Don Satz announced his intention of doing some comparative reviews of the
Nielsen string quartets.  Just to make life more difficult for an already
busy man, Don should know there's a Naxos series in train as well.  Yes,
I know that sentence is ambiguous, in order to give him a face-saver in
the unlikely event that he didn't know about it.

He also wrote:

>You might wonder how I can do this at all, since I've mentioned that my
>cd storage method stands for "chaos." I'm in the process of changing all
>that and going to an alphabetical system.

I find such a system essential, but there are problems in setting it up.
Once you've got, say, all your Beethoven CDs together, how do you arrange
them? I use essentially the old Gramophone catalogue system of orchestral,
chamber, instrumental, choral and song, stage.  The alternative is
Schwann's alphabetical by title of work.  Then how do you arrange your
versions of the first symphony - alphabetically by conductor, presumably.
But it will be coupled with different symphonies, so if you start with
all the CDs containing the 1st, the others will be in the wrong place.
Then there is the problem of a CD containing, say, Beethoven's 8th and
Schumann's 4th.  Or one which contains a short piece by a composer
beginning with A and a 45-minute symphony by one beginning with S.
Or one with works by a dozen different composers.

An alphabetical system is fine as long as you don't buy any more CDs.
After buying a CD of Alkan piano music, you spend ages moving nearly all
your CDs to accommodate it.  Murphy's law also dictates that if you leave
space at the end of each shelf, it will quickly be filled.  So the question
is whether the time spent keeping an alphabetical system organised is less
than that spent in hunting for a particular CD which could be anywhere.
I suspect it is.

Richard Pennycuick
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