I'm not a classical music aficionado, but Jonny Greenwood's Phantom Thread soundtrack is pretty great as background music to write some code to.
Anyway, music changes. To me, someone very obviously classically influenced like Igorrr (Gautier Serre) is a genius. Classical music has morphed into something new and interesting, which is the way it should be.
Ludovico Einaudi and Max Richter put me in the mood quite nicely. Mozart, the three tenors, and similar stuff also work (but most of the time not as good as the former artists).
Nonetheless that's rara avis among my coworkers, anyone else listening to similar stuff while coding?
The Keith Jarrett style was amazing - I really felt the analogy between playing a live instrument and changing the code in real-time, and it sounded very good.
I had visions of a large symphony hall with people dressed very sharply watching a master 'player' create and manipulate this piece in real-time... I think there may be a possibility. Interesting thought anyway.
If you haven't already, I'd encourage you to check out some of Philip Glass's other soundtracks. One I like in particular is The Illusionist.
There's also a very short video game OST of a game called Splice [0], [1] that coincidentally I'm listening to right now which is very similar to Glass's music. My playcount on each of the tracks is literally over 1000, and my playcount on the first track is over 2000 (getting close to 2500 now) because once I didn't notice I had it on loop(1) rather than loop(all) for several days.
It's the only music I'm able to listen to when I have a mild migraine, although when the headache gets bad I require absolute silence.
This is sort of un-related, but for fans of coding to ambient music (or anyone for that matter) - if you haven't already, check out "9 Beet Stretch" - http://www.park.nl/park_cms/public/index.php?thisarticle=118 - Beethoven's 9th Symphony stretched out over a 24 hour period. I heard it first on the "Time" episode of Radio Lab (great show). It's a real trip to listen to.
"Carlos’s work on A Clockwork Orange is particularly brilliant."
Amen to that. But if you are a young person reading this who has somehow never been exposed to classical music, this is a good introduction, inasmuch as it includes not just Carlos's take on Beethoven using the synthesizer, but also some wonderful orchestral selections from Beethoven and others.
It borrows heavily from a number of sources. The main theme is a thinly modified reworking of Korngold's Kings Row.
It's why movie music is a relatively mediocre artform. It's mostly reheated 19th/early 20th century cliches and borrowings with none of the fluency or genius of the originals.
People forget that being able to write for an orchestra isn't proof of genius. The bar is higher than that.
Ravel, Wagner, Debussy, Stravinsky, and Rachmaninov - and others - absolutely kill all of the Hollywood guys.
More interesting are recent TV scores that have been all-electronic and abstract. Chernobyl seems to have broken the trend into the mainstream, but I'm hearing examples on shows like The Mandalorian and Dr Who. They sound a lot fresher than the orchestral blobbery that's more usual, because they're more about evocative sound design than trad synth/sampler sounds.
Anyway, music changes. To me, someone very obviously classically influenced like Igorrr (Gautier Serre) is a genius. Classical music has morphed into something new and interesting, which is the way it should be.
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