# Will classical music be fixed?



## KenOC (Mar 7, 2011)

Tom Service has some interesting ideas on how the death of classical music's current business model may "cure" its ills.

"...the recording industry tried to fix in the collective imagination what individual musical works should be, like the totemic masterpieces of the Western canon (or rather, like those pieces of music that were turned into canonised totems, in part by the recording industry): a series of desirable, aspirational cultural and commercial objects, a collection of black-lacquer-magicked things that could be literally possessed by anyone who bought a record of Furtwängler conducting the Ring cycle, or Toscanini conducting Verdi."

http://www.theguardian.com/music/to...lassical-music-recording-industry-paul-morley


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## brotagonist (Jul 11, 2013)

The article is a grand collage of the ideas that have been floating around TC in the last week or so: Service must be here among us  I don't think his ideas change my own perceptions appreciably.

I would like to note, however, that the fixing of the Western Canon into my imagination by the recording industry is what gave me something to latch on to, something to collect, something to get to know about, etc. Without that, I think I, and serious music, might have been adrift. The fact that I could "possess" these "canonized totems" has cost me a lot of money, money that I fuelled, and continue to fuel, into the recording and music industries.


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## Blancrocher (Jul 6, 2013)

I'm of course happy about the increased access to compositions and performances brought about by the internet. However, for me the big surprise has been a whole generation of classical (and other) listeners that doesn't seem to care about audio quality. Don't get me wrong: I download and stream my share. But I suspect that there are a lot of people out there who don't even realize that Beethoven sounds a whole lot better on a stereo than on headphones. 

This was something that Service should have brought up, imo, since companies were not only striving towards the "definitive" performance but the best recording possible of every successive performance (or remasterings of older ones). There have been massive strides in this regard that are lost in itunes and spotify. 

As always in life, change brings the bad along with the good.


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## Bulldog (Nov 21, 2013)

Does classical music need to be fixed? I don't think so.


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## Andreas (Apr 27, 2012)

There were different venues for which music was written: for churches, courts and palaces, concert halls. Realistically speaking, today it would have to be written for living rooms, I suppose.

Music has really been run through the culture industry meatgrinder for the last 60 some years. It's bad enough that Hollywood presents us with the same film over and over again, only is slightly different guises - the classical music industry feeds us literally, not figuratively, the same works, works we practically know by heart. Yet, it is wonderful, though, without any irony, to be able to pick one's favourite version of that same old work. And maybe pick a different one next week. This kind of musical promiscuity is without sin, I suppose. Whether it actually does much good beyond that, I don't know.


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## brotagonist (Jul 11, 2013)

That was exactly what I thought when I first read the title of this thread, Bulldog. What's wrong with it? All of us here seem to be pretty excited about it.

The business model? Keep the CDs coming and I'll keep on buying. I want to own my music, and not just rent it.


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## Andreas (Apr 27, 2012)

brotagonist said:


> The business model? Keep the CDs coming and I'll keep on buying. I want to own my music, and not just rent it.


Right! And a CD is just a copy, one of countless like it, hard to fetishize, really. Owning a work because one has a recording of it? No, if I owned a work, I'd be getting royalties off it, and I sure as hell haven't.
However, compared to a download ... you can't take your download to bed and cuddle with them, can you? Not that I ever cuddled with any of my CD. But still, who knows what it will come to.


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## Alypius (Jan 23, 2013)

Service does a great service (sorry!) with his blogging, and this article is nicely provocative. The many versions of, say, Brahms 4th does dispel the old totemic illusions promoted by the record industry. But he sidesteps the big financial problem: how do big orchestras pay for themselves so that they can keep performing all those new, alternative versions of Brahms 4th? He also ignores what I believe was one of the major landmark events in the recording history of the last century: Naxos, or more precisely the Naxos-ization of classical music, that is, the decision by the music industry (during the 1990s) to "record everything." The reason for the current flood of recordings available on Spotify and YouTube and Pandora is that the industry made the decision to record every little nook and cranny of well-known composers and all sorts of little-known composers and then assembled all those into these massive box sets so that we now have the complete so-and-so of whomever. That decision is what really shattered the great Western canon in the minds of the broad mass of classical music buyers (scholars and practicing musicians had, of course, broken it down long ago). Of course, that great canon has not exactly gone by the boards given that the great wealth of works and diversity of composers rarely find their way into the big concert halls where concert programs remains far too warhorse-y. The diversity that all of us here on TC enjoy is not the norm. How often do you all get Myaskovsky's 17th played in live performance? or Norgard's 4th? or even Haydn's 6th?

