TUE., MAY 29, 2007
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Classical Music, Welcome to the MP3!
by Justin Davidson
For almost all of the 20th century, people knew what a symphony felt like — how much the pile of 78s weighed, how delicately you had to slide each shellac wheel from its brittle paper envelope and thread it over the gramophone’s spindle, how you could caress the deeper ridges of a fortissimo passage, how a length of magnetic tape would wrinkle, and how (later on) the iridescent silver compact disc popped out of its cheap plastic case with an ominous snap. Popular music benefited from each new recording technology, but that was a side benefit of a process that responded to the classical music lover’s demands for longer playing times, less surface noise and richer sound.
Then came downloading, which did away with the tactile experience completely, measured music in the basic unit of “songs,” and catalogued recordings by the inscrutable heading “artist.” To listeners who thought of music as divided into movements and suddenly couldn’t divine whether to search by pianist, conductor, orchestra, singer or composer, the new process was disorienting, and the tendency was to ignore it. As local record stores closed and even the monolithic chains rusted, it was increasingly difficult to sidle up to one of those shaggy enthusiasts who worked the aisles and could hold forth for three-quarters of an hour on the difference between tempo choices in Wilhelm Furtwangler’s and Fritz Reiner’s Strauss.
This was a situation that thrived on one of classical music’s most plentiful sources of energy: nostalgia. Wistfulness for the packaging of yore mingled with longing for music-making of days gone by. Audiophiles complained of meager sound quality (as they had with CDs). Meanwhile, classical music enthusiasts at first neglected to notice that downloading was as great a boon for the art they loved as CDs and LPs had been before. Producing and distributing recorded music is cheaper and more democratic than it has ever been, which is a good thing for the collection of mini-niches we call classical music.
We should not romanticize the record store. Those soundproofed havens where expertise ruled were as off-putting to the merely curious as they were comforting to aficionados. The glass doors that divided rock from Rachmaninoff literalized an artificial barrier between styles. Major labels paid for prime real estate on the shelves and enticed customers with cutout figures of the musicians they hoped to convert into stars.
Today, instead of being sold a personality, or hypnotized into making subliminal connections between a body of work and a body in a strapless gown, we shape our tastes by following chains of recommendations. A columnist’s link or an editor’s suggestion may get you started, but then you’re in the hands of your fellow listeners, some of them as obsessive and knowledgeable as the serious fellows in the record store.
And just as downloading has broken out of the record store’s glass cage, it has also made colossal opuses totally portable. Wagner’s “Ring” cycle, Monteverdi’s opera “L’Incoronazione di Poppea,” the complete Bartók string quartets, John Cage’s prepared piano music — all of it fits easily in a box smaller than a cigarette case, as we would have said back in the days when such devices didn’t exist.
Classical music, it is true, doesn’t make quite as suitable a traveling companion as songs that remain at a standard volume all the way through. Try listening to Mahler’s Seventh on a subway train, and the hushed whisperings vaporize in the general din. Turn the volume high enough so that a mezzo piano sits comfortably in the ear and one of his climactic crescendos will rattle the skull.
But carrying classical music is well suited to other pleasures, or to ease the discomfort of other environments. A cross-country flight offers one of the few opportunities in our hectic lives to listen to Wagner’s four-hour “Tristan und Isolde” all the way through. Schubert’s song cycle “Die Winterreise” (“Winter’s Journey”) acquires an immediate poignancy when listened to while trudging through snow. Now that portable music players can be easily linked to car stereos, an impromptu playlist that hopscotches freely among Mozart, Handel and Verdi arias can do wonders to relieve the tedium of a traffic jam.
Music has been portable before, and one can of course download it to a fixed home system, too. But there’s a powerful link between recorded music in its most ephemeral form and the ability to cram it into a nearly weightless gadget. The technology promises to affect the music of the future, too. In pop, downloading has liberated the single, allowing listeners to pick their favorite songs without paying for an album’s worth of Hamburger Helper. In classical music, it has helped the cause of comprehensiveness. Records allowed people to listen to an etude, then a movement or even a symphony, without a click, a pause or a maneuver. CDs extended the range to any work under 73 minutes, causing some tempos to be taken a hair more briskly and the odd repeat to be ignored. Now, if a composer wanted to write and record a 24-hour rhapsody, someone, somewhere will download it, lie down, and sink into blissful catalepsy for the duration.
