Keeping Up with a Large Collection of Recordings

My history of maintaining a collection of recorded music goes all the way back to my secondary school days, when my parents still had some of their music on 78 RPM discs. When I entered the Massachusetts Institute of Technology as a freshman, my primarily recreation time was spent at the campus radio station (whose call letters, at that time, were WTBS for Technology Broadcasting System). When I saw the breadth of music in the station’s collection, I was happier than a pig in you-know-what.

Since that time I have been growing my own library, which has followed me to all of my post-doctoral jobs, first in Israel and subsequently on the East and West Coasts, respectively. Over the decades I have had to expand space for my albums over several different cabinets, now in two different rooms in my current condominium unit. In order to maintain a viable framework of organization, I have relied on the Schwann Catalog, which provided a useful indexing system for the many different genres in my collection, primarily classical and jazz.

Sadly, Schwann went into bankruptcy in 2002. As a result, my primary index remains the Winter 1998–99 release of Schwann Opus for classical music and the Spring 1996 Schwann Spectrum for the rest. (I also have the 1995 “Master edition Number 2” of The Gramophone Classical Catalogue, but it has been quite a while since I consulted it.) There are, of course, any number of recent recordings that do not appear in any of those sources; but I have yet to have a problem with fitting them into the indexing system.

There is an old joke about the man who shows off his extensive library of books to anyone visiting him. The usual question put to him is, “Have you read them all?” I have no problem owning up to the fact that the unread books on my shelves outnumber those I have read. Nevertheless, whenever I encounter a new recording (usually by download these days), I make it a point to listen to it as soon as possible to make sure that there are no defects in any of the tracks. Where the downloads are concerned, I also make it a point to burn a physical copy for backup (along with the backup facility I have through my computer’s Time Machine software).

Gregor Piatigorsky (and his cello) on the cover of the booklet for the Sony box set of his recordings

While Schwann has provided me with the necessary framework, there are still times when search may be challenging. If the content is digital, I have no problems relying on Apple Music. The major problem is dealing with the physical, particularly box sets, such as the Sony release of all the RCA and Columbia albums of recordings made by cellist Gregor Piatigorsky. For the most part, I have been able to rely on Discogs to provide a Web page that indexes the contents of a box set. However, these tend to be abbreviated, meaning that specific details (such as titles of short pieces) are lacking. More often than not, however, I can usually find a way to feed a Google search to lead me in the right direction!

Inevitably, however, the “search space” will continue to grow; and all I can do is hope that my digital resources will allow me to keep up with it!