The Enduring Charm of Classical CDs

Interesting article entitled 'The Classical Cloud' by Alex Ross for the New Yorker (can't seem to access it via work's IE6) where he discusses his abiding fondness for CDs over digital music streaming, despite the accumulation of damaging and space-occupying petroleum-produced objects. Among the benefits of CDs he particularly lists the liner notes (the comprehensiveness of which is almost unique to classical music), and how much information they provide that streaming platforms cannot; cover art; the joys in browsing spoines and selecting discs at random, and the memories provoked from seeing an old CD – where it was acquired, where it was most enjoyed, where it has lived and travelled … Spotify is singled out for its poor handling of classical music tracks, mixing up movements, symphonies, confusing artists, etc. Who'd have thought?!

What with classical music’s interest in supporting information (composer and artist biographies, work analyses, performance reviews, instrumental detail, recording dates, locations, libretto, extracts of original scores, etc,), the anorak nature of so many of its more devoted listeners, the need for high definition sonic clarity, and the money and support behind the industry, classical certainly does the CD format better than most genres. I too still value classical CDs more than others, often even over classical vinyl. I recently even bought some, all $5 a pop brand new, or rather still in shrinkwrap but having lingered in the dust filled (now defunct) warehouse of a certain music distributor. I even recalled handling these when working there many moons ago:

James Dillon: Book of Elements (NMC)- dizzyingly complex piano music, with enough strange hooks to cut through the chaos. Dillon was a semi-staple on Dead and Alive, reckon we'd have played more of him if we'd kept at it :


Player Piano 6 - Original Compositions In The Tradition Of Nancarrow (MDG) - Core Dead and Alive repertoire - wonderfully strange sounds from player pianos in post-Nancarrow language, a world I'm obsessed with. Music by Daniele Lombardi, Tom Jonson, Krzysztof Meyer, James Tenney, and interestingly pianists Marc-Andre Hamelin, Stefan Schleiermacher, kind of like writing themselves out of work:



Bernhard Lang: DW (Col Legno) - Using samples and turntables to produce a type of high-brow, refined hauntology; ice-cold and terrifying:



Luigi Nono: Orchestral Works & Chamber Music (Col Legno) - Part of what I always thought looked like Col Legno's "budget sampler" range:

Listening - 25 March 2013

Oddly traveled to work by work car this morning and listened to 45 minutes of Per Bojsen-Moller's Curator's Cuts 28 for Little White Earbuds, burnt to CD for the car stereo. Was good, with slow tempo, calm tones and regimented 4/4 suited to Monday morning's headache and sluggishness. Had zero interest in music at this hour but this helped bring me round. Good start with Madteo:


Much as I enjoyed it I'm not sure I'll bother hearing the rest of this set. Had burnt this to soundtrack a long road trip and figured the air-break tracklistings to be useful, but now that the trip is over... interest has waned.

Listened to no music at my desk, as usual. Tried unsuccessfully to play a few things on the portable digital music device while walking about at lunch but headphones were stuffed (dodgy work in-ear cheapies). Heard snippets of R.E.M. from their I.R.S. Years, skimmed through Autechre's Chichli Suite and Lee Perry's Disco Devil but all sounded too shit to bother with.

This is the problem with portable music all too often, along with the interface being too user unfriendly to engage with, and yet for many (including myself) this is the primary means of listening to much music. And this is a factor in commencing the Listening Series, to try and bring some sense of active engagement to these driftless and passive and largely (presently) unenjoyable activities.

The weekend's listening highlight was several airings of the Delos CD Perchance to Dream to soothe a sick child, played through the living room stereo at modest volume. This was acquired through warehouse in Soho Square, where masses of abandoned Delos and Hanssler CDs were stored. My daughter calls it "the magic CD" and isn't the only one:

Just last week my nephew Karl sent me a quote from Danielle, a friend of his from school days, about her experiences with “Perchance to Dream” and its sequel:

“I had something I wanted to share with you should you ever pop up on my radar again. So, through all of these years, I never forgot that I had the opportunity to meet your Aunt Carol and how cool I thought it was that she’s a concert pianist.

“I thought you might like to know that in my son’s 5-1/2 years on this planet, he’s probably gone to bed at night fewer than thirty times without listening to one of her CDs. I would say that Nicholas is likely her biggest fan. I forgot to bring the CDs with us to Hilton Head last week and heard an earful because of it! I’d better get that stuff on my iPod STAT.

“I purchased “Perchance to Dream” first when I was going through a particularly rough time in the early 90s and was looking for something to help me relax (short of fist-fulls of Xanax!). I liked it so much that I purchased “Such Stuff as Dreams,” too. When Nicholas was born, I was looking for something other than Disney to play him at bedtime. The rest, as they say, is history.

