The overall quality and sharp critical insights offered by Gramophone – “the world’s authority on classical music since 1923,” the magazine that still bills itself as offering “the world’s best classical music reviews” – have plummeted from the heights of when I first started reading it (in the early ‘90s). And I know there are codgers out there who, even then, felt that that the magazine had become a shadow of its former self.
But contributors like John Steane and Alan Blyth were still around then, old timers who possessed encyclopedic knowledge of their respective fields and long, long memories that reached back into the 78 era. These reviewers’ assessments were invaluable – invariably erudite, articulate in a manner that is now lost, and spot-on in their ability to hone in on the most telling details expressed in often poetic ways. Performances were to be savored and records were to be cherished.
Anxiety about format change was expressed in its pages by the magazine’s founding editor, Compton Mackenzie, all the way back in 1949 with the introduction of the 33 rpm long-playing record. While I am sure Mr. Mackenzie went on to enjoy more than his share of music released on the new format and even came to embrace it as superior to the old, we are now at a point, I feel, where a resistance to change is more than simply reactionary.
It is dismaying to me that there are young men now at the helm of Gramophone (and just about everywhere, apparently) who are only too glad to forgo the pleasures of a hard-earned physical collection, assembled over many years – sometimes at great personal sacrifice, but not infrequently tinged with the thrill of the chase – in favor of downloads or streaming. Where the hell is the pleasure in that?
Sure, their version of enjoyment saves space and spares the environment, due to the lack of packaging and physical “stuff.” But it is very far away from my happiest experiences, when I could hold an album in my hands and spend hours absorbed in concentrated listening. Does anyone really focus on anything anymore? Or are we more likely to click a mouse and use the music as background as we surf the internet, shop, pay bills, check Facebook?
Yes, there are certain staples that could probably be left off of my shelves at this point. I didn’t even own a copy of the “Brandenburg Concertos,” beyond the set I picked up on LP back in my high school days, until perhaps the last year or two (the more recent ones I got for free). Recordings of these works are so pervasive, and they can be readily sampled online. Of course working at a classical music station, I also have access to the library there, such that it is. But I’m not about to get rid of my Bernstein Mahler Symphonies or my Boult Vaughan Williams set or the landmark Dorati Haydn just because they can be streamed.
At any rate, there is tons of material in any collection that has been amassed over decades that will never be reissued in any form. It might be for reasons of copyright or small companies going out of business or a perceived lack of consumer interest. Whatever the case, only a fraction of what has been will ever appear again (and usually the same things over and over and over). Invariably things get “lost.”
So I lament the constant technological “upgrades” (in most things), including the exclusion of CD players from many newer cars. It’s too often the case that the market drives consumer choice rather than the other way around. And astonishingly, people just roll with it. Then younger folks come up, and they never know the difference.
The whippersnappers at Gramophone don’t seem to mind giving themselves over to the vagaries of a streamed catalogue from which items may be deleted at any time for whatever reason a provider sees fit. At least when I buy something, I know I own it. It may be destroyed by house fire, but it will never be retracted.
Those who roll with change might be happier people, or think they are. For me, I’ll continue to build my collection by cherry-picking from everybody else’s cast-offs and by treasure-hunting at Princeton Record Exchange.
Now get off my lawn.
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