Requiem for Strings
Stauffer, George B.
Requiem for Strings The salutary past, and uncertain future, of classical music. by George B. Stauffer Cultural commentators have been noting for quite some time now classical music's fall from...
...Equally improbable was Wilhelm Kempff, a solid but lackluster pianist whose career blossomed on the basis of recordings rather than concerts...
...Modern observers commonly claim that audiences listened more intensely in the past, when they were not diverted by innumerable distractions...
...But wait...
...When the files were in, however, the result was an astonishing 1.4 million downloads...
...Within one year his record sales topped $22 million— half as much as the entire classical market...
...And the underlying theme of the book is compelling: Classical music, unlike popular music, can enhance the quality of life...
...The yes vote is cast by Norman Lebrecht, well-known British music critic, who traces the rise and fall of the classical recording industry...
...In his view, classical music is not only alive—it is a potential source of salvation...
...Big names no longer spelled pay dirt (as Lebrecht puts it) and the reign of the classical performer had come to an end...
...Would the restoration of Superman's powers after his encounter with kryptonite feel as strong if it were not accompanied by the return of the heroic main theme in John Williams's stunning score...
...The expectation was a thousand takers...
...It is so loud that one can talk the whole time without people hearing what one says...
...It is often difficult to put one's finger on precisely what happens, but this only enhances meaning...
...Listening to classical music is like working out at an aural fitness center: It not only provides escape from the tedium of daily activities but also commands attention, pushes the intellect, and offers insight and empathy...
...The introduction of magnetic tape in the 1950s opened the door to studio editing and the manipulation of the recorded sound...
...Of the two volumes, Kramer's is the more substantial...
...Solti's recording of Wagner's Ring, made in 1958-1965, has managed to sell 18 million copies, and von Karajan's orchestral recordings weigh in at 200 million sales and counting...
...The music becomes a story in which details count: Characters (in the form of themes) appear and take life, plots and subplots unfold and interweave...
...Before signing off, Lebrecht notes that, in May2005, the BBC placed an in-house recording of Beethoven's nine symphonies on the web for a week, allowing listeners to download the music free of charge...
...While Kramer is convinced that classical music still has the right stuff, Leb-recht would say it doesn't matter, since the recording industry that carried the great masterpieces to a broad audience has changed priorities...
...But there were also healthy contingents from Vietnam, Thailand, Taiwan, and other non-Western countries, a fact that points to the emergence of new, global audiences...
...Pavarotti is second on Lebrecht's all-time artist list, with 100 million sales...
...dilemmas develop and resolve...
...Thus Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven may not be dead, after all...
...Is it time, in light of recent trends, to declare that Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven are dead, too...
...By his death in 1921, Caruso had earned more than $2 million from his recordings—more than Babe Ruth could boast in his famous salary face-off with President Hoover...
...his 1971 remake of the same piece sold 20,000 copies...
...Lebrecht closes his eulogy with an annotated catalog of the 100 best and 20 worst classical recordings in history...
...classical music develops them...
...With classical music, the fate of the melody becomes important...
...Classical music also appears to have stabilizing qualities...
...That Parisians could follow the intricacies of classical sonata form without the aid of a Music 101 course suggests enlightened times...
...On the other hand, boxes at many opera houses in the 18th and 19th centuries were set up for eating and card playing, implying that audiences did not always listen with rapt attention...
...Although the "Mozart effect" has now been discredited (a group of lab researchers at Texas Tech claimed that rats exposed to the music of Mozart and Schoenberg preferred the former, seemingly because of its calming properties and pleasing organization), Kramer maintains that the hierarchical structure of classical music helps to train the ear to listen deeply and perceive how the world might be arranged...
...one simply surfs, clicks, and downloads...
...The listener takes possession of the tale and wants to know how it comes out...
...By the mid-1920s, the recording industry was moving forward at full steam, fueled by its recordings of classical music...
...The no vote is cast by Lawrence George B. Stauffer is dean of the Mason Gross School of the Arts at Rutgers...
...As many historians have noted, Lincoln's Gettysburg Address comes from its nonspecific language—language that calcu-latedly transcends a battlefield in Pennsylvania to apply to the broader fight for freedom worldwide...
...With the switch from the 78 to the long-playing album in 1948, classical music entered a golden age of recording...
...By the middle of the 20th century any middle-class citizen could sit in his home and compare Kempff and Backhaus, Heifetz and Mil-stein, or Rachmaninoff and Horowitz...
...Still, it is difficult to know whether the BBC listeners were seeking the transcendence described by Kramer or simply looking for cultural chachkas to complement the Dave Matthews and Christina Aguilera tunes that already crowd the megabytes of today's iPods...
...The author presumes that the reader still has access to classical music and that he seeks more edification than popular music provides...
...It is the general nature of the emotion in music that gives it its power...
...EMI saw the writing on the wall and began to judge classical recordings on profitability...
...In a similar way, Kramer argues, the battle for consonant resolution in a Beethoven symphony has the ability to symbolize the wider struggle for peaceful existence...
...The vagueness of classical music only serves to make it richer, according to Kramer...
