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Steve Metcalf has been writing about the musical life of this region, and the wider world, for more than 30 years. For 21 of those years, he was the full-time staff music critic of The Hartford Courant. During that period, via the L.A. Times/Washington Post news service, his reviews, profiles and feature stories appeared in 400 newspapers worldwide.He is also the former assistant dean and director of instrumental music at The Hartt School, where he founded and curated the Richard P. Garmany Chamber Music Series. He is currently Director of the Presidents' College at the University of Hartford. Steve is also keyboardist emeritus of the needlessly loud rock band Duke and the Esoterics.Reach him at spmetcalf55@gmail.com.

Goodbye to All That

Rob Choucroun
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Creative Commons
I know we're not supposed to get too attached to mere things in this world, but I have enjoyed my recordings.

Socio-technological bulletin:

I have decided to get rid of my CDs.

I’ve been thinking about it for a while, and I believe it’s time. I’ve pretty much crossed over to the download/streaming side, and I just don’t play the discs much anymore.

No doubt I’ll simply give a lot of them away – assuming that libraries and schools still want CDs.

Some of the ones that I paid good money for I might put on eBay or something.

In any case I have lot of sorting and deciding to do. Which ones will I “rip” into my iTunes library and which will I simply let go of, never to hear again? And should I buy one of those industrial- strength music players that feature a giant hard drive, so that at least a goodly portion of my library will be in some sense still “mine?”

I should say here that we’re talking about several thousand discs. I haven’t counted them in many years, but it’s a big number.

My jumbo collection is partly the result of professional circumstance: For 20-odd years, beginning in the early 80s, I was the classical music writer/critic/editor at The Hartford Courant. As it happened, CDs at that time were just beginning to replace vinyl records. And they were energizing the industry. Record labels, in addition to issuing torrents of new releases, began to re-package their back catalogues onto the CD format. (And why not – the silvery little wafers reportedly cost less than $2 to make, and could be sold in the stores for $15 or more, even for albums that had long since covered their original investment.)

Credit Börkur Sigurbjörnsson / Creative Commons
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Creative Commons
CDs

Everybody wanted attention from the press. So the labels would send out review copies of nearly every title they issued – new or old – in the hope that newspaper people like me would write about them. At the Courant, the classical titles – and certain other categories that nobody seemed interested in, like film and Broadway music -- would wind up on my desk. It’s almost embarrassing to think about the volume of discs that would pour in, with each day seemingly bringing padded parcels from Sony Classical, EMI, Polygram, Telarc, and dozens of other labels large and small. It wasn’t unheard of for a hundred discs to pile up in a single week.

For a kid who had grown up able to squeeze out, at best, maybe an album or two a month, from the lone record store back in my hometown of Schenectady, this was pretty dazzling. As one of my mildly jealous friends put it, the Publisher’s Clearing House Sweepstakes of Music.

I would purchase a lot of discs, too.

At the dawn of the CD transition, my wife, correctly sensing a gathering storage crisis, said to me, “You’re not going to go and replicate your LP collection on CD, are you?”

“Of course not. That would be foolish and redundant. I can’t believe you would ask such a question.”

Yet, of course, full replication was eventually achieved. And by eventually I mean within a year or two.

And once it was achieved, I gave away my vinyl LPs – several thousand of them. (Incidentally, I am not one of those who believes that vinyl records are necessarily superior to CDs, nor do I think that, beyond the limited world of audio enthusiasts, they are destined to make a “comeback.”)

Credit Quinn Dombrowski / Creative Commons
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Creative Commons
We Be's Gettin' Down

I know we’re not supposed to get too attached to mere things in this world, but I have enjoyed my recordings. I have enjoyed tending to them, and I have enjoyed being the guy people called when they needed to borrow some obscure title.  

But in recent years, it has all become slightly oppressive. After a while, having installed as much built-in shelf space as I could, I found I had to institute a policy not unlike the one now used at many state prisons: a new arrival had to be offset by a current incumbent being set free.

I have given away literally thousands of discs.

Still, mysteriously, the numbers continued to creep up.

I almost never buy a disc, but a trickle of promotional copies still comes to my home. My cataloging and organization of the titles, once admirably disciplined, has slipped. My disc stewardship is sliding into a kind of Grey Gardens territory.

