Pre-loved or brand-new?

We humans do love to find patterns in the chaos of the universe; easy ways of carving up the overwhelming whirl of life, in all its kaleidoscope colours, shapes and sizes (and all the gradations in between), into convenient little parcels that allow us to categorise, explain and, ultimately, dismiss the things that make us who we are.

They don’t mean anything, all of these patterns, all these means of classifying and grading us. Humanity cannot be boxed up into neat packages (and certainly not into hierarchies), even though we insist on trying again and again and again. Just look at gender, for example. We tried to divide everyone into male and female, but that didn’t work, and the picture is even more complex for sexuality.

What started off as labelling people as either heterosexual or ‘wrong’ has been sliced up so many times into so many different permutations and combinations that we are in danger of running out of colours and, more importantly, of missing the point.

While it sounds pleasingly progressive to say that we are all somewhere on a sliding scale of sexuality, that implies that we occupy a single point on that scale and stay there, fixed for life, and there we must remain.

Yet we evolve constantly over the years and with increasing experience, and I have the sense that our individual, personal sexuality lies on a sliding scale within us, and that we moves back and forth along that scale at various points during our (hopefully) long and interesting lives.

But I digress. I didn’t start of wanting to talk about gender and sexuality; it popped into my head when I was trying to think of ways in which we humans carve each other up into artificial but very distinct groups (while making excuses for our own untidy complexities).

With that cleaving of one human from another, we ascribe personal qualities to each type and emphasise differences until we find ourselves either side of a divide that can apparently never be surmounted (such as we do with adherence to religion or allegiances in sport).

To look at an entirely different, rather more innocuous aspect of our existence, I have found it tempting to split people into either those who like to surround themselves with new and shiny things that speak of a bright, optimistic future; and others who prefer the old and previously loved, with a tangible connection to a past stretching back towards antiquity.

But it is of course perfectly possible to like both old and new things, and I do. I have a fairly up to date iPhone, my beloved XS having sadly died recently, and I like shiny tech, in its place; yet I also have a love of antique furniture and prints, vintage clothes, 35 mm and medium format film cameras, typewriters (of which I have too many), vinyl records (of which I have far too many) and cassettes, old cars and all manner of other objects that speak of a life lived through other hands.

I see it, in a way, as having the opportunity to be a custodian of items with a value that is (often) not monetary and a palpable history that can be passed on, and increased, from one generation to the next, and allow us to reflect on the eternal aspects of existence and, just as importantly, to understand what is ephemeral.

In this digital age, there is a great temptation to see ‘real’ things such as books, magazines, records and even CDs and DVDs as old fashioned and surplus to requirements; a reminder of why we should have everything available to us just a tap and a click away, as our fingers dance across our illuminated screens like a latter day miniature Fred Astaire.

One of the arguments for going back to tangible media, however, is that the experience is so much more rewarding and ‘human,’ bringing us closer to it and heightening our sense of engagement. I agree: reading a paperback in a park, under the shade of a conveniently placed tree, is so much more enjoyable than flicking through the pages on a phone or other backlit device; even more so at bedtime or in the bath, with its attendant risks.

There is also the question of practicality: a book will never run out of battery, or overheat in the sun, or be unable to load the next page due to some internal gremlin, or be denied access the internet at a crucial moment.

But when it comes to music, and movies and TV series, there is another crucial consideration: that of quality. (I am tempted to say that photographs shot on film are ‘better’ than their digital equivalents, but I have come to the conclusion that they are simply different media and, in a sense, incomparable. It’s a little like comparing oil with acrylic or watercolour painting.)

You can argue it whichever way you want, but the calibre of sound from a vinyl record or CD (leaving aside any discussion over whether records are ‘warmer’ or closer to the ‘real’ experience than CDs) is far better than that from streamed digital files, particularly when fed through actual, connected stereo speakers via an amplifier (rather than a Bluetooth-connected single speaker system).

I have road-tested this again and again, comparing music files with the real thing, so to speak, and there is simply no contest. Tangible, physical media wins hands down every time. (And to my mind, spatial audio Dolby Atmos does not improve things, but rather takes the sound of digital music even further away from ‘reality’.)

Exactly the same can be said for DVDs and even more so for Blu-ray discs. I have watched innumerable streamed movies from reputable media companies over excellent fibre internet connections running at very high speed, all on the latest televisions, and have I ended up being disappointed.

A couple of years ago, I got frustrated with the picture quality of a night scene in a favourite film I was streaming and switched to the DVD copy that I had lying around. I was amazed at the difference in sound and picture quality (and kicked myself for having been sucked in by the marketing). Then I tried a Blu-Ray—of the first Bourne film, if I remember correctly—and decided there and then that I would rebuild my home film collection on physical media only.

All of which to explain that one of my favourite stop offs on any day out shopping is my local charity chop, where the selection of typically pristine DVDs is quite staggering. I never leave empty-handed, although my concession to digital tech in this regard is that I have an app on my phone to store my movie catalogue, so I don’t accidentally buy something twice.

On a recent trip to my local Oxfam, however, I found a treasure trove of music CDs, mostly from the now defunct Pilz label, which was active in the 1980s and 1990s and focused on Central European orchestras and conductors. The label must be hardly known outside of devotees to classical music, and I got to know it while I was a student, when I encountered some very respectable recordings as part of its East German Revolution series.

The Vienna Master Series is no different and on this trip to Oxfam I came across a box set of Bach recordings, with Karel Brazda leading members of the Philharmonia Slavonica in the Brandenburg Concertos and Christine Jaccottet playing the Goldberg Variations, all of which are as quietly impressive as I have come to expect from this budget label catalogue.

The real revelation, however, was a recording of Mendelssohn symphonies by Alfred Scholz. This is a conductor who I got to know through my parents’ vinyl collection, where his name cropped up on some Mozart records and a Golden Classics vinyl from the late 1970s, on which he conducts Wagner, Tchaikovsky and Bizet.

I dismissed him, to be frank, as he didn’t seem to suit the repertoire he was conducting, and the recordings were hardly top drawer, but with Mendelssohn, leading the London Symphony Orchestra, on this newly discovered CD, he is surprisingly good. He seemed perfect match for the material.

Interestingly, I found while writing this column that Alfred Scholz was also a record producer, who invented a pseudonym called ‘Albert Lizzio,’ under which he would pass off his and other conductor’s older recordings for the mass market.

Reading that, I immediately went over to my classical vinyl collection and found a recording of Vivaldi’s Four Seasons by the very same Albert Lizzio, which was handed down to me from my parents. It’s easy to say that now, but I always considered it to be no more than passable. But I hung onto it for sentimental reasons and because, as with books, I don’t like to throw records away.

However, I am not sure the next generation of collectors will thank me for saving that particular record for posterity. One can take the notion of being a custodian too far.