Sounds & Fury

Rush To Judgment

[Note: This post has been updated (2) as of 11:58 AM Eastern on 7 Jul. See below.]

In a piece for the Financial Times titled, "Critics In A Hostile World", veteran Pulitzer Prize winning classical music critic, Martin Bernheimer, bemoans what looks to him like the imminent extinction of the professional arts critic.

These are hard times for journalism in America. Newspapers are at best shrinking, at worst folding. Fewer than 10 cities still support more than a single daily. Writers face buy-outs, lay-offs or firing. The papers that survive are making do with fewer employees, fewer pages, fewer articles and fewer opinion pieces. Critics are looking more and more like dodos.

And the proximate cause of this distressing trend?

A primary cause of our imminent extinction must be the Internet. An impatient generation is succumbing to the free and easy lure of computer enlightenment. Sure, not all those who cover the arts in old-fashioned print are paragons — still, most do have sufficient education and/or experience to justify their views. On the Web, anyone can impersonate an expert. Anyone can blog. Credentials don’t count. All views are equal. Some sort of criticism may survive the American media revolution, but professional criticism may not.

Essentially, our civilisation is tilting towards anti-authoritarian contests. Audiences, not judges, select winners. Call it the American Idolisation of culture. On TV, contestants get voted off without explanation. Quality is measured by thumbs, up or down. Scholarly analyses have turned into irrelevant extravagances for snobs.

As constant readers of Sounds & Fury are aware, Mr. Bernheimer is one of a handful of professional classical music critics whose writings we regularly single out for praise, and we find ourself in full agreement with much of what he has to say above. But his intemperate assessment that, "On the Web, anyone can impersonate an expert. Anyone can blog. Credentials don’t count. All views are equal," is overblown even as rhetoric.

There can be no argument with Mr. Bernheimer's assertion that anyone can blog. Indeed, anyone can. Almost no one, however, can "impersonate an expert" successfully in the arts blogosphere for very long without in some measure actually being one, the blogger's lack of "credentials" notwithstanding. In fact, the imposture will be sniffed out far more quickly, and punished far more decisively in the blogosphere than in the print world.

So much for "All views are equal."

We share Mr. Bernheimer's concern with and his dismay at the seemingly unstoppable rise of the rabid equalitarianism and populism that today so malignantly infects our American cultural life. It's manifest everywhere, and most perniciously in the high arts, a domain in which classical music arguably occupies the highest station. Mr. Bernheimer, however, has misidentified the culprit. The cause of that seemingly unstoppable and alarming rise lies elsewhere and deeper than blogs, bloggers, and the Internet which are merely the most widespread and visible instances of its expression. Where and what that elsewhere may be we, as a non-expert, are incompetent to identify adequately, and so leave its full exposure and suggestions for a means to defeat it to those best qualified to accomplish those urgent tasks.

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Update (5:24 PM Eastern on 5 Jul): Lisa Hirsch of Iron Tongue of Midnight has a response of her own to Mr. Bernheimer's article.

Update 2 (11:58 AM Eastern on 7 Jul): James Reel, professional arts journalist and critic for Arizona Public Media, adds his thoughts on the matter on his blog, Cue Sheet.

Is Your Brain Being Reprogrammed?

[Note: This post has been updated (1) as of 2:27 PM Eastern on 16 Jun. See below.]

Writer Nicholas Carr is experiencing an unsettling problem. Without his assent, he feels his brain's neural circuitry is being remapped and his memory reprogrammed. And what dastardly agency is responsible for this most disturbing process? The Internet.

Over the past few years I’ve had an uncomfortable sense that someone, or something, has been tinkering with my brain, remapping the neural circuitry, reprogramming the memory. My mind isn’t going — so far as I can tell — but it’s changing. I’m not thinking the way I used to think. I can feel it most strongly when I’m reading. Immersing myself in a book or a lengthy article used to be easy. My mind would get caught up in the narrative or the turns of the argument, and I’d spend hours strolling through long stretches of prose. That’s rarely the case anymore. Now my concentration often starts to drift after two or three pages. I get fidgety, lose the thread, begin looking for something else to do. I feel as if I’m always dragging my wayward brain back to the text. The deep reading that used to come naturally has become a struggle.

I think I know what’s going on. For more than a decade now, I’ve been spending a lot of time online, searching and surfing and sometimes adding to the great databases of the Internet. The Web has been a godsend to me as a writer. Research that once required days in the stacks or periodical rooms of libraries can now be done in minutes. A few Google searches, some quick clicks on hyperlinks, and I’ve got the telltale fact or pithy quote I was after. Even when I’m not working, I’m as likely as not to be foraging in the Web’s info-thickets—reading and writing e-mails, scanning headlines and blog posts, watching videos and listening to podcasts, or just tripping from link to link to link. (Unlike footnotes, to which they’re sometimes likened, hyperlinks don’t merely point to related works; they propel you toward them.)

[...]

