Announcements of the demise of the classical music
recording industry have been issued regularly for years — most recently
by the art form's self-appointed coroner, the journalist Norman Lebrecht, who
declares on a regular basis that something or other is dead. "What the big
labels cannot grasp is that their day is done," Lebrecht announced with relish
in The Telegraph last month. "All the best music has been
recorded many times over by maestros more accomplished and celebrated than any
alive."
There's no doubt that the business of selling concert music on recording, if you can call it a business at all, is a ghost of what it once was. I don't dispute the trends Lebrecht and others have documented exhaustively: falling sales and withering release schedules, contracts scrapped, executives fired, famous conductors finding that there's no room on the shelf for their legacies. The question I would like to pose is whether all this is really such a bad thing.
What's left when the record companies, with all their marketers and middlemen, finally fade away is a world full of artists left to their own considerable devices, making records not for the promise of nonexistent glory but for the sake of the music. Recordings, I wager, will be fewer, but they will have been made with more of a sense of mission.
Classical music was always an interloper in the corporate world. In concert, no symphony orchestra is expected to turn a profit, and even sold-out events generally require private sponsorship. Why should an art form that needs some fiscal coddling in its native habitat be expected to thrive in the tundra of the free market? This misplaced emphasis on profits has warped the relationship between music and medium. One benefit of a depleted recording industry is that we can once again start treating CDs as byproducts rather than products, imperfect documents of live events rather than simulacrums of performances that never actually took place.
As David Patrick Stearns has already pointed out, what we're looking at is less the death than the decentralization of the record business. High-quality recording equipment is now portable and available, compact discs are relatively easy and inexpensive to print, and the Internet has made it increasingly possible to market to small, fragmented audiences. All of this means that artists and ensembles don't really need what we still laughably refer to as "the majors." Sony Classical and Yo-Yo Ma still have a cozy synergy going, but if the executives on the Sony building's upper floors eventually decided to scuttle the label and cut the cellist loose, Ma could do what Madonna did, and turn himself into a corporation. The world would not have to struggle along without his latest foray into bluegrass, Baroque, contemporary, Chinese or Azerbaijani music.
Ma is a bona fide celebrity and some of his records even make money for Sony. But in the ocean of saleable entertainment, he is a flick of spray. The fact is that large record companies — those flush enough to be able to afford the luxury of a classical label — feed on more zeroes than are dreamt of in our imagination. Consider: The London Symphony Orchestra claims that its new Grammy-winning recording of Berlioz's opera Les Troyens, which it produced in-house and released under its own banner, is the best-selling opera recording in ten years, with 18,000 copies sold worldwide. But success in that domain can only envy failure in the high-stakes world of pop. When Mariah Carey's latest album, "Glitter," faltered, EMI cut its losses and dropped her with a $28 million consolation payment: the CD had only sold two million copies.
Until now, the important classical music labels have depended on communications giants that span the globe, spitting out cultural messages that consumers from Detroit to Dar-es-Salaam can share. For years, art has tried to adapt to the culture of capital while the capitalists tolerated the presence of artists as a corporate adornment. But prestige doesn't count for much any more on the annual report. Finally, those corporations have come to notice what was obvious from the beginning: even the most profitable new orchestral recordings generate so little money on the global scale that it's hardly worth making the effort to collect.
This is not cause for mourning. Classical music has never been a good candidate for the sustained mass marketing of taste. Ours is an art of niches. Five hundred aficionados may jam a tiny auditorium for a countertenor's recital debut, as they did with David Daniels before he became a star, and the event will have more lasting cultural impact than one more New Year's Eve extravaganza beamed to slack-jawed millions.
Music is also a live art, not a packaged one. Pop music concert tours are essentially promotional behemoths that slouch around the world, bleeding money in the hope that for every fan who attends an arena, five more will buy a CD. In classical music, it works the other way around. The New York Philharmonic plays to some 700,000 people every year, but only a trickle of people around the world buy one of the orchestra's releases conducted by its outgoing music director, Kurt Masur: 4,100 so far for a version of Strauss' Four Last Songs with Deborah Voigt put out in 1999; 5,200 for a recording of Prokofiev's Symphony No. 5 made two years before that. This imbalance is not a sign of the orchestra's decrepitude. Nobody would claim to judge the vigorousness of a dance company by how many videotapes of its performances it could sell. The fortunes of art museums do not depend on the health of art book publishers. The New York Philharmonic is doing fine, thank you, even if its CDs aren't.
I believe that the ills of the industry are largely a consequence of the uneasy marriage between two different economic models: the non-profit world of performance and the bottom-line doctrines of large corporations. It's not that art shouldn't sell. I'm not so snobbish as to hold that financial success is in inverse proportion to artistic merit. Music and mammon can coexist, but they will always have different agendas, unless classical musicians agree to recast themselves as entertainers — as Pavarotti has done with his grand arena concerts — or corporations give up on capitalism.
There's nothing like financial failure to help redefine success. "People used to assume that media equals money," Clive Gillinson, the managing director of the London Symphony Orchestra recently remarked. "Now we need to look at it differently: Media means access." The LSO has defied record-biz wisdom by selling its homemade recordings, like Berlioz's Les Troyens at bargain-bin prices, but Gillinson argues that the revenue comes at a later stage: when all those ears that have been hooked by a recording get reeled into the concert hall.
Recordings have long served the function of democratizing the music of an elite, and they can still continue to do so. For years Americans who lived hundreds of miles from the nearest symphony orchestra regarded their sets of the complete Beethoven symphonies conducted by Toscanini as marks of membership in the middle class. These days, the ability to whistle the "Pastoral" is no longer a requirement of the sophisticated citizen and the heartland's preeminent providers of great music in convenient packages — RCA and Columbia — have pretty much faded from the scene. But we should remember that, corporate woes notwithstanding, the preservation and distribution of music have gotten easier, not harder.
"If you take that view, this is the best period we've ever lived in," says Gillinson. "There are more opportunities to reach the greatest number of people with our music." Those figures need not be huge: Berlioz may not be getting Mariah Carey's numbers, but then Mariah Carey isn't either. So perhaps we have reached a point where artists can reclaim recording as a valuable artistic endeavor, one that, like live performance, operates in a market tempered by an abstract notion of value. Some discs need to get made even if they cannot pay their way alone.
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