From the New York Times:
Adventures in Downloading Haydn
By Anne Midgette
Classical music critics seldom get to feel that they're on track
with a hip new product. So I came to iTunes with an extra sense
of empowerment. ITunes, if you missed it, is the new music
service from Apple that allows users to buy and legally download
songs from a huge range of licensed albums. In the first week
after it opened, in late April, the service sold a million music
tracks. Finally, someone had figured out how to make money selling
music on the Internet. And there I was with a new PowerBook,
able to cruise iTunes' offerings of everything from rock to,
yes, classical music.
I felt ahead of the curve in another way: I knew the terrain.
For nine months in 2000, I was the classical music editor of a
Web site that sold music, legally, on the Internet, Musicmaker.com.
In some ways it was a lot like iTunes, down to some of the same
music, including large chunks of EMI's classical catalog. Like
my PowerBook, Musicmaker helped me feel like a child of my own
generation: it allowed me to share with my peers the experience
of working for a failed dot-com.
Musicmaker also taught me an important lesson: classical music
resists being forced into the restrictive framework of a computer
data base. So when I headed to the classical section of the
iTunes site, I scented blood in the water.
To be clear, iTunes is great. It's easy to understand why it has
done so well. At 99 cents a track, you're tempted to grab handfuls
of favorite songs, like candy, to stash away on your hard drive.
And with performers like the sopranos Maria Callas and Natalie
Dessay, the pianists Artur Schnabel and Leif Ove Andsnes and the
conductors Herbert von Karajan and Simon Rattle, you can have a
lot of fun browsing.
But therein lies a tale. If you browse in classical music, you'll
find a wide range of divergent options, even with a single
composer. Is it Puccini (which gets you "Madama Butterfly" with
Renata Scotto) or G. Puccini (the same opera with Victoria de
los Angeles)? Camille Saint-Saens (under C) or Saint-Saens (under
S)?
There are 10 different listings for Tchaikovsky, from Piotr
Ilytch to just plain Peter. If you opt for a power search, typing
in "Tchaikovsky" will call up 250 songs - "songs" being the
nomenclature for tracks in Internet parlance - including favorite
Tchaikovsky selections like "John of Dreams" by Cherish the
Ladies and "Fool on the Hill" from a Swingle Singers album called
"1812." After this, one is hardly surprised to find Irving Berlin
and Itzhak Perlman filed under "opera," but no mention there of
Beethoven.
This isn't all Apple's fault. It's just the way classical music
is made. Your average rock track is a fairly straightforward
proposition: song title ("Purple Haze"), artist (Jimi Hendrix).
But take Saint-Saens's First Cello Concerto, with Mstislav
Rostropovich as soloist and Carlo Maria Giulini conducting the
London Philharmonic. Whose name should go into the "artist"
slot? And what's the "song title"? According to iTunes, it's
"Violincello in A major, Op. 33, No. 1" - a title that may take
you a minute to place when you see it on your playlist (even
leaving aside the misspelling of violoncello). The "artist" is
Mr. Rostropovich; Mr. Giulini and the orchestra don't rate a
mention. And the composer's name is present only in the album
title, so you'd better already know that Saint-Saens's Cello
Concerto is the one in A (No. 1; Op. 33), not the one in B (Op.
104) on the same album, which is by Dvorak.
As a casual listener, you might not think this would be such a
problem. As a classical music lover, you might think it would
be easy to get it right. Believe me, you would be wrong. My heart
bleeds for the people at Apple who were responsible for entering
the classical music albums in the data base. I can only hypothesize
about their feelings, because Apple politely but firmly informed
me that it doesn't give out information about specific musical
genres on the iTunes site to the press. I can well imagine why
it might not want to talk.
At Musicmaker, I started out serenely confident in my ability
to oversee a team of freelance data-entering musicians in creating
a first-rate classical data base. To help the team in its labors,
I created a list of guidelines that grew inexorably the longer
we worked. Our site's search function required absolute stylistic
uniformity.