...Their pincer movement in the 1950s and '60s delivered a blow from which classical music—and perhaps Western civilization as well—has never recovered...
...by George B. Stauffer Cultural commentators have been noting for quite some time now classical music's fall from grace...
...As Lady Henry declared in The Picture ofDorian Gray, "I like Wagner's music better than anybody's...
...But with RCA and Columbia in the United States competing against EMI and Decca in Britain and DGG and Telefunken in Germany, the recording industry steadily revived and prospered though the 1940s...
...The largest group of listeners—approximately 40 percent of the total—stemmed from the United States and United Kingdom, as might be expected...
...Maybe yes, maybe no, to judge from two recent books on the topic...
...Here the author cites Ludwig Wittgenstein, who compared listening to classical music to viewing the expression on a face: We understand it, but we don't decode it...
...A home collection of classical music, carefully assembled through reading reviews and browsing in stores, is no longer necessary...
...Popular music presents good tunes...
...Following the stock market crash, this figure plummeted to $6 million...
...Elvis Presley's arrival in 1955 changed everything...
...Adolescents soon became the main drivers of the recording industry: They had the money to spend on records, and they, not media moguls, became the arbiters of taste...
...In early times a wealthy patron could bring Handel and Scarlatti, Bach and Marchand, or Chopin and Liszt together for a match-up of skills...
...Lebrecht begins with the first recordings of classical music by Enrico Caruso in 1902...
...In film, the life-enhancing social energy of classical music forms a convincing partnership, one that proves effective even in campier productions...
...In 1926 RCA Victor sold $20 million worth of Victrola players in one week alone, and by 1929, annual classical record sales totaled $104 million...
...But are people truly engaged when they listen to classical music—engaged enough to experience the transcendence that Kramer describes...
...How does it do this...
...Like Mark Twain's premature obituary, the reports of classical music's demise may be an exaggeration...
...On the one hand, we have Mozart's description of an audience in Paris that heard one of his symphonies and applauded gleefully when it recognized the return of a theme cunningly delayed...
...In Lebrecht's view, overproduction of a limited number of masterpieces (435 different versions of Vivaldi's Four Seasons, for instance), corporate pragmatism, competition from television and other media, and the lack of convincing new music have added to the problem...
...To Kramer, classical music remains a Lourdes-like spring in which weary pilgrims plagued by the stresses and complexities of 21st-century life can bathe and find themselves restored...
...His appraisal of the Prelude from Bach's G-Major Cello Suite in the soundtracks of Master and Commander and The Pianist is masterful and shows how classical music can add both nuance and new meaning to the cinematographic image...
...Arthur Schnabel's cycle of Beethoven sonatas, although riddled with technical slips, nevertheless became a cultural marker, a reference tool as necessary in one's personal library as the Encyclopedia Britannica or the World Book...
...This is not to say that there was no market whatsoever...
...As Otto Bettmann said of Bach's music: It puts in order what life cannot...
...If today's audiences are not conscientiously listening, there is still the chance that they are conscientiously looking...
...Kramer believes that classical music deals with the fundamental choices and transitions of life: Loss and recovery, desire and destiny, forgetting and remembering, change and recognition...
...Melody, harmony, rhythm, and other musical elements are artfully arranged and granted substance...
...Recordings also led to the rise of star conductors—Toscanini, Walter, Klem-perer, von Karajan, and others—whose albums took them far beyond their local cities, Lebrecht points out...
...Kramer, professor of music and English at Fordham, who champions the salutary effects of classical music upon the soul...
...His renditions of Verdi and Puccini convinced listeners that the gramophone was not just a gimmick...
...To Lebrecht, the authoritative hold of classical music was broken with the arrival of Elvis Presley on the Western front and the Beatles on the Eastern front...
...Short, stout, and not particularly handsome, Caruso was an unlikely operatic superstar, but his penetrating tenor voice with its dark, baritone-like timbre carried through the pop and crackle of the early cylinders and 78s...
...The plummeting attendance at classical concerts, the abandonment of classical repertory by the major recording labels, the precarious financial state of professional orchestras, the replacement of pianos by media centers in middle-class homes, and the elevation of popular music and idolization of popular musicians (some of whom can neither read music nor sing it in tune) are taken as signs that classical music is doomed, and that it will not be long before it fades from modern life altogether...
...Lebrecht's numbers tell it all: Arthur Rubenstein's 1956 recording of Rachmaninoff's Second Piano Concerto sold 350,000 copies...
...To me, the record on "the good old days" of classical listening is mixed...
...Kramer devotes considerable discussion to the effective use of classical music in film, from Disney's groundbreaking Fantasia through Brief Encounter and People Will Talk to such recent movies as Paradise Road and Impromptu...
...Ironically the compact disk, with its brilliant sound, portability, and low production costs has proven to be the coup de grace for the classical record industry: Easily pirated through digital means, it is as often dispensed as a souvenir or promotional gift as cherished in one's library...
...Cultural shifts in Europe towards the end of the 19th century spurred Nietzsche to proclaim that God is dead...
...As Kramer points out, the precise notation of classical music allows for thoughtful organization and manipulation of the text...
Vol. 12 • July 2007 • No. 43
