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It took almost 10 years for digital technology to catch up with the riddle of how to display classical music titles correctly on MP3 players, car radios and home stereos.
And thanks to technology owned by Emeryville, Calif.-based Gracenote, it took only a few seconds to unmask the highly touted recordings of a noted British pianist as fakes.
The company owns the largest database of music information in the world. Gracenote recently unveiled the first standard for the display of classical music on digital devices, which will greatly affect the downloading, cataloging and playlisting of classical music.
It already has affected the classical music world in ways unexpected, such as the case of the late pianist Joyce Hatto, whose recordings were revealed to be the work of other pianists, thanks to Gracenote’s software.
“It’s not that a boatload of plagiarists are out there, but the digital world is opening up a whole new range of possibilities, and this happens to be one of them,” said Harry Sumrall, classical music editor at Gracenote.
That technology, called the Classical Music Initiative, embeds a ghostlike digital “fingerprint” in works of music. That fingerprint identifies a work of classical music in a vastly different way than the old standard three-line display that listed album, track and artist.
The old arrangement couldn’t differentiate between composer and artist and did not allow for information on movements, opus numbers and orchestras to be displayed in a standard order. Nor could it account for recordings by the same symphony with the same conductor, such as Herbert von Karajan’s four complete sets of Beethoven symphonies.
In the new standard, a work can be displayed with track, album, composer and artist information along a three-line scheme that allows subfields for opus numbers, movements, key signatures and the like. The new display scheme also allows the public to index and search classical music works in a way not possible before, said Sumrall.
“This is sort of like creating a Dewey Decimal System for music,” said Sumrall. The process, whose structure seems simple but proved difficult to implement, begins when an album or CD is submitted to Gracenote for conversion to the new standard. The company gets about 2,500 submissions daily. It now has roughly 250,000 classical recordings in its database that it is converting to the new standard, said Sumrall. Once a classical work has been converted, it will correspond to the new standard for posterity.
“This is very important, because classical music has complex data, and none of the digital services has been able to display classical music correctly,” said Junko Gardenour, business development manager with Naxos of America, the world’s largest independent classical label. To date, the Naxos has converted its complete catalog of 2,500 recordings to the new standard.
The new standard works only if you purchase the music from a provider that subscribes to the format. Gardenour said it has been an uphill battle to motivate companies such as iTunes to display classical music in the new format. But she said the tide is turning, with iTunes and other digital music providers, retailers and labels enabling the new standard.
“It (the standard) will enhance the experience for those that are already using downloads and classical music on the iPod,” said Steven Levy, technology writer for Newsweek.
Gracenote’s Classical Music Initiative seeks to stamp an organizational standard on almost 1,000 years of classical music, Sumrall said.
“The more organization you get, the more you start seeing anomalies and phenomena that you’re not even aware of,” Sumrall said.
One of those anomalies that was not anticipated was the unmasking of recordings represented as being by Hatto.
The pianist, who died in 2006, slowly gained cult status among critics and piano aficionados by virtue of her more than 100 studio recordings. Battling cancer, Hatto stopped performing live in 1976 and devoted herself exclusively to the recording studio.
Those recordings, released on the small label Concert Artists, run by her husband, William Barrington-Coupe, were frequently praised for their clarity and virtuosity.
It took only seconds to begin the unraveling of Hatto’s reputation. And it came at the hands of the Gracenote software.
It happened when a music fan inserted Hatto’s recording of Franz Liszt’s “Transcendental Etudes” into his computer. When he did, the Gracenote software displayed the name of an obscure German pianist, Laszlo Simon.
The fan alerted Jed Distler, a critic for the British music magazine Gramophone. Distler hired an audio expert to analyze the recording by comparing Simon’s CD to Hatto’s. The recordings proved to be identical. Several more of Hatto’s recordings have since been outed as fakes.
Barrington-Coupe recently confessed to manipulating his wife’s recordings by substituting the work of other pianists to replace passages marred by his wife’s pained utterances due to the effects of advancing cancer.
