Editing Your Collection - How?
Mon, Jan 31 2011, 2:20PM
"...my house is already packed, foundations to loft, with CDs. A time now to draw a line: I must stop duplicating music I already have..."
Philip Clark in the February issue of Gramophone, reflecting on a problem that many readers must face.
I wonder what approaches/techniques/rules you take when slimming-down your collections? When so many new recordings arrive, surely some have to fall of the end of the shelf, so to speak?
I've found it useful to say, right, I only have room for three recordings of a semi-marginal piece like Handel's Alexander's Feast. That way, I keep a) the one that's my overall 'number one' recording b) one with some sort of a unique feature [such as the Philip Ledger recording with boys' voices] and c) the one with the best supporting notes/documentation. That I did, before an attractive new recording of AF arrived from Delphian last week...
Then there are Mahler symphonies and Wagner operas...help!! I'd love to hear Forum members and experienced collectors share their 'processes of elimination' - and to hear if you enjoy this painful process as much as I do.
Tue, Feb 1 2011, 12:10PM
#2
RE: Editing Your Collection - How?
In fact I was having a moan about major labels (and Sony, whose Leonard Bernstein Complete Symphony Edition I was writing about, are especially expert at this) sticking a few rare/previously unreleased items inside a compilation of material that any Bernstein aficionado will inevitably already own, thus obliging fans to buy the same music again and again and again, which of course needs to be stored somewhere. (And as one room in Chez Clark is currently being transformed into a nursery, the problem has never felt so pressing.)
Last year, when Sony put out the hitherto unreleased Bob Dylan Witmark Demos, I ordered the set from Amazon, and then my finger, er, 'slipped' as I also ordered up the Dylan Original Mono Recordings, released at the same time, and containing eight Dylan records I already owned, albeit as they would have originally been heard (apparently). Similar slippage occurred when Sony issued their complete Miles Davis Album Collection, which is a lovely thing, but how much better it would be if they stopped recycling the same cashcows and, for example, reissued those ten or so Dave Brubeck albums that have weirdly never made it on to CD, not to mention those long deleted masterpieces by Ellington, Basie, Louis Armstrong, George Russell et al. But 'cashcow' is the pertinent word here - 'Best Of', 'Essential', 'Greatest Hits' compilations have always bolstered the recorded music industry, and never has said industry needed more bolstering.
Andrew's point about multiple versions of a classical piece is a bit different. Boulez's Mahler 9 is not the same music as Abbado's; but "Take Five" on Time Out is quite literally the same music as "Take Five" on the recently issued Dave Brubeck: Legacy of a Legend, released to celebrate Brubeck's 90th birthday. And, guess what, that includes one previously unheard track as a tease!
Tue, Feb 1 2011, 11:29AM
#3
RE: Editing Your Collection - How?
Obviously with obscure repertoire, where I'm more likely to have only one recording, then the disc stays. But with more major works (if you'll excuse the rather lazy term) attracting many interpretations, over the years I've developed a sense of self-awareness about whether a particular interpretation is there because I really like, and listen to it, or because I feel that it should be there for reasons of completeness, or because received wisdom tells me I should own it. The latter are increasingly going to the charity shop. Because - and I'm suprised this conversation hasn't yet moved in this direction - I can always find many a reference recording instantly, online, on streaming services, should I need to.
Tue, Feb 1 2011, 12:37PM
#4
RE: Editing Your Collection - How?
Firstly jewel cases: being a lover of the jewel case I'll only ever remove a CD and sleeve from its case if I can house it in a clamshell. I did it this week: there was room in the DG COE/Abbado complete Schubert symphonies clamshell for three of Jonathan Nott's Schubert symphony discs and their respective booklets. An action only warranted by the fact that Tudor's packaging isn't too pretty.
(Perhaps that's also my individual response to Martin's point: as much as l value tools like the Gramphone player, I simply HAVE to have the physical product, and PHYSICAL choice in-the-moment).
Which brings me on to Phil's point. I had six of the nine Beethoven symphonies from Vanska/Minnesota Orch, on three discs in jewel cases. When BIS issued the complete set in a clamshell, I could buy that and save about an inch of shelf space (I sent the original three discs to a primary school in Moss Side, Manchester!). It may be cynical of BIS, Phil, but it's worth the price of an inch.
What I'd like to know Phil (and the rest of you) with respect to a piece like Mahler 9, is where you draw the line. And, indeed, HOW you draw the line. We read Gramophone because we get excited by infinite interpretative and technological possibilities.
