Jenn
October 30th 07, 03:45 AM
Interesting thoughts music in the digital age. A thumbs up for the
mention of the San Francisco Symphony/MTT "Keeping Score" project; a
FANTASTIC thing.
http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2007/10/22/071022fa_fact_ross?printabl
e=true
THE WELL-TEMPERED WEB
The Internet may be killing the pop CD, but its helping classical music.
by Alex Ross
OCTOBER 22, 2007
In the spring of 2004, I made the questionable decision to start a blog.
I reserved a dot-com address, signed up for an Internet-for-dummies
service called Typepad, and, to the delight of more than a dozen
compulsively Googling insomniacs around the world, began adding dribs
and drabs to the graphomaniac ocean of the Web.
Like many people, I started blogging out of an urgent need to
procrastinate. Yet a nagging sense of possibility also drew me in.
Classical music, my subject, was thriving on the Internet in unexpected
ways. Not all blogs, I discovered, were devoted to cataloguing
continuity errors in the films of George Lucas; a smattering of
musicians, composers, and listeners were writing on music with
intelligence and verve, revelling in the chance to express ideas that
had no other immediate outlet. Between 1980 and 2000, classical music
more or less disappeared from American network television, magazines,
and other mainstream media, its products deemed too litist, effete, or
esoteric for the world of pop. On the Internet, no demographically
driven executive could suppress, say, a musicology students ruminations
on Gyrgy Ligetis Requiem on the ground that it had no appeal for
twenty-seven-year-old males, even if the blogger in questionTim
Rutherford-Johnson, of The Rambler was himself twenty-seven.
News bulletins were declaring the classical-record business dead, but I
noticed strange spasms of life in the online CD and MP3 emporiums. When
Apple started its iTunes music store, in 2003, it featured on its front
page performers such as Esa-Pekka Salonen and Anna Netrebko; sales of
classical fare jumped significantly as a result. Similar upticks were
noted at Amazon and the all-classical site ArkivMusic. The anonymity of
Internet browsing has made classical music more accessible to
non-fanatics; first-time listeners can read reviews, compare audio
samples, and decide on, for example, a Beethoven recording by Wilhelm
Furtwngler, all without risking the humiliation of mispronouncing the
conductors name under the sour gaze of a record clerk. Likewise,
first-time concertgoers and operagoers can shop for tickets, study
synopses of unfamiliar plots, listen to snippets of unfamiliar music,
follow performers blogs, and otherwise get their bearings on the lunar
tundra of the classical experience.
Chris Bell, the director of worldwide product and music marketing at
iTunes, happens to be a classically trained violinist, and he has
closely monitored the progress of the classical division. He told me,
An interesting fact I recently uncovered is that, when you look at
different genres in terms of sharing and cross-pollination, theres more
dabbling going on than you might expect. We sell almost as much hip-hop
to classical buyers as we do jazz. Weve made iTunes a safe place to try
classical music. It is easy to sample and the buying is low-risk. Bell
talked about the serendipity of listening on the Internet, where someone
might come to the site looking for a souvenir of Pavarotti and end up
with the Kronos Quartet playing pieces by the Icelandic band Sigur Rs.
He declined to discuss over-all sales figures or classical musics
percentage of the total market, but he did say that classical music
overindexes a great deal more over the figures commonly quoted for
physical retailmeaning that the figures are considerably higher than
the two- or three-per-cent share to which the genre has generally been
consigned.
Classical-music culture on the Internet is expanding at a sometimes
alarming pace. When I started my blog, I had links to seven or eight
like-minded sites. Now I find myself part of a jabbering community of
several hundred blogs, operated by critics, composers, conductors,
pianists, double-bassists, oboists (I count five), artistic
administrators, and noted mezzo-sopranos (Joyce DiDonato writes under
the moniker Yankee Diva). After a first night at the Met, opera bloggers
chime in with opinions both expert and eccentric, recalling the days
when critics from a dozen dailies, whether Communist or Republican or
Greek, lined up to extoll Caruso. Beyond the blogs are the Internet
radio stations; streaming broadcasts from opera houses, orchestras,
new-music ensembles; and Web sites of individual artists. There is a new
awareness of what is happening musically in every part of the world. A
listener in Tucson or Tokyo can virtually attend opening night at the
Bayreuth Festival and listen the following day to a premire by a young
British composer at the BBC Proms.
