Against Recorded Music

[SonicDimension]

Given the nature of Boards of Canada's music, I thought some of you might find this essay from The New Yorker interesting:
The Record Effect: How technology has transformed the sound of music

It is about how the invention of the phonograph and subsequent recording technologies altered the creation and consumption of popular and classical music in the twentieth century.

On a related note, I met a pianist/composer a few years ago who told me that he had stopped listening to recorded music. Strangely, he had been a fan of Autechre and Boards of Canada at some point and was familiar with BoC's work through the Geogaddi era.

He was very interested in experimental composition techniques involving math and was intrigued when I told him that Boards did things like basing a melody on the Fibonacci sequence. However, he insisted that artists like Boards who create sounds exclusively in a recorded medium are not creating music, but 'sound sculptures.'

Now, he may have simply been defending his profession (classical music composer and performer) which is dependent on live performance, but for some reason his refusal to listen to recorded music left a strong impression on me. I consider myself a Luddite in many ways, but I had not given critiques of recorded music much thought.

These days, I find myself increasingly unsatisfied with listening to records. It somehow cheapens the experience of music and creates a jarring disconnection from my present situation in space and time. Also, most of it seems really boring and derivative (not to mention standardized by uniform recording techniques) . With the Internet, records have become an even cheaper commodity that people produce and consume in mass quantities without much concern for any aesthetic values whatever.

Then again, I really love Boards of Canada and I appreciate the importance of technology in the creation of their art. But they are definitely an exception. They spend years meticulously crafting their tracks and employ all kinds of creative recording tricks to create sounds that are emotionally powerful.

I would be curious to hear anyone's thoughts on this.

[fdamb]

Excellent article, thanks for sharing. One of the things that is so fascinating about BoC is that to a large degree the beauty of their "sculpture" involves the reflection on the medium its self. There's definitely a dimension to electronic production that acoustic music can not reproduce and vice versa.

Gareth Loy in his book "musimathics" compares the computer to a spaceship and acoustic instruments to a bullock cart.

Computers open up so much room for imaginative soundscaping potential. However acoustic instruments,
piano, orchestra etc seem to lend themselves to an equally rich world of form which is more of an "absolute" music.

With recording technology the studio became an instrument and now we are sort of
locked into this dialogue with all these different atmospheres; music for films, tv commericals, radio, on and on and on.

So increasingly it moves away from a string vibrating and the acoustic wave hitting the ear to this more abstract, cerebral, highly subjective, multi-temporal experience when we hear a sound. We aren't just hearing the sound but we are feeling its temporal and cultural references too. Perhaps that's the "disconnection" you're talking about.

[saturdayindex]

Great article.

I do feel like recorded art tends to be more "soulless" to an extent than live music.

Some interesting concepts...

[GH]

Nice article, with a lot of meat on it.

I agree to an extent, and disagree to another. Recording hasn't lead to the demise of music yet, and I don't think it will.

I don't really see myself as a musician, and I'm sure there are lots of others who record, and even perform in the electronic field who don't either. So that kinda goes along with the recorded music is sculpted sound rather than music theory.

Is music only music when it's playing live?

[Beacon]

I think that this composer is awfully closed-minded and stuck behind the times. For me, recorded music is the purest form of it. Live music can be as much about performance and technically impressing the audience as the sound itself.

Recorded music is awfully abundant, especially with the advent of everything being streamable on sites like bandcamp. This definitely adds some excitement to live performances. But I don't think it makes live music any better. Live music also forces you to give music your undivided attention - but you can do this with recorded music too if you choose.

It really bothers me how stubborn some people with a music school background are about this. There were a tonne of composers and musicians that focused on live performance before our era. Do something new and embrace new mediums.

[2ndMOUSE]

Sounds a bit pretentious to me.
Its like someone saying they dont watch tv or movies bexause they dont portray real life , or they dont go to restaurants because they cant eat anything they didnt kill , skin , and cook themselves.
The actual process of recording music has opened up many doors like compression , flanging , dub delay etc...that havecaused music to evolve as a medium.and there are many directions that music has taken , that wouldnt have been possible without modern recording techniques.

[Cupz]

There are no "truer" or "more honest" art-forms, just different ones.

