Apple Music might be a game changer.
I have seen the future of music.
I think.
I’m speaking here of Apple Music, the new music streaming service just introduced by our good friends out in Cupertino.
I have been unscientifically fooling around with the trial version for a couple of weeks now, and despite some issues that are irritating but seemingly solvable, I would venture to say we’re looking at the next big thing.
Of course, there have been streaming services for several years now. And I have used them, periodically and half-heartedly. I have semi-positive feelings about Spotify, although I have been unimpressed by Spotify’s level of interest in anything other than the pop/rock world.
Why does it seem that Apple’s entry might be the game changer? Answer: Because it’s Apple.
You might recall that there were a number of portable MP3 music players in the marketplace back in the fall of 2001. Then the iPod appeared. Can you now recall a single one of those other players?
Similarly, tablet computers had been kicking around for a few years before the iPad made its bow. A few of them have survived, but we now call them all iPads.
Classical music is more accessible on Apple Music than other streaming platforms.
I have mostly been interested in how Apple Music handles classical music, and to a lesser extent, jazz. This is not just because I am personally interested in those genres, it’s because Apple’s ability to deliver those complex and less popular categories is the surest way to assess whether Apple Music might indeed become The New Way We Receive and Experience Music. After all, that’s the goal, isn’t it?
We’ve been told for some time now that streaming is poised to be nothing less than the platform by which music is accessed by all of us. And the model is kind of irresistible: Physical objects like discs will be gone, even downloads will be gone, and instead there will basically be one giant record collection in the sky, containing the complete universe of recorded music, and it will be made available, on demand and for a monthly fee, to every listener on the planet.
It’s a heady concept.
All I can report so far is that Apple has made a pretty impressive start in that direction.
Just one example: To get a sense of the comprehensiveness of the service, I searched for the Ravel String Quartet. From other sources, I determined that there are some 80-odd recordings of the piece currently in circulation.
Apple Music seems to offer more or less all of them. The other services fell well short.
As Alex Ross pointed out in The New Yorker’s online site, there are still problems that specifically bedevil the classical realm. The metadata tags that we use to search – performer, composer, movement, conductor, ensemble, opus number, etc. – are randomly and confusingly applied, if at all, and often with comical results. Yet in an age where we send a craft to Pluto, these problems do not seem insurmountable.
Also, whereas most classical and jazz fans will judge Apple Music by its ability to serve up obscure titles, the arc of the new service – like all of them – bends toward wanting to find common patterns of listening. In other words, this is still a business founded on the idea of Hits. As consumers we can embrace that tendency or ignore it, as we see fit.
And of course, Apple Music likes to guess what additional music we might enjoy based on the music that we already do enjoy. I don’t particularly care about this feature, although at least in Apple’s case the suggestions are reportedly being made by human beings, not some ultra-geek-based algorithm. My only real concern about this feature is that I worry it will keep young listeners trapped in their teenage comfort zones forever. Is there an algorithm that would lead a listener from Taylor Swift (whose work I admire, for the record) to John Coltrane or Sergei Prokofiev?
So what will the promise of instant accessibility – remember we’re potentially talking about the entirety of recorded music here -- do to us as listeners? Will we become more musically literate, more inquisitive, more sensitized to the variety of musical experience? Or will we just become lazier and more blasé? I grew up in a little town that had one record store, and as kids we would spend all Saturday afternoon in that crowded little place, checking out potential purchases in glass-walled listening booths, endearing ourselves to the owner. When we eventually came to a decision, put down our money and made our way home with our new LP, we were conscious of having made an investment, and more often than not, also conscious of having taken a chance. We listened with what felt like, given that investment, an obligatory intensity. There was no fast forward button, no thumbs-down icon.
Will the new service, with its almost laughably tiny monthly charge, devalue the process of discovery, somehow?
All I can say, after a couple of weeks of experimentation, is that the ability to partake of virtually everything – from Monteverdi to Gershwin to Jay Z – feels like it has the potential to be as big a digital miracle as anything Apple has presented to us thus far. And as with those other miracles, whether this one makes our lives better will be largely up to us.
Music in a Different Cloud
It seems that the music world, broadly defined, has lost an unusual number of important practitioners in recent weeks. Here, in case you missed the news, are some who have joined the Heavenly jam:
Ronnie Gilbert, the clarion-voiced lone female member of The Weavers – the vocal quartet that truly ushered in the so-called folk revival in the late ‘40s and early ‘50s -- died a few weeks ago at 88. She was predeceased by her fellow Weavers Lee Hayes, who died in 1981, and the great Pete Seeger, who left us just last year at age 94. Of the group’s founding members, only Fred Hellerman, 88, survives.
The pedal steel guitar virtuoso Buddy Emmons, often cited as the supreme master of that instrument, passed last week at age 78. Among his countless credits as a session player, he provided the distinctive, defining pedal steel counterpoint and soaring mid-song solo on Judy Collins’ 1969 version of Ian Tyson’s “Someday Soon.”
The great Czech pianist Ivan Moravec died a couple of weeks ago at age 84. Moravec’s lengthy catalogue of recordings for the Connoisseur Society brought him worldwide acclaim. He was especially admired for his performances of Chopin.
Vic Firth, whose drumsticks and percussion mallets have been the preferred choice of everyone from rock drummers (Charlie Watts, Ginger Baker) to orchestral percussionists for several decades, played his final paradiddle a couple of weeks ago at age 85. Firth earned a spot with the Boston Symphony Orchestra in 1952, and remained in the orchestra for fifty years; for most of those years he was the BSO’s principal timpanist. In the early 60s, dissatisfied with the drumsticks and mallets then commercially available, he began his own company by personally whittling a few sticks to his own specifications. The Vic Firth Company eventually came to manufacture 12 million sticks annually. Its factory, still very much in business, is in Newport, Maine.
The Austrian-born troubadour and actor Theodore Bikel, who created the role of Captain von Trapp in the original 1959 Broadway production of “The Sound of Music,” took his final curtain call a couple of weeks ago at age 91. He later became associated worldwide with the role of Tevye the Milkman in countless touring productions of “Fiddler On the Roof.” It was a role he memorably brought to the Bushnell stage in Hartford in 2000.
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.
