# Recording and its Discontents



## SottoVoce (Jul 29, 2011)

I was reading an interview with Honegger. He brought up a point that I've heard people argue before, but never done so poetically:



> You know that a man exposed continuously to a powerful light finally grows blind. Our existence is increasingly dominated by the noise amid which we live. By force of living in such noise, we shall in a brief time be quite deaf. Your landlady's radio or your neighbour's pours forth a flood of noise from dawn to midnight. It might be the Mass in B minor or the vile belchings of lunatic accordians. You hear it everywhere, in the streets, in the shops, cafes, restaurants, even the taxis. It is even forced on one in the factories. Do you persuade yourself that a man who has heard the Symphony in C minor perhaps six times in one day is going to rush to the concert hall in the evening to pay a relatively high fee to hear it a seventh time? Many school children and students do their mathematics homework in front of their radio set in action. They become accustomed to thinking of music as a 'noise in the background' to which the mind pays no attention, no more than to the whitewash on the wall. Would we look at a Velazquez endlessly repeated before our eyes? That is what is ahead in the near future.


I think it is a good point. We tend to have a view of pre-recording classical music existence was a thing to be pitied, where people didn't have great works and a wide repertoire at their fingertips. But there is a certain the romance of getting together and playing a piano four-hands arrangement of a work, being fully prepared for the big moment when you actually go see the work, and where, as Wittgenstein said of the Ninth Symphony, it is literally a life-changing experience. As Honegger points out, it seems that music is the only art form where 1.) there is no choice whether to attend to the artwork or not and 2.) it can be attended to completely passively. I think this has had quite an affect on our musical listening, and how we pay attention to a musical work in general.

I've come to see it recordings as a tool; like a saw can be used to kill someone or to build a house. They can either be abused or be seen as a great help. But it does seems that with its merits, there are also grave weaknesses, something that should be taken noticed when we pity the poor souls before the modern age who didn't have such.


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## Nereffid (Feb 6, 2013)

I'm delighted to have recordings. Simply put, I wouldn't have become interested in classical music in the first place without recordings. Honegger has recordings to thank for the the fact that I've heard his music.

Conversely, I don't "pity" people who never had recordings. What a bizarre idea!


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## brotagonist (Jul 11, 2013)

It is certainly true that the average listener who has already heard a work "perhaps six times in one day is [not] going to rush to the concert hall in the evening to pay a relatively high fee to hear it a seventh time." It would certainly be true for me.

I wouldn't want to trade places with people of the time before recorded music. In the present age, I can own the right to hear anything I want whenever I want. I am able to 'know' music, huge amounts of music, that I could never have dreamed of then. Sometimes, it is "no more than... whitewash on the wall," "attended to completely passively," but even that takes on colour over time; other times, it is an actively engaged experience with the power to project a palette of colours onto the wall at a single listening.

I'm not so sure about Selby's closet (see next post)  Me, I like to recline on the living room floor with the loudspeakers blasting  I am out as an unabashed 'content': just like Nereffid said, "I'm delighted to have recordings."


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## Selby (Nov 17, 2012)

If I were to listen to a piece of music 6 times in one day it can be assumed that I certainly would rush out and buy a ticket to a performance of the piece, because I am obviously very fond of it. 

I find that recordings have an advantage in environment: one night I could not sleep and listened to all 3 of Gorecki's SQs through fancy headphones sitting on the floor of my pitch black closet. It was a very moving experience.

I find that performances have an advantage in intimacy and immediacy. Performances do a good job of forcing the listener to participate; not allow the music to be a passive presence like Honneger feared. There is also a communal component that I find important. I recently took a close friend and his spouse on a double-date to Mahler's Das Lied. It was their first symphonic experience. It was incredibly rewarding to get to share something I love with them and witness them first experience a live orchestra. Very cool.


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## rspader (May 14, 2014)

I have to disagree with Honegger. I may not listen to a piece six times in one day and then rush out that same evening. If I am going to a weekend concert, however, I will prep for it by listening to recordings of what is on the concert program many times in the preceding week.

I do agree that there is probably too much "background music" and not enough "deep listening" these days, but there is no way i would trade my stereo and CDs for a return to only live music.


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## Varick (Apr 30, 2014)

I'm with Nereffid, I don't "pity" those before me without recordings. That would be like people 200 years from now pitying us for not being able to teleport from New York City to Rome in a few seconds. That we actually had to spend 7 hours on a plane to do so. We can't conceive it, so we don't miss it.

