Re: GG and Napster and MP3

[Bradley Lehman <bpl@umich.edu>]

Elmer Elevator and Anne Marble wrote, variously:
> > Idea 1. I make my living from Intellectual Property and rely on the
> > world to respect it in order to make my living from it.

Me too.  Both musically and extra-musically.  The "product" is the result
of organizing detailed ideas, not materials.  It's nice to retain credit
where credit is due, and (if possible) to be paid for the efforts of
thinking and integrating everything into a coherent "product."  In short,
Intellectual Property.

> > Idea 2. I discovered .mp3's and, not long ago, Napster, and I think
> > they're wonderful. Before I logged on, I suspected Napster would be
> > nothing but the ghastliest cacaphony of rap, tekno, Britney Spears, The
> > Carpenters, Lilith Faire, ABBA and whiney-teen music (?), but the first
> > time I typed "Glenn Gould" on Napster, I was astonished at the huge
> > number of selections that spewed back. (Not to mention Caruso, Weill,
> > Teresa Stratas, all my classical favorites, that avant-garde loony Harry
> > Partch, and wonderful treats from the ancient past like the comedy duo
> > of Jonathan & Darlene Edwards doing to "I Am Woman" what should have
> > been done at its birth.)

Mixed feelings about .mp3's and Napster.

First off, I think mp3.com is wonderful.  It's a place where lesser-known
musicians have a chance to be heard, and it's a level ground where the
music-making can stand or fall on its quality (not just on fame or
hype).  There are thousands of musicians who have put in 20 or more years
of hard work perfecting their craft, and who are well-respected by everyone
who's heard them play "live," but who have never been picked up by the fame
machinery or the major companies.  The companies are reluctant to take
risks on unknowns whose recordings might never make a profit or bring them
prestige.  If people can go to mp3.com seeking music that delights or moves
them, even though it's not available in retail outlets (for whatever
reason), great!  The musicians have a chance to be heard and appreciated,
and can even make a bit of money at it.  Things can be tried out in draft
form before "real" publication.   Or they can be out there just for anyhow.

Napster I'm less enthralled with, thinking about it from the perspective of
a professional musician.  I do like the idea of being able to hear somebody
else's work before buying it.  But I don't like the idea of people making
an unlimited number of bootleg copies of something, and possibly losing the
trail of where it came from.  The musicians who have written and performed
and produced the music have done work, and deserve to be paid for that time
and skill.  With streaming audio the trail isn't broken...one has to be
connected to the appropriate site where rights and credits can be
posted.  But with downloaded files, it's out of the hands of those who
created it.

Would Glenn Gould have liked these?  Hard to say.  He was fortunate to have
got his big breaks very early in his career.  If we're talking about the GG
who had already released a dozen albums and whose bank account was already
secure, and whose name was already a household word, I think he would have
liked both mp3's and Napster as a way to exchange artistic ideas.  Witness
those essays of his about art phasing itself out, and the one about
forgery.  It seems that to the middle-to-older GG the important thing was
getting the idea out there into circulation, and the identity of the artist
was supposedly secondary.

On the other hand, later into his career his playing continued to evolve
into "Glenn Gould's commentary about this piece" rather "this piece as
played by Glenn Gould"...the interpretations become as much about himself
as about the music.  There's hardly any chance of people listening to a
late GG recording and not knowing it's GG...the ideas had their own
definite stamp, no anonymity.  Even if a GG recording would turn up
mislabeled on Napster, it would still be recognizably GG.  That's not true
of the majority of classical musicians (whether by philosophical choice or
by default)...most don't play with such an aggressively chiseled profile.

Daniel Baldwin and I were conversing off-list yesterday about players such
as Horszowski, Pennario, Browning...those who play beautifully and
selflessly at the service of the composer and the instrument.  I think
Napster is much more dangerous to such musicians than to someone more
individualistic like Glenn Gould.  People who produce selfless
interpretations have just as much right to be paid and credited for it as
people who set out to be novel or provocative.  Even though one can't
listen to Horszowski and say immediately, "Yep, that's Horszowski, his
fingerprints are unmistakeable," he was still a wonderful player and
consummate musician.

