Dennis Bathory-Kitsz wrote:
I'm one of those who prefers to listen to recordings or watch films. To me, live performances are the rehearsals for the recordings (as long as the recordings aren't flattened by so many takes as to remove the musical interest). There are good moments now & then in live performances, but they tend to be extra-musical.
But recordings have been thrilling & rewarding and changed my life. In 45 years of going to concerts, I've never been excited or moved in the same way. Of course, my musical experiences came from recordings, so maybe that's why.
Improvisatory artforms are another matter -- that's where the composition happens in real time. But if you're reading from a score or a script, give me a recording any day!
Dennis
The world sure has room for all kinds of musicians! Recordings are all around, like wall paper, but live performances are relatively rare . And while some recordings have left an immeasurable mark on my musical life (I recall listening to the Monteux recording of Le Sacre with the Rousseau picture on the cover in the living room of a house we left when I was six), it's live instances of music that have become the center of my life, but not necessarily public performances. For me, rehearsing chamber music or with my gamelan group is more important than public music-making, and score reading (at a keyboard, sight-singing, or even silently) can have the same charge as the best concert.
In High School and College, back in the last days of the LP, the new and experimental music that interested me most was rare and hard-to-find. I bought any record I could afford and assembled quite a library. Then, while a grad student, I couldn't afford a stereo, and stopped buying, and then as CDs were introduced, they came out initially so slowly (I believe that there was actually a period of several years when no commercial recordings of Webern, for example, were available) and so expensively that I never started buying cds. I made a principle out of my practice, and have never really bought the things. But somehow, I've ended up with several hundred cds, all gifts or give-aways. At new music concerts, composers will exchange cds like bankers trading business cards.
The upshot of all this has been that I've had no enthusisasm about producing recordings of my own music, and have really begun to think of my music as tailored for concert, live broadcast, and private playing. I think that the greater possibilities of electronic play-back from scores will change this somewhat, but the ramifications of this are still pretty vague to me.
Daniel Wolf http://home.snafu.de/djwolf/ http://renewablemusic.blogspot.com/
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