My Mozart-Mac 80's Mashup

In the pre-web days of the 1980's and early 1990's, I went through a couple of serial obsessions (hobbies, I guess) that I once attempted to merge. I was reminded of this today when I discovered a cool Spotify playlist, "Mozart - Complete Chronological Catalogue."

I bought an early Mac a few months after Apple announced it, around March 1984. It was expensive - the Mac (128 KB RAM!), external floppy drive (no hard drive!), and dot-matrix printer cost about $3500, and a few months later I spent another $900 to upgrade to a "Fat Mac" with a whopping 512K of RAM (yes, KB, not MB)! That $4400 would be about $10,000 in 2014 dollars, but I loved that goofy little computer. I was a complete Mac fanatic until 1994 when I bought my first PC, for work-related reasons, and I haven't had a Mac since (though I have drunk deeply of Saint Jobs' i-device Kool-Aid).

In 1987, Apple came out with a program called HyperCard that allowed Mac users to create "stacks" of hyperlinked "cards" that could contain text, data, and images, with a scripting language that would let you turn these stacks into interactive graphical databases and other sorts of programs (here's an interesting look back at HyperCard from 2012). These were very much like web sites, except that all the data and images had to reside on the Mac itself (around the same time, there started to be hard drives and local networks for Macs, but it was still basically a single-user, single-computer program).

I loved HyperCard, and was always looking around for things to do with it (in the mid 90's, I would use the much more powerful HyperCard 2.0 to create a working prototype for a graphical user interface for a software project at my company, but that's another story). Around the same time (fall 1984 actually), the movie Amadeus was released, but I didn't actually see it until sometime in 1985, oddly enough in Japan. I had long been aware of Mozart's music, but I didn't become a big fan until I saw Amadeus and bought the soundtrack album.

I started reading about Mozart, and buying and listening to more of his music. When I later looked up the meaning of the "K numbers" (K.201, etc.) and realized that there were some 626 Köchel-cataloged works by Mozart, I got an idea for a HyperCard project (I'm guessing this was in 1988-89, so I had already been collecting Mozart CD's for a few years). I could use it to build a linked and illustrated database of all of Mozart's works. I didn't realize at first how big a project this might be, in part because there are really more than 626 individual pieces of music, and in part because in those pre-web days, all of the information I would need was in books, and I would need to enter it all by hand. I'm not sure what I intended to do about graphics beyond the limited clip-art of the day (and I never got far enough to worry about copyright).

I must have worked on this for several months, and I had the structure and logic pretty well worked out, for perhaps 100 pieces or so (probably the ones I had on CD). But researching and creating the "content" for hundreds of additional Mozart works was an overwhelming task, pretty much like writing a book. Around the same time, the brief era of CD-ROM "multimedia" software was starting, with titles such as "Multimedia Mozart: The Dissonance Quartet" (actually that was on the Mac in 1991, and I didn't have it until I got an early Windows PC with CD-ROM in 1994). Although multimedia was becoming a big deal, I realized that creating a full Mozart catalog as a HyperCard stack was too big a project for me, and I never finished it.

Now of course we have the web, with all the information you could want on Mozart and everything in the world at our fingertips. Zillions of people have created databases, websites, blogs, music streaming sites, YouTube, Facebook, and all the rest of the time-sucking internet. Today I was updating some of my Spotify playlists with favorite classical music, and I decided to look around at what others may have done for Mozart. That's when I discovered the complete Mozart playlist. Its author "Ulysses" (perhaps not an individual, since there's a Spotify app called "Ulysses' Classical") also has "complete works" playlists for Debussy, Wagner, Brahms, and others. Pretty freaking amazing. Of course these playlists only include one version of each work, but Spotify contains any number of alternate performances you can quickly find if those are not to your liking (I immediate checked out Symphony No. 25, K.183, and I don't especially like the Bruno Walter version the list maker chose - though I'm sure it's a classic, I remain a Neville Marriner man on that piece).

While 25 years ago I dreamed of having an interactive database of information to read about Mozart's works, now you can find any sort of information on the web, and find and stream any of Mozart's music (and millions of others') in seconds. The Ulysses playlist for Mozart's works has 2,805 "songs" (works, movements, and sections of works), with a play time of 127 hours, 17 minutes. I will have to block out some time. So far I am up to K.12.

UPDATE: After I wrote this, I clicked around a bit more and discovered that there is a modern programming environment inspired by and quite similar to HyperCard. It's called LiveCode and with the help of a KickStarter campaign (the videos give you a good idea of what it can do), it was recently turned into an open source project, with the goal of greatly expanding the community of users and developers. The software is now free (with certain restrictions) for non-commercial use. I downloaded and played briefly with a "hello world" test project, and it is amazingly similar to the HyperCard I remember, except that it supports multiple platforms (Mac, Windows, Linux, and even app creation for mobile devices running iOS or Android). If I had time for another infinite time sink in my life, I would totally be playing with this. I probably will anyway! If I wanted use it to develop an iOS app, I would have a slight problem in that the Apple tools for porting and testing iOS code only runs on Macs (not Windows). Good thing I don't have any app ideas! Oh, wait...