Is it perverse, that in mind, taking pleasure from editing a collection - casting a recording into oblivion knowing we're not going to be able to hear it again? Can a process of re-assessing and editing one's collection ever end? Is it good for the ears?
In that respect I think Martin has hit upon the nub of the matter: peace, resignation, or whatever, in the face of one 'good enough' recording. But what happens, Martin, when a new recording of a work arrives that challenges your library choice? Are you ever forced to make those decisions all over again?
Tue, Feb 1 2011, 1:48PM
#5
RE: Editing Your Collection - How?
In that respect I think Martin has hit upon the nub of the matter: peace, resignation, or whatever, in the face of one 'good enough' recording. But what happens, Martin, when a new recording of a work arrives that challenges your library choice? Are you ever forced to make those decisions all over again?
Well indeed, my library is a flexible thing! And always growing by more than it ever shrinks by... Though, Andrew, I also think I'm a little more open to digital storage than you. When listening to a disc I tend to rip it, put the disc safely away and stream the digital file from that point on. It saves so much time reuniting the listened-to discs with the pile of empty boxes at the end of the week. But more importantly, I also find the ease of accessing digitally-stored music probably means I explore a wider variety of recordings more regularly than I did before.
Tue, Feb 1 2011, 2:10PM
#6
RE: Editing Your Collection - How?
What´s a clamshell? Is it one of those cases where CDs are placed in both sides of the holder like the Holmboe symphonies on BIS? The love, or not, of the jewel case I imagine depends on whether you first started your collection in the vinyl or CD age. There are many beautiful CDs, but they have never given my anything like the thrill I still get when I see a stash of vinyl in a charity shop or street market. So whatever problems people might have with CDs, spare a thought for people with stashes of vinyl, mine is currently in three different places, (none of which I own), and two different countries; I gave away about hundred lps last summer because I couldn´t burden any more friends or family with this stuff, such is the dilemma of not being nor ever having been a home owner. I gave away my Klemperer Zauberflote only to discover people are happy to pay 100 euro for it.
My basic principle is to have one version of works that interest me, and two of works that I really like, that could become more depending on new recordings. My thing has always been to hear new things all the time, rather than umpteen interpretations of the same piece, life is just too short.
The whole psychology of collecting is fascinating and disturbing in equal measures. There are times when I have been on my knees, searching through crates, barely able to breath for the dust, and feeling my self respect disappearing, only to find something that makes it all worthwhile. I never use Ebay it´s cheating for me. My best friend is a jazz lunatic and we have talked about this a lot, why are collectors never happy with what they have? Why is it the moment you get your hands on something you´ve been looking for for years, you immediately start dreaming about something else?
Personally I think it´s some kind of race against time, the thought that you may go to the grave without hearing Elvin Jones´ greatest drum solo, or some mind blowing 20th century orchestral piece that will just stop you in your tracks, keeps you searching endlessly. Maybe having walls of records or CDs to look at is some way of trying to make permanent the fleeting and inevitable transience of all our experiences, our way of dealing with mortality. If this is the case I know I´m fooling myself, but sure it´s great fun while it lasts.
Tue, Feb 1 2011, 7:22PM
#7
RE: Editing Your Collection - How?
Dubrob - I appreciate you divulging your rule of thumb. I wish I had the self-discipline and clarity of thought to arrive at just two recordings of some masterworks. I think Martin, writing above, comes near it. It's useful to know.
Also, some of your thoughts on collecting resonate deeply with me. Firstly the thought of finding something wonderful. But how about finding it within your collection? I like to have a sizeable proportion of discs in my collection that I haven't heard. I think this is connected with the lingering impact of my first visit to big CD shops; I try to re-create the feeling of stumbling upon something, as in a shop, and taking possession of it - there and then - through listening to it. It's tremendously exciting to know that that feeling - that process - is always potentially available. (Of course we have the luxury at haymarket of having plenty of new CDs arrive and a good proportion of them at our disposal).
This is also linked to talking to friends and colleagues about recordings, and reading about them in Gramophone. I love nothing more than a friend or an issue of the magazine recommending a recording to me for particular reasons and subsequently discovering that I have it at home but haven't listened to it. There are few bigger thrills for the collector.
(I have to confess to now-and-then squirreling away a box of CDs I haven't heard - sometimes still in celophane - and waiting until I've forgotten what's in it before rooting it out and opening it up).
That process, though, also brings us back to the original question of how to 'edit' the collection. On first audition, each CD is always fighting to retain its place on the shelf, giving an extra element of excitment to the process of discovering it and listening to it.
