kittenscribble | performance: the vanishing art

I was reading an article called "Playing Music: The Lost Freedom", by Charles Rosen.

The meat of this book review mostly focuses on piano technique and how some frills are perfectly acceptable in performance but less so when listening to a recording - interesting, but not compelling by any means. The really fascinating bits compare today's age of recorded music to yesterday's age of live performances. After all, there was a time when memory was the only way to take the music home.

It relates to why I rarely listen to CDs of live performances, at least not frequently. When you go to a concert you're living in the moment: when the artist adds little details to the song, when he draws some notes out for emphasis or when he just barely misses a note, you don't mind. You rather like it. It's live, after all. But when you take a live recording home and you listen to it over and over again, the wrong notes jump out at you. You'll wince in anticipation of that one lady screaming in the middle of the second verse, or the artist's stumble near the end of the song. And so on. I like listening to CDs over and over again, but live ones get old quickly.

Recordings are supposed to be perfect (and they're least annoying if they are) but at the same time they're rather soulless. My CD of Palestrina's motets is beautiful, flawless, and (once you get over how cool the polyphony is) quite utterly uninteresting if you're listening for the fiftieth or fifty-first time in a row. Familiarity breeds contempt, etc. Whereas, even though our version is much less impressive, I never get tired of singing it. (Especially that one bit where the tenors come in as we're holding our A, and they start a lovely line that weaves around our slower sequence... it's wonderful. Every time.)

I'm sure live music will never die out completely, but the techniques of performing classical music for an audience - where a missed note isn't a big deal, and expressive details can be inserted at will - may be fading in favor of recording-quality perfection. And that would be a great pity.

Apparently there used to be a musical instrument and at least one musician of sorts in every middle-class family, just so that music would be available at home. Now people have rows upon rows of CDs (or hard drives full of mp3s), and no one has any room to store instruments. I like having music at my fingertips, but I can't help mourning a bit for the days when getting music meant you had to go to a concert, or make it yourself...

(On the other hand Mom raised us all with piano lessons, and Dad liked it when we sung. Now my sister has a keyboard and three(!) guitars in her apartment. My brother in college has a guitar and uses the practice pianos frequently; my other brother is angling for a keyboard when he moves out. And I have a piano of my own. So I suppose my grousing about the lack of live music in the home is a bit hypocritical, considering.)