Classical Music - On Demand

From the days of vinyl, when wages were $3/hour, comes an incident at an old Record Bar outlet. A clerk was put in charge of labeling a placard for Stravinsky's "Le Sacre du Printemps," and thought he had better translate it. The label turned out, "The Bag of Spring."

I love it. There was also a Russian recording of Bartok's "Miraculous Mandarin" that was translated on an English LP jack as "The Wonderful Tangerine."

Henry Fogel

I wounder if the classical records sales in music stores such as Virgin would rise if the sales staff had a clue about their wares... The $8/hour wages are much too low to attract anyone how knows the first two things about classical music. Most of the customers come in looking for a piece they heard on the radio. So imagine a man who walks in and asks for "Dixit Dominus". The sales person sends him down to the country and western section because "Dixie Dominos" sounds like a name of a country band. After looking through the wrong shelves for half an hour in vain the customer turns around and leaves because it's just not worth the trouble. True story. Happens all the time. What would the real estate sales look like if 99 out of 100 real estate agents didn't know how to get to the house they are trying to sell?

Some years ago my wife went to a record store to ask about a CD of Michael Feinstein singing Irving Berlin. "Irving Berlin? That's Classical isn't it?" asked the clerk!

Henry Fogel

I've been collecting recordings, via whatever medium, for most of my life. I built my first Heathkit when I was 19, & today I'm building Siegfried Linkwitz's latest speaker systems. I'm a lifetime "audiophile." But it's not really about the equipment or the medium, it's about the music. Since retiring several years ago from 40 years as an orchestra manager and moving to a small city, I've become reliant on the radio and recordings for the music that I need to sustain me. Fortunately, here in central NY we have a decent NPR station that plays classical music a few hours a day. More fortunately, through the computer, we can hear our all-time favorite station, WBLV from Blue Lake Music Camp in West Michigan. But I still figure I'm falling further behind every day in awareness of the newest & best in contemporary music, because I no longer have a way to learn what's newly available (not a completely bad thing, it's great that so much more new music is being released than used to be), nor can I afford to buy everything I'd like to on my now (more) limited income.

By the way, if you don't want to keep getting blog comments from your son, you'll have to stop writing about such darned interesting topics! :-)

I realize your point is really about declining CD sales not saying much about interest in classical music, but I think what's happening here may be more fundamental than some orchestras realize...

At a conference I was at a few months ago, Phil Hardy, the editor of the journal "Music and Copyright", gave a speech in which he made the point that the digital revolution is unlike all previous format revolutions, and is the last such revolution.

The change from 45s to LPs (or from cylinders to acetate disks, or acetate disks to 78s, or 78s to 45s, etc) was merely incremental improvement. All those media shared the same fundamental properties, the main one being that you couldn't copy them. Even cassette tapes are basically uncopyable — you can do it for a few generations, but the quality degrades each time. (Cassettes even degrade if you just let them sit for a while, and all of the above degrade a bit when you play them.)

CDs, on the other hand, are not really a medium at all. They're just packaging for strings of bits — the 1s and 0s that are the actual recording. The data is digital and permanent; the packaging is irrelevant. You can transfer the data to other places, such as your computer's hard drive, your iPod, or your friend's iPod, leaving the CD behind if you want. The pattern of 1s and 0s is the same in all these places, no matter what the packaging. I could destroy every CD in my collection and not lose a drop of music, if I wanted to.

That's the difference between digital and analog. Analog has media, while digital just has access methods. Media requires care: you have to use that particular medium to get at that particular data; you usually damage the medium even by putting it to its intended use; and you can never separate the data from the medium (unless you're willing to accept degradation at every transfer point). Meanwhile, access methods require no care at all: there's a wireless network surrounding you, there's a wire coming into your home, there's a hard drive on your computer, another one on your iPod... and they all store and transmit the same formats, with zero degradation. Data is data, it lives in the global data cloud, and when you need another copy, you reach into the cloud and grab one. That's all there is to it. (Right now, there are some parties claiming that you should pay a small fee every time you reach into the cloud, but I suspect that will one day be seen as a silly idea.)

When music went digital, that was the end of the line. CDs themselves were only necessary because digital playback equipment became widespread before networks did. Those who get all their music from digital networks now (which is to say, an ever-increasing number of high school students with iPods) will one day not even understand what this discussion is about. They already have "albums" assembled for them by friends or by their favorite web sites, rather than needing to accept the groupings provided by record companies.

Perhaps the revolution that really matters now is the one that places small, high-quality recording devices at everyone's disposal. Soon, it may not be an orchestra's decision when or how they are recorded — the audience is going to take care of that for them. And when they do, they'll put the data into the cloud.

The best thing an orchestra could do right now might be to just hang a microphone in the hall and stream every sound out to the Net, 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. People are going to get their hands on the data anyway; might as well make it easy for them, and get a higher level of sound quality in the process.