I hate it when people say this is better then that, be it written word, pictures or sound. I'm glad it all exist.

I couldn't play the piano like a concert pianist,
a concert pianist couldn't produce huge blood-overdrived-overcompressed beats like I can...well maybe he could, thats not the point.

[bearhead]

I don't like eating hamburgers because they are soulless, and they aren't the purest form of the cow.

I eat the whole cow to get the full experience.

[2ndMOUSE]

I don't like eating hamburgers because they are soulless, and they aren't the purest form of the cow.

I eat the whole cow to get the full experience.

But a hamburger is a more pure form of cow than a stick of broccoli or 3 carrots.
I vaguely remember hearing Yoda saying something along those lines when he was rambling on about using the fork......use the fork luke , use the fork...

[Negamuse]

Your professor's point is bizarre. He's hung up on separating music (as art) from performance (as art), and that's sort of understandable coming from his point of view as a classical performer (though I entirely disagree with him). But the advent of recorded media changed that forever, and it's stuckist to ignore that, and write off all recorded music as non-art.

What's bizarre is that he then listens to avant-garde modern recorded music, sees some worth in it, and that appears to clash with his worldview of what music is, so he says "OK, this has artistic merit, it's not a performance per-se, but something that's crafted and presented like a finished artifact... like a SCULPTURE". Torturous analogy, but beyond that it's sad that he can't let go of his preconceptions and embrace it for the art it is.

It's doubly stupid when you consider that people like BoC and Autechre take the recording process and explicitly exploit elements of it for artistic purposes. BoC playing on the concepts of aged recordings and everything that invokes about memory and time passing, Autechre taking the pinpoint precision and non-linearity of electronic recording and amplifying it beyond human comprehension. To anybody who makes any claim to be able to evaluate music as art, that should raise a massive red flag that they're missing something important about what recorded music is in an artistic context.

I'm not even going to get into high-art vs low-art debates because they're crass, but yeah, he sounds like he needs to do some actual listening.

[Treefingers]

Your professor's point is bizarre. He's hung up on separating music (as art) from performance (as art), and that's sort of understandable coming from his point of view as a classical performer (though I entirely disagree with him). But the advent of recorded media changed that forever, and it's stuckist to ignore that, and write off all recorded music as non-art.

What's bizarre is that he then listens to avant-garde modern recorded music, sees some worth in it, and that appears to clash with his worldview of what music is, so he says "OK, this has artistic merit, it's not a performance per-se, but something that's crafted and presented like a finished artifact... like a SCULPTURE". Torturous analogy, but beyond that it's sad that he can't let go of his preconceptions and embrace it for the art it is.

It's doubly stupid when you consider that people like BoC and Autechre take the recording process and explicitly exploit elements of it for artistic purposes. BoC playing on the concepts of aged recordings and everything that invokes about memory and time passing, Autechre taking the pinpoint precision and non-linearity of electronic recording and amplifying it beyond human comprehension. To anybody who makes any claim to be able to evaluate music as art, that should raise a massive red flag that they're missing something important about what recorded music is in an artistic context.

I'm not even going to get into high-art vs low-art debates because they're crass, but yeah, he sounds like he needs to do some actual listening.

This.

The whole point is that they're different. There are a myriad things you can do with recording that can't do live, and there's things you can do live that would seem pointless in the context of a recording.

What merit can be found in art exists within the individual works themselves, not within the ridiculously broad generalities that exist within the forms that the works make use of.

[SonicDimension]

I do not think that this composer believed that recorded music is not art. I think he could even appreciate the value of recorded music (as I said, he listened to artists like Boards of Canada before he stopped listening to records). I do not actually know the reason why he refused to listen to recorded music; he never fully explained his reasoning to me. My impression was that he simply enjoyed the experience of playing and listening to music created by live people playing physical instruments much more than he enjoyed listening to records. Maybe he felt that records were a distraction from what he viewed as a purer form of music and he did not want them to consume his time and energy.

I think he agreed with some of the points that Sousa made about how records have led to a music culture of passive consumption where only a small minority actually learn to play (much less compose) music and people do not engage artistically with the people in their face-to-face social circles. Music has become a cheap commodity created primarily by 'professionals' who need to create products that can be marketed to a mass audience. I can understand why someone would want to protest against this trend.

