I was already thinking of writing about this topic (again) when this article came up at another blog I read as part of the Friday miscellanea
http://themusicsalon.blogspot.com/2019/02/friday-miscellanea_22.html
here it is
https://www.macrumors.com/2019/02/15/classical-music-apple-music/
It's hardly the "only" problem or even the "big" problem with classical music but a lot of the troubles with digital music for classical music and streaming purposes in terms of being able to find what you want or recognize tracks when you see them has a lot to do with metadata.
Which is .... ?
Basically it's the information that comes up (or doesn't!) when you attempt to rip a CD on to iTunes that you just bought. iTunes has gotten a lot better than Amazon metadata but that's another matter, in its way.
For a survey of writings on metadata as applicable to classical music .... here's a few randomly selected links.
https://www.npr.org/sections/therecord/2015/06/04/411963624/why-cant-streaming-services-get-classical-music-right
Why is classical music so hard to enjoy on streaming services? In one word, it's metadata. Metadata is the information that coexists with every digital music file: each and every piece of information about a selection of music that a listener might find useful to know, and what makes the information in one file discernible from the next. In the case of classical music, relevant and important metadata includes the name of the piece of music, the composer, the album it's from, the performers, the label that released the recording and the year it was recorded.
...
https://futureofmusic.org/blog/2013/03/05/classical-music-needs-better-metadata
https://www.dailyrindblog.com/classical-music-metadata-101/
But not everyone agrees that metadata is the ultimate problem. There's a case to be made that one of the big problems in classical music where digital content is concerned could be solved by "make the covers bigger".
https://properdiscord.com/2016/05/25/metametadata-almost-everything-you-read-about-classical-metadata-is-wrong/
In the past if you had an album with a dozen or more musicians who all got named on big old vinyl album covers in the 21st century the various artists are crammed, if named, ,into a digital reproduction of the album art that might, ,if you're fortunate, spring up in a display screen as an image anywhere between two to four times the size of a postage stamp.
Which is no problem if you're listening to the Rolling Stones or Kanye West. If you're listening to the Sixteen with soloists X, Y and Z backed by Ensemble W performing something by Frank Martin, well, whatever. You just have to know that already because odds are odd whether or not you'll get that kind of information on the basis of metadata.
Metadata was, as best I can tell, designed to be a handy range of reference points for popular music and for popular song. The industries that arrived at metadata to identify music did so on the basis of the musical styles and forms most likely to be sought out on the basis of such metadata, pop music, in a phrase. So if you're looking up "Tears of a Clown" as performed by Smokey Robinson, you'll look it up on the basis of Robinson, for instance, or, since Stevie Wonder wrote so much of the song, you'd look it up on the basis of songs associated with Stevie Wonder. But let's just pretend we're trying to look for this on the basis of things fans of classical music care about, you're not likely to find "Tears of the Clown" on the basis of the bassoonist who performed the wicked cool bassoon part on the song. :) Seriously, the most rock and roll bassoon solo in the history of 20th century song.
There are other things besides metadata as to why classical music is as marginal as it is and at one level I don't mind that it isn't a booming musical field. At another level I sort of mind a lot, but I've written about my conviction that what are colloquially described as art music and pop music have balkanized into camps that are full of pedagogues who don't commit to cross-breeding elsewhere.
No comments:
Post a Comment