The New York Times led off its annual list
of notable classical recordings of the year with this determinedly optimistic passage:
The year brought more talk of doom and gloom for the classical recording industry, or at least its CD wing. Yet recordings continue to stream out from new sources as well as from major labels in retrenchment or recovery. And many of them are truly excellent.
That is not what I call encouraging, and neither is the list. Except for the reissues–which include such familiar, regularly recycled fare as Wanda Landowska’s Bach recordings–I haven’t heard anything on it. What’s more, only one of the new recordings, a soon-to-be-released live performance by the late, lamented Lorraine Hunt Lieberson of her husband Peter’s Neruda Songs, piqued my interest in the slightest. A Beethoven symphony cycle by Bernard Haitink? An original-instrument Eine kleine Nachtmusik? Krystian Zimerman’s second recording of the Brahms D Minor Concerto? Still more John Adams and Philip Glass?
Don’t get me wrong, please. I love classical music with all my heart and soul–but I have no love whatsoever for the current and final incarnation of the classical recording industry, which has been committing slow suicide for the past decade and more. As I wrote in “Life Without Records,” the essay reprinted in A Terry Teachout Reader in which I summed up the decline and fall of a great industry:
Now, after a quarter-century of Donnys and Barrys and Dannys and Zubies–of crossover and the Three Tenors and a hundred different recorded versions of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, each one duller than the last–the classical recording industry appears to be on its last legs. Nor will it die alone. Hard though it may be to imagine life without records and record stores, it is only a matter of time, and not much of it, before they disappear–and notwithstanding the myriad pleasures which the major labels have given us in the course of their century-long existence, it is at least possible that the 21st century will be better off without them.
To be sure, this prospect is understandably disturbing to many older musicians and music lovers, given the fact that the record album has played so pivotal a role in the culture of postwar music. Nor do I claim that life without records will necessarily be better–or worse. It will merely be different, just as the lives of actors were irrevocably changed by the invention of the motion-picture camera in ways that no one could possibly have foreseen in 1900. But one thing is already clear: unlike art museums and opera houses, records serve a purpose that technology has rendered obsolete.
I think of those words each time I walk past Tower Records’ soon-to-be-shuttered Lincoln Center outlet. What will our lives be like without record stores? This is something I have written about, most recently in a “Sightings” column about the impending demise of Tower Records:
I’ve spent countless happy hours trolling the aisles of Tower Records in search of buried treasure. Yet when amazon.com and iTunes made it possible for me to buy any album I wanted without leaving my apartment, I didn’t think twice about turning my back on Tower. As a wise old department-store owner once told Peter Drucker, “There is no customer loyalty that two cents off can’t overcome.”
Is the narrowly targeted buying-on-demand facilitated by online stores creating a world in which consumers are less likely to try new things? Perhaps–but the infinitely deep catalogs of these stores also make it possible for the curious listener to range farther afield than ever before. Only last week I saw the Signature Theatre Company’s production of August Wilson’s “Seven Guitars,” in which a catchy tune called “Joe Louis Was a Fighting Man” is played between scenes. No sooner did I get home from the show than I went straight to iTunes, learned that the song was recorded by a gospel quartet called the Dixieaires and downloaded it to my iPod on the spot.
Yes, I miss the good old days of browsing, the same way I miss the big black manual typewriter that used to sit on my desk. Both had their advantages, just as online buying has its disadvantages. All blessings are mixed–but that doesn’t make them any less blessed.
I got a lot of mail about that column, much of it frankly disapproving. So be it: there is plenty of room in the world for principled disagreement. But I don’t think there can be any serious disagreement about the fact that the great cultural shift I predicted in “Life Without Records” (and on numerous prior occasions) is now taking place. For better and worse, the Age of the Album is over, and we must come to terms with its passing.