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Seedy Sales

November 2009 Nicely in time for the great Annual Festival of Shopping and Gluttony (still quaintly known as Christmas in the English-speaking world), the 'Gramophone Classical Music Guide 2010' is now available from all good stockists. This musical bible, 'the most authoritative guide to the best classical recordings', boasts more than 3000 CD reviews, all written by the 'world's leading critics', and a 'definitive diamond rating' of the greatest recordings. The quantity and quality of reviews and reviewers is truly impressive and (on paper at least) unique.

Now, by most measures, the CD is a brilliant invention; it has given people unprecedented access to centuries of the finest music from all over the world, performed by excellent musicians. And whereas pop culture has embraced the low-fi mp3 download (the throwaway nature of pop 'music' neither demanding nor deserving a reliable preservation medium), the 'lossless' audio quality of the CD continues to guarantee its survival as the best repository of recorded art music.

Yet most CDs are far more product than document, manufactured to make money for companies and shareholders having little real interest in music as art. As a consequence, retail CDs are - with very few exceptions that also prove the thesis - massively overpriced; and most of the industry uses a shamefaced scale of euphemisms to partially disguise this fact, ranging from 'full price' - actually meaning 'very expensive' ("lots of profit to pay for big star advertising, management salaries, first-class air travel and suites in swanky hotels all round etc") - down to 'super-budget', meaning 'not necessarily cheap' ("considerably more than the couple of dollars/euros/pounds you might have been hoping").

And the annual Gramophone Guide, along with the media multinationals inevitably lurking in the shadows, pushing their products to the professional critics, perpetuates the idea that we consumers, music lovers secondarily, must keep on reading, keep on buying, keep on building up our precious Collections, so that we don't miss out on such and such's outstanding new interpretation of a work we all thought we already owned the most outstanding version of, because the Guide's unique diamond rating persuaded us to buy it a couple of years back. Regardless of their expertise and their love of art music, reviewers are co-opted salesmen, their role being primarily to persuade people to buy things (or occasionally, to buy something else instead). At the amateur level, the reviewer's incentive will be a free copy of the CD; professional critics keep the CD, get paid for the same write-up, and see their name in lights (albeit small ones).

As a result of these sales drives, there are many individuals - mainly middle-class, older white males, the main audience for European art music - who might almost spend more time reading reviews, ordering CDs, installing additional storage space in their spare room and (invariably) cataloguing their collections, than they do actually listening to music.

That isn't an exaggeration: a collection of, say, 2500 CDs (or LPs) - by no means an unusually high figure among the types who buy the Guide - would take around 2500 hours to listen to end to end; that's equivalent to nearly a year's worth of listening for those with the luxury of listening for 8 hours a day; so 4 years for a more reasonable (but still quite generous) 2 hours a day.

And that's listening to everything once. Of course, the more times you listen to a piece of art music, the more you stand to get out of it; it wouldn't be unreasonable to many music lovers to listen to Beethoven's last string quartets or piano sonatas once a week. So give that collection the benefit of at least the double hearing virtually every piece deserves, and you double the above listening periods. To give everything a far from inappropriate annual airing would require the full 8-hour day after all.

If the collector can't do that - and presumably there will be many that can't - then why have the collection in the first place? Why have 10 or 20 different Ring cycles or sets of Brahms or Mahler symphonies, when it is to all intents and purposes practically impossible to do even one of each the justice the music merits?

The answer can be found, of course, within the pages of the Gramophone Guide, which, with the help of numerous other review compendia (of which Gramophone has coincidentally another out, a joint venture with - surprise, surprise - Classic FM, entitled (bovinely) 'Classical Music: The 111 Greatest Works', squarely aimed at the Classic FM (middlebrow) end of the market), has made the collecting of recordings of art music something unedifyingly fetishistic. CDs (like LPs before them) are strangely addictive to certain types (like shoes, books or recipes to others), and those with sufficiently high incomes can find themselves drawn in by the seductive words of the critic (especially if the CD has nice cover artwork!), and before they know it they're persuaded they need another 'definitive' rendition of Bruch's first violin concerto or Chaikovsky's first piano concerto by the latest DG/Warner protégé.

And impressive though the resulting collection is in its way, it's actually one of physical artifacts rather than music, which the collectors no longer have enough time to listen to properly even if they had two lifetimes. The music - entertainment - industry loves these people, and it's primarily for them that it publishes the Gramophone Guide* every year.

* And Gramophone's monthly magazine itself, only about one quarter of which is not dedicated to selling products.

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