Ignorance, Classical Music Marketing Gobbledygook, and the "Great Charade"

One of the things a music critic can look forward to, even a bottom-tier one such as yours truly, is finding their e-mail inbox dependably filled with classical music-related concert ticket offers and other assorted marketing each and every morning. This morning was no different. It had been a long while since I last reviewed some of these promoted ensembles, but I recall those occasions well. Not so much for the performances, fine enough though they were, but for the memories of seeing a good part of the audience skimming through their phones, talking with each other, or just plain dozing off. Admittedly, at one of these concerts, I started falling asleep too. When I got home later that afternoon, I sat in front of my keyboard and faced a small crisis. After all, how does one write compellingly about a phoned-in run-through of some warhorse that has been played practically to depletion by everyone else?

I thought about that moment while scanning through press releases promising me “glorious” and “intimate” concerts filled with “magic” and “spectacular journeys”; all of them garlanded with stultifying jargon (e.g. “fresh perspectives,” “advocacy platforms,” “bridges of understanding,” etc.). That, in turn, called to mind a guide on “diversifying orchestra audiences” that was published in January by the League of American Orchestras.[1] Being the first-born child of South American immigrants myself, it was hard for me not to be personally insulted by its rhetoric of infantilization (and implied racism) meant to placate people such as myself; a lecture made all the more infuriating by the fact that the born scolds wagging their fingers were hardly representative of American diversity themselves. The fusion of trendy politicking with the usual marketing hokum only serves to confirm that those who hold the purse strings in classical music will ensure that the same works are trudged through again and again, that any new works that may appear will—despite pleading to the contrary—likely be stylistically dead-on-arrival, fated to be played but once, and will only ever of be interest to other highly-specialized academics; and that, in general, no constructive change, much less revival will ever come.

Present-day unease and hostility to classical music is fundamentally predicated on the notion that the genre is entirely a European and Anglo-American phenomenon—which is a lie. Western classical music eked out an existence in Spanish and Portuguese America long before the establishment of the United States. Since the turn of the 20th century it lives and sometimes has thrived in Latin America, Asia, and Africa. What prevents the wider dissemination of this history and music is ignorance, the timidity of performers and donors to committedly champion anything remotely unfamiliar, and the ideological inflexibility of professional “allies” whose paychecks depend on propagating grievances. Racism by subterfuge, in other words.

As I mentioned in another post, my contact with classical music was pretty much zero prior to my discovery of it at age 12. More juvenile prison than place of learning, the junior high school I attended at the time was a poor place to develop an appreciation for the life of the mind. My father had a limited appreciation of classical music, although like a lot of parents, he believed its main purpose was to serve as a high-brow performance enhancer for improving children’s test scores. (When I unexpectedly fell in love with it, particularly with modern music, he was not pleased.) There were countless reasons why this music could have eluded me forever. Moreover, it quickly became apparent as I pored through Eric Salzman’s Twentieth-Century Music: An Introduction, which was my guide in that first year I listened to music, that very few composers in it (or anywhere else, for that matter) looked much like me or were even tangentially connected to Latin America. But it never mattered. That this music could (or should) be inaccessible to me because my race/ethnicity/religion differed from these composers never occurred to me. A short time passed, though, when I began to discover that Latin America and the Spanish-speaking world in general had not only quite a few great composers, but also its own fascinating and ongoing classical music history. Even Chile, where my parents came from, had a few distinguished composers including Pedro Humberto Allende, Alfonso Leng, and Domingo Santa Cruz Wilson.

Decades later, I discovered Japanese music of the interwar period. Earlier this week, I was a sobbing mess listening to Uehara Bin and Yūki Michiko in their bittersweet 1937 song, Uramachi jinsei (Backstreet Life). I am not Japanese, have no Japanese ancestry, and aside from my maternal grandfather, who was stationed on a Chilean hospital ship docked in Nagasaki after the war, have no connection to Japan. That never impeded me from enjoying this music, wanting to learn more about it, learning the Japanese language as a result, and loving it as if it were part of my own cultural patrimony. Yet it is the same gatekeepers—whose platitudes about “representation” drip with paternalism that infers non-whites are intellectual inferiors—who choke off wider exploration of the life of the mind; or, worse, instill in the young hostility to art that they have yet to experience and make up their minds about for themselves. How can such malicious deception be tolerated, let alone encouraged?