I’m not the only one. When I mention my troubles with reading to friends and acquaintances — literary types, most of them — many say they’re having similar experiences. The more they use the Web, the more they have to fight to stay focused on long pieces of writing. Some of the bloggers I follow have also begun mentioning the phenomenon. Scott Karp, who writes a blog about online media, recently confessed that he has stopped reading books altogether. "I was a lit major in college, and used to be [a] voracious book reader," he wrote. "What happened?" He speculates on the answer: "What if I do all my reading on the web not so much because the way I read has changed, i.e. I’m just seeking convenience, but because the way I THINK has changed?"

RTWT here.

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Update (2:27 PM Eastern on 16 Jun): And here's a corollary to the above.

Here Be Dragons

I’ve just returned from a voyage of discovery within Deutsche Gramaphon’s newly opened DG Web Shop wherein I sampled a number of tracks from some few dozen albums without downloading any. The site is state-of-the-art from top to bottom and back to front; loaded with goodies from the sterling DG catalog, all available in glorious 320 kbps MP3 format (and it is indeed glorious; for most practical purposes, almost the equivalent of CD quality) and all reasonably priced; and, in my sampling, not so much as a single incidence of a movement of, say, a sonata or symphony referred to as a “song”.

In short, the DG Web Shop is everything a site devoted to the sale of recordings of classical music should be (I’m of course assuming that the download function operates flawlessly as whatever else DG might have screwed up in their setup, their screwing up on that function is an unimaginable stupidity making, as it would, the entire site little more than a bad and very expensive joke).

Given all the above, I’ve just added to my browser a new bookmark folder named, Here Be Dragons, into which I’ve placed the permanent bookmark for the DG Web Shop, the folder’s sole occupant. Downloading is too quick and easy — a bit like the danger of playing with chips instead of cash in a high-stakes poker game; my bank account too meager; and my willpower too frail.

I need the reminder — and the caution.

Dead In The Water

And that’s even before actually jumping in. I’m talking about the promotion phase of my POD self-publishing experiment of course. During this period of enforced waiting until the book has made it through the distribution process and shows up (or, rather, is made available to show up) on booksellers’ online lists and on their brick-&-mortar-store bookshelves (about 8-10 weeks from now), I’ve been investigating what’s available to me promotion-wise, and just what needs to be done in order to promote the book after it’s finally made it through that distribution process, and just an investigatory dipping of my toes into those promotional waters has already overwhelmed me by the impossibility of the demands I now see clearly will be made on me if the promotion is to be even marginally successful.

I’d naively imagined that a satisfactory promotion campaign could be waged for very little money and right from my own living room utilizing the Net almost exclusively. While the Net is an important part of promoting a book today, I now see its use is mostly supplementary. The core of any successful promotion, I discovered very quickly, involves two central elements: 1) getting the book reviewed by established reviewers in established venues; and 2) getting one’s ass out of that comfortable chair in front of one’s computer, and onto The Street to Greet 'n Meet and Press The Flesh of both booksellers and the reading public. Both those elements are sine qua non — quite literally — in any successful book promotion today.

The first is, in practical terms, quite literally impossible for a POD self-published title by an unknown author, and the second, for me personally, is a virtual impossibility. Me, go out on The Street again? Me, Greet 'n Meet and Press The Flesh of actual, real-world, real-live humans?

Not in this life.

To begin with, such a situation would prove an embarrassment for everyone concerned as in short order it would be discovered that I, the author of a mystery fiction novel, never read mystery fiction, and in fact know absolutely nothing about the genre beyond what I was forced to learn before writing A Deed of Dreadful Note by reading ten-gazillion best-selling mystery fiction titles, past and present, over a three-month period — the absolutely longest three months I’ve ever spent — in order to get a grasp of the genre “formula(s)” involved. Never in my life have I been exposed to so much utter literary trash. I confess, however, that it served to encourage me to write Deed, and bolstered my confidence in its future commercial success. I mean, if that utter literary trash saw commercial publication, Deed would be a shoe-in.

Uh-huh. Right.

Further, I’m just not a people-person kind of guy. Not my thing, generally speaking, and most especially so when my sole purpose would be to sell people something. I lack entirely the “Salesman Gene”, and cringe physically at the very thought of having to sell anything to anybody. During my younger days I had the infamous (but secretly cherished by me) reputation of not being able to sell a glass of cool water to a thirst-tortured man in the middle of the Sahara.

All too true, I’m afraid.

So, it seems I’m dead in the water even before jumping in. Too bad, actually. The experiment’s an excellent idea. Just not with me as the experimenter.

Late To The Party, We Know

Due our current involvement in things neither classical music- nor opera-related, we're rather late to this first-rate piece by blogger and New Yorker classical music critic, Alex Ross.