Those who see the dawning of a new golden age should bear in mind the
Snakes on a Plane rule: things invariably appear more important on the
Internet than they are in the real world. Classical music has
experienced waves of technological euphoria in the past: the Edison
cylinder, radio, the LP, and the CD were all hailed as redeeming
godsends for a kind of music that has always struggled to find its place
in American culture. At the end of such bouts of giddiness, classical
music somehow always winds up back where it started, in a state of
perpetual fret. Nevertheless, the classical business is not doing badly
at presentin August, the Metropolitan Opera sold more than two million
dollars worth of tickets in a single dayand the unregulated openness
of the Internet seems to have done it many favors. Perhaps no one should
be surprised at this turn of events. If, as people say, the Internet is
a paradise for geeks, it would logically work to the benefit of one of
the most opulently geeky art forms in history.
A tour of musics new virtual realm might begin at www.schoenberg.at,
the Web site of the Arnold Schoenberg Center, in Vienna. In a handsome
twist of fate, the most famously difficult composer of the twentieth
century is now the most instantly accessible: possibly no modern artist
has such a large Web presence. On the site, you can read immaculate
digital reproductions of Schoenbergs correspondence, listen to his
complete works on streaming audio, examine his designs for various
inventions and gadgets (including a typewriter for musical notation),
and follow links to YouTube videos of him playing tennis. Particularly
touching are documents of Schoenbergs California period, from 1934 to
1951. In one letter, the inventor of atonality seeks customer service
for his new Ford sedan: It happened today that the cooling system was
without water, so that we saw the steam coming out and when we went to
the next garage and he opened, boiling water was in. Cannily, the
Schoenberg Center, with the amiable support of the composers American
heirs, has treated this monumental legacy as a kind of open source: in
an era when estates, record labels, and publishers fight for control of
copyright, Schoenberg, love him or hate him, is up for grabs.
Go next to Think Denk, the blog of the pianist Jeremy Denk, a superb
musician who writes with arresting sensitivity and wit. The central
predicament of Denks existence is that he is struggling to master the
great works of the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries while
meandering through a twenty-first-century landscape of airports,
Starbucks outlets, and chain hotels. He relishes moments of absurd
collision. While he is practicing the finger-busting fugue of
Beethovens Hammerklavier Sonata, his wearied brain discovers that the
principal fugue subject matches the theme song of Threes Company:
Come and knock on our door / Weve been waiting for you. . . . Denk
also reports the well-meaning but deflating things that people say to
him at post-concert receptions: How ever do you fellas get yer fingers
to play together? Far less mundane is his account of what it is like to
play the piano part in Messiaens Quartet for the End of Time:
Somewhere toward the middle of the last movement, I began to feel the
words that Messiaen marks in the part, I began to hear them, feel them
as a mantra: extatique, paradisiaque. And maybe more importantly, I
began to have visions while I was playing, snapshots of my own life
(such that I had to remind myself to look at the notes, play the
notes!): peoples eyes, mostly, expressions of love, moments of total
and absolute tenderness. (This is sentimental, too personal: I know. How
can you write about this piece without becoming over-emotional?) I felt
that same sense of outpouring (pouring over) that comes when you just
have to touch someone, when what you feel makes you pour out of your own
body, when you are briefly no longer yourselfand at that moment I was
still playing the chords, still somehow playing the damn piano. And each
chord is even more beautiful than the last; they are pulsing, hypnotic,
reverberant . . . each chord seemed to pile on something that was
already ready to collapse, something too beautiful to be stable . . .
and when your own playing boomerangs on you and begins to move
yourself, to touch you emotionally, you have entered a very dangerous
place. Luckily, the piece was almost over. . . . When I got offstage I
had to breathe, hold myself in, talk myself down.
This is a voice that, effectively, could never have been heard before
the advent of the Internet: sophisticated on the one hand, informal on
the other, immediate in impact. Blogs such as this put a human face on
an alien culture.
