Research Paper

I just wrote a 5 page paper for one of my classes, and am about to go to bed for 3 hours.
I figured i might as well put it on the internet in case somebody feels like reading it.

"Recordings don't compare"

Ever since ancient times, perhaps since the “beginning”, music has been seen as a substance in the spiritual and emotional realms. It cannot be touched, yet is felt on a deep level within our minds and souls. Music has been performed for millennia for varieties of purpose: religious worship, the entertainment of kings and royalty, the enjoyment of the elite class, and most recently for the recreation of common people. Over the past few centuries, the culture of music has changed dramatically as not only ideas and styles have evolved but also as technology has been developed. The introduction of recording technology changed the primary mode of listening to music from a performance of the wealthy into an inexpensive pastime for the common man, yet as recorded medium becomes irrelevant there has been a marked upturn in the importance of live performances.
Two hundred years ago, Beethoven was actively composing works during the Classical movement in Vienna. He wrote his pieces, often commissioned by aristocracy, in music manuscripts that could be printed for the members of an orchestra to play to an audience. This was the way that music was listened to in the 19^th century: it had to be played. If someone knew how to play an instrument, the one could entertain himself or others. But otherwise, in order to hear music, one had to be a patron of a theater, a luxury that lower-class members of society couldn’t afford to begin with.
With Thomas Edison’s invention of the phonograph in 1877, and more so with the advent of more practical 78rpm record discs, came a paradigm shift in the concept of “recorded music”. No longer was music recorded merely with notation, but now the actual sounds of the instruments could be preserved, separated from the musician and the stage. With the industrialization of every aspect of society under way, by the end of the Second World War most Americans could feasibly own their own record players and a personal music collection. The burgeoning recording industry exploded as music became a defining force in the lives of young people. Musicians enjoyed the results of this widespread media as now a band with relatively little experience could sign a record contract and make a livelihood off of their music through the private listening in consumers’ homes.
Momentum built up and the recording industry grew to become enormous. By the middle of the 20^th century, concerts were no longer a significant force in experiencing music: “A mutation of musical communication has occurred in which live performance has become a mere adjunct to most people’s musical experience, which now comes to them overwhelmingly through loudspeakers and even earphones. (Chanan, Repeated Takes 18)” As the market for music expanded, it became capable of supporting more and more musicians. Styles changed and evolved as popular music became a driving force in modern life. From swing to blues, jazz to rock, music became increasingly diverse in its offerings. But with everything good that the recorded album had to bring to the world, it was still an imperfect way to experience the music that it stood for.
In the most obvious sense, recordings are imperfect through their mediums. Early phonographs were limited by their mechanical reproduction systems, and even after electrical amplification, the materials could not fully capture all the nuance that the Human ear is capable of. This physical imperfection has been mostly rendered a moot point in recent years with digital reproduction and high quality components, but a more pressing limitation is highlighted with recorded media: in a word, distance.
When music is performed live for an audience, that audience is there with the musicians, experiencing the emotion as it unfolds, surrounded by the atmosphere of a hall and enjoying the company of others. When a person puts on a pair of headphones and listens to a recorded album, there is none of that. There is no