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About the Playlist

September 3, 2020

In our offices, the start of the fall term is typically an occasion that is as much heard as it is seen—our collective listening centers on the resonant sound of excited students who quickly fill the building with music and animated chatter. And so for the next two Collective Listening Project playlists, we will recreate this sensation by tuning into the musical worlds of our two wonderful student interns: Alexander de Gogorza Moravcsik and Brendan Zelikman, both members of the Class of 2023.

Alex is the student representative on the Princeton University Concerts Commitee and manages our Student Ambassador initiative, working to create an engaging community for music-loving students across campus. An avid photographer, Alexander is also a jazz pianist and spent time living in Paris to study at the American School of Modern Music before coming to Princeton.

I’ve always found myself in a limbo between genres, loving bluegrass and folk while simultaneously partial to the unrelenting pulse of house and electronic music. I’ve taken these disparate styles and, mixing in many of my pianistic influences, have tried to create a seamless playlist where the borders of genre fall away. Here is an extremely diverse set of songs I’ve been listening to (in order, the transitions are essential!). It goes from folk to newgrass into polyrhythmic ethnojazz and then into soft-pop, French new wave, Irish flute funk, electro, deephouse, and back into folk. Enjoy!

Bob Dylan: Blowin’ in the Wind

Punch Brothers: Familiarity

Tigran Hamasyan: Ara Resurrected

Tigran Hamasyan: Lilac

Ólafur Arnalds: We Contain Multitudes (from home)

Blake Mills: Summer All Over

Joni Mitchell: The Magdalene Laundries

Mac DeMarco: Nobody

Flavien Berger: Pamplemousse

the olllam: the devilll for my hurt

Floating Points: Bias

Stavroz: Whale Parade

Aoife O’Donovan, Chris Thile, Edgar Meyer, Stuart Duncan, Yo-Yo Ma: Here and Heaven

Adrienne Lenker: Indiana