Greg Stepanich

Katrina relief could honor area's historic role in American music

No one knows how exactly how bad the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina will prove to be, but at this hour of the early morning, the news from the Gulf Coast is getting worse, with at least 55 people dead, flooding everywhere, houses and businesses destroyed.

Relief efforts are already in full swing in Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama, and no doubt will continue for some lengthy time to come. Those of us who've lived through hurricanes can feel nothing but sadness and empathy for our fellow citizens now enduring this terrible catastrophe.

These things are a tragedy wherever they occur, but I think there's a chance here for a special kind of helping-hands initiative. I'm not going to be able to do anything at this point, except perhaps make a Red Cross contribution (here's a link to help out), but I've got a proposal that might be attractive to someone with some money and muscle:

Simply put, the area of the country that has been pummeled by this pitiless storm is the birthplace of the music the world knows as American. The blues came from the Mississippi Delta, and jazz was born in the Crescent City. (And the blues had a baby, and they named it rock and roll.)

So wouldn't it be wonderful if musicians with real means stepped up and helped out, if only to honor the place where the colloquial style that came to dominate the world's music first saw the light? Perhaps that sounds unnecessarily gimmicky; perhaps it sounds as though I mean that in order to help in an authentic way it be critical that the place being helped be historically significant.

Not at all. I just think that in the days to come we'll be seeing all sorts of heart-rending images from this part of our country, and if there were a relief effort that also reminded people of the area's musical significance, we might be able to more carefully preserve the monuments and special places associated with the rise of American popular music.

This part of the Gulf Coast is sacred to American musical art, and I think a charitable plan that recognized that while at the same time attending to the immediate needs of the people who've lost so much would bring us closer to the secular sacred; in other words, it would at once point out our obligation to our fellow man and point out that our fellow ancestral man did some remarkable things to deepen American culture.

Maybe it will be just for me to make out a check and write in the memo space that I'm giving for immediate need and in honor of our shared culture, too. It's just that I can't help thinking of all the history up there that also took a beating when the big winds rolled in.

Anyway: May good fortune revisit the people of Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama in this time of need. Hang in there. We're all pulling for you.

Bulletin board: News on the piano, organ and chorus fronts

A bulletin board entry today, to take note of some upcoming concerts and other musical matters:

On the piano front: Abram Kreeger has three concerts coming up in the next few months at the Steinway Gallery in Boca.

On Sept. 25, it's the American pianist Koji Attwood, a graduate of Curtis and Juilliard whose bio touts his dedication to contemporary music and features an impressive list of positive reviews.

Elsewhere on the Web, there's attention paid to his performances of music by Anatol Liadov and Scriabin, and he's credited with an arrangement of the Vladimir Horowitz version of Liszt's Rakoczy March, so he's got some affinity with the Russian virtuoso wing of pianism. No program details yet, except that there will be something by Schumann.

On Nov. 20, a concert by the Chinese-American pianist Qi Liu, who's appeared here before in the Palm Beach International Invitiational Piano Competition. Program hasn't been set, but here she is playing the third movement of a piano suite by a young (25) French composer named Francis Kayali. The music's fairly derivative, but there's some fleet fingerwork by this pianist.

On Dec. 10, a performance by the Duo Scarbo. Formerly known as Duo Hammel-Sanchez, they consist of the Puerto Rican pianist Elena Hammel and the Spanish pianist Laura Sanchez. Here's a bit from the Ritual Fire Dance of Manuel de Falla, from a performance in 2002. I like the musicality of this performance excerpt, so I'll be interested to hear how they sound live.

On the organ front: The last of the four Sunday afternoon organ concerts at Bethesda-by-the-Sea in Palm Beach. William Brian Davey of St. Gregory's Episcopal in Boca, Daniel Copher of All Saints Episcopal in Fort Lauderdale, and Mark Jones of First Presbyterian in Pompano Beach are performing; the program includes the so-called St. Anne Prelude and Fugue in E-flat (BWV 552) of Bach, as well as pieces by Petr Eben and Saint-Saëns. The concert starts at 2 p.m.