Writes Alex:

Like many people, I started blogging out of an urgent need to procrastinate. Yet a nagging sense of possibility also drew me in. Classical music, my subject, was thriving on the Internet in unexpected ways. Not all blogs, I discovered, were devoted to cataloguing continuity errors in the films of George Lucas; a smattering of musicians, composers, and listeners were writing on music with intelligence and verve, reveling in the chance to express ideas that had no other immediate outlet. Between 1980 and 2000, classical music more or less disappeared from American network television, magazines, and other mainstream media, its products deemed too élitist, effete, or esoteric for the world of pop. On the Internet, no demographically driven executive could suppress, say, a musicology student’s ruminations on György Ligeti’s Requiem on the ground that it had no appeal for twenty-seven-year-old males, even if the blogger in question — Tim Rutherford-Johnson, of The Rambler — was himself twenty-seven.

RTWT here.

It's A Whole New Publishing World Out There — Maybe, Pt. 2

In the initial installment of this saga (which can be read here), I related how I discovered the new publishing phenomenon of POD self-publishing when, by happy accident, I stumbled across the online POD self-publisher Lulu.com, and subsequently "published" a trade paperback of an old ms of mine. I was so impressed by the ease with which one could self-publish a book, and even more impressed by the physical product produced by that process, that I determined right then to investigate the matter more thoroughly to see whether an author — specifically an author of fiction — could overcome the strictly-for-losers stigma attached to self-publishing, and actually make real money by self-publishing his own work. Toward that end, I embarked on an informal research project to attempt to discover just what it is that's required to accomplish both.

The first thing I learned is that if one wants to see one's book for sale in markets other than Lulu's own Marketplace, one has to get one's physical book into the proper shape to meet industry standards, and then get that book entered into the book distribution system so that it's available for purchase by booksellers — both the online and brick & mortar sort — worldwide.

Turns out that latter, which sounds dauntingly formidable, is actually a piece of cake with Lulu. One simply buys one of the two distribution packages offered: Published By You (cost: $50), or Published By Lulu (cost: $100).

With the former, you are the publisher; with the latter, Lulu is the publisher. In both cases you as the author retain all rights to your work, and with each you make the same amount of money from sales of your book. The only significant difference between the two distribution packages is that with the former you must first register yourself as the publisher and apply for an ISBN (International Standard Book Number) for your book, an absolute necessity as nothing can be done with a book in the book marketplace absent its assignment of an ISBN.

Well, that's a royal pain in the ass, and a two- to three-week wait before the ISBN — which you will then own for that one book — is assigned. With the latter distribution package you don't have to do anything, and there's no wait involved. Lulu is the publisher, and the ISBN for your book is assigned instantly but is owned by Lulu as the publisher, not you, which is a mere technicality.

With both distribution packages, once the ISBN is assigned Lulu will then,

1: Place a scannable Bookland-EAN bar code on the back cover of the book.
2: Feed the bibliographic data on the book to the major international bibliographic databases so that the book will be findable by booksellers worldwide.
3: Convert your retail price (which you set yourself) into five currencies (US dollars, British pounds, Australian dollars, Euros, and Canadian dollars) to facilitate global availability and purchasing.
4: Ensure a listing of the book in the catalog of the major US wholesaler which gives access to the book for purchase by all US booksellers including Amazon and Barnes & Noble.

Needless to say, I purchased the Published By Lulu distribution package.

So far, so great.

Now, about getting that book into physical shape to meet industry standards, there are two areas of concern: the book's cover (back, front, and spine), and the book's interior (the "inner matter"). In my case, the cover was a no-brainer as I simply used one of Lulu's standard templates which is guaranteed to meet industry standards (and not so incidentally, in terms of the physical materials used, exceeds them; the perfect-bound Lulu trade (6x9 format) paperback, both cover and interior, is simply gorgeous). I merely customized the cover with the background color (I use no images on my cover), text typefaces, font sizes and font colors of my choice (the text being my own, of course).

The inner matter required no work at all as my original formatting met industry standards. The only iffy part is that I created the required PDF file directly from Word by using Word's own PDF file generator which sounds like it might be something complicated but is another no-brainer as one simply clicks on SAVE AS PDF instead of the normal SAVE which latter saves the file as a regular Word document (. doc or .docx file). The iffy part is that while the resulting PDF file generated in that way is perfectly OK for printing a book for the Lulu Marketplace, Lulu tells us that to meet industry standards (i.e., to comply with the requirements of industry-standard print converters) the PDF file must be "distilled" using the Adobe Distiller which would mean purchasing from Adobe (the inventor of PDF) an almost $400 piece of software for which I've no other use, or uploading my .docx file to Lulu (instead of a PDF file) who will then do the PDF distilling for me.

I'm fairly certain, however, that I won't need that pricey piece of software or need Lulu to do the distilling as Word's PDF file generator generates a PDF file that's in compliance with a PDF standard called PDF/A which is a PDF standard set by the digital printing industry itself. I'll know within two weeks whether I'm right about that or not. (The printer for the book wholesaler — not the same printer Lulu uses for printing books for its own Marketplace which books, as I've already noted, exceed the physical standards of the books printed for the wholesaler — will examine the PDF file to make certain it's OK for their use, and if not report back what needs to be changed.)

