Thread: My OCD and the Brilliant Complete Box Sets

I admit it, albeit shamefacedly, that I am a collector. From childhood, I have been fascinated by things that come in a series and are numbered. In my tender years I collected the nature books of Thorton W Burgess, each with their little starred numbers on the spines lined up in order on my shelves. Later, The Hardy Boys. In my adult years, any number of different authors' complete works (though, without the starred and numbered spines, alas). I was a publisher's dream.

Is it any wonder that, once I started into classical music I would become fascinated with Opus numbers and uniform series of records and boxed sets?

So, even though I try to force myself to be selective and pick only performances I love, when something like the Brilliant Complete Brahms, or Haydn Symphonies, or Complete Mozart comes along, I can't resist it. The performances may range from merely serviceable to good (and only rarely great), but it doesn't matter...it's complete!

Well, almost.

I can't tell you how much time it took to spreadsheet the Brahms lieder on the Brilliant set to be sure they were all there, split up and mixed up as they are on ten or so different discs! Don't they know what it means to be obsessive/compulsive? Now, I'm going to have to copy and sequence them on my own home-made CDs.

Originally Posted by Vesteralen

[...]
So, even though I try to force myself to be selective and pick only performances I love, when something like the Brilliant Complete Brahms, or Haydn Symphonies, or Complete Mozart comes along, I can't resist it. The performances may range from merely serviceable to good (and only rarely great), but it doesn't matter...it's complete!

Well, almost.

I can't tell you how much time it took to spreadsheet the Brahms lieder on the Brilliant set to be sure they were all there, split up and mixed up as they are on ten or so different discs! Don't they know what it means to be obsessive/compulsive? Now, I'm going to have to copy and sequence them on my own home-made CDs.

I had what is apparently a milder form of your affliction. I didn't need complete sets, or 'boxes' in general, but what I did have by a composer needed to be organized for sequential hearing in in the order in which the works were composed. After a couple times through, then the sequence could be ignored; I had the evolutionary thingamajigs worked out.

When I was in my collector phase (40 years or so) some recordings had to sit unheard for awhile, until I had enough recordings to establish a database for Composer Evolution.

Life is easier now. Those things are pretty much worked out. And I seem to have forgotten why I cared in the first place. But it must have been important!

Originally Posted by Hilltroll72

I had what is apparently a milder form of your affliction. I didn't need complete sets, or 'boxes' in general, but what I did have by a composer needed to be organized for sequential hearing in in the order in which the works were composed. After a couple times through, then the sequence could be ignored; I had the evolutionary thingamajigs worked out.

When I was in my collector phase (40 years or so) some recordings had to sit unheard for awhile, until I had enough recordings to establish a database for Composer Evolution.

Life is easier now. Those things are pretty much worked out. And I seem to have forgotten why I cared in the first place. But it must have been important!

Sounds like heaven. I've been listening to classical music myself for a little over 40 years, so who knows? Maybe one day soon I'll wake up and complete sets won't be important to me either!

In all seriousness, though - when I moved recently, I did kind of gut my collection on purpose to get rid of the chaff that was clogging up my CD racks - stuff that was only there to make complete sets of things. Unfortunately for me, my newly simplified life style hasn't completely cured me of the urge as I thought it would. Maybe this site will be the therapy I need to get back to a quality-instead-of-quantity approach.

In the meantime, my habit of selecting seven or eight dics from my entire collection to listen to repeatedly for one week has been pretty satisfying. Sometimes I'll listen to a disc at home, other times in the car or at work. It's enabled me to familiarize myself with a number of works I did not know well before. And lately, three of those weekly discs have been coming from the afore-mentioned Brilliant box sets. I've expecially enjoyed getting more familiar with the Brahms and Mozart chamber music literature this way. So, it's not all bad.