classically digital
The other day I was talking with a classical music fan and I asked if he downloaded music. No, classical music, with its vast dynamic range, didn’t go well with walking down noisy city streets or riding the subway. He preferred to listen to music at home, and didn’t have an MP3 player hooked up to his stereo. That’s typical — classicalistas, in general, have been among the last to adopt the new technology.
Now, I have the absurd luxury of being able to ask a Pulitzer Prize-winning classical music critic for his thoughts on such things. So I e-mailed eMusic’s classical music columnist Justin Davidson and invited him to weigh in on the matter for his June eMusic column.
Justin makes a number of arguments for the compatibility of classical music and downloading. For one thing, it’s enabled the recent profusion of independent and self-released classical recordings: “Producing and distributing recorded music is cheaper and more democratic than it has ever been,” Justin writes, “which is a good thing for the collection of mini-niches we call classical music.” See the rest of his insightful column for more on why classical fans should embrace the MP3 like Violetta embraces Alfredo in La Traviata.
My problem with downloading (or, for that matter, buying physical discs of) classical music is quality-control. There are so many different interpretations of the same work, so much fluxuation in sound quality and fidelity, and so many works (many of which have confusingly similar or nondescript names), that it’s hard to (a) know where to start and (b) separate the wheat from the chaff.
But I’d like to know more about — and better appreciate — classical music. Any help in that regard is appreciated.
for what it’s worth, i really liked the Beginner’s Beethoven and Mozart Essentials Dozens, and the Classical Innovators one, too. It’s a daunting field, to be sure.
I used to be not a huge fan of the MP3 for classical because I didn’t trust the sound quality. It still doesn’t sound great to me, but I’m coming around to the download because I can get an entire album of bizarre trombone concertos from eMusic for way less than the $18.99 it would run me in a real store. It’s less investment to explore new repertoire. New recordings, too: I didn’t think Osmo Vanskaa’s readings of the Beethoven symphonies would be all that. Turns out they are!
If eMusic can get to 256 kB sampling, I’ll be more wholehearted about embracing classical downloads, but it’s been fun for a lot of stuff so far.
Downloads are great for classical because it’s always been difficult to get what you want off the shelf, even at a megastore like (the now defunct) Tower. Personally, I’m not an audiophile, mostly by choice - I prefer the convenience and cheapness of mp3s, and I rarely notice one that sounds downright bad.
Anybody who reads the messageboard has heard me rant about how the online world fails classical music consumers in the areas of metadata quality, overall organization, and marketing. Simply put, they need to hire classical heads and let them build the service from the ground up.
“classical fans should embrace the MP3 like Violetta embraces Alfredo in La Traviata.”
You know she dies at the end, right?
I only came to the world of classical downloading by accident. The MP3 craze was in full swing and I bought one to rip my cd’s to. In all honesty, I don’t think I ever intended to use my MP3 player to hear classical music on, but that’s neither here nor there. What changed for me was an offer from one e-music. com to try out their site (for free). When I discovered the wealth of classical music on the site, I was hooked. I have almost completely stopped buying cd’s, partly because I had reached the end of what stores were carrying and I was willing to pay for, and partly because those said stores closed down one after another. Downloading gives me ultimate flexibility. I always complained about having to buy a whole cd for one piece of music, but now I just get what I want and move on. It is a tremendous rush to peruse a virtual classical music store with untold thousands of discs. Although the “major” labels are not represented, I lose nothing. I am more interested in pieces than performers, but that probably makes me rather rare. With regard to portability, I choose not to listen on the go. Classical music outside the classical era (1750-1825) just isn’t consistent enough in its dynamics to be heard on the go. I get my downloads and burn them on cd (another rush of mine is to make those permanent compilations) and listen at home. I miss the liner notes and the sometimes pretty covers, but there is so much information on line about most music, I am not missing very much. So thank you e-music. You have changed the heart of this music listener from the cd camp to the cd camp, except the music comes from the world wide web.
I listen to mp3 classical music when I am sitting at my computer (and that’s many hours a day). But I would like to download music and feed it to my high end equipment. This could be feasible if online stores would be able to sell music in lossless compression formats, such as Flac, Aiff or Wav. That would change the way classical music lovers buy their favorite recordings. A few days ago Czech Radio made available for free the complete recordings of the Brandeburg Concertos performed by Musica Florea with director Marek Stryncl. They have been encoded in mp3 and flac. Differences are not significant if you just listen to it through your computer loudspeakers (even good ones). But the difference between the two formats is striking if you manage to feed your digital music to the home amplifier and loudspeakers. I think high quality digital recordings is the future of classical music, on and off line, and there are already some small labels that offer them.
buteful