On the audition front: The Delray Beach Chorale is holding auditions for singers from 11 a.m. to 1 p.m. Sept. 10 and 11 at the First Presbyterian Church at 33 Gleason St. in Delray. You need to be able to sight-read, and rehearsals start Sept. 13. The chorale lists two numbers for information: (561) 865-3354 and (954) 486-9149.

On their holiday program, scheduled for Dec. 11, are the Gloria of Vivaldi, an early Magnificat by a teenage Franz Schubert, and seasonal works.

All of which reminds us that the musical season will be here before we know it.

Tallis motet a soundtrack to storm fears

What's the best music to listen to as a storm rolls in? Does it have to complement the sound of the wind, the sea, the hammering of the rain?

Or should it be something that takes your mind off Nature's racket?

The other weekend I picked up, purely on impulse, a copy at the library of the 40-part motet Spem in alium, written in 1571 by the English composer Thomas Tallis (1505-1585). It's one of this Tudor master's most important works, written for eight five-part choirs, and probably for performance at a now-demolished country house owned by Henry Fitzalan, the 12th Earl of Arundel (according to the notes with this recording, a 1990 Argo all-Tallis disc featuring the King's College Choir under the direction of Stephen Cleobury).

This is a beautiful and massive 9 minutes of music, clearly written with a big space in mind, and utterly evocative of a grandiose form of worship, one that glories in towering interior architecture and the pageantry of ceremony, and the sheer sound of dozens of voices raised in praise. It's hard to hear this music without thinking about who's performing it, and how it looks to see all those choristers arrayed in quintets around the room.

As I've been listening the last day or two while at the same time worrying about Tropical Storm Katrina (not yet a hurricane, but which probably soon will be), the Tallis has become something of a soundtrack to my worry-wartedness. I hear in those thumps of chordal motion the steady approach of something huge and powerful rolling in from over the sea; I hear in its otherworldliness a sense of inevitability that keeps me silent in the face of something I can't control.

It sounds, in other words, like an advance guard of avenging angels, an uninterruptable sound that can't be halted as it grows steadily louder and closer. Maybe this is the fault of seeing too many movies in which a last, shocking act of violence is followed by the balm of a choir singing something ancient — the filmmakers know we need something classic and serene to focus at least part of our minds on the things that are good about human nature.

Or maybe it's just the sheer weight of its sound that keeps me thinking of large, overwhelming things. No matter the reason, I've already associated this lovely piece forever with a storm, and with hurricane season.

Not fair to Tallis, of course. Probably what I need to do is find something to listen to that doesn't sound so elemental.

And it could be that I'm responding to the last lines of the motet and hoping for the best:

Domine Deus,
Creator coeli et terrae
Respice humilitatem nostram.
(Lord God,
Creator of heaven and earth,
Be mindful of our lowliness.)

A sentiment for times of fear, and desperate hope as what we fear bears down on us.

Even if this storm doesn't turn out to be so bad — be safe, everyone.

Magazine celebrates the amateur musician

A magazine for amateur musicians called Making Music is entering its second year of publication in Syracuse, N.Y., and they've sent out an interesting news release to mark that milestone.

So I've headed over to their site to check things out, and it's worth a look. The point of this publication is to cater the community of musical hobbyists out there who aren't schoolchildren and who aren't trying to have a professional career.

That leaves a good many people who picked up an instrument in their younger years, and perhaps now they miss it and wish to get back into that uniquely wonderful feeling of playing music. All genres of music appear to be represented; there's a piece about a community orchestra in Rochester, N.Y., and another about the Mamapalooza Festival, in which moms who still want to kick it slap their rocking shoes back on and jump back on stage at the head of bands with names like Housewives on Prozac.

I recall with real fondness most of the times I've spent playing in various musical ensembles, as a pianist, a French hornist, a guitarist, and even as a member many years ago of a handbell choir. Not only is it healthy to join with others to bring a good piece of music into being, but you can also learn a lot from your fellow scrapers, blowers and pounders.

