Scott Spiegelberg's top play count post reminds me to finally complete the aworks Top Tracks of 2004. As you may remember, I was blogging in December about the top 10 aworks-related tracks for the year as measured by play count. And at number one, with an incredible 415 plays last year, it's A Spider, written by Ernst Bacon, with text by Emily Dickinson and performed by Helen Boatwright and Ernst Bacon!
A spider sewed at night
Without a light
Upon an arc of white.
Athough the song is only a minute, A Spider's play count seems abnormally high, since I only remember listening to it maybe five times, in a burst of seasonal activity around Halloween. The play count must be right since iTunes and those new (and highly reliable) electronic voting machines both use the same underlying technology. So I have several theories: one, I left my iPod in "repeat one track" mode for seven hours, or two, a band of art music fanatics broke into the house and listened to this and only this track all night without waking me up (they wore headphones). Probably the latter...
Links to the aworks Top 10: #2 Cage, #3 Cowell, #4 Glass, #5 Glass, #6 Cage/Harrison, #7 Ives, #8 Ornstein, #9 Fink, #10 Garland.
And in keeping with the spirit of Scott's post, here's my non-filtered top 10 list.
- A Spider. Helen Boatwright, soprano/Ernst Bacon, piano. Charles Ives. Songs Of Charles Ives & Ernst Bacon
- Souvenir (1983). John Cage. In A Landscape. Stephen Drury
- Go To Sleep (Little Man Being Erased). Radiohead. Ed O'Brien, Colin Greenwood, Jonny Greenwood, Phil Selway & Thom Yorke. Hail To The Thief
- God Put a Smile Upon Your Face. Coldplay. A Rush of Blood to the Head
- II High Color. Henry Cowell. New Music
- Beneath The Southern Cross. Patti Smith. land 1975-2002 disc 1
- White Rabbit. Jefferson Airplane. Grace Slick. Platoon Soundtrack
- Suicide in an Airplane. Marc-André Hamelin. Leo Ornstein
- Metamorphosis Two, for piano. Philip Glass. Aleck Karis
- Why Does Someone Have To Die. Philip Glass. The Hours Soundtrack
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