Perhaps the most constructive digitization of classical music is taking
place on a Web site called Keeping Score, which is hosted by the San
Francisco Symphony. Michael Tilson Thomas, the San Franciscos music
director, has set a new standard for educational programming with a
series of behind-the-music radio and television broadcasts. To accompany
the TV shows, which delve into canonical works such as Beethovens
Eroica Symphony and Stravinskys Rite of Spring, Tilson Thomas and
the orchestra have set up high-tech pages where listeners can follow the
score bar by bar, stop to listen to the conductors explanations of the
particulars, and see musicians demonstrate how Stravinsky reinvented
their instruments. Not since the fifties, when Leonard Bernstein walked
across a gigantic blown-up score of Beethovens Fifth on the TV show
Omnibus, has there been such a vividly intelligent introduction to
some of the fundamentals of classical music. Tilson Thomas is
Bernsteins most faithful and hopeful follower, and with these programs
he is performing radical acts of demystification.
If there is a man behind the curtain of classical musics online realm,
it is Klaus Heymann, the founder of Naxos Records. Heymann is a robust
seventy-one-year-old German native who has long been a resident of Hong
Kong; his first business venture was a mail-order operation delivering
electronic gadgets to American soldiers serving in the Vietnam War. He
shifted into the classical-record business in the eighties, purveying
obscure repertory on the Marco Polo label; enthusiasts went to him for
the symphonies of Havergal Brian and the operas of Franz Schreker. With
the invention of the CD, Heymann saw a market for budget recordings of
mainstream repertory; he launched Naxos in 1987, recording huge swaths
of music, from Adolphe Adam to Zemlinsky. In the early years, he relied
on the low-rent services of orchestras from Eastern Europe, and many of
his offerings were of middling quality; as Naxos has gathered force, its
standards have risen, to the point that its new Brahms cycle features
the formidable Marin Alsop conducting the London Philharmonic. In 2006,
Heymann said, Naxos had revenues of eighty-two million dollars, and last
August was the best-ever month for its U.S. division.
Heymann was among the first people to grasp classical musics Internet
potential. In 1996, he put his entire catalogue online, inviting
listeners to listen to any track for free. It took years before
technological advances made this service practicable for a wide range of
users, and, by extension, profitable. Honestly, until about two years
ago, for me this whole music business was a hobby, an expensive hobby,
Heymann told me. Only since 2006 or 2007 has there been a piece of
return on the investment, through the digital. Digital sales now
account for twenty-five per cent of his revenues, and, because of
drastically lower production and distribution costs, he makes much more
profit on each sale. Hence the venue for our meeting: a
forty-first-floor hotel suite overlooking Central Park.
All the classical labels are eying digital sales as a way to renovate
their business. Having wasted much effort in the nineteen-nineties
trying to copy the pop paradigm of blockbuster hitsthe singular
phenomenon of Pavarotti was a will-o-the-wisp luring them onthe labels
now realize that they can make money by selling large numbers of
releases in more modest quantities. Chris Anderson, the author of the
contrarian business book The Long Tail, calls this strategy selling
less of more. The long tail is the almost limitless inventory of CDs,
books, movies, and other products that pours forth on sites such as
Amazon.com. Some may sell or rent only once a year. Yet, Anderson says,
about a quarter of Amazons book sales come from outside its top
100,000 titles. Classical music, with its thousand-year back catalogue,
has the longest tail of all. In Naxoss case, thirty to forty per cent
of its digital sales in the U.S. come from albums downloaded four times
a month or less. Thus, a not insignificant portion of the companys
revenue comes from titles that, by Justin Timberlake standards, dont
exist.
Yet Heymann is skeptical of the long-tail hypothesis as a long-term
business model. Posting audio files on the Internet still costs money,
he says, and if labels, orchestras, and radio stations glut the globe
with archives of recorded material the long tail will bite itself. He
doesnt think that the CD is obsolete; in classical music, if not in
pop, collectors still cherish high-quality sound, cover art, program
notes, song texts, and other paraphernalia. Ultimately, though, Heymann
predicts that many listeners will obtain recorded music by subscribing
to a library and searching for the compositions they want. In fact, he
already has such a service up and running. For $19.95 a year, you can
have access to all the Naxos recordings that are online. The service has
eleven thousand users, around half of them under the age of forty.
This is the most promising model we have seen, Heymann told me.
