I like most kinds of music, but my real musical passion is for what is popularly referred to as Classical Music, which actually encompasses of variety of musical categories such as Baroque, Classical, and Romantic -- the greatest hits of the 18th and 19th centuries, with some selective spillover into the 20th.

My main interest ranges from early Baroque or pre-Baroque composers like Thomas Tallis and Henry Purcell through the big guns like Handel, Bach, Mozart, and Beethoven, through some of the classical/romanticists like Chopin, Brahms, Tchaikovsky, St. Saens, et al.

I have no use for the atonal, 12-tone, dissonant, non-melodic junk that was foisted on the world by Josef Hauer and Arnold Schönberg in the early 1920s, and perpetuated by Schönberg’s disciples, Alban Berg and Anton Webern, which, along with other sorts of expressionist “new music,” dominated supposedly “serious” music through the last century, but I do like some 20th Century works by Mahler, Rachmaninoff, Ravel, Vaughn Williams, and even Copland and Gershwin had their good days.

In my opinion, not much memorable (and precious little listenable) music has been composed outside the popular genres since World War II, and I do like a lot of rock-and-roll in its various nuances, but I’m pretty choosy. I have a small collection of pop and rock CDs and MP3s, but what I find myself listening to most on my Mac as I work is Classical music recorded in the MIDI (Musical Instrument Digital Interface) format

MIDI was originally conceived as a protocol for connecting keyboard synthesizers, and it subsequently proved a logical method for connecting computers to musical instruments as well. MIDI files are compact strings of data containing information that a MIDI compatible application like QuickTime can use to create synthesized musical sounds. MIDI files are wonderfully compact compared with digitalized sound files like CDs -ROMs and MP3s.

Several years ago Apple licensed a collection of patches (synthesized instruments) from digital musical instrument maker Roland and included them in the QuickTime Musical Instruments Extension. MIDI files can be opened within any application that opens QuickTime files. To play a MIDI file you must have QuickTime and the QuickTime Musical Instruments extension installed. Just open your MIDI file in QuickTime Player, or even in a program like Tex-Edit or SimpleText. The QuickTime Player interface or a little player window will appear respectively, and you’re away to the races.

Some of my audiophile friends look disdainfully on MIDIs, but while some Classical works are available on MP3, longer works would require humongous MP3 files that would not be practically downloadable except over broadband, and would require massive amounts of hard drive storage space.

MIDI files, on the other hand, are admirably compact. An entire concerto or symphony only requires a few hundred kilobytes. For me, this allows satisfyingly quick downloads over a slow, dialup connection, and storage of a large selection of Classical works in a small amount of hard drive real estate.

There is of course a vast selection of Classical CD-ROMS, but that involves the hassle and distraction of a bunch of CD jewel-cases cluttering up the work space and the bother of loading/unloading them into the drive. That’s fine when music listening is the primary agenda, but when you’re mainly doing something else. with MIDI files all it takes is a couple of absent-minded mouse clicks.

And while MIDIs vary widely in quality of musical reproduction, some are quite wonderful. I have, for instance, a MIDI of Pachelbel’s Canon that I like better than any conventional recording of the work that I’ve ever heard, and I find that piano/harpsichord music in general, and Baroque in particular, make good candidates for MIDI reproduction, whereas, full orchestral stuff tends to be less satisfying. I do have a MIDI treatment of Copland’s Appalachian Spring that stands up well to good “real instruments” recordings of the work, but I’ve downloaded two different versions of the Jupiter Movement of Gustav Holst’s “The Planets,” which I love, and one is bad while the other is plain horrible. You really have to try them, as, for that matter, pertains to “real” recordings as well.

Of course, Classical isn’t the only sort of music available on MIDI, but one of MIDI’s major shortcomings is that you really can’t properly synthesize human vocals, so the vast majority of contemporary popular music isn’t a practical proposition in MIDI format.

Unlike digitalized sound such as CD-ROMs or MP3, MIDIs don’t contain any real audio information, nor do they attempt to reproduce actual recorded sounds, but rather provide the basis for a facsimile reconstruction of the music, based on data in the information string.

I do have a few pop ditties in MIDI -- a rendition of Aqua’s “Barbie Girl” (sans vocals) is actually quite charming in MIDI -- but MP3s are a much preferable format for pop-vocal music.

However, like Barbie Girl, some Classical choral works can be quite pleasant as MIDIs. I have a MIDI of Beethoven’s Choral Fantasia that I like a lot (Beethoven in general seems to translate well to MIDI), and also some of my favorite bits from Handel’s Messiah.

