The weather being awful in an agreeable way, and my body in its pre-infusion slump, I changed my plans yesterday and stayed home. No Museum, no movie, no running around. Instead, a long afternoon with the CD library, which I brought to a new level of order.

First, I cleaned out the curious rolling five-drawer cart, designed for what I have no idea, certainly not CDs. I’ve been using it as a sort of midden. Anything that I didn’t know what to do with went into one of the drawers — more like bins, really. Example: the block of foreign-language CDs. The rather wonderful CDs that I receive once a month, with my copy of BBC Music. Those are actually still in the cart. But little else is. I’m ready to put the drawers to a new purpose: the marshalling of all small-label CDs, in double alphabetical order (label>composer).

Here is how I have dealt with the CD-storage problem: the jewel box (plastic case) has to go.

• The CD goes into a paper sleeve with a circular glassine window on one side. Along the top of the other side, I affix an identifying label. The label is not essential, but it comes in handy when a labeled sleeve is empty: I know that something is on the loose. (This rarely happens.) I place the sleeve on a surface, label side down, open edge facing left.
• The booklet (the “cover” in old LP parlance) is placed atop the sleeve, stapled edge facing me. (Or, again, top to the left.)
• The back matter, the piece of paper that you have to disassemble the jewel box to retrieve, is placed atop the booklet, top to the left.
• When this bundle is placed sideways into a drawer of the vaguely Jacobean cabinet that holds most of the classical CDs, the flaps on the back matter, which serve as spines in the enclosed CD jewel box, continue that function. It took about eighteen months of experimentation to discover this.
• Three or four bundled CDs take the room of one jewel box. That’s without real cramming.
• There are fifteen drawers in the cabinet. This is inadequate, but it holds the major labels: Sony (Columbia that was), DG, Decca, Philips, Erato, Hyperion, and so on.

If you are asking, why are labels important, then it is clear that you have never worked with large quantities of classical recordings. From the earliest days of the LP, each label had its own spine style, together with a coherent, sequential numbering system that was no more difficult to deal with than telephone numbers. In those halcyon days, performing artists were much more closely associated with labels than was later the case — we have reached the other end of that curve, with artists publishing their own recordings — and, if you were looking for Van Cliburn doing the Tchaikovsky, you went straight to RCA, and toward the left (earlier) end of the shelf. Five years of dealing with a radio station’s library instilled a military sense of order about these things.

The current storage regime (no jewel boxes) dates to the introduction of iTunes into my life. It was then that I stopped listening to CDs and began assembling lengthy playlists for use on an iPod. As a rule, I don’t dismantle the jewel box until I have loaded the CD’s contents onto the computer library, but this rule took long to take hold. The evolution of the system was gradual, and earlier versions persist in some drawers. For example, my initial procedure was to file CDs and printed matter separately. It did not take eighteen months to see the folly of this, but I had deconstructed quite a few CDs by then.

For several years, I have been living in a comfortable muddle, with most of the CDs from major labels broken down and properly filed. Most. The bad side of the muddle is the disarray of small-label CDs. Taken together, the small-label CDs amount to about a third of the collection. I can’t find anything without a great deal of ferreting.

Some of the labels are very small indeed. Yesterday, I “processed” a CD on the Boston Skyline label. (“Processing” means loading the CD onto the computer, printing a label, breaking the jewel box down, and filing the bundle. In that sense, I did not fully process the Boston Skyline disc; it’s still in a pile on my desk. Processing marathons such as the one I undertook yesterday (which I hope will soon become a thing of the past) are multi-day affairs.) Now, I’ve never heard of the Boston Skyline label, and this CD is the only one that I’ve got. You might imagine that it’s an obscure recording of obscure music, but that is so not the case! There was a time when the recording in question was a collegiate status symbol. In those days, it came in an austere grey sleeve, just like all the other LPs issued by Arkiv Produktion, the early-music sublabel of Deutsche Gramophon. A collection of Renaissance dances recorded by an outfit called the Collegium Terpsichore, it contained a flutey little number that was known far and wide on the flower-power remake hit, “Ding, Dong, the Witch Is Dead,” from The Wizard of Oz, but now with the interpolation of a catchy bourrée from Michael Praetorius’s 1612 compilation, Terpsichore. If you had the Arkiv recording, then you could listen to the bourrée without all the Munchkin nonsense: very cool at the time.  It may be hard to believe now (it is for me), but Renaissance dance music sounded astonishingly fresh in the Sixties, even in the somewhat anachronistic performances of those early days. So, for the matter of that, did Vivaldi. Really! They were an interesting form of indie rock.

