Tag: Music

About ten years ago, I met Elliot Carter. When I say ‘met’, I mean I stood next to him outside the cloakroom at The Museum of Modern Art in New York while someone fetched his coat. At the time I thought this was pretty cool (cooler still because earlier that day I’d stood next to another cuddly modernist – Allen Ginsberg – in a lift. I said “hello”, he said “yeh”. Or it might have been “yh”).

Carter was mobbed by adoring fans approximately one-fifth his age – students, I guess – all pressing scores and books and albums on him for his autograph. The man was 87, smiley and cute. This year he’s 97 and everybody still loves him, of course. In fact, I think he must be the world’s best-loved difficult atonal composer.

I’d love to be at The Barbican tomorrow for the last day of the big Carter weekend but my kids won’t let me – his may be the most accessible scary post-war music you can get but they’re not buying it. We might make it to the ridiculously friendly and cheery Children’s Classic Concert at the same venue in May but I’m pretty sure they won’t be doing any Carter (no. I checked. They’re not doing any Carter).

A couple of years after the giant sucking sound coming from Cupertino was first heard in even the quieter parts of the record industry there can’t be much music released that isn’t available for download straight away somewhere or other and, for you cheapskates, the file sharing networks are bigger and more useful than ever. What I’ve been wondering, though, is “where is all the out-of-copyright stuff?”

Recordings made in the first half of the last century – hundreds of thousands of them presumably, from just about every nation and musical style on earth – are now out-of-copyright. Bunk Johnson, Caruso, Sophie Tucker, Mistinguett, The Carter Family, Toscanini, Big Bill Broonzy, George Formby: hundreds of artists should by now be available for download but it’s way too patchy.

Archive.org provides a lot of this material (especially 78s) but there don’t seem to be any dedicated out-of-copyright archives. Archiving and indexing this culturally important and hard-to-find material (as well as the movies and radio programmes and comic books and posters and magazines and theatre programmes and…) looks like a very useful (and entirely legal) job for the file sharing networks to tackle.

As an obvious public service, it might also insulate the P2P networks from further vandalism by the labels. It would certainly be harder for a witless Judge to switch off a network the majority of whose content was recorded before he was born than one pointlessly stuffed with already ubiquitous contemporary top 40 material.

Flickr’s Glastonbury tag (and the RSS feed).

Now I feel bad. I forgot to mention that, in the last few weeks we lost two of the most important Old School opera goddesses of all time: Victoria de los Angeles and Renata Tebaldi. In their native countries (Spain and Italy respectively) they were practically worshiped. They were contemporaries of Callas and of comparable stature. They’re both in my record collection – de los Angeles on several super-cheap CDs probably given to me by my friend Paul who used to buy that sort of thing from a stall on Whitechapel Waste when he worked over the road at Eastside Books (her lovely Catalan songs seem to be unavailable but you can still get this fat collection of traditional Spanish song at amazon.co.uk) and Tebaldi on heavy vintage vinyl probably bought from the quite amazing and precious Harold Moore’s Records in Great Marlborough Street when I worked next door at Marks and Spencer. Opera divas are no longer glamorous, remote figures, loved by millions from a distance – they’re struggling to retain their relevance, losing a lot of weight (well, most of them), doing Reality TV shows and charity concerts. They should be a protected species.

Twenty years ago, when I started listening to classical music, things looked pretty good for the form. A small revival was under way – lots of gorgeous new music, influential movie soundtracks and superstar ensembles seemed to promise some kind of renaissance. The subsidised concert halls were full and radio deregulation promised a wave of new classical stations. Now, things are much gloomier.

Classical music is a basket case, in fact. The generation that was supposed to save it has moved on – either to revitalised ‘serious’ rock or to some point on the huge and groovy spectrum of dance music. Classical album sales have collapsed, the labels can’t fund the big budget recordings any more and even the major orchestras are struggling. A decade of wasted investment in witless crossover acts and overpaid has-beens hasn’t helped. Worst of all, no one knows what to do – there’s no evidence that the industry has a response up its sleeve – either to the disastrous loss of audience or to the promise of new technology.

Meanwhile, Radio 3 and a bunch of top orchestras have got together to make classical performance available to people who wouldn’t normally see it. Disabled people are invited to call 0800 033 033 and book a free performance from some of the best musicians in the land in their own home. Marvelous: a really brave initiative – but it got me thinking. What classical music needs, I think, is something bigger, something much more ambitious.

The subsidised ensembles ought to launch the biggest outreach programme in their history. It’s quite simple (and it’s really just the disabled scheme on a bigger scale): for a year, anyone who can promise an audience of more than, say, twenty, should be able to call a single number and book an orchestra, a chamber group, a choir or a soloist for a free performance anywhere. I’d like to see a year of frenetic activity from the musicians and administrators, composers and conductors – a really serious effort to convert thousands, tens of thousands (hundreds of thousands?) of new listeners, a really serious effort to rescue classical music from the heartbreaking spiral of irrelevance it’s caught in now.

Speaking of classical outreach, every programme in Radio 3’s brilliant Discovering Music series is worth listening to and they have a proper archive.

Jamie Reid’s cover art was the ultimate ‘fuck off’ to our parents’ generation and all that fuss about the Queen and EMI was intoxicating if your last album purchase was Tales from Topographic Oceans. So now all that perfectly ephemeral stuff is perfectly collectable – and, I’ll tell you, I’d like one… (does that make me hopelessly middle-aged?).

I don’t think that anything so tender, tragic or complete as Schubert’s String Quintet in C exists in the orchestral repertoire. And nowhere else will you find such passion, love and involvement as among the musicians who play it. An (unidentified) musician from a Radio 4 documentary about the Quintet:

“The expression also comes, I suppose, from loving the music and loving to play with those particular players enough to give away your personality to what they want to do at any given time. So, if you imagine, in the quintet, all five players have the leading voice at different points and you have to be confident enough and love the other four enough to trust them to take you where they want. You need imagination in the players – something that’s not routine, something that’s not “we’ve done this before. We know this piece”. And yet you have to have done it before, you have to know this piece. And yet you have to have a free mind…”

This is brilliant radio (which will presumably have been overwritten by the next programme in the series by now. How annoying is that?). Update: Sure enough, the Schubert programme has been replaced by a George Formby programme.