On the reliability of Internet Classical Music

With the demise of over-the-air classical music in Boulder, I'm now listening to more and more classical music over the Internet. It's not as easy as just turning on the radio and it doesn't work in my car, but it's better than nothing, or even worse, the talk-talk-talk news-news-news nonsense. One major downside of listening over the Internet is the technological addition of lots of rests. Rests in music are very important - they indicate that the musician(s) should to stop and wait a bit. Composers use them for emphasis, transitions, surprise and emotion. There's the famous rest in the adagio of Samuel Barber's String Quartet, opus 11, often performed as the "Adagio for Strings". The strings ascend to a tense dissonance, then stop and return in a mild tonal lower key. If my memory serves, it was played during the time of Kennedy's assassination as a reminder of how life can be cut short. Rests make music music.

But Internet music has interspersed rests where they shouldn't be. They aren't really rests, rather they are transmission breaks. I've been listening to my favorite Internet station, Contemporary-Classical.COM at night. Frequently, very frequently in the middle of some music there's a break. I know it's not supposed to be there, but there it is anyway. Sometimes it's a short one, more often not 2, 3 or more seconds -- disruptive. I don't believe it's the fault of Contemporary-Classical.COM because I hear the same "rests" in other Internet music: Pandora, LastFM, ShoutCast stations, KING live streaming and others. I'm convinced that it's the same "rests" that I see while using the secure shell, SSH, to access another system on the Internet. I'm typing away and ...... everything stops. My keystrokes don't get reflected back and I'm stuck. All too often I get a message that the remote server has disconnected my session. Since I'm somewhat familiar with the Internet technology and I monitor stuff, I see breaks in the connection from my cable modem to the Comcast router which is my gateway to the Internet. SSH breaks and so does Internet music.

On a slightly different subject, some of my initial exposure to some of these Internet music services have left me disappointed with their notion of what constitutes a classical "tune". I was startled to hear the 3rd movement of Mahler's Second Symphony ("Resurrection") played as a stand-alone fragment sandwiched between two non-related selections. The technologists who put these services together need to view classical music through other than a popular lens. Media companies push laws to protect their intellectual property but never seem to protect artistic intent. If Mahler wanted just some of his music to be played independently without context, then he would have written "tunes" and not symphonies.