Rifling through the discs, in preparation for divestment, is  poignant. So many hopeful young pianists, violinists, quartets, singers, entire orchestras. So many composers, “world premiere” recordings; so many atmospheric album titles that didn’t quite work.

Here’s an Eastern European piano trio, with a very bad cover photo, playing repertoire I’ve never heard of on a label I’ve never heard of. Here’s a disc featuring a smiling young tenor singing operetta chestnuts; the disc, I notice, is now 20 years old – I wonder if that tenor is even still in the business. Here’s a no-name Russian or Baltic orchestra and here’s another, and another. 

Some of these discs, reprehensibly, I never found time to listen to at all, or even unwrap. (Why do I say reprehensibly? I couldn’t have listened to all of these discs if I had devoted every waking moment to them.)

Some of these discs will be easy to part with. But many – most, I would say – will not. I might not reach very often for the one and only recorded version of Elgar’s “The Banner of St. George,” but it’s been nice knowing that it’s over there on the middle shelf in the downstairs office, just to the right of Sir Edward’s “The Kingdom” and some of his other lesser known choral efforts.

Credit Urko Dorronsoro / Creative Commons
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Creative Commons
CD Art

I expect my CD purge to feel liberating. Still, the idea of owning the music, of possessing it, is hard to let go of. Especially in the LP days, the record somehow was the music – with the often-beautiful cover art, the crisp and necessarily concise liner notes, and the beauty of the very disc itself, with its shiny black grooves promising a pleasure that, unlike most, would be deep and endlessly repeatable.

Converting my collection, at this point in my life, to electronic files, or even just reconciling myself to the idea of streaming -- a la carte -- from some vast cloud-based repository, is really no big deal. I’ve already extracted from these discs the thrill of discovery, as well as the aforementioned satisfaction of ownership and display.

But I do wonder how the disappearance of recordings as physical objects will alter the relationship that younger people have to music. Virtually the entire universe of recorded music is available to them at a click. And it’s so easy, so tempting, in fact, to pull the plug on a new or unfamiliar piece after just a few minutes. Thumbs Down. Skip Track. Gone.

Conversely, it’s so easy to use the new algorithms to stay within your pre-established musical comfort zone. Enjoyed that piece? Here’s another dynamite track that you’re sure to like, too!

I guess young listeners will figure it out. After all, the new generation seems at least as passionate about music as we were.

I’m glad I have been able to experience, and partake of, the digital revolution.

But I’m also grateful that I grew up in the pre-digital age, and that I had the chance to while away endless hours in record stores, often crowded little mom-and-shop joints with bins full of quirky, far-flung titles. And even as I prepare to let them all go, I savor the memory of selecting and bringing home a new recording from one or another of those stores– an experience that almost always enriched my life, and not infrequently changed it.

Real Men Don’t Listen to String Quartets

I think I can accept a little good-natured classical music bashing as well as the next man. But there’s a new TV commercial for the Dodge Challenger that is too stupid to go unremarked on.

In the ad, a guy driving a Challenger is pulled over for, apparently, not driving aggressively enough. One of the interrogators, who for some reason happens to be a small bear, then notices the music on the guy’s sound system.

“Is that chamber music?” the bear asks, disdainfully. The man sheepishly nods, and is, like, ordered out of the car. So the implication is that this guy who listens to chamber music is not man enough to sit behind the wheel of a Dodge.

Ridiculous. I happen to know that Jeff Gordon is a huge fan of the Shostakovich String Quartets, especially the late ones, and particularly favors the Brodsky Quartet’s Teldec interpretations, for, as Jeff puts it, their laserlike intonation and rhythmic incisiveness. 

Steve Metcalf was The Hartford Courant’s fulltime classical music critic and reporter for over 20 years, beginning in 1982. He is currently the curator of the Richard P. Garmany Chamber Music Series at The Hartt School. He can be reached at spmetcalf55@gmail.com.

Steve Metcalf is an administrator, critic, journalist, arts consultant and composer. He writes the weekly Metcalf on Music blog for WNPR.org, and is the curator of the Richard P. Garmany Chamber Music Series at The Hartt School.

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