If the magazine is able to help people get together and form a string quartet, or a jazz combo, or a speed-metal band with anarchist leanings — more power to them. The making of music is for many people shrouded in mystery, as if its practitioners had some access to black magic rituals that gave them insights into the Mixolydian mode not normally granted to humans.

But music is, or should be, such a normal part of the human condition that it's a shame that people who want to join in the fun feel blocked by mistaken impressions of what it's all about. I can't recall where I read this, but some wise person once pointed out that the root of the word "amateur" comes from the Latin for "lover," and it's in that spirit that a real amateur best approaches musical tasks.

The news release the folks at Making Music sent to us ends this way:

If you would be interested in taking advantage of a free year’s subscription (6 issues) to Making Music, please visit http://www.makingmusicmag.com/concir or call (800) 724-9700 x116, and mention that you heard about the magazine in the Palm Beach Post.

I don't know that the Making Music people would consider finding out about their offer through this blog as having heard about it in the Palm Beach Post, but I think it's close enough, and it's worth a shot, if anyone out there is interested. I'll check with them later this week and post an update when I get an answer.

In the meantime, head over to your closet and dust off that violin.

Concerts explore overlooked corners of musical library

In almost any musical genre you care to name, there's going to be a historical and cultural heritage, and great figures who moved the music to new heights. Even more importantly, there are the workaday practitioners of the music who toiled happily in its fields and made it a living, breathing art form.

Each style of music, in other words, has a rich literature and tradition that you discover as you explore the sounds that have bewitched your ears. There are two concerts this weekend that delve into some of these often-overlooked corners of the musical library.

Tonight in Delray, it's a concert by The New Blue, the a cappella women's singing group of Yale University. Judging by the repertoire list on the Web site, this is a pop-music group, with songs by Ani Di Franco, Lauryn Hill, Anita Baker and others.

Unaccompanied vocal ensembles have an ancient history, of course, but there also is a venerable tradition of such groups doing popular music, and the more elaborate and clever the arrangement, the better. The nation's colleges have plenty of these kinds of singing groups, and they offer listeners a chance to hear how music can sound fresh all over again in the context of a choir, and also what songs its arrangers have chosen to turn into performance pieces.

That's why I'm interested in seeing on The New Blue's repertoire list the names of all the arrangers, most of them with class years affixed to the surname. This is the most compelling part for me: How did this writer choose this song? What challenges did it present? Some things that work well with instrumentation, such as a static harmonic background, are much less successful when you have to submit the same music to unaccompanied voices. And in some songs, a percussion effect might be critical. How do you do that and not sound silly?

It's a mighty task, refashioning a pop confection that might have come easily in the course of an afternoon's recording session to its guitar-strumming author into a choral piece for several human beings singing without benefit of instruments. And so I salute all those bending authors, hunched over the manuscript paper, trying to notate all those inexact pop rhythms. Not many people appreciate how hard it is to do what you do.

The New Blue performs at 8 p.m. today at Old School Square.

A friend at work was listening last night to a recording by a vocal group at her alma mater, the University of North Carolina. Since I'm a nice guy, here's a link to the Web site for that band, the UNC Clef Hangers.

On Sunday, it's the third in the four-concert inaugural season of organ music recitals at Bethesda-by-the-Sea in Palm Beach. As I've mentioned before, this series sprung out of a conversation I was having with series organizer Diana Akers, so I'm a little biased.

But the first two concerts were fascinating from the standpoint of musical rarities and the realization that this area has some excellent organ players who know their way around the multiple keyboards and the enormous literature for this instrument.

Tomorrow's concert features a demonstration of the Bethesda instrument's capabilities by Harold Pysher, and performances by Christopher Harrell, organist and choirmaster of St. Philip’s Episcopal Church and School in Coral Gables, and Jay Brooks, organist and music director at Grace Episcopal in West Palm Beach.

