Depending on how it’s tallied, at some point around last week I spun my 200th classical music piece for the grand experiment that I thought may never have gotten out of the starting blocks.“Snooch’s Silly Symphony” project, as it quickly affectionately became known around my house, has done so much for me, and has taken on a life of its own, in part, simply, because I let it.

Early on in 2012, and the final weeks of 2011 as I first considered the project, my aim was to “achieve” these pieces (all symphonies in Year One, concerti in Year Two, and going all over the map from there). My prior associations with listening lists were in music school, preparatory to “needle drop tests”. Early in the semester, the instructor would assign a list of disparate works, to be listened to independently throughout the semester, complementing the class lectures, all leading to the final exam in which students would hear randomized snippets of a few measures’ length, and be asked questions like “Who is the composer?”, “What is the piece?”, or “What year was this written?” With that as my only prior experience, it seemed the logical way to head.

I had, after all, sincerely enjoyed those exercises, adding to my list of pieces that are a “part” of my being, that have stuck with me these twenty years since college. Mathis der Maler, for example, was forced upon me in Music Theory IV, and introduced me to Hindemith, a composer I may not have found on my own for several more years. I had a listening list in Music of the Baroque Era, which still to this day causes my wife and I to laugh and parody, as the entire list seemed to be comprised of harpsichord works that imitated bird calls. I guess professors tend to assign those pieces they themselves enjoy.

And, the entire act of preparing a listening list was a completely different affair some two decades ago. Nowadays, I presume, some ace of a student, or perhaps even the teacher, likely creates a Spotify list and it’s immediately on all the students’ devices. Here at business school, I often think that we make it too easy for today’s students in comparable assignments. A lot can be discerned about the dedication of a student who actually “makes it happen” from, in my music school case, a simple list of titles on an otherwise blank piece of 8 1/2 x 11″ paper. “Learn these works.” Well, back then, CD’s weren’t even the complete norm, as public music schools struggled to justify repurchasing titles that existed in perfectly fine LPs. There was a cumbersome paper catalog, in which I would find a title, and its corresponding “phonodisc”, creating a punch sheet that I would hand to the librarian, who’d struggle through the massive shelves of records, handing me a heavy pile to borrow only as long as I was in the library. And, it required quite a bit of forethought, too, because if I didn’t have enough time to turn all those records in real-time, and create dubs to my stack of audio cassettes, some other day I’d have to ask the same librarian for the same records, and she would not be too happy.

At the end of it all, we had a pile of tapes, and had to listen, listen, listen. I loved the tests, and may have been trying to recreate that sensation when I set sail on my symphonic voyage in 2012.

I said, above, that this has worked in part because I allowed the project to breathe and develop on its own. At some point (who could even say when?) I discovered that needle drops are not a viable goal for an otherwise busy adult human trying to digest (on average in that first year) 30 minutes of new, complex music. There were a few weeks that year that I programmed as “recovery” weeks, intended to catch up with my playlist before moving on. The implication, there, being that I intended to be “done” with a piece by Saturday night. Not only did that turn out to be foolhardy and quixotic, but much more importantly, I have found the opposite to be necessary. I don’t want to be “done” with any but a few of these pieces!

This has ended up being an exploration. To take a sloppy pop-culture analog: Suppose all those American Idol hopefuls lined up in their cattle call, and the goal was to expire each one before listening to the next, what would have been accomplished? There’d not even be a contest, because the true goal of those auditions is to move the process forward, finding artists whom we hope to spend a lifetime with (incidentally, in my case after umpteen seasons, there’s only one (the first) whom I’d ever want to listen to forever, but I digress).

With that shade on it, I’ve started to think of my playlist as a series of auditions. Each week (starting on Fridays, now) I welcome a new hopeful into my studio and see where it goes. Looking through my statistics in iTunes this year, I see that some tracks have had dozens of plays, while there are a few stuck in single digits. And now I’m okay with that. I’m an adult doing my own project.

Some recent posts introducing my latest listens have been mired in notes indicating that I feel like I’m “getting behind” and there was a time when I even wondered what the point was. Then, that very week, I watched a documentary on the Van Cliburn Competition, and following the first chord of the piano quintet they were required to perform, I was singing along, well aware of its lineage. Just this morning, I was directed to this quiz and got a near-perfect score. It’s this sort of familiarity that I’m seeking in the end.

You may name me a piece from my list, and in some cases, I may not even recall if it’s in the 200. But for nearly all, if I start playing the track, I can anticipate the melody’s twists and turns. That’s something, isn’t it? When I browse the season listings for my beloved Boston Symphony Orchestra, the New York Philharmonic, and even that of my old colleagues at the New England Philharmonic, I no longer see a list of pieces that I’ve only heard of, surrounded by Mozart works I know by heart, as would have been the case in 2011. Now, I have new eyes, gazing at programs of pieces I know, juxtaposed in ways that encourage me to ponder why the artistic directors had made those coupling choices, and imagine what it will be like to hear their interpretations either in person or on the radio.

Snooch’s Silly Symphony has opened my ears, and opened my eyes. I’m a different person than I was 200 pieces ago. And, without playing a note, I’m a far better musician than I had been. Thanks, largely, to letting the wind take me aloft, and seeing what might happen.