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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