The concert starts at 2 p.m. Sunday. At the second concert, which was attended by about 100 people, there weren't enough programs to go around, which is a good problem for a concert series to have. I'm looking forward to this concert and the fourth and final one next week.

Upcoming Beethoven bio probes mystery of creativity

From Edmund Morris' upcoming biography of Beethoven (Beethoven: The Universal Composer), due out in October from the Harper Collins Eminent Lives series:

A distinguishing characteristic of the creative mind is that it can accept reversals of fortune without emotional damage — indeed, process them into something rich and strange. Ordinary psyches often react to bad news with a momentary thrill, seeing the world, for once, in jagged clarity, as if lightning has just struck. But then darkness and dysfunction rush in. A mind such as Beethoven's remains illumined . . .

I don't know quite what to think about this statement on the character of creativity. My first, unfair, impulse is to laugh out loud at its air of pretense, at its genuflecting in the face of the awesome mystery of the creative mind.

Morris himself — author of a standard biography of Theodore Roosevelt and a controversial one about Ronald Reagan — should probably be considered a creative person, so he's writing from the point of view of his own experience. But I'd hazard a guess that it's more likely he's adopted the position that he's merely a faithful recorder of history, not one of its progenitors; that gives him enough critical remove to assess the creative apparatus.

Surely, though, the idea that a creative person can transmute outrageous fortune into something sublime isn't evidence that the mind hasn't suffered emotional damage. A creative mind compartmentalizes, clearly, in order to get the work done while Chaos rules the rest of the world, but does that mean it does not suffer wounds, and is thereby changed?

Could it be argued that some of the music that results from the tragedies great and small is actually proof that there has been emotional damage? For example, much has been made of the increasing number of trills that play so important a part in Beethoven's late music.

Why all those trills? They could be evidence of a longstanding habit of mind, or simply increasing affection for a beloved sound effect. Then again, perhaps they are the way this aurally disabled person made sonic reference to the buzzing of his ears that tormented him for so long.

Or maybe those trills, such as the carpets of them that dominate the last pages of the Op. 111 piano sonata, are the sound of comfort, the sound made by a deeply damaged person trying to calm himself when his rage at the manifestly unsuccessful way his private life turned out threatened to overwhelm him. (Here's a link to the Beethoven Haus site in Bonn.)

I'm reminded, for some reason, of Conrad Aiken's much-anthologized short story, Silent Snow, Secret Snow, about a boy slowly descending into mental illness. The protagonist of that haunting story increasingly chose to escape into the mental pictures of falling snow he had in his head; the sight of the gently dropping screen of white gave him comfort.

I'm not suggesting that Beethoven was on the cusp of craziness, but it could be that the trills he so obsessively wrote into his later scores were a necessary response, an important release, for the mental traumas he had endured and was continuing to endure.

In other words, a creative mind, can indeed transform something horrible into something wonderful, but not without suffering emotional damage. Maybe Morris means something a little different by this phrase — he might mean that the instrument of creativity is still able to function and, importantly, function at a high enough level to continue the work.

Still, the amazing thing about so much great music is that many of the minds and psyches that created it were so profoundly damaged. The creative impulse reigned supreme, and was able to distance itself from the site, so to speak, of the abuse so that the symphony could be written.

But what a shattered wreck that symphony left behind in the shipyard as it embarked for the vast, immortal horizon.

Hindemith Prize goes to triple threat Auerbach

The Hindemith Prize, which carries with it a cash prize of 20,000 euros (as of Friday, when the prize was awarded, that was worth about $24,881) has gone to the young Russian-American composer Lera Auerbach.

She's an impressive talent by any reckoning. Judging by what I heard on the site, she's a fine pianist, and her music trods an interesting path between full Romanticism and the asperities of 20th-century modernism. So you hear textures (in the piano concerto called Wind of Oblivion) and the Piano Trio that summon the ghosts of Rachmaninov and Tchaikovsky, and then she reminds you we've moved on from there with some blunter harmonies.

