The death of classical music?

You seem to be comparing "Golden Age" major label recordings of the symphonic/operatic warhorses with new independent label recordings of contemporary works. This is not an apples-to-apples comparison.

Plus, the overhead costs of recording have changed significantly with the digital age. The new labels don't need to print or ship many physical products, as shown by the large increase in classical mp3 sales.

I'm sorry if I wasn't clear. Let me give you some apples to apples comparisons:

Big-ticket recordings, with major orchestras:

1957: paid for by record companies; made a profit; the orchestras made money

2007: paid for by the orchestras, perhaps with outside funding; the orchestras may well lose money, but think of the recordings as a promotional expense.

New-music recordings:

1957: on big labels, paid for by the record companies; on small labels, might be paid for with non-profit funding (CRI Records, for instance)

2007: very few of these recordings are on big labels; smaller-label new music releases are often paid for by composers, or else by the performing groups that play the music, using any funding they can get

These are very rough summaries, subject to exceptions, and needing further research.
As for recordings made for downloads, it's true that now the manufacturing and distribution costs are minimal (though not necessarily the marketing costs). But income, so far, is minimal, too.

Glad to see your up and about! I think we need to acknowledge that recording and selling CDs of ANY kind of music is doomed. Any pop music you want can be downloaded for free, and there is almost nothing that the record companies can do about it. So pop musicians are going to have to find other ways to scare up a buck. And those whose music is studio-centric are going to have a hard time making the transition.

I love classical music...my ipod is full with music from Pergolesi to Adams. And I have to say that it seems that you are looking at one aspect of the classical music recording industry. The changes from the 1960's are paralleled in all music genres.

You bring up positive things that are happening...there are more young people than ever who are playing, listening to and learning about classical music, and yet you dismiss this out of hand.

Classical music is most assuredly NOT dead. It is changing...and I firmly believe that those small classical music labels are showing the rest of the music industry the way to build something new.

My goodness...if you want to attack this concept, try taking a look at both points of view. Try talking to people on both sides of the story.

One final thing...the "report" from Australia...please remember that that is NOT the only way to grow your audience younger. I contend that many orchestra's marketing departments are simply not adventurous enough to try other ideas.

So please...please don't just throw up your hands in defeat...it is just getting interesting!

I've got a different impression about the economics of recording in earlier days.

As I heard, when an orchestra made a recording, an account was set up for that orchestra. The account started with a debit -- the costs of the recording.

As the recording sold, the profits were attributed to that account. When -- and only when -- the recording "met its nut," the orchestra received royalties. But that was very rare, because every recording by the orchestra was debited to its account and, since only about one out of ten recordings showed a profit, many orchestras never got one cent of royalties.

I remember talking with Mira Schoenber, Arnold's daughter, at UCLA back in the early 50s. She said that RCA had never paid any royalties to her father, even though the St. Louis SO recording of "Pillar of Fire" (ne, "Transfigured Night") had sold very well as a result of the popularity of the ballet that was using it as the score. Somebody else, present at that conversation, made the claim that RCA had eight lawyers on its staff who were assigned to fighting royalty claims by composers and artists. (As they say in show biz, "the most creative efforts of show biz occur in the book keeping department.")

The practice of subsidizing recordings also goes a long way back. The Walter/VPO "Song of the Earth" was backed by the Mahler Society. The Brits used to do a subscriber thing -- they'd set up an account and when enough people had bought the recording the company would record it. I think the Schnabel Beethoven sonatas were made that way, and I'm pretty sure the Hugo Wolff Society backed all the Hugo Wolff recordings. And then there was the maharaja who paid for recordings of and by Medtner. I have also heard that Bernard Herrmann paid for the recording of his opera.

The earliest release of the Ring cycle that appeared in the Schwann Catalogue was attributed to the Patagonia opera company, which later turned out to be performances from Bayreuth recording off the air on a radio located in some hotel room in Vienna. I was done on the cheap, to such an extent that they only had one tape recorder, so when ever a reel of tape ran out, and they had to replace it, they lost whatever music had occurred in the meantime.

As for the emergence of small labels, after some 70 years as a record addict, I think it is the healthiest thing that has happened in the recording industry. When I started buying records, you had two choices: Victor - RCA/Victor or Columbia. You could listen to the orchestras they recorded -- period. The European records people bought in Europe and tried to bring into the USA were confiscated at customs. Victor and Columbia had a quota as to the number of foreign recordings they could import. So, while the NY Phil, NBC, and Philly kept cranking out the recordings, the chances of the rest of the American orchestras making other than sporadic recordings was minimal. (Even the Boston was locked out for many years because of union problems.)

Today, we can buy recordings from Nashville, Milwaukee, San Diego, Buffalo, etc, etc, etc. As far as I'm concerned, the good old days for record fans is now: We have access to a huge proportion of the standard repertoire, we have more access to riskier stuff than ever before, we can hear more orchestras than ever before.

If classical recordings are dead, it ain't the fault of the companies. Look elsewhere.