How the Collegium Terpsichore recording fell out of the Polygram catalogue, I have no idea, and how or why Boston Skyline picked it up remains a mystery that I’m not moved to solve. I’m too busy making sure that this time the CD will be settled where I can find it, along with all the many other small and one-off labels. I’ll draw up a list one of these days; some of the names are quite amusing, in a desperate sort of way.

iTunes being iTunes (ie perversely brain-dead about classical music, which it refuses to recognize as a realm apart from the world of “songs”), the recording label is not a data field, so the computer can’t tell me where to look for a CD. I haven’t figured out a solution to this problem, but then I haven’t  properly tackled it, either.

Yesterday, I was working both rooms. While classical CDs were being fed into the computer, other kinds of music were going on to the laptop. The laptop holds my “everything else” library, from Broadway shows and Christmas albums to the Ventures. There are over ten thousand tracks on the laptop, and nearly forty thousand on the desktop. This didn’t happen overnight! Both libraries are periodically backed-up to an in-house NAS drive, and I stoutly reject all iTunes updates order to preserve the very considerable internal organizing that I have imposed there. Now I have a lot of CDs to put away. But I have plenty of room for them, thanks to the way I started out yesterday.

***

All afternoon, I checked on the delivery status of a box of books from Amazon. It was promised for the end of the day, but the tracking update remained stuck at a “transit” that occurred at 4:50 in the morning. When I went downstairs to collect the mail, as late as I could and braving the floods of trick-or-treaters, the box was there. O happy! Clearly I’ve got old masters on the brain, because that’s what these books were, or were about. The Oxford Companion to Shakespeare, for example. Gilbert Highet’s Poets in a Landscape,  which Donna Tartt told an intereviewer she was reading. Paul Hazard’s The Crisis of the European Mind 1680-1715 (also a NYRB reprint). A book that I saw at the Frick, but didn’t want to lug around that day, The Books That Shaped Art History, a collection of essays about key texts, such as Panofsky’s Early Netherlandish Painting and Kenneth Clark’s The Nude, in the development of modern art-criticism. One of the books that is given an essay, Francis Haskell’s Patrons and Painters: Art and Society in Baroque Italy, also arrived by the same shipment. After dinner, I read bits and pieces from all these new acquisitions, but I very firmly settled on the Haskell, which makes great sense as history but which is also written in etched prose so worthy of its subject that, if a book could be drawn, as in an old-master drawing, Patrons and Painters would be a fine example.

Within the general framework that has been outlined there was a wide range of variation possible in the relationship between an artist and the client who employed him. At one end of the scale the painter was lodged in his patron’s palace and worked exclusively for him and his friends; at the other, we find a situation which appears, at first sight, to be strikingly similar to that of today: the artist painted a picture with no particular destination in mind and exhibited it in the hope of finding a casual purchaser. In between these extremes were a number of gradations involving middlemen, dealers and dilettantes as well as the activities of foreign travellers and their agents. These intermediate stages became more and more important as the century progressed, but artists usually disliked the freedom of working for unknown admirers, and with a few notable exceptions exhibitions were assumed to be the last resort of the unemployed.

I feel better just copying that out. Everything from “freedom” on is a smothered riot.

Drop me a line at rjk@dailyblague.com
This entry was posted on Friday, November 1st, 2013 at 12:35 pm.