So I read a fascinating article in the New Yorker recently. It concerns the way the advent of recording has changed music - for better and for worse. The article focuses mainly on classical music, and talks about how classical has become very standardized since commercial recordings have become widespread. It seems that prior to the advent of recorded music, classical music was much more fluid, and the players given much more leeway in the way they played a given piece. Recordings also made the players much more self-conscious about inadequacies in their playing; it's analogous to living your entire life without seeing a mirror or a picture of yourself and suddenly realizing that you have an ugly mole in the middle of your forehead. Also interesting was the idea that since the early records were so lo-fi, loud brassy music and out-front singing was much easier to hear than quiet violins - it seems as if recoordings made pop music popular.

It's not something we think about, but the way we experience music is almost entirely through recordings, and not live performances - 100 years ago, there were almost no recordings, and the only way people got to experience music was to go and see it being made. And even when we do see a live show, it is almost always informed by listening to a recording prior to the show, and the musicians know that nearly everyone has heard a recording, so they try to live up to it, or try intentionally to play differently to play against our preconceived notions of the song.

This all reminds me (and this is something Ann and I talk about from time to time; she can expound on it more than I can and drop names like Derrida like a good English major) of why one needs to see a real painting when reproductions are so ubiquitous. When we were in NYC in February we went to the MOMA. As you may or may not know, they have Van Gogh's Starry Night on display. When I saw it, all I could think was "this is the original to all of those posters in every girl's dorm room at college." I couldn't distance myself from all of the reproductions I have seen in my life. Are the reproductions art?

So David Byrne read the same article I did and had a great long response on his blog (scroll down to Jun 5). He is a bit more optimistic than the author of the first article, and has some great things to say about different kinds of music today.

Incidentally, Alex Ross, the author of the original article, wrote the best article on Pavement/Malkmus that I have ever read. Check it out.