Music Selection in Brick-and-Mortar Stores Today, A Nostalgic View

One of the strange things I have done for about 10 years is save all of my receipts, except for gas or food purchases. Why? Part habit, part practical reasons (returns) and a smidge of nostalgic reasons. Well, the latter caused me to go through a big pile of receipts that's still at my parent’s house last time I was there. I realized that DAMN I spent a lot of money at Borders Bookstore in my college years. I would bet that I slowly transferred them a few thousand dollars in a few years.

I have many fond memories of going to Borders after or between classes, that was essentially what I DID with my spare time. Other people hung out with friends or went somewhere, I went to look through books, and browse the classical music section. I'd often discover some new composer (thanks NAXOS!) and listen to it on the way back to school, and then read a review(s) of the disc in the computer lab if I had time. Let just put it this way: I was in heaven, and this normally cost less than $10, especially if it was on the budget label NAXOS. This was all helped by how I would try to save on things like food; back then, as now I would prefer to spend money on something tangible.

Anyway, in those days (2000-2004) the classical music selection was quite large, or at least large enough to where I could look through it for an hour once or twice a week without seeing too much of the same thing. But today it's hardly a shell of its former self. The last time I was in a Borders I covered the entire classical section in maybe 15 minutes, and it was hardly something I would return to pick through on a daily basis. I have to think that before long it will be like the classical section in a Best Buy -- which no one EVER bothers to look at. I mean, who really wants a grab bag CD of "The Best Romantic Adagios," random parts of random works by random composers and unknown performers?

According to "common wisdom" classical music is now purchased online more than ever before.* And while it's true that you can get more online than in any store, there's something about being able to BROWSE. There's something about making a new discovery and holding the item in your hand, looking it over. Sure I can and do browse online, but I can tell you 99 times out of 100 I won't buy it there, one reason is I hate waiting for it to arrive. For me the store acquired a sense of "place," it was somewhere I wanted to go, I liked the atmosphere, it fit in with my day, and in those days I had money and was willing to spend it.

I'm not blaming Borders, the reasons for this disintegration are numerous: One is that classical music isn't popular, and thus is the first to go in a store with limited shelf-space.** Make way for things that will sell...like trinkets that cause the store to look more like a "gift shop" than a bookstore.

There are other reasons, but one that gets little attention is that most people don't need more than one recording of a particular work that they like. I'm the opposite; I enjoy different "interpretations" or "renderings" if it's a favorite work. While there's probably hundreds of different recordings of Beethoven's 5th (to name a purely popular title), one will get most people by. And on top of this, since classical music doesn't tend to get old (and the composers are dead and not producing anything new) there's not as much incentive to explore more.

I'd be interested in anyone else's opinion on this; I have a feeling that this is the overall trend across the country. I visited Amoeba Music in San Francisco about 2 years ago where I was very impressed by the selection, but then it's probably the biggest new and used music store in the country.

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*A lot of classical music is also downloaded by both legitimate (e-music, amazon.com mp3) and illegitimate (torrent, p2p, etc.) means today. Ironically, as far as downloads go, the legit means are often compressed and lower quality than the illegit means which are often in CD quality.

**I remember a report in 2006 that said classical music sales grew over every other genre of music, this is probably due in part to "classical crossover" -- in other words, classically trained singers like Andrea Bocelli or Josh Groban who might as well be Yanni or John Tesh as far as I'm concerned.

My Emotional Journey Back to Music and the Lack of "Emotional Range" in Music Today

After a 2-3 year hiatus I have started listening to classical music again. The reasons I stopped were a combination of depression and the more practical fact that I had been moved into a new environment where I drove my car less -- that's where I had listened to music most. Over the past few months I've started listening again, and the memories and emotions flow back at a rate that's often a challenge to face, more on that later.

I wasn't raised on classical music, I was first drawn to it for it's complexity of sound; both in the number of instruments and the resulting range of colors and the complexity of form. That's the main reason I am drawn back to it, but another reason now more than ever is the complexity of emotion. Many complaints can be made of popular music today, but the one I will make is that the emotional range is both limited and overt, there’s nothing very subtle out there. Rock and "Alternative" today has a spectrum of happy, sad and pissed-off; and it's the same throughout the song, its one big episode. There's no ever-changing kaleidoscope of emotion.

