The insanity of abundance!

[Florestan]

At times likes these, I'm glad to say I don't live in Scandinavia. 

Oh yeah, that's like me saying I don't live in the Balkans: geographically accurate but culturally ambiguous. 

[Jo498]

I suppose it is fair to say Gould has been very hyped over the years.  But so has Lang Lang and so has Martha Argerich. 
The question is, whether he (and they) are worth the hype.  My personal opinion is yes to Gould (and Argerich.....and jury still out on Lang Lang).

Gould has also been dead for almost 35 years. I seriously doubt that Todd is old enough to remember Gould being created by the CBS marketing department in the early 1960s. Or if anyone here does remember, I'd be grateful for data/anecdotes/whatever. Of course the marketing department was not idle but there is no comparison to the glamourized and "made" stars of the last decade or so.
Just look at the late 1970s covers where AS Mutter appears every bit the pudgy teenager she was at that time. Of course noone hesitated to employ her looks as soon as it made sense. But by then she was already very famous because of her playing.

Argerich also was a sensation before she was 20, had her first "breakdown" and then won the Chopin competition fair and square a few years later with 24 in 1965.

[Todd]

Or if anyone here does remember, I'd be grateful for data/anecdotes/whatever.

The Gramophone archive might come in handy here.

I know that everyone on this forum is far too informed and sophisticated to be influenced by marketing, but suckers elsewhere are not so shrewd.

[71 dB]

To me art and glamour shots are completely different things.

[bwv 1080]

Marketing isn't a bad word, every label and artist markets their work

And this:


just reflects the program of Bischoff's Symphony no. 2, "Two Naked Chicks on a Seesaw"

[Ken B]

To me art and glamour shots are completely different things.

I posted glamour shots of famous sopranos. The Rise Stevens pic is from the 30s.
Schwarkzkopf was heavily marketed on her quite extraordinary good looks back in the 50s.

[71 dB]

I checked the covers of Naxos CDs released so far this year (January-May):

60 releases and 5 of them "glamour shots". So even in 2017 hardly 10 % of Naxos covers are glamour shots.

[arpeggio]

In my opinion the gap between so called great and non-great composers is made bigger than it is. I enjoy the Cello Concertos of Carl Stamitz quite a lot, so how much lesser can he be compared to the "great" composers of his time? Does it even matter if I enjoy the music? Kind of dismissive to call these composer "non-great". As if they didn't have remarkable careers as composers.

Please, I did not mean that one should think these composers were not "great".  Stamitz may not be as good as Mozart but he is still an outstanding composer (I hope no one reads into this something different that what I am trying to say)  As a matter of fact I used the Stamitz Bassoon Concerto as my audition piece.  I prefer it to the Mozart. 

I am sorry if members thought that I was slamming composers like Stamitz.

[Ken B]

I am sorry if members thought that is was slamming composers like Stamitz.

I don't think anyone did, but feelings might be tender after the outbreak of Stamitz slammers we had here last year. Even worse were the Dittersdorf dissers, but that was ages ago.

[Sergeant Rock]

Marketing isn't a bad word, every label and artist markets their work
just reflects the program of Bischoff's Symphony no. 2, "Two Naked Chicks on a Seesaw"

Sarge

[Jo498]

The Gramophone archive might come in handy here.

I know that everyone on this forum is far too informed and sophisticated to be influenced by marketing, but suckers elsewhere are not so shrewd.

You can hardly deny that Gould's playing was extraordinary in many respects. You may not like it and he might be hugely overrated but the reasons for his enormous influence and popularity are not mainly marketing. The marketing might be responsible that his status as a "cult figure" works even today.
But back then he served a unique mix of personal excentricity and brilliant interpretations of repertoire not well covered on disc (as the trend in the 1960s was to play Bach on the harpsichord) that was created by himself, not by some marketing department. That these features are still marketable today is also true.
Whatever the reasons, when I got into classical music in the late 1980s Gould had been dead for several years but according to my recollections his recordings completely dominated the market for Bach on the piano. Sure, his Mozart was excentric but for Bach Gould was the standard and even more importantly the only easily available artist for a broad range of pieces. Sure, there were other recordings but either niche (like Joao Carlos Martins) or only for a few of the best known pieces. That one can pick up a lot of Bach from fairly famous pianists, e.g. Schiff, Perahia, Hewitt etc. is a rather recent phenomenon. Very little Bach was available by the then active or recently deceased pianists around 1990. And I daresay that the popularity of Gould's Bach recordings in the 70s and 80s kept piano performances "in the ring" despite a strong harpsichord faction (as far as I remember several pianists, e.g. Brendel played very little Bach in concert because they seemed to be convinced that it should be done on the harpsichord).