It brough to mind something that Doris Lessing told Michael Dean in a 1980 BBC interview:

I can't remember any time in my life where I wasn’t sitting looking at the grown-up scene, for example, and thinking, This must be some great charade they’ve all agreed to play. I was always seeing through what went on. That was the makings of a critic, you see.[2]

For those willing to peel the veneer of the “great charade,” the liberation of one’s ears (and mind) awaits.

Notes

[1] Wise, Brian (January 19, 2024). “A Guide to Diversifying Orchestra Audiences”. Symphony: From the League of American Orchestras. URL: https://symphony.org/features/a-guide-to-diversifying-orchestra-audiences/. Retrieved March 19, 2024.

[2] Lessing, Doris (2000). Ingersoll, Earl G. (ed.). “Writing as Time Runs Out”. In Doris Lessing: Conversations. Princeton, New Jersey: Ontario Review Press. ISBN 0-865538-080-5. Page 87.

Allan Evans (1956 - 2020)

I never met Allan Evans and will always regret not having been able to. We were supposed to have met last October, but insurmountable obstacles on my end prevented this from happening. “I’d be glad to have you sit in on one of my classes [at Mannes] whenever you’re able to,” he said to me over the phone shortly before concluding an interview with him about a musical mentor from his youth. That was just over six weeks ago.

At the age of 12 I was bit by the classical music bug and life has never been the same since. Through a series of chance happenstances, I quickly ended up diving into the proverbial deep end: Specifically mid-20th century avant-garde music and historical recordings. Both of these youthful loves were combined in my discovery of Ignaz Friedman, by way of the Pearl Records set which Allan Evans produced and wrote his splendid liner notes for. Hitherto my only encounter with Chopin’s Mazurkas had been through Arthur Rubinstein’s late RCA recordings, which presented this music as desiccated relics caked beneath a thick layer of formaldehyde. (It was not until about 20 years later that I finally began to love Rubinstein’s Chopin—except for his Mazurkas.) Hearing Friedman’s fingers, however, was something else altogether. Chopin’s bristling rhythms and harmonies (in the late Mazurkas sometimes closer to Schoenberg’s Vienna than the Paris salons of his own time) came alive. Suddenly one wasn’t hearing a neatly curated museum curio kept tidily under glass. Friedman understood the performance of Chopin not as the reenactment of esoteric rituals encoded in a ceremonial dead language, but as documents of joys and sorrows uttered in a living lingua franca. Here was Chopin the lover, the poet, the dreamer, the frustrated patriot whose music drew a starlit patina over subversive nationalist yearnings of a future Poland resurgent. Heady stuff for an 8th grader!

Somehow I managed to collect my thoughts and scribble out a fan letter to Allan Evans, which was sent in care of Pearl Records, who then happily forwarded it to my hero. What I wrote has since vanished into the recesses of my memory, but Allan Evans kindly replied to me, patiently answering a number of questions, and encouraging me further on my adventures in listening. 

A co-worker at a record store gig long ago once chided me for my musical preferences. “If you listen to classical music now, what are you going to listen to when you’re old?,” he snickered. Presumably he had never heard Rachmaninoff’s sweetly rueful observation: “Music is enough for a lifetime, but a lifetime is not enough for music.” (And that in a time well before today’s present atomization of music and the listening audience.) Yet it was precisely because of classical music that I needed to hear and absorb other styles in order to better contextualize it. Over the next quarter of a century I used my ears, to borrow a phrase from Charles Ives, like a man. Coursing through my cochleas like an unstoppable torrent were tangos, milongas, Weimar-era cabaret songs, psych-folk rock from the 1960s, easy-listening instrumentals for bluehairs long gone, experimental noise from East Asia, mournful prewar Japanese gunka, electronic novelty amusements, languorous romantic ballads from a Latin America now the dust of eternity—alongside Shostakovich, Bruckner, Stravinsky, Boulez, Feldman, Webern, Brahms, Beethoven, Revueltas, and Carter. Although he was unaware, Allan Evans presided over it all, my distant spiritus rector.

