Requiem For Classical Music

Tower Records is dead. Long live Tower Records. I'm in Philly for the week (well, I'm starting in PHL, we'll see where we end up by week's end), and our hotel is right near Broad Street, where there is a large, two-level Tower Records. I'm accustomed to supplementing my CD collection on each visit to PHL, as I so rarely get to a place where one can buy classical music (and until somebody finds a better interface, it sucks to shop for classical music online). This place has a world-class orchestra, and the population to support it, and so conditions for the proper care and feeding of decent classical music stores are right.

But I made a bee line there this morning, and the store is... gone. Well, it's actually being converted to an FYE store, with big banners in the windows boasting what will be the area's largest selection of used CDs. Given the character of the FYE that just closed in our mall in Appleton, I'm just not getting a good vibe from this. There's a Borders books & music across the street, with no better a classical selection than what I find in the Barnes & Noble in Appleton. Now my Tower Records locations in New York, Chicago AND Philly have gone dodo. So maybe I should have titled this post "Requiem for Tower Records."

But I fear the phenomenon is larger than the demise of one retailer.

I understand that web shopping has made it difficult for the average CD retailer to keep anything like a decent selection of classical recordings on hand. The catalog, first of works themselves, and then of recordings of those works, is absolutely daunting, and it's a rare recording that might be called high-volume. Indeed, most of these recordings, even in a busy store, will collect some dust before limping off the shelves. So it's a niche market.

But I would have thought that these three cities--NYC, Chicago, PHL--would have had exactly the concentration of classical music buyers to make keeping physical stock a viable business proposition. I mean, they're not shipping many copies of Jeanne Demessieux's Choral Preludes to, say, Crawford, TX; the buyers are in the big cities where the orchestras and ensembles and concert series are.

I suppose it's an easy enough proposition to look at classical CD sales. This figure seems a better indication to me than orchestra endowments, which have a novelty and social (and "society") aspect to them, whereas the CDs are how a modern person will immerse themselves in this repertoire. But there's little succor to be gained in this search. I didn't find the figures I was looking for in my brief search, but just asking the question was like lifting the corner of a tourniquet to see if the bleeding has stopped. The rush of blood spurts out sickeningly.

I've been aware of the Grim Reaper's shadow on this corner of my passion for years, but it's nipping rather close now when my favorite outlets are evaporating before my eyes. And it all raises questions which I am nowhere near able to answer. I've always known that there's something stagnant about an immersion in thinking from 300 years ago. It's not that Bach is not brilliant, nor even that he's not relevant, exactly. On the contrary, I'm thrilled and moved and amazed by the workings of his mind on a daily basis. But there's no escaping that he was the best of his age, and that music has moved on to other things, to other great minds, to new horizons. He died in seventeen-frickin'-fifty.

I don't know; maybe currency has nothing to do with it. A great idea is no less great for having been dreamed up a long time ago. And music is abstract, so maybe the whole idea of currency kind of flies out the window here (or should). Our ear is never just our ear. The "ear," of course, is really our brain. And classical music as a field of study is really just the human intellect applied to our collected knowledge about composed (as opposed to spontaneous) music. I think it's this consideration, this working-out of ideas that draws me to this music. There's a history involved, with its parallels to other artistic fields and to the rest of human history. We have basic rules that have been codified and amended and evolved over several centuries to bring us to our present day, and we can immerse ourselves in this history and find it moving and enriching and gratifying as a study of human thinking.

My musical mind --my ear--is able to process music from a century or two before Bach up to about the middle of last century. There are plenty of present-day movie scores that parade 19th Century music around in late 20th Century clothing, but I don't think anyone considers this a leading edge of MUSICAL evolution. But it does demonstrate that mine is not the only ear that has not been trained to deal with newer musical milieux. But there it is. I'm on board with Debussy and Ravel and Hindemith and bits of Shostakovich; I can get along very well with early Messiaen; and organ-specific composers like Vierne and Duruflé and Widor I adore. But along comes Schoenberg and Berg and Messiaen's forays into birdsong and I'm just not able to enthrall at these as musical phenomena. Guys like Rachmaninov were derided as having been born in the wrong century, his popularity be damned. Real innovation was going on elsewhere. And so at some point the leading edge of intellectual concert music left behind the predominant intellectual background of its listeners, and became a field of specialists--not just for music production (which has been a specialist endeavor for a long time), but for music consumption as well. The masses were left with the digestible conservatism of rock and roll--mostly mundane music which made its innovation in social fields: parading around in androgynous clothing with the bludgeoning dazzle of pyrotechnics and great volume. (If you're REALLY conservative in your tastes you get the suffocating inanity of... country!)

I'm joking, of course. Kind of. There have been undeniable expressions of human greatness and emotional vitality in many fields of popular music, and maybe we all just need to embrace what we've moved on to--where we are NOW (indeed, that's what pretty much all of us have done). But it's not the same thing; it doesn't tickle the same region of the brain, sometimes not anywhere near it.

Is it just my bad fortune that I happen to value having a part of my brain tickled that (almost) nobody else gives a damn about?

Farewell, Tower Records. I did what I could to keep ye afloat.

(I'm listening to a lush and haunting choral piece of Alexander Gretchaninov as I write this, and he understands me perfectly!)