It's not easy to find reliable information on classical recording in past decades. I've interviewed some people who were centrally involved, but that's only a start. I don't have numerical data -- and I also don't have it for the present day. Record companies are very cagey about their numbers.

One thing is clear, though. Big American orchestras used to make money from recording, however the royalties were handled. You can see the figures in their budgets.

And now for some historical footnotes. There was a surge in recording American orchestras in the 1940s. Complete symphonies on 78 rpm records, by various regional groups, for instance the Minnesota Orchestra with Mitropoulous conducting. Early in the '50s, there were alternatives to Columbia and RCA, at least in big cities. London (the American imprint for Decca records), with all kinds of goodies, including a large opera catalogue featuring Renata Tebaldi. Angel (the American imprint of EMI), with Karajan recordings, Fischer-Dieskau, and of course all the operas with Callas. Some German imports showed up, including a once-famous "Magic Flute" conducted by Friscay, which I bought for my father as a birthday present.

Vanguard, and its offshoot, the Bach Society (I hope I'm remembering this right) released many recordings of European performances, typically of smaller repertoire, but also including pioneering Mahler recordings with the Utah Symphony and Abravanel. Westminster and Urania also released European performances. Westminster had once-popular recordings of "Messiah" and the St. Matthew Passion, with Hermann Scherchen conducting, and Urania -- which I believe specialized in German performances -- had some Beethoven with Furtwangler, languishing on the shelves while most people bought RCA's Toscanini releases.

And that's only a start. I don't mean to challenge Paul's memories, only to interject my own. It was a long time ago, and people are going to remember things differently. I grew up in New York, and we had a terrific record store, Sam Goody, with what at the time seemed like an exhaustive selection. I also used to read record catalogues, which certainly marks me as a classical music nerd, even at age 11. My first classical recording was excerpts from Don Giovanni, in a Viennese performance on the Haydn Society label, with Hans Swarowsky conducting (later to become famous as a conducting teacher), and Mariano Stabile in the title role. He'd been famous between the wars as Toscanini's Falstaff at La Scala, and must have been over 60 when he recorded Don Giovanni.

And those pirate recordings! My recollection puts the Pataqonia Festival releases in the mid-'60s. The very name was a joke. Patagonia? These were performances of Italian operas (Rigoletto was one of them, I think), which in fact had been taken from European radio broadcasts, and illegally released. But if I remember correctly, they were available for quite a while.

I have a distinct -- though maybe unreliable -- memory of that pirated Bayreuth Ring. I borrowed it (or at least parts of it) from the Cambridge (MA) Public Library, idly wondering why I'd never seen or heard of it before. Only years later did I learn its history. This memory is intertwined with others -- borrowing the Callas Puritani from the same library (which was the first time I'd heard that opera; I remember Giuseppe di Stefano's brave but strained singing in the tenor role better than I remember what I thought of Callas).
And at some point, I dated the record librarian. With that, these recollections end up where they belong, in the swirls of memory, and certainly not in the realm of documented fact.

You can remove the footnote by just correcting a tiny error: The Solti was the first -studio- recording of the Ring, but far from the first complete Ring that had been recorded.

Walter Ramsey

Very true. As we've seen, for instance, in the recent release of a live Bayreuth Ring with Hans Hotter and Astrid Varnay, recorded by Decca with thoughts of releasing it commercially. When that didn't work out, the Solti Ring followed.

What I meant, actually, was that the Solti Ring was the first complete Iand legal) Ring recording available commercially.

Your memory is quite accurage in regard to the proliferation of recordings from foreign sources. This was made possible by the invention of magnetic tape recording. Instead of shipping enormous recording lathes to the recording location, setting it up (preferably on a concrete base, and recording on fragile wax discs, recordists could lug a tape recorder into any hall anywhere in the world and record. It was wonderful -- we got music that had never been recorded before from artists that we had never been able to hear before.

But the point I was making was that subsidized recordings are not new. They have a long history. I would add to the examples I listed the fact that the Ormandy/Minneapolis recordings that gave us -- among other things -- the Bruckner 7th and the Mahler 2nd -- were made at no cost to Victor Records. I differ from Lebrecht in his claim that subsidized recordings are a sign of the downfall of the record industry; they have been with us almost from the beginning.

You are also right in regard to the surge of recordings. When Charles O'Connell was head of A&R for RCA, it was his goal to record every American orchestra in pieces from the standard repertoire so that, for example, music lovers could compare performances of the Beethoven 5th by every major American orchestra and conductor. He signed up, as I remember, St. Louis, Chicago, Indiannapolis, the National, San Francisco, Rochester PO, etc, and made some recordings with them up to and during WWII.

Columbia, on its part, signed up Minneapolis (still recording for free), Cleveland, Pittsburgh, Philly, NY Phil, etc.

