How To Build A Top Quality Classical Music Library For $100 (Prelude)

This is a reposting of an article that George A. Pieler and I wrote for Forbes.com, back in 2013. Who knows, how much longer these articles will be available on Forbes (for now, they still appear here, here, and here, although the formatting is already off), in uncorrupted form, so I wish to give them a slightly longer potential lease on life here. Not the least as a humble little tribute to my friend George. George Pieler, with whom I collaborated on many articles covering all kinds of subjects, died of a heart condition at his Washington, D.C. home on September 30th, 2021. I still received his annual birthday-whiskey - but he did no longer receive my thank-you card. It was returned "addressee unknown". Though certainly not lacking definite opinions, on matters of politics, liberty, economics, but also his passion, classical music, he would graciously defer to me in picking the recordings for this lists. Still, they reflect his tastes in that he approved my choices, tempered some of my biases, and made sure I would include Szell's Mozart.

These two lists started with this preliminary musing which was, in turn, prompted by a post of Tyler Cowen’s Marginal Revolution, who had done the same thing a few years earlier – asking, along the way, how music could actually be measured anymore, both as regards cost and medium (length), given the proliferation of “free” music and the changes in consumption of music as online bits & bobs. That this question, 13 years after our pondering it superficially, has not yet been definitively answered, despite the dominance of streaming services of one kind or another as our primary music-conduits, is interesting in and of itself. The measure as to what “$100” in music might be, probably has been further softened. The idea how best to look at music as units, meanwhile, remains the traditional album. That’s certainly true in classical music which is (not surprisingly) a somewhat more traditional corner of the music-appreciation niche. Our lists, therefore, retain some value as general “introduction to classical music” essays – and if they bring a few people closer to the genre, we feel we’ve done our job. (Incidentally, we probably did: For years, if you clicked on any one of the albums especially of the first list, Amazon would show you, under the rubric “Frequently bought together”, all the other albums we listed. But here we go, with the first of the three articles:

Two Cents About Classical Music For $100

ByJens F. Laurson and George Pieler

The Grammys (see full list of winners) put classical music in a ghetto of its own, an afterthought following folk, reggae, and spoken word. Is that because classical music, once culture-defining beyond its actual household reach, isn’t a market-driven, profit-potential line of entertainment and culture anymore? Recently on Forbes.com, Connie Guglielmo pondered iTunes’ Top Ten classical music picks, part of an Apple campaign that promotes “essential” classical music (which constitutes about 12% of sales, though heavy on crossover and light classics). A few years ago, Tyler Cowen (Marginal Revolution) took a more sophisticated look at what kind of starter-kit classical music collection could be put together with $100.

The way these two surveys approach classical music, beautifully frames two key aspects of the classical music world today: availability and affordability. Classical (ditto jazz) is a fascinating niche industry annually pronounced dead but more alive than ever. It’s just changing in all possible kinds of ways, at different speeds, in different countries. Pricing, production, distribution, listening and purchasing habits, even the very medium itself and its long-accepted norms (like album playtime, the concept of ‘album’ itself etc.) change or vanish.

Let’s focus just on what Cowen and Guglielmo touch on: price, medium, and the idea of “essentials”.

Now that Tower Records and the HMV Shop are history, how do we consumers determine price? By the cost of a CD on ArkivMusic.com, the specialty on-line seller of classical music owned by Steinway & Sons? [Note: Once a great resource for research and checking on what was available and new – but now quite useless.] Or Amazon, taking an average of prices offered and considering shipping? By the album cost on iTunes, or dedicated classical download sites like [Ed. Long defunct] The Classical Shop (which was run by Chandos, offering Digital Rights Management-free, high audio-quality downloads), Classics Online (Naxos, Ed.: also defunct), or (for the francophone) Qobuz? [Ed. A survivor and definitely not just for the francophone anymore. Arguably the best and most fair source for purchasing/streaming classical music online!]

But even downloading, which opens the intriguing question of whether you own or lease a digital file (more on that in a future column [Ed. That didn’t alas, happen]), may be a thing of the future past: left in the dust as streaming becomes ever more available, reliable, and cheaper. Your tunes are in the cloud, ready when you want them, where you want them. Assuming the internet isn’t down and that you can live with—as yet—modest sound quality or little clicks between tracks (because we can send people to Mars but struggle with Gapless Playback, apparently).

If you are serious about music, it’s a rough transition, though. Catch-all services like Spotify and Rhapsody make finding specific recordings hard, thanks to sloppy meta data and limited catalogs, and can frustrate the inquiring listener and overwhelm the newcomer. [Ed. Also, they aren’t all that great for the participating artists.] For a full dose of Beethoven Symphonies, Haydn String Quartets, or Bach Cantata streaming, they’re quite practical, however. If a standard bearer like Herbert von Karajan suffices, Spotify has all four of his complete cycles. But if you don’t know how the cover of the zesty 60s cycle looks, or which edition contains the savvy 70s recordings, and which box the mannered, digital 80s run-through (all with the Berlin Philharmonic), you will be left guessing. And if you want the sprightly punchy, historically informed musicianship of Jos van Immerseel and Anima Eterna (Zig Zag Territories), you are out of luck altogether.

The [wonderful] Naxos Music Library (and versatile Qobuz) offers a well-honed, classical-only streaming experience with plenty of relevant information, and Immerseel on both services, but on the Naxos Music Library only select early Beethoven recordings of Karajan (made for HMV with the Philharmonia Orchestra, now EMI, just sold to Warner as part of the Parlophone auction) are available, and early post-war broadcasts from Berlin (Audite). [Ed.: ALL the standard Karajan Beethoven is now available on the Naxos Music Library.] Only Qobuz emerged from this random test with all five cycles available. [Ed. The two live Japanese cycles and the two for-video-cycles are still out of reach for streaming.]

All this is by way of suggesting that the very idea of what $100 worth of music means, is changing by the day, if not the hour, and impossible to define. You could probably get the complete works of Mozart or Beethoven as downloads for that money. You would get fine music, too, though probably not all quality performances or snappy interpretations, which is what makes classical music so different from other genres. And for most, the bulk approach won’t yield the most memorable experience.

For our own list of how a relative newcomer might most satisfactorily invest $100 in classical music, we turn to the anachronism of the familiar CD—a medium that will be with us for decades to come, however outdated it may already seem. Certainly as a unit of price and music, CDs remain a trusty standard, perhaps akin to the way horses still define how we measure rail gauge and the engine power of an aircraft carrier. (Ed.: See list here: How To Build A Top Quality Classical Music Library For $100 Part I & Part II)

Amazon is currently merging the two worlds of hard copy (satisfying the collector) and digital availability (for immediate gratification and portability) with a function called ‘auto rip’. This delivers a free cloud–version to your Amazon cloud player when you purchase a hard copy of the CD from Amazon. Selection is limited so far, especially in classical, but fast expanding [Ed.: OK, that didn’t take off, massively, but it is still alive and available to consumers with billing addresses in the United States who have a U.S. bank-issued credit card] and it does include two of the Karajan cycles (1950s EMI and 1960s DG, if you find the right one among various editions of just that particular set [Ed.: I don’t think it does, anymore].

For skeptics who still think this kind of music is a dead-white-male cultural relic, we suggest the very profusion of listening options—in repertoire, medium, and listening mode—tells us classical is not just very much alive, but a great case study in market evolution. We hope to offer a glimpse into that (from our alive-white-male point of view) when we put together a sophisticated introductory list, available across various formats. We might ignore vinyl, though, which is making its own fascinating niche-within-a-niche comeback.

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