There was a time, not all that long ago, when musical performances were as ephemeral as casual conversations. People played, people listened, then everybody went home. All that remained was memory, pleasant or not as the case may be. In the enforced impermanence of the concert hall, momentary lapses in music-making were no more remarkable than coughs, sniffles, squeaks, rustles, and outside noise. It all happened, part of the ongoing stream of events. Most folks had well-honed mental filters that removed most of the disturbances.
Canning that impermanence via recordings has effected a cascade of change in musical culture. We’re all familiar with the many gifts recordings have brought us. We are blessed with unprecedented access to music and musicians via a discography that now extends beyond a century into the past. Performers and ensembles have acquired an important new revenue stream. Music has become ubiquitous, available, and effortless.
Yet this incredible gift comes with some very sturdy strings attached. Chief among those is the freezing of Western music, its past achievements celebrated and rewarded while contemporary music is all but asphyxiated. That seems paradoxical on the surface: recordings expand the available repertory, after all. But that very expansion has resulted in a conservatism and fixation on the past that is without parallel in Western history.
I see a parallel in the mid-19th century. Our modern civic orchestras were springing up throughout Europe, and with their arrival access to music expanded logarithmically. Those new institutions were mostly populist and democratic, so everyday Joes could buy a ticket and hear a Mozart or Beethoven symphony, a privilege that just a few generations back had been largely restricted to the aristocracy. Concert series, permanent civic orchestras, subscriptions, touring soloists: they all came together in the early to mid 19th century to fashion the music business as we know it today. Music moved out of the courts and churches and into the concert halls. It became something anybody could buy.
You would think that contemporary symphonic production would have gone nova under such circumstances. But instead, the symphonic genre lapsed into near-terminal ennui. By the mid 1850s symphonies were all but dead. Composers were still churning them out, but audiences weren’t interested, nor are they today—who but the most devoted orchestra wonk is familiar with the symphonies of Gernsheim, Draeske, Ries, Volkmann, or Reinecke? There was nothing particularly wrong with those rejected symphonies, but they didn’t have the chance of a snowball in hell. The reason: Ludwig van Beethoven. Those new audiences flocking into the new concert halls were often discovering the Beethoven symphonies for the first time, at least heard as they were meant to be heard, played by a full-sized and well-rehearsed orchestra. They wanted to get to know the Eroica better, and and that meant more performances. But orchestras only played so often. The headliners of the day came to town only so often.
So of course they played the music that the audiences were clamoring to hear—more Beethoven and Mozart, together with the then-popular, now-faded figures such as Spohr and Hummel. Result: new symphonies tanked.
The situation didn’t change until the 1870s when Brahms broke the stranglehold and produced four symphonies that entered public consciousness at a Beethovenian level. A few more composers managed the feat as well: Dvořák, Tchaikovsky, Bruckner, Sibelius (at least in England and the United States.) Then the curtain rang down again; during the 20th century only Shostakovich and Mahler made the grade, and in that latter case, it took a good fifty-plus years.
Recordings have exacerbated that tendency to compare the present unfavorably with the past. Beethoven still rules the roost for symphonic recordings, with nearly 300 of the C Minor alone currently in print in the United States. Michael Tilson Thomas and the San Francisco Symphony just released a stellar rendition. The Beethoven Fifth isn’t dead or even ailing, and it makes as potent a vehicle to display the capabilities of the SFS on disc as it was for the Berlin Philharmonic under Arthur Nikisch back in 1913. Its very familiarity works in its favor: we can hear the recording in the context of past achievements, like seeing an actor give us a compelling new Hamlet to set alongside Olivier and Gielgud and Irving.
The rise of the phonograph was the continuation of a trend begun in the nineteenth century, as an art formerly restricted mostly to aristocrats and clergy broke free and reached everybody with no restrictions regarding ancestry or bank balance. Concert halls got the ball rolling, but the phonograph was the true leveller; once you could cozy up on the couch somewhere in central Nebraska and hear the Vienna Philharmonic play Beethoven, the process was complete. Radio and TV and movies helped, but by the time they came along folks were already in the habit of thinking about performed music as something everybody could buy and enjoy, over and over as many times as desired. With that came the realization that there was so much more to be heard, so much more to explore in a single composition. The big-ticket items multiplied quickly, and listeners could compare Beethoven According To Stokowski and Toscanini and Walter and Bernstein and Abbado and Vanska and Zinman. All differing takes on well-known, treasured, and yet still mysterious works.
And thus the stature of our forbears rose all the more while their sheer marketability improved correspondingly. Claudio Abbado and the Berlin Philharmonic might sell a few copies of Stockhausen’s Gruppen, but bragging rights—and big profits—come with their knockout Beethoven Ninth of 2000.
This doesn’t bother me in the slightest. I’m a discriminating listener to be sure, but nonetheless my tastes run more or less squarely down the middle. Nor am I worried particularly about the shadow cast by our masters of Western music: English theater has managed to flourish although its greatest achievements were four hundred years ago. If recordings have made the worth of our past masters all the more manifest, then they are providing a valuable service in keeping an increasingly fragmented society connected to its common heritage. And nothing’s stopping anybody from buying a copy of that Abbado/Berlin Gruppen. I have it, and I even listened to it.
Once.