Well, I just uploaded my final-proofed inner matter PDF file of that old ms to Lulu (the cover is generated by Lulu themselves), approved all the things that Lulu requires one to approve (a matter of a simple button click, actually), and within seconds got this eMail back from Lulu:

Thank you for approving "A Deed of Dreadful Note" [the book's title].

You have completed your portion of the Published By Lulu process.

Your book information will be sent to Bowker's Books In Print [the publishing industry's "bible" of bibliographic data] and once approved by Bowker, Lulu will upload your title to our distribution network. Should there be any problems with your title in Books In Print, we will contact you. This process is generally completed within 2-3 weeks. You can expect to see your book listed on Amazon and other online retailers within the next 6 to 8 weeks.

Regards,

Lulu Support

Assuming everything goes well with that, then the truly daunting, positively scary, but sine qua non business begins: the promotion of the book.

What's that I hear you saying? How am I going to go about doing that?

Not a clue — yet. Except to give you all a link to the web page I've set up for A Deed of Dreadful Note which provides a general description of the book, permits you to read Chapter 1 complete, and contains the link to A Deed of Dreadful Note's Lulu Marketplace page where you can purchase the trade paperback. A Deed of Dreadful Note's web page can be accessed here.

It's A Whole New Publishing World Out There — Maybe

[Note: This post has been updated (1) as of 7:33 AM Eastern on 12 Oct. See below.]

The thing began innocently enough. I'd just purchased a copy of Microsoft Office Home and Student 2007 ($125 from Amazon) mainly to get a copy of Word at the lowest possible price. I've been using Word as my word processor since it's inception and this 2007 incarnation is the first major redesign of the product in almost a decade, and all the changes looked just spectacular and the right way to go. Now all I needed was a project that would allow me to put it through all its paces, but had none in the works that would permit that.

Shortly thereafter, I was doing some small research on Berg's Lulu, and by mistake entered into Google the keywords, lulu opera book, instead of entering the correct keywords, lulu berg opera book. And the very first item on the list that came up was, Browse Books - Lulu.com. Aha! A site devoted exclusively to books on Lulu. Perfect! And so I clicked over.

Needless to say, Lulu.com is nothing of the sort, but is instead a Print On Demand (POD) publisher. I'd of course heard of POD publishing, but only in a very general way, and I didn't pay a lot of attention to it as it seemed to be something of interest mainly to book publishers and sellers for the most part. But Lulu is not set up for book publishers and sellers. Quite the contrary. It's set up for authors themselves as a way to self-publish, but not to be confused with that justly vilified self-publishing entity, the so-called vanity presses, most of which are largely scams, and hugely expensive ones at that.

Well, this seemed to offer a perfect way for me to wring out my new toy. I'd take an old ms typescript and massively reformat it as a POD paperback in my new Office Word 2007.

But on first investigation, Lulu simply looked far too good a deal, which of course made me instantly suspicious: No fees involved, up-front or otherwise, except as a small commission on your sales; the offering of valuable distribution and marketing packages the purchase of which are entirely voluntary and at prices that are almost too reasonable; and an online physical publishing process that's so fast and simple even a trained chimp could manage it (well, not quite, but you get my meaning, I'm sure).

After the matter of fees, the very next thing I thought suspect was the quality of the physical product that would be produced by this amazingly simple online publishing process. No way could this process produce a physical book that could pass as the same product from a major publishing house. I mean, c'mon!, give me a break.

And so I took that old ms, reformatted the typescript in my new toy, saved it as a PDF file (a technical requirement of this publishing process), and "published" it. It took me all of two hours to reformat the thing (Word performed like the champion application it's always been, only easier to navigate and operate than with former incarnations), and exactly nine minutes to "publish" it as a 6x9 trade paperback (for the cover art, I simply used a standard Lulu template as I have neither the software nor the expertise necessary to do my own cover art).

Oh yeah. This is going to work. When pigs fly, maybe.

I then ordered a copy of the 178pp book (cost: $8) to see what I and Lulu had wrought.

I received the book a week later (shipped UPS). When I opened the Amazon-style package, I simply couldn't believe what I was looking at. The physical book was absolutely, and in every way, indistinguishable from any trade paperback put out by any of the best major houses in the country.

Astonishing.

I'm now investigating more deeply this whole POD self-publishing phenomenon to see whether it can possibly overcome the justified stigma attached to vanity publishing (which POD self-publishing can be, but is not necessarily), and actually make real money for authors. If it can do both, it's a whole new publishing world out there, and one I want to be a part of.

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Update (7:33 AM Eastern on 12 Oct): Part 2 of this saga can be read here.