Then came downloading, which did away with the tactile experience completely, measured music in the basic unit of “songs,” and catalogued recordings by the inscrutable heading “artist.” To listeners who thought of music as divided into movements and suddenly couldn’t divine whether to search by pianist, conductor, orchestra, singer or composer, the new process was disorienting, and the tendency was to ignore it. As local record stores closed and even the monolithic chains rusted, it was increasingly difficult to sidle up to one of those shaggy enthusiasts who worked the aisles and could hold forth for three-quarters of an hour on the difference between tempo choices in Wilhelm Furtwangler’s and Fritz Reiner’s Strauss.
This was a situation that thrived on one of classical music’s most plentiful sources of energy: nostalgia. Wistfulness for the packaging of yore mingled with longing for music-making of days gone by. Audiophiles complained of meager sound quality (as they had with CDs). Meanwhile, classical music enthusiasts at first neglected to notice that downloading was as great a boon for the art they loved as CDs and LPs had been before. Producing and distributing recorded music is cheaper and more democratic than it has ever been, which is a good thing for the collection of mini-niches we call classical music.
We should not romanticize the record store. Those soundproofed havens where expertise ruled were as off-putting to the merely curious as they were comforting to aficionados. The glass doors that divided rock from Rachmaninoff literalized an artificial barrier between styles. Major labels paid for prime real estate on the shelves and enticed customers with cutout figures of the musicians they hoped to convert into stars.
Today, instead of being sold a personality, or hypnotized into making subliminal connections between a body of work and a body in a strapless gown, we shape our tastes by following chains of recommendations. A columnist’s link or an editor’s suggestion may get you started, but then you’re in the hands of your fellow listeners, some of them as obsessive and knowledgeable as the serious fellows in the record store.
And just as downloading has broken out of the record store’s glass cage, it has also made colossal opuses totally portable. Wagner’s “Ring” cycle, Monteverdi’s opera “L’Incoronazione di Poppea,” the complete Bartók string quartets, John Cage’s prepared piano music — all of it fits easily in a box smaller than a cigarette case, as we would have said back in the days when such devices didn’t exist.
Classical music, it is true, doesn’t make quite as suitable a traveling companion as songs that remain at a standard volume all the way through. Try listening to Mahler’s Seventh on a subway train, and the hushed whisperings vaporize in the general din. Turn the volume high enough so that a mezzo piano sits comfortably in the ear and one of his climactic crescendos will rattle the skull.
But carrying classical music is well suited to other pleasures, or to ease the discomfort of other environments. A cross-country flight offers one of the few opportunities in our hectic lives to listen to Wagner’s four-hour “Tristan und Isolde” all the way through. Schubert’s song cycle “Die Winterreise” (“Winter’s Journey”) acquires an immediate poignancy when listened to while trudging through snow. Now that portable music players can be easily linked to car stereos, an impromptu playlist that hopscotches freely among Mozart, Handel and Verdi arias can do wonders to relieve the tedium of a traffic jam.
Music has been portable before, and one can of course download it to a fixed home system, too. But there’s a powerful link between recorded music in its most ephemeral form and the ability to cram it into a nearly weightless gadget. The technology promises to affect the music of the future, too. In pop, downloading has liberated the single, allowing listeners to pick their favorite songs without paying for an album’s worth of Hamburger Helper. In classical music, it has helped the cause of comprehensiveness. Records allowed people to listen to an etude, then a movement or even a symphony, without a click, a pause or a maneuver. CDs extended the range to any work under 73 minutes, causing some tempos to be taken a hair more briskly and the odd repeat to be ignored. Now, if a composer wanted to write and record a 24-hour rhapsody, someone, somewhere will download it, lie down, and sink into blissful catalepsy for the duration.
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