The New Yorker: The Well-Tempered Web
In article . com,
" wrote:
On Oct 29, 8:45�m, Jenn wrote:
Interesting thoughts music in the digital age. � thumbs up for the
mention of the San Francisco Symphony/MTT "Keeping Score" project; a
FANTASTIC thing.
http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2...fact_ross?prin...
e=true
THE WELL-TEMPERED WEB
The Internet may be killing the pop CD, but it¹s 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 student¹s ruminations
on Gyrgy Ligeti¹s 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
conductor¹s 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 performers¹ 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,
³An interesting fact I recently uncovered is that, when you look at
different genres in terms of sharing and cross-pollination, there¹s more
dabbling going on than you might expect. We sell almost as much hip-hop
to classical buyers as we do jazz. We¹ve made iTunes a safe place to try
classical music. It is easy to sample and the buying is low-risk.² 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 music¹s
percentage of the total market, but he did say that ³classical music
overindexes a great deal more over the figures commonly quoted for
physical retail²meaning 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
³Snakes on a Plane² 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
dollars¹ 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 music¹s new virtual realm might begin atwww.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 Schoenberg¹s 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 Schoenberg¹s California period, from 1934 to
1951. In one letter, the inventor of atonality seeks customer service
for his new Ford sedan: ³It 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.² Cannily, the
Schoenberg Center, with the amiable support of the composer¹s 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 Denk¹s 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
Beethoven¹s ³Hammerklavier² Sonata, his wearied brain discovers that the
principal fugue subject matches the theme song of ³Three¹s Company²:
³Come and knock on our door / We¹ve been waiting for you. . . .² Denk
also reports the well-meaning but deflating things that people say to
him at post-concert receptions: ³How ever do you fellas get yer fingers
to play together?² Far less mundane is his account of what it is like to
play the piano part in Messiaen¹s ³Quartet for the End of Time²:
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 ³mantra²: 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!): people¹s 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 (³pouring over²) 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 ³move
yourself,² 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 ...
read more »
Thank you for posting here your stimulating thoughts about MUSIC.
What a pleasant change from the flood of OTs!
I want to add a very personal and very amateurish impression. I heard
yesterday a thrilling performance of Prokofiev's Piano Conc #2.
Orchestra Vancouver Symph., conductor Christian Arming, pianist Avan
Yu.
I may have been in a particularly rewceptive mood but I never heard
the VSO play so well. If I'm right the young conductor must have had
something to do with it and so is worth watching. The relatively
unknown pianist seemed to me to be simply wonderful.- see what he will
do in the future. The flood of the outstanding Chinese performers of
Western music demonstrates, if demonstration was needed, the idiocy of
the racist deep thinkers in the RAO. .
The Schumann #3 symph. that followed was.to me an anticlimax. But de
gustibus...
Ludovic Mirabel.
Thanks...I'll look up the pianist.
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