Free music - so what's new?

'Music industry finds the solution to its pirate troubles - give everything away' - screams a Guardian headline. Sorry folks, but the classical sector has been giving away music for years. Here from my current Visa bill are the prices I paid for CDs online recently including delivery: Messiaen Des canyons aux étoiles (2CDs) - £4.00, Dallapiccola choral works - £3.41, Stockhausen piano works - £4.22, Elgar Dream of Gerontius (2CDs) - £5.67.

It actually gets worse in the stores. Just last week I bought 10CDs of Thomas Tallis' complete works in recordings made as recently as 2004 for £3 a CD, and that wasn't discounted. In HMV stores you can currently pick up 14CDs of the complete Mahler symphonies by classical music's premium brands, Simon Rattle and the Berlin Philharmonic, for £1.79 a disc. That means a Mahler CD from our industry's most prestigous band now costs less than a cappuccino, and it's not expanding the market for classical music or filling concert halls at all.

So with prices already at rock-bottom what will be the impact of free downloads from Qtrax and others? Classical music will become just another disposable commodity. Download it, give it a quick listen, it doesn't appeal on first hearing? No problem, delete it and try again. Contemporary composers had better start thinking catchy, and record companies (if any survive) had better start thinking instant gratification.

Benjamin Britten had it nailed when he wrote 'Music demands more from a listener than simply the possession of a tape-machine or a transistor radio. It demands some preparation, some effort, a journey to a special place, saving up for a ticket, some homework on the programme perhaps, some clarification of the ears and sharpening of the instincts. It demands as much effort on the listener's part as the other two corners of the triangle, this holy composer, performer and listener'

So what does a dead composer (European to boot) know about today's market with its MP3s and iTunes? The answer is a lot. Britten wasn't just a composer, he was a musical polymath whose vision created one of the few successful, and growing, classical music communities in the world. Last year Aldeburgh Music sold 91,000 tickets. I wonder how many bargain basement Berlin Philharmonic Mahler boxes EMI has sold in the UK - 5000 perhaps? The solution for the music industry isn't to give everything away. It's the opposite. Think added value, think Glossa, think Soli deo Gloria, but above all think Alia Vox.

Now playing is Jordi Savall's newly released Francisco Javier 1506-1553, the Route to the Orient on Alia Vox. Yes, it comes with 2CDs of lovingly researched and performed music, but there is much more in the form of a 273 page colour book (cover above) which is a work of art in itself. In it there are fascinating and scholarly articles ranging from early music performance, to Erasmus of Rotterdam, Niccolo Machiavelli, Thomas More, and Martin Luther, as well as Francisco Xavier, who was an early Jesuit missionary, himself. And the whole package is worth far more than the sum of the parts. I paid £30 for it in Prelude Records in Norwich, and that is the best £30 I have spent on recorded music for a long time. I didn't get two CDs for my money, I got a unique musical experience. And that is what will rejuvenate the market, not giveaways.

Britten would have approved. The Route to the Orient is about as far from instant gratification as you can go. It demands preparation by reading the book, and it also demands effort to understand the non-Western music that it explores. You must leave your computer and take a journey to a special place called an independent record store to buy it, and you will also need to save up as it is not available online at a discount or as a download. The thoughtfully planned multi-cultural programme needs to be understood, and clarification of the ears and sharpening of the instincts are definitely needed for close encounters with instruments such as the shinobue, nokan, sarod and shakuhachi.

Are added value projects like Francisco Javier, the Route to the Orient and Christopher Columbus, Lost Paradises (below) the future of classical music? Or are they just small ripples in a big pond? Only time will tell. But I haven't heard Alia Vox talking about mass redundancies, and their 2008 release schedule looks pretty healthy. Which is more than can be said for EMI.


It was Philip Glass who said world music is the new classical.
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Soli Deo Gloria

Photograph by Steve McCurry; he provides the cover images for John Eliot Gardiner's cycle of Bach cantatas described in this post, open this link to see more images by this superb photographer.
Musician owned record labels have already been the subject of postings on On An Overgrown Path, including Sir Peter Maxwell Davies' MaxOpus, Michael Nyman with MN Records, The Sixteens' Corro label, the Brodsky Quartet, and even as I type this the London Philharmonic Orchestra announce the launch of their own label. But the acid test for any recording project is whether the artists have anything important to say. With his latest recording venture John Eliot Gardiner, the Monteverdi Choir, and the English Baroque soloists with distinguished soloists pass that test with flying colours (this choir also brought us the superb Santiago a Cappella disc mentioned in my Pilgrimage post).

