malvasia bianca

I am still looking for music recommendations. Several of the bloggers that I read occasionally recommend either individual artists or podcasts; since I seem to agree with said bloggers’ tastes in other matters, I usually give them a try. Alas, all such experiments have proved unsatisfactory. Fortunately, the artists that they recommend have sample songs available on their web pages, so I can discover that they are not to my taste before spending money on them. Progress, I suppose.

I’m somewhat embarrassed (or at least surprised) to find out that basically the only music podcast that I continue to listen to is Next Big Hit, which I found through the top 100 list on iTunes rather than more informal methods. A grab bag of pop, not particularly the sort of thing that I’m looking for, but I usually don’t mind most of it, and every week or two there’s a song that I rather like. And it’s in an AAC feed with chapter markings, so if there’s a song I particularly dislike, I can just hit the ‘next’ button.

Not a crisis, I suppose – I have enough music lying around the house that I don’t mind going through my CDs over and over again. (I’m just finishing a Mahler symphony run right now. Somewhat to my surprise, I’m finding that, though I basically like all of them, the first and second continue to stick in my head to a much greater extent than the others. Is that because of the symphonies themselves, or because I listened to those two over and over again before I bought recordings of the other ones? Maybe I should try, say, listening to just the sixth several times in a row.) And I have enough to listen to on my iPod; when I run low on my regular podcasts, I can always learn Japanese. Hmm – maybe I’m making a strategic error by looking for pop podcasts, and should try looking for classical music podcasts instead – judging from my non-podcast musical experiences, I’m probably more likely to find matches that way. Or if I’m going to branch out more, maybe jazz is a better place to go than pop. I shall experiment.