Restarting at the end of summer

It's been a slow summer musically for me, just two Colorado Music Festival concerts: Mahler's Fourth and Prokofief's Third piano concerto. Most of the CMF season had little appeal, focusing on "world" music, whatever that is. Fortunately I've got lots of MP3's and CDs along with an Internet radio so it was exactly quiet.

I've just finished an interesting book related to music Steve Knopper's "Appetite for Self-Destruction: The Spectacular Crash of the Record Industry in the Digital Age". It is an interesting history of the decline of an industry I've been purchasing from since I was an eleven year old paper-boy. My first record purchase was Pierre Monteux conducting Stravinsky's "Petrouchka" and the "Firebird Suite", a 1957 RCA LP which I still have. I can remember as a young kid pretending to conduct "Petrouchka" in my bedroom with it blasting away, driving my mother crazy.

Knopper describes the disintegration of the industry that allowed my love of classical music grow, though his focus is primarily on the personalities involved in "pop" music: disco, rock-and-roll, rap, country-and-western, etc. He names weirdly-named performers/bands along with the executives involved in this strange business. Classical music is essentially ignored, with only one reference to anyone I even recognized -- Phillip Glass. "Appetite" traces the introduction of the CD, the war against Napster, the RIAA's attack on their customers, and explains the dreary state of the recording industry today. I concluded that this industry, lead by the RIAA, is why we now have legal desecration of broadcast classical music.

Earlier this summer I communicated with an executive of an Internet radio station. He responded to my complaint about the tyranny of the track -- playing individual tracks from a piece of classical music, rather than the whole work. He said "unfortunately that's a licensing constraint; not something we do by choice." So with the rapid decline of classical music on FM radio, classical fans are left with Internet radio. There we can thank a clump of thoughtless lawyers for demeaning our music.

What gets to me is that some pieces are played in its entirety. The other night I heard a complete performance of "Scheherazade", about 25 minutes worth of music. Then later I heard a single movement of Glass's "Mishima" String Quartet, a whole minute and a half. That's just ludicrous.

The last year has shown the "best and brightest" on Wall Street weren't so talented after all. Recording industry executives and their lawyers clearly are the same.