> But for how much longer will this be true? A century on, fewer and
> fewer classical records are being made.
I couldn't be more pleased. Recordings are to music what the Olympics are to sports -- a very bad thing.
Two days ago I lent my uncertain bass to a performance that included two Bach cantatas and music of Couperin and Gesualdo. (This may be classical music or not depending on how you understand the term.) In the same venue I've helped perform Brahms motets and the same old boy's Deutsches Requiem, and music by Gabrieli, Palestrina, Schutz, Rossini, Buxtehude, Byrd, Tomas Luis de Victoria, Handel, Purcell, and many other now-dead and in some cases long-dead composers.
I want to stress here that I am the most amateur of amateur musicians. But the people who came to hear us liked what they heard. You can tell. There's perfunctory applause, and then there's applause that conveys real pleasure. They're as different as chalk and cheese.
Commercial recording statistics tell us a lot less than applause tells us -- very little more than, say, the Dow Jones average tells us. But just as I love a fall in the Dow, so do I enjoy a downward trend in recordings of the music I most love.
There's no doubt in my mind that there will always be people who want to sing and play this stuff, and other people who want to hear it, and they absolutely will find each other, with or without the mediation of the record labels -- and better without, if you ask me.
-- --Michael J. Smith --mjs at smithbowen.net