From the WSJ Opinion Archives
LEISURE & ARTS
Bottom of the Ninth
The iTunes site leaves classical music fans singing the blues.
This week I browsed for classical music on the iTunes site, a promising thing to do, even for classical professionals. There's a lot of classical music there--and also on competing legal download sites, like Napster and BuyMusic--with more coming all the time and predictions of a deluge in the future. I found 18 recordings of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony, including some of the most powerful ever made.
But there's bad news, too, and not just bad--disastrous, even disgraceful. The music that showed up when I searched for "Beethoven" wasn't properly sorted, so the only way I found those Ninth Symphonies was by watching them appear, apparently at random, as I browsed, with increasing disbelief, through 1,500 Beethoven tracks. I stopped after 1,500, but in fact there's still more Beethoven with, for all I know, more Ninths buried there.
And, worse still, I sometimes couldn't tell which recordings of the Ninth these were. Some were labeled only with the conductor's name, so I couldn't tell which orchestra was playing. Sometimes only the orchestra was listed, so I couldn't tell who was conducting. Sometimes there was no information at all, making the performance completely anonymous. As I browsed for more music, I found opera recordings without cast lists. Who's singing? I could only guess.
Using the iTunes "power search," I looked for recordings by Maria Callas, the greatest opera singer of modern times. I found many tracks, but Callas doesn't actually sing on all of them; when she was in recordings of complete operas, her name had been entered as "artist" on every track, even on those where she doesn't sing. But then many of her CDs didn't show up at all, because her name hadn't been listed as the artist . . . and, going back to Beethoven, there were piano sonata recordings by the drop-dead legendary pianist Artur Schnabel where the listings didn't even show which track was from which sonata.
It's enough to make you scream. Before classical music is ever going to take off in digital downloads, the whole classical-recording database--this is a mammoth job, but it's got to be tackled--will have to be rejiggered. Music has to show up correctly labeled, and fully searchable, by composer, composition and performers (with each artist's role correctly specified). It can be done--look at the Tower Records site, or, even better, Naxos, a classical-record company that allows you to stream almost its entire catalog from its Web site, with all the music correctly cataloged so you know how to find it.
But things get worse. Suppose that, despite these problems, you download classical music, or that you rip some from your classical CDs. Of course you want to put it on your digital music player--and now you've got disaster, part two.
These players--and the digital music files that go on them--are optimized for pop, and, to be fair, optimized quite nicely. You rip songs off a pop CD, and (if your software looks them up on the Internet) they automatically get labeled by artist, genre, song and album. Put 10,000 songs on your iPod, and, with a touch of a finger, you can look at all your hip-hop, or all your Springsteen, grouped either by album or as an alphabetical list of songs.
Try that with classical music. Typically a classical piece has several movements, separate musical sections that show up on recordings as separate tracks. What you want, when you put classical music on your digital player, is to see the tracks grouped together under the name of the composition, and then all the compositions listed under the name of their composer.
But these digital gadgets don't think that way, and when you put classical music on them, the complications--trust me--can get truly frightening. The iPod, at least, has a separate "composer" category, which helps a little, though there's still no way to search composer tracks by composition, and if you buy a competing digital player you don't get any listing for composers at all. By some stroke of luck, I bought an iRiver player, which, I discovered, lets me treat it like a computer hard drive, organizing music by files and folders. That means I can give Beethoven a folder of his own, with subfolders for each of his works--though I have to type all the information in myself. Aargh.
It won't be easy to fix this player problem. We'll have to change the digital file formats--the way MP3s, Windows Media files, and Apple's AAC files are encoded--so that their digital "tags" (which hold the verbal information that tells us what the music is) include the categories classical music needs. This will be a huge job--not only will the formats have to change, but everything already digitized will have to be encoded once again. But if classical music is ever going to thrive in digital downloads, the whole classical-music business will have to rise up and demand that the job be done.
