Recording

Yesterday I stumbled upon a fascinating page chronicling the history of recording technology. The ability to record has had such an enormous effect upon the development of music since it became used by musicians in the 20th century that its impact is difficult to talk about or quantify in any meaningful manner; however, reading about the nitty gritty details of the history brought to mind some really interesting thoughts on the ramifications of recording.

Recorded music has changed the way music is passed down from generation to generation. Until the advent of written scores for music, it was accomplished entirely in an oral/aural fashion, which has an inherent element of interpretation. Even with written scores, once you get one generation removed from someone who heard the original composer conducting or involved in a performance of the music, you get into the realm of interpretation of how the music should be played. The technical can be conveyed by written scores: pitches, tempo, dynamics, etc, but the emotional impact of an individual performance was never able to be passed along (or tinfoil cylinders, as the case would later be). This meant that the music had to be interpreted by a conductor and that each performance could vary without being compared to any gold standard, other than the audience's previous listening experiences.

And speaking of the audience, think of the enormity of live music when there is no such thing as a recording. Live WAS music, there was no live/recorded dichotomy to speak of (and whether a live/recorded dichotomy even exists now is for another post and another day). If you wanted to hear music, you went to see it as well, and you were a part of the experience.

With the ability to record music, all of that changed. It wasn't that you couldn't still go see music - many people did and continue to do so. But, you could also take it home with you and play the same recording over and over. You could listen to your favorite recording and study every nook, cranny and nuance that the recording offered, and if you were a musician you could learn from the recording.

The implications are too vast to cover in any blog post. Books have and will continue to be written on the subject, and there is some excellent scholarly writing out there about recording if you want to look.

It's a particularly interesting time to be thinking about the recorded medium - it has made, and continues to make, a transition from very physical and tangible, in the form of cylinders, acetates, records, magnetic tapes and compact discs, to the intangible file formats of the computer and internet. We can buy recorded music that we cannot touch, we can only interact with it in a physical way through the interface of a computer or another electronic device such as an iPod.

I'm realizing I haven't said much of substance in this post, but maybe it might be a catalyst for you to think about these issues, as it has for me. As I continue to process my thoughts on the matter I'll also continue to write about the subject.