A few years ago at another record store job, a co-worker inducted me into the mysteries of blues music. As my head swirled with the frisson of hearing this music for the first time, my thoughts turned to musicians from another, seemingly unrelated time and place. It struck me that there was a thread of kinship, however unlikely it appeared, between Rev. Gary Davis, Washington Phillips, and Blind Willie Johnson; and the likes of Ockeghem, Wolkenheim, and Josquin. One could call the latter representatives of “Western European roots music,” if you will. (With Bartók, arguably, being its final practitioner and synthesizer.) This epiphany, vividly illustrating the “only two kinds of music” quote apocryphally attributed to an ever-expanding who’s who of musical notables, was the kind of deep listening personal experience fostered by Allan Evans. 

He was a gentleman scholar whose restless intellectual curiosity touched countless people, some even afar and unknown to him; an individual who is a rarity in any age, but especially so in our strident and vulgar times. We shall not see the likes of him again.

I never met Allan Evans and will always regret not having been able to.

The best Recordings and Reissues of 2019

(This list arrives a trifle late as I was feeling a bit under-the-weather at last year’s close.)

We’re down to the last few days of 2019 and as often happens at this time of year, many of us enjoy reflecting upon our favorite records of the past year. 

For listeners like myself, devoted to digging about in the past, 2019 was yet another boom year for inexpensive and handsomely produced reissues and hitherto unheard archival revelations. For example, here in my hands is the entirety of Bruno Walter’s American Columbia discography—all of it available for less than $200. And this is only one among many such sets.

While the “major” labels have largely abdicated their commitment to serious music, the so-called “minor” labels have been spoiling us with splendid new recordings of repertoire well-trod and arcane. 

So without further ado, and in no particular order, here are my favorite reissues and new recordings of the past year. 

 Favorite reissues:

• Raymond Lewenthal: The Complete RCA and Columbia Recordings [Sony]: Eccentric and erudite, a figure as much a creation of Carnegie Hall as it was of Hollywood, Lewenthal carved a niche for himself among the most unique and fascinating in music. A pianistic late bloomer, he pushed his technique to its very limits. The sheer force of will he was capable of summoning is immediately palpable in these recordings from that brief moment when his career was in the ascendent. Throughout this set one encounters the flashing color, bold rhythmic projection, and messianic zeal that keeps the listener at the edge of their seat. He was also that great rarity in a musician: A genuinely articulate, insightful, and engaging speaker on music. Like the man himself, this set demands your attention. 

• Bruno Walter: The Complete Columbia Recordings [Sony]: Twenty-five years ago, Sony reissued about ⅔ of this material in their Bruno Walter: The Edition. Now here is the entirety of the conductor’s output for Columbia, handsomely produced and remastered, and priced cheaper than ever. His recordings from the 1940s and early 1950s, many previously unavailable on CD, with their fire and rhythmic tautness, have long been praised as being his finest work. But the final studio sessions in Los Angeles, which have their many detractors, sparkle afresh here; their warmth and generosity of spirit compelling on their own terms. 

• Dinu Lipatti: The Last Recital [FY Solstice]: The tale of Lipatti’s final performance, eloquently retold in the liner notes by Mark Ainley, to say nothing of the performance itself is well-known to collectors. Lovingly restored in full for the first time as it is here from the original tapes, complete with the pianist’s evocative preluding, this reissue is a revelation nevertheless. A poignant tribute to an artist whose star was dimmed much too soon. 

• Debussy’s Traces (recordings by Marius-François Gaillard, Irén Marik, Mieczysław Horszowski, Mary Garden, Claude Debussy, and Marie-Thérèse Fourneau) [Arbiter]: Debussy’s sound webs, woven together from strands as disparate as Wagner and gamelan music, are often turned soggy by many a pianist, incapable of the deft hand needed to render these delicate tapestries. Marius-François Gaillard, a champion of this music while it was still considered modern, presents here a nuanced, multifaceted Debussy wholly unlike the bland saccharine pastel often presented today. From these freshly-scrubbed shellac grooves the music sings, declaims, laughs, sobs, dreams; all of it faintly bristling with a sense of danger. Performances of Debussy by other pianistic greats fill out this compilation, but make no mistake: Gaillard is the star of the show. Superb notes by producer Allan Evans. 

• New Music String Quartet: The Complete Columbia Album Collection [Sony]: A surprise reissue. The NMSQ didn’t have the fame of their contemporaries such as the Budapest, Amadeus, and Juilliard String Quartets, but their astonishing articulation, colorful phrasing, and adventurous programming make this a vital memento of this long overlooked ensemble.