Downloads are limited. In the States, sales are not like this
anymorehe made an ascending diagonal with his handbut levelling off.
In Europe, there is very little traction outside the U.K. Germany is a
disaster. So I am looking past downloads to subscriptions. He spoke
about the possibility of selling preprogrammed MP3 playerssay, a
fifty-dollar unit loaded with fifty hours of Mozart.
With some amusement, Heymann took note of a recent story in the Times
Magazine, by Lynn Hirschberg, about the record producer Rick Rubin, who
earlier this year became the co-chairman of Columbia Records. In the
article, Rubin looked ahead to a time when a listener could forgo the
buying of individual CDs or downloads in favor of a subscription to a
large-scale online musical library. Youd pay, say, $19.95 a month,
Rubin told Hirschberg. When pop moguls start taking tips from German
classical-music producers, something new is under the sun.
The probable demise of the recording as a physical artifact is a
frightening prospect for many people who got to know classical music
through the gradual, painstaking acquisition of beloved LPs and CDs. The
greatest studio recordingssuch as those of Walter Legge, after the
Second World War, with the likes of Otto Klemperer, Maria Callas, and
Elisabeth Schwarzkopfachieved a state of glowing perfection that no
live concert could match. And perhaps that was part of the problem.
Concert presenters have long complained that many avid record collectors
seldom venture into the concert hall. At the height of the hi-fi era,
recordings seemed to become a kind of phantasmagoria, a virtual reality
that threatened to replace concert life. James Levine thinks that
recordings have played an outsized role in the modern era; they should
simply be souvenirs of performances, he told me. MP3s and live audio
streams, disembodied and often tinny in sound, are very souvenir-like;
they dont pretend to re-create an orchestra in ones living room, and
may actually lead listeners to exercise their imaginations as a way of
making up for sonic shortcomings.
To a surprising and encouraging degree, recording in the digital era
serves to reinforce live performance rather than supplant it. Some of
the best new opera recordings are documents of live performances;
thumping stage movement and rustlings from the audience add
verisimilitude. Many opera collectors have shifted to DVDs as the
preferred means of experiencing the art in absentia; Teresa Stratas
singing and acting Salome blows away all audio-only competition. At
the heart of iTuness classical division are its collaborations with the
New York Philharmonic and the Los Angeles Philharmonic; the latters
Minimalist Jukebox festival in 2006 captured international notice
because recordings were available via iTunes almost overnight.
Some recent articles have asked whether the Internet can save classical
music. Classical music is, in fact, saving itself; Internet activity is
merely the most immediately visible evidence of its refusal to fade
away. Younger musicians, in particular, are using every available means
to reach a potential public that is far larger than the one that already
exists. They are not haunted, as older musicians often are, by nostalgia
for a time when Bernstein appeared on the cover of Time and Toscanini
was a star of NBC radio. Instead, they see the labyrinth of long-tail
culture as an open field of opportunity; they measure success in small
leaps.
The Grand Valley State University New Music Ensemble, from the farmlands
of Allendale, Michigan, provides a case study in how new technology is
playing to classical musics benefit. Last year, part of the group
travelled to New York to attend Steve Reichs seventieth-birthday
festival at Carnegie Hall and participate in a workshop. The Grand
Valleys director, Bill Ryan, wrote a firsthand account of the visit for
the Web site NewMusicBox, introducing his ensemble to a wider audience.
In June, they performed Reichs Music for 18 Musicians at Bang on a
Cans annual marathon concert in downtown New York; their time slot was
five in the morning, but, for reasons that no one could quite
understand, some four hundred listeners showed up to hear them play. The
ensembles recording of Music for 18 is being released this week on
the Innova label, its arrival heralded by a striking video trailer on
YouTube, which ingeniously contrasts Reichs hyper-urban music with
shots of rolling cornfields. The Michigan musicians play with glistening
precision, yet they also bring out the variously jubilant and wistful
emotions beneath the surface of Reichs score.
