Anyone who has seen Vladimir Horowitz come onto a stage will know what I mean. Looking out into the audience, Horowitz seemed to be sizing us up, saying to himself “Who’s here? What kind of people are these? How shall I play Mozart tonight for them?” Seeing him create the illusion of a piano chord that swells in volume (an impossibility on a hammered instrument), One knew that this was not added electronically during an editing session but rather was a result of the incredible control he had over individual fingers. Horowitz would strike the top note of a chord infinitesimally before the other notes in order to create this illusion of a chord that increases in volume after the attack.
Clearly we benefit from the invention of recording technology, broadcasting technology and the Internet. I grew up at a time when radios in Canada were licensed, revenues went to the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, and Lorne Greene was the “Voice of Doom” on the evening news broadcasts. In the 1940’s, each major city in Canada had its own CBC Symphony Orchestra, perhaps not as prestigious as Toscanini’s NBC Symphony Orchestra but nevertheless a source of broadcasts that introduced me to the orchestral repertoire.
When I was a child, 78-rpm records of 12” diameter lasted six minutes per side and very few operas had even been put on record. The shellac discs were easily broken, and “record changers” often marred the surfaces by dropping needles carelessly onto the grooved surfaces. My family owned an album of “Favorite Piano Concertos” with twelve-minute segments from the first movements of each of eight concertos. I treasured these glimpses of repertoire that I would perhaps never hear live.
Then came the birth of Long Playing records. The floodgates opened. I bought Béla Bartók’s second piano concerto after listening to it in Schmitt’s Music Store in Minneapolis. (In those days, you were allowed to go into a booth and preview records.) I bought János Starker’s recording of Zoltán Kodály’s “Sonata for Solo Cello.” I had happily discovered twentieth-century Hungarian music.
After being educated as a physicist, I participated in research on early laser materials (dilute ruby), never imagining that we would one day see low-cost lasers reading music from the surfaces of optical discs. The development of the Compact Disc made my LP record collection obsolete, but I now had room for fifteen Wagner opera recordings (including two Rings) to replace my previous six recordings on LP.
Fast forward to the present. The Compact Disc is vanishing as a mass distribution format. Direct file transfer from the Internet will become the dominant technology for the dissemination of music to the mass market. The communication industry seeks maximum revenue and profit, not maximum quality. The mass market (popular music) accepts MP3 audio quality (MPEG Layer-3 format with a data compression ratio of ten to one). However, MP-3 file quality is unacceptable for classical music, since the recordings are audibly inferior to existing CDs. Other formats with less compressed data can be free of audible loss, but as yet the infrastructure is lacking for easy distribution, and there is still doubt about the ultimate digital format. Standards and infrastructure will arrive. Classical CD’s will then become at best a niche market of private label discs sold by mail or after concerts by the musicians involved.
And what of broadcasting? After the sale by the New York Times of WQXR’s spot on the radio dial, New York City will have only one radio station dedicated to classical music, a possibility once unthinkable. NPR affiliate WNYC plans to continue WQXR high on the dial with classical music while emphasizing more talk show content on WNYC.
All of us may soon find our traditional sources of classical music drying up. Whether we want to or not, in the future we will depend upon the Internet for broadcast classical music and to buy recordings. More about this in a future column.
© 2009 Edward C. McIrvine
Arts Spectrum column #445
August 7, 2009
VERY interesting!
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