(Clamshells are the firm cardboard boxes in which paper wallets housing CDs are contained - usually complete cycles or artist profiles).
Tue, Feb 1 2011, 8:21PM
#8
RE:
Replying to Andrew's second post...
Again, BIS repackaging Vanska's Beethoven symphonies as a box set (absolutely fair enough) isn't quite what I mean. I'm questioning the wisdom/ethics of major label honchos who continually repackage the same dead-cert crowd pleasers at the expense of rarer items of interest to specialist listeners. For example, that fantastic Mahler 9 with Bernstein and the BPO - imagine the outrage had, at the time, DG reissued all Bernstein's 'official' Mahler cycle, and then sneaked it in as a 'bonus' CD. That's kind of what Sony are doing with their Bernstein Symphony Edition, or by including a couple of never-before-heard items in their Complete Miles Davis Album Collection, and obliging dedicated Miles fans to pay again for music they already have to hear them.
Companies who own back catalogues of music that are central to our culture have a duty of care towards that music, and if they have no intention of reissuing it, keeping exclusive ownership of it in their vaults is morally suspect, I think. It ought to be licensed out - especially as a growing industry of bootleg labels are releasing jazz records on the very day the 50 year copyright period expires anyway.
As for 'where to draw the line', I tend to find that answers itself. I spent most of last year studying Beethoven piano sonatas and The Kinks, and bought pretty much everything (certainly everything by The Kinks, although my budget couldn't quite stretch to some rarer Beethoven recordings). Otherwise I pick up recordings as my enthusiasm for a particular piece peaks and troughs.
Perhaps the next thread should be - "Listening to Your Collection - how you find the time?"
Tue, Feb 1 2011, 8:24PM
#9
RE: Editing Your Collection - How?
Interesting habits Andrew, but any CD I buy gets listened to the moment I get home, or the moment I leave the shop if I have the Discman with me, everything else sort of slides out of view until I do so. Financial restrictions mean that I almost always buy one CD at a time, OK there have been the odd paydays over the years when I have walked into Tower gone bananas, and walked out with something equvalent to a 4 stone sack of spuds. Although I listen to everything immediately, I don´t listen to all my CDs as many times or as often as I´d like to, I try to be systematic, but it´s not easy finding the time when they are in the thousands. If they don´t do anything special for me after the second or third listen, then they go straight to Oxfam.
Thanks for setting me straight on the clamshell. I think they are a far more sensible and attractive way to sell CDs, especially if you are talking doubles or triples or more. I remember I bought Boult´s VW cycle many years ago, it was a clamshell with 5 separate jewel cases inside, I thought it was ridiculous and an inexcusable waste of plastic, my 11 CD compilation of Couperin´s Pieces de Clavecin on Brilliant was thinner and lighter. When shelves start creaking or you have to move this last comparative is also highly relevant.
Tue, Feb 1 2011, 8:59PM
#10
RE: Editing Your Collection - How?
Philip I´m reminded of my favourite primary school teacher, who whilst puffing on his pipe used often to mutter, skulduggery, duplicity, and collusion.
None of us are forced to buy anyhting, but the record companies know what we are like. I bought the 50th anniversary box set of a Kind of Blue two years ago, now I see there´s a 40th anniversary box set of Bitches Brew. I have the original lp, and the remastered CD, so I won´t be buying that, but I know there are many poor souls who won´t sleep until they have it. I´m a sworn enemy of bonus tracks. I always feel if a tune is good enough it would have been released at the time of the original LP or CD. There are exceptions Dylan possibly being the greatest, because he was just so prolific. God knows how many blinding sessions there are in the vaults of Prestige, Blue Note or Atlantic that have yet to see the light of day in any form, whilst they continue to release and re release their back catalogues of established classics. I have no problem when the musicians involved want it that way for example I like the fact that Neil Young has never released Time Fades Away on CD. I bought a 6 CD box of DG´s 111 series, then I also bought the book which also comes with 6 CDs, the same CDs alas.
Tue, Feb 1 2011, 9:27PM
#11
RE: Editing Your Collection - How?
A year or so ago I started going through all my symphony collection, vinyl, cd and tape, roughly in order of date of composition. It has been an eye-opener, composers I’d previously discounted sounding fresh-minted, others I’d considered favourites no longer sounding quite so magical. Over time our tastes, for both works and performances, change so it’s dangerous to chuck out stuff. But if I start out disliking a performance and years later it still doesn’t work for me, out it goes.
