ARE WE DOWNLOADED? NO!

As with most technology, I came late to the downloading of music. Ever since VCRs were first on sale and I bought a Phillips instead of a VHS, I’ve been leery of investing in new technology until I’m sure that it’s a lasting development or that the invariable pairing of rivals has rationalized into one top dog (squarial, anyone?). A friend was inordinately proud of his quickly extensive collection of laser discs, then downcast when the system just as quickly became obsolete and he was left with a cache of stuff that no one wanted.

For years I resisted CDs, liking vinyl records much more as pure objects and figuring that the advantages of the CD – resistance to surface damage and wear, reduced demand for space – were outweighed by the down side – cover artwork compressed to a fraction of how it was designed to look, sleeve notes abandoned or rendered so tiny as to be illegible. I no longer remember what changed my mind: probably the record companies ceasing to issue albums I wanted on vinyl or cassette tapes.

I may never have got into downloads, had not a friend given me an iTunes token as a birthday present. To use the token, of course, I had to register with iTunes. I was never able to make the token work, however, and its value reverted to the giver who then spent it on himself, so it turned out to be a proverbial Indian gift.

My own computer is an iMac so there was never any compatibility issue with iTunes. But it took a while to get used to the style of the site. The trouble with iTunes, as with other download sites, is the lack of someone organizing the material who has the appropriate mind-set for the job. To get this right you need people who have anal qualities, the kind that fire librarians and researchers. You need people who are passionate about music and in a geeky, detail-loving way. You need gay people, for god’s sake.

There is no sense in the iTunes ‘store’ that anyone who programmes it has any feel for – or even knowledge of – the broad range of music. Irritatingly, all the individual tracks are referred to as ‘songs’, which tells you eloquently enough that their heads are in pop. They no doubt know what the current best sellers are. But their interaction with their customers is mechanistic rather than imaginative.

I log in and find a section entitled ‘Just for You’. This means me. It lists two albums by each of George Michael, Jamiroquai, Christina Aguilera, Madonna, Eurythmics and (yuk!) Sugababes. I have never downloaded any of these people – nor am ever likely to – but presumably much of it derives from my buying an Annie Lennox album. I have also downloaded albums of Vivian Blaine, CPE Bach, Scissor Sisters, Bernard Herrmann, Manhattan Transfer, Kaija Saariaho, Steely Dan, Lena Horne, Gustav Mahler, Bobby Darin and Blossom Dearie, among others. Does none of these compute?

It’s bizarre and alienating that a computer presumes to “recommend” music to me based on what it imagines my purchases indicate. How does my downloading Modern Times by Bob Dylan suggest that I’d want Elton John’s The Captain and the Kid? Is it just a generational connection? And why would my buying an album of opera arias sung by Cecilia Bartoli suggest that I might want Nikolai Lugansky playing Beethoven Piano Sonatas?

Among the preferences offered for listing in your own ‘library’ of downloads is the identity of the composer of each ‘song’. Not very taxing for the computer if the recording is of Haydn String Quartets. But I downloaded a double album of standards sung by the incomparable Lee Wiley and not one of the tracks is credited to a composer (though I can name pretty much all of them; the ones I can’t I want to know now and not to have to look them up in a reference book). Someone at iTunes just hasn’t put the hours in.

When I first investigated iTunes, I felt sure that I would never use it for classical music. To begin with, all the people in their lists of what is available are organized according to first names. This is an absurdity. Fine of course if you want to download Lulu or Mantovani. But tell me – quick, now – what is Rossini’s first name? And can you spell it? If you don’t know, you’ll find it damned hard to locate a recording of Il Turco in Italia to download.

On another site, eMusic, there’s a different problem when you want to search for a classical recording. Suppose you fancy something by Elgar. You put that name in the search engine and you get this list:

Elgar
Edward Elgar
Elgar, Edward
Sir Edward Elgar
E Elgar
Elgar Howarth

Apart from the last-named (a different composer whose first name happens to be Elgar), all the others refer to the same old master but how are these cross-references differentiated? No doubt it’s to do with the formulation used on the cover of the CD or perhaps in the label’s catalogue. But the customer has no idea which particular recordings are going to be attached to which particular version of Elgar’s name. This is really no help. You can’t blame the poor, philistine computer which has no means of knowing that Elgar, Edward and Sir Edward Elgar are one and the same. But an intervening programmer who knew a modicum about music could sort this out pretty quickly. If you search for Bach in eMusic, you get 34 results, embracing twelve members of JS Bach’s family and a modern composer called Jan Bach. Good luck.

