Bernard Haitink RIP, and is classical music worthless?

When I was first encountering recorded classical music in the 1980's (mainly on cassette tape!), Haitink and von Karajan were the default conductors, their names were on practically anything.  Both enjoyed long and exceedingly prolific careers, and indeed made it a point to record just about everything of note in the standard repertoire, often multiple times.  Recently, I was shocked to discover that he was still actively conducting at age 90, his skills very much intact.    

Just yesterday I was listening to Haitink's recording of Shostakovich's 15th Symphony, coupled with the song cycle "From Jewish Folk Poetry".  In this instance, the "B-side" outshines the main event, Haitink had a sympathetic ear for Jewish themes, his acclaimed recording of Shostakovich's 13th Symphony providing another example.  Haitink reportedly claimed he got his breaks in the music industry only because of better talents being lost to the Holocaust.  That's a debt that can never be repaid, but I'd like to think that he had a mission to fulfill by recording historically fascinating compositions such as these.  "From Jewish Folk Poetry" is equal parts solemn lament and joyous celebration of life, Haitink was equally adept at conducting both styles.  

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Dave Hurwitz's latest rant, titled "How the industry made classical music worthless", goes to show that the music industry's follies transcend genres and span multiple generations of fans.  I agree that classical record companies made a ludicrous mistake by abandoning the prospects of mass marketing in the early 1950's, when every other major genre realized there were mountains of money to be made by selling records.  I wouldn't say that the music is worthless these days, but the reasons for the CD's decline is no different for classical music than for the other genres I've been writing about all these years.  Fans feel swindled by the record companies for paying inflated CD prices from the inception of the medium through the early 2000's.  Once CD burning technologies became installed in nearly every computer, and fans realized that their formerly exalted discs cost pennies to produce (but were routinely sold for upwards of $15-20), an entire generation of paying music fans were lost forever to filesharing and later streaming services.  

As noted by Hurwitz, multiple repackagings have exhausted even the most hardcore fans and diluted the market with inferior products -- this is certainly true for pop and rock as well.  Essentially the entire middle of the market has been hollowed out, leaving only the most dedicated fans willing to shell out money for special conversation pieces (180 gram vinyl re-releases with expanded artwork, Record Store Day exclusives, etc) and those who are happy to dabble in paid or free streaming services and have no use for a physical product.  

One could argue that Haitink and Karajan contributed to this by oversaturating the market and ruining things for future generations, but I personally would not (and not just out of respect for Haitink's recent passing).  Karajan supposedly sold hundreds of millions of records and is still a notable name more than thirty years after his death, he was unquestionably doing something right.   

The war against genres is over

I used to hate genre labels.  Privately, I wanted to hatch a master plan to eliminate them completely.  These labels are supposed to divide music into convenient, easily digestible categories, thereby directing the interested listener to what he or she wants to hear, for example, in helping you browse through large inventory in a music store.  However, my chief complaint was that genres actually misdirect people.  Cross pollination across genres had made simple categorization impossible and attempting to shoehorn everyone into a single genre was doing their art a disservice.  Fans had illogical and stupid negative associations with particular genres ("nobody listens to techno!" or  "I like everything except rap and country") that prevented listeners from exploring new types of music. The only solution, I thought, was to alphabetize everything and let the listeners work out what they wanted, free from the genre labels.  This would make the job of journalists and record store employees a bit harder, but would force them to earn their pay by describing the music more colourfully and making informed recommendations by drawing on their (alleged) wealth of experience.  

Twenty years later, and of course the world has changed.  Streaming radio based on algorithms, beginning with Pandora, were able to tailor their broadcasts to the personal taste of the listener.  Genre boundaries came crashing down as the program would collate the music you actually liked and remarkably got better at the task the more you listened.  These days, Google and Youtube recommendations are so advanced, they know my tastes better than I do a lot of the time.  Autoplay meets my approval far more often than not.  As we all know, brick and mortar stores have mostly faded away.  Apps can direct you to great music far better than any craggy record store clerk ever could.

My private war is now moot.  Lately, I enjoy comparing Spotify and Apple Music playlists. Spotify has more tantalizing moods and eclectic playlist ideas than I know what to do with.  A "shoegaze classics" playlist contains many of the usual suspects (but not always their most obvious tracks) but also a broad selection of lesser known bands.  It's a playlist far more steeped in deep cuts and I'm likely to get a few new (new to me) band recommendations each time I listen.  On the other hand, Apple's comparable playlist has a more straightforward selection of bands and songs, and seems to aim at linking fans of different groups rather than curating the best shoegaze songs.  For instance, The Cure's "Plainsong" isn't shoegaze in the least, but I don't know a single fan of the music who doesn't like The Cure, so it's a fair choice.  But Oasis' "Don't Look Back In Anger"?  That's a major algorithm fail.

Neither approach is intrinsically better.  Sometimes you prefer the hits, sometimes the more obscure stuff.  It's all good!   I approve of our computer overlords, etc.