OT: 175k master recordings lost in fire in 2008

[marciero]

This article may be the first public account in mainstream press of the full extent of the loss from a fire eleven years ago in a Universal Music Group warehouse. The loss was originally downplayed for a number of reasons explained in the article, but encompasses approximately 175,000 one-of-a-kind masters and other recorded material, including unreleased material, from a long list of jazz and rock artists.

The article does a great job of explaining the significance of master recordings, especially in the uber-compressed digital streaming era. Also details the film and record industry's historical indifference to archiving.

I am trying to apprehend the magnitude of this. It seems unfathomable.

NYT: The Day the Music Burned

[fiamme red]

I had never even heard of this before. What a disaster.

It reminds me of the 1937 fire in the Fox vaults, which destroyed most Fox films made during the silent era. At the time, it was just considered old stuff, and very few people cared. But our culture is poorer for it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1937_Fox_vault_fire

[KarlC]

"It was the biggest disaster in the history of the music business."

Crazy

.

[BobbyJones]

Well written article, but it really is just the topic of the day to be outraged about.

The loss has little effect on the way *most* consumers consume or will consume music in the future, even self-professed enthusiasts.

Whoever thinks this is the biggest disaster in the music industry is really sensationalizing this.

[marciero]

Originally Posted by BobbyJones

Well written article, but it really is just the topic of the day to be outraged about.

The loss has little effect on the way *most* consumers consume or will consume music in the future, even self-professed enthusiasts.

Whoever thinks this is the biggest disaster in the music industry is really sensationalizing this.

I think "outrage" is the wrong word, since there is no person or entity to hold responsible. You cant really blame anyone for not better safeguarding these artifacts. They were owned by UMG so they were free to do with them as they wish. There was no clear monetary incentive to take better care, and would be huge expense and trouble.

For me it's sadness. I am saddened that I will never have the opportunity to hear John Coltrane or Billie Holiday or Joni Mitchell in original sonic clarity (the article points out the recent advances in playback technology). But you do have a point that it will not affect most people directly. On the other hand the same could be said of the burning of Notre Dame cathedral. For most people it's more akin to to that, many times over, or having one third of all art museums destroyed. The fact that I may never visit the Louvre would not diminish the sense of cultural loss I would feel if I knew that, for example, only photos of great works of art existed. And there are less tangible broader effects of such cultural losses.

[buddybikes]

Isn't there any recordings of note in the national archives? I thought there were some dedicated films (and recording) within it.

[gone]

Originally Posted by marciero

For me it's sadness. I am saddened that I will never have the opportunity to hear John Coltrane or Billie Holiday or Joni Mitchell in original sonic clarity (the article points out the recent advances in playback technology). But you do have a point that it will not affect most people directly. On the other hand the same could be said of the burning of Notre Dame cathedral. For most people it's more akin to to that, many times over, or having one third of all art museums destroyed. The fact that I may never visit the Louvre would not diminish the sense of cultural loss I would feel if I knew that, for example, only photos of great works of art existed. And there are less tangible broader effects of such cultural losses.

Well said and as a music lover that’s exactly how I feel about it.

[MattTuck]

Interesting article, I am not quite sure what to make of it.

Making and listening to music is an experience. A recording captures some percentage of the overall experience of listening to a live show, but not all of it. Over the years, many many songs have been lost to time. That doesn't decrease the enjoyment that people a long time ago got from the music.

I don't know anyone alive today that listened to the original performances of Beethoven or Bach. But we still can experience that music performed by others. Granted, this is because good records were kept of the sheet music. For the lost recordings, I am not sure if we have similarly preserved notations.

A recording is a facsimile of the performance. Not the performance itself. All music is fleeting and transient.

Focus more one getting out and listening to musicians live, support them financially by going to see them. (I know we have some professional musicians on here. I'm curious what their take is on this.)

[MattTuck]

Originally Posted by KarlC

"It was the biggest disaster in the history of the music business."

Crazy

.

Interesting, I would have thought this was the biggest disaster in the history of music.

[redir]

The only way you would be able to listen to the original pristine recording is to actually listen to the master recordings. The only people who really ever get to do that are the recording engineers and performers in the studio. The master is then used to create copies. You cannot 'copy' a master. A master is a master is a master.

So yes this is an unprecedented disaster for the recording industry. These are on offs. Once gone they are gone. But the copies of the masters of course exist and that's what we all listen to anyway. So the music isn't lost but the original snap shot in time is and that makes for a very sad day indeed.

[daker13]

Reminding us once again that big record labels are 1) incompetent when it comes to storing/archiving, and 2) stinking liars when it comes to slapping the 'sourced from the original master tapes' phrase on a reissue. Because much of that stuff has been reissued since 2008, and you can bet a lot of it wasn't actually from 'original master tapes,' but from digital files, safeties, etc.

[marciero]

Originally Posted by MattTuck

Interesting article, I am not quite sure what to make of it.

Making and listening to music is an experience. A recording captures some percentage of the overall experience of listening to a live show, but not all of it. Over the years, many many songs have been lost to time. That doesn't decrease the enjoyment that people a long time ago got from the music.

