114,000 Songs

A mere 54 days after my last thousand songs were heard, I have just heard my 114,000th unique iTunes track, a sadly lyrical song written in the Theresienstadt (Terezín) concentration camp by Karel Berman, “Před usnutím” (‘Before Sleep’), performed almost miraculously by the composer himself in 1985. Berman survived Auschwitz to become a quite famous Czech opera singer and director, and lived another half century after his liberation by the Allies in May 1945. The song itself, based upon a poem by František Halas, is plaintive and—as is not atypical of music composed in the concentration camps—somewhat dissonant. The 114,001st song or rather track following this piece for piano and voice is a recording of T.S. Eliot reading the Chorus from Act II of his blank verse (mostly) play, The Family Reunion. Eliot’s insistent reading of this piece of baffled futility dovetails nicely with the depressing-because-of-history song which came just before.

The Stats

114,000 unique tracks takes up 746.86 GB of data (↑ 11.45 GB), which would take 488 days, 18 hours, 49 minutes, and 17 seconds to play from end to end (↑ 11 days less one hour). Remaining unplayed in my iTunes library of files are 77,458 tracks, 643 fewer than my last report (thus 357 tracks have been added to my library since my most recent check-in). The unplayed files occupy 527.6 GB of data space (↓ 8.7 GB) and 279 days, 17 hours, 56 minutes and 47 seconds of time (↓ 10 days & 4 hours). (I’ve added back in the T.S. Eliot recitation’s time in these calculations.)

To reach the 114,000th unique track, I listened to 1326 songs since track #113,000, starting this latest leg of my musical consumptive journey with “Hell With The Lid Off”, a preacherly rant by Marjoe Gortner at age 8, as mentioned in my last report. Those 1326 songs occupy 13.19 GB of data, and 11 days, 20 hours, 18 minutes, and 34 seconds of time.

It took 54 days to listen to the last thousand songs, meaning just over 18.5 new songs per day were heard.

18.5 New Tracks Heard per Day

If we include the previously heard songs, we find that I heard 24.56 tracks per day. This is nearly nine more songs a day than the last tranche of a thousand songs, undoubtedly because I’ve finished my CDs for my cousins and so haven’t been listening endlessly to the same set of songs seeking to find the perfect order or the perfect mix.

24.66 Tracks Heard per Day

And … that’s all folks. See you next time!