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The Talk Classical Community's Favorite and Most Highly Recommend Works is a prioritized list of classical music (inclusively defined) recommendations put together by members of the Talk Classical discussion forum and the (now defunct) Amazon.com classical music discussion forum.
The idea of it is that the work(s) on the first tier are our highest recommendation(s), the work(s) on the second tier are our next highest recommendation(s), and so on.
With over 6500 works (so far) on 126 tiers (so far), it is a list that can be as helpful to an old veteran looking for a surprise as to a newbie just familiarizing herself with the canon.
Naturally, these recommendations do not claim to be the official canon of art music or anything like an objective ranking of the greatness of each work. For better or worse, they represent the knowledge and tastes of the people who have helped build the list.
Perhaps you disagree with our choices. There are a variety of ways to recommend a work more strongly, as explained in the OP of the main thread of the project.
But this thread is an experiment with a fourth way to recommend works more strongly.
The basic idea is simple:
You just find a work that you think should be recommended more strongly (than it currently is) and post its title here along with its current tier and the date of your post, perhaps like this:
Then you wait at least three days and pick another work to promote. In your post, you need to include your previous promotions, perhaps like this:
However, there is an exception to the "one work every three days" thing, and it is that you can promote two works every three days as long as one of them is from the 120th tier or lower. As you see, our imaginary voter has selected a work from the 127th tier, so she gets to choose one more work. Her post might look like this:
The format doesn't matter very much, as long as I can see the tier and the date as well as the work(s) you want to promote.
We'll run this experiment for thirty days, so you might get to promote as many as twenty works. Here are some limitations:
I hope that's clear. It's not complicated, really, but I suck at explaining things, so let me know if you have any questions.
As this is experimental, I reserve the right to cancel this at any time if it runs into some kind of problem that I cannot foresee. On the other hand, if it works well, we'll do it (or something similar) again next month, and so on.
Have fun, y'all. Happy listening.
Finally, though, please indulge me for a moment. I beg you to approach this list with an open mind with regard to your own tastes and knowledge. On any given tier, you will probably see a work or maybe several works that seem far too highly recommended to you, compared to your favorite works on that tier. Maybe you've never heard of them, maybe you've never heard nice things about them, maybe you've never liked them, whatever. Well, I hope you'll strongly consider giving them a listen, or another listen. Maybe look them up and see if they're respected for some reason that you don't already know about. In short, I wish that we would all use this as a way to learn more about a very wide variety of music from each other -- and come to enjoy it more profoundly.
Thank you!
The idea of it is that the work(s) on the first tier are our highest recommendation(s), the work(s) on the second tier are our next highest recommendation(s), and so on.
With over 6500 works (so far) on 126 tiers (so far), it is a list that can be as helpful to an old veteran looking for a surprise as to a newbie just familiarizing herself with the canon.
Naturally, these recommendations do not claim to be the official canon of art music or anything like an objective ranking of the greatness of each work. For better or worse, they represent the knowledge and tastes of the people who have helped build the list.
Perhaps you disagree with our choices. There are a variety of ways to recommend a work more strongly, as explained in the OP of the main thread of the project.
But this thread is an experiment with a fourth way to recommend works more strongly.
The basic idea is simple:
You just find a work that you think should be recommended more strongly (than it currently is) and post its title here along with its current tier and the date of your post, perhaps like this:
When I see your post, I'll promote that work up one tier.
Then you wait at least three days and pick another work to promote. In your post, you need to include your previous promotions, perhaps like this:
And I'll promote your new selection up one tier.
However, there is an exception to the "one work every three days" thing, and it is that you can promote two works every three days as long as one of them is from the 120th tier or lower. As you see, our imaginary voter has selected a work from the 127th tier, so she gets to choose one more work. Her post might look like this:
That's very nice.
The format doesn't matter very much, as long as I can see the tier and the date as well as the work(s) you want to promote.
We'll run this experiment for thirty days, so you might get to promote as many as twenty works. Here are some limitations:
- You cannot promote a work if it is the only one on its tier.
- You cannot promote any work more than once. (You can, however, promote a work that someone else has promoted.)
- In this 30-day period, you can only promote one work from any of the top ten tiers. I.e, if you promote a work from the tenth tier to the ninth tier, that's it, bud, no more promoting works on the top ten tiers for you, at least for this 30-day period.
- In the same way, in this 30-day period, you can promote no more than two works from the eleventh to twentieth tiers, no more than three works from the twenty-first to thirtieth tiers, and no more than four works from the thirty-first to fortieth tiers. Beyond that it's open season.
- You can list your future selections if you want -- you can even lay out your selections for the entire 30 days all at once -- but you have to include the dates because I'm not moving them until (at least) the day you would be eligible to vote. However, you cannot promote retroactively: if you miss some days, you just miss some days. It's a form of mortality and we have to make our peace with it.
I hope that's clear. It's not complicated, really, but I suck at explaining things, so let me know if you have any questions.
As this is experimental, I reserve the right to cancel this at any time if it runs into some kind of problem that I cannot foresee. On the other hand, if it works well, we'll do it (or something similar) again next month, and so on.
Have fun, y'all. Happy listening.
Finally, though, please indulge me for a moment. I beg you to approach this list with an open mind with regard to your own tastes and knowledge. On any given tier, you will probably see a work or maybe several works that seem far too highly recommended to you, compared to your favorite works on that tier. Maybe you've never heard of them, maybe you've never heard nice things about them, maybe you've never liked them, whatever. Well, I hope you'll strongly consider giving them a listen, or another listen. Maybe look them up and see if they're respected for some reason that you don't already know about. In short, I wish that we would all use this as a way to learn more about a very wide variety of music from each other -- and come to enjoy it more profoundly.
Thank you!