To take the discussions by a few dozen people on internetfora over 10 years or so as indication of the waning status is about as reliable as counting the number of reissues by Sony, probably less.

[Todd]

You can hardly deny that Gould's playing was extraordinary in many

Sure, it was extraordinary in that it was decidedly different, but so was Celibidache's late style.  It really just comes down to which eccentrics one prefers.  As to the Bach discography pre- or around 1990, you appear to be leaving out a lot - Kempff, Tureck, Weissenberg, Gulda, and Richter all come immediately to mind, for instance, and they were hardly alone.  Bach was well represented on disc.  Your recollections of Gould dominating the market appears to be an artifact of precisely the type of marketing I am referring to.  Old Gramophones could help sort out discography claims, and if you wish to spend the time sorting that out, be my guest.

I don't place great weight on the relative decline of discussion of Gould, but mention it because it is obvious.  So, too, is the inevitable decline in mentions of his recordings in publications, for obvious reasons.  Perhaps Gould maintains a stronger hold on the imagination of some people to a greater extent than, say Van Cliburn, but Gould is now basically just a cult figure whose stardom peaked long ago and is in the long phase of disappearing.  Even a big star like Elvis isn't immune to this.  For some reason, as I mentioned before, some Gould fans tend to be especially defensive about the star.  He's a long dead pianist, just one of hundreds, and maybe that realization is too much to bear for some reason.

[71 dB]

I don't think anyone did, but feelings might be tender after the outbreak of Stamitz slammers we had here last year.

The bolded part sounds almost like the name of a summer blockbuster zombie movie. 

Even worse were the Dittersdorf dissers, but that was ages ago.

Yes, yes! Dittersdorf dissers is the third most hideous group on this planet after ISIS and Al-Qaida. 

[vandermolen]

Recently I have been more into classical music. You may have noticed my activity on this forum. Now I am AGAIN facing the insanity of classical music in the form of abundance. I'm constantly on Amazon browsing CDs to buy! Damn! I'm listening to Spotify like there was no tomorrow! Damn. Classical music takes my life, my time, my money! It's insane!

Non-classical music is so easy in comparison. It is so "limited". Most of my favorite non-classical artists have released only a couple of albums or singles. Tangerine Dream is extremely prolific (100+ albums) among my other favorites and even it is somewhat manageable compared to classical music. Yes, there is A LOT of non-classical music, but what helps a lot is the fact that I find 99 % of it totally uninteresting. Classical music is another story. So much of it (perhaps 30 %) IS interesting.

All the talk about composers I haven't explored much makes me feel I should explore them, but exploring just one of them takes a lot of time and money. It's exhausting, but there's dozens and dozens of these composers! The list of obscure Russian composers alone has dozens of names! What about Poland? Turkey? Romania? Italy? Belgium? Chile? Canada? South-Africa? The list of obscure names contains hundreds if not thousands of names! Who can explore such abundance? You need to limit yourself radically to do any kind of exploration, but is the exploration even meaningful if it's done under radical limitation? Are we fans of classical music totally insane? I don't know.

How do you fans of classical music deal with the insane cornucopia that is classical music? Sometimes I am so scared of it! 

