Listening

As a child, and a lover of Western classical music, I used to feel terribly frustrated at the lack of opportunities to listen to this music beyond whatever records/tapes were owned by my family. 

There was just the one radio program, Classical Music at Your Request, where I once was able to hear the Sibelius 4th Symphony on my request..what a thrill that was in every way! 

There was a very shabby collection of tapes copied off original CDs at the German cultural consulate, Max Muller Bhavan, and these did sort of fill a gap...I remember being entranced by the Brahms 3rd symphony, conducted by Schmidt -Isserstedt, and mystified by Wagner (I'd expected unintelligible songs as in Italian operas, but unintelligible hollering in speaking voices was more of a challenge!) The British Council didn't "do" music, but one of the better venues to sample new music was, for a while, the Soviet record store, Vostok...the records here were very affordable and gave me my first exposure to Rachmaninov among others (I still regret not being able to persuade my mother to buy me the chunky box sets of Rimsky-Korsakov's innumerable operas!).

On trips abroad, I would be able to wangle perhaps 3-4 new tapes and copy a few others from my uncle's collection. I was adjudged too young to be taken to big orchestral concerts when visiting England, but was lucky enough to hear Nikolai Demidenko in a barnstorming all-Russian program at the age of 14, an experience that's always stayed with me.

There was, to be fair, occasional live music in Calcutta (as it was then known), mainly at Max Mueller Bhavan...usually small-scale recitals, where the perfumed snobs would indulge in heavy-duty name-dropping and nostalgia for trips to the Occident.

Despite the negatives, I was still able to accumulate a fairly massive CD collection by the time I reached college (by this time more music had become available to buy locally)...and then it all stopped. For a while, I indulged myself with pop and rock music...but more importantly, I had pretty much bought up all the music I knew of !

How wrong I was though...once YouTube came along, while it did sort of make my music collection superfluous, but it also opened up so many new doors and windows...no, music was not just about chomping on whether Karajan's first Beethoven cycle was better than his 3rd...while the recording industry has collapsed, technology has given a platform to dynamic young musicians from all across the world, as well as given a chance to hear the less-performed works and composers. Most of all, it's bridged the gap of economics and geography...no longer does one have to live in London, nor even visit it, to experience the joys of a Prom performance !

At the same time, I sometimes wonder if technology has empowered or confused us...when you have all the music ever played across the world on your phone, are you really able to sample it adequately or to appreciate it? I can remember the smell, the texture of the sleeves of every LP in my childhood home, I can remember waiting patiently for years to complete my first collection of the 9 Beethoven symphonies. But can you touch or treasure or even remember the bewildering smorgasbord of options flooding our eyes and ears today? Are young people today even aware of how wonderfully fortunate they are or am I just getting old?!