Classical.com Blog

Marimba - wonderful instrument for creating moods

Before I talk about subscriptions, I must enthuse about Marimba - went to an astounding concert this evening of two marimba/percussion players and thought you should hear some of it. 

Anyway, back to subscriptions. Is the subscription model a big vision waiting to come to fruition?  For many a year the top executives have considered the future of music consumption to be a fee for an ‘all you can eat’ model.

Others are less convinced, especially considering the ad-hoc, near-subscription qualities of the vast internet. Instead of a well-curated, contained system in a walled garden, the broader net offers bigger (though more chaotic) selection, no credit card hit, and permanent downloads that can be acquired and dumped in a flash.

We don’t know the anser to these questions. AOL certainly failed when it tried to keep content in a walled garden. It is surprising how long it is taking ‘the future’ to tell us the answer to this question!

Schubert - top of the charts

The music industry is feeling sorry for itself because of all the people who just take a free copy from a digital source (call it P2P, a friend’s CD, or somewhere in cyberspace). The TV and Film industries are also feeling sorry about the easy availability of their digital content. We recently read about the decline in DVD sales because users can find the films in other ways than buying them from digital sources.

We believe that this will produce a return to 19th Century values. For example, there will be an increase in live concerts - so much more engaging than audio recordings. That rise in public concert giving is happily taking place in a proliferation of small concerts, as well as the big supermarket concert houses like Carnegie Hall and the Festival Hall.

The other thing people will continue to love is a sense of service. I remember when I was young, last century, and the green grocer told me broccoli was good that day, or that he would have some wonderful asparagus the next day and I should come back soon. Thus it is with music services - great investment has been made in recommendation engines at Classical.com so that we can be like that green grocer of yesteryear and tell you about recordings you will love. That is what we call added value.

The other thing people like is charts. That is part of the gossip about what is fashionable. So the Charts can take you to wonderful worlds - and show how exciting and fashionable classical music can be.

Brahms Variations - the depth of tone acts as a hook

For some reason from time to time a short fragment of music stays in my mind. This Brahms piece has for some reason caught my imagination for the last few months. The ‘hook’ is not so much a musical fragment (like in pop songs) or a rhythm (as in Beethoven’s fifth) but just the sheer depth of the piano tone. It is haunting - the whole line of the theme is a very particular feeling that creates a haunting mood.

Brendel, Beethoven Waldstein sonata

You might think it is presumptuous to say this, but I am not sure the true greatness of Beethoven can be realised by most of us. This may seem a startling point of view, but I went to a Beethoven seminar in London - part of a series each month - and the lecturer made this comment about the level of Beethoven’s achievement being beyond most peoples’ comprehension.

Now here is another way of thinking about our senses, ‘and knowledge of the universe’ in just an everyday simple example.

A few days later I got a sandwich for lunch, with some flavourings poured into the sandwich. It made me think how sight and smell would never have prepared me for the taste of the flavourings the sandwich maker had poured on. If I did not have a sense of taste, I would never have known the ‘reality’ of that sauce by sight and smell and texture alone. Without taste I could not perceive the ‘real’ dimension of the ’sauce’.

So it is with astrophysics, and the extra dimensions of the space-time continuum and perhaps the multiverses that string theorists talk about. We cannot perceive many of these dimensions. Reading Quantum Theory Cannot Hurt You by Marcus Chown is a good help, but we do not have the perception to really understand space-time dimensions.

So it is with Beethoven. Just listen to his quartets. Yes, listen again. And you will hear dimensions that you can only dream towards, but which he touched and created. Play the last movement of the Waldstein Sonata EXTREMELY slowly and carefully. You will see that the chord structure is so simple, but moves to different harmonies and places which at a very very slow speed has even more effect on your body and mind.

It is increasingly clear that Beethoven had a knowledge of the universe which outstrips anything we mere mortals can comprehend.

Brahms devoted his entire life intensely to music

We had a comment a few weeks ago:

“Perhaps in the future man and machine can co-exist by recommending playlists. ”

Well that is a testament to the power of communities. Music is the fingerprint of our humanity In the old days of cavemen, communities banded together to gather food, protect the group from dangers - and song arose we are told with rhythmic beats very early on. Later, at the time of the ancient Greeks, song had profound powers - for example the music of the sirens could drive a wanderer to distraction.

Later we learnt how to write music down with notation, and share music between far away peoples. Today we have both the written tradition (Mozart, Bach, Beethoven) and the shared tradition of folk song or world music. After all, what people in Western Europe call World Music is actually ‘classical music’ in it’s own country. Gamelins are classical music in Bali, for example.

So, our commentator was right. Taking this superficial sweep through thousands of years, we come to realise that music represents our spiritual DNA. It helps us define our societies. In the last 45 years since the Beatles music has, more than ever, defined the youthful generation.

