Spotify & The Ambient Century
In 2003, on my 24th birthday, one of my closest friends Brenden Tamilio gave me a wonderful book called The Ambient Century.
From the expanding classical horizons of Mahler, Satie and Debussy to the revolutions in electronic music inaugurated by Stockhausen and Cage; From the Indian-influenced Minimalism of Philip Glass and Terry Riley to the ‘unlocking’ sound worlds of Brian Eno and Arvo Part; through the epoch-defining music of rock maestros The Beatles and Jimi Hendrix down to the pure electronic creations of Kraftwerk, Goldie and Trance…
As that quote from the sleeve makes pretty clear – this book is ambitious and above all else thorough.
I Couldn’t Afford This Book
Because Mark Prendergast’s intention with this book is to walk the reader through over a century of music, and provide listening suggestions for each composer – there is no way I, nor most people could afford to fully digest the contents of this book. In the first 10 pages alone, between Mahler and Satie, I could easily have spent $100 just to listen to the examples he mentions. This isn’t the author’s fault. He is simply pointing his readers to the great works of the composers he is discussing.
Because the text is so directly tied to the musical examples – reading it without access to a full anthology of ambient music proved very difficult. Eventually I became frustrated and put the book down.
How Spotify Will Change The Way We Learn About Music
It is now 2011. I knew from the moment I started using Spotify that it would change the way I listened to music forever. So as I was cleaning up my bookshelf the other day, I saw this forgotten book – and realized that now I could fully appreciate it.
I have brought the book into the office with me, and am reading a chapter a day. I have created a Playlist within Spotify where I am keeping all of the works mentioned in the The Ambient Century. If you have any interest in checking out it out, here is the The Ambient Century Playlist.
I’m not a passive music listener. I sometimes wish I was. I can’t just hear a composer I like and give them a listen in the background while I work. I need to find their back catalog, discover their influences, read entry upon Wikipedia entry about their life and what affected their work. This obsession far pre-dated my time as a music-school kid in college. This goes back to when I was buying my first cassettes and reading every single liner note, about every producer and every studio musician on a given recording. As you can imagine – this has always been prohibitively expensive and inherently limited.
For $10 a month (I subscribe to the Premium plan, but there are also $5 and free add-supported versions available), Spotify has given all of us the ability to truly discover more about music than was ever possible before.
