Hang on to your hats, for Lebrecht's Maestros, Masterpieces and Madness: the Secret Life and Shameful Death of the Classical Record Industry is out on Thursday. Martin Kettle duly ponders the future of classical recording in the Guardian.
I don't like to be rude but for goodness' sake -
Music, classical or otherwise, is an art form. As such, it is a tapestry of human life and aspiration in every colour. It comforts, encourages, and fires. It can also be disturbing, funny or boring: anything, in short, that reflects our feelings, the world about us and what may be above and beyond . Through it, we come to know both ourselves and others, and as such, it matters.
Some people may be more fufilled by literature, galleries, the theatre, football, or even by what I believe is called 'popular music'. But there remain many people throughout the world passionately in love with 'classical music' (if so it must be called). Like any other major art form, it - recorded or otherwise - is not fucking dying. It is evolving, like anything else alive. It may be there is less of a market for more CDs of 'The Four Seasons', but there now exist 435 recordings of this piece, and even a seminal pop album like The Bends only comes out the once, give or take some re-mixes.
If artists do what has been done too much before of course public interest will wane. I don't understand why death is shameful, if what has lived has come to the end of its allotted span. Thereafter it becomes part of history, and our past is also part of our present and future selves. Personally I think classical recording is still alive, but dead or alive, it still matters.
If musicians expect either to make money or
attract interest through discs of music recorded hundreds of times
before by better artists (if you really are the greatest yet, that's
different - go tape a 436th 'Four Seasons'), then yes, they will
struggle. Hire a studio and do it for your own satisfaction if you
like, but don't expect any support from industry. Industry needs a market: it has to give people something if they are to give (money) back to power it.
Classical music can never really be industrial anyway. It's expensive to learn and perform and you have to pay musicians so that they can eat and bring forth riches that aren't fiscal. As I've argued before, you have to make music matter enough for people to decide to invest in it, not expect it to pay. If you want a classical CD, you have to fund it, just as if you want a music lesson, or a nice harp. If you are poor, hopefully a civilised society that cares about the arts has sponsorship opportunities for you, but the need for money remains.
To make people care about any music, recorded or otherwise, you have to communicate - in concert, on disc, in books and magazines, through education and by what you create in the first place. You have to reach out to others. It never ceases to amaze me how many so-called artists think their self-interest self-expression is the only thing that counts, but music (to me) is too widely human, too gloriously infinite. Just as someone who only talks about themselves is a crushing bore, all creative endeavours that are only masturbatory acts of self-love fail. Some initial charisma might carry the artist for a while, but there is no lyricism, no tenderness, no angry drive to make things better for others, no love: only an arid and deluded pride that ultimately burns itself away, for it has no other fuel.
I've been recording the Berio Folk Songs this week. Without even getting off the stage of Bavarian Radio studio 2 I have been transported across throughout Europe and America; been at parties; with lovers; and briefly in a strange Sardinian darkness. I am like Joyce Grenfell's taxi driver, who reads and all the time be travelling in his head.
Wandering to work through Passau`s peaceful Sunday streets, I passed by an American woman bedecked in Tracht (the dirndl, lacy bits etc that make up Bavarian national dress) and explaining to a rapt cruise ship audience "well, not many people leave the church, because then nobody will bury you."