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Posted by John Quinn I go back even further than Patrick with Gramophone for I began reading a friend's copy in the late 1960s and bought my own first copy in October 1970, when I went to university. I have since bought every issue and have been a subscriber for it must have been 25 years. But the November 2006 issue was my last. I have not renewed my subscription and from now on I'll rely on International Record Review (IRR), which I've also bought regularly since its launch and, of course, on Music Web. Patrick is absolutely right to say that Gramophone still has some very good reviewers on its staff and one of the reasons I continued to take the magazine for the last few years was a reluctance to give up reading the contributions of the likes of Alan Blyth, Rob Cowan, Richard Osborne and, especially, John Steane. But Patrick has put his finger on a key failing of Gramophone in recent years: the reviewers have been emasculated. I strongly suspect that in many cases the reviews have been edited down. Only a few issues ago I read a review by a reviewer who knows what he's talking about. The review, at least as published, discussed the music that was featured on the disc but contrived not to say anything at all about the performance itself or about the quality of the recorded sound. What kind of guidance to the prospective purchaser is that? I haven't, of course, seen the December issue which so stirred Patrick's wrath but his description of some of the contents sounds wearyingly familiar. The reviews have been squeezed down in length - and, frankly, have been dumbed down in content - to accommodate more and more "Features", many of which are depressingly superficial. And, though not mentioned by Patrick, all too many of the articles are artist-led. I'm not against general articles by any means. In fact I think IRR goes too far the other way, offering little but reviews, though these are generally of a very high standard. However, I think the trouble with Gramophone in recent years has been the lack of a clear editorial policy. Both the present editor and his predecessor, under whom the rot really set in, seem to have been unable to make up their minds whether the prime purpose of Gramophone is to be a magazine about music or about recorded music. As it is Gramophone currently falls between these two stools and fulfils neither function properly. So, as I say, I didn't renew my subscription when it expired and I expect the November 2006 issue will be the last I shall acquire. After 36 years of buying Gramophone, during which I never missed an issue, I'm genuinely sorry to have given it up. I guess the trouble goes back to the acquisition of the magazine by the Haymarket Group. Under their ownership Gramophone has probably been positioned as "bright" and "accessible" but in so doing I think core readers - the serious collectors - may have been alienated. I think the parallels that Patrick draws between BBC Radio Three and Classic FM are all too evident. Gramophone has surrendered its pre-eminent niche market position and with it, I fear, its authority. What a shame!
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Posted by Tony Haywood |
Posted by Anne International Record Review was far and away the best magazine around when it first appeared. Michael Oliver was one of the main writers, a man whose insights were always stimulating, and whose breadth of knowledge was outstanding. In the last 3 or 4 years, though, its quality has drastically declined. What it is now is a pale imitation of what it was. This is an important issue, because in the age of downloads, music will reach the listener without booklets etc. Listeners will all the more need all thoughtful, imaginative writing about music that stimulates them to listen carefully and find out more. They won't get that from suppliers whose job is to sell. In theory, that "might" means a different kind of reviewing, where the purpose is neither to slam nor rave a recording per se but to evaluate it thoughtfully so the reader can think. It's not "what" is said, but how the conclusions were reached. Good teachers know that what they really teach is not a lesson per se but the art of learning. On the other hand, the decline of IRR and the rise of "sound bite culture" may indicate exactly the opposite.
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Posted by John Quinn I'm afraid I must disagree with the first paragraph of your posting. Until recently I have read Gramophone continuously for some 35 years and so far as I can recall they have never awarded star ratings for any aspect of a recording. Furthermore, if it is true or fair to say that their reviews emphasise the "hard" issues rather than the "soft" ones then that's something that has crept in in recent years. What I and other contributors to this debate have been saying, either explicity or implicitly, is that it is precisely the reduction in well informed comment and evaluation of both the music and the recorded performances that we miss in Gramophone these days. It follows from this that I - and I suspect all the others who have joined in this discussion - would agree with the very important point that you make in your final paragraph
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Posted by Rob Barnett This delight in reading literate, detailed and well-informed reviews and being intrigued by exotica advertised by the likes of Harold Moores, EMG, Direction Dean Street, Gramex etc continued into the late 1980s. The pleasure in reading somehow entwined itself with the pleasure of listening to music. Then, gradually, two things happened to Gramophone: reviews, features and information shrank and it dawned on me that the world of recordings was a much richer place than Gramophone would have had us believe. Where were the reviews of the French, American and Scandinavian LPs? I found a copy of the Schwann catalog in a jazz shop and discovered there were many other realms of music. Why were so many smaller labels' LPs relegated to collective ghettos at the back or listed as received but not reviewed, film music was sniffily treated as were many bargain price issues. Of course there is never enough space to review everything but Gramophone could selectively have spread its wings in the main review section. This coincided with friends in the USA and Scandinavia sending me cassettes of broadcasts and copies of LPs and 78s. Horizons were expanding - Gramophone was not. There were exceptions to