Music on tap

 

I am listening to Ravels Bolero through my new Sonos toy. The music with its ratter-tat-tat snare drum background, the various instruments coming in, one after the other, repeating a haunting musical refrain. Slowly the volume increases, the sound swells until, as if in crisis, the shrill and dramatic cry from the strings plunges the whole orchestra into a torment, like an agonised animal in its last dying throes leaving a final crescendo of sound followed by an equally dramatic void when the music stops.
Jack Johnson's easy strolling lyrics, Maria Callas glissading up and down the scales with perfect pitch and sublime control, music on tap as never before.
One of the first records I chose was Enrico Caruso singing an aria from Puccini. The recording was old and you could hear on the track the scratches of the steel needles which were used in those days. It was the self same record I have upstairs, a vinyl 78 one of many, a precious memory of my Mother and Father and the music we played when I was young.
With a catalogue of thousands there isn't a song or piece that isn't available. 
Fore-instance I have just switched, between paragraphs, to Bluesology played by the fabulous Modern Jazz Quartet, how easy was that ? 

I remember going to the St George's Hall in Bradford to sit enraptured as those jazz giants performed on stage. Ella Fitzgerald and Oscar Peterson, Dizzy Gillespie all our American heroes in the flesh and only a 'trolley bus' ride away !!
Now at the tap of a computer key the sound floods out from the speaker. Missing of course is the excitement of sitting 10 rows back and being carried along with the enthusiasm of the ones fellow acolytes but then you can not have everything and anyway a glass of wine at the elbow and not having to queue in the wet draughty street for the last bus home has something to recommend it.