GG: A very gouldian subject

[Luiz Gonçalo de Moraes Prado <luizpra@zaz.com.br>]

Alô F-minors!,


The article below from today's NY Times has a couple of interesting
viewpoints on classical music recordings. Gould would like to read it...

Luiz Gonçalo






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October 21, 2001


Classical Recording: Spinning Into Oblivion?

By ANTHONY TOMMASINI

On May 1, George Scarlett, the vice president for product and vendor
management of Tower Records, issued a directive to all 113 of the company's
stores in the United States that rattled the already shaky classical music
recording industry. His stark memorandum ordered an immediate buying hold on
three independent distributors that have issued recordings highly valued by
classical collectors: Allegro, Qualiton and Harmonia Mundi U.S.A. In
addition, Tower asked all labels, large and small, for extended terms to pay
for products it was ordering, an arrangement that amounted to ordering
records on consignment.

In any other industry such a move would be seen as typical maneuvering in
economically strapped times. Classical recording, though, has always been an
atypical industry. With rare exceptions, the labels produce specialty items
for comparatively small numbers of informed buyers. But getting these
products into the hands of those buyers is not easy, and the one retailer
that all recording companies, especially the smaller ones, had long counted
on was Tower Records, which used to pride itself on stocking virtually
everything.

The classical recording industry seems to be collapsing, and aggrieved music
lovers are looking for someone to blame. During the summer Tower was an easy
villain. By fall, the retail chain, though grappling with its own deficit,
had reached a tentative agreement with the independents. How long it will
last is another matter.

To be fair, Tower Records received an undue amount of criticism. True, the
company has done its share to undermine the industry. A Tower store was once
a serious place where classical music lovers could browse through rows of
releases and discuss them with informed staff members. Today, after years of
gobbling up the market and shoving aside small, independent retailers, the
stores have become mall-like behemoths, featuring snack bars, bookstands and
video rental departments.

Yet can any retailer be expected to stock everything when the market is so
glutted with products? Mr. Scarlett estimates that in classical music alone,
there are now some 60,000 items in the catalogs. "It would be physically
impossible to stock all that," he said recently. "We don't have the shelf
space." Confused consumers have gone from anger to frustration to apathy.
Reportedly, the classical share of the total CD market, which had peaked at
7 percent during the height of CD mania, has slipped to 3 percent.

Several seemingly contradictory factors are causing the crisis in classical
recording. While recording costs, especially for symphonic and operatic fare
have skyrocketed, the cost of producing a CD - actually making the thing -
has never been cheaper: roughly $1 per disc. For years retrenchment and lack
of vision have characterized the five major companies that account for
four-fifths of worldwide sales and are under pressure to make big profits:
Universal, EMI, BMG, Sony and Warner. Consequently, scrappy independent
labels that just aim to stay afloat and enjoy themselves have cropped up
everywhere. The market has been flooded with recordings of neglected and
offbeat repertory, and live performances from past decades (often obtained
by skirting copyright laws, which are hopelessly outmoded anyway).

Some idealistic directors of independent companies view the situation as
messy, yes, but full of promise. The little guys have defeated the big
shots, all those capitalist banditos who took over the majors and signed up
worthy classical artists only to toss them aside when unrealistic profit
goals went unmet. Time is up, the argument goes, for those corporate suits
who piled more and more versions of the Beethoven Fifth and "Tosca" onto the
CD stockpile. Now the indies can rush into the breach.

But with Tower cutting back its services, how will the smaller labels get
their products to consumers? Those troublemakers at Napster, who challenged
the pop record producers by introducing computer programs that allowed users
to download songs and albums free, may actually have been pointing the
entire industry to the inevitable solution: the Internet.

Online shopping sites like Amazon.com and Borders already offer ways for
consumers and recording companies to bypass retail stores, and this trend
will continue. So far, downloading recordings directly through the Internet
has been an issue, and a hassle, only in the pop field. That situation may
be about to change.

For the moment, the major labels have won a legal battle against Napster.
But other direct downloading services, like FastTrack, iMesh and Aimster,
are cropping up. Obviously, few people would condone the theft, in effect,
of copyrighted work from creative artists and the companies that record
them. But if intellectual property rights lawyers and Internet engineers can
find a way to compensate artists and producers properly, some manner of
direct downloading may represent the future of the recording industry,
classical recording included.

Why else would the five competing major companies and other media outlets
have joined forces recently to set up Pressplay and MusicNet, two direct
delivery downloading services? It would seem that the major companies and
their lawyers are searching for legitimate ways to do what the upstarts at
Napster got slapped down for.

Before international conglomerates started acquiring record companies about
20 years ago, the classical recording field was not doing badly. During the
glory years of Columbia Records in the 1950's and 60's, Goddard Lieberson, a
trained composer and critic, was the head of Columbia Masterworks, the
company's classical division. The parent company, CBS, expected Lieberson to
keep the company in the black and even make a little money. But not a lot of
money. Recording classical music was considered a cultural service, a
prestige operation.

