Recently I have encountered a threat to a substantial collection of vinyl LPs — not my records, but an excellent library collection — that got my back up, my fangs out, and my blood roiling. I’m not even sure if it was the actual endangerment of the collection that upset me so much as it was the careless disdain being expressed by the threat. The LPs run a distinct risk of being locked away in cabinets, unaccessible or at least hidden away so people forget they even exist. They number in the neighborhood of 8000, all classical, dating back to the 1950s through the 1980s.
I understand that fewer and fewer people are interested in vinyl LPs, especially the older stratum of this particular collection with its monophonic releases performed by long-bygone performers. But that’s just the problem: those albums, and those performers, should never be allowed to wither away or become forgotten. They’re our heritage as modern musicians: our careers are built on their achievements, our performing styles on their pathfinding efforts. We’ve moved on and they have stayed frozen like flies in amber, but they’re there to be heard, savored, experienced.
In some cases those now-antique LPs have been remastered for the modern digital world, but by no means all have made it to the modern world intact. Nor is there any guarantee that the remasterings are worth hearing; tin-eared engineers are just as damaging to good sound today as they ever were, if not more so given the prevalence of audio folk raised on strident pop records or even, heaven help us, highly compressed mp3s or YouTube audio.
For some of today’s youth, even vintage LPs can be a revelation. Yes, they have pops and clicks. Yes, you have to deal with tonearms and cue levers and cleaners and brushes and stylii and all that. Yet I hear constantly from my own students how fascinated they are by the liveliness and the warmth of vinyl, the humanity of it all compared to digital. There is no lack of interest in LPs, just a lack of access in many cases.
Yet the danger continues to loom. I have been going through a substantial number of Westminsters from the 1950s, back when the label stood for superb audio and high-grade pressings. (MCA’s embrace of the label in the 1960s was the kiss of death, first in quality, then altogether.) Many of the orchestral albums were guided by ace conductor Hermann Scherchen, indubitably amongst the greats but often disregarded today. That’s not really that surprising. Scherchen’s heyday was the three decades of the 1940s through 1960s; consider his competition. It was a golden age for conductors: Toscanini, Szell, Reiner, Steinberg, von Karajan, Böhm, Barbirolli, Jochum, Ormandy, Bernstein, Munch, and a whole lot more. Even the lesser-known folk (Kondrashin, say, or Martinon) were truly first-rate masters of the orchestra. So Scherchen was in ritzy company, and even there he was distinguished. On many of those Westminsters he is conducting either the “Vienna State Opera Orchestra” — better known as the Vienna Philharmonic, but given the alternate name to avoid contract issues — or the “Philharmonic Symphony of London” — the Royal Philharmonic on Beecham’s day off.
They range from very good to stellar, but more to the point, they’re richly detailed, intact performances, excellently recorded by the standards of the day and still more than listenable today. There’s a lot to learn from the performances rusticating in those old library-shelved grooves. But that can’t happen if the records are whisked away into a dark place, forgotten and most likely eventually sold off or, even more likely, quietly deposited in a dumpster some dark night.
And that’s a tragedy. More than a century of recorded audio has resulted in a lot of music available. An overwhelming amount, even. But that’s no excuse to let it slip away. Even if it just sits there quietly on its shelves, waiting, I feel confident that its time will come. How tragic it would be if these grand vintage recordings came to be valued posthumously, only as a memory.