“Anyway, the next time you speak to her, let her know her #1 fan is a 5-year-old boy in metro Atlanta. She might get a chuckle out of it.”

Perchance to Dream: A Lullaby Album for Children and Adults is the only CD I own to feature contrasting covers for adults:


... and children:

Cheap Classical Records

I've spoken before about the joys to be had shopping for classical vinyl. You’re in a world of your own in most shops, scrounging through unorganised bundles of dusty $1 and $2 items, usually stored on the floor, in milk crates, under the racks of more marketable fare. It can be hard on the knees, unless you get to sit down, on an old chair or a box, as I did last week in my most recent haul. There’s perhaps more outright crap to wade through – bulky Reader’s Digest boxes, misplaced 1970s easy listening crooners and unloved sleeveless discards – but its also easy to find gems, even in charity shops.

Here’s what I just picked up:

Schubert - Selling in China for an absurd $120.



I discovered a recent fondness for the harp after hearing Cage’s wonderful In A Landscape played on harp by Victoria Looseleaf, on her album Harpnosis (he he, also includes great versions of soothing modal classics by Satie, Debussy etc.) Also heard a surprisingly pleasant Harpo Marx recording - DL here, low-fi, but better than you’d expect. The cover on mine is Part 2 of a budget Record Club thing not featured online. I passed on Volume 1.



I have a good recording of this by the Australian Chamber Orchestra on hybrid SACD I got for free, but it takes too long to read on my non-super CD player. Check the blurred photo


These guys are old champs


Vaguely surrealist cover for kooky Gould (and stern Schoenberg), I stretched to $6


One of DGs all time best sellers. I still don't understand the cover


Nice cover art on all these, yet strangely not related by label






Only link I could find to Soviet recording of the Shostakovich piano quintet and Stravinsky’s Three Pieces for String Quartet by the Borodin Quartet with Ljubow Edlina on Melodiya Eurodisc is a red herring to here



To sit unplayed with my other 10”s

The High Quality of Contemporary Classical Music Releases

It's hardly surprising that classical music is among the genres least affected by the digital music revolution. Its consumers are for the most part financially well off and happy to pay for CD releases; budgets remain for new classical recordings to take place, funded by relatively stable record labels and a healthy base of philanthropic support; live performance of classical works continues in well-funded halls and venues around the (Western) world; schools and academies around the world continue to support performers and composers to continue the tradition; the classical tradition exists as an always-available pool of repertoire for new recordings, performances and arrangements, with a financially healthy pool of consumers all-too-happy to continue to purchase new recordings of old work; state, private and community radio stations worldwide continue to promote the established tradition, and promote new recordings of work from the tradition; classical music relies on intensive listening and high quality sound played through expensive systems, not MP3s played through earbuds and computer speakers; classical music benefits from wordy written analysis, written by learned academic critics, made available within a discourse of books, magazines, CD liner notes, radio commentary (and websites and blogs); etc. etc. etc... *

There's plenty to get frustrated about here, but there is also an exciting, niche industry for the creation of new classical music. Much of this music works most effectively by engaging with classical music tradition and providing options for ways in which this tradition can be pushed, pulled, tweaked, mocked, followed, discarded, celebrated or destroyed. An understanding of this tradition helps to engage with new composition, but it's by no means essential. I came to classical music through an interest in sound as sound, lured by the shamelessly pretty yet dark and mystifying piano music of Ravel and Satie, the orchestral drones of Ligeti and Penderecki, primitive electronics of Xenakis and Stockhausen and the intriguing processes of Cage and Messiaen. Listening to all this as abstract sound is thrilling, and, in me at least, inspired a pursuit of further understanding, which fortunately the canon is more than able to provide.

The quality behind a lot of contemporary classical CD releases is inspiring, particularly in the current industry climate. The care, effort, commitment - and expense - that go into releases on labels like Bis, hatHUT Kairos and Wergo, is consistently impressive. Naxos too have gone from budget label to major player, regularly releasing the work of new young composers and unearthing under appreciated music from little-known composers throughout history, and from composers from wider parts of the world. Liner notes, recording quality, packaging, all point to a devotion to the music recorded, and whatever issue one has with classical tradition the care and attention to detail cannot be faulted. It's difficult to criticise this aspect, particularly given the incredibly narrow, specialised, hand-to-mouth status of many of the smaller classical labels.

Exemplary of this standard is the Dacapo label, "The Leading Label for Danish classical music", who recently sent me a swag of new releases on chamber music by contemporary Danish composers (reviewed here). Everything about these discs was impressive, as they proudly proclaim at their first rate website:

We present a vast selection of Danish music, encompassing everything from contemporary electronic music to the earliest notes of the Middle Ages. Since Dacapo was founded in 1989 we have released over 450 CDs of Danish music. And with each new CD the picture only gets clearer: There is so much original and exciting music in Denmark that you forget how small the country actually is!

