November 2025

Mister Stokowski! Mister Stokowski!
Let's talk about movies, classical music, and high-fidelity home audio.
Article By Roger Skoff

  In the 1940 Disney film, Fantasia, Mickey Mouse, still in costume from his performance as Dukas' The Sorcerer's Apprentice, runs up to Conductor, Leopold Stokowski, and, full of admiration, pulls on Stokowski's coat, says "Mr. Stokowski! Mr. Stokowski!", whistles to get the great man's attention, says "My congratulations, sir!" and the exchange continues:

Leopold Stokowski: "Congratulations to you, Mickey!"

Mickey Mouse: "Gee, thanks! Hehe! Well, so long! I'll be seeing ya!"

Stokowski: "Goodbye!"

Back in those days, Mickey Mouse was hugely successful, Stokowski became a popular figure, Fantasia became one of the all-time classic movies, played, re-played, re-dubbed, and, finally, in 2000, given a sequel. And classical music was, for at least a while, if not the, at least a kind of music enjoyed by the masses.

(Just a side-note, here, when my daughter was little, she was quite smitten by Fantasia – which we had on tape and played at home – and called the Sorcerer's Apprentice sequence "The Sausage's Appendix")

Classical music hasn't quite died in the cinema since Fantasia; there have been, every few years, classical music or ballet films (also usually classical music-based), and some of them have even done tolerably well by movie standards. Billy Elliot, for example,(2000) a film about a boy ballet dancer in a mining town, grossed about $109M worldwide. Save the Last Dance, another dance film (2001), did $131M. The Pianist grossed $120M and won three Oscars. And Black Swan, a 2010 ballet-classical-music-psycho-thriller not only made good money ($330M worldwide), but won its star an Academy Award for Best Actress.

There are other films, too, that were about classical music, musicians, or composers, or that used classical music for their background – the most obvious being Amadeus, the blockbuster film from the play about Mozart (8 Oscars but only $90M gross, worldwide) – but they've been few and far between, and have had little long term effect in making classical music the popular hit it became after Fantasia.

Not even among audiophiles.

In fact, the experience among Hi-Fi Show exhibitors for more than just the last few years has been that the very best way to get people to walk out of your room at a Show and move on to the next one is to put on a classical music recording.

Yeah, really.

And that really has me baffled. For one thing, just from the standpoint of the music, itself, there are, as the Beatles amply demonstrated, a whole lot more things that can be done creatively, musically, and even sonically, with a 120-piece full symphony orchestra – with or without a rock group standing in front of it – than can be done by just four guys with three guitars and a drum kit, all by themselves.

Even just in terms of playing time, classical music has the advantage: There's just a lot more enjoyment possible in the average 25 to 40 minutes of a classical performance than in the typical under-3½-minutes of a popular or rock hit. And, according to Statista analysis of the last 160.000 streamable songs, the average rock/popular song length is declining: In 1990, the average hit was 4 minutes 19 seconds long, and by 2020, it had dropped to just 3 min 17 seconds .

In fact, the estimated average playing time for the last 1000 hits, according to that same source, is likely between 3:15 and 3:45, with pop tunes tending to be shorter and rock hits sometimes a little longer (especially for ballads or progressive styles.) The reason for that is that, in media where artists and rights holders get paid by the number of plays, shorter songs tend to be played more often.

That all started with radio, and the desire of artists and producers to get the most radio play possible is still affecting many of the popular music genres, not only as regards length,  but available dynamic range. As I've written before, the higher the average volume level of a radio signal, the greater the station's area of coverage will be and the more listeners will be possible, and the more listeners a station has, the more it can charge for its commercials – which, for most stations, is the whole reason why they're  broadcasting. That's why the short songs (to allow for more commercials), and why most non-classical recordings are heavily compressed – for greater broadcast range and more revenue.

Classical music, on the other hand, is not only possible to have a greater dynamic range (think of the difference between the sound of a single triangle strike and the whole 120 man orchestral tutti following it!) than a four guy rock band – even when they're always playing LOUD – but in classical music recordings, that full dynamic range is typically preserved (at least to the degree technically possible) for the listener's enjoyment.

Another thing about classical music is that it's likely to be either real, done in one "take", or an edited together (to get rid of "clams" [missed notes], or other bloopers), pastiche of a number of real takes to come up with one perfect performance. Much of popular music can't make that claim and, in fact, may never have had an "original" recording session, but is simply an engineer's construct of multiple tracks recorded individually, each of different musicians, playing at different times, and possibly even in different locations, with no "real" performance ever.

That's not to say that such a thing can't be good (I personally love the heavily produced, entirely manufactured sound of the early Eurythmics , or Yello and others), but it IS to say that – if sonic realism is one of the goals for your audiophile listening experience – it can never happen, because there was never anything there for either the recording or your system to be real about!

My big audiophile turn-ons, beside transient attack and decay (which compression tends to muffle) and dynamics (ditto, in spades) are imaging and soundstaging – the ability, not to feel like the musicians are right there, in your listening room, but that you have somehow been transported to their location (whether a studio, a stadium, or a concert hall) and can almost see the performers and reach out and touch or shake hands with them.

That's the effect of a great classical recording played on a great system in a great listening room.

I want to be the one tugging on Stokowski's coat tail and congratulating him on a great performance.

That's how I want to...

Enjoy the music!

 

Roger Skoff