The result is a vibrant recording that deserves to leap from the
new-music ghetto onto the mainstream charts. In these unsettled times,
it might have an outside chance of doing so. After all, for a little
while the other day, a surprising name appeared at the top of
Amazon.coms Top MP3 Artists, outperforming even Kanye West: Richard
Wagner.
mention of the San Francisco Symphony/MTT "Keeping Score" project; a
FANTASTIC thing.
http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2007/10/22/071022fa_fact_ross?printabl
e=true
THE WELL-TEMPERED WEB
The Internet may be killing the pop CD, but its helping classical music.
by Alex Ross
OCTOBER 22, 2007
In the spring of 2004, I made the questionable decision to start a blog.
I reserved a dot-com address, signed up for an Internet-for-dummies
service called Typepad, and, to the delight of more than a dozen
compulsively Googling insomniacs around the world, began adding dribs
and drabs to the graphomaniac ocean of the Web.
Like many people, I started blogging out of an urgent need to
procrastinate. Yet a nagging sense of possibility also drew me in.
Classical music, my subject, was thriving on the Internet in unexpected
ways. Not all blogs, I discovered, were devoted to cataloguing
continuity errors in the films of George Lucas; a smattering of
musicians, composers, and listeners were writing on music with
intelligence and verve, revelling in the chance to express ideas that
had no other immediate outlet. Between 1980 and 2000, classical music
more or less disappeared from American network television, magazines,
and other mainstream media, its products deemed too litist, effete, or
esoteric for the world of pop. On the Internet, no demographically
driven executive could suppress, say, a musicology students ruminations
on Gyrgy Ligetis Requiem on the ground that it had no appeal for
twenty-seven-year-old males, even if the blogger in questionTim
Rutherford-Johnson, of The Rambler was himself twenty-seven.
News bulletins were declaring the classical-record business dead, but I
noticed strange spasms of life in the online CD and MP3 emporiums. When
Apple started its iTunes music store, in 2003, it featured on its front
page performers such as Esa-Pekka Salonen and Anna Netrebko; sales of
classical fare jumped significantly as a result. Similar upticks were
noted at Amazon and the all-classical site ArkivMusic. The anonymity of
Internet browsing has made classical music more accessible to
non-fanatics; first-time listeners can read reviews, compare audio
samples, and decide on, for example, a Beethoven recording by Wilhelm
Furtwngler, all without risking the humiliation of mispronouncing the
conductors name under the sour gaze of a record clerk. Likewise,
first-time concertgoers and operagoers can shop for tickets, study
synopses of unfamiliar plots, listen to snippets of unfamiliar music,
follow performers blogs, and otherwise get their bearings on the lunar
tundra of the classical experience.
Chris Bell, the director of worldwide product and music marketing at
iTunes, happens to be a classically trained violinist, and he has
closely monitored the progress of the classical division. He told me,
An interesting fact I recently uncovered is that, when you look at
different genres in terms of sharing and cross-pollination, theres more
dabbling going on than you might expect. We sell almost as much hip-hop
to classical buyers as we do jazz. Weve made iTunes a safe place to try
classical music. It is easy to sample and the buying is low-risk. Bell
talked about the serendipity of listening on the Internet, where someone
might come to the site looking for a souvenir of Pavarotti and end up
with the Kronos Quartet playing pieces by the Icelandic band Sigur Rs.
He declined to discuss over-all sales figures or classical musics
percentage of the total market, but he did say that classical music
overindexes a great deal more over the figures commonly quoted for
physical retailmeaning that the figures are considerably higher than
the two- or three-per-cent share to which the genre has generally been
consigned.
Classical-music culture on the Internet is expanding at a sometimes
alarming pace. When I started my blog, I had links to seven or eight
like-minded sites. Now I find myself part of a jabbering community of
several hundred blogs, operated by critics, composers, conductors,
pianists, double-bassists, oboists (I count five), artistic
administrators, and noted mezzo-sopranos (Joyce DiDonato writes under
the moniker Yankee Diva). After a first night at the Met, opera bloggers
chime in with opinions both expert and eccentric, recalling the days
when critics from a dozen dailies, whether Communist or Republican or
Greek, lined up to extoll Caruso. Beyond the blogs are the Internet
radio stations; streaming broadcasts from opera houses, orchestras,
new-music ensembles; and Web sites of individual artists. There is a new
awareness of what is happening musically in every part of the world. A
listener in Tucson or Tokyo can virtually attend opening night at the
Bayreuth Festival and listen the following day to a premire by a young
British composer at the BBC Proms.
