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Doublereed Archive - Posting 000052.txt from 2005/08
From: "Grace Tice" <grace.tice@-----.net>
Subj: [DR-L] newspaper article--classical downloads
Date: Mon, 29 Aug 2005 05:43:34 -0400
This caught my eye. Thought you wouold all appreciate that somebody has a
new angle. Apparently, it worked!
Aug. 26, 2005, 10:52AM
Downloading Dvorák. Swapping Prokofiev.
---------------------------------------
Let's face it: if classical music is to survive, it's gotta be on the
Net
By PAUL HORSLEY
Knight Ridder Newspapers
Illegal Beethoven on your iPod? Scandale !
Future hope for the growth of classical music might indeed lie in that
murkiest of netherworlds, the quasi-legal (and at times illegal)
activity of downloading music from the Internet.
At least that's what a recent experiment by BBC Radio 3 suggests.
Earlier this summer, to promote an all-Beethoven week on the British
airwaves, the service offered free downloads from its entire digital
catalog of Beethoven symphonies.
Listeners young and old loaded individual movements and whole
symphonies onto their computers, iPods and handheld devices and are
still listening to the thundering Fifth, the bucolic Sixth, the
triumphant Ninth.
The staggering success of this publicity stunt - 1,369,893 downloads -
caused pundits to muse on a new future for an old art form.
Some might consider it ironic that an art form Americans consider prim
and proper might ultimately thrive on the vaguely disreputable
free-for-all we call the Internet.
But in the words of Jeff Goldblum in Jurassic Park, life finds a way.
Classical music is already thriving on peer-to-peer servers like Kazaa
and BearShare, the same p2p sites that have gained notoriety as the
place to "steal" pop music, movies and even television shows.
The BBC downloads provided a free and temporarily legal means for all
manner of folks to listen to, evaluate and enjoy this music, unfettered
by elitist prejudices, stuffy concert-hall etiquette or overpriced CDs.
Such initiatives are bound to fall on fertile soil in the United
States, too. In the virtual absence of classical radio in America, the
Internet can provide what radio does for other musical genres, namely a
"free" means of hearing new and unfamiliar music, which if you like,
you'll go out and buy.
But with the element of radio removed from the market structure, there
are almost no places to randomly hear Beethoven's Eroic a Symphony or
Stravinsky's Rite of Spring while driving home from school or work.
The Net provides direct access. With the stuffiness removed from the
classical experience, people can hear just how glorious Stravinsky
really is.
Kids especially gravitate toward anything that sounds interesting, as
numerous studies have shown. Especially, for some reason, Bach.
All this underscores a point I've spent my life proclaiming: Classical
music is intrinsically as interesting as anything in our culture - and
far more interesting than Desperate Housewives - but through ignorance
and fear it has become stigmatized as elitist.
Indeed, if these free downloads had been held up next to the pop charts
that month, Beethoven would have made No. 1.
Of course, the record labels grumbled, having approved the BBC concept
beforehand but later expressing vague regret that it attained such
phenomenal success.
All some of these bloodless executives can think of is lost sales, of
"stolen revenues," of people who heard Beethoven for free when they
should have been paying through the nose for him.
(These are the same companies who 25 years ago promised us that the
price of a CD would eventually go from $15 to half that. And we
believed them!)
Don't they realize this is a cheap and easy way to revitalize a product
that years of neglect, mismanagement and unimaginative marketing have
severely imperiled?
I'm not advocating illegal downloads, of course. But I am thinking that
everybody concerned with classical music's future had better get
Net-savvy, and I mean now.
If we're going to feed kids' natural curiosity about all kinds of
music, we'd better be coming up with some powerful alternatives
posthaste.
Paul Horsley covers classical music for the Kansas City Star.
Brought to you by the HoustonChronicle.com
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