[Jenn]

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/2..._ross?printabl
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 élitist, effete, or
esoteric for the world of pop. On the Internet, no demographically
driven executive could suppress, say, a musicology student¹s ruminations
on György Ligeti¹s Requiem on the ground that it had no appeal for
twenty-seven-year-old males, even if the blogger in question‹Tim
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
Furtwängler, 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 Rós.
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 retail²‹meaning 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 première 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 present‹in August, the Metropolitan Opera sold more than two million
dollars¹ worth of tickets in a single day‹and 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 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 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 yourself‹and 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 Score, which is hosted by the San
Francisco Symphony. Michael Tilson Thomas, the San Francisco¹s 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 Beethoven¹s
³Eroica² Symphony and Stravinsky¹s ³Rite of Spring,² 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 conductor¹s 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 Beethoven¹s Fifth on the TV show
³Omnibus,² has there been such a vividly intelligent introduction to
some of the fundamentals of classical music. Tilson Thomas is
Bernstein¹s 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 music¹s 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 music¹s 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. ³Honestly, until about two years
ago, for me this whole music business was a hobby, an expensive hobby,²
Heymann told me. ³Only since 2006 or 2007 has there been a piece of
return on the investment, through the digital.² 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 hits‹the singular
phenomenon of Pavarotti was a will-o¹-the-wisp luring them on‹the 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 ³The Long Tail,² calls this strategy ³selling
less of more.² The ³long tail² 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,
³about a quarter of Amazon¹s book sales come from outside its top
100,000 titles.² Classical music, with its thousand-year back catalogue,
has the longest tail of all. In Naxos¹s 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 company¹s
revenue comes from titles that, by Justin Timberlake standards, don¹t
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 ³the long tail will bite itself.² He
doesn¹t 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.
³This is the most promising model we have seen,² Heymann told me.
³Downloads are limited. In the States, sales are not like this
anymore²‹he made an ascending diagonal with his hand‹³but 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.² He spoke
about the possibility of selling preprogrammed MP3 players‹say, 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. ³You¹d pay, say, $19.95 a month,²
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 recordings‹such as those of Walter Legge, after the
Second World War, with the likes of Otto Klemperer, Maria Callas, and
Elisabeth Schwarzkopf‹achieved 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 ³souvenirs² of performances, he told me. MP3s and live audio
streams, disembodied and often tinny in sound, are very souvenir-like;
they don¹t pretend to re-create an orchestra in one¹s 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 ³Salome² blows away all audio-only competition. At
the heart of iTunes¹s classical division are its collaborations with the
New York Philharmonic and the Los Angeles Philharmonic; the latter¹s
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 music¹s benefit. Last year, part of the group
travelled to New York to attend Steve Reich¹s seventieth-birthday
festival at Carnegie Hall and participate in a workshop. The Grand
Valley¹s 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 Reich¹s ³Music for 18 Musicians² at Bang on a
Can¹s 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
ensemble¹s recording of ³Music for 18² is being released this week on
the Innova label, its arrival heralded by a striking video ³trailer² on
YouTube, which ingeniously contrasts Reich¹s 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 Reich¹s 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.com¹s Top MP3 Artists, outperforming even Kanye West: Richard
Wagner.

[[email protected]]

On Oct 29, 8:45Â*pm, Jenn wrote:
Interesting thoughts music in the digital age. Â*A 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 élitist, effete, or
esoteric for the world of pop. On the Internet, no demographically
driven executive could suppress, say, a musicology student¹s ruminations
on György Ligeti¹s Requiem on the ground that it had no appeal for
twenty-seven-year-old males, even if the blogger in question€¹Tim
Rutherford-Johnson, of The Rambler €¹was 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
Furtwängler, 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 Rós.
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 retail²€¹meaning 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 première 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 present€¹in August, the Metropolitan Opera sold more than two million
dollars¹ worth of tickets in a single day€¹and 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 yourself€¹and 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.

[[email protected]]

On Oct 30, 12:58 pm, " wrote:
On Oct 29, 8:45 pm, Jenn wrote:

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/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

See motre in the posting above this one
===================================
Thank you Jenn 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.

[Jenn]

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 ÂŽlitist, effete, or
esoteric for the world of pop. On the Internet, no demographically
driven executive could suppress, say, a musicology student¹s ruminations
on Gyšrgy Ligeti¹s Requiem on the ground that it had no appeal for
twenty-seven-year-old males, even if the blogger in question€¹Tim
Rutherford-Johnson, of The Rambler €¹was 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
FurtwŠngler, 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 R—s.
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 retail²€¹meaning 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 premi�re 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 present€¹in August, the Metropolitan Opera sold more than two million
dollars¹ worth of tickets in a single day€¹and 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 yourself€¹and 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.

[Jenn]

In article . com,
ScottW wrote:

On Oct 29, 8:45 pm, Jenn wrote:
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/2...fact_ross?prin...
e=true


Seems to me Atkinson was bitching here about someone posting a
complete
copy of an article.....Considered it a copyright violation.

This doesn't seem like a copyright problem to me, as I posted the link
to their website, thereby giving attribution. At any rate, had I not
done so, someone would have been critical of that. So, whatever.


Anyway..."unregulated openness of the Internet seems to have done it
many favors."

It being classical music.

Giving away recordings inspires interest in performances.

Yes it can. As long as it's the owner's decision, it's a good thing.

Musicians
should not be greedy.

Most are just trying to make ends meet like everyone else.

[Jenn]

In article ,
"ScottW" wrote:

"Jenn" wrote in message

...
In article . com,
ScottW wrote:

On Oct 29, 8:45 pm, Jenn wrote:
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/2...fact_ross?prin...
e=true


Seems to me Atkinson was bitching here about someone posting a
complete
copy of an article.....Considered it a copyright violation.