Our recordings are made in the best possible sound quality that is based on proud Danish traditions of a natural, precise and spacious sound. Every link in our productions are of the highest quality, which has among others brought Dacapo a large number of distinctions that include the Cannes Classical Awards, Grammy nominations and lots of Danish Music Awards.

In our new Dacapo Music Store we now offer our full catalouge instantly available with just a few mouse clicks: You can download the music in various formats, from the popular mp3 format to 24-bit digital audio, which will deliver far better sound than you're are used to from CD playback. It has never been easier to explore the world of music - and it has never sounded so good. We would like to welcome you to discover Danish music. And the journey begins right now at your computer.

Enough flattery, but others could learn a thing or two from Dacapo.

* I'm also happy to hear that Harold Moores Records, the independent classical shop I worked at in London, is still going strong while HMV, Virgin, ZAAVI etc. have died. They certainly weren't doing well when I worked there.

Recorded Music in the Digital Age

For me, much of the joy in listening to recorded music, particularly acoustic music, has to do with hearing the recording process itself, acknowledging - celebrating even - its artifice, self-referentially incorporating this process into the finished product. This is why records are such a rich medium: the noise of needle on vinyl is inescapable and intrinsic to vinyl playback.

The Hi-Fi phenomenon of the twentieth century was obsessed with noise reduction, a 'problem' which seems to have been largely mastered (pardon the pun) by the advent of digital recording and CDs. Or, more likely, no one cares anymore in the frenzied everything-for-free fileshare deluge, heard as low bitrate MP3s through little white earbuds or computer speakers. I'll moan about some of the other issues with MP3s at another time, but the sound quality alone is enough to champion vinyl, or CDs even. Since we've gone all-vinyl at home I find even CDs sound shit, and now view digital files purely as the 'reviewing tools' argued by music giveaway blogs. I'm a prolific 'previewer' of digital files, I'll admit, but I feel less guilty about it now.

This hot issue has kicked off a regular series in The Wire featuring various arguments on digital music and quality, value, storage, listening habits, etc, and its been interesting to follow. I feel strongly that musicians need to get paid, but I also feel that policing the ceaseless flow of stolen music on giveaway blogs is an impossible task and one that now its too late to start trying to enforce. As one side of the argument has articulated, the landscape has irrevocably changed and the past cannot be recaptured. Given this, that the initial shock over music freely available everywhere online has passed, we've reached a kind of plateau and something has been realised: there exists a demand for quality music releases on physical formats, and that some people are willing to pay for music in these forms.

The issues here lie around the idea of 'quality', and the volume of music that people are willing to pay for versus the volume of music they want to acquire and listen to. The quality argument came up at mnmlssgs and by Stefan Goldmann at LWE, and touched on in varied forms by countless others, and cannot be overstated - given the saturated market we find ourselves in, and the lack of financial reward available to most music producers, its more difficult than ever to create original music work of high quality and have it recorded and released to a high standard. I'd argue that this is less of a problem in certain genres, particularly classical (and I'll post about that soon), but in most areas of music there's complacency and tedium from the many issues that digital music has raised.

As for how much people are prepared to pay for music, this area will continue to be defined as time passes within this situation, ie as those listeners prepared to pay AT ALL for music begin to cement their spending habits in this age. I still buy far more music on vinyl than I need/ought to, but never as much as I'd like to. I also trawl charity shops for bargain records, something no one aside the charities benefits financially from, but given that most of the people involved in the production of the record are long dead, who cares?

I also download a lot of music, scan, promptly forget and/or abandon in search of the next new cheap hit. This seems symptomatic of current music consumption habits, that given the lack of investment, in all senses, in music downloaded and skimmed through portable devices, music consumed in this way can only be heard cursorily. This practice is wearying, causing exhaustion and depression (and guilt), but can be corrected. Sit back in your listening space, turn on the stereo, dust off some records, have some people over, play whole albums, talk about them, let them lead you to other records, study the covers, read the notes, buy some more ...

Reviews

Cyclic July roundup:

The Machinist – Of What Once Was

(Moving Furniture Records)
Two deep long drones with field recording and distorted guitar fuzz.

Leonardo Rosado – Opaque Glitter (Feedback Loop)
Mournful synths and crackle veering from blissful ambient to deep unease.

Rytis Mazulis – Musica Falsa (Megadisc Classics)
Thrilling canons and overtones from the Lithuanian superminimalist and ATTSWOH favourite realised by flute virtuoso Manuel Zurrio.

Lucia Mense: Electric Counterpoint (Satelita)
Excellent survey of new music for recorder from live Cologne performance.

