The great classical music swindle - and why we're better off now

Some aperçus and soupçons based on those of Paul Morley, with whom I was talking recently for a film I’m making for BBC4 on Mozart. As well as Paul’s Mozartian epiphany – thanks to a darkened room and a Google-lottery of K numbers, but you’ll have to wait until the autumn for more on that – Morley suggested something that got me thinking: that today’s era of technological fluidity, flexibility, and almost-instant access to an entire world of musical possibility suits classical musical culture better, potentially, than it does rock and pop.

Morley has a bigger thesis about how we still don’t have a language for whatever the musical product or experience might be today; that musical statistics are still wedded to models that come from the era of the CD, or even the 7-inch and the LP – of charts, of singles, of albums; all categories that don’t really mean much today. But his specific point about classical music is that it never really belonged in the strait-jacket of the recording industry and its fetishised objects of fixity; that there’s something inherently resistant in the art-form to the idea that a performance can be solidified for eternity in the form of glossy vinyl or glossier silver disc.

Economically speaking, I’m not totally sure I agree with Morley: after all, the huge popular success of recordings in the post-war period is testimony to the power that these objects had, or were given, by the millions who bought the recordings of Caruso, Toscanini, Karajan, Horowitz, Heifetz, and all the rest.

But aesthetically, and even ethically, I think he’s on to something: the recording industry tried to fix in the collective imagination what individual musical works should be, like the totemic masterpieces of the Western canon (or rather, like those pieces of music that were turned into canonised totems, in part by the recording industry): a series of desirable, aspirational cultural and commercial objects, a collection of black-lacquer-magicked things that could be literally possessed by anyone who bought a record of Furtwängler conducting the Ring cycle, or Toscanini conducting Verdi. There was also a broader fixitive effect on the whole shooting match of classical music, which – arguably – was reduced by the heroic stage of the recording era to a library of unchanging, perfected icons instead of a living, breathing, ever-changing cultural practice.

No-one is naïve enough today to talk in terms of finding or creating the “definitive” performance of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony or Puccini’s La Bohème or Brahms’s Violin Concerto. But we used to - in the collective sense of classical music culture - that’s the principle on which all of those “essential recording” lists were (and are) based on, the idea that there can or should exist a single, infallible, immutable interpretation of all of these timeless masterpieces.

As a cultural fiction, this has been a pretty powerful myth to dispel. Ironically, it was in pop and rock in the 60s and 70s that the truly immutable masterpieces were conceived and made, the albums-as-artworks that were made in studios and created for the medium of the LP, and which exist, definitively, in that format rather than on the live stage or as a series of suggestions for future interpretations of the same musical material. Classical music, on the other hand – above all, of course, the repertoires of anything composed in the pre-recording era - was never meant to be turned into a single perfected realisation of anything: these musical “works” – whether they’re Bach’s Passions or Mendelssohn’s symphonies or Chopin’s piano music – are more like assemblages of musical possibility, which exist as the sum total of their scores, their editions, their range of interpretative choices, and even their range of representations in writing, thinking, and listening to and about them.

Yet the classical part of the record industry strove mightily hard to try and force this slippery, messy, ever-changing phenomenon into a philosophical vice and onto the never-to-be-changed surfaces of vinyl, tape, and CD. (And it also used every means it could to dupe its consumers into thinking that what they were buying on these inert weldings of broken beetle-backs – shellac, keep up! - had anything to do with Bruckner’s Symphonies or Wagner’s operas: on record, properly speaking, all recorded music becomes “electro-acoustic” or “electronic” music; it’s only an imaginative fiction that allows us the illusion of thinking that we’re hearing an orchestra in our living rooms… To which: “Personally, I can’t think of anything worse than having an orchestra in my living room”, as Michael Flanders has it introducing Flanders and Swann’s skit on Hi-Fidelity...)

The irony was – as anyone can see – that however hard the industry tried to make it seem as if each new set of Beethoven’s symphonies was “better” than the last, what you ended up with in reality was a chaotic collection of interpretative differences, which realised precisely what the whole recording process was designed to refute; i.e. that Beethoven’s symphonies can be many things to many people, and can’t, in fact, be reduced to a single idea or interpretation.

Which takes us to the present post-recording-era, in which the status of the record as object has lost its magical, fetish-like power since – another irony - everything is now recorded… What that means is that we’ve lost the innocence, and the ideology, about what a recording of a musical work means and what it should represent. Instead of dreaming of that never-to-be-bettered desert-island recording of your favourite Brahms symphony, we’re now swimming in a sea of perpetual possibility, in which, thanks to YouTube and Spotify and all those other streaming services, we can instantly compare one performance of Brahms’s 4th with another, making our own minds up about what interpretations we prefer; decisions that can and will change, week by week, year by year. For all the denigration of decreased attention spans and inability to concentrate on anything for longer than 10 minutes (really? tell that to anyone who has lost a weekend to Breaking Bad or The Bridge: has any era of human cultural consumption ever been as addicted to the ultra-long form as we are, with our box-set marathons?), “listening” has become potentially more active than passive. As listeners, we’re astonishingly privileged to be able to access more than a century of recordings as proof of how classical music culture has changed, how many different meanings the same piece can create, and how fluid the continuum of classical music performance practice really is.

To be part of that stream of musical consciousness means, on one hand, being part of the cutting edge of what we can do technologically today on our smartphones, our computers, and our enhanced world of screens and headphones and speakers and instruments. But on the other, it also returns us to a more realistic conception of what a work of classical music might be. Think again about Mozart: for him – and for the vast majority of composers – there can never be any individual artefact or performance that fixes a piece for eternity. His scores, his manuscripts, are tools for performance rather than holy relics that circumscribe the limits of the thing we call the Jupiter Symphony or The Magic Flute. They’re documents that bear witness to his living, breathing process of composition, a process that demands to be continued in the hands of his interpreters and his listeners. And that process is a journey without a single destination, without a unique “reference” recording.

That’s why Morley might just be right: the fluidity of today’s technoverse might well be a worry if you’re a band trying to sell a single, or a perfected studio version of your songs. But for classical music and its musicians, it means technology may finally have caught up with the essential, life-enhancing and life-reflecting power of the art-form, the way it’s endlessly renewed and recreated in the hands of generation after generation of performers, and the ears of its listeners.