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What I Listened To In 2023
2023 was pretty definitively my year of classical music. This year, I have learned about sonatas, concertos, symphonies, piano miniatures, and vespers. I have listened from Mahler’s First to Mahler’s Sixth. I know that some people are inexplicably very mad at Yuja Wang and Igor Levit. I have attended concerts by both my local orchestra (shout-out to the Duluth Superior Symphony Orchestra!) and the Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra. I’ve had a great time with all of it.
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What I Read in November 2023
The end of the year is list season, which I love. I don’t need to know what’s best, I don’t think any of us do, but I do love learning about new things. That’s something that happens across the year, of course, but it’s something that’s easier to do at the end of the year when everything gets compiled into list after list after list. I love book and music lists in particular.
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A Heavy Metal Roundup
For a good while this year, I wasn’t feeling especially jazzed about new heavy metal. This is not to say that good metal hasn’t been released. It definitely has! I come not to criticize, but instead to say that sometimes I just want to listen to something big, ridiculous, and cheesy. I’ve had my somber fun for this year — the new Insomnium and Tomb Mold records are both great — but as a fan of ‘80s trad metal, I like a good time with classic metal sounds, too.
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The Discographies Project
In The New Yorker, Colin Marshall writes: I’ve made a daily habit of listening to “old” music—music by artists who began their careers in the nineteen-sixties and have made the largest, most obvious marks on popular culture. Working my way through their entire studio discographies, I take one album per week and play it once every day, straight through. This method (which I used most recently to navigate the nearly half-century-long catalogue of David Bowie) requires both an obsessive streak and a certain degree of patience: the studio albums of Dylan alone, which number thirty-nine as of this writing, took up most of a year.
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What I Read in October 2023
October is a strange month. On the one hand, it always feels like something new to me. I celebrate my birthday (quietly, I don’t like to make a big deal out of it) and look toward the next year, excited to see what will come. At the same time, fall in Duluth gets cold quickly and October very much means The End, the point where we all go hibernate until April.