On a recent night, strewn across my living
room carpet was an array of audio parts of a rather historic
nature: a platter, a drive belt, a tone arm and cartridge, a
counterweight, and an anti-skating weight. As I surveyed the
spread, slightly daunted, I wondered whether this is how it
might have felt to enter a blacksmith’s workshop, or perhaps the
chambers of an ancient alchemist.
I was, it’s true, assembling a newly acquired turntable, and
savoring the ironies, in 2015, of the entire exercise. A box of
old LPs, retrieved from an unholy corner of my basement, sat
nearby. Also nearby was a Mac that I have sedulously loaded over
the years with many gigabytes of digital music. Was it me, or
did the computer’s sleep light seem to be pulsing above the
entire scene with a vague air of suspicion?
Not to worry, as the disclaimer should read: No aluminum
unibodies would be harmed in this experiment. But it was
nonetheless a thrill to be hooking up a turntable once more —
and for reasons beyond nostalgia for albums past. In fact, vinyl
LPs — that supposedly rickety sound technology of yore — have
for the last several years been declining to accept the verdict
on their own obsolescence.
Instead, they have made an improbable return in a wide array of
pop genres. And now, finally, this trend is starting to arrive
on classical shores. For the first time in decades, one of the
major classical labels has begun pressing single albums again on
vinyl, both new releases and, mostly, reissues from its back
catalog. Others appear to be testing the waters. But there’s no
mistaking it: Classical vinyl is new again.
Let’s take a moment to allow our iOS-addled brains to register
this strange fact. Wasn’t history supposed to be heading in the
other direction? Stores devoted to CDs — the technology that was
supposed to supersede vinyl — have themselves all but vanished
from the urban landscape. Even digital downloads are being edged
out by cloud-based streaming services such as Spotify, with the
fantasy they purvey of infinite choice. (Jorge Luis Borges, by
the way, came to the idea a long time ago, and called it “The
Library of Babel.”)
Of course, plenty of stalwart classical collectors have held
onto their LPs straight through it all, tending the vinyl flame
as others snuffed it out. But this newest phenomenon is
something different: a return to active production for a
recording technology that seemed to have been consigned to the
dustbin. At a time when digital triumphalism reigns supreme, the
thought conjures feelings of charmed incredulity — as if next we
will be told that South Station has been forced by popular
demand to open a new gate for those who, fed up with the
indignities of modern travel, have begun arriving by stagecoach.
But the vinyl renaissance is real — if also in economic terms
still a very small slice of the music market. As Barry Holden of
Universal Music recently explained to me, the company’s first
return to classical vinyl came three years ago with a Decca box
set, and this year, Deutsche Grammophon will release dozens of
single LPs. Holden expects the upward tick of classical vinyl to
continue, both from its back catalog and in its new releases.
 I
inaugurated my new turntable with a favorite old recording of
Brahms’s B-flat Major Sextet (with the Cleveland Quartet joined
by Bernard Greenhouse and Pinchas Zukerman). E-mails queued up
and calls went to voice mail. I had no desire to do anything but
listen.
With numbers like this, it’s hard not to wonder what, on a
deeper level, is driving this broader return. My personal theory
is that the vinyl revival may have exposed a flawed set of
premises underpinning the digital music revolution from the
outset: that sound can be reduced to just another form of data,
that it is indifferent to its own container, that the medium has
no message, and that music can be accessed through increasingly
frictionless and ephemeral modes of delivery without influencing
the way we hear. More likely, it has always seemed to me,
technologies for listening frame and mediate the act itself.
They contain their own relevant histories. And each technology,
in its own way, shapes the ritual and practice — simply put, the
experience — of listening.
There was just one way to prove my idea, and with unimpeachable
scientific rigor. I had last owned a phonograph some two decades
ago. It was time to give vinyl another spin.
Building my new turntable turned out to be considerably more
than a quick plug-and-play affair, though I confess that I
relished the hands-on contact, real or imagined, with the
machine’s underbelly. As I hesitantly stretched the drive belt
into place, a passage came to mind from Milan Kundera’s novel
“Immortality,” in which the author wistfully summons a golden,
prelapsarian moment from the era of Goethe — a time in which
modern inventions had made life more comfortable, but, as
Kundera puts it, “an educated person could still understand all
the devices he used.” Such a person still grasped how his home
was built, how oil lamps produced light, what principles
informed a telescope. “The world of technical objects,” Kundera
writes, “was completely open and intelligible to him.”
Here already was perhaps one element of vinyl’s current appeal:
This technology is more transparent. It has not been shorn of
visuality. You can understand the principles, and watch the
sound being produced. Compare this with music that mysteriously
arrives through ear buds attached to opaque slabs of glass and
aluminum after a button has been pressed or a person has intoned
the word “Siri” to no one in particular.
