What I wanted to suggest, but most contributers to the thread seem not to have noticed, is that music throughout most of human experience has been a performance art, a social event with a profound communal significance. To some extent, it remains so. What rock fan would give up going to concerts, and would accept recorded rock as the equivalent of the experience of being there? The same is true of more sedate :-) genres such as classical music and jazz. But there are those who are so fascinated by the physics of generating sound waves in the atmosphere that they reduce music to that dimension alone. They are welcome to their technical expertise, but I still understand music as a musician and an attender of live concerts primarily, and as a listener to recordings only secondarily.
Some years ago I was on a classical music e-mail list which I eventually dropped off of because it was gradually taken over by CD collectors who knew nothing about music, but loved to boast about how many thousand disks they had collected, or the rare ones they had managed to snag. I think my breaking point came when some bright guy opined that it was now unnecessary ever to perform a piece again, because everything worth listening to had been recorded already, and all we had to do was sit around listening to the disks.
On Jan 31, 2005, at 5:52 PM, Carl Remick wrote:
> Yes, recorded music is a veritable Swiss Army sword of multiple edges.
> In terms of positives, it's tremendous to have all the world's
> musical heritage available for instant electronic retrieval. And it's
> nifty to have great musical moments frozen in time -- to know that I'm
> hearing "Audrey" just the way the Dave Brubeck Quartet recorded it
> Oct. 12, 1954. OTOH, I think there's no question that the easy
> availability of recorded music discourages people from becoming
> amateur *and* professional musicians. That vast inventory of
> recordings weighs heavily on career opportunities for musicians today.
But please also remember that it has fostered what might be called the "tyranny of virtuosity." Since most musicians who get to make commercial recordings are likely to be very good, often superlatively good, at their work, they become the standard everyone judges their musical efforts by. Before sound recording was invented, most people only rarely if ever, in their lifetimes, got to hear a really good virtuoso, so they were quite happy with what they normally heard, which was the music-making of their family, friends, and neighbors. (This is my answer to your question: "But was it a pleasure for their listeners?" Sure it was -- why wouldn't enjoying an evening of music making with people you were close to not be?)
This of course is related to a whole host of social issues -- the growth of passive entertainment (records, radio, TV, movies) over active, creative entertainment, the loss of community (or the shrinkage of community to a nuclear family and a few friends, none of whom these days, in many cases, has learned to play an instrument), etc.
Besides the tyranny of virtuosity, there is also the tendency for mass-produced recordings to play into a dominant aspect of our culture, the worship of magnitudes. Allegedly, the wonderful thing about recording is that the maximum number of pieces of music can be distributed to the maximum number of listeners -- what one might call the "Fordist" theory of music.
On Jan 31, 2005, at 12:14 PM, Joseph Wanzala wrote:
> I agree with you essentially, but doesn't your point really apply only
> to purely acoustic music played live with no amplification? Otherwise,
> isn't live music once amplified in an arena or auditorium dependent on
> the same technical vagaries as reproduction? I've been to many live
> performances that sounded awful (frustratingly so because this had
> nothing to do with the performance itself which was usually stellar)
> and many indeed that were sublime, but all this was a function of the
> acoustics, the sound engineers, the equipment and so on and so forth.
Amplification in live performances is sometimes acceptable, even necessary, and, as you say, sometimes terrible. It is still verboten in opera (at least in the best houses); it used to be unheard-of in classical guitar (my instrument) concerts, until some of the latest technical advances have made it at least tolerable. But as long as it is technically well done, amplification can be quite an aid in certain situations. Again, though, I am not concerned with the technology as much as with emphasizing that music has to be understood as an social situation in which people's hearts and minds are moved, not just an occasion on which sound waves of certain frequencies and amplitudes are sent through the atmosphere into people's ears and generate nerve impulses in their auditory nerves -- or a technical question of how to best to record the sound waves generated on that occasion and shoot as close as possible to the identical sound waves into the ears of the owners of the recording.
Of course, by "performances," I don't mean only formal concerts by professionals. I also mean street and subway performers (two of our kids are in that category), folks who hang around the local park (the one near our house is next to the Curtis Institute, so we get some pretty snazzy musicians sometimes, but also plenty of so-so ones), and so on. And there is something of a movement these days of adult first-timers picking up instruments and getting a bang out of it, even if they will never rival the pros. So the picture isn't all gloomy.
Jon Johanning // jjohanning at igc.org __________________________ Misery, mutilation, destruction, terror, starvation and death characterize the process of war and form a principal part of the product. -– Louis Mumford (from "Technics and Civilization")