Those who see the dawning of a new golden age should bear in mind the
Snakes on a Plane rule: things invariably appear more important on the
Internet than they are in the real world. Classical music has
experienced waves of technological euphoria in the past: the Edison
cylinder, radio, the LP, and the CD were all hailed as redeeming
godsends for a kind of music that has always struggled to find its place
in American culture. At the end of such bouts of giddiness, classical
music somehow always winds up back where it started, in a state of
perpetual fret. Nevertheless, the classical business is not doing badly
at presentin August, the Metropolitan Opera sold more than two million
dollars worth of tickets in a single dayand the unregulated openness
of the Internet seems to have done it many favors. Perhaps no one should
be surprised at this turn of events. If, as people say, the Internet is
a paradise for geeks, it would logically work to the benefit of one of
the most opulently geeky art forms in history.
A tour of musics new virtual realm might begin at www.schoenberg.at,
the Web site of the Arnold Schoenberg Center, in Vienna. In a handsome
twist of fate, the most famously difficult composer of the twentieth
century is now the most instantly accessible: possibly no modern artist
has such a large Web presence. On the site, you can read immaculate
digital reproductions of Schoenbergs correspondence, listen to his
complete works on streaming audio, examine his designs for various
inventions and gadgets (including a typewriter for musical notation),
and follow links to YouTube videos of him playing tennis. Particularly
touching are documents of Schoenbergs California period, from 1934 to
1951. In one letter, the inventor of atonality seeks customer service
for his new Ford sedan: It happened today that the cooling system was
without water, so that we saw the steam coming out and when we went to
the next garage and he opened, boiling water was in. Cannily, the
Schoenberg Center, with the amiable support of the composers American
heirs, has treated this monumental legacy as a kind of open source: in
an era when estates, record labels, and publishers fight for control of
copyright, Schoenberg, love him or hate him, is up for grabs.
Go next to Think Denk, the blog of the pianist Jeremy Denk, a superb
musician who writes with arresting sensitivity and wit. The central
predicament of Denks existence is that he is struggling to master the
great works of the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries while
meandering through a twenty-first-century landscape of airports,
Starbucks outlets, and chain hotels. He relishes moments of absurd
collision. While he is practicing the finger-busting fugue of
Beethovens Hammerklavier Sonata, his wearied brain discovers that the
principal fugue subject matches the theme song of Threes Company:
Come and knock on our door / Weve been waiting for you. . . . Denk
also reports the well-meaning but deflating things that people say to
him at post-concert receptions: How ever do you fellas get yer fingers
to play together? Far less mundane is his account of what it is like to
play the piano part in Messiaens Quartet for the End of Time:
Somewhere toward the middle of the last movement, I began to feel the
words that Messiaen marks in the part, I began to hear them, feel them
as a mantra: extatique, paradisiaque. And maybe more importantly, I
began to have visions while I was playing, snapshots of my own life
(such that I had to remind myself to look at the notes, play the
notes!): peoples eyes, mostly, expressions of love, moments of total
and absolute tenderness. (This is sentimental, too personal: I know. How
can you write about this piece without becoming over-emotional?) I felt
that same sense of outpouring (pouring over) that comes when you just
have to touch someone, when what you feel makes you pour out of your own
body, when you are briefly no longer yourselfand at that moment I was
still playing the chords, still somehow playing the damn piano. And each
chord is even more beautiful than the last; they are pulsing, hypnotic,
reverberant . . . each chord seemed to pile on something that was
already ready to collapse, something too beautiful to be stable . . .
and when your own playing boomerangs on you and begins to move
yourself, to touch you emotionally, you have entered a very dangerous
place. Luckily, the piece was almost over. . . . When I got offstage I
had to breathe, hold myself in, talk myself down.
This is a voice that, effectively, could never have been heard before
the advent of the Internet: sophisticated on the one hand, informal on
the other, immediate in impact. Blogs such as this put a human face on
an alien culture.