This doesn't seem like a copyright problem to me, as I posted the link
to their website, thereby giving attribution. At any rate, had I not
done so, someone would have been critical of that. So, whatever.


Anyway..."unregulated openness of the Internet seems to have done it
many favors."

It being classical music.

Giving away recordings inspires interest in performances.

Yes it can. As long as it's the owner's decision, it's a good thing.

Musicians
should not be greedy.

Most are just trying to make ends meet like everyone else.

20 Million classical musicians trained in social programs might
not help.....

ScottW

Sorry, you'll have to clarify.

[Jenn]

In article .com,
ScottW wrote:

On Oct 31, 7:45 am, Jenn wrote:
In article ,





"ScottW" wrote:
"Jenn" wrote in message
.
net
...
In article . com,
ScottW wrote:

On Oct 29, 8:45 pm, Jenn wrote:
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/2...fact_ross?prin.
..
e=true

Seems to me Atkinson was bitching here about someone posting a
complete
copy of an article.....Considered it a copyright violation.

This doesn't seem like a copyright problem to me, as I posted the link
to their website, thereby giving attribution. At any rate, had I not
done so, someone would have been critical of that. So, whatever.

Anyway..."unregulated openness of the Internet seems to have done it
many favors."

It being classical music.

Giving away recordings inspires interest in performances.

Yes it can. As long as it's the owner's decision, it's a good thing.

Musicians
should not be greedy.

Most are just trying to make ends meet like everyone else.

20 Million classical musicians trained in social programs might
not help.....

ScottW

Sorry, you'll have to clarify.- Hide quoted text -

That Venezuela social program is going to make classical musicians
cheaper than
berry pickers.....

As if more than a tiny fraction want to or qualify for doing music as a
profession.

[Shhhh! I'm Listening to Reason!]

On Oct 31, 5:07 pm, ScottW wrote:

What qualifications does it take to qualify for music as a profession?

Duh.

Using gross revenue as a measure of success?

Duh.

Sadly the answer is more T as in T & A than talent or training.

Sadly, Christopher Parkening has no "T". But Itzhak Perlman has a nice
"A".

Also sadly, there is no hope for you to become smarter.

[Jenn]

In article .com,
ScottW wrote:

On Oct 31, 2:55 pm, Jenn wrote:
In article .com,





ScottW wrote:
On Oct 31, 7:45 am, Jenn wrote:
In article ,

"ScottW" wrote:
"Jenn" wrote in message

igy.
net
...
In article . com,
ScottW wrote:

On Oct 29, 8:45 pm, Jenn
wrote:
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/2...fa_fact_ross?p
rin.
..
e=true

Seems to me Atkinson was bitching here about someone posting a
complete
copy of an article.....Considered it a copyright violation.

This doesn't seem like a copyright problem to me, as I posted the
link
to their website, thereby giving attribution. At any rate, had I
not
done so, someone would have been critical of that. So, whatever.

Anyway..."unregulated openness of the Internet seems to have done
it
many favors."

It being classical music.

Giving away recordings inspires interest in performances.

Yes it can. As long as it's the owner's decision, it's a good
thing.

Musicians
should not be greedy.

Most are just trying to make ends meet like everyone else.

20 Million classical musicians trained in social programs might
not help.....

ScottW

Sorry, you'll have to clarify.- Hide quoted text -

That Venezuela social program is going to make classical musicians
cheaper than
berry pickers.....

As if more than a tiny fraction want to or qualify for doing music as a
profession.

What qualifications does it take to qualify for music as a profession?
Using gross revenue as a measure of success?

Sadly the answer is more T as in T & A than talent or training.

I'm sorry, since we were discussing the youth orchestra program in
Venezuela, I thought that we were talking about classical.

Although there is a bit of T&A there as well of late.

[Jenn]

In article . com,
ScottW wrote:

On Nov 1, 8:00 am, Jenn wrote:
In article .com,





ScottW wrote:
On Oct 31, 2:55 pm, Jenn wrote:
In article .com,

ScottW wrote:
On Oct 31, 7:45 am, Jenn wrote:
In article ,

"ScottW" wrote:
"Jenn" wrote in message
.
prod
igy.
net
...
In article
. com,
ScottW wrote:

On Oct 29, 8:45 pm, Jenn
wrote:
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/2...1022fa_fact_ro
ss?p
rin.
..
e=true

Seems to me Atkinson was bitching here about someone posting a
complete
copy of an article.....Considered it a copyright violation.

This doesn't seem like a copyright problem to me, as I posted
the
link
to their website, thereby giving attribution. At any rate, had
I
not
done so, someone would have been critical of that. So,
whatever.

Anyway..."unregulated openness of the Internet seems to have
done
it
many favors."

It being classical music.

Giving away recordings inspires interest in performances.

Yes it can. As long as it's the owner's decision, it's a good
thing.

Musicians
should not be greedy.

Most are just trying to make ends meet like everyone else.

20 Million classical musicians trained in social programs might
not help.....

ScottW

Sorry, you'll have to clarify.- Hide quoted text -

That Venezuela social program is going to make classical musicians
cheaper than
berry pickers.....

As if more than a tiny fraction want to or qualify for doing music as a
profession.

What qualifications does it take to qualify for music as a profession?
Using gross revenue as a measure of success?

Sadly the answer is more T as in T & A than talent or training.

I'm sorry, since we were discussing the youth orchestra program in
Venezuela, I thought that we were talking about classical.

Although there is a bit of T&A there as well of late.

What have you gone and done now you naughty liberal you?

ScottW

Not me, certainly. But the marketing types are "interesting" people.