I have a new iPod.

That's actually a lie, I don't have a new iPod.

I found it three years years ago when I was catching the 8 bus to the Orange line subway on my way home from school. It belonged to some girl named Hollee,who I never found, despite asking around. So I kept it.
Whoever Holee was, she had terrible taste in music: It was nothing but pop music* with some My Chemical Romance and Yellowcard and the more poppy songs made by Greenday on it. I never got to use it though, because my brother, loving and unselfish person that he is, promptly started using it without my permission, and he never gave it back. It somehow became his just like that. Well, he got a new one, so he let me have it back.

And so,for the past two weeks, I have proved my schizophrenia to myself by downloading every song that I love.
I say 'proved my schizophrenia', because on it, I'll have something like 'Total control' from The Clash immediately followed by a prelude from one of Widor's symphonies,with parts from five or six organ works. Then after a brief, quiet break with Elgar's 'Nimrod' from the Enigma Variations (With a lovely 32' string at the end of the crescendo) We go onto seven or eight songs by Cage the elephant, followed by some rousing Anglican hymns sung by a good English Cathedral choir. Then, onto some preludes and fugues by Bach, followed by some pieces from Vierne's 24 Pieces en Style Libre.

There's no sense to it at all, and it jumps all around the centuries and genres. The only common threads in it are the uses of Cavaille-Coll or Skinner organs in all the organ music, and the fact that all the choral music is sung only by English Cathedral choirs.(Whether Roman Catholic or Anglican.**)



*Have I told you guys about my seething hatred of the so-called genre of music called 'Pop'? Sorry, my older brother bred into me a dislike of it, which he got from my dad. I can't very well throw out a tradition, can I?

** James Orrel is probably the best chorister that I have ever heard. The closest thing we have to him in the U.S, I think, might be two of the soloists in Philly's Archdiocesan Boy Choir, James Corcoran and Tyler Maschio. Good clear, strong voices those two have. I'm not sure if the former of the two still sings with the choir, since his voice has probably matured by now. And I know, by liking someone from Liverpool, I'm probably betraying my beloved Westminster a little bit. I just wish more RC churches in the U.S. would keep up the tradtion of the choir of men and boys. There is no sound like it.