• Wilhelm Furtwängler: The Radio Recordings, 1939 – 1945 [Berlin Philharmonic]: These recordings are by now so famous (infamous?) that yet another reissue seems hardly warranted. But these new remasterings from the original tapes—a considerable improvement on their tinny-sounding predecessors—and the informative liner notes accompanying them will draw the eye of even the most fatigued Furtwänglerite. At their best, they capture the sort of frenzied, single-minded orchestral execution that was rare even in the conducting golden age from which these sprang forth from. Everything teems with vitality and necessity. Nothing sags, not a moment is wasted. Whether one is a neophyte or a seasoned follower of this conductor, no single set most persuasively demonstrates the spellbinding power of Furtwängler’s art better than this. 

• Artur Rodziński: The Complete CSO Recordings [Pristine Audio]: Conductors can often be mercurial characters, but Rodziński was something else altogether. Fanatic, superstitious, and increasingly paranoid as his years wore ingloriously on, he became his own worst enemy. These recordings from his short-lived tenure at the helm of the Chicago Symphony, then, are a poignant reminder of a high-flying career that would soon crash with a thud. Not that any of that is discernible here. The energy, clarity, and edge that had made him a sought-after conductor in the 1930s and 1940s is amply evident. In a better world, a more even-tempered Rodziński would have kept on leading and recording with Chicago, perhaps avoiding driving himself into a premature death. As it is, we have only these few, but fascinating testaments of a musical partnership as artistically brilliant as it was acrimonious; plenty enough to contemplate what might have been. 

• Mahler: Symphony No. 5 (London Symphony Orchestra/Jascha Horenstein) [Pristine Audio]: Until recently, there were no recordings of this symphony by this great Mahlerian. Now we have two, with this most recent one being the finest. Presented in fine sound, Horenstein, as usual, delivers a Mahler that is both structurally sound and dramatically incisive, illuminating this score’s dense textures with seeming effortlessness. Excellent notes by the conductor’s cousin, Misha Horenstein. 

• Rudolf Firkušný: Bern Recital; March 16, 1976 [Weitblick]: The Czech pianist was never a glamorous A-list pianistic star. Elegant and self-effacing, he instead became something of a pianist’s pianist. The music-making on this set from Weitblick beguiles, charms, even seduces. Like his great compatriot, Ivan Moravec, Firkušný seemed incapable of playing anything less than stunningly gorgeous. This Swiss recital from the late 1970s captures him at his very best. 

• Ustvolskaya: Young Pioneers’ Suite, Children’s Suite, Sports’ Suite, Poem (Leningrad Philharmonic Orchestra/Yevgeny Mravinsky, Arvid Jansons, Igor Borisoglebsky, Vladislav Lavrik): The enigmatic and brutal music of this withdrawn, one-time student of Shostakovich has steadily been garnering attention over the past quarter century. This budget reissue from Brilliant compiles a number of excellent recordings of her early music. Bright and boisterous, these colorful scores burn with an inner conviction that augur the uncompromising tone poet she would eventually become. 

Favorite new recordings:

• Dupont: Complete Symphonic Works (Orchestre Philharmonique de Liège/Patrick Devin) [Fuga Libera]: The shadow of death looms over this music which also glows defiantly with life, with the resolve to create, to leave a mark upon existence against all odds. Part Franck, part Debussy, the short-lived French composer Gabriel Dupont took the various strands that influenced his work and fashioned an art that was original and deeply expressive. This gorgeous music is matched to equally gorgeous performances that captivate, leaving one admiring the force of will that wrought such beauty against the decay of illness. 

• Ravel: Piano Concerto in G, Le Tombeau de Couperin, Alborada del gracioso (Javier Perianes; Orchestre de Paris/Josep Pons) [Harmonia Mundi]: While most pianists today seem bent on out-Horowitzing and out-Argeriching each other, the Spanish pianist Javier Perianes prefers to be himself, sensitively honing his subtle art. In this Ravel album, he conjures as much gossamer as he does glitter, daubing the sparkle with a warming glow that invites. His sound—bronze, not brass—is a joy for the ear always. 

