Chicago Classical Music

(Okay, so I'm a little late to the party.)

My personal discovery came as the result of a request from Steve Robinson, head honcho (officially Senior Vice President) of WFMT. Steve asked if we would be willing to offer a "fully-loaded" iPod containing every track from all 100+ CDs in the Cedille Records catalog as a premium for the station's November fund drive.

So I asked our engineer, Bill Maylone, to make a prototype I could listen to. Of course, this item has become my constant companion when I'm out of the house and a wonderful way for me to reacquaint myself with discs I produced years ago. Often, I'll have a sudden desire to hear a particular piece or performance and can call it up instantly. I remember especially the exhilaration of listening to the brisk scherzo and finale from Jan Vaclav Hugo Vorisek's Symphony in D Major (1821) while biking home through a violent thunderstorm this summer.

Equally fun is putting the iPod on "shuffle" and hearing the most eclectic mix of classical music imaginable. This can be especially jarring when the iPod suddenly jumps from a piece of conventional classical music to one of Easley Blackwood's weirder Microtonal Etudes, as it did during my ride on the Red Line yesterday afternoon.

WFMT ended up giving away three "all-Cedille" iPods as a premium at the $1800 level. We now offer the Cedille iPod as a product on our web site (at a lower price).

Some interesting statistics on our downloads: Our most downloaded albums do not necessarily match our best-selling CDs (which tend toward our newest releases and our star violinist, Rachel Barton Pine) - it really seems to be a different "market."

The most downloaded full Cedille album by far this year was Gian Carlo Menotti's opera The Medium (Chicago Opera Theater) followed by Alex Klein (oboe) and Mathieu Dufour's (flute) disc of 19^th century Wind Concertos and contemporary sextet eighth blackbird's strange imaginary animals CD.

Our most downloaded track is the Black Swan Duet ("The sun has fallen...") from The Medium followed by Bach's famous Toccata and Fugue in D minor (from Bach: Complete Toccatas & Fugues; David Schrader, organ) and "strange imaginary remix," the dance remix at the end of strange imaginary animals - which also accounts for seven of the next eight tracks on our most-downloaded list. (I should note that our download report covers only the first three quarters of 2007 - long before eighth blackbird's disc received three Grammy nominations!)

So how do you listen to your iPod and what special pleasures or surprises has it brought you? Please tell your stories in the comments.

This is my last blog post of the year, so I will end by wishing everyone Happy Holidays (and diffidently noting that our Holiday Sale is still going on at our web site).

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