Campbell Vertesi

Just a statement.  At some level of course, I'm addicted to sites like Facebook and MySpace... but at another level I have more "WTF?" moments with those sites than with almost anything else on the internet.  (If you don't know what WTF means, look it up somewhere else... this is a family site)

Facebook is a prime example: the sheer volume of information on there is incredible, but what's REALLY messed up is the way people plumb the depths of their history for new people to "friend." I mean the people who you knew in kindergarten, who now want to connect with your online profile.  Or that guy you hung out with at summer camp when you were 12, or the random chick who you think might have been in your 9th grade science class, but you're not sure.

Now, I don't want to disparage these people from friending me.  It's cool to see what you're up to, and I too get a kick out of renewing acquaintances.  But what made you think of me?  Do you regularly wonder about that guy from summer camp?  Many of these people are so obscure in my history that I have to go back to old documentary evidence - yearbooks and the like - to make sure they really existed. What made you search for my name?

You know what, don't answer that.  Just friend me, and we can get on with our lives.  But be warned: you will get pestered to come to my recitals!

A friend emailed me this site recently, which looks at the state of online classical music stores.  The author starts off by explaining that Itunes has launched an initiative to improve their classical offerings, and that the results can already be seen.  They have an improved catalogue, with recordings of even the most obscure composers.  On the other hand, sound quality is limited, albums are sold track-by-track, and the search features are shoddy.  What is most interesting to me, is the figures for what makes the classical "top 10" in Itunes.  Andrea Bocelli of course (does he even still count as "classical"?), and Rostropovich... but nothing with an overwhelming sales figure.  Something is still not "clicking" in Itunes classical business model.

Alternatives are sites like classical.com or naxos.com, both of which offer streaming music for a flat monthly fee.  Both sites also restrict sound quality to something less than CD quality, and I'm not a fan of either interface.  The catalogues involved are impressive however, and it's worth a try for any classical music lover.

 Where do you get your classical recordings?  Do you just rip from your own CDs?  Do you get them from your friends?  Or do you have a favorite site?  

As far as I can tell, the only way to get good, high quality classical recordings in digital format is to rip them from CD yourself.  I have yet to find a service that really offers the convenience, price and catalogue that I am looking for. 

Yes folks, it's true.  I've sunk to a new low, usually only inhabited by musicologists and other cave dwelling creatures.  Your humble blogger is excited about a term paper.

I get to write about the effect of the internet (and the digital revolution in general) on the classical music industry.  Specifically - where it's going, is this a good or bad thing, is there anything we can do about it... all my favorite questions.  Expect advance copies to circulate on this very blog.  Also expect me to beat myself up for my own milk money.

Time to admit it: I'm a music nerd.  sigh. 

Lately I've begun playing with a new way to interact over the internet: Second Life.  I've been encouraged to explore this medium by one of my jobs... and I've found it interesting, for lack of a better word.

First of all, a brief primer: Second Life is a freeform virtual universe, where people interact over the internet.  It's a bit like a giant chatroom, with visuals.  When you sign up, you create an "avatar" (a character) to play as.  You can change your avatar's appearance as much as you like, at any time - be male, female, dragon, or flying spaghetti monster.  And then you go interact.

As I mentioned, SL is entirely freeform.  The parent company (Linden Labs) creates only the land where things happen.  Users create everything else.  From chairs and couches to buildings and fighter jets, everything is built by users.  Not that you have to be able to program in order to get by - people own stores as well, to sell the things they build.  This means that the world contains literally anything you can imagine.  Plenty of people have homes that float in the sky.  Flying (yes, like superman) is a major form of transportation.  People, are, have, and do the wildest things you can imagine.

SL even has an economy of sorts - a currency with a free floating exchange with the US dollar.  There are people who earn a living in this virtual world.  Anshe Chung for instance, was the first Second Life millionaire - that's millionaire in US dollars.  I'm not kidding when I say that this is an entire universe.

So why am I posting about it on a music blog?  Because like the real world, second life also has a music industry.  

This is still hard for me to wrap my head around, so bear with me.  There are concerts given in SL all the time, often synchronized with real world events.  To my understanding, they work much the same way a real concert does - buy a ticket, sit down, and listen or watch.   The website touts virtual concerts by U2, Duran Duran, and Susanne Vega. 

Having no experience with this aspect of the virtual world, I can't offer you much insight into it.  But maybe you all can help me?  Is there a future for musicians in this sort of digital broadcast?  Is it worthwhile streaming any of your performances over the internet, in any format?  What would be the attraction of having an avatar stand on a virtual stage and perform to your instrument?

And inevitably: does performance art like opera have a future in this kind of virtual environment? 

It seems that the Met video broadcasts have been so popular, they are all earning encore performances!  Bravo!  This evidences a (hopefully not premature) greater public interest in opera than I think anyone expected.  I have my own theories about that - and I blame the Internet.

I blame the Internet for introducing us to a much wider world of musical interest than we ever had before.  Thanks to everything from Napster and Audiogalaxy (may they rest in peace) to Itunes, consumers have found (gasp) a selection of music again!  They have (shock) learned how to experiment with their musical taste!

