Beautiful poem, Nancy. I don’t agree with that hot take. I think the world would be so cold and lonely without the existence of recorded music. How could we ever appreciate the song stylings from bygone eras if that music hadn’t been recorded? I understand that seeing a musician play or sing live is a transportive experience and the recording may never capture the magic of that exact moment, but a song has the power to move us, to trigger a memory, and soothe us even in its recorded form and that’s what makes it music IMHO.
"I understand that seeing a musician play or sing live is a transportive experience and the recording may never capture the magic of that exact moment, but a song has the power to move us, to trigger a memory, and soothe us even in its recorded form"
This is really the question, right? What makes music music? Is it the live experience? Or is it something else? Or are live music and a recording just two totally different things and it's not that one is better or worse than the other, but that we equate them when we shouldn't? My experience of singing Aaron Copland's "In the Beginning" at an ACDA convention in Trinity Church in Boston can never be duplicated by a recording--it was a truly singular event--but I'd be lying through my teeth if I said I'm not glad I have the recording and that it doesn't, in many ways, send me back there.
At the same time, reading that discussion and thinking about it as I was writing this poem really had me wondering about how recording ossifies our experience of music (or other performance) because it leads us to expect the exact same thing every time, consciously or not. That's not realistic to the human experience, and it's probably not even desirable. The excitement of live performance is that you never know what will happen, but I know I've often wrestled with the way my brain wants the live performance to sound just like the album, which is pretty counterproductive, but that's what's trained into us by repeated listening.
It really does make me wonder what our experience would be like if we never had these tools to help us look back all the time--if the only way we could look back was through our own foggy memories rather than HD video and audio. I'm too much of a music lover in particular to want to live without all those recordings, but I really do wonder what the net effect would be.
Such a beautiful poem and inquiry, Nancy! Thank you for this! I've been thinking recently about how different grief must have been for our ancestors before the invention of the camera, when death meant never seeing that beloved's face again. Or maybe their memories remained clearer when they didn't have an external device to rely on. Great line of pondering, thank you!
Oh, wow--what a fascinating question! I've never thought about the grief aspect before. When portraiture would have been something only the very wealthy could afford, how must it have been to know that some people had that kind of memento, but you didn't? Yikes.
I have wondered before about how photos reinforce or dilute memory. I'd be curious to know if anyone's found a way to study that... but at the same time, I kind of wonder if it's better to wonder.
Beautiful poem, Nancy. I don’t agree with that hot take. I think the world would be so cold and lonely without the existence of recorded music. How could we ever appreciate the song stylings from bygone eras if that music hadn’t been recorded? I understand that seeing a musician play or sing live is a transportive experience and the recording may never capture the magic of that exact moment, but a song has the power to move us, to trigger a memory, and soothe us even in its recorded form and that’s what makes it music IMHO.
"I understand that seeing a musician play or sing live is a transportive experience and the recording may never capture the magic of that exact moment, but a song has the power to move us, to trigger a memory, and soothe us even in its recorded form"
This is really the question, right? What makes music music? Is it the live experience? Or is it something else? Or are live music and a recording just two totally different things and it's not that one is better or worse than the other, but that we equate them when we shouldn't? My experience of singing Aaron Copland's "In the Beginning" at an ACDA convention in Trinity Church in Boston can never be duplicated by a recording--it was a truly singular event--but I'd be lying through my teeth if I said I'm not glad I have the recording and that it doesn't, in many ways, send me back there.
At the same time, reading that discussion and thinking about it as I was writing this poem really had me wondering about how recording ossifies our experience of music (or other performance) because it leads us to expect the exact same thing every time, consciously or not. That's not realistic to the human experience, and it's probably not even desirable. The excitement of live performance is that you never know what will happen, but I know I've often wrestled with the way my brain wants the live performance to sound just like the album, which is pretty counterproductive, but that's what's trained into us by repeated listening.
It really does make me wonder what our experience would be like if we never had these tools to help us look back all the time--if the only way we could look back was through our own foggy memories rather than HD video and audio. I'm too much of a music lover in particular to want to live without all those recordings, but I really do wonder what the net effect would be.
Such a beautiful poem and inquiry, Nancy! Thank you for this! I've been thinking recently about how different grief must have been for our ancestors before the invention of the camera, when death meant never seeing that beloved's face again. Or maybe their memories remained clearer when they didn't have an external device to rely on. Great line of pondering, thank you!
Oh, wow--what a fascinating question! I've never thought about the grief aspect before. When portraiture would have been something only the very wealthy could afford, how must it have been to know that some people had that kind of memento, but you didn't? Yikes.
I have wondered before about how photos reinforce or dilute memory. I'd be curious to know if anyone's found a way to study that... but at the same time, I kind of wonder if it's better to wonder.