Neglect

From the "Circuits" section (technology, computers) of today's New York Times, a letter to the editor:

To the Editor:

Re "It's Got a Good Beat, but Where's the Cover?'' (Nov. 6), on the decline of album art and the potential for digital offshoots online: I regret that the article discussed this issue only in terms of popular music. In fact, the writer's apparent certainty that online music distribution will replace the compact disc demonstrates a perspective that relegates recorded classical music to the fringes of the market.

Classical music fans, by and large, remain loyal to the compact disc. It offers quality and convenience that MP3 cannot match. Moreover, perhaps more than any other genre, recorded classical music benefits from tangible album art. There is no substitute for the lavishly annotated and illustrated booklets included in many classical and opera releases; their contents add greatly to the enjoyment of the art form.

Dana John Hill

This should tell us how small the audience for classical music is -- or, maybe more precisely, how little impact classical music has on the media. Or how little the people who create the media (editors, for instance, in their 30s and 40s) are interested in it. What the letter-writer describes is familiar. In Billboard, for instance (Billboard is the weekly trade paper of the record industry), it's possible to read huge articles on the impact of some change in the recording business -- the sale, let's say, of one of the major record companies -- without finding even one mention of what impact the change will have on any classical labels involved.

Or take iTunes, Apple's generally wonderful online (and legal) music download store. Lots of classical music is available, but the database that lets you search for it is a mess. This is common, almost universal, in any kind of online music service, whether it's the old Napster, or Amazon.com. A search for Beethoven Symphonies at Amazon brings up "The Only Opera CD You'll Ever Need" and "25 Piano Favorites."

A search on iTunes for Schoenberg produces only a few of their Schoenberg selections. I was looking for "A Survivor from Warsaw," which, as it turns out, they have as part of an old Erich Leinsdorf recording, which paired that Schoenberg piece with Beethoven's 9th. But on iTunes, the Schoenberg work is apparently indexed under "Beethoven," so a Beethoven search produces it. You can also find it by searching for its title, but my point here is that you can't find every Schoenberg piece by searching for Schoenberg -- or, I'm sure, every Beethoven piece by searching for Beethoven. The problems here grow wildly baroque, as I learned some years ago when I worked for an online music company, and tried to reform their classical database. Information is typically entered by people who don't know one classical work from another. Often (look at iTunes) there's no way to search for music by composer. You have to search by "artist," and it's a crapshoot what artist name any classical CD might be listed under. The composer? The conductor? A soloist?

And what about the "Vienna Philharmonic" and its German-language doppelgänger, the "Wiener Philharmoniker"? Same orchestra, two languages. What search will give us all recordings filed under both?

This problem, though, is just about never talked about, when these online services get covered -- as they are almost constantly -- in the media. As far as I know, only my wife, Anne Midgette, wrote about the situation, in an "Arts and Leisure" piece in the Times. Mostly, though, classical music has so low a profile that people in the media never even notice these problems exist.

What's the solution? I've said it before, but I'll say it again. We shouldn't waste our time blaming the media. That'll get us nowhere. Instead, we should make noise on our own, to draw attention to classical music and to any media problems in covering it. What if the New York Philharmonic had issued a press release, complaining that classical album art wasn't mentioned, or that online music services mishandle classical listings? Every classical music organization -- and, really, any classical musician -- has to act as a representative of the entire field, drawing attention (as far as possible) to everything about classical music that the world needs to know about. It's not enough, any more, for all of us to make noise only about our own projects.

(Important caveat: What I've just said is exaggerated, because some artists are only artists, and have no head for public agitation. Bless them. They should continue just as they are, and disregard everything I've just written. Organizations, though, should take seriously what I've suggested.)