During the course of this past year I became a frequenter of several classical music discussion groups on Usenet, partly to drum up business for SF Classical Music Examiner, and also as a lab to find out how some of my articles were playing out with a cross-section of readers. Typically after writing an Examiner article, I would post a link to that article on the group, together with a short description of it, and then see what kind of response it garnered, joining the discussion or not as the situation warranted.
Usenet may not be all that familiar to some folks; it’s an old Internet service on the brink of extinction, the grand-daddy of social networking sites such as Facebook or Twitter. Usenet groups (numbering in the tens of thousands) are mostly text-based, electronic bulletin boards hosting discussions on a bewildering array of topics. Discussions can begin, grow expansive, and then slowly die away as other hot topics take their place. Usenet also supports "binary" groups which allow the uploading/downloading of pictures, movies, sound files, even applications. It is those groups which have been causing corporate concern about Usenet; they are, after all, ideal conduits for disseminating pirated material such as recordings or movies. Nobody seemed particularly upset about Usenet as a lavish porn bazaar, but once the RIAA flexed the muscles of its hairy arms and began swinging clubs around, Internet service providers became concerned. Nowadays, many of the major providers do not offer Usenet service.
However, the text-based groups on Usenet are easily accessible via Google Groups, while an inexpensive subscription to a Usenet provider can get you to the rest of it.
But Usenet has problems — not the technology itself, but steming from the nature of the people who participate. Most of the groups are unlimited and unmoderated, meaning that they can be taken hostage by just about any wacko or dysfunctional personality who cares to take the trouble. As a result, any attempt at a civil discussion is quickly destroyed by heaps of nonsense, abuse, or just downright strangeness.
That was the first problem with the classical music group I began posting to regularly about year ago. There were always some thoughtful, friendly, and interesting people in the group who could be relied on to give me good feedback about my articles, offer corrections if they encountered an error, or bring up interesting issues.
But there were some who were obnoxious, abusive, or in some cases, simply intolerable. My killfile — i.e., the list of people whose posts my Usenet reader automatically deleted — grew at an alarming rate.
For example, I wrote an article for Examiner about the tritone, covering some of the ways in which this simple interval has been viewed and used by composers over the centuries. One particularly ill-mannered fellow immediately posted that the diminished fifth is not a tritone, holding that you can use the term only for the augmented fourth. This is ridiculous pedantry and I replied with a series of quotes from musical reference works — Oxford Companion, Harvard Dictionary, even Aldwell & Schachter, that all allow the term in common usage for augmented fourths and diminished fifths alike. His reply was incredibly venomous, accusing me of being incompetent, spattering how he felt so sorry for my students, and the like. At that point there was the Usenet equivalent of a pile-up from other posters, who at first simply refuted his stance, but then the situation degenerated into name-calling, ad hominem attacks, and the like. I stopped reading that particular thread, having answered and having nothing more to say on the subject. From then on the original nitpicker could be counted on to eviscerate me whenever I posted — but I only found that out obliquely, given that he had taken up permanent residence in my killfile.
The dysfunctionals, like the fellow with his pedantry, were not much trouble to deal with once deposited in the killfile, nor the actual nutcases — there being several who were regular posters. But much trickier were the people whose entire outlook on music has been shaped by reading reviews.
I should point out that this group was devoted to recordings of classical music, and so the discussion was mostly about CDs and the like. I had no problem with that; the other classical music-oriented Usenet groups had all become gibbering madhouses long since so the recordings group was about the only left with some semblance of content. But the fact that it was largely inhabited by record collectors skewed the discussion.
For one thing, many members appeared to think in a sharply dualistic manner: if somebody calls ‘A’ good, then by definition ‘B’ must be terrible. I remember an argument that got going after I posted a link to my Examiner article on Beethoven symphony sets. The article discussed about four or five sets with which I’m familiar, nothing more. But one fellow immediately demanded that I specify precisely my reasons for "rejecting" other sets—as if by discussing the ones I did, I therefore considered the non-included sets to be de facto inferior. I tried pointing out that we make simple choices all the time; ordering one’s dinner off a restaurant menu does not imply a wholesale rejection of everything but the selected items. But that would not do for this fellow; he was insistent. I didn’t get caught up into the discussion, however, and just let it pass. (Others, however, started slugging it out for all they were worth.)
I was constantly surprised by the number of people who define "depth" in an article about recordings as comparisons between one recording and the next. That’s due to the prevalence of such thinking amongst CD reviewers, I daresay. But I see little value in comparing performance A to performance B—such and such was faster, slower, louder, quieter, etc. So typically I just would never do that in any of my Examiner articles, and any number of Usenet posters accused me of a lack of depth as a result.
But perhaps more than anything else, I’m amazed at the concepts of "good, better, best" that so many of these guys (they’re always male) carry around. Recordings, unlike performances, are objects that are purchased and used. Therefore, a certain shopper’s mentality seems to surround them. That even infects otherwise quite sober and polite posters—such as the guy who criticized me for not identifying which performances of Haydn symphonies I considered the BEST (and he used all caps like that). But I don’t think in those terms, and never will.
Except for the viciousness and madness, the same problems tends to pop up in moderated groups in which people are ejected for misbehavior. If anything they’re more pronounced because people are taking pains to be civil about it all. I was in a fairly new one that was set up on Yahoo, by and for refugees from the Usenet classical recordings group, and while it was a much more pleasant place, I was still struck by how qualitative, how comparative, how commercial so many folks were in their thinking.
So I gathered my marbles and withdrew from the groups altogether. I realized that there was a solid reason why there were almost no working musicians on even the higher-quality Yahoo group; we just don’t think like record collectors. I may have an enormous, ever-expanding CD collection, and I may acquire a great deal of my knowledge of the repertory through recordings. But I’m just not into BEST or WORST, or "Top 5" lists. That’s all for shoppers and consumers; it has little to do with making music, which is what I do.