Binging on classical music

In years time, when mountains of books have been written about the COVID-19 pandemic and our grandkids ask about how we handled ourselves when the virus hit, I can talk about how my musical tastes took a sudden and unexpected shift toward classical music.

Black swan events matter -- we saw it in the 2008 crash, and we're seeing it now.  Human reactions to these unlikely but inherently predictable events are themselves unpredictable.  Nobody knows how they will react if and when they occur, because nobody has any past experience to draw upon.  Would I have taken this deeper dive into classical music if I had read Alex Ross' "The Rest Is Noise" not during the pandemic?  It's hard to say.  If the natural reaction to the pandemic is fear -- fear about one's continued good health, or fear of our everyday way of life being overturned -- then it makes sense to take comfort in music from the more distant past.  We long to turn back the clock to a more comfortable era, to a life with fewer unknowns.  The further back you go, the more you can overcompensate for the uncertainties of today.  Using completely illogical math, transporting back one hundred years produces five times more certainty in understanding the then contemporary world than transporting back only twenty years.  Do I consciously feel any of this?  Of course not, but this is the sort of stuff we all muse about these days ...

I have liked classical music since I was a teenager.  In those days it was a lot of Beethoven and Mozart on cassette, later on it was the odd CD (Stravinsky, Gavin Bryars) and works by some of the key minimalists (Steve Reich, Terry Riley).  Electro-acoustic and other modern experimental works fit into a different category.  Still, as I sit here writing this, I am trying to remember the last time, pre-pandemic, that I bought a true classical CD.  I am quite sure it didn't happen in the 2010's.  My guess would be 2003-4-ish, since those were the last years before filesharing and streaming took over my listening habits, and based on the contents of my music catalogs before and after leaving Canada.  

Then, a few weeks ago, I bought a recording of Sibelius' Second Symphony featuring the Vienna Philharmonic conducted by Leonard Bernstein.  It scratched the Sibelius itch I was feeling at the time and was a performance I was familiar with through Youtube.  

Yesterday, I bought another seven classical CD's.  There was no precedent for this type of purchase in my decades as a music buyer.  I have gone CD shopping hundreds or maybe thousands of times, but this was the first time I went specifically to search for classical music. Third Ear and  Black Hole have exemplary classical sections -- the first based around newer recordings, while the strength of the second is their extensive bargain selection.  The damage included works by Sibelius, Bryars, Shoskatovich, Satie, Mahler, and John Adams.  "The Rest Is Noise" introduced me to many contemporary composers, and I took most strongly to Adams.  

Have I mentioned how pleasant music shopping has become?  This is not a pandemic-related thing, it's a situation that has evolved over the past several years in particular thanks to vinyl's huge comeback and music buying (as opposed to streaming) becoming an ever more specialized pursuit by a small number of hardcore fans.  In the supposed golden years of music stores, the clerks were assholes.  That's just a fact, we all remember Jack Black in High Fidelity and know that his character was anything but a parody.  Working in a music store gave you the social cred to claim that your taste in music was better than anyone's other than your fellow clerks, scoffing at the inferior tastes of your customers was part and parcel of achieving the status of music store clerk.  They were conceited and proud of it, and even the most dedicated customers wouldn't have expected anything less.  

These days, there are no more casual music buyers.  Big box stores are gone, and just about all that's left are tiny shops run by exceedingly nice people that cater to exceedingly loyal customers.  The owners offer you water or coffee, everyone is in each other's face because of the cramped surroundings (ratio of music bin space to floor space: typically > 2:1), and the stores are true social spaces more than they ever were in the so-called glorious past.