[In_The_Annexe]

there are musicians
there are composers
there are electronic composers
and there are electronic/composers who are also musicians.

Good article but I have to disagree with some of it. artists like Boards of Canada or Carbon Based Lifeforms don't fall into just one category of production when it comes to music and it is when you fully accept all types of music, that you will come to know the limitless diversity in it. I'm happy electronic music came around because it opened doors to places you can't go with normal live perfomed music. It created new types of art.

I like live shows, but unfortunately for me I don't have a band that can follow me around wherever I go and play tunes for me, nor do I want one.

music taste is straight up opinion but honestly, music only gets boring when you close yourself off from different genres or hold pointless grudges towards technology and how it's made musical composition easier to do.

any kid with a laptop - made a pretty cool sounding but otherwise simple and untalented track
a person with talent and a laptop - made an extroadinary earth-shattering piece of music

[TaoTapeTao]

Well I will go ahead and say that live music has an entirely different energy to recorded stuff in a studio no doubt and given the chance I would always pick seeing/hearing something performed in the present moment in front of me... as long as it's good


But recording music does give one a lot of opportunity to alter sound and create a particular atmosphere... in that respect it is more like sonic structure than pure immediate music. But the music element is still there 100 percent!

[tiges]

Availability/Affordability
I come from a mid sized city (Glasgow) and there are lots of opportunities to see live music. I see loads including classical and there are lots of pluses above recorded music - volume for one. Last week I saw Pere Ubu, Rachmaninov and Efterklang live and they're pretty far apart on the musical spectrum. But even in big cities you are never going to be able to see everything even if you could afford it. There are plenty of people who only play the major cities in each country or the big festivals.

Repeated Listening
Recorded music has to stand up to repeated listening. Live music doesn't. Before recorded music there were plenty of classical composers who have loads of dull stretches of music in between the high points. Opera and sacred music are particularly guilty of this. I would speculate that modern classical composers (like Reich) write music differently in the knowledge that it will be heard often. Not to say that it's better, just different.

[FernieCanto]

Seeing recorded music as "sonic sculptures" is kind of funny. Personally, I see live music as a bit of "musical theatre". I mean, as much as performers try to hide it, there will always be an element of theatricality to live performances. So, in a way, recorded music is more "pure". But who the hell cares about purity?

One funny thing that makes you reconsider your views on recorded music: every time you play a recording, it will sound different. Even digital music. The differences are too minuscule for us to perceive, but they are there. So, in a way, recorded music, when played back, is still "live". There's no way the musician can have absolute control on every sound the listener will hear, so even when recorded, there is this wild, uncontrollable energy to music, and even at 192GHz/256bit quality, it will still be that way.

Music is so maddeningly, infinitely complex -- like the Universe itself -- that every view on it is inaccurate. You'll always be very far from the truth. As I see it, the closest you can get to the truth is by being as broad as possible; music is, simply, art made of sounds. No matter how they are produced, represented or preserved, if it is made of sound and someone called it "music", then it is.

Finally, it should also be noted that many classical musicians have fully embraced sound recordings, like maestros such as Herbert von Karajan and Leonard Bernstein. Pianist Glenn Gould, in fact, preferred the recording studio rather than the concert hall (but then again, he was an eccentric fanatic for perfection). So, this view that "recorded sound ain't music" is not universal among the most "erudite" crowd.

[aviationparkway]

while photographers capture photons of an image through chemical and or digital process

the eye also transfers the image through chemical process to your brain

that composer is an idiot, perhaps we should abandon sheet music too, because it's also "recorded"
perhaps we should abandon the past 500 years of instrument technology because its too "new"

gimme a break

music is sound, but not all sound is music, that noise, however, may still be enlightening

just because that d-bag can't play a rain storm in forest
doesnt mean I can't record one and play it back.

He really needs a beatdown from Stockhausen
srsly classical droids really make me frustrated sometimes
end rant

[GH]

Good discussion though. I wouldn't go so far as to say the guy is an idiot. I don't think he was dismissing recorded music.