But it was after the war, and the introduction of audiotape, that the rush begain. Capitol signed up Pittsburgh, St. Louis, Indianapolis. Mercury got Detroit, Chicago, Minneapolis. Columbia had the NY Phil, Philly, etc, and set up a special line, Opus?, to make records with Szell, Cleveland, and Leon Fleisher.

So, the orchestras were busy recording.

But sales figures prevailed and, one by one, the orchestras were dropped, until only the best sellers remained, and things went back to normal, with only a few saleable orchs making records, with the others getting an occasional turn at the mike.

And, yes, with the introduction of the LP, European records started flooding in. Capitol Records started it classical division on the basis of the elderly, but still impressive, Telefunken line. Decca records sent its records here but, since Bing Crosby and associates had the name Decca registered for American use, English Decca's recordings were issued in America under the London label.

But, returning to the recordins made in American, even the surge of recordings by a variety of orchestras was not as rosy as it seems. When Marek(?) was head of A&R at RCA the rule of thumb was that if a recording was unlikely to make back the cost of printing the four-color album art, that recording did not get made. Hardly a triumph of art.

There was also a hard and fast rule as to keeping a record in the catalog: as soon as sales dropped below a set number per month, that record was deleted.

That rule applied until fairly recently. Consider that the SLSO turned out lots of recordings during the period when it was the only orchestra under contract to RCA; consider that virtually none of them are currently in the RCA catalog.

I believe that Lebrecht is quite simply wrong about classical music recordings. He may not be wrong about current sales figures -- I don't have the data on that; but I believe he is wrong on the criteria he uses to make the decision.

As to the Ring thing, that was really extraneous. The Patagonia recording is just one of those factoids that I bring up at every opportunity because I don't want it to be forgotten.

Me, too -- I love the memory of those Patagonia recordings. I used to see them in a record store on Mt. Auburn Street in Cambridge; the store was on the second floor of a building, as I remember. And there would be those two-LP sets of Italian opera, credited to the Patagonia Festival. That seemed so droll...I wondered what was really going on.

Things are, undoubtedly, as you say they are so far as recordings go.

But as I read the Ross/Lebrecht debate, they're a bit at cross purposes. Ross is claiming that classical record sales are as good as ever. Lebrecht is claiming that classical recording is dying. The claims are consistent. Well, to some degree.

But what do people think a recording is, anyway? It's a single performance that can be listened to again and again. The whole point of making a recording is that it reduces the need to make further recordings.

The raison d'etre of the recording industry is to engineer its own demise: it can hardly be any other way.

The recently-released Bayreuth Ring with Varnay and Hotter was very likely scotched within Decca by Culshaw, who wanted to record a studio version. Take a look at his disparging remarks about it in Ring Resounding. It turns out to be a masterpiece, of course.

The earliest complete Ring that's been released is, I think, Moralt's from Vienna, which is from 1949, predating Furtwangler's La Scala Ring by a year.

One wonders but that while the number of recordings of classical and new music is increasing, their value in dollars is decreasing. The decline in value is thus reflected in decline in corporate interest in selling classical CDs.

Technology has made recording and worldwide distribution within the reach of almost any individual artist, so the purpose of a recording is undergoing a change that may be independent of the popularity of the music. It isn't difficult to extapolate present trends to see the day when perhaps a CD of a given symphony performance will be mailed to every ticketholder as part of the "total experience" and the (rather small) cost of production written off as a promotional expense.

Greg, I'm glad to hear that you are back up and at them. Good luck with the symphony premiere.

The label Columbia set up for the Cleveland recordings was Epic. They also did recordings for Columbia as the Columbia Symphony Orchestra for a while--some of their best as a matter of fact.

It's hard for someone who isn't in the industry to know for sure what is happening in the world of classical music recording, but I can only judge by the shrinking inventory of most of the stores here in Florida.

I'm thinking that things are leaning toward downloading and mp3, as that seems to be where a lot of the energy is right now. I recently did my first download from itunes (Lieberman Neruda Songs with Lorraine Hunt Lieberson) and I have been enjoying it immensely. Of course there are no liner notes and I haven't figured out a way to listen to it in the car yet, but I guess that is a simple matter once one has done it.

I predict that orchestras will figure out a way to market things on the internet, and the profits will increase dramatically. Perhaps they won't make the kind of profits that an RCA would require for a recording, but in a "Long Tail" manner they may end of earning a handsome profit. Just my take on things.

How to listen to an iPod in the car, for anyone else who might wonder how it's done.

You can buy an adapter that broadcasts the iPod sound to your car radio. These aren't very expensive, and they work pretty well. The only problem will be interference from broadcast FM stations, but you can adjust the frequency the adapter uses, so you can work around that.

You can also buy adapters that connect the iPod to your cassette player, and I find these more reliable, though the sound isn't that good.

If you only wanted to listen to certain music from your iPod, you could burn a CD of it from iTunes, and listen to the CD in your car. A few cars do have iPod adapters built in, and maybe in the future all cars will.

Sometimes Naxos doesn't pay musicians anything to make recordings. Sometimes it asks the musicians to pay in order to have a recording made.