I have been thinking about life and time and such things a lot during the last few years, where I have seen many of my music heroes pass away. Composers, musicians; and with them often dies a full industry of both interest for their music and the very type of it - who is playing anything like David Bowie now, for instance? Ennio Morricone left the playing field with some amazing but often too little recognized compositions behind him, and now there is nobody like him anymore.
I bought recently a pile of CDs from an online shop, and I have been thinking how amazing and weird it is that these can be 30 years old - or more - and they have been waiting to be sold in a warehouse somewhere, perhaps moving between several warehouses, perhaps being sold off at a still lower price, as the previous shop got cold feet and just wanted to get rid of them.
This Berwald album was produced in 1993, recorded 1-2 years earlier. I just bought it for 1 dollar, as a new CD, shrink-wrapped and all. That was half price of the now regular 2 dollars for this title. I wonder what price it started out with in 1993? As I remember it, prices were more like 20-25 dollars in those days, for a 1-CD album. So, a heavily reduced price, but still sellable.
This particular copy did not age well, as it is impossible to rip it - I doubt that it would play either in a CD player, so the 1 dollar is lost - I will not complain and send it back for replacement when it has such a low price.
Several others of these old CDs are in a poor shape where one or more tracks cannot be read correctly, and quite often the mailman manage to destroy the jewel case - after it has survived for so many years before the shipping, but this one is still in one piece.
But apart from these troubled slices of plastic, I actually find that it is amazing, really, that a 30 year old product can still be sold. How many other things have that kind of life-length?
Most of the music I listen to every day has been composed, played, directed, produced by people who are long gone. Kind of a historical activity, actually, more than taking part in the world as it is right now. Music is very much about the past.
Even for artists who are still alive, it is often so that they made this music, I am now listening to, many years ago. And I try to compare with the things I made many years ago - are any of them still being used by anyone? Probably not. Anything still sellable? Hardly, as I have worked with IT, and that doesn’t live that long.
Berwald himself lived 1796-1868, so even if the CD had worked, it would still be another dive into history.
Well, just a bit of mid-week evening philosophy from me 