CD sales dive into toilet, end of musical civilization

[robinlandseadel at comcast.net]

Mind you, one of my careers was as a recording engineer,
recording classical music, mostly, "early music"---Bach and 
Pre-Bach overwhelmingly. I've cooked up my fair share
of malevolently electronic music as well. The kinds of 
skills that Hopkinson Smith or Jordi Savall have on 
display exist in wholly other spectra than the Chaos
Magick of Xennakis or Glenn Branca, and the semi-
professional noise making that emulators of those modern
styles cook up only adds to the pre-existing mountain of 
unplayed and unplayable noises on polycarbonate. That 
heap of crap will take multiple mellenia to decompose. 
Doubtless, surveyors from other galaxies unearthing the 
1980's in some far future will have a number of questions
about the cult of the "Madonna", and wonder why that cult 
dissapeared so fast.

It's weird: there's all these "Lifestyle" classical compilations
popping up: "For When You're In The Mood", "For Yoga", 
"For Whatever". I was on the ground floor of that, cooking 
up classical compilations for a new-age record company
back in 1988. Pretty good company: they produced a 
wonderful Hildegard von Bingen series. 

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Complete-Hildegard-von-Bingen-Vol-1/dp/B0000007YO

http://conservation.catholic.org/Hildegard-von-Bingen.jpg

But the number 
of new classical music productions continues to go down. 
Mind you, a lot of the new productions are of composers 
that no one was really aware of like Biber, or Dowland or
Hildegard von Bingen. Many are of composers of new
music, Like Glass or Adams, or newish music previously 
unrecorded like Partch or Ives or Ruggles. But the number
of people buying those types of recordings continue to
decline, and while some musicians are practicing 
breatherians, that's a lifestyle choice few go along with for 
much more than a month.

There's a kind of knowledge in the antique musical
arcana that is dwelt with repeatedly in "Against the Day",
I touched on one particular scene involving 'Pert,
Tallis and the phygerian mode a few days ago. The 
T.W.I.T. enterprises and the alchemical stuff is tied to the
multiple references to modal tuning systems littered
throughout "Against the Day". There's a specifically
Pythagorean aspect to these elements of music.

http://cnx.org/content/m11633/latest/

http://home.vicnet.net.au/~colmusic/maistre1.htm

"Those who invoke him are claiming, by proxy, to be 
fellow initiates in the universal mysteries available to 
the Pythagorean cult. Newton, for one, cited their 
authority in support of his own axioms; he speculated 
that the celebrated philosopher of antiquity had 
uncovered the secret to measuring the heavens, by 
experimenting with proportions of weights and string 
lengths."

http://larvatusprodeo.net/2006/02/09/last-of-the-magicians-a-keynes-tangent/



 -------------- Original message ----------------------
From: "Gordon, Alex" <alex.gordon at abbeyroad.com>
> Well, only if you're trying to make traditional sounding rock music... 

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