Remember in the old days, when the only ways to learn about new music were the radio, MTV, and maybe a record store friend?  In those days, the only acts that could catch anyone's attention were the big sellers - the mass market stuff that made it onto the airwaves, or into your local record shop.  Smaller bands and niche genres were SOL.  Even if someone did venture outside of their demographic and chance to recommend an opera singer to you, the likelihood of you actually going and buying a CD to find out was small.

In the age of the internet, musical experimentation has become commonplace, even a social activity.  I can't count the times I've been to a party where the host was keen to show off his/her selection of bands and music I'd never heard of.  Having a distinct and individual taste in your music is now a badge of pride, and sharing niche music a social activity.

Is it any surprise that in this niche-oriented market, opera is feeling increased success?  People are proud of their esoteric taste, and actively hunt out new kinds of music to experience. Today, if someone told you to check out singer  X who's really incredible, you would probably go look her up on Youtube, almost no matter what genre of music she was in.  This is a very good thing.

In the age of niche music, of aural experimentation, opera is popular enough to earn reruns in the theaters.  I say Bravo! 

Get 'em while they're hot!

The International Mozart Foundation in Salzburg is sending out Mozzie's 250th Birthday year with a bang! They've bought the rights to the definitive scholarly editions of the complete works of Mozart for free release online!

That's right, free as in beer. And that's right, scholarly as in Baerenreiter. These are the most expensive, most coveted Mozart texts (for singers, at least), prized for their high accuracy and scholarly annotations. Apparently the big B got a cool $400,000 for the rights. Not that this was the end of the spending: with over 45,000 visits in the first two hours, they've had to buy a bigger server!

So what are you waiting for? The full text is searchable, so (as reuters points out) a search for "Pamina" will yield all of her arias, as well as the famous Baerenreiter notes thereupon.

I can't believe it, so I'm gonna say it again: the complete Baerenreiter scores of Mozart are available for free online!

Here’s some more great news in the musical geekery world!  Has anyone else heard about San Francisco Symphony’s new Keeping Score program?  This is great stuff. As the SF Chronicle puts it:

“[Keeping Score] is an undertaking that will allow music lovers to crawl inside the heads of the composers; ...peer at the score while a pointer marks the place being played; become historically immersed in the time and place in which the music was introduced; ...and at the same time listen, listen, listen.”
—San Francisco Chronicle

A few weeks before every concert, they start playing the pieces on the radio . Local classical stations I guess, NPR… that sort of play.  Each time, there are discussions about different aspects of the pieces, interviews between Music Director Michael Tilson-Thomas and instrumentalists he knows.  Then they do a video broadcast on PBS – documentaries, biographies of composers (check local listings).  Finally (and this is my favorite bit), they set up a website for the pieces.  Not a mom and pop website like you’re used to, either.  This is a high-quality, information packed flash dealie.  A veritable cornucopia of music geekery.

Listen to the piece while reading about the programmatic aspects.  Watch the score scroll by as you watch a video of the orchestra playing it, each measure highlighted as you go.   Interesting information is represented as colored blocks in the score.  Click on one to see an interview with a particular player (“interview with trombonist John Doe on the role of the horns in this piece”), a discussion on the music theory behind the passage, perhaps a historical tidbit, or a ‘parody’ explanation (parody is music history speak for “plagiarized”).  Musical notation can be moused-over, to see an explanation of “pp” or “adagio”. There are mini-interviews with music director Michael Tilson-Thomas.  There is so much information to geek out on, it’s unreal.  The first time I saw this site, I think I wet my pants.

Go on.  Check it out.  Their pilot project is Tchaikovski’s 4th symphony. Enjoy!  Now this is the kind of thing I like to see - getting audiences more involved in the stuff that give classical music such depth!

Finally they're starting to understand! Marketwatch is reporting that according to EMI's CEO, "the music CD is dead". Not as if it hasn't been obvious for the last 7 years or anything.  Well, at least they're catching on.  Better late than never!  Choice quotes from the sparse article:

"You're not going to offer your mother-in-law iTunes downloads for Christmas," he said. "But we have to be much more innovative in the way we sell physical content."

Record companies will need to make CDs more attractive to the consumer, he said.

"By the beginning of next year, none of our content will come without any additional material," Levy said.

 Not a big surprise for anyone here, I hope!  I guess we have to do this in baby steps. 

The next little step to to realize that digital copying is a rule of the market now.  This is a very big bite for normal people, so it might take the big labels some serious time to understand.  Anything that can be made digital, can and will be copied.  There is no DRM that can keep your computer from making internal copies of a song while it's being played, or transmitted.  As the saying goes: build a better mousetrap...   This makes for some very significant changes to Supply and Demand.

Once you wrap your head around the idea that uncontrolled copying of digital content is inevitable, the next big bite is to realize: this is a good thing for the music business.   Don't expect those dinosaurs at the RIAA to pick up on this one for a loooooong time though.