XPost: rec.music.classical.recordings

On 3/6/21 5:02 PM, Néstor Castiglione wrote:

On Saturday, March 6, 2021 at 2:52:21 PM UTC-8, andrewc...@gmail.com wrote:

On Sunday, March 7, 2021 at 8:15:06 AM UTC+11, Néstor Castiglione wrote: >>> I always think about Allan Evans' notes for his Pearl set of Ignaz Friedman's recordings, wherein he explained that all his recitals for ABC (Australian Broadcasting Company) were scrapped for use in the war effort of the 1940s, many of them

eventually being ending up as bits of gravel used to pave the Australian freeway system.

And I had never heard of this virtuoso, who died before the resurgence of interest in classical music in Australia took place, greatly assisted by other Central European refugees who found safety in Australia. BTW those recorded broadcasts were

originally made by the Australian Broadcasting Commission (now Corporation), the Australian government-funded national broadcaster, the equivalent of the BBC in Britain.

One of the things that people will confront in the next decades is how impermanent our cultural legacy really is. Think about the infamous Universal lot fire from a decade ago, which wiped out a lot of pop and jazz masters, along with various other

artifacts. Even under optimum conditions, how long can these things really last? With respect to classical music, at least, I do believe record companies are aware of this. These big box set blowouts are their way of cashing in on these things one more
time before either a precipitous drop in already low demand and/or further deterioration of masters makes this impossible.

I'd have to agree with that, sadly, although I'm not a record collector myself, tending to buy recent recordings. Could it be, however, that digital archives - in the cloud and well backed-up - might prove more durable than physical discs?

Andrew Clarke
Canberra

Digital files are surprisingly tricky to store and have their own issues with permanence. For one thing, they could become obsolete, with no available way to salvage them.

My previous phone conked out about a year ago, with literally tens of thousands of these photos of my wife, family, friends, and other loved ones irretrievable. (Neither Apple nor my phone service provider were able to help.) It then struck me that the

only tangible reminders of my life from the past decade, of loved ones present and gone amounted to about a dozen physical photographs. If something like that to occur to an entire archive of cultural artifacts for which there are no longer any physical
originals, the effects would be disastrous.


You're describing accidental loss of digital sources. What about
deliberate destruction of digital works? Say an evil publisher of
the future, like today's Random House, the copyright holder of the
Suess books, decided to *exterminate* some of their works? They
could, because in their desired version of the future, the ability
for absolute censorship is an inherent part of the system they want.

All the mountains of talk about digital preservation is completely
unrealistic if we don't take into account that there are evil
people in power who want to use digital systems to exterminate
dissent. With all frankness, the CEO of Random House, Zuckerburg
of Facebook, the Sulzbergers of the New York Times, Zucker of CNN,
Bezos of Amazon, etc., are not good people and have proven they and
the like cannot be trusted to advocate the interests of the public.
They are the number one reasons for the dumbing down of the news, and
their panegyrics about digital preservation must be suspect.

--- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
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