The digital future

It seems more and more obvious that we're going to get recordings digitally -- and that this will, on balance, be pretty wonderful.

I, encouraged to think this by two recent experiences. First, I've been using Naxos Music Library, a soon-to-be-available service I've talked about here. (Available, anyway, to institutions.) If you use it, you'll be able to hear, on the web, any recording from the huge Naxos catalogue, in more than decent sound. Lately I've been working on projects that require me to hear huge amounts of music, mostly from the standard orchestral repertoire. I have a lot of it on CD, but it's hugely more efficient to simply type in "Prokofiev" and "Symphony No. 5" and have the music play. This goes beyond convenience; it's a revolution, which I wouldn't have understood if I hadn't needed it.

Soon all recordings will be available like this, available either for streaming or for sale via download. Even now, I can at least sample pieces I don't have on CD, and that Naxos hasn't recorded, by going to the Amazon or Tower Records sites, and listening to excerpts, typically the first minute of each track. (The Tower site, by the way, has a very fine classical search engine, and so does Naxos.)

Second experience: Getting a large-capacity digital music player, an iPod equivalent. It doesn't take much time to load it with a dozen CDs (and, in none too long, a hundred)I've thought I'd like to listen to. So now, there they all are, accessible all in one place, easy to hear at random moments. Elliott Carter, Michael Torke, wonderful Brandenburg Concerto recordings by the Orchestra of St. Luke's, David Zinman conducting Beethoven, a CD of Schoenberg and Shostakovich by a conductor I know…things I've meant to get to for days, weeks, or months, suddenly right at my fingertips.

A story in the New York Times this week -- my tired memory tells me it was in the media business section this past Monday -- predicts that in the coming year the digital download services (iTunes, the new legal Napster, BuyMusic.com, MusicMatch) will expand radically, offering all kinds of unusual music, including classical, that they don't have now.

But here's a warning! These services aren't set up to handle classical music. I've said something about this before, about how horrible the databases are, so it's hard to find the classical things you want, or even, all too often, to know what the classical selections are when you find them. (I'll never forget the enticing live CDs from the Vienna State Opera available through a defunct digital music company I used to work for. These offered live performances from the 1930s, pure gold for people who love historical vocal recordings -- but the people who made the database forgot to mention who was singing!)

But there's more. If you've used MP3 and Windows Media Files -- the two main online music formats in the Windows world -- you may have noticed that they include more than just the music. They can also give you information about the music, encoded into what the geek world calls "tags." So your download of Schoenberg's Pierrot Lunaire might come with built-in listing of the title of each separate song in the piece, along with the names of the people performing. These will be displayed when you play the download on your digital music player, or your computer. Better still, you can sort what you've got by these tags, so at least in principle you can quickly look at everything you have by Schoenberg.

So here's the bad news. These tags weren't planned with classical music in mind. The standard tags are "Title," "Artist," "Album," and "Genre." For pop, that makes perfect sense. "Thunder Road," by Bruce Springsteen, from Born to Run. What else do you need to know? The genre, naturally, is "rock." You can sort through all the rock albums you have, or all the rock songs, or all the rock artists. Or hiphop, or jazz. Or you can see everything you have by Springsteen or KRS-One.

What's missing is a tag for "composer." In classical music, we need that. We want to see everything we have by Bach, everything played by the Vienna Philharmonic, and all our symphonies -- with, please, not just a listing saying "Symphony No. 5 - Allegro con brio." We'd like to know that movement is by Beethoven. And in fact, we need yet another tag, to keep tracks of separate works with all their movements. iTunes, Apple's download service, now available for Windows, encodes music in a format of its own (too much confusion!), and includes a "composer" slot in the information it displays (which can be customized). I'm told we can search for composers on the iPod, which is good news. But what about the Windows world, and all the digital music happening there, not just on little digital players, but on computers? 

In the Windows world, the standard MP3 and WMA music tags aren't much good for classical music. If classical downloads vastly grow, we'll be in trouble. We'd better do something now. Except there isn't any "we!" Who speaks for classical music? Who's got clout enough to make these download services -- and the linked but not directly coordinated groups who set the overall standards for digital music -- redo their work?