My Favorite Music of 2006

Quote of the day:
“In youth we run into difficulties. In old age difficulties run into us.”
--Beverly Sills

Follow-up to The Most Amazing Story of 2006?:
“The Religion Newswriters Association and Beliefnet.com both named the Amish of Nickel Mines, Pennsylvania as the newsmakers of the year for their inspiring example of forgiveness in response to the murder of five young girls this past October.”
--Sandi Dolbee, in today’s "San Diego Union-Tribune." What also makes this so newsworthy is our rush to categorize this Amish community as quaint or deluded.

It’s a weekend of lists and marathons. Lists of who has died this year, major news events, movie releases in Oscar contention, celebrity babies and on and on. We also are treated to dozens of marathons on television--everything from What Not to Wear to Law and Order: SVU, and, of course, The Twilight Zone. I wonder if one of the sports channels will offer a marathon of marathons. We could watch the Boston Marathon, the New York Marathon, the Tallahassee Marathon, the San Diego Marathon and all the others. It could go on for days. Now that would be exciting.

There was some excellent new music released this year. But many of the music releases--including some of the most popular ones--were rereleases or repackaging of older music. While this is sometimes carried to extremes, I like it, because it invites rediscovery of excellent music that I may have missed the first, second, or third time around.

My favorite three new albums this year are just new to me. They’re not even rereleases. One is from 2000, one is from 1940 and one is from 1926-37. I guess it’s always true that there is much more good music to be discovered from the past than from the present, because there is simply much more music, period. Also, most of the bad stuff has fallen out of view so it’s not cluttering up the landscape.

They are Duke Ellington at Fargo, 1940, a serendipitously wonderful concert in an unexpected location; Down in the Basement, a collection of forgotten treasures from the 20s and 30s, compiled by collector Joe Bussard; and Casta Diva by Angela Gheorghiu, which is notable because she opts for beauty and nuance over vocal showmanship.