Also about GG and Napster: remember that GG could be a total "control
freak."  Would he have wanted his work spinning around out there totally
out of his control?  Hard to say.  He might have been amused by the notion
that everybody can have his or her own private *illegal* collection of GG
recordings...it's subversive (as Anne alluded to).  Or he might have been
indignant.

GG also expressed desire to be a prisoner (whether seriously or not).  What
might a prisoner listen to most conveniently?  Why, Napster!  <grin>  Think
about where someone would be culturally/artistically if their *only*
exposure to any music for five years would be limited to what they can find
on Napster...that is, part of the prison sentence is that they are not
allowed to listen to any music that was obtained legally.  Would that
person spiritually starve, or not?

p.s. Elmer, thanks for the reminder about Jonathan and Darlene
Edwards!  (And you do, I trust, have The Ernie Kovacs Record Collection
with all the, uh, music on it?  That song about fish is no way inferior to
Florence Foster Jenkins' masterpieces.  But we digress dangerously.)

p.p.s. I liked your word "cacaphony."  Something can be simultaneously caca
and phony....

> I checked Napster out of curiousity, and also because someone else was
> curious, so that gave me the impetus to check it out. I was surprised when
> I found 100 Glenn Gould songs right away. There may have been more out
> there -- I think 100 hits is the maximum it will find. Anyway, I didn't
> download anything. (For one thing, I have a 56k modem!) Still, being able
> to download a song as a preview might encourage me to buy the whole album.
> There are some GG recordings I don't own, and being able to listen to them
> might encourage me to <gasp> buy them. I hope more companies figure that
> out.

Indeed.  Unfortunately, though, some of those companies are terrified of
Napster and of internet distribution in general.  They are reluctant to
take on any new projects (I have been told this directly when I proposed
some) because the internet has drastically changed how they do their
business, and they are just trying to stay solvent.  This is *not* good news.

> > I think it's a magnificent achievement that 1904 Caruso recordings,
> > shouted into a mechanical sound collecting horn to scratch a wiggle on a
> > wax cylinder, are now being preserved for cyberspace and the future in a
> > format that can never warp or degrade. Regardless of what his Estate may
> > think, everything I know about Gould's obsession with any technology
> > that did good things for music tells me he would have been thrilled with
> > .mp3's and Napster.

I agree, if we're talking about the financially secure and artistically
well-established GG (as I mentioned above).  Earlier in his career, I don't
know if he would have been so thrilled.  And it depends how much (at any
time) he wanted to retain control of his work that was presented to the
world.  Remember, he was the guy who scripted both sides of his own
interviews....

> After all, Glenn Gould came from an era when you could go into a record
> store and ask to preview a record before buying it!
>
> The record stores now sell CDs (though I still call 'em record stores). CDs
> are much less vunerable than records. Yet most stores won't let you preview
> it. In the Borders the other day, I overheard a staff member say that they
> would let customers preview a CD only if they had three or more copies on
> the shelf! In other words, I wouldn't be allowed to preview most of the
> classical selections, except the Big Hits such as the Three Tenors. Heck,
> I'm the type who prefers The Three Counttenors and No Tenors Allowed, plus
> the Greatest Hits of Men at Work. I'm lucky to find one copy, let alone
> three. (Didn't find any Oberlins at all!)

Yep, and "music store" meant a place where one could buy printed music
scores.  "Music" was something that people got together and did actively,
rather than only listening to somebody else....

More recently, I remember when Borders itself wasn't even a chain, just one
store in Ann Arbor Michigan.  It was a delightful place.  It's still a
delightful place, but it's also a megamart.

> > And I don't have a doubt in the world that sampling an artist's music
> > from Napster stimulates millions of people to go out and $BUY$ the whole
> > album. How many times in a record store has an unknown artist caught our
> > eye, but we decided the investment was too dear to take a dare? And then
> > wondered what we might have missed. Napster brilliantly fills that "take
> > a dare, it's free" gap.

True.  But I'd still rather check it out from a legitimate copy (whether
from a library or from listening in a shop or from streaming excerpts on
the internet)...that way there's still incentive to go get the real thing
and know that something might be getting back to the musicians.  Part of
the joy in buying a new recording is discovering the *other* things on the
disc that one didn't know about.  Often I end up liking the previously
unknown parts better than the piece which was my main incentive to buy the
disc.


Bradley Lehman
Dayton VA
http://www-personal.umich.edu/~bpl