The project started with the Bach Pilgrimage. This performed and recorded all Bach's surviving church cantatas on the appropriate feast day in a single year starting in Weimar on Christmas Day in 1999, and travelling to a different venue for each group of performances. The logistics of the project were mind-boggling, with 198 cantatas to perform in various locations throughout the year. Underpinning the project was a contract with Deutsche Grammophon, then owned by Canadian drinks conglomerate Seagrams, to record and issue all the cantatas on CD.

But with the pilgrimage successfully completed, and with all the cantatas on tape, came the sting. With just a handful of releases on the shelves DG pulled the plug on the project. The main reason given was too many rival versions in an already crowded market (including one from the innovative super-budget label Brilliant Classics). But DG clearly also had their eyes focussed on loftier artistic projects such as their 2000 release of guitarist Goran Sollscher playing arrangements of the Beatles music, plus an inexorable orchestral piece by their producer George Martin (interesting URL in that link - http://www.sirgeorgemartin.com/ - gives a whole new meaning to the word surtitles!)

In a classic knights move John Eliot Gardiner turned obstacle to advantage, and created his own record label to release the cantatas. And in a brilliant piece of nose-thumbing at DG the new label is called Soli Deo Gloria, meaning to the Glory of God alone, which Bach wrote at the bottom of his manuscripts. And of course Soli Deo Gloria abbreviates to SDG. (Universal Music's dubious financial machinations failed to save their bottom line, as profits tumbled they were sold to the now collapsed French conglomerate Vivendi run by the financier Jean Marie Messier who eventually was taken into custody under suspicion of financial misappropriation and insider dealing, presumably he will blame it all on file sharing?) .

But SDG is not just a vehicle to market recordings that were already on the shelf. Even before hearing the music it is clear that Gardiner has created a thing of beauty. Every part of this project has been brilliantly thought through. The two mid-priced CDs that make up each release in the series are beautifully packaged in a wallet which thankfully fits into standard CD storage slots (the complete set will comprise around fifty-one CDs so storage space is a consideration!)



The covers are graced by contemporary photographs by Steve McCurry, and there are informative notes in the form of a pilgrimage diary by Gardiner (will this journal see the light of day as a book? - I have Tallis Scholar's Director Peter Philip's book on the shelf for summer holiday reading). Even the practicalities have been thought through. It can be difficult to open the shrink-wrap on CD wallet packaging without damaging the card, SDG have thoughtfully split their shrink-wrap into to two easy-to-open sections. Card sleeves for the CDs can result in damage, but here the discs are held in place by embossed retainers.

But what about the music? The performers are, of course, of the highest order. The soloists change with location. Volume 8 which I bought features Katherine Fuge soprano, Robin Tyson alto, Mark Padmore tenor, and Thomas Guthrie bass. All the recordings are made live in concert, but are patched where necessary with takes from a complete rehearsal performance in the same venue. This allows for obvious fluffs and audience intrusions (including applause) to be edited out.



The music making is quite superb, and the unique aural 'footprint' of each venue, and sense of spontaneity of a live performance, more than compensate for any minor compromise arising from not using a conventional studio location. The venues for Volume 8 which covers the fifteenth and sixteenth Sundays after Trinity are Unser Lieben Frauen in Bremen, and (joy of joys) Santo Domingo de Bonaval in Santaigo de Compostela. The Executive Producer is Isabella de Sabata , who is John Eliot Gardiner's partner, and previously happened to be a senior executive at, you guessed it, DG.

Bach's sacred cantatas are one of the triumphs of western civiliation. John Eliot Gardiner and his collaborators have complimented them with their own masterly presentation, which puts into perspective the shabby policies of DG and their corporate peers. There has been speculation as to whether SDG will be able to complete their journey by releasing every cantata. For me completeness is a highly desirable luxury, meanwhile we should relish every issue in this remarkable series.

Any copyrighted material on these pages is included as "fair use", for the purpose of study, review or critical analysis only, and will be removed at the request of copyright owner(s). Report broken links, missing images and errors to - overgrownpath at hotmail dot co dot uk