“So bad it’s good”
An article by Anne Midgette on the sales of classical recordings recently appeared in the Washington Post. Among the more alarming revelations was the following:
"The dirty secret of the Billboard classical charts is that album sales figures are so low, the charts are almost meaningless. Sales of 200 or 300 units are enough to land an album in the Top 10 [...] In early October [2009] pianist Murray Perahia's much-praised album of Bach partitas was in its sixth week on the [Soundscan] list, holding strong at No. 10. It sold 189 copies."
It has always been dangerous to compare classical sales to those of popular music—I remember hearing an anecdote in the 1980s that described Alfred Brendel's astonishment at the difference—and it is more than worrying when our niche becomes practically invisible. However the worlds of commercially successful music and, for want of a more inclusive term, "classical music," are too far apart to warrant comparison based on sales or downloads.
Ignoring for a moment issues of track length, radio format, marketing and demographics, there is the very basic issue of publishing royalties: the residuals attached to the "work" (composition) when it is performed, recorded, broadcast, arranged or sold as sheet-music. After a composer has been dead for fifty years (seventy years in some territories), the work enters the public domain and can be exploited without charge. This is true of the bulk of recorded classical material, where no one really has a vested financial interest in the music itself. In the commercial world where, more often than not, the composer is very much alive, there are huge financial benefits attached to the publishing rights. Put another way, in an industry now driven primarily by fashion and style, and less by content and quality, a dead composer is unlikely to prove particularly hip, nor is he likely to make anyone rich.
There are the exceptions to the rule however and they are fascinating. Sting's fairly recent Dowland project Songs from the Labyrinth particularly so (see Norman Lebrecht for a balanced and musically informed review). For those who might have missed that extraordinary singularity, when John Dowland's star shone incandescent over the earth before fizzling out in the waves of disbelief generated by his more traditional fan-base, this was Sting's take on the lute-songs of one of Elizabethan England's finest musicians.
It was greeted by many classical and early-music listeners with open-mouthed horror. But, and this is a big but, the album did well enough to climb to number 25 in the Billboard 200 album chart, a place as unfamiliar to classical musicians as the depths of the Mariana Trench are to a goldfish. One might argue that the opportunism of Deutsche Grammophon, coupled with Sting's huge celebrity and his inability to contain either ego or creative impulse, would have fuelled similar success, no matter what the repertoire, but that still does not provide a good explanation, although it clearly tells us that it is the messenger rather than the message that counts.
There are now thousands of unfortunate "crossover" recordings, most probably less well-intentioned than Songs from the Labyrinth, which was clearly motivated by self-fulfillment rather than self-aggrandizement.
An old favourite—and I am told its motivation places it squarely into the first "serious" category—is Mrs. Miller's remarkable rendition of Groovy Kind of Love.
Apparently someone at Capitol Records saw the financial potential in her vocal performance, although Mrs. Miller herself, at least in her initial ventures into the studio, was convinced of her musical bona fides.
One is simultaneously fascinated and repelled; the aural equivalent of watching a televised hernia operation. If you need more of these alternative covers from the not-so-swinging-sixties, try her rhythmically fearless and lyrically creative version of Downtown and the unparalleled There Goes my Everything, double-tracked for a doubly-troubling vocal experience. Her most ebullient and popular track remains A Lover's Concerto.
A typical listener comment maintains that a Mrs. Miller track is "so bad it's good." In truth she succeeds because she just manages to stay on the right side of musical catastrophe: she almost sings in tune; almost phrases like Petula Clark; almost adheres to a pulse; almost remembers the words. It is this "almost" quality, her daredevil attempts at improvisation and her senior's wobble that create something infinitely and hilariously memorable, but not, by any regular standards (and pace Julie Andrews), something "good." Something good doesn't often sell in the hundreds of thousands.
Simon Wynberg