Can't believe I didn't respond to this before.  Actually I don't really deal with it. It is clearly a form of obsessive compulsive disorder ( but so what?). My wife, as I have mentioned before, has accused me of 'having an affair' with my CD collection whereas my daughter just thinks I'm mad. However, as I'm now 61 I've decided that things must change and am hanging  on to the wise motto 'Less is More'. So, I have actually started (sort of) to reduce my CD collection by giving away Naxos duplicates, for example, to the charity shop. It is oddly therapeutic. In my 30's, 40's or 50's I would never have considered this but as a lifelong fan of Taoism I think that I should start putting into practice the wisdom of that great ancient Chinese philosopher to live a simpler life. 

[Madiel]

I checked the covers of Naxos CDs released so far this year (January-May):

60 releases and 5 of them "glamour shots". So even in 2017 hardly 10 % of Naxos covers are glamour shots.

You seem intent on proving that you dislike "marketing", but Naxos generally having a plain, no fuss look is every bit as much "marketing" as the glamour shots you are so against.

You're free to like whatever you like, but trying to turn it into some kind of objective standard of rightness is pushing you towards the "no true Scotsman" fallacy. Only in your case it becomes the "no true Naxos album" fallacy.

[Zeus]

My latest trick to curtail the rate at which I purchase new discs is to listen to every new disc (or box set) twice within the first month or so after purchase.  Needless to say, I stay away from the big box sets.

Between sniffing around for promising new leads, sampling prospects before purchase, correcting and enhancing iTunes meta-data after purchase, and listening to new purchases twice, I've managed to make expanding my music collection quite a time-consuming chore!
 

Despite this routine, I've still purchased more than 120 hours of new music so far in 2017.


But hey downloads are cheap these days on eMusic (between $2.50 and $3.50 a pop after discounts) so I can splurge a bit.

[Parsifal]

I find it impossible to even come up with a criterion for whether a classical musician is more "in decline" than another, let alone how to measure it. In classical music there is a very, very small community of hard-core fanatics and a large segment of the population that has enough respect for classical music to have a Beethoven symphony or a recital of Verdi aria's on their shelf or iPod. Do we put more weight on the fact that a greater fraction of the population recognizes the name Glen Gould than the name Richter, that Sony releases more retrospectives of Glen Gould than are released for Richter, or that there are more lunatics searching the internet for out-of-print Richter bootleg recordings?

I have no idea if Kempff is "in decline," I just know I'd rather listen to a Kempff recording than basically any other pianist. I already have his recordings, I don't care how many times DG re-releases them.

[71 dB]

You seem intent on proving that you dislike "marketing", but Naxos generally having a plain, no fuss look is every bit as much "marketing" as the glamour shots you are so against.

You're free to like whatever you like, but trying to turn it into some kind of objective standard of rightness is pushing you towards the "no true Scotsman" fallacy. Only in your case it becomes the "no true Naxos album" fallacy.

I have the right to prefer a certain type of marketing.

[PerfectWagnerite]

I find it impossible to even come up with a criterion for whether a classical musician is more "in decline" than another, let alone how to measure it.

I have no idea of Kempff is "in decline,"

Exactly, awhile ago someone posted a ludicrous assertion that somehow the likes of Solti, or HvK, or even Lenny, are in decline. They may be LESS popular with certain hardcore classical music fans but not by majority of the general public.

My latest trick to curtail the rate at which I purchase new discs is to listen to every new disc (or box set) twice within the first month or so after purchase.  Needless to say, I stay away from the big box sets.

Right now my "trick" is that if it is available on YOUTUBE in somewhat good quality I will not buy that recording. This trick has had mixed success in 2017.

[kishnevi]

I recently took a voluntary early retirement. Which means until I get a new job, I need to severely curtail, if not completely stop, my purchasing habit.

First step I did was to delete my credit card info on Amazon. Meaning no impulse buys.  As of now, I only buy sale items at Arkivmusic and some jazz at Barnes and Noble's retail store.  I can always browse the used CD store if I need a fix.

It helps that there are only two big boxes out there I truly want--the complete Menuhin and the EMI Karajan--and even those two I am willing to live without.

But my Listen pile is rapidly dwindling, which means I will soon be able to 1) relisten to stuff long overdue for listening and 2)attack the Opera Pile, which includes stuff I have had for five years or more but not yet listened to.