One thing of which, I hope, I’m cured is completism. Used to be that if I found a work I liked I’d go out and buy everything that composer wrote and of course end up with the good, bad and ugly. Or with rock music I’d keep buying a performer’s output long after he, she or them had finished saying all they had to say. It’s a rare rock act that can keep it up for more than two or three discs and there are very few worthwhile comebacks.
I wonder if music collecting brings out the hunter instinct in us, which may explain why it tends to be a male obsession. I used to love hunting through shops for rare discs, and record shops would be a first port of call when traveling abroad. I can recall when Melodiya discs were sold by one agent in Liverpool. These were the old Soviet days and – I’m not exaggerating here – you’d go up a dingy flight of wooden stairs above some dusty shop on Church Street, knock on a door and a lugubrious man in a trilby and coke-bottle glasses would admit you silently. But what a thrill to get hold of that 10 inch copy of Kogan playing the Shostakovich VC1 on vinyl made of ground-up telephones in its tacky original Melodiya cover.
As for buying repeats of what you already have, that’s a roll of the dice. DGG continue to re-issue supposedly remastered and sonically superior versions of their prime catalogue, and I’ve yet to hear any difference. On the other hand the Decca Legend series is a huge improvement, the ones I have anyway. Similarly I find the 1997 Davis “Kind of Blue”, remastered with pitch corrections, vastly superior to earlier editions.
And just when you think you’ve heard everything there is to hear in a work, a new issue can shock. I own, and have heard, so much Mahler over the years I thought I was done, and then I picked up the Chailly set for $35 and was staggered. Totally different from any other approach I’ve met.
Which is why we keep collecting and why our wives think we have a screw loose.
Tue, Feb 1 2011, 10:07PM
#12
RE: Editing Your Collection - How?
Am I alone in having bought records and actually hiding them from the wife, because if she found them there´s no way I could justify buying ¨more bloody records¨?
Tue, Feb 1 2011, 10:45PM
#13
RE: Editing Your Collection - How?
"I wonder if music collecting brings out the hunter instinct in us, which may explain why it tends to be a male obsession."
More of a *middle class* obsession, I'd say. Some of you must spend phenomenal amounts of money - no wonder wives/partners etc get annoyed!
Personally, I'm interested in the music only, not the physical artifacts. As soon as I could I began ditching my CDs for FLACs (or mp3s, even). No jewel cases, no booklets, no shelves, no hi-fi components, no rip-offs. Bliss.
Tue, Feb 1 2011, 11:53PM
#14
RE: Editing Your Collection - How?
I wouldn´t agree that record collecting is a middle class obsession. I grew up on a working class housing estate, one of nine kids raised on a postman´s salary. As a teenager me and a lot of my friends were bitten by music, I started doing part time jobs when I was 13, and from the start I bought records when I could.
For years a lot of the music I had was taped from the radio. I´ve never spent more than a small part of my salary on records, the vast majority of which are second hand, but I´ve worked for years so it builds up. If I counted it all up it probably is a very large amount of money, but that´s my choice, I´ve never bought a house or a car, the most I ever paid for a stereo was 300 Irish punts 13 years ago, and more importantly I´ve never had debts. When I have money to spend I buy records or CDs, when I don´t nothing gets bought, and if I needed money for something more important they´d be sold. Obvoiusly you need money to buy records, but that doesn´t mean it´s necessarily limited to the middle class.
Wed, Feb 2 2011, 4:06AM
#15
RE: Editing Your Collection - How?
Right on, dubrob.
I bought my first lp - Gene Pitney's Big Sixteen - with paper round money, always had part-time jobs when I was at school or university, often went without lunch in order to save for a record or go to a concert. Today I guess I'm comfortably off by most people's standards but I drive a 14 year-old car. It's nothing to do with 'class' it's to do with a personal choice of where to, and where not to, spend your money. I joke about my wife's reaction to record collecting but she enjoys music too (though not Xenakis) and loves opera. If I've felt a bit guilty about buying yet another cd, that's my own hangup. To me it makes far more sense to spend on something enduring that you love rather than blow it on stuff that's supposed to make you look fashionable or enhance your status.
My process of elimination has been to give cds I don't want to the local library. They've been good to me, introduced me to lots of works on dvd or cd that I wouldn't have experienced. Just gave away my Dutoit Roussel symphonies - the Deneve versions on Naxos are superior in every way. Also just gave them my Haitink VW Sea Symphony after giving it one more listen and determining it sounds even worse than when I first heard it.