The bottom line is that MIDIs allow me to listen to lot of different Classical works, including the obscure pieces that I would never otherwise have been exposed to, in a convenient, no-hassle format. As a simple, low-overhead format for playing background music on my PowerBook while I work, I find that MIDI has much to recommend it. I love ‘em.

One really cool thing is that iTunes’ support of MIDIs, and I can create play lists of MIDI files just the same as I would with MPs trees. Indeed, I can mix MP3s and MIDIs on the same playlist.

There is no problem finding MIDI files to play, as entering “MIDI files” in any Web search engine will demonstrate. Whether your musical tastes run to Rock, Pop, Country, Christian, Metal, Alternative, Classical, TV/Movie Themes, Big Band sounds, BlueGrass. Broadway. Country. Gospel. Ragtime, R&B, Rock, Techno, or something else, you can likely find it in MIDI.

The big magillah of Classical MIDI sites is Pierre R. Schwab’s http://jp.classicalarchives.com/index.html The Classical MIDI Archives Site, which offers (as of the last time I was there) 17,160 works by 1,208 composers. Mr. Schwab flags selections that he deems especially good, and freely concedes that others are “atrocious.” Helpful when choosing among such an incredible variety of possibilities.

A person could go completely nuts on this site, which is no doubt why Mr. Schwab has imposed some sensible restrictions. Visitors are not permitted to access more than 100 MIDI files per day at penalty of being possibly denied future access, and a maximum of any 100 files stored on your hard drive is specified.

The Classical Archives currently provides for the following classes of users and subscriber with rights of usage as indicated:

• Free Users:
No charge. Listen up to 25 files/day. No HiFi MP3 files can be downloaded. Other material may also be restricted to paying subscribers only. Free users can store a total of 100 files from the CMA on their PC. Subscribers have no such limitations.

• Friends:
$25 per year fee. Listen to up to 100 files/day. Download up to 25 Zip Collections or HiFi MP3 files/day.

• Patron:
$500 per year fee. Listen to up to 250 files/day and download up to 250 Zip Collections or HiFi MP3 files/day. In addition, Patrons will receive a CD-ROM containing the MIDI files in the Archives which were posted up to the previous quarter. The CD and its contents are for personal use only and cannot be entered into any website, copied, sold, or used in any commercial endeavor whatsoever.

The majority of the files in the Archives are in the MIDI (Musical Instrument Digital Interface) format. Most of these files were sequenced one note at a time although some of the great files are real-time performances by very gifted artists. The site also has some MP3 Audio files that are provided for download to paid subscribers. These files are encoded at HiFi quality at 128kbps and thus, they may be quite large.There are also a few video files in the Archives. The pages containing video are written in such a way that Mac users are automatically presented with RealVideo embedded files, while users on any other platform are presented with Windows Media Video embedded files. Paid subscribers may also download Zip Collections which allow you to download all the MIDI files from a particular composer with one click. Composers who have a very large number of works (e.g. J.S.Bach, Beethoven, etc.) are broken down into several Zip Collections to keep the download times reasonable.

My only complaint about Mr. Schwab’s wonderful MIDI site is that it is extremely PC-centric. There is a page of MIDI-related shareware and freeware utilities, but only for Windows users. Nothing for the Mac.

On a site of this type and magnitude, where much of the content is posted by contributors, copyright issues are no doubt a bit of a nightmare, and Mr. Schwab has posted a considerable quantity of rights information, and links to more. While most of the original works on the CMA Site are in the public domain, the performances may not be.

You can visit the Classical MIDI Archives site here:
http://jp.classicalarchives.com/index.html

It’s a great place to start a Classical MIDI collection, but it’s certainly not the only Classical music MIDI site on the Web. A few others include:

http://www.midiworld.com/cmc/index.htm

http://www.sciortino.net/music/

http://www.onlinebusiness.com/shops/_midi/BEST_MIDI_Archives.shtml

http://classicalmus.hispeed.com/links.html

http://www.geocities.com/Vienna/Strasse/4660/MidiMenu.htm

And you’ll find more links here:
http://dir.yahoo.com/Entertainment/Music/Genres/Classical/MIDI_Files/

To download MIDIs the usual drill, at least with Mozilla/Netscape 6, is to control click on the desired MIDI link and select Download. For smaller works, the download time will only be a few seconds.

As noted, a variety of sound-savvy Mac applications can handle MIDIs, but I just highlight the icons of the ones I want to select, and drag them to an iTunes playlist window. Occasionally, you will have to rename a downloaded file before it will play. just call it whatever you want with a .mid suffix.

If you’re not familiar with MIDI Classical recordings, it’s not a big investment in time to check a few out. You may find them not to your taste, or you may, like me, get hooked on MIDI.

Charles W. Moore