You should try listening to Federico Mompou. I saw a CD of music of his by chance in the home of a musical friend over Christmas and noticed that it had won the editor’s choice from Gramophone so I made a note to find some Mompou when I got back. The music turns out to be delightful (if a little lacking in variety after a while).
I found myself asking, characteristically, whether there is any way I could have found out about his work through some kind of automated Internet tool (rather than just participating in a “classical music related forum”:http://www.good-music-guide.com/forum/). Doing a Google Set search with the names of the two composers he’s closest to just gave me a “list of other famous composers”:http://labs.google.com/sets?hl=en&q1=debussy&q2=satie&q3=&q4=&q5=&btn=Large+Set, not of others who were similar. The excellent “All Music Database”:http://www.allmusic.com does provide “see also” information for Debussy and Satie but neither entry mentions Mompou (even though he’s in their database).
If you want to find some Mompou to listen to without resorting to peer to peer piracy, “here”:http://search.singingfish.com/sfw/search?last_query=mompou&query=mompou&x=62&y=14&adult_results=&a_submit=1&aw=1&sfor=a&dur=1&fmp3=1&freal=1&fwin=1&fqt=1&cmus=1&rpp=20&persist=1&a_eml_search=1&email_type=2 are 67 entries of at least a minute’s length from the SingingFish audio and video search engine. Altavista “only finds 14”:http://www.altavista.com/audio/results?q=mompou&maf=mp3&maf=wav&maf=msmedia&maf=realmedia&maf=aiff&maf=other&mad=long (and only lets you specify more or less than 1minute length) and “Lycos finds 63”:http://search.lycos.com/default.asp?tab=multi&adf=&query=mompou&submit.x=21&submit.y=9&submit=Search&cat=audio&loc=searchbox&agree=1 but doesn’t let you specify a minimum length.
P.S. Can anyone help with a query about anti-Chomsky media scholarship over at the Media@LSE blog?