Yeah, Right

We suspect the following somehow got its data packets reshuffled or rerouted somewhere in cyberspace, and what was supposed to show up online in the pages of The Onion instead got routed to The New York Times:

In an unusually blunt session [at the headquarters of the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers] today, several of Hollywood’s highest-ranking executives called for the end of the entertainment industry’s decades-old system of paying what are called residuals to writers, actors and directors for the re-use of movie and television programs after their initial showings.

The executives stopped short of saying they would demand an immediate end to residual payments in the upcoming, probably difficult negotiations with writers, actors and directors. But they were emphatic in calling for the dismantling of a system under which specific payments are made when movies and shows are released on DVD, shown abroad or otherwise resold. Instead, they want to pool such revenue and recover their costs before sharing any of the profit with the talent.

Yeah, right. When pigs fly maybe.

RTWT here.

Huffington Classical

[Note: This post has been updated (1) as of 6:59 PM Eastern on 5 Jun. See below.]

With today's confirmation ("A ‘New York’ Run Ends") of the firing of New York Magazine's long-time and first-rate classical music critic, Peter G. Davis, first learned about on 1 June on Henry Fogel's ArtsJournal blog, On The Record, and the retirement of the position he held, along with a number of recent similar firings and position retirings at other major publications across the country, things really do seem to fast be approaching epidemic proportions on this particular front nationwide. If proof were needed not of the seemingly ubiquitous prognostications of "the death of classical music," but of the marginalization of classical music in our postmodern culture, this epidemic-in-the-making is certainly right up there near the top of the evidence schedule for the prosecution.

So, is the dastardly culprit in these firings and position retirings the big, bad, greedy, and philistine Mainstream Media? Easy to find them guilty of the crime, we know, but we think such a verdict would be a too-facile rush to judgment, you should pardon the expression. The MSM is as much victim of the current Zeitgeist as are those fired classical music critics and their retired positions.

What to do? Is there a viable answer — an economically viable answer — to that question, or is it just a matter of, And so it goes, and Qué será, será, and that's that?

We think there is an economically viable answer, and its key is the Internet (surprise!). And, no, we do not mean the Blogosphere, although it, too, will have its own important if supporting role to play. We're thinking along the lines of a daily digital publication such as The Huffington Post, but a digital publication devoted exclusively to the coverage of the classical music and opera world nationwide, the initial roster of contributors to which — paid contributors who would be given the freedom to write what they wished, how they wished, and at whatever length they wished — would be every MSM classical music critic and reviewer in the country: present, former, and soon-to-be former.

Pie-in-the-sky pipe dream you say? We don't think so. It would require initially a non-trivial investment of seed money by an enlightened, forward-looking, and wealthy White Knight to launch and maintain until the ad revenue proved sufficient to the job of keeping the publication afloat, and would require as well a managing editor well respected enough by the nationwide pool of prospective professional contributors to sell them on the idea, but the concept is not only doable, but in our considered opinion the way of the future, and the very near future at that.

White Knights, please forward notice of your intention.

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Update (6:59 PM Eastern on 5 Jun): More on the Peter G. Davis firing here. The way New York Magazine is reported to have handled this business is bloody disgraceful. Our thanks to classical music critic Martin Bernheimer for the heads-up.

WFMT Press Release

Along with, we imagine, every other classical music blog in the blogosphere, we just received the following press release from Chicago's WFMT which we pass along for your information:

98.7WFMT Pays Tribute to Cellist, Conductor Mstislav Rostropovich

Listener Memories, Recordings and Rare Interviews Pre-empt Regular Music Schedule

Chicago, IL -- 98.7WFMT, Chicago's Classical Experience, is paying tribute to Russian musician and human rights activist Mstislav Rostropovich who died this morning in Moscow. Today, Friday April 27, and tomorrow morning, Saturday April 28, the station is airing recordings from its archives of Rostropovich cello performances and conducting various orchestras around the world. In addition, the station is airing voicemails and reading emails from listeners recounting memories of the world-renowned musician, who visited Chicago many times during his lifetime. Rare interviews have also been posted on wfmt.com.

The special tribute pre-empts previously scheduled musical programming.

Streaming is available at http://www.wfmt.com/

I Love The Internet II

In response to this query posted to perhaps the premier opera eMail list on the Internet which query was a response to something I'd earlier posted to the list:

I'd really like to know. Seriously. Your statements that Italian opera is corrupt without saying why has left me addlepated, hornswoggled and bamboozled. Frankly Mr. Douglas, you really do appear as if you hold Italian opera and its lovers in contempt. Can I ask ... do you not mind that people know you hold them in contempt?

I replied:

I thought I made crystal-clear why I consider Italian opera corrupt, the bel canto rep in particular. I'll repeat it here. Because Italian opera is a corruption of opera's idealized origins as dramma per musica, the Italians over the centuries having generally (there are exceptions) turned opera into little more than a crowd-pleasing showcase for songbirds.

