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Comment by mastercheif | Hacker News Reader

Roon is the only other music player that understands the difference between compositions and performances like Apple Music Classical does.

What’s cool about Roon is that it applies this approach to all Music, not just classical.

Roon also seamlessly merges any locally stored music you have with your libraries from Tidal, Qobuz, or KKBox, which allows you to manage all of your music from one place.

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> difference between compositions and performances

What is the difference and why's it important for an app to have these categories?

To take a specific example, Pergolesi wrote a setting of the hymn ‘Stabat Mater’ (which is fantastic). So that’s the composition. But it can sound very different depending on how it is performed, my favourite performance is by Emma Kirkby. But it’s hit and miss about how that gets categorised - and it’s particularly important if the piece forms part of a set of works. I don’t want to search Emma Kirkby to find a piece by pergolesi, and I want to be able to group by composer rather than performer even through the performer is listed as the artist. Or, I might want to find other pieces performed by her from other composers.

The way works on Spotify is that the artists for the piece are listed as Pergolesi, Emma Kirkby. Then you can click on either artist.

This seems ok for me - at least, not terrible. I can see why you'd want the two categories though.

https://open.spotify.com/album/6bPCZb1WjvotzyNkg2LciV?si=doH...

Take a piece by Mozart for example. That piece has been performed and recorded many times over the years. A classical music listener wants to be able to browse by the composition (all performances of the composition), but also by the performer (all compositions performed by player/group).

Conductors tend to follow a certain interpretation of a composer's music. If I like the way Leonard Bernstein or Michael Tilson Thomas conducts a Mahler symphony, I'm likely to want all of Mahler's symphonies as recorded by one or the other (or, heaven help me, both), not one conducted by Leonard Slatkin (tho he's really good as well) and another one from Fritz Reiner.

Though I'd make an exception if I could find the Mahler's 2nd conducted by Eugene Ormandy I grew up with in the late 1960s, though...

One classical music composition can have multiple performances, potentially hundreds. So if you are in the mood to listen to, as a random example, Mahler’s Symphony No. 5 but are interested in how different musicians have approached that work, it is helpful to have an app that allows you to look up that composition, and see all the recordings of it with their respective orchestras and conductors shown.

Imagine a music app with first class support for tracking and listing remixes and covers of a given song, except here it’s classical music.

> Roon is the only other music player that understands the difference between compositions and performances like Apple Music Classical does.

Idagio mentioned in this thread does this as well. You can choose your performance by conductor / soloist / ensemble etc.

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