A friend pointed me to this article by Alex Ross talking about classical music on the web. After my lament some months ago about the teetering state of classical music in this country (spurred by the rapid closure of my favorite CD outlets in New York, Chicago and Philly), this is a breath of fresh air. I still think there are a bunch of valid questions here about how long music written 300 years ago can remain relevant, about what in that time period made something so lasting when so much of modern culture (to include much modern music, at least to my ear) is destined to flash and disappear. The whole classical music industry, it seems, rests on the frills of a cultural fetish which seems oddly insular and disconnected from the ever-accelerating stream of popular culture. I'm not trying to make a judgment (though I have strong feelings on the subject); I'm just trying to see where the lines intersect and what it means.
Ross is the classical music critic for the New Yorker, and his article gives a glimmer of hope. That the web might constitute classical music's iron lung (or maybe its penicillin) makes sense, actually. Just as eBay enables you to peddle your fur-coated widget to that exact person in a rattling tenement in Surinam who has been searching for just that very thing (spoken like a Dame Edna), it makes sense that the web enables a gathering of sorts of a whole lot of interested people to something which locally appears to be almost nonexistent. One classical music person per small Iowegian town does not enable an orchestra to form, or even a soloist to visit. But given enough little towns, the numbers become significant. I can understand that the world may not need several hundred symphony orchestras, but the merits of the music are real; I can't accept that because not every community can generate the financial numbers to keep an concert ensemble afloat then the music itself must die and leave those of us with ears to suffer Carrie Underwood.
Me, I love lots of stuff musical, but one of my chief passions is the organ. If I wring my hands a bit about the fate of the symphony orchestra, I really feel nervous about the future of the organ--with some justification, I think. 75 years ago, the big organ building firms in this country were producing several hundred substantial instruments a year. The number must be a fraction of that today. Organ music is not a growing concern--quite the contrary; it is becoming a relic of a past age, an exercise in conservatism and nostalgia (which is why the church remains its last, fading bastion). The idea of putting a pipe organ in a new civic auditorium has already moved from quaint to archaic to unjustifiable. In the end, it's just too narrow a niche, I'm afraid, one with which electronics are too easily able to cope. Don't get me wrong: I dearly love the instrument, and I don't think an electronic keyboard is an adequate replacement; but I think some pessimism about its future is warranted.
But when I spend a little time online, it seems I'm not the only person who will lament the organ's passing. Spend a little more time, and I begin to think our numbers are such that maybe my own rumors of the organ's death have been greatly exaggerated.
I got my computer back after a week in the shop, and of course it came back with all my music files missing. All 17,000 of them. I kind of expected this, and I think I have a good backup on an external drive at home, but I won't get a chance to put everything back on here for several days (and I'm not sure it'll work then, or exactly what I'll have at transfer's end). I do have my iPod along, so I'm not without music altogether. But I was facing a week spent on reduced musical rations.
But not to worry. I found that a little poking around--by way of Minnesota Public Radio's Pipedreams website and Wikipedia's list of organ builders--kept me in fabulous and unexpected organ music for several hours, with no end in sight. Various builders often have sound clips available of their instruments for streaming, and sometimes for download. And there are a whole lot of other resources available. I don't believe any of this promises to put the organ back in the driver's seat of people's musical and intellectual nourishment; and I think the same $250,000-$500,000 that would put a beautiful pipe organ in a nice, reverberant space can buy some very interesting and ever-improving alternatives for producing similar sounds. As a fan of recorded music, the work of synthesist Wendy Carlos, and the prospect of "virtual acoustics" talked about in this post make me excited for what lies ahead, even as I lament a beloved thing which is passing into antiquity.
(And I'm amazed again and again at what sits ready at our fingertips.)
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