What I hold in contempt are TOFs (True Opera Fan -- a little like a teenage movie fan only worse, much worse). You know, the diva-centric sort who, at bottom, care nothing for genuine opera (i.e., opera as dramma per musica), and understand it less. One has only to witness TOFs engaging in one of their favorite pastimes of "calling" an opera while it's in progress in the same way that sports announcers call the rounds of a prizefight, to understand the justice of my contempt. For the TOF, singers are the be-all and end-all of opera, and nothing else really matters. It's those very TOFs that the Italians centuries ago set out to pander to; ergo, their corruption of opera as an artform, making it a showcase for songbirds rather than genuine dramma per musica. And, yes, I hold those showcases in contempt as well. The music for those showcases is quite often very pretty and engaging, but pretty and engaging in the same way that, say, high-class street trollops are pretty and engaging.

Knowhadamean?

The firestorm of abuse directed my way that followed, including calls for my banning from the list which I'd joined only a few months earlier, was prompt, voluminous, vicious, and doorpost-ignorant, with special offense being taken to my use of the term, dramma per musica(?!).

I suspect you'll think me disingenuous when I tell you that, as deliberately provocative as my comments were, I didn't expect that firestorm of abuse, not from members of this particular eMail list, but instead expected heated arguments against what I'd written. Only a single such materialized, but, alas, it subtly but critically misunderstood the central thrust of my comments, and so I responded with this further clarification:

Glorioski! An intelligent response at last.

My "main objection to Italian opera," as you put it (and although it should be totally unnecessary at this point in my comments on the subject, but, alas, on the evidence of at least one lister's remarks, I see is not, I repeat: I exclude entirely Mozart's "Italian" operas from this discussion as they're sui generis and Italian in nominal form only), is NOT that, "there are all these _songs_ (which serve only to show off the singers) getting in the way of the drama," also as you put it, but that those songs, which are intended, first and foremost, to serve as individual displays for singers within the overall showcase for singers that is the entire opera itself, act merely as proxies or substitutes for, or in lieu of, genuine (music-)drama. If it were the case that they simply "[got] in the way of the [music-]drama," that would be merely a fault of technique (of the composer's) that could perhaps (underline perhaps) be gotten around in performance by a combination of clever staging, discreet musical rearrangement or alteration, superb acting, etc.

With much of the Italian rep, and the bel canto rep in particular, that's not the case at all. Rather, the case there is simply that there's no genuine music-drama for the songs to get in the way of. What pretext of music-drama exists in the opera is but a pale simulacrum of genuine music-drama (pale, notwithstanding that individual moments may be emotionally heated, dramatically charged, or fraught with bathos or, more rarely, pathos) which pretext is meant to serve as the overall frame into which to set and individually display the singers singing their songs -- in short, the result of an act of purposeful intention on the part of the composer, not a fault of his technique which technique in the genre's best practitioners is, in fact, quite highly developed indeed.

If one accepts that this is what opera is about, and what opera is capable of dramatically, then one will view that solution not as something to be sneered at, but as an artform in its own right, and judge on their own terms and in that light operas that employ that solution. If, however, like myself, one views that solution as antithetical to what opera at its origin (i.e., at that point in time when opera was first viewed as or became a separate genre unto itself) was meant to be -- viz., dramma per musica; drama through the agency of music; genuine music-drama -- then one will view that solution as an out-and-out subterfuge; a corruption of what opera is really about, and a betrayal of what the artform is capable of dramatically.

And therein resides the reason of my contempt for Italian opera generally as it's come down to us through the centuries from its birth.

to which clarification no response has been forthcoming. Not so much as a single one. The firestorm of abuse, however, has apparently burnt itself out, scattered snide or otherwise insulting remarks referring to my good self, albeit expressed only en passant in messages having nothing to do with me or anything I wrote, seemingly having taken its place.

I love the Internet.

Be There Or Be Square!

For those of you who don't know of its existence, this is one great idea, and too long coming.

Be there or be square!

I Love The Internet

A couple days ago, a poster on the widely popular Opera-L list — someone whom I understand is a regular contributor to The Met Opera Guild publication, Opera News — had this to say about Wagner's Die Meistersinger:

If people are going to start censoring opera, they may as well start with Wagner's Die Meistersinger. Nowadays, when Met patrons read their title translations during the glorious last act, their mouths drop open when they read the highly offensive anti-Semitic rantings about "pure German art". Should opera companies change those words to suit modern tastes?

in response to which several other Opera-L posters countered with the correct reading of Sach's closing Act III monologue by simply making reference to the text itself, and pointing out to this sure-of-himself poster that there was nothing of the anti-Semitic to be found there, to which the poster replied:

How those of us, who love Wagner's music would like it to be so! Unfortunately this stuff is echoed in his more virulent writing on the subject of Jews and German art and was even published. I've seen several letters in which he wrote the same thing. Your interpretation ... could, I guess without knowing the context of those rantings, be correct, but you can read the same swill in "Das Judenthum in der Musik" (The Jews in Music) published in 1850 under a pseudonym and later in an expanded edition under his own name in 1869. He toned it down in Meistersinger but his meaning is unmistakable and would have been well known, its code completely understood, by the audiences of his time. The assault he was decrying was from the Jews.