• Feldman: Patterns in a Chromatic Field (Mathis Mayr/Antonis Anissegos) [Wergo]: Feldman’s hypnotic and unapologetically beautiful music is among the glories of the late 20th century. This late score from 1981 finds Feldman less gauzy and more galvanized than usual. Mayr and Anissegos interact with almost conversational casualness, imbuing an earthiness into this often ethereal score, belying their feat of intense focus needed to bring off this score. Its slight technical imperfections impart a human face upon this rarefied music; this creation of an abstract Romantic, the unlikely musical grandchild of Bruckner and Sibelius, baptized by Cage. 

• Henze: Heliogabalus Imperator, Los caprichos, Ouvertüre zu einem Theater (Anssi Karttunen; BBC Symphony Orchestra/Oliver Knussen) [Wergo]: The knotty, thorny music of Henze finds here sympathetic friends in the guise of cellist Karttunen and the late conductor Knussen. Often venomously ironic and delighting in its own invention, Henze could also be disarmingly sincere. Both soloist and conductor, with the excellent support of the BBC Symphony, cut through the music, exposing to the listener a body of work which deserves ranking among the greatest composed. 

• Beethoven: Complete Piano Sonatas (Igor Levit) [Sony]: Levit, despite being only in his early 30s, has much to say about these works that are better than they can ever be performed. Even at his interpretively most imperfect, Levit’s fingers restlessly search out this music’s meanings, consider carefully their manifold implications. This is bracing Beethoven alive and surging with purpose, nervy, daring the listener to come to grips with it. 

• Zimmermann: Violin Concerto, Photoptosis, Die Soldaten (Vokal-Sinfonie) (Leila Josefowicz; Anu Komsi, Jeni Packalen, Hilary Summers, Peter Tantsits, Ville Rusanen, Juha Uusitalo; Finnish Radio Symphony Orchestra/Hannu Linttu) [Finlandia]: Atonal music, so it’s often claimed, is “cerebral” art bereft of emotion, better left behind in the ash heap of the 20th century. The music of Zimmermann is a living refutation of that lame stereotype, proof positive that expressive music isn’t dependent on traditional tonality to move the listener. The “vocal symphony” he extracted from his magnum opus, Die Soldaten, is like the opera it’s based a febrile and intense thing; a writhing waking nightmare among the most potent musical statements of the last century. Joined by two other important Zimmermann scores, these performances under Hannu Lintu convey this music to the listener with superhuman virtuosity and intensity of expression that highlight its debt to Beethoven and Mahler. 

• Ives: Symphonies Nos. 3 and 4 (San Francisco Symphony Orchestra/Michael Tilson Thomas) [SFS Media]: Over 30 years ago, Tilson Thomas made fine, if somewhat flawed recordings of these scores. Today perhaps no other living conductor better understands the crazy quilt audacity of Ives. These recordings, documenting a lifetime’s love and devotion to this music, convincingly presents their explosive balancing act between the rural and cosmopolitan, the homespun and cosmic. Tilson Thomas doesn’t smooth the roughness—like the coarse shapes of a homemade woodcut—of this music. Instead, he celebrates it; he celebrates Ives in all the inconsistency and awesomeness of his originality. In his hands, the composer is revealed as perhaps the most accurate reflection of the nation from which he emerged: Taciturn, petty, ambitious, heroic, and sentimental. 

• Shostakovich: Symphony No. 7 (Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra/Mariss Jansons) [BR Klassik]: The late conductor’s final recording of Shostakovich’s wartime colossus proves to be his finest. The splendid Bavarian brass—rich-toned, but with a touch of tartness—are superb, carrying through with graceful power in the first and third movements. Jansons’ sense of pacing is natural, allowing the music room to unfurl without detriment to its drama, toning down this score’s jingoistic swagger into something Beethovenianly noble. 

• Roussel: Le festin d’Araignée; Dukas: L'Apprenti sorcier (Orchestre National des Pays de la Loire/Pascal Rophé) [BIS]: Roussel’s late ballet, like much of his music, tends to be overlooked. A shame because as these pert and subtly colored performances demonstrate, his music—alight with mesmerizing rhythms—is among the 20th century’s finest. The fine performance of Dukas’ deathless tone poem is the icing on the cake. 