Lieberson had top-selling classical artists on his roster: Leonard
Bernstein, Glenn Gould, Isaac Stern and Rudolf Serkin, among others. But it
was understood that, say, Serkin's recording of Beethoven's "Emperor"
Concerto would sell many more copies than his version of Max Reger's Piano
Concerto. Dividends from Bernstein and Gould releases were used to offset
money-losing projects, like the conductor Robert Craft's recordings of the
complete works of Schoenberg and Webern, and the monumentally historic
series featuring Stravinsky conducting his own works. Albums by artists in
the company's popular division, like Bob Dylan, really paid the bills at
Columbia, and kept the execs at CBS happy.

Today, the descendant of Columbia Masterworks is Sony Classical, a
subsidiary of the Sony Corporation. This once illustrious classical division
has been issuing pink slips to its demoralized staff since the summer.
Paradoxically, the sensational success of certain crossover artists, like
Andrea Bocelli and the Three Tenors on other labels, has had a pernicious
influence on classical divisions like Sony's. Suddenly, corporate higher-ups
realized that a classical recording could sell in the millions. The
classical directors were told, in effect, "Fine, put out your prestige
albums of Esa-Pekka Salonen conducting Lutoslawski, and Murray Perahia
playing Bach, but find us marketable crossover artists who can pull in some
real money."

Sony Classical, like most major companies, devised a two-pronged response.
On one hand, they nurtured their top-selling artists like Yo-Yo Ma, signed
up new artists like the soprano Jane Eaglen and brought out the Masterworks
Heritage line, with reissued important recordings by Bernstein, Fritz
Reiner, George Szell and the Budapest String Quartet, smartly packaged and
with intelligent liner notes. In 1998, Sony began a highly praised series
featuring the music of Gyorgy Ligeti. On the other hand, that same year, the
company found its own crossover sensation: a 12-year-old singer from Wales,
Charlotte Church.

By 1999 Sony Classical had abandoned the Ligeti project and scaled down the
Masterworks Heritage line to almost nothing. Meanwhile, it made millions
with the "Titanic" soundtrack album and kept sinking money into Ms. Church.
Just the other day, the latest Sony release appeared: "Our Favorite Things,"
a "Christmas in Vienna" concert featuring Tony Bennett, Plácido Domingo,
Vanessa Williams and Ms. Church, performing with the Vienna Symphony, no
less. Anything for money.

Obviously, executives at Sony Classical, who know how to count, have
determined that this album will sell. All you can say is, rest in peace,
Goddard Lieberson.

Meanwhile, the Ligeti project was picked up by Teldec, which has begun a
sublabel for contemporary music called New Line. But don't count on New
Line's longevity. Teldec is owned by Warner Classics, which acquired it a
decade ago at great expense, along with Erato, another distinguished
classical label. But recently, to cut costs, Warner closed down the
headquarters of Teldec in Hamburg and Erato in Paris.

Both are now centralized in Warner's London offices. Among the casualties
are Daniel Barenboim and the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, which has lost its
contract with Teldec. Many other artists have fallen by the wayside. For
example, no sooner had two superb Erato recordings featuring a young Russian
pianist, Nikolai Lugansky, playing the complete Chopin études and a
Rachmaninoff program been released than the company canceled his contract.

Things are even starker at BMG, the company that owns and operates RCA
Victor: the remnants of a once essential classical label. There have been
staff cutbacks of more than 25 percent in response to a loss of $100 million
during the fiscal year that ended in June. It will be weirdly fascinating to
see what happens to the powerful Universal Classics, which includes Deutsche
Grammophon, Philips and Decca, now that it has been acquired by the Vivendi
company, known for waste management and environmental services, and now
branching out into telecommunications and media.

The current market for classical recordings is chaotic and confusing. The
smaller companies are turning out all sorts of unusual recordings. From the
budget label Naxos you can pick up piano works by Sigismond Thalberg and the
"Christmas Oratorio" by Bach's contemporary Gottfried Heinrich Stölzel.
Symphonies by Svenden and piano concertos by Alwyn are available from
Chandos, which recently brought back into circulation the 1970's recording
of Wagner's "Ring" performed in English translation, a probing performance
conducted by Reginald Goodall.

Yet the major companies have a repository of important older recordings of
the standard repertory that they have let slip from the catalog. So right
now, for example, you can buy a new Naxos album of works for male chorus by
Janacek but not the remarkable 1961 Decca recording of Verdi's "Otello,"
conducted by Herbert von Karajan, with Mario del Monaco and Renata Tebaldi.
For a critic, it's an exercise in frustration to recommend your favorite
recordings of, say, Debussy. Inevitably half of your choices have been
withdrawn.