As I tightened the final screw and heaved the turntable onto a
shelf, another piece of the vinyl puzzle suggested itself: the
utter lack of portability. The music is anchored in a physical
place, typically in one’s home. How terribly limiting, I know.
But could it also be that this adds to its appeal, that
something in music pushes back against our impulse to stick it
in our pocket and carry it along?
The question may have deeper roots. “Originally,” the composer
R. Murray Schafer has written, “all sounds were original.” In
other words, you once had to be at a performance to hear what
was played. Schafer coined the term “schizophonia” to describe
the fundamental breach introduced by the advent of recordings: a
separation of sound from its original source.
In the early years of the phonograph, marketers seemed to intuit
that the mind still needed a source onto which it could map what
it was hearing. In his book “Capturing Sound,” Mark Katz
describes the range of attempts made to close the gap, from the
Illustrated Song Machine, which would cycle through images in
time with the music, to something called the Edison Realism
Test, offered in local record stores across the country.
Customers were encouraged to sit in a quiet area and picture in
their minds a live concert they had recently attended. Then —
and only then, presumably — would they be able to grasp the
recorded sounds as documents of an authentic performance,
capable of moving a listener like the original.
These days we may trust our recordings more intuitively, but
newer habits of far-flung listening would seem to have only
increased our collective schizophonia, precisely in ways that
the digital revolution has loved to celebrate. (Your music — set
free! At the beach, in the park, or while conducting your
research on the North Pole!)
Yet while this radical portability of listening can enable a
pleasant embubbling of the self in public spaces, our
connections to the music’s origins — as an actual event in sound
— become that much more tenuous. Moreover, when music becomes a
background soundtrack to life, it becomes easier to regard it as
many people regard background soundtracks, which is to say, to
barely notice it at all.
By comparison, it was rather hard not to notice the freshly
pressed and very hefty LP in my hands: a new recording of a live
recital by the Russian pianist Grigory Sokolov. Had vinyl in
fact grown heavier, or did it only seem that way given the
shrink-to-nothing tendencies of the journey from LP to CD to MP3
to the cloud? Yes, in fact, it has grown heavier — thanks to a
new audiophile standard of pressings at 180 grams, up from the
older 120 grams. The bulking up is said to have many sonic
advantages on its own terms, but it is also, incidentally, a
striking departure from the digital world’s guiding obsession
with thinness. (Here’s some ad copy you won’t be hearing for the
next iPhone: “Now 50 percent heavier than before!”)
It’s not just the tactility of LPs, but also the experience of
playing vinyl, that would seem to discourage the casual,
ear-budded, aural-wallpaper approach to listening. Vinyl rewards
close attention. The playing of the record is the event.
The salience of this fact returned to me as I inaugurated my new
turntable not with Sokolov, but instead with a favorite old
recording of Brahms’s B-flat Major Sextet (with the Cleveland
Quartet joined by Bernard Greenhouse and Pinchas Zukerman).
There it was, the sound I still recalled: warm and uncompressed
and present in the room. E-mails queued up and calls went to
voice mail. I had no desire to do anything but listen. The
Sokolov recording, in addition to being a dazzling performance,
conjured a similar island in time.
Listening, it turns out, is built into the early pre-history of
the phonograph itself, and not in incidental ways. Historians of
early sound reproduction tell of an obscure and long-vanished
invention called the “ear phonautograph,” built by Alexander
Graham Bell and Clarence Blake as part of the journey toward the
first telephones and phonographs. This device attached a stylus
to the small bones and the ear drum of an actual severed human
ear, and transformed speech through a horn into the sketchings
of sound on smoked glass. In short, as Jonathan Sterne
illustrates in his book “The Audible Past,” before we wanted
machines to play us sound, we wanted them to listen.
Sterne’s book and others in this genre are full of examples of
famed inventions whose meanings and uses have evolved over time:
telephone lines, for instance, that were once used to broadcast
performances from the opera in Paris, or phonographs that people
dreamed might one day be placed in post offices to record and
play messages for those who could not read or write.
In this spirit, and after playing as many old and newly pressed
records as I could find, I realized that with vinyl, both
nothing and everything has changed. It appeals today for the
same reasons as it did back then — the warmth, the sound, the
euphony, the presence — but also for a set of entirely new
reasons. Or, better said, old reasons given new valences by the
wake of technologies that were supposed to have taken its place.
That latter category of charms flows from the pleasures of
slowness, tactility, intentionality, historical resonance, and a
firmer anchoring of sound in a particular space. Perhaps vinyl
is best thought of as the scenic footpath that still improbably
wends its way in the shadows of the superhighway. Small wonder,
actually, that so many are now treading it once more, or for the
first time.
Back in my own living room, the Mac’s sleep light appeared to
have returned to its normal glow, apparently resigned to
peaceably sharing its access to the amplifier. That’s good,
because my newest addition to the stereo, this time, is here to
stay.
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