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Zenon M. Feszczak writes:
>What are the philosophical and cultural implications of changing from a
>live-performance orientation to a recorded-"performance" orientation. The
>recorded "performance", of course, is often not a performance in the
>traditional sense at all.
I think you'll find that both Glenn Gould, Walter Benjamin, and Michael
Channan (Repeated Takes, Verso, 1995) deal with this subject in an
interesting way. What interests me as a composer is that while most of us
receive at least 90% of all the music we hear through the mediation of
recording, those who discuss and (worse) teach music behave as if the live
performance paradigm were still dominant. In any other field, such
attachment to a superceded model would be classified as "denial".
Your statement that:
>Even classical works, generally imbued with an
>inherent purist orientation, are typically edited and stitched together
>from multiple takes to create the best possible performance: a performance
>which never occurred in reality...
seems to me hostage to that same view which regards live performance as the
appropriate model for music, and other manefestations of music (recordings)
to be a sub-species. Vernacular music has long ago (since Sgt. Pepper at
least) shed itself of this model, but we of the conservatorical frame of
mind persist.
Curious.
sd
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Prof. Stephen Deutsch, Director
Centre for Sound and Music Design
Bournemouth University
Tel: 01202 595102
Fax: 01202 595530
email: sdeutsch@bournemouth.ac.uk
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