• Bruckner: Symphony No. 9 (Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra/Manfred Honeck) [Reference Recordings]: The partnership of Pittsburgh and Honeck seems to fly under the radar of the mainstream classical music press. Heaven knows why. Their recordings—initially with Exton, now with Reference—demonstrate the kind of hefty sound and daring sense of interpretive risk all too rare nowadays. Their conception of Bruckner’s final symphony is appropriately apocalyptic: The cyclopean opening movement thunders, the Scherzo roils with anger, and the crushing climax of the “Adagio” opens up like an awful cosmic revelation of utmost terror. 

The Double-Edged Sword of Classical Marketing

Marketing for classical music may very well be one of the most thankless jobs around. I can think of no better (worse?) example of a “damned if you do/damned if you don’t” kind of a situation than that experienced by these people who attempt to foment interest for a genre whose capacity to interest a wider audience becomes more difficult by the day. And rather than blame the irreversible historical processes which have led to this result, to say nothing of the endemic structural problems within the classical music business itself, it’s the marketing teams which are the first and most loudly blamed for any slump in donations and ticket sales. 

Still, their often times shrill, tonedeaf, or just plain clueless approach to the promotion of classical music makes it difficult to muster much sympathy. 

Case in point: The online calendar for the Segerstrom Center for the Arts in Orange County. Did the person(s) who wrote this bother to actually read this before making their blurbs public?

“Filled with deep emotion, profound complexity and beautiful melancholy, Brahms’ 4th symphony finishes with a finale that will leave you speechless.”

This kind of hyperbole is self-defeating on a number of levels. Not least of which is that if somehow this kind of hype were to be effective in getting the kids to drop Lil Nas X and Lizzo, and come running to hear Brahms, they’ll more than likely be disappointed to find a work that is, at least on the surface to somebody who knows no better, a standard classical work, and a rather stodgy one at that. Then there is the performance itself which—unless Carl St. Clair has become the second coming of Mengelberg or Golovanov in the years since I last heard him—will definitely be neat, immaculately played, but hardly leave anybody “speechless” (unless they find themselves dozing off). I don’t think Brahms 4 left anybody “speechless” even while the ink was still wet. And as for Brahms’ “deep emotion” and “beautiful melancholy,” Tchaikovsky, for starters, would like to politely object, while Webern hardly saw much beauty in the composer’s “grey on grey” orchestration.

Even for somebody who enjoys classical music, Brahms can be a tough slog to understand; sort of like a musical oat bran or granola antipode to the luxurious culinary offerings of, say, Tchaikovsky or Wagner. I started listening to classical music at age 12, but couldn’t wrap my mind around Brahms until starting when I was 18. Even then, not all of it was immediately approachable or intelligible. It was only this year, for example, when I finally came around to understanding and enjoying his chamber music. 

Well intentioned though it may be, marketing hype is dangerous in classical music because, let’s face it, to the uninitiated it’ll rarely live up to the actual experience of the thing itself. To a young listener reared on Top 40 and the various addictive aural hooks offered by a standard 3-minute song, what excitement can a middle-of-the-road interpretation of an approximately 130-year-old work by a composer who is on the record about prioritizing structural perfection over expressive power hold? And if the music doesn’t live up to the hype the first time, what are the chances that this non-classical listener will bother to try again?

Marketing hyperbole to leave anyone “speechless”. [www.scfta.org]

In the Trenches of the Format Wars

Francis Fukuyama may have been wrong about the inevitability of global liberal democracy and its implications on future societal developments, but when it comes to playback formats, music lovers may indeed wonder whether we have reached the “end of history.” As I type this, I have just finished losslessly streaming through my phone an album of Beethoven’s wind music conducted by Karl Haas. The notion of being able to stream anything at CD quality would have seemed unthinkable to me even five years ago. But even as up-to-date though such an act may appear, the FLAC file format upon which my streaming service depends upon is nearly two decades old, and is based off of predecessor digital formats whose roots go even further back. Historical progress in musical reproduction has today converged into a static horizon point of possibility.

Even as we are on the cusp of entering the third decade of this current century, the old 20th century’s grip on music appears stronger than ever. The “vinyl renaissance” will immediately come to mind for many, of course, but perhaps the most dramatic illustration of this phenomenon is the nearly forty-year-old compact disc which, for all the disdain and snobbery it incurs from today’s “vinyl” snobs, remains stubbornly alive. Despite posting declines of sales overall, it persists as the top physical music format sold globally. We may eventually find that it will also be the last physical musical format to earn widespread public adoption, the final step in a long evolution that began with the wax cylinder. It’s worthwhile to recall at this moment that forty years into its existence, the LP was on the verge of becoming obsolete. What would the average listener in 1980 say if one had told them that people would still be listening to music in generally the same way in 2020—and with no flying cars, to boot?