For the older people, like me, I just love western classical music more and more the older I get. I also feel more open than ever before to World music. I can hear the sound of the humanity of the performers and composers.

In conclusion, I warmly agree with our commentator - music and the recommendation of playlists [choices of music] are a key to understanding who we are, who we like and love, and is at the root of communication about ourselves.

French Resistance poets: Paul Eluard, Louis Aragon, Albert Camus, Francois Mauriac

There was a wonderful programme on the radio today about the French. They said that one if the key defining characteristics of a Parisian is language. The language itself if used with precision, elegance, good syntax and a sense of occasion enables us to dress up thoughts in ways that are convincing - even if their actual message is unclear.

So I looked for some recordings, and found this extraordinary recording of great French poets of the Resistance. You do not need to understand a word of the language to understand the music of its meaning:

Paul Eluard - Les Armes de Ladouleur
Paul Eluard - Les Sept Poemes d’Amour en Guerre
Paul Eluard - L’Honneur des Poetes
Paul Eluard - A l’Endroit
Paul Eluard - Les Belles Balances de l’Ennemi
Paul Eluard - Courage
Louis Aragon - Gloire au Maquis
Louis Aragon - Ballade de Celui Qui Chanta Dans les Supplices
Louis Aragon - Je Vous Salue, Ma France
Albert Camus - Editorial de Albert Camus: Combat Aug. 25, 1944
François Mauriac - Editorial de François Mauriac: Le Figaro Aug. 25, 1944

Fanny Mendelssohn played by Sarah Rothenberg

Over the past weeks dipping into shared playlists, it has been instructive to see how many women composers there are. One of my favourite at the moment is Fanny Mendelssohnwhich I heard recently on a shared playlist. It includes a wonderful piece, Departure from Rome - During a trip to Italy she met Gounod, the two forming a firm friendship, with Gounod later acknowledging the influence she brought to bear on his musical development.  Despite the notable size of her output, little of it was published; even now, many of her manuscripts are unavailable and so a thorough analysis of her style is problematic.  However her known works display fine crafting, and a traditional stance evidencing her admiration of composers unfashionable at the time, such as Mozart and Handel.

Another piece I love is Das Jahr (The Year) with a wonderful piece for each month. February is a remarkable Scherzo, which is lively, chilling, and demonstrates a wonderful imagination - who would have thought of characterising the month of February (the time of writing when London has been covered in snow a few weeks ago, just like Germany would have been). Listen to the depiction of the months - a revelation.

Recommendations

We launched a system to search for playlists, and found that a lot of people began to listen playlists with Mozart or Chopin or Musicals in the titles. This was encouraging, and the interesting point is that people like people more than machines!

We all spend most of our lives with machines, typing things into them, and reading things on their screens. But we like the human mediated content. What do I mean by that? It is simple - that the machine is actually irrelevant - what matters is human thought. We don’t like information generated by machines.

We invested a Government grant in a wonderful Recommendation engine, to rate tracks according to whether someone purchased the download of the track, or just listened to it (streaming) or took it as a free download in their subscription. The ANSWER is clearly that for all the wizardry of our Recommendations, people still like the playlists of other people.

That says something about our investment programme doesn’t it? Let people drive the system rather than machines.

A curious thought passed by a few nights ago, having dinner with a friend, she asked whether people have enough music on the old CD collections, or whether they need any more.

In ‘popular’ music there is continual re-invention as new artists perform mostly songs they have written themselves, and sometimes those of close collaborators who understand their particular performance skills.

But in Classical music the re-invention takes place but contemporary composition unfortunately seldom captures the public imagination. Furthermore, how many people can really tell the different between different performances (’cover versions’) of a Beethoven sonata?

Well, probably many people can distinguish a great performance, even though they do not know they can. They can instinctively feel a performance, and the impact on them of the particular performer. I am struck by how quickly people - especially women - react to a particular performance.

So in summary it would seem that:

1. yes, many people can distinguish different performances of the same work
2. yes, many people need more music in a process of endless discovery

In support of 2. above I have no evidence other than the pleasure people show when they follow leads to find more new music, and relish increasingly the wonders of what composers can do for enriching our lives.

I was just clicking on some of the sharedplaylists today, and came across these amazing recordings on a playlist called David. There was some Bach that I knew, but then it was followed by Nancy with the Laughing Face, which I had not heard before although it was a familiar genre.  It is from this album by Frank Sinatra. The playlist continues with other Mozart and then took me to an old favourite of a Shostakovich string quartet. What was particularly touching is that I could hear the connection between the works - it was as though the music revealed a person’s character.

It is interesting how a musical footprint works. Is a playlist a way of understanding someone’s character, probably more informative than a Gipsy reading the palm when you cross it with silver! Anyway, that’s enough for now, as I go and read more about character in playlists people have assembled. Right now I am listening to Ravel, Lever du Jourfrom Daphnis which is simply enchanting.