Many small labels are run by dedicated people who do not expect to make much
money. The composer Gunther Schuller manages GM Records, which has produced
important recordings of contemporary music. When Mr. Schuller decided to
bring out a complete survey of the Beethoven piano sonatas, it was because
he had recruited a distinctive pianist with fresh insights into the works:
Russell Sherman.

As another example, Peter Kermani and Susan Bush run both Albany Records, an
independent label with 600 titles in its catalog that notably champions
American music, and Albany Music Distributors, which handles some 90 smaller
labels.

"The pullback at Tower Records really hurts us," Ms. Bush said recently.
"Whatever we sold elsewhere, we could always count on a check from Tower to
come in on the nose. That made for some semblance of cash flow." Ms. Bush is
skeptical about the potential for the Internet as an alternative sales
source. "Our perception is that many classical consumers are browsers, and
older, and sometimes not even computer-literate," she said. "We sometimes
put out only 200 copies of a recording. But I'm convinced there are 200
people out there who will want it. We as an industry haven't come up with
another way of reaching them." Though some traditional collectors may not
like it, that way may have to be the Internet.

The entire classical recording field is about to be challenged again by the
arrival of new digital recording technologies: SACD (super audio compact
disc) and DVD audio, which, adherents assert, represent staggering
improvements over existing CD recording technology. These formats can sample
the musical signal - the sound, that is - 2.8 million times per second, 64
times the rate for existing CD's. Many audiophiles who find the sound of
digital recordings too cold and clinical, and even those analog holdouts who
prefer the sound of long-playing stereo records, are getting excited over
the new technologies.

In the past, a breakthrough like this would quickly have triggered a huge
conversion to the new technology among producers and consumers, just as
happened 20 years ago when digital recording was introduced: suddenly the
major companies had an excuse to rerecord the entire standard repertory in
the new format. Consumers responded with a madcap dash to their local CD
stores.

My guess is that this time consumers will not leap so quickly. The industry
is too much in flux, the economy too worrisome. Besides, a format war is
going on between the competing technologies, and discerning classical music
lovers may wait to see who wins. And right now, for all the advances, it is
hard to imagine any direct downloading technology that could accommodate
these super discs, so crammed with data.

So what will happen? Certainly, online shopping sites will proliferate. But
what about direct downloading? A similar uncertainty hangs over the world of
printed media. Will computer books relegate printed books to the recycling
bin? Will printed newspapers disappear, as more and more people get their
daily news online?

In a sense, the musical equivalent of the computer book arrived 20 years ago
with the CD, which is, after all, nothing but a plastic-coated floppy disk.
Leaving aside the legal complications, the problem with downloading
recordings at home is that the results in terms of audio fidelity are
inadequate for classical music listeners, especially if you listen through
high-quality speakers. Downloading a three-minute rock song is one thing;
downloading a three-hour Verdi opera is another. It would consume hours of
time and use scads of space on your hard drive. Even then, the sound would
not be of high quality.

But eventually that will change. Superfast cable lines that replace
telephone hookups are vastly improving the audio quality of downloaded
music. Given more time, the industry will solve this problem.

There may also be a middle-ground solution: recording companies will be able
to list their complete catalogs online, then take a single order for a
particular recording and print out ("burning," it's called) a copy for the
waiting consumer. Imagine the space saved in warehouses and retail stores.

Still, direct downloading is also coming, as long as ways can be found to
protect artists and producers. Napster, in its anarchic way, provoked a
crisis by insisting that downloaded music be free.


BUT freedom of a certain kind is an issue here. After all, some artists have
no problem with their work's being circulated on the Internet free. They
have determined that, for now, the benefits of exposure outweigh the
financial sacrifice. Most newspapers and magazines have come to the same
conclusion, at least for now, and offer online access to their publications
free. Eventually fees will probably be charged. But not while we are still
adjusting to the new online world.

If the classical recording business goes online, music lovers will miss
collecting albums they can hold in their hands. We love the idea that all
nine Mahler symphonies can fit into a little box on our shelves. It's still
a kick to see the entire Callas discography on EMI, 30 complete operas and
17 discs of recitals and rarities, all lined up on two shelves in my living
room. On the other hand, I hate looking at the stacks of CD's on the floor
in my office. All that clutter could be cleared away if more recordings were
made available online.

Music lovers will miss browsing, of course. In the 1980's, the Harvard Coop
in Cambridge had a thriving classical music section. Everyone's favorite
sales clerk was Pamela Dellal, an aspiring mezzo-soprano by night, the
czarina of the Coop's classical department by day. Buyers could count on her
for trustworthy recommendations. Ask Ms. Dellal which recording of Purcell's
"Dido and Aeneas" to get, and she would persuade you to buy two.

Today the Harvard Coop's classical music department is a mere remnant of
what it was; Ms. Dellal is a successful singer; and the Internet is here to
stay. If we want classical recordings to survive, we may just have to
embrace it.




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