Blancrocher helpfully mentioned one of my longstanding gripes: the poor sound quality of all that diversity that gets heard on YouTube and Spotify and especially on iTunes. I went to the Apple store recently and the young salesperson tried to sell me by appealing to the high-pixel quality of the latest version of the Mac Air. I replied that I hoped now that Apple has purchased Beats, the headphone manufacturer begun by Jay-Z (because he wanted people to hear the music he produced at the high quality sound he had created it at), Apple will also hire some of the Beats sound engineers who hopefully will insist that we have high quality sound to match the high quality color scheme on our computer screens. It seems to me to be disgraceful that in an era with HD tv, we have this dumbed-down sound. Well, let's just say that that salesperson suddenly got very defensive and talked to me about the problems of download speeds from the cloud and all the needed storage space. I replied that since Apple had messed up the sound quality standards of the industry by displacing the CD as our normal vehicle, they might make it a priority to fix it. Tom Service's article, here and there, belittles those shiny discs. But our CDs have vastly better quality sound than the overwhelming amount of our digitized versions (except for those of us who have gone over to various loseless formats). What we need from the recording industry in all its forms is a commitment to some version of an HD sound. Those have existed (SACD, of course, also the Japanese Blu-spec), but unlike HD tv, they are part of this little niche market. For the moment that Service is celebrating, Apple, Spotify, Pandora, and other marketers of the new diversity are all too content to pipeline to the listening public (who must have very bad hearing) the contemporary equivalent of what I grew up with: a transistor radio. End of rant.


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## PetrB (Feb 28, 2012)

Blancrocher said:


> I'm of course happy about the increased access to compositions and performances brought about by the internet. However, *for me the big surprise has been a whole generation of classical (and other) listeners that doesn't seem to care about audio quality. * Don't get me wrong: I download and stream my share. But I suspect that there are a lot of people out there who don't even realize that Beethoven sounds a whole lot better on a stereo than on headphones.
> 
> This was something that Service should have brought up, imo, since companies were not only striving towards the "definitive" performance but the best recording possible of every successive performance (or remasterings of older ones). There have been massive strides in this regard that are lost in itunes and spotify.
> 
> As always in life, change brings the bad along with the good.


To the OP: Classical music is not broken and needs no 'fixing.' Re: recordings et al...

B]"for me the big surprise has been a whole generation of classical (and other) listeners that doesn't seem to care about audio quality."[/B]

Surprising and 'astonishing' at what, it seems, has come to be enough to satisfy so many -- its a 'bad part' that came along with the good -- but that it be the very quality of the audio is a pretty low blow.

One trouble with creating a purchasable canon is you then get the recording companies, and orchestras, tossing their ring in the hat with _yet another recording of_ a Beethoven Symphony / the Beethoven Symphonies; Bolero, etc. etc. etc. There is repertoire for which their is a veritable stable of a multitude of in circulation recordings. I'm certain many of these make a minimum, trying to compete against so many other current recordings of the same ol' same ol'.


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## Itullian (Aug 27, 2011)

When is someone going to record Beethoven's symphonies backwards?

Or maybe with "prepared" instruments?


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## arpeggio (Oct 4, 2012)

*Expensive*



Alypius said:


> But he sidesteps the big financial problem: how do big orchestras pay for themselves so that they can keep performing all those new, alternative versions of Brahms 4th?


Thanks. This is a point some of us have been trying to make for years.

Classical music is expensive. It costs a great deal of money to support large music ensembles like orchestras. Also music educations programs are very expensive to administer.

The high expense is the elephant in the haystack. I just do not see how in the United States we can maintain a high level of classical music with just the support of the private sector.


