Needles in the great iTunes haystack.

Despite the fact that I am an obvious music lover, I have a terrible habit of treating my CDs poorly. They usually end up in a big stack in my office cabinet. After a few years of that sort of thing, they tend to get a wee bit scratched up. This year, I've noticed that more of them are becoming unplayable than ever before. For years, students have been urging me to invest in an iPod. Last year, I finally got one. How did I ever survive without these things?

But see, my only problem is that some of my recordings have been damaged beyond salvation. You might say "No problem... just buy them again on the iTunes store." But when you're talking about classical music a particular complication comes up:

If you have a hankering to listen to Elvis singing "Blue Suede Shoes"... you log onto iTunes and download that song from whatever compilation it resides on. Chances are, you'll find the same recording on multiple albums. But if you want to hear Beethoven's Symphony No. 9... you may find over 70 different recordings of it by different conductors, orchestras, soloists, etc. And while they all used the same sheet music, you will find drastically different takes on tempo, dynamics, and expressive nuance. It can be difficult to find recordings that you really like.

Add to this the fact that your perception of certain pieces may be greatly affected by the first recording that you heard. It just so happens that I am particularly attached to my 1972 Solti/Chicago Symphony recording of Beethoven 9: the solo baritone singer has a particularly low, deep tone... making the baritone on every other recording I've ever heard sound like they have a testosterone deficiency. Fortunately, I was able to move that one into my iTunes collection without much fuss.

Not so with my recording of the Bach Double Violin Concerto, and my Handel Watermusic/Royal Fireworks CD. Both of them scratched beyond salvation, both of them out of print. So I spent the better part of last night clicking through the samples of the iTunes store to find replacements. It was kind of depressing: it's almost as if all the recordings of the last 20 years took everything up about ten notches on the metronome - way to frantic for my taste. I used what little information I remembered about my previous recordings to find a suitable substitute: conductor, orchestra, soloists.... In both cases I found recordings by the same people. After purchasing and downloading them, I realized that I had indeed found the exact same recordings re-released on different albums.

Score.

Totally.