By ALLAN KOZINN
NEW YORK -- Many people who love music and are of a
certain age -- that is,
old enough to have grown up before compact disks -- share
memories of an
educational ritual. It involved browsing through canyons of
plastic-encased LPs at the
public library, reading the spines, scanning the liner notes
and gradually collecting an
armful for an afternoon's private exploration. We would take
these treasures to a
carrel, put on headphones, carefully cue up the tone arm and
play through the stack of
black, 12-inch vinyl disks. If the encounter proved unusually
pleasant, we might take
some disks home for a week or pick up a fresh copy of one at
the nearest record
store.
That ritual -- at least, in exactly that form -- has largely
come to an end at the New
York Public Library for the Performing Arts at Lincoln Center,
which has just junked
all but a fraction of its once large circulating LP
collection. "Junked" is the literal term:
pressed for shelf space and having watched patrons turn their
attention steadily away
from LPs in favor of CD over the last decade, library
officials decided to get rid of the
old vinyl disks. Because circulating LPs take a heavy beating,
they were deemed both
unmarketeable and unappealing to the dwindling number of
institutions that might take
a better preserved collection as a donation.
If you walk into the library now, you will find several
shelves of comedy, spoken
word and global folk music LPs, a few thousand disks all told.
Symphonies, chamber
music, mainstream classical repertory -- that's all gone, and
the shelves where they
used to sit are now empty. By the library's estimate, the LP
collection has been
reduced to about 10,000 disks from 50,000; but there appear to
be far fewer than
10,000 LPs remaining. (The library's other branches have also
discarded most of their
circulating LPs.)
Browsers can still sort through the compact disk and tape
collection to recreate the
old LP ritual in an updated way. There are, unquestionably,
some improvements in the
experience: the lack of surface noise, clicks, pops and skips
and the ability to skip
freely around the disk without causing damage, not least among
them. But browsing
CDs in library packaging is not quite the same as browsing
through the old LP
shelves, and other quality of life issues -- like readable
program notes -- are
compromised.
Listeners can also, of course, go to the research library on
the third floor, where
technicians will happily play LPs or even 78s and cylinders
for them. But here too, the
browsing part of the experience is lost: the state of
cataloguing at the library is such
that one has to look through the old card catalogue, as well
as in a book version and a
computer database for a comprehensive view of the library's
holdings. That kind of
search generally begins with having a specific piece or
recording in mind and doesn't
allow for the magic of happenstance.
Is the discarding of the LP collection a great tragedy?
Probably not. Robert Marx, the
executive director of the New York Public Library of the
Performing Arts, was quick
to point out that of the classical music recordings that were
discarded, 98 percent of
the works and 60 percent of the performances had been replaced
on CD, and that
there was nothing in the circulating collection that could not
be found in the permanent
research collection, the Rodgers and Hammerstein Archives of
Recorded Sound,
which holds more than 500,000 recordings of all kinds.
He added that the current circulating collection, which
includes the remaining LPs as
well as CDs, cassettes and video tapes, totaled about 70,000
recordings, about 50
percent more than there were at the height of the LP era.
"We are not discarding any categories of LPs that you cannot
find on CD," Marx
said. "Primarily, those categories include plays, radio shows,
sound effects, comedy,
dance instruction recordings and an area that is very
important to our user base,
accents and dialects. Actors use them all the time. Those will
remain on our browsing
shelves until they are either replaced by CDs or become
unplayable."
And what of the LPs themselves? Are collectors likely to be
slapping their foreheads
in disbelief, wondering what the library had in mind? It seems
unlikely, and in fact, the
collectors I've mentioned this to, after raising their
eyebrows for a moment, all had
essentially the same reaction: that there would have been few
rarities, if any, among
the circulating LPs, and what was in the collection cannot
have been in good shape.
Except for specialty pressings, after all, LPs have been out
of production for more
than a decade, which means that the newest disks in the
library's collection are that
old. In that time they have been played on equipment of all
sorts and handled roughly.
Even a collector friend with an expensive industrial-strength
LP-cleaning machine
expressed little concern about these disks being tossed.
Library officials, at any rate, were convinced that the disks
were in wretched shape.
When LPs from the circulating collection were offered to the
research division for sale
in its annual public bazaar (this year's was on Jan. 11), they
were rejected on the
ground that they were too beat up to be saleable, even at 50
cents apiece.
From the library's point of view, dumping the LPs -- just as
they dumped their 78s in
the 1950s -- was inevitable for entirely practical reasons.
One was demand. From
September to December, Marx said, 1,400 LPs were borrowed.
During the same
period, the library lent 24,000 CDs. Over the last year, LP
borrowing had dropped
46 percent, and that was after years of steady decline. "We
have to use our space,"
Marx said, "for the format that people want."
Also, the Lincoln Center library is about to close for two
years of remodeling, starting
in July. For those two years, the research collection is to be
moved to the Library
Annex, at 43rd Street between 10th and 11th Avenues, and the
circulating collection
is to be moved to the Mid-Manhattan Library, Fifth Avenue at
40th Street. With use
of the LP collection dwindling, it seemed pointless to move a
huge collection to
temporary quarters and back.
It all makes a great deal of sense. Still, there is something
sad and even a little
disturbing about the vision of the library unceremoniously
consigning thousands of
LP's to the trash heap. Libraries, after all, exist to
preserve culture. One could argue, I
suppose, that a distinction must be made between an expression
of culture -- a
Beethoven symphony or a Louis Armstrong performance, for
example -- and the
plastic carrier on which it is mass-marketed. Yet who could
deny that the LP is a
cultural artifact in its own right? It seems a pity to watch
an institution of cultural
conservation put one of the last nails in the LPs coffin.
-- Jason Jercinovic jjercino@interport.net multimedia production interface and sound design 5 Flights Up Productions aka dj iball