Re: The Death of Classical Music (da capo, con brio)
On Apr 3, 2007, at 5:52 AM, Colin Brace quoted:
http://music.guardian.co.uk/classical/story/0,,2048916,00.html
Vanishing acts Martin Kettle
What went wrong was partly the glut: with 435 versions available, who needs number 436?
More than partly. By the mid-1960s, recording technology had gotten
very good, and things from the 1950s weren’t so bad either. So we’ve
got 40 or 50 years of very high quality performances of what is a
large but nonetheless limited canon. Do we really need contemporary
re-interpretations of the minor works of Telemann?
The bigger problem might be that younger people are not taking up
classical music, and even boomers rarely listen to it except as
upscale mood music. That’s sad, but aside from blasting out some old-
fartism, I don’t know what to say about that.
As Lebrecht points out, the quality both of performance and audio on the internet is still generally inferior. The iTunes bit rate is less than one tenth that of a classical CD, while even hi-tech downloads are below CD standard.
Most people could hardly tell the difference between the iTunes
version and an AIFF file, especially with modest equipment.
Doug