San Francisco Classical Voice

MUSIC NEWS

Mozart for Rats, And Other Wonders
January 5, 1999

Happy New Year

By Robert P. Commanday

Now that most have recovered from overdoses of "best and worst of 1998" and from the sugared whipped cream shock induced by "Viennese" New Year's programs, it might be useful to pick up the tag ends of the old for whatever they might tell us of the new.

The Minnesota Orchestra Association seems on the horns of a contradiction. On the one hand, it recently announced ending the second consecutive fiscal year in the black . On the other, a reliable source reports declining audiences there despite the popularity of the young conductor, Eiji Oue-- something about concert attendance not being part of the current life style. Perhaps Minnesota's new Governor Jesse Ventura assisted by his cultural advisor, Arnold Schwarzenegger, can be induced to front a program for jump-starting interest in classical music.

While San Francisco's audience does not seem to be flagging and indeed looks younger than those in the suburbs at least, there's no indication that the San Francisco Symphony will coast on this, not even with a budget surplus for FY 1998 of $850,000. Michael Trendy Thomas' latest gambit, to set up a collaboration with the heavy metal rock band Metallica and the composer-arranger Michael Kamen for some kind of performance next year suggests a major play for the younger set. The best of the living composers seem outside his interest and scope.

Now we switch to Montreal, Canada, where they're offing the young toughs from the Metro stations by playing opera at them, not just classical music that some other Canadian cities have used for the purpose. Two results: fewer baddies hanging around and less hassling of regular riders, but also complaints from opera lovers about the demeaning and prejudicial use of the art form.

One of the cheerier science stories of 1998 reported on the experiments of psychologist Frances Rauscher who, in studying the effect of music on the brain, played Mozart to rats. "The score makes them scamper faster and more accurately through a maze even days after the music stops,"she reported. The lucky rats' reward was to have their brains dissected to see if listening to Mozart caused the neurons to reach out and make more and different connections to surrounding cells. You don't suppose that if the Montreal subway managers were to play Mozart operas in the station that the effect on the punks would be..... No. Couldn't happen.

One story at year's end that triggered many well-informed letters and anger and frustration to the local newspapers concerned the demise of the Marin-based KKHI-FM, leaving the area with only one classical music station. Other stories however suggest that the advances of technology will soon make the whole issue of classical radio moot. Besides CD players and changers at home and in the auto, Web radio is already worrying the recording industry. Lists of the available stations are posted on www.broadcast.com and www.radio-directory.com. The RealPlayer needed to pick up the audio signal can be downloaded free at www.real.com.

But for a clearer signal that won't fade wherever you drive, some time in the year 2000 you'll be able to pick up satellite-delivered digital broadcasts from CD Radio Inc. and XM Satellite Radio Inc. They'll count on a big base of subscribers who would need to acquire adapters to fit into their cassette or CD players and a tiny antenna, and it seems promising.

For now the music industry is more worried about the Diamond Rio PMP300, a little player the size of a deck of cards and costing $200, that plays audio files transmitted over the Internet by MP3 sites and stored at home on computer disks. It's an eminently portable player that enables you, while away from your computer, to hear the music you had previously downloaded into your computer. These files are compressed to about one-tenth their size without appreciable loss of audio quality through the MP3 (MPEG Layer 3) technology. The sound is reported to be almost as good as on CD.

The compression allows for much quicker distribution over the Internet and downloading into the PC or away from home, into various kinds of digital devices to be transferred later into the home PC for audio playing. Because the music is stored on a chip, there is no skipping or jumping if the Rio is bounced about. It holds about an hour of compressed digital music but this can be expanded. Leaders of the Recording Industry Association and of the five major recording companies plan to work with technology companies to develop the Secure Digitial Music Initiative for copyright owners to control distribution of their music while making it easily available for sale.

With all this going on and more wonders of technology to come, classical radio does seem more and more like the one-horse shay.

(Robert P. Commanday, the editor of San Francisco Classical Voice, was the music critic of The San Francisco Chronicle, 1965-93, and before that a conductor and lecturer at the University of California, Berkeley.)