tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9617011.post2745893997047905286..comments2024-03-27T23:45:06.093+01:00Comments on Renewable Music: A Veritable CornucopiaDaniel Wolfhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09093101325234464791noreply@blogger.comBlogger1125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9617011.post-76598599940756560052010-11-09T11:53:36.758+01:002010-11-09T11:53:36.758+01:00(3) I'm astonished by your outburst; frankly, ...(3) I'm astonished by your outburst; frankly, it's unworthy of what, until now, I thought was one of the more sensible blogs about classical music. As someone apparently capable of reading between the lines and seeing beneath the surface, you should know better than to be so superficial - and, indeed, if this 'factoid' is so unsurprising, why comment on it at all, especially as you find absolutely nothing interesting or new to add?<br />I carry no special brief for Gramophone magazine (disclosure: I have read it regularly since my teens and I currently have both an academic and a very tenuous professional interest in it) and there's much about it that I find irrelevant to my own present needs, tastes and interests. It takes me 20 minutes to flick through an issue these days. But I care about intellectual honesty and I find your characterisation of it shallow, cliché-ridden, snide, inaccurate (for instance, none of it is about 'trading' recordings) and even - I do not use the word lightly - sexist (the fact that a product is overwhelmingly consumed by one sex does not make it, in and of itself, damnable).<br />So offering information, advice and criticism to consumers of classical music on record is equivalent to printing photographs of women in swimwear, is it? And everything is hunky dory in the 'classical music live performance world', is it? And that's because there are more women there, is it? How profound and at the same time so simple!<br />Well, history lesson no.1: audiences for live classical music have always contained more women than the buyers (note; not necessarily the listeners) of classical music on record. Either you are unaware of this, in which case you need to absorb it and ponder its implications; or you know it and you truly believe that a century of publishing activity in the field of recorded classical music has been both irrelevant and, possibly, harmful to the health of classical music as a whole, a proposition extremely hard to sustain.<br />History lesson no.2 (since we're apparently sanctioned to deal in broad-brush generalisations): composers have mostly been either indifferent or hostile to discourse about recording and, in the above post, you are simply behaving according to type - just what you accuse the readership of Gramophone of doing.Nickhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/01447090393898006955noreply@blogger.com