I grew up in the period described here as "the golden age of the LP." My parents were on the faculty of a liberal arts college with a strong music department. Some of my closest high school friends were serious classical music students: one a countertenor, another an organist, a classical guitar player, and others. Several of them were collectors of, and advocates for, particular composers. All of us, often together, listened to classical music on good stereo systems. I was lucky to have experienced those times. From Isaac Sligh's "For the Record":
Lately, I have been visiting a small used-record shop in Manhattan that seems to be in some stage of shedding its classical music section. I come back from my lunch breaks with armfuls of records rescued from the curb. They pile up in my cubicle; they spill into the common walkway. ........ Never in history has so much music been so available and yet simultaneously so inaccessible. On streaming platforms, recordings by different orchestras, conductors, and performers, from distinct years and labels, blend together into an incomprehensible slurry. Listen to a single movement, and autoplay and shuffle will whisk you away to some completely different part of the algorithm. ....Psychologically and spiritually, streaming is an impoverished and impoverishing medium. It is no wonder that classical music’s status in the record industry has diminished. ....During the golden age of the LP from the 1950s to 1970s, thousands of recordings proliferated on labels great and small. Classical was the industry’s prestige repertoire and the reference material for rapidly advancing audiophile sound systems.... The postwar era that coincided was one of middle-class aspiration: The record industry catered to the G.I. Generation’s desire to build collections of great classical music in their homes, just as publishing imprints like the Modern Library helped them easily build libraries of the Great Books. College attendance became widespread, and a liberal arts education at that time encouraged building a generalist, canonical knowledge of the humanities. All of this went hand in hand.As these private libraries have died out in recent decades, public and institutional libraries have hardly offered a sound alternative. Increasingly, they move to hide their collections of books and music in off-site storage, converting valuable square footage into space for coworking, events, and computers. Swiftly vanishing are the days of wandering the stacks, picking up a book by Dostoevsky, and noticing his other novels on the shelf beside it; glancing to the shelf above and finding Gogol; looking further and discovering Pushkin. Even the physical space of the library has been transformed into a kind of replica of the streaming interface: More is available than ever before upon request, but nothing is intuitively accessible, and all is stripped of its canonical context. ....Such artifacts are the ligatures of history. When we cast them to the curb, we reject a hand that is outstretched in a gesture of friendship from past to present. .... (more)