All this came to mind earlier today when I took a break from writing to watch a video from Techmoan, one of my favorite YouTube channels. His latest upload deals with the format wars of the late 1940s: Namely, between Columbia’s 33 ⅓ RPM long-playing discs and RCA Victor’s 45 RPM discs. Each sought to succeed the 78 RPM format; both ultimately “won,” although the retelling of this history typically overlooks the crucial role played by classical music. 

During this period, classical music was not only an important “prestige” genre, it was also a very financially lucrative market that record labels could not ignore. Even by the 1930s, the 78 RPM was beginning to look (and sound) behind the times, with mostly classical musicians expressing their frustration with its limitations. From its very inception, many of them were skeptical or outright disdainful of a format they felt was plagued by poor quality sound reproduction and short duration. The roster of musicians whose distrust of the then comparatively primitive state of recording technology—a process which Bruno Walter late in life likened to being made to sit in “animal cages”—could not be overcome is a long and painful one. 

Because of these limitations, many larger symphonic works or operas were prohibitively expensive to record, or altogether impossible to do so, at least profitably. In 1937, Electrola recorded Act III of Wagner’s Der Meistersinger von Nürnberg with the Staatskapelle Dresden and the Dresden State Opera under Karl Böhm’s direction. Even a single act from the opera took up 15 heavy and fragile double-sided discs. Around the same time, RCA Victor recorded Serge Koussevitzky conducting the Boston Symphony in Bach’s St. Matthew Passion. That recording exceeded 50 discs, if I’m not mistaken. Their cumbersome bulk, not to mention price (a single 78 RPM disc in the 1930s would on average cost the equivalent of approximately US $25 – $30 today) placed such recordings far beyond what all but a very few people and institutions could afford. 

It was these problems that spurred a development mentioned in the video: RCA Victor’s failed attempt in 1931 to popularize the Victrolac, its own long-playing format. There are several reasons why they were unable to gain traction at the time, but perhaps among the most important was the growing power of the pop music market. Because while the Victrolac resolved some of the issues posed by the 78 RPM disc, it opened up new ones which alienated the pop music audience

With its comparatively modest demands in length and production, the pop music of the era was as if tailor-made for the 78 RPM format. Understandably, the average fan had no need for expensive multi-disc albums, no concerns about length. Single discs were sufficient to contain the music they desired to hear.

So when RCA Victor (in conjunction with Bell Laboratories) began experimenting, then attempted to market extended playback (and stereophonic sound), it was no surprise that instead of enlisting the pop musicians of the era to push the Victrolac, they instead relied on men like Leopold Stokowski and Sir Thomas Beecham. Even had classical listeners been won over to the Victrolac format and managed to overlook its significant flaws, the prohibitive cost of this new format would have precluded any possibility of winning over fans of pop music, whose support was crucial to make it a viable competitor and successor to the 78 RPM. 

This become clearer when fifteen years later Columbia succeeded with its LP, which owed its triumph to two main reasons. Firstly, because the vinyl surface of its playback materials and its duration—with a single album comfortably fitting a standard-length symphony—were an undeniable improvement in fidelity over 78s. Because of that the label could count on the support of their talent roster to court the classical audience, with Igor Stravinsky, Bruno Walter, Eugene Ormandy, and George Szell (who appears on the far right of a group photo with LP pioneer Edward Wallerstein in the aforementioned video) all being prominently featured in their marketing. But secondly, and perhaps more importantly, the LP was affordable. Not only was it significantly cheaper than the Victrolac had been a decade earlier, it promised to eventually be cheaper than the 78 RPM it hoped to replace, thereby making the format accessible to an unprecedentedly broad audience. 

At the same time, RCA Victor also succeeded with the 45 RPM precisely because most pop listeners at the time had no use for albums, instead wanting to only hear the latest hit song. It’s telling that pop/jazz musicians wouldn’t really learn to effectively take advantage of the LP format until well into the 1950s. Even deep into the 1960s, many non-classical LP albums were ramshackle things consisting of a hit song or two accompanied by ten or so tracks of filler. Likewise, the possibilities afforded by tape were first explored by the seemingly irreconcilable opposites of the experimental electronic composers and easy-listening orchestras of the 1950s, with rock musicians finally bringing together elements of both in the 1960s.