Perhaps the most constructive digitization of classical music is taking
place on a Web site called Keeping Score, which is hosted by the San
Francisco Symphony. Michael Tilson Thomas, the San Franciscos music
director, has set a new standard for educational programming with a
series of behind-the-music radio and television broadcasts. To accompany
the TV shows, which delve into canonical works such as Beethovens
Eroica Symphony and Stravinskys Rite of Spring, Tilson Thomas and
the orchestra have set up high-tech pages where listeners can follow the
score bar by bar, stop to listen to the conductors explanations of the
particulars, and see musicians demonstrate how Stravinsky reinvented
their instruments. Not since the fifties, when Leonard Bernstein walked
across a gigantic blown-up score of Beethovens Fifth on the TV show
Omnibus, has there been such a vividly intelligent introduction to
some of the fundamentals of classical music. Tilson Thomas is
Bernsteins most faithful and hopeful follower, and with these programs
he is performing radical acts of demystification.
If there is a man behind the curtain of classical musics online realm,
it is Klaus Heymann, the founder of Naxos Records. Heymann is a robust
seventy-one-year-old German native who has long been a resident of Hong
Kong; his first business venture was a mail-order operation delivering
electronic gadgets to American soldiers serving in the Vietnam War. He
shifted into the classical-record business in the eighties, purveying
obscure repertory on the Marco Polo label; enthusiasts went to him for
the symphonies of Havergal Brian and the operas of Franz Schreker. With
the invention of the CD, Heymann saw a market for budget recordings of
mainstream repertory; he launched Naxos in 1987, recording huge swaths
of music, from Adolphe Adam to Zemlinsky. In the early years, he relied
on the low-rent services of orchestras from Eastern Europe, and many of
his offerings were of middling quality; as Naxos has gathered force, its
standards have risen, to the point that its new Brahms cycle features
the formidable Marin Alsop conducting the London Philharmonic. In 2006,
Heymann said, Naxos had revenues of eighty-two million dollars, and last
August was the best-ever month for its U.S. division.
Heymann was among the first people to grasp classical musics Internet
potential. In 1996, he put his entire catalogue online, inviting
listeners to listen to any track for free. It took years before
technological advances made this service practicable for a wide range of
users, and, by extension, profitable. Honestly, until about two years
ago, for me this whole music business was a hobby, an expensive hobby,
Heymann told me. Only since 2006 or 2007 has there been a piece of
return on the investment, through the digital. Digital sales now
account for twenty-five per cent of his revenues, and, because of
drastically lower production and distribution costs, he makes much more
profit on each sale. Hence the venue for our meeting: a
forty-first-floor hotel suite overlooking Central Park.
All the classical labels are eying digital sales as a way to renovate
their business. Having wasted much effort in the nineteen-nineties
trying to copy the pop paradigm of blockbuster hitsthe singular
phenomenon of Pavarotti was a will-o-the-wisp luring them onthe labels
now realize that they can make money by selling large numbers of
releases in more modest quantities. Chris Anderson, the author of the
contrarian business book The Long Tail, calls this strategy selling
less of more. The long tail is the almost limitless inventory of CDs,
books, movies, and other products that pours forth on sites such as
Amazon.com. Some may sell or rent only once a year. Yet, Anderson says,
about a quarter of Amazons book sales come from outside its top
100,000 titles. Classical music, with its thousand-year back catalogue,
has the longest tail of all. In Naxoss case, thirty to forty per cent
of its digital sales in the U.S. come from albums downloaded four times
a month or less. Thus, a not insignificant portion of the companys
revenue comes from titles that, by Justin Timberlake standards, dont
exist.
Yet Heymann is skeptical of the long-tail hypothesis as a long-term
business model. Posting audio files on the Internet still costs money,
he says, and if labels, orchestras, and radio stations glut the globe
with archives of recorded material the long tail will bite itself. He
doesnt think that the CD is obsolete; in classical music, if not in
pop, collectors still cherish high-quality sound, cover art, program
notes, song texts, and other paraphernalia. Ultimately, though, Heymann
predicts that many listeners will obtain recorded music by subscribing
to a library and searching for the compositions they want. In fact, he
already has such a service up and running. For $19.95 a year, you can
have access to all the Naxos recordings that are online. The service has
eleven thousand users, around half of them under the age of forty.
This is the most promising model we have seen, Heymann told me.