I love the fact that I have recorded music and my beck and wim. I do not think we will be losing our hearing at all due to all the background noise in our modern world, and I think it is a pretty unintelligent conclusion to come to in comparison to someone constantly being subject to bright lights eventually becoming blind. Now, if someone is constantly subject to extremely *loud* sounds, then yes, one will probably become deaf. But in our modern world of media, with TV screens everywhere we go, and images constantly flashing before us, none of us are in danger of going blind because of such things. However, constant bright lights in our eyes are an entirely different thing.

I find very little discontent in our modern recorded audio world. I'd actually have to think hard to find one. I think we are blessed because of all the wonderful music we have, in essence, at the touch of a button.

V


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## GioCar (Oct 30, 2013)

Varick said:


> ... That would be like people 200 years from now pitying us for not being able to teleport from New York City to Rome in a few seconds... V


Nice and optimistic vision, Mr Spock...


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## Varick (Apr 30, 2014)

GioCar said:


> Nice and optimistic vision, Mr Spock...


Oh, it's coming... and I'm just pissed that I wont be alive to experience it! LOL

V


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## Woodduck (Mar 17, 2014)

I deplore music piped into public places, commercial establishments, etc. I have walked out of restaurants before ordering because of the ambient noise some consider music. I have left stores without shopping. I have asked that whatever was being played be turned down, and have expressed a preference for having it turned off altogether. Apparently it is believed that hearing music automatically makes us docile and prone to buy things we would otherwise have the mental clarity to know we didn't want or need. On me the effect is precisely the opposite. 

I want to choose when and where I hear music, and what music I hear. But going back to the time before recordings wouldn't improve the situation. It would only substitute the inability to hear music I like for the inablity to avoid music I don't like. And a lifetime of exposure to musical wallpaper has not desensitized me to the real thing.


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## hpowders (Dec 23, 2013)

So glad I can come to TC and when I log in, the first part of the final movement of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony isn't there to greet me.

Perhaps with Premium Membership?


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## Sid James (Feb 7, 2009)

SottoVoce said:


> ...
> I've come to see it recordings as a tool; like a saw can be used to kill someone or to build a house. They can either be abused or be seen as a great help. But it does seems that with its merits, there are also grave weaknesses, something that should be taken noticed when we pity the poor souls before the modern age who didn't have such.


I think a big issue is that technology has made music more of a personal thing. You can listen alone, basically, without the need to be able to play music yourself.

I read that Brahms did what you said before, he got his friends together to hear a two-piano reduction of a new symphony before premiering it, basically to gauge their reactions and get their opinions. Gershwin would do the same, before the premiere of many of his pieces (including Rhapsody in Blue) he would play them through virtually complete at a party, see what people think. I would say that's lost now, a composer can get computer software to 'play' it and put it on the net as on this forum (or send it to friends via email). But with that, I think some of that community aspect of music has been lost. At parties people would probably be bored of that stuff, and we're all so stuck for time that we'd just say to Brahms "send your new symphony to my email."

But in terms of what I do, its changed. When I first got into classical, if I went to hear a piece live in concert, I would hear it to death on the recording I had of it. I wanted to know every note of it. But now I am not obsessive, I might just hear it once or not at all. I like to approach things with fresh ears, and I even go to concerts where I known none of the music beforehand. I suppose that's like an approximation of the audiences of the past, most of them heard music for the first and only time. If you where in London when Haydn went there, you would be lucky to hear the man conduct his own symphonies, otherwise the option would be to hear them in the various reductions that where done for chamber sized ensembles. It was literally a once in a lifetime experience. Hard to imagine now, isn't it?

But even in the mid 20th century things where more limited. Quite a large part of the repertoire that is now considered core repertoire was not recorded, or it was not widely available. I met with a person well into their senior years who was happy to get a piece by a then living composer, Shostakovich. This person had to wait for something like six months for it to be shipped over, and it was the only recording available of this particular work. Made in the USSR!

I think we have lost some things and gained some things. We can be quite jaded now, and quite fussy. Sometimes I just think back to the restrictions they had, and I am more contented with what I have rather than fussing about things I don't have.

Another aspect is canned music is easily distinguished from the real thing. When I'm walking past a cafe or bar and they're playing live music, I can tell its live instantly. 9 times out of 10 I'm right if I need to check. This is attractive to people now as well, in this mechanical age of muzak, many people like live music while they have a drink or meal at such a place, just like how it happened in the past in the world without recordings.


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