Take Sibelius' "Night Ride and Sunrise," even if you've never heard it I think you will understand what I am getting at. To me it has three sections -- it begins with a exuberant, bouncy repeated theme on strings, eventually joined by a serious, "folk-like" theme on woodwinds which rides above but is driven by the turbulence below. The mood is extremely serious, exciting, driven, dark and entirely life-affirming. This climaxes like a whirlwind and then slowly disintegrates into the second, short middle section which is pure beauty; long, slow melodies on strings come at you like waves of pure emotion. The third section begins quietly with low pizzicato strings and short, playful woodwind motifs, later noble brass chords play under the introduction of the "Sunrise" theme introduced on woodwind. Variations of this carry us to grand but not bombastic climax.

This all takes place in 15 minutes. When's the last time you heard anything like that on the radio?

While there are emotions in classical music which you can't exactly label, there's also soundscapes and emotions which I can get close to "defining," and will list below. I don't find anything in music today that is expressing these neglected and complicated emotions the human spirit is capable of feeling.

A Nocturnal World
Shostakovich - Symphony 6 Movement 1
Honegger - Symphony 2 Movement 2
Sibelius - Symphony 3 Movement 2
Debussy - Nocturnes for Orchestra
Mahler - Symphony 7

Respect for the Rugged and Coldness of Nature
Vaughan Williams - Symphony 7
Sibelius - Symphonies 4, 6 and 7
Bax - Almost all the Symphonies
Rautavaara - Cantus Arcticus

The Nostalgic
Vaughan Williams - Symphony 5 Movement 3
Moeran - Symphony in Gm

Realistic Reflections on Death and Dying
Mahler - Symphony 9 Movement 4
Shostakovich - String Quartet 15
Beethoven - String Quartet 16
Rachmaninov - Isle of the Dead

Giddy/Exuberant
Lilburn - Symphony 1 Movement 1
Milhaud - Many of the Symphonies

"Transcendental"
Bantok - Hebridean Symphony Movement 1
Vaughan Williams - Symphony 9
Bach - Toccata and Fugue in Dm, Fantasia and Fugue in Gm
Bruckner - The Symphonies
Mahler - Symphony 10

Sad but Noble
Elgar - Symphony 2 Movement 3, Cello Concerto
Mahler - Symphony 5 Movement 5

Dramatic but Noble
Atterberg - Symphony 7 Movement 1
Dvorak - Symphony 9

Fevered and Stark
Bartok - String Quartets
Chavez - Symphony 5 Movement 1
Shostakovich - Symphony 4 Movement 1
Pettersson - Late Symphonies
Sessions - Late Symphonies
Penderecki - Symphonies

Pastoral
Vaughan Williams - The Lark Ascending, In the Fen Country
Beethoven - Symphony 6 (of course!)

Darkness and Desolation
Sibelius - Symphony 4
Shostakovich - Symphony 8, String Quartet 8
Tchaikovsky - Symphony 6 Movement 4
Miaskovsky - Symphony 13
Pettersson - Almost Anything
Tubin - Almost Anything

These descriptions are all very general of course; each of the pieces above contains a world of its own.

When I say that this is an emotional journey for me personally, I am serious. I could not say how many memories are invested in some of this music. This isn't disposable art, I could listen to this stuff my entire life, and thus the memories within it go way back. You don't notice it, but music incorporates itself into you're life without your awareness. If you're depressed like I was, more emotion often isn't the medicine for it. People who don't think classical music is the most emotional and can even be the darkest music out there have only heard Mozart and Beethoven. Composers of the 20th century (Modern period) produced music that, to me at least, really "speaks" in a very realistic way that can't be brushed aside as emotional excess like we have today.

I'm not going to say that people are emotionally simplified now because I am still drawn to this music and I think its part of human nature to have a sensibility for more than just a few colors, however I do think it requires patience.