ITunes' search function, which is superior to that of any
other classical music data base I've encountered, can recognize
individual words. A search for "Beethoven Violin Concerto" yields
32 entries, nearly all of them actually composed by Beethoven.
Our data base was more literal. It didn't have the imagination
to link a Concerto for Violin and Orchestra with a Violin Concerto
in D. And no data base will associate Tchaikovsky with Tschaikowsky
(let alone Chaikovsky) or Rachmaninoff with Rachmaninov (let
alone Rakhmaninov). They have to be typed in exactly the same
way.
We also wanted to make sure that users could tell what artist and
recording they were getting. On iTunes, a buyer who doesn't know
the libretto of Ponchielli's "Gioconda" by heart, or at least
know the famous arias, could click on a track that claims that
the artist is Maria Callas and download "Cielo e Mar." Who knew
that Callas could sound like a strained Italian tenor? It must
have been one of her late recordings. (In fact, it was one of
her greatest, as you could hear if you got a track with her on
it.)
After several months, Musicmaker's directors were having trouble
understanding why classical music required five or six times as
much manpower, money and time as the seven other genres combined.
They decreed that data entry would therefore be done in-house,
and I became a slave driver to two colleagues at headquarters
in Reston, Va.
My comments, in our exhaustive e-mail messages, sound niggling:
"Please don't translate German song titles into English: `Ablosung
im Sommer' does not mean `Replacement of Summer.' " (It means
"Changing of the Guard in Summer.") But I was learning the hard
way that if you don't consider all these things, you end up
looking ridiculous to classical music fans.
Consider the track I just bought from iTunes. It's called "V.
Lustig im Tempo und Keck im Ausdruck" ("Merry in Tempo and Bold
in Expression"), and it's by Lucia Popp, Ortrun Wenkel and the
Southend Boys' Choir. Fortunately the name of the album it's
from also appears on the download: "Mahler: Symphonies Nos. 3
and 4." If you know the Mahler symphonies, you know that the
Third has a fifth movement (and even a sixth), while the Fourth
has only four; you also know that Popp and Wenkel do not sing
on every track of both symphonies, as iTunes claims. But it's
up to you to figure out who's conducting.
This is the only track I can download from that album. In most
genres of music, a single CD track equals a "song" and is a few
minutes long. In classical music, a track can be a 30-second
recitative from an opera or a 30-minute movement of a Mahler
symphony. Pricing all classical tracks at 99 cents would let
Mahler lovers get a whole CD-length symphony for four or five
dollars. So iTunes has established a cutoff at about seven
minutes; to get any track longer than that, you have to buy the
whole album.
There are exceptions. When I searched for Leontyne Price's classic
recording of Barber's "Knoxville: Summer of 1915," I found that
I could get all 16 minutes for 99 cents. Not surprisingly, it's
listed as the top download under Leontyne Price. I apologize to
Ms. Price's admirers if Apple, on seeing this, withdraws that
option.
Because Apple's speed of response is commendable. The few weeks
since the site opened have brought notable improvements. Multiple
spellings of Beethoven have vanished. The bizarre limitation
that you could download only three of Strauss's "Four Last Songs,"
because the fourth runs more than seven minutes, has been remedied.
I still wonder what the market is. Having purchased a range of
classical music from iTunes for this article, I have a motley
playlist of individual tracks that are hard to identify. When I
play them, one blends into the other without a break, as on a
classics lite radio station. Does anyone really want to download
individual opera recitatives, or spend $40 on a download of a
complete "Gioconda" that comes without a reliable cast list or
libretto? I'm not sure what the future of classical music is,
but I suspect that only aficionados can get much benefit from a
site like this, and they probably don't need it.
At Musicmaker, we didn't have the manpower to fix every mistake
on the site, and it gradually became clear that whatever the
secret to selling music on the Web was, we hadn't found it. What
we did have, after nine months, was the beginning of a knowledgeable,
detailed data base of a lot of EMI's classical music catalog.
In a last-minute e-mail exchange in the hour or two after the
layoffs had been announced and before we had to vacate the
premises, my Reston colleagues and I joked about selling it. If
only we had called Apple.
Richard Pennycuick
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