One of the most amazing experiments in music downloading history happened in the past year when the BBC offered all nine of Beethoven’s symphonies, one per week, for free downloading on their website. Nearly 700,000 downloads were recorded during the time they were available. It showed that people were eager to download music that was legal and free, and it pointed to a telling new interest in classical music. No classical recordings had ever made that kind of mark before in retail sales and of course, a large part of the downloads could be chalked up to the price, but what about the obviously huge group of people who were exploring this music for the first time, the newcomers who may have found that Beethoven had a lot more to offer them than they were led to believe their whole lives?
This week, the Los Angeles Philharmonic took a huge step forward in reaching out to new listeners (as well as satisfying longtime fans) by partnering with Apple’s iTunes to offer recordings of their live concerts from Walt Disney Concert Hall. Now, that might seem like just another smart marketing idea on the surface, but what makes this a groundbreaking cutting-edge move is the fact that the concerts will be available from the iTunes Music Store within a few days after the performance!
All music fans know about the incredibly long lead times that have become standard in the recorded music business. Whether you’re a pop or rock act, or a symphony orchestra, it usually takes up to a year (and sometimes longer) to get your CD in stores after you’ve put the final touches on it in the studio. Now, this experiment will put the music in your hands almost immediately. The ramifications of this could be great for composers who write new works. Music fans all over the world will be able to hear world premieres in an almost-real-time delivery. And classical music isn’t the only music that should be able to benefit from it.
The first iTunes concert, from the Philharmonic’s current Minimalist Jukebox festival, is a pairing of compositions by Arvo Part and Louis Andriessen. The second concert features music by Steve Reich. I haven’t loaded them on my iPod yet, but they sound great just listening at my desktop. I played electric guitar on the Andriessen pieces and although I wasn’t thrilled with the music itself, which I found to be uneven and laborious at times, there were a few wonderful moments and I had a lot of fun playing them in concert. The four woman vocal group, Synergy, was a marvel to listen to and a joy to work with. The conductor, a sly Dutchman named Reinbert de Leeuw, kicked up the already fast tempo of De Staat by about 12 metronome markings for the first concert which had us scrambling to make the incredibly fast unison lines intelligible. Think Chick Corea Elektric Band meets Phillip Glass on crystal meth and you get the idea.
Two months ago, NY Times music critic Allan Kozinn wrote that the center of the classical music world had shifted 3,000 miles to the west. In 2006 Los Angeles finds itself with an incredible world-class orchestra which is truly excited to be a part of the fabric of a great modern city, a crown jewel of a concert hall as notable for its acoustics as its stature as an architectural icon, and a music director/conductor who may well be the most talented and exciting musician/composer of his generation. That’s saying a lot, but audiences are proving it true as they continue to fill Disney Hall for a dazzling variety of programs by the Philharmonic.