the sliding decline, of course, including David Fanning's Gramophone feature on the rarer Soviet symphonies but the decline overall seemed terminal. The glossier Gramophone became, the less the substance; the less the interest in engaging me with provocative and new information - with Reithian education and stimulation. Fanfare, which I discovered by accident, was far more adventurous and satisfying - although I eventually gave up on that as well. Had Records and Recordings not died the death in the early 1980s I would have stuck with that in preference to Gramophone - who else would have carried Richard D C Noble's superb review of American classical LPs issued by SPAMH? IRR has too few reviews and too few pages for my liking but it has a good sense of editorial direction - long may it continue. My last subscription to Gramophone expired in the mid-1990s and when I have glanced at copies since I have had little cause to regret the decision and, by contrast, every reason to take some pleasure in the achievement of MusicWeb since 1998. Of course we are fallible but we remain detailed in our provision of discographical information (trainspotting anorak that I am), open to correction and to differing opinions on the worth of music and its performances, not backward-looking, communicative of the multifold pleasures of music, for the most part not parochial and certainly not in an exclusive way, accommodating of new music and 'old' new music and ambitious in our attitude to discovery. As for Gramophone, its approval or otherwise of recordings needs to be taken with the same oxygen-rich scepticism as that of any 'authority' ... including MusicWeb. Ultimately you make up your own mind but in the case of MusicWeb we have the space to be expansive and informative, the confidence to voice a dissenting opinion, the collective knowledge to be authoritative (we ride on the shoulders of the many giants among the volunteer reviewers), a receptive and uncondescending attitude and above all an adventurous spirit. Long may Len Mullenger's achievement continue. Rob Barnett |
Posted by Tony Reinhardt-Rutland (a) the changes in the recording industry: a massive increase in the number of recordings, often produced by artists that would never have been recorded twenty or so years ago. To choose an example at random, I should never have expected that Grand Canaria could produce a full-scale symphony orchestra, let alone one that is in any way accomplished - yet that is what I hear in Adrian Leaper's admirable recording of Mahler's 7th Symphony on the Arte Nova label. My point: the attempt at subtle comparison that can be applied a small number of recordings of a given work - the sixties produced no more than three or four Mahler 7s - is no longer feasible. (b)the dawning realization that some of the past critique may have often been prejudiced and at times downright misleading. For example, I remember one Gramophone reviewer's take on Bruckner. He seemed too easily caught up in a Zeitgeist that regarded any Brucker recording not emanating from the likes of Berlin, Vienna or - at a pinch - Chicago as dubious. Add in overblown metaphors invoking mountain climbing, and I now rate this reviewer as having been at the least unhelpful. To be sure, I still scan the reviews - even Gramophone's reviews, although I do prefer what the web has brought forth... - but I can no longer take any review too seriously.
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Posted by Paul Serotsky I was already finding it seemed rather "thin" (in the sense that there was no longer sufficient substance to hold my attention for anything like a full month) when, one day, I received some SPAM mail from Haymarket, from which I discovered that I could receive "Gramophone" more cheaply than my direct subscription! At the time, I was utterly unaware that Haymarket had "taken over" the publication. Maybe I wouldn't have minded, but they didn't even have the courtesy to reduce the cost of my current subscription, and they didn't even bother to reply to my letter of enquiry. This was a straw that irretrievably damaged the camel's back of a dyed-in-the-wool Yorkshireman, as it made that "thin" look more like "emaciated". I didn't bother to wait to see if things might pick up again, and jumped ship on the spot. Sadly, I find myself agreeing with everything that John and Patrick have said. "Gramophone" is but one example of the accelerating erosion of "substance" by the burgeoning "LCD Tendency". The World is apparently becoming obsessed with cosmetics. To take another example, just one of many: only yesterday, on the news, I witnessed a piece on the demise of OU television, a piece that positively rejoiced that no longer would we have to "suffer" those "awful" complicated, incomprehensible technical diagrams. No voice was raised to point out that such things are part and parcel of physics, engineering and higher mathematics, and that no amount of "cosmetics" (flashy visuals and sound-effects) would replace them effectively, not if "understanding" was your goal. The parallel with the decline of "Gramophone" is depressing, to say the least. Where will it all end? If all are sheep, who will be the shepherds?
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Posted by Raymond Waud Hello. |
Posted by Christopher Miles |
Posted by John Quinn In passing, it's quite noticeable that the Letters to the Editor column never contains anything remotely critical of the magazine itself - in contrast, may I say, with the MusicWeb message board, which is a proper forum. Though I didn't mention it in my original posting I too have found the "bright and cutting edge" design of the magazine a major stumbling block in recent years, and especially in the last twelve months or so. The page design is bitty and unhelpful, especially in the review section. I can't understand why the layout is such that very often a review which could easily have been accommodated on one page spills over onto a second simply so that more reviews - or the start of them - are contained on a single page. And in recent months there has been a tendency to squeezing in items such as "future releases" or short interviews with artists into very thin, long columns within the review pages. Whatever one's stance about the quality of the content of Gramophone - and I'm sure there are some readers who are perfectly comfortable with it - I find it hard to imagine that many readers find its jumbled pages easy to read.
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