Serious and online

I have just read this intriguing Guardian article about the BBC’s extraordinary demonstration of the public’s love for Ludwig van Beethoven and his symphonies.

The background to this story was the wonderful, week-long Beethoven Experience which BBC Radio 3 ran for 24 hours a day from June 5th to 11th.  Every note the great man wrote was broadcast during this time, and not one note by another composer.  At the close of this prodigious musical event two sets of free downloads were made available on the BBC’s website: his symphonies and his piano sonatas.  I downloaded two of the sonatas I did not already have in my library, and very fine they are, too.

But, as the article immediately makes clear, it is the staggering number of symphony downloads and the, frankly, gobsmacked response of “music industry” leaders that have emerged as the lasting lessons of the Beethoven Experience.

Forget Coldplay and James Blunt. Forget even Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, which, in the version performed at Live8 by Sir Paul McCartney and U2, has become the fastest online-selling song ever. Beethoven has routed the lot of them.

Final figures from the BBC show that the complete Beethoven symphonies on its website were downloaded 1.4m times, with individual works downloaded between 89,000 and 220,000 times. The works were each available for a week, in two tranches, in June.

... To put another perspective on the success of the Beethoven downloads, according to Matthew Cosgrove, director of Warner Classics, it would take a commercial CD recording of the complete Beethoven symphonies “upwards of five years” to sell as many downloads as were shifted from the BBC website in two weeks. The BBC has been stunned by the response - so much so that its director general, Mark Thompson, opened his annual report with Beethoven’s inscription on the score of the Missa Solemnis: “From the heart ... May it go again to the heart!”

The classical music industry has also been shocked since the demand for the symphonies seems to defy gloomy predictions about the shrinking appetite for classical music.

Roger Wright, the controller of Radio 3, said it was “clear that people had been coming to Beethoven for the first time” through the Beethoven downloads. This was discernible from the fact that the symphonies nos 1 and 2 had a high take-up compared with no 3, the Eroica, a much more famous work.

One has, of course, to add the caveat that massive exposure and free availability make a difference, and a very large one.  But the fact remains that the men whose purpose and business it is to understand their market have had the long-held belief that classical music is in decline falsified.  At its broadest interpretation, the appetite of folks who, in musical terms, are either serious-minded or aspire to seriousness is now a proven fact.  The industry has been so hypnotised by pop culture and “MTV as the future” (instead of vile social prosyletising), it has quite lost its way.

I draw the heartening conclusion from this that seriousness of mind, which is hardly confined to music, is a powerful fact of online life. The appetite is there for serious political debate as for anything else.  Where that seriousness is predicated on honesty and free speech sites like MR have our role to play.  I am wholly of the conviction that the subject matters and treatments eschewed by the mainstream media - the forbidden, the “incorrect” - are precisely those the serious-minded public strives to understand - because they recognise that these are truly the great issues of our day.

Good evidence for this exists in the performance of the BNP website in the aftermath of the London attacks.  I can’t find the link now, but the BNP has claimed that its site visitor rate - already far in excess of that for any other Party website in Britain - has doubled or tripled since 7/7.  I did a quick mental calculation when I read this.  From memory, I came up with an averaged front-page download every sixteen seconds or so.  OK, my mental arithmetic stands second only to my bird-pulling power in the GW list of personal attributes - not.  But bear in mind that the BNP is horribly demonised, and serious-minded folk are not necessarily non-suggestible.  So it’s a fairly remarkable occurrence.  To put it into context a bit, my calculation of the BNP’s visitor figure isn’t much different from MR’s figure, but we are not a Brit-only site.

Bear in mind that, of course, the big political sites of liberal America are simply off the scale.  But that’s a different phenomenon, I think - and one John has laid at the door of the leftist’s gnawing need for reassurance in the face of reality.  Self-deception is not seriousness and, plainly, the likes of Daily Kos are perfect strangers to honesty and free speech.  They are mood music for leftist neurotics.

On which timely and optimistic note I shall listen to no.31 in A flat, Op.110.

Posted by Guessedworker on Thursday, July 21, 2005 at 03:24 AM in Oh Tempora, Oh Mores
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