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## DiesIraeCX (Jul 21, 2014)

Alypius, I'm glad you brought up sound quality. I'm a stickler good sound quality, that's part of the reason why I insist on owning the actual physical CD's. So I can I have 44khz/16bit lossless song files, especially with Classical music where soundstage and instrument separation is so important! I also have a few HD 96khz/24bit symphonies (the complete 1963 Karajan Beethoven Cycle)


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## Blake (Nov 6, 2013)

I'd venture to say that most could not distinguish between a 320 44 kHz lossy file and a lossless. I can't... and I was into that whole audiophile stage for a bit.


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## KenOC (Mar 7, 2011)

Vesuvius said:


> I'd venture to say that most could not distinguish between a 320 44 kHz lossy file and a lossless. I can't... and I was into that whole audiophile stage for a bit.


Ditto here, though I'd lower that to 256 kbs VBR in my case. I believe there have been rigorous blind tests that showed this to be the case more generally. Another poster recently said the same, for him, of 128kbps MP3s. That may be pushing things... But kudos to the audiophiles, they keep the economy ticking!

As the French say, wine is something you use to wash down meat, and the rest is imagination.


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## brotagonist (Jul 11, 2013)

That may be, Vesuvius  but I bet you can distinguish between ear buds and a pair of towers with a subwoofer


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## DiesIraeCX (Jul 21, 2014)

Vesuvius said:


> I'd venture to say that most could not distinguish between a 320 44 kHz lossy file and a lossless. I can't... and I was into that whole audiophile stage for a bit.


I would agree that the differences are certainly not blatantly evident, especially with a lot of genres of music. I actually don't mind AAC-320kbps lossy files (that's what I listen to on my iPhone). The thing is, most people don't have the equipment to be able to discern the differences. If you're listening on a iPhone, you're not gonna be able to distinguish a 320kbps from a lossless file because its playback capabilities are limited. However, if you have nice speakers or good quality headphones and a device that can play back high quality files, then you'll hear the difference. For my iPhone, I use lossy. For my FiiO X3, I use lossless files (it's able to play back 192/24 master-track files, not that I have any.)

My reasoning for having lossless files is this, if I have the CD, then there's really no reason for me not to. In fact, even people who say they really can't hear the difference do indeed recognize that classical and jazz are two genres that benefit the most from higher quality lossless files, because of soundstage and instrument separation.

*Also, to be clear, I don't consider myself an audiophile. I just think that since I own the CDs, there's no reason to have the music in lossy files. It kinda defeats the purpose*... With regards to the 96kHz/24bit Beethoven cycle, I only bought that because it's remastered and because I'm a Beethovenphile, not because I'm an audiophile.


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## Blake (Nov 6, 2013)

brotagonist said:


> That may be, Vesuvius  but I bet you can distinguish between ear buds and a pair of towers with a subwoofer


For amplitude and soundstage... the towers will win every time. But there are some very solid in-ears that don't leave a whole lot to be desired. I use my Gr07s more than I use my big cans.


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## PetrB (Feb 28, 2012)

Itullian said:


> When is someone going to record Beethoven's symphonies backwards?
> 
> Or maybe with "prepared" instruments?


Louis Andriessen ~ _The nine symphonies of Beethoven for orchestra and ice cream bell_


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## Guest (Aug 10, 2014)

First thing I thought of was this:






But the Andriessen is more along the lines of Ferrari's Strathoven:






Great find, Petr!


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## PetrB (Feb 28, 2012)

some guy said:


> First thing I thought of was this:
> 
> 
> 
> ...


Thanks... the Andriessen is pretty funny.

But, ahhh, with the audio technotools of today, _just stretch it out..._ 
from going to Ytube, typing in the search "slowed down 800."

There is a near plethora of choices:
Beethoven, Sonata Op. 29, No. 2 in C# minor; 1st movement -- ca. 43' min.





Steve Reich ~ Music for Eighteen Musicians, 1st segment -- stretched to 44' min!





or for that matter, The Beatles' _Strawberry Fields_ -- running at ca. 32' min!


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## KenOC (Mar 7, 2011)

Somewhere on the net there's a Beethoven's 9th stretch, 24 hours, that plays continually.


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