What I don't hear here are harmonies in which the dissonances pile up simply for the sake of piling up; it seems to me that she chooses her chords carefully, and that her overall language is much milder than that of other contemporary composers, which should make her music more popular. If she were able to match that kind of writing with a stronger melodic profile, she might shoot into much wider recognition.

She's also a writer, as her bio says:

Her literary works include five volumes of poetry and prose, two novels, and numerous contributions to Russian-language literary newspapers and magazines.

All told, very impressive for someone who's just 31 years old.

It's quite humbling and inspiring at the same time to read about, and then hear, the work of someone as gifted and disciplined as Auerbach is. What she still needs is more performances. I can't recall seeing any of Auerbach's music on any of next season's programs that I know about.

This is the problem in general with so much new music. Someone like Auerbach has recordings a plenty and lots of exposure, but what music of any kind needs to survive is live performances, and frequent ones at that. I'm going to get my hands on some more of her music and get a better sense of what this young writer is all about.

In other news: Jeffrey Zeigler, who appeared in Boca earlier this year performing works by Paul Moravec and Paola Prestini, has been named cellist of the Kronos Quartet, the new-music string quartet that has done much over the last couple decades to bring challenging, out-of-the way music to records and concerts.

My review of Zeigler's concert is elsewhere on this blog (March 26). I enjoyed talking to him after the recital; he was generous with his time and happy to discuss the music he had played. He's a fine, dedicated player, and I congratulate him on this new gig, which is one of the more prestigious in the field of contemporary American classical music.

The Kronos has a huge schedule of concerts ahead of it through May, but I don't see a concert near here on the list, sorry to say.

The real Shakespeare: A master propagandist

This week at home, we've been having one of our occasional Shakespeare video mini-festivals. There are numerous screen renditions of the Bard's plays, and Sharon and I like to go through them, following along occasionally with the texts in front of us.

We've got three of the productions the BBC began filming in the 1970s, and we chose them at random from the library shelves — Richard II, The Merry Wives of Windsor and The Winter's Tale. It's edifying and fulfilling to watch the plays and once again marvel at the presence, through beauteous Renaissance English, of a giant, questing intellect bringing itself to bear right there in our living room.

By chance, I happened to discover that on Monday, a book was published that deals with the life of Edward de Vere (1550-1604), the 17th Earl of Oxford, whom many — including me — think was the actual writer of the plays and poems attributed to Shakespeare. The book, by Mark Anderson, is called Shakespeare by Another Name, and it's got its own Web site that you can check out here.

As with all long-lasting controversies, there's a rich literature of debate that's grown up around this question, and for the purposes of this blog I'll direct interested parties to the Shakespeare Oxford Society's Web site.

At first, I found the idea that someone other than William Shakespeare of Stratford was the actual author of the plays to be preposterous, but once you give the theory a chance, you don't see how it could have been anyone else but Oxford. (Here's a link to a piece by Charlton Ogburn, the late champion of the Oxford theory in the U.S.)

What you gradually come to realize, in fact, is that the plays of Shakespeare are nothing less than propaganda, and propaganda of a consistent, and magnificently expressed, kind. Most of the plays deal with the same basic plot device — the central authority in a society has gone astray or relinquished power, and out-of-joint things happen until absolute rule is once again restored.

Just off the top of my head, there's Macbeth, Hamlet, Othello, Lear, Titus, Much Ado, Measure for Measure, Winter's Tale, Tempest — all of these plays are set in motion and resolved by the same turning of the imperial screw (I'm oversimplifying, but that's the macro story).

What better advertisement could there be for the ruling power in the England of Elizabeth I? These plays would have been seen by the court, who would have applauded the message — see what happens when we're not in charge? — and been sure that the same idea got out to the common folk through performances of the plays in the public theaters. "This play was brought to you by the people that run things around here, and don't you forget it.�

I'm not usually an adherent of alternative theories like the Oxford one, because I find that things that seem mysterious on their face are usually explicable through diligent pursual of the facts. But in this case, the plays are so clearly the product of an aristocratic mindset that they don't make a lot of sense interpreted outside of that background.

