klemperer | 27 |
| Leonard Bernstein | 26 |
| John Storgårds | 26 |
| Edward Higginbottom | 25 |
| Bruno Walter | 25 |
| John Wilson | 23 |
| Eugene Ormandy | 23 |
| Neeme Järvi | 22 |
| Murray Perahia | 22 |
It is interesting to compare this list to that for 2023. New arrivals this year include the likes of Klemperer and Bruno Walter: that's mostly a result of the increased play-time for Mahler which has taken place. Suzuki still tops the list by a country mile because of the huge number of Bach cantata recordings that are supremely his. Similarly, Murray Perahia makes the list because of the increased play of Mozart that took place toward the latter part of the year. For the curious, Łukasz Borowicz makes the list almost exclusively because of his many short recordings of Andrzej Panufnik I started listening to in August.
On other fronts, the year has been productive. Giocoso reached version 3.20 with a much-needed slew of self-controlling music playback options, making it much more convenient to operate as a music player. Semplice similarly reached version 2.00 in July, and swiftly moved to version 2.07 by November: I find it a highly-usable FLAC tagger! Niente also reached version 4.00 this year (in September) and has been happily ticking along, keeping an eye on the health of my music collection, ever since. It has been a busy year on the software development front, basically! However, all three programs are, I think, now more or less "feature complete": I don't anticipate dramatic revisions to them in the coming year, with minor bug-fixes being released as-and-when I encounter the need for them! The only obvious improvement I'd want to make to Giocoso is to be able to record plays in a single, central database no matter what PC is performing the plays -but that's an architectural development that is definitely non-trivial, so though I will definitely be tinkering in that direction in the coming year, I doubt anything will be released.
Away from the software, I was lucky to holiday in Vienna back in September, most of it seemingly spent in cemeteries, paying respects to Beethoven, Schubert, Salieri, Mahler, Schoenberg and Brahms. A week in Prague earlier in the year similarly found me prowling around cemeteries, this time saying hello to the likes of Smetana, Dvořák and Karel Ančerl (whose memorial bust has a broken nose, fixed with great dollops of badly-applied glue: someone should do a proper fix!)
Next year should see me finally reach the goal of having played everything in my collection at least once. That will mean playing a final 9 days of Bach, 7 of Beethoven, 5 each of Wagner, Handel and Mozart, and 4 of Verdi. There are twenty four other composers with currently unplayed recordings, but those recordings are few and mostly short. However, music is always a moving target: there remains 500GB of ripped-but-not-yet-catalogued music to work my way through (equivalent to around 1500 CDs)! At some point, I will have to stop buying new recordings, though I've been telling myself that for at least three years now!
So, with the clock ticking its way to 2024's doom, I wish all my regular readers and generous donors (whose contributions have been greatly appreciated) a Happy and Musical New Year!