Ranking the Numbers One Through Fifteen

A couple weeks ago, inspired by Jack's description of a "Death and his String Band" performance and Alex Ross' passing-along of some mostly apt one-line descriptions of Shostakovich's quartets, I followed through on some reductive Shostakovich-based thought I vaguely formulated a while ago. I jotted this stuff down on a sticky note and then misplaced it on my nightstand for a while, but I type it up now: It's a little rainy-day (or, alternatively, slowy-office) game I call "Ranking the Numbers One Through Fifteen".

Shostakovich composed fifteen symphonies and fifteen string quartets, so the idea is simply:

• Rank each of his symphonies from your favorite to least favorite, one to fifteen.
• Rank each of his string quartets from your favorite to least favorite, one to fifteen.
• For each number one to fifteen, assign a pair consisting of the rank of that number symphony and the rank of that number string quartet.
• Rank the numbers one to fifteen based on the sums of the pairs, with lower sums ranked higher. Break ties when possible by giving the higher rank to the number whose pair contains the lowest number. (Intrinsic qualities of the numbers one to fifteen not related to works by Shostakovich, including their actual numeric values, are ignored for the purposes of this exercise.)
• Congratulations! You now have a fairly abstract measure of how good the numbers one to fifteen are in comparison to each other.

That sounds more confusing than it's worth, and I can't argue against that, but it's at least easier to do than to describe. Since the two bodies of Shostakovich's work don't line up with each other stylistically or chronologically the resulting list most likely won't map onto your rankings of either his symphonies or quartets and can cast a different light on both (i.e. "Why is fifteen lower than I thought it would be?", "Why are four and five in that order?"). Mostly I just like it as an easy framework for thinking about all those pieces and their relative merits, which ones are relatively underrated, etc.

Anyway, here are my results. Also, for no reason other than that it's possible, I'll display the ranks as hexadecimal digits, 1 to F.

1. 14
2. 13
3. 10
4. 8
5. 15
6. 4
7. 5
8. 11
9. 1
A. 3
B. 9
C. 6
D. 7
E. 12
F. 2

Feel free to play at home, compare, contrast, question my usage of free time. This game does kind of presuppose that you have an opinion off the top of your head about each of the thirty works in question.

Maybe someday I'll write up full rationales for my relatively firm mental Power Rankings (to lift a term from ESPN.com) of Shostakovich works, though it'd be longer and not much more useful than the above.