Downloads are limited. In the States, sales are not like this
anymorehe made an ascending diagonal with his handbut levelling off.
In Europe, there is very little traction outside the U.K. Germany is a
disaster. So I am looking past downloads to subscriptions. He spoke
about the possibility of selling preprogrammed MP3 playerssay, a
fifty-dollar unit loaded with fifty hours of Mozart.
With some amusement, Heymann took note of a recent story in the Times
Magazine, by Lynn Hirschberg, about the record producer Rick Rubin, who
earlier this year became the co-chairman of Columbia Records. In the
article, Rubin looked ahead to a time when a listener could forgo the
buying of individual CDs or downloads in favor of a subscription to a
large-scale online musical library. Youd pay, say, $19.95 a month,
Rubin told Hirschberg. When pop moguls start taking tips from German
classical-music producers, something new is under the sun.
The probable demise of the recording as a physical artifact is a
frightening prospect for many people who got to know classical music
through the gradual, painstaking acquisition of beloved LPs and CDs. The
greatest studio recordingssuch as those of Walter Legge, after the
Second World War, with the likes of Otto Klemperer, Maria Callas, and
Elisabeth Schwarzkopfachieved a state of glowing perfection that no
live concert could match. And perhaps that was part of the problem.
Concert presenters have long complained that many avid record collectors
seldom venture into the concert hall. At the height of the hi-fi era,
recordings seemed to become a kind of phantasmagoria, a virtual reality
that threatened to replace concert life. James Levine thinks that
recordings have played an outsized role in the modern era; they should
simply be souvenirs of performances, he told me. MP3s and live audio
streams, disembodied and often tinny in sound, are very souvenir-like;
they dont pretend to re-create an orchestra in ones living room, and
may actually lead listeners to exercise their imaginations as a way of
making up for sonic shortcomings.
To a surprising and encouraging degree, recording in the digital era
serves to reinforce live performance rather than supplant it. Some of
the best new opera recordings are documents of live performances;
thumping stage movement and rustlings from the audience add
verisimilitude. Many opera collectors have shifted to DVDs as the
preferred means of experiencing the art in absentia; Teresa Stratas
singing and acting Salome blows away all audio-only competition. At
the heart of iTuness classical division are its collaborations with the
New York Philharmonic and the Los Angeles Philharmonic; the latters
Minimalist Jukebox festival in 2006 captured international notice
because recordings were available via iTunes almost overnight.
Some recent articles have asked whether the Internet can save classical
music. Classical music is, in fact, saving itself; Internet activity is
merely the most immediately visible evidence of its refusal to fade
away. Younger musicians, in particular, are using every available means
to reach a potential public that is far larger than the one that already
exists. They are not haunted, as older musicians often are, by nostalgia
for a time when Bernstein appeared on the cover of Time and Toscanini
was a star of NBC radio. Instead, they see the labyrinth of long-tail
culture as an open field of opportunity; they measure success in small
leaps.
The Grand Valley State University New Music Ensemble, from the farmlands
of Allendale, Michigan, provides a case study in how new technology is
playing to classical musics benefit. Last year, part of the group
travelled to New York to attend Steve Reichs seventieth-birthday
festival at Carnegie Hall and participate in a workshop. The Grand
Valleys director, Bill Ryan, wrote a firsthand account of the visit for
the Web site NewMusicBox, introducing his ensemble to a wider audience.
In June, they performed Reichs Music for 18 Musicians at Bang on a
Cans annual marathon concert in downtown New York; their time slot was
five in the morning, but, for reasons that no one could quite
understand, some four hundred listeners showed up to hear them play. The
ensembles recording of Music for 18 is being released this week on
the Innova label, its arrival heralded by a striking video trailer on
YouTube, which ingeniously contrasts Reichs hyper-urban music with
shots of rolling cornfields. The Michigan musicians play with glistening
precision, yet they also bring out the variously jubilant and wistful
emotions beneath the surface of Reichs score.
The result is a vibrant recording that deserves to leap from the
new-music ghetto onto the mainstream charts. In these unsettled times,
it might have an outside chance of doing so. After all, for a little
while the other day, a surprising name appeared at the top of
Amazon.coms Top MP3 Artists, outperforming even Kanye West: Richard
Wagner.