Eisuke Yanagisawa: Ultrasonic Scapes (gruenrekorder)
Buzzing ultrasonic frequencies from organic and inorganic sources in Basic Channel steel box.

Mompou: Piano Works 6 (Naxos)
Positively dreamy undiscovered piano music from the willfully naive Catalan composer.

Nicolas Bernier: Usure Paysage (Hronir)
Award-winning musique concrete from the prolific Bernier.

Various: Contemporary Danish Music (Dacapo)
Impressive and high quality productions and performances of obscure chamber music by contemporary Danish composers. More on this label soon.

Villalobos and Loderbauer: Re:ECM (ECM)
Expertly pitched electronic doodling of ECM samples by Berlin techno duo.

Yoshio Machida: Scape Dance (Amorfon)
Patient Feldman-esque tin-pan improvisations and processed digital tin-pan digitalia accompany strange pastel visual cut ups on DVD. More on Amorfon, "the music adventure label and hair salon", soon.

Angélica Castelló: Bestiario (Mosz)
Chaotic sampladelica by Mexican subbass recorder player.

Coming up: New ambient stunner from Chihei Hatakeyama on Room 40.

Cheap Vinyl

One of the perks of being a fan of classical music, aside from the implicit knowledge that you are smarter, more sophisticated than and superior to non-classical listeners, is that classical records are dirt cheap in most record stores. My boss is away - an extreme rarity - so I hopped on a tram to Fitzroy Hipsterville and visited some record shops. First up was Northside Records, known for their soul-jazz-funk-hip-hop, had some good stuff at acceptable prices, including Motor City Drum Ensemble's "Monorail" double 12" for $26, a bargain round these parts, and were I more flush I'd have picked it up.



...with John Roberts, usually boring but this is good:


But not as good as the Hundred20 old-skool tracks:


I also thought it would make me look cool next to the bundle of bottom shelf $2 clutter I actually bought:

Beethoven Piano Concerto #5, Wilhelm Kempf, old pressing

Berg, Schonberg, Webern - Those dudes don't know the gold they're sitting on - Second Viennese School for 2 bucks!!!

Debussy: Prelude etc. Nice Rousseau cover

Mussorgsky: Pictures, probably never listen to this, I think I find it annoying, but maybe the Ravel will get an airing.

Dexter in France. Could be in poor shape, their jazz collection was generally more highly regarded, and costlier.

It being 2011 and record stores a different beast these days, the owner shmoozed me, asked me my taste in electronic music (flustered, I said "house and ambient") and pulled out full-price recommendations to hopefully snag more of a sale. I'm probably being cynical though, if they've made it this far they're probably safe. His interest sagged when I asked whether he had any classical music, replying "down in the $2 bin". Bonanza!

Ten bucks lighter but five records heavier I strolled around the corner to the The Searchers book & record exchange. Less disregard shown for classical, stored above ground and in the same racks as rock, pop, hip-hop etc, but here they went as low as $1. I bought this:

Adams and Reich. Never really liked Adams but the Reich is good, and minimalism on vinyl always welcome, in some vain hope I'll someday mix with it

Debussy Images etc. Add more yellow to the sides of the casette image below for what the vinyl looks like.

Vivaldi chamber music. Hadn't really seen Hyperion LPs, they look identical to their CDs.

Beethoven by the Menuhins.

Mine is an EMI HMV LP with Arnodl Bocklin's "Ein Fruhlingstag" on the cover

Mozart Clarinet Concerto, from the recording below, but mine is a 10" without the horn work, on Decca, with a reproduction of an uncredited Dutch outdoor tavern scene on the cover. The previous owner was named "Bennett" and they bought it 17 April 1964, according to the sticker in the corner.

Felt ok with Steve Reich in the pile but purchasing anything valued at $1 is a degrading experience. The look I received from the clerk, not dislike but utter disinterest, was revealing: I'm too old to look young and cool listening to Vivaldi, especially in my work strides; now I resemble the 100% classical penny-pinching cranks I used to serve at Harold Moores.

Ligeti Etudes

There's a number of good videos of Ligeti Etude performances but this is one of the more exciting, Ching-Yun Hu playing the No. 10, "Der Zauberlehrling". Ligeti was concerned with the tactile nature of piano playing, taking this well beyond the fingers into a forced whole-body dance, brilliantly demonstrated by Ching-Yun here.

Pierre Laurent-Aimard's performance of the second featured here, the "Blockierte Tasten", shows this tactile obsession more closely, the fingers of one hand forced to dampen keys while those of the other dance madly over and around. The gentle caress of flesh on key here is almost erotic.

For the Brahmsian romantic Ligeti look at Boris Feiner's take on the Etude No. 6 "Autumn in Warsaw". He even looks like Brahms with his to-and-fro sway.