Yes. Well, up to that point I'd been on best behavior, and declined to post any response whatsoever, but this poster's total disregard of the actual text of Sach's closing monologue, and his above ignorant comments — nay, assertions — were just a bit too much, and so I responded,

With all due respect, what you wrote above is, for the most part, abject rubbish. That Wagner was a virulent and vocal anti-Semite is unquestionable and unquestioned. The lunatic notion that he "coded" that anti-Semitism into his operas generally, and into _Meistersinger_ in particular, is nothing more than a baseless, poisonous, and totally insupportable effusion from the academic left, and from a couple prominent professional Wagner-haters. For my response to that notion, and to your above remarks, please see this article [gives URL of a Sounds & Fury post].

Oh, and not so BTW, the title of Wagner's thoroughly ugly and vicious essay translates NOT as "Jews in Music", but as "Judaism in Music". The distinction is by no means a trivial one.

The poster declined to respond to my remarks in public (surprise!), but instead sent me a long, highly indignant eMail berating me, among other things, for the "unforgivable" "personal insults" I directed his way, for my not signing my insulting and offensive post with my full name but only my initials, and for my "furious revisionism" in calling rubbish a clear case of Wagner inserting into Die Meistersinger an unmistakable expression of his virulent anti-Semitism.

After pointing out to this high-minded blockhead (via an answering eMail) that I made no personal insults whatsoever in my post but merely labeled as rubbish his ignorant assertions, and that my full name was in the header of all my Opera-L posts in full view of all list subscribers, I instructed him to post his replies in public where they belonged, and again directed him to my July 2004 post on this blog wherein I dealt in some detail with the lunatic notion that Wagner inserted into Die Meistersinger and other of his operas coded expressions of his rabid anti-Semitism, and to which post I now, dear reader, also direct you. It can be read here.

The poster's response was to again berate me for my offensive and insulting behavior, and to inform me that I was never again to address him, and that if I did, my posts would be ignored by him, and go unanswered.

I love the Internet.

Whoa!

[Note: This post has been updated (1) as of 5:56 AM Eastern on 11 Jan. See below.]

Ain't this a kick in the ass.

The world's biggest record label yesterday unveiled a download store devoted to classical and jazz music, hoping to tap into a booming market for digital sales and promising to unlock a treasure trove of thousands of recordings that have sat in the vaults for decades.

The attention given to soaring rock and pop downloads has masked the shot in the arm that downloads have given to sales of classical and jazz music. According to Universal, sales of classical music downloads have soared by 1,000% in the last year and jazz sales have grown by 900%.

The new site will offer all of Universal's classical and jazz releases, including classic imprints such as Deutsche Grammophon, Decca, Verve and Impulse, running to 125,000 tracks taken from nearly 8,000 CDs. The repertoire available at launch will include every note written by Mozart, 265 albums of Beethoven compositions and jazz artists from recent crossover successes such as Jamie Cullum to legends such as John Coltrane.

And best of all, the site labels a track a track, not a "song", and bloody iPods need not apply as the downloads can't be played on an iPod but are encoded at 320kps in Windows Media Audio format; more than double the bit-rate of iTunes iPod encoding.

A proper digital classical music store has finally arrived on the Web.

Download site is here. (Note: The site seems to be set up for Brits only. Emailed them a query. Stay tuned.)

---

Update (5:56 AM Eastern on 11 Jan): This just received from the powers that be at the Universal site:

Hello - thank you for your enquiry. Unfortunately at the moment you can't register with a US address and credit card - you have to [be] based in the UK. There are plans in the future to expand the site internationally.

Whadarday, nuts?

Jeez!

New York Times Copyeditors Begin Holiday Vacation Early

A front-page lede in the online edition of today's New York Times:

After his execution, Saddam Hussein was buried early today in Awja, Iraq, near Tikrit, his hometown.

Good thing, too. It would have been most inconvenient had it been done before rather than after (although before would not have been at all a bad idea).

A "Passionate Debate"

Anne Midgette, a music critic writing for the New York Times, and concerning whose critical faculties we've in the past been less than kind, has a piece in today's Times the subject of which is making generalized judgments about an opera singer's capabilities based on a single live performance (not a good thing to do, says Ms. Midgette, and we agree). In her piece, Ms. Midgette remarks, "After I began writing this article, a passionate debate on the same subject erupted in an online discussion forum: how can you presume to judge a singer after a single hearing?"

How indeed.

We strongly suspect that the "passionate debate" referred to by Ms. Midgette is one that erupted on one of the New York Times's very own forums: the New York Times Opera Forum, which "passionate debate" concerning Ms. Netrebko's performance in last Wednesday's Puritani (see our post here) is, at the time of this writing, some 215-messages long and counting. If we're right about her reference, Ms. Midgette is being far too gentle and far too kind calling that imbecile TOF food-fight a "passionate debate." Of passion there's surely an overabundance. Of debate..., well, to call that 215-message, risibly adolescent free-for-all a debate is tantamount to calling the murderous sectarian violence between Sunni and Shia in Iraq today a sorting out of theological differences.

