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Another New Wrinkle for Classical Recordings: The App By Susan Elliott October 31, 2013
The iTunes app store has existed only since 2008, but apps could well be The Next Big Thing for classical recording. At a time when the approach for creating, distributing, and marketing classical recordings has become fragmented and puzzling—and the need to appeal to additional audiences continues to mount—apps are starting to provide at least one solid path. “The real beauty of this medium is that it can provide a guide for getting into a subject that is difficult to grasp,” says Touch Press CEO and Founder Max Whitby. And since classical music is often relegated to the “difficult to grasp” category, the app could be the ideal way in. Touch Press was one of the first companies to recognize (and capitalize on) the app’s potential for interactive learning. Its first, The Elements (now available for Mac, PC, and iPhone), was issued in 2010, just about the time when the iPad first hit the market. “Apple found it extremely useful in explaining what the iPad was,” says Whitby of the illuminating dissection of Theodore Gray’s book of the same name. (“I give you here a catalog of everything you can drop on your foot,” Gray writes in the introduction.) So useful that Apple loaded it onto all of its iPads. Users could download the first few minutes for free, and if they wanted more they paid for it. Touch Press by now has 17 apps, three of which are about classical music, with more on the way. “Classical music is an area where we can use the iPad to provide layers of explanation and interpretation on top of the performance itself,” says Whitby. As pointed out in The Best App Yet.
Esa-Pekka Salonen and the Philharmonia Orchestra recorded Touch Press’s first classical app, With music education programs being eliminated at an alarming rate, the classical music app looks to be a highly promising medium,
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