October 20, 2003
Grrrr.
The quality of notes in early music recordings has really diminished. The length of essays has gone down, the clarity of the listings is often a mess, and the packaging has become downright bizarre in various futile efforts to interest the mass market in trecento music (ain't gonna happen, label people). I have been comparing a few titles that I have on vinyl and just bought on CD (from the same label), and pages of useful material are gone, unless the CD is from earlier days of the medium.
It is really stupid to skimp on this stuff, because the primary (dare I say only) market for a lot of this music is specialists, who want every little decision and source explained. I really cannot imagine people impulse buying a disc of Machaut motets at the supermarket. Why are they being packaged that way? Those of us who want Machaut are, well, nerds.
Anyway, with that you get an idea of what I have been doing with my free time these days. I will be leaving for San Diego later this week, and will try to post a couple of good recipes before that, and I should be able to post on the road, but I will probably be at this more diminished level of blogging for a week or two. Things should pick up after the 29th.
Posted by erik at October 20, 2003 4:47 PM | TrackBack The whole recorded music industry is in a time of great change right now. The technologies of MP3 files and cheap cd-recordables have changed everything - 15 years of commercial music releases are now de facto in the public domain for ever and ever...for right or for wrong. This will change permanently the way music is packaged and sold, we don't know what the result will be yet. I plan to write a longer essay on this sometime soon on my own site.
Anyway, nice blog. I have discussed some things with the Old Oligarch myself.
I hear you, John. My favorite recordings of early music give details of tunings and registrations and comments from the editor and all sorts of fascinating goodies. Same with jazz, where microphone information, instrument information, session notes, etc. all add interesting pieces to the puzzle.
I have taken a brief look at your list, and will look closer at it in the next few days. There are many overlaps between our collections. If I post my jazz library, it will have to be CDs only, as documenting the vinyl is going to be a monumental task (and one I need to do).
Posted by: Erik Keilholtz at October 22, 2003 2:32 PMI agree-I want liner notes with every detail that can be put there-if it's a jazz recording I want to know when it was recorded, who arranged it, which musicians played on which tunes, how the mixing/mastering was done, everything. There was a Thad Jones/Mel Lewis Orcestra album that showed exactly how the stereo mix was laid out (not just "trumpets left, saxes right", but where the lead trumpet, etc. was)-that was cool.
I've listed all the items in my music collection in an entry on my site (Oct.19)-see if we have anything in common.
Posted by: John Salmon at October 20, 2003 10:43 PM