Walt Whitman, as many Oxfordians have noted, called the Shakespeare plays "unacceptable to Democracy,� or thereabouts, and that's a wonderfully insightful point. It might even be said that the idea of absolutism championed by de Vere more than 400 years ago, and repeatedly taught down the ensuing centuries to countless schoolchildren, has left an unhealthy idea of leadership hanging around in our cultural fabric.

Edward de Vere, poetic genius and master publicist, and the premier defender of the notion that things run better when one person is calling the shots. He may have left a legacy far more extensive than he knew.

Up next: The CGI Symphony

Here's more proof that even if you write ostensibly stuffy symphonic music, you can find an audience:

The Associated Press reports about the success of Video Games Live, a new series of orchestral concerts featuring music written for popular video games. This is a link to the concert site; I think my favorite ad on this thing is the note about a "composer/designer meet and greet" at one of these events. You've just got to love it.

"Why yes, Jimmy, I did think an oboe was the perfect way to express the impending vaporization of the Undersea Demons. Why do you ask?�

This is the kind of thing that classical composers have been dying to be part of for a long time. Those of us who write this kind of music would like, every once in a while, to be treated like a celeb if we come up with something good.

What's particularly interesting is how the composers have found a way to reach classical nirvana — big concerts of their orchestral music — in another fashion than the traditional one of cranking out a large piece on commission for a far-off orchestra, or for a contest, or even for the sheer joy of it. You might wait forever for all that work to reach its greatest realization in the old-fashioned way, but with the video game scores, you write the music, and you get a devoted fan base for extras.

Of course, you want the music to be as good as you can make it for the gamers, but at some point what you write has to have integrity as music, too. And who's to say that you don't write at your most authentically when you're scoring a high-speed chase in a CGI universe?

Ultimately, it's all about the music, and I'll be wandering the Web trying to check some of this stuff out, not being all that big a fan of the games. If anyone's got a favorite video game score, let me know so I can check it out.

Copyright, yours truly: In the meantime, I've done some more music of my own for the Web, this time with some background music for a flash presentation of a few nature photos. We couldn't use much of the music, which was rather long originally in order to accommodate many more photos.

Here's a link to the full piece; it's not played or recorded particularly well, and it's kind of wallpapery mood music, but I wanted to put up a link while it's still available.

'Too much product': The orchestra debate revives

There's a dustup in the blogosphere about some comments offered by Joseph Horowitz, whose new book Classical Music in America I've read and reviewed (my piece hasn't run yet). I very much liked the book, I'll say right off the bat, even though I didn't agree with everything he said or implied.

I've mentioned one of my disagreements in an earlier blog entry, but overall, I thought Horowitz did a good job of summing up the place this music has had in our country, as well as the effect of its marketing, particularly in the last half of the 20th century.

But on a Washington radio program Monday (on which he appeared with Tim Smith of The Baltimore Sun, formerly the classical critic for the Sun-Sentinel), Horowitz said at least one thing that has the cybercommunity chattering. America's orchestras are putting out "too much product," he said, and have to figure out a way to give fewer concerts.

Over at his Adaptistration blog, which covers issues arising from orchestra management, Drew McManus has an angry riposte-post (and links to another blog with a similar post); I've commented on that blog but thought I'd expand a little bit on my small comment over there.

On the one hand, the comment bothered me because I didn't recall running into that attitude while I was reading his book (which I did twice, cover to cover); the ending of the book is rather open-minded and suggests that renewal for classical music could come from an infusion of postmodernist energy or a return to older norms of musical culture in which composers such as John Adams are more engaged in the performance side of things.

So I pulled down the book again, and there it is, on page 538, in the penultimate paragraph:

. . . as elsewhere, there is too much classical-music "product" for the present-day classical music market. And, behind the scenes, there is far too little music-making in home and school.