Then again, I wanted to see if eMusic had the recording of Glazunov’s 4th Symphony by the National Orchestra of Wales, conducted by Tadaaki Otaka. Of the various sub-divisions of the search engine, I chose Classical Album Title and typed in Glazunov Symphony no 4. The result of the search offered me 1,948 recordings beginning with Beethoven’s 1st and 5th Symphonies. What possible use is that?

I searched eMusic for an album of 14th century French ballades and other French songs by the group called Gothic Voices. It seemed sensible to choose the category Classical Performer and search therein for Gothic Voices. The ‘match’ I was offered was to “Various Artists” and when I clicked on that I was offered a list of 7,211 albums beginning with ‘This is Rock Anthems’. Only a computer could believe this is in any way helpful.

But is it cheaper to download music? Naxos are a famously cheap label, generally retailing in shops at £4.99 a disc. The entire Naxos back catalogue is available through eMusic and, for the deletions alone, that is great news. But is it good value? You can download 40 ‘songs’ per month for £8.99. I have a Naxos CD of John Cage’s Prepared Piano pieces that runs to 19 tracks. Two like that would use up all but two tracks of my entire month’s allowance and would cost me the same as the CDs in a shop but I wouldn’t get the booklet and recording details that come with the CD.

The Naxos collection on eMusic is highlighted in a section called, wearyingly, Naxos Nexus: “it’s a big catalog [sic] to plow [sic] through, so here are some great performance [sic] of the ‘classical canon’.” You soon twig that the writer of this illiterate tosh has never listened to any of these “great performance”. For instance, if you were looking to download a version of Mahler’s 1st Symphony, it certainly wouldn’t be Zdenek Kosler’s. Further on in the list is a mixed album of pieces by Janacek, Enescu and Dvorak credited to ‘Various Artists’. You click on ‘Short Description’, hoping to learn who the various artists might be, and there’s our old friend the list of thousands of albums beginning with ‘This Is Rock Anthems’. Do me a favour. What’s more, the Naxos list has not been updated in over a year.

To test out iTunes, I decided to see what it’s got of one of my favourite contemporary composers, Kagel. Nobody with the first name Mauricio is listed under either ‘Modern Composition’ or ‘avant-garde’, the two ‘subgenres’ (as iTunes are pleased to call them) of ‘classical music’ where you might expect to find him. So I put Kagel in search. This produced someone called Muricio Kagel under Artists. An album of his orchestral works (which I already have as a CD) listed the composer as Mauricio and the conductor – the same man, of course – as Muricio. Sloppy. There’s also a trombone album of modern pieces by various composers but you can’t download the Kagel alone, you have to buy the whole album.

On iTunes, you can buy by the album (each individually priced) or (with exceptions such as that above) by the track. On eMusic, you pay a flat rate per month that allows you to download a number of tracks. This needs careful planning to maximize your value. A big symphony – Bruckner, Mahler, Havergal Brian – is a good buy because the whole album may only be four hefty tracks. An opera may be a poor buy, using up all your allowance in one hit. I didn’t download the Gothic Voices album from eMusic because it comprises 18 tracks, some of them under three minutes long.

What are the advantages of downloading? A few minutes after seeing that an album is available, I can be playing it on my iMac. I can go straight to it on my screen and do other computing tasks while it plays. And I don’t have to shlep around a record store – not, in my view, anything of a chore.

But I can only play the download on my iMac, unless I burn it onto a blank CD or buy myself an iPod (not my style, I think). I don’t get the information that is standard on CDs, though some labels (Naxos, for instance) now expect you to go to a website for opera librettos and the words of long oratorios and song cycles and leave them off the CDs. If it’s from eMusic, I have to apply myself to get the album installed on my iTunes player, at least with the tracks in playing order, and play it all through in one sitting, otherwise the player divides it into separate ‘albums’. This can be tiresome.

Clearly a mixed blessing, then. Perhaps the definitive judgment is this: to download I only need to sit on my arse and get fatter. To buy CDs, I need to walk round shops. Well, I should get out more. I’ll stick to majoring in CDs.

And Rossini’s first name? It’s Gioachino. But you knew that.