But TOFs will be TOFs, and being risibly adolescent in all matters operatic is, after all, what being a TOF is all about. TOF food-fights, however, do make for perversely entertaining reading, and so if you're feeling just a bit perverse at the moment, the "passionate debate" can be read beginning here.

Have fun, and don't blame us if you come away shaking your head. After all, we did caution you well in advance.

Lesson Du Jour

For those symphony orchestras finally getting the message that in order to supplement their too often threadbare coffers they have to take into their own hands the production, distribution, and marketing of their own recordings (first proposed by us in January of 2004), a word of advice: do not — repeat, do not — offer for sale the CDs or MP3 files of those recordings through any outlet or service that insists on labeling the individual tracks of those CDs or MP3s a "song". Doing so makes you part of the problem, not the solution.

Thus endeth today's lesson.

Richter Plays Haydn (Or Maybe Scarlatti And Haydn)

I'm no fan of the piano nor of the piano literature past Mozart, but way back in the '60s I made a trip to New York with a CP (child prodigy) pianist friend of mine to hear the great Sviatoslav Richter in recital, and came away slack-jawed with amazement. I never thought the piano could sound like that, nor a pianist play like that. In particular, his Beethoven was simply not to be believed. Richter came across as a veritable force of nature, and I was fairly blown away.

On the Classical Music & Opera Forum, one of the posters put up a YouTube link to Richter playing Chopin, and I was again blown away. Following, another poster mentioned a YouTube video of Richter playing a Beethoven sonata, and yet once again I was blown away even though there was some rather sloppy playing in that performance.

Then another video, or rather a series of videos, of Richter caught my attention; videos of a recital given in Japan in 1984. Haydn and Debussy were on the menu. Well, I'd never heard Richter do any Haydn, and even though I'm no particular fan of Haydn's work although I've huge admiration for his craftsmanship, I just out of curiosity wanted to hear what Haydn might sound like under Richter's hands.

Absolutely revelatory is what. What an astonishing performance! None of the music on those live-concert videos was familiar to me, and I would have sworn that the opening number was something by Scarlatti, but the video identifies it as something by Haydn. If that identification is correct, I think I just might start to love Haydn.

To audition those videos, begin here, and then continue through Parts 2, 3, and 4 (links listed on the YouTube page on the sidebar on the right). That will take you through the Haydn (but I still swear that opening number is by Scarlatti and not Haydn), and up to the Debussy which, I feel constrained to confess, even Richter could not make me love. On that last, your mileage may vary.

Keeping Score

Along with, we'd guess, every blog in the cultural blogosphere, we received the following press release from the San Francisco Symphony, and what it's flogging is worthwhile enough that we here pass it along verbatim and without further comment beyond saying the main Keeping Score website as well as its adjuncts is superbly crafted and the content first-rate, so be sure to click on all links.

I work with the San Francisco Symphony and wanted to let you know that its interactive Keeping Score web site just launched. The web site, www.keepingscore.org, is a companion piece to the San Francisco Symphony’s Keeping Score television series on PBS which explores the stories behind classical music; the series features works by Beethoven, Stravinsky and Copland.

The web site allows you to dig into the score, listen as musicians share their insights, and learn about the lives of the composers, music theory and keys. The site gives an understanding of classical music thru the dissection of a score and the examination of the history, personal lives, and politics that created the music. You have to play with it to get a true sense of the capabilities, but here are some highlights from the section on Beethoven’s Eroica:

• Learn about key, themes and markup – as the Eroica Symphony score plays you can choose to show keys, themes and markup on the screen. A video of the San Francisco Symphony in concert plays in tandem while you explore the score.

• Beethoven’s deafness story – two video clips of Dr. Goodhill, from Hope4Hearing Foundation, simulate what Beethoven heard as he was going deaf and describes Beethoven conducting the 9th Symphony after he was deaf. Also included is a musical excerpt of how the 9th Symphony possibly sounded to Beethoven.

Each composer’s section on the Keeping Score web site launches a week before the program featuring them airs on television (Beethoven is already up and running as Keeping Score begins airing on PBS stations nationwide next week). Let me know if you’d like a demo of the web site or have any questions.

Some online tools to learn more about Keeping Score if you’re interested:

You can find out when Keeping Score airs in your city by clicking on the link below:

http://www.pbs.org/keepingscore/airdates.html

You can find trailers for the Keeping Score television series at: http://www.keepingscore.org/preview1.html

Website Redesign

This really sucks. Big time. We can only hope, with fingers crossed, that this shameful (or perhaps we should say shameless) bit of prole-pandering is no harbinger concerning more substantive areas where things really count.