I have a google play (which plays streaming music) and it’s really terrible for classical music. If you choose virtually any piece of classical music and then flip forward three songs you invariably end up with Claire de Lune or the Moonlight sonata. For science, I just tested this again right now, and here are the unfiltered results:
- Initial Selection: Art of Fugue
- Next Piece: Toccata and Fugue in D minor (ha ha; semantically similar I guess)
- Next Piece: First movement, Moonlight sonata
- Initial Selection: Brahms, Op 119 no.1
- The initial selection continued with Op 119 no.2 on the same track; I don’t think that counts
- Prelude and Fugue in B flat minor #22 from Well-tempered Clavier Book 2. Pretty good! Mind you, when I asked google what it was playing to confirm, it said “Country road, by John Denver.” In fact, this appears to happen when I ask about any piece of music at all.
- Moonlight sonata (but third movement!)
- What sounds like cheap Debussy but google play still claims is John Denver.
- Another Brahms intermezzo! (Op 118)
- Flight of the Valkyries (blech)
- Initial Selection: Schubert Op 929, second movement.
- The Swan (arranged for violin and Piano)
- Schubert Op 929, second movement. Hmmm.
- The Nutcracker suite (perhaps complete? from the beginning recorded live.)
- Air on a G-string.
I say: hypothesis confirmed.
Some other strange results: I once asked for the Franck violin sonata and somehow got the piano accompaniment without the violin part. Actually that may have been the most interesting selection it ever played.
Speaking of Franck, I only recently learnt that he composed his violin sonata when he was 64. It’s not so usual for great composers to write great music late in their lives (Art of Fugue, unfinished when Bach was 65), but a little unusual, I think, for one’s most famous piece of music (perhaps by some distance) to be composed relatively late in life. I hope I prove my most famous theorem when I’m 64!
My go to recording is by Perlman and Ashkenazy; here they are (very young; from 1968, apparently) in the recording studio (apparently I am unable to embed this video, but I promise this is a real and interesting link!)
Frobenius discovered the character theory of finite groups when he was 47.
I don’t know of any better entries in the late-best mathematical result, especially if one requires that the result was a fundamental advance. Maybe de Branges’ proof of the Bieberbach conjecture, when he was 52.
In music, one has the late Beethoven quartets, written when he was 55 (although whether or not they are his best compositions is a matter of taste).
You must be getting close to 47, Frank…
It can’t be argued however that Beethoven wrote plenty of good music before the late quartets, however…
Yitang Zhang proved bounded gaps between primes when he was 58.
I haven’t tried it, but Apple recently started a new streaming service exclusively for classical music. See e.g.
https://www.npr.org/2023/04/24/1171092442/apple-music-classical-streaming-app