Well, it says bad things about me that I missed this both times I went through the book (I knew I would find it if I looked, because writers tend to want to spout their formulations via voce as well as print). My only defense is that it's at the very end, and there's quite a bit more to the book than this. Still, it didn't register.

Now that it has, I have to say that looked at one way, the market as it has traditionally been conceived and marketed to is smaller than it used to be, and I suppose you could argue that if you're thinking only of the market as is, then you might be dealing with an oversupply situation.

But creative entrepreneurs offer the best rejoinder here: They create a market you didn't know you had or needed. Looked at coldly, who would have thought Howard Schultz could have made such a fortune marketing high-end coffee? Where was the market for that when he started out?

And former Miamian Jeff Bezos at Amazon? He's had any number of worthies tell him his idea for a great big online retail shop would never work, that there was no market at all for people buying books over the computer. Which was correct. There was no market for it until Bezos invented one.

Without sounding like a Nasdaq ad, it was the ideas these guys had that mattered. Their ideas plugged into something inchoate, but rising, in the American public, and now people routinely follow not only the sales and expansion plans of Starbucks, but the culture Schultz created along with it.

Amazon, too: In addition to creating a different kind of convenience shopping, Amazon linked like-minded people, having them write reviews and offering them the chance to buy products Amazon didn't have through a network of outside shops.

The same thing applies to music. Reggae is a niche art form, for example, but it's far larger than it would have been without Bob Marley, who defined it for most outsiders and whose melodies were infectious enough to permanently define what Jamaican pop music is all about for new generations.

Classical's livelihood could ultimately come to depend on a new major figure, probably a composer, who can assemble all the disparate pieces of his or her universe and forge a music that reaches millions. Beethoven and Wagner, to cite two composers off the cuff, invented syntheses that changed what art music meant and still help define it today. In so doing, they created new and much larger markets, expanding their reach from the cognoscenti to the man in the street.

If that composer does come along, perhaps he or she will reenergize the older paradigms for classical music tradition (the ones with too much product), and then again, maybe not. What will matter is how much that music means to a wide variety of people, and that's what a healthy musical culture is all about.

So I don't think even for the market that's there today, that there's anywhere near too much product; probably the reverse, considering how passionate the classical music community is. The marketing itself needs to adapt itself to the way society has changed (I've written before about podcasts of concerts, for example), and if the solution is creative enough, the music will find a ready audience, and one that will expand.

Ah, Bartleby! Time for some great books

I suppose old Charles W. Eliot would be pleased to see his 5-foot Shelf of Knowledge available online as easy as clicking this link, though he probably would have been wistful about the time he wandered into a distant library somewhere off the beaten and found those leather volumes occupying pride of place and illuminating the masses.

I've been browsing through the 70 volumes of the Harvard Classics at bartleby.com, and while it doesn't have the gravitas of the books, it has this going for it: While you might be able to wander into a decent bookstore and find any number of editions of the great Greek playwrights or short stories by Mark Twain, it's going to be a lot tougher to lay your hands on a copy of Sir Thomas Browne's Religio Medici or Joseph Lister's paper on antiseptic practices during surgery.

And if you've got to have Browne, you've got to have him. And so off you go to the site.

Still, there's something to be said about the trouble of going to get a book, of searching it out, stalking it in antiquarian shops, finally laying your hands on it and seeing what the master had to say. At which point the book turns back into words again, and you're communing with the thoughts more than you are the physical reality of the book.

I think I'll be using the site whenever I need a quick reference to something classic that I don't have in my own library, but if I really want to read the thing cover to cover, I'll still go ahead and get it in book form, despite that all its text is here, for free, for the taking. I can't see ever wanting to stop heading out to the backyard on a beautiful weekend day, cracking open a book and losing myself in it for a couple of hours.

A simple pleasure, made available by a basic, durable technology. You can't outdo that, but it's good that today's tech makes all of the texts available so easily when there's little time for anything else.

I imagine there are many of us out there who feel the same way; I'd be happy to hear your thoughts.