Klarinet Archive - Posting 000118.txt from 2000/06

From: LeliaLoban@-----.com
Subj: [kl] Does On-line Music make any money?
Date: Mon, 5 Jun 2000 10:44:41 -0400

Carl Rondinelli wrote:
>Then there are
>the reissues from major labels of wonderful performances from the 1950's
>through 1970's, also cheaper, not to mention the real "bottom dog" issues,
>you know, Gunter Wunderlich and the Northwest Bavarian Statsorchester. (Any
>similarities of this conductor and orchestra to actual ones, living or dead,
>is purely coincidental!) I get the whole range of prices when I walk into a
>record store.

Bill Hausmann wrote,
>>I've picked up quite a few of this level of release, some for as little as
>>$.69 each at Best Buy! Don't expect much in the way of documentation,
>>recording quality ranges from abysmal to quite decent, same goes for
>>performances. Still, they are useful for filling out a collection or
>>exposing yourself to unfamiliar repertoire on the cheap.

The following is hearsay and I have no independent confirmation. When my
husband and I lived in Atlanta for a year back in the mid-1970s, he played
chamber music with Bill Gripp, a local newspaper music critic and an
unusually good amateur cellist. Bill, who owned a vast collection of LPs,
told us that some of the poor-quality discount LP recordings of unknown
people were actually the work of well-known musicians. He said that most of
these records were either concert hall bootlegs or purloined outtakes and
unreleased material from studio recordings. The producers of these LPs would
invent names that sounded Eastern European and pass the recording off as
something from behind the Iron Curtain. This story sounded credible to me,
because Kevin and I thought we recognized many of the opera singers' voices
in particular (Jussi Bjoerling, especially, sang with a highly characteristic
slight accent in English) on the LPs Bill played for us. Bill said that
occasionally a musician would record "under the table" with friends for fun,
under an assumed name, because making the recording violated the artist's
contract with another studio. I wonder if the same sort of things go on now
with CDs?

Bill, BTW, had a photographic memory and the most educated ear of anyone I've
ever met. He taught me most of what I know about how to listen to a record.
We used to "play guessies" with him. You could play him a few bars of *any*
classical LP, no matter how obscure, and within seconds, he would accurately
identify not only the composer and performers, but the label and usually the
date of the recording. He couldn't possibly cheat by sneaking a peek,
because we taped the "guessies" off the recordings and took only the tape
with us to his place, or put the records away before he arrived. Often he
wouldn't stop at simply identifying the record. He'd go on to recite many
other facts about it from the liner notes and other sources, such as the
location where the recording was made, the piano the soloist chose to use and
so forth. In a year of trying, Kevin and I never did manage to stump Bill
(and we owned a pretty good LP collection, that included some extremely
obscure violinists and pianists). People who believe ignorance is a
prerequisite for becoming a music critic never got to know Bill Gripp! He
introduced us to many artists we'd never heard of, who later became
favorites, although we also have him to thank for introducing us to the
delightful atrocities of Florence Foster Jenkins...!

Lelia
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
The truth is out there . . . so what are we doing here?
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

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