I don't know anyone alive today that listened to the original performances of Beethoven or Bach. But we still can experience that music performed by others. Granted, this is because good records were kept of the sheet music. For the lost recordings, I am not sure if we have similarly preserved notations.

A recording is a facsimile of the performance. Not the performance itself. All music is fleeting and transient.

Focus more one getting out and listening to musicians live, support them financially by going to see them. (I know we have some professional musicians on here. I'm curious what their take is on this.)

I would argue-and the article touches on this- that recordings are intrinsic works, much like photographs. Most would agree that an Ansel Adams is much more than a mere facsimile of Half Dome. In the same sense recorded performance is its own artistic medium, distinct from live performance. This is especially evident with multi-tracked studio works with a lot of production. Musicians are often not even playing at the same time, and in many cases would be hard-pressed to produce anything close to it live! (Consider the "concept albums" from the 70's.) But is is also true int the simplest situation with a group of musicians performing live in the studio, the point of the performance is to produce a recording. So in that sense, the recording is the performance.

[daker13]

Originally Posted by redir

The only way you would be able to listen to the original pristine recording is to actually listen to the master recordings. The only people who really ever get to do that are the recording engineers and performers in the studio. The master is then used to create copies. You cannot 'copy' a master. A master is a master is a master.

So yes this is an unprecedented disaster for the recording industry. These are on offs. Once gone they are gone. But the copies of the masters of course exist and that's what we all listen to anyway. So the music isn't lost but the original snap shot in time is and that makes for a very sad day indeed.

Well, they lost lots of session tapes and outtakes and no-one-even-knows-what, because it wasn't catalogued. So that sucks. But the really good engineers really try to locate the original master(s) and generate reissues from there; many others aren't that invested, and you can usually tell from the results. (I'm not a big Beatles fan, but the vinyl reissues from a few years ago, that came from the original US/UK mono mixes, are good examples of very good sounding, historically important, well done reissues.) The promise of high resolution digital formats is that you would be able to digitize the master and put out a pretty close approximation of it commercially at some point. That's not going to happen, with the tapes gone.

Reissues are hit and miss as it stands. What's going to happen with a lot of these recordings is that the original vinyl issue is going to be the closest thing to the original master tape.

You want a really great sounding record, find Steve Hoffman's cut of Buddy Holly's original sessions (not a very pricey lp--it's from the 90s I think). Hoffman went to a lot of trouble to locate the original masters in the vaults and cut his lps from there. Now, from what I understand, these masters are among those lost in the fire and Hoffman's cut may be the closest thing to those masters now available.

[KJMUNC]

Originally Posted by MattTuck

A recording is a facsimile of the performance. Not the performance itself. All music is fleeting and transient.

Focus more one getting out and listening to musicians live, support them financially by going to see them.

This x1000

I love listening to music recordings as much as anyone else and listening to songs I know and love takes my back to the moment I heard the song and evokes memories unlike anything else. But.....music was meant to be made and listened to live. It's the ultimate celebration of improvisation and creativeness. What if painters works disappeared as fast as they painted them? Would you go watch?

There's no substitute for live music and I love going to hear bands I've never heard of before as you never know what you're going to hear and fall in love with.

[Dino Suegiù]

Originally Posted by marciero

I would argue-and the article touches on this- that recordings are intrinsic works, much like photographs. Most would agree that an Ansel Adams is much more than a mere facsimile of Half Dome. In the same sense recorded performance is its own artistic medium, distinct from live performance. This is especially evident with multi-tracked studio works with a lot of production. Musicians are often not even playing at the same time, and in many cases would be hard-pressed to produce anything close to it live! (Consider the "concept albums" from the 70's.) But is is also true int the simplest situation with a group of musicians performing live in the studio, the point of the performance is to produce a recording. So in that sense, the recording is the performance.

In a way, yes, but not entirely: Ansel Adams, also a very accomplished classical pianist, wrote, "Yes, in the sense that the negative is like the composer’s score. Then, using that musical analogy, the print is the performance." (Often paraphrased as "The negative is the score; the print is the performance.") That there is no one, single, definitive, print/record.

In the negative/master recording comparison, most film photographers created duplicate negatives (or copy-photographed their print at the time to then have a negative of the print that was the interpretation of the original negative at that particular time/session) precisely because of fear of damage.

In the case of the fire cited here, while as bad as I understand it was, it does not seem that we are talking about one-off, never repeated performance recordings here (if those are lost yes then it is a shame) but rather a certain cache of recordings (albeit "master recordings") among many other caches that still do exist, like the very many "Moonrise", etc. Adams prints (and negatives).

I think I remember von Karajan expressing similar thoughts, like Adams, relative to his many live and studio recordings of the exact same pieces; that there simply was no single definitive recording, never would be, and that that did not bother him at all (and he had DG likely recording every whisper). That the music was of course in constant evolution even under the same conductor/orchestra/engineers, let alone an entire universe of them, and that that was the entire point and beauty of it.

So, yes it's too bad that those particular recordings were lost, but it is only a major disaster to those who want it to be so maybe. Even all the lost outtakes, etc, OK, too bad, but there's a limit there too, as there is with any artist's archive; a lot of it, even in the case of someone like Da Vinci or Picasso, they themselves simply considered trash, just something (work, process, trying **** out) done on the way toward (or away from) the next step.