The classical market, while much diminished after the 1960s, would continue to be an important force in the recording industry as late as the early 1990s. The advent and durability of the CD bears testimony to this fact. Later attempts at physical format improvements—DVD Audio, SACD, Blu-spec, and Blu-ray Audio—have only managed to appeal to a very niche audience, or have simply failed precisely because the classical audience, which tends to prioritize playback duration and fidelity of sound, has itself become an extreme niche in the wider music industry. Many, perhaps most pop music fans today appear to be quite content streaming music at low-quality bit rates. Some pop music today is even mastered on mp3. 

If present trends in listening and musical taste continue, it could very well come to be that in forty years from now, the CD, LP, and various successors to today’s present digital formats (if not the present ones themselves) will still be with us. And somehow our dreams of flying cars will, mystifyingly, remain unfulfilled. 

“He wants you to enjoy the full beauty of his cello.” Gregor Piatigorsky helping to sell the Columbia LP, 1947.

Jörg Demus (1928 – 2019): A Personal Appreciation

Nothing lasts forever. A hard lesson repeated since time immemorial which each generation, each individual must learn as if it were new. Not only is our personal existence an impermanent thing, but as the burning of the Notre-Dame de Paris illustrated to a horrified global audience, the very world upon which we hinge our existences, too, is a transient one.

The death of Jörg Demus last month was, perhaps, a similar reminder of the ephemerality of our existence, as well as a loss of comparable magnitude.

Not that his was a household name even among the rarefied coterie of admirers of Western musical arcana. It is a testament to the man’s humility that his best-known work is, paradoxically, not as glamorous soloist, but as the eloquent and unassuming partner to such performers as Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau and Elly Ameling. Not that he had anything to hide. As these or the number of solo recordings which remain highly prized amongst record-collecting congnoscenti readily testify, Demus was a musician devoted to the cultivation of beauty. His cycle of Schumann’s piano works—the first ever integral set—remain a model of poetry and poise.

But it is, perhaps, in the work of the composer whom Wilhelm Furtwängler once referred to as a “modern Schumann” where the breadth of Demus’ art is unfurled to its fullest.

That some of the greatest interpreters of Claude Debussy’s piano music were German or German-trained would have been a rueful irony to the great musicien français. Pianists like Gieseking and Arrau were among the few who most closely approximated the composer’s velvety ideal of a piano without hammers. (Comparatively, French pianists often seem to equip their instruments with ice picks.) In his own traversal, Demus follows in that Teutonic tradition, conjuring through his fingers a Debussy of poetic reveries on the verge of becoming mist.

Listen, for example, to the panoply of veiled hues he elicits in Voiles; his Des pas sur la neige of soft-focus blurs slowly coming into focus; the simple charm of his Arabesques or Rêverie; the warmth and human scale of his Études. Threading through it all are those sensitive hands carefully constructing subtly variated textures, drawing long-breathed singing lines, and shaping a dynamic flow as natural as breathing itself.

Here, as in all his best recordings, is the illusion woven by the greatest musicians, who by dint of their virtuosity of body and mind, subsume themselves seamlessly into the composer. In our time when classical music is beset by crude, egomaniacal keyboard-bangers and hair-tousslers who treat their art as merely a prop to frame their Botox-infused, PR-managed “sex appeal,” the plain sincerity of Demus’ art seems not so much as from another time, as it is from another planet. Would that more of his kind light up ours.

The late Jörg Demus at the piano. [Image credit: International Jörg Demus Festival]

Michael Gielen (1927 – 2019)

A few years ago at a record store job I once held, a customer approached me asking for recommendations of Mahler recordings. I led him over to the composer’s section in our store and began going through several which were personal favorites. He asked if there were any integral sets of the composer’s symphonies which I could suggest. We happened to have Michael Gielen’s cycle in stock and held that one out to him.

The customer just looked at me puzzled.

“Who is he?”

I replied with a very brief summary of his life and work, adding that he was to me the greatest conductor then living.

“He can’t be that great,” this customer shot back in irritation. “I’ve never even seen him on social media.”

Requiescat in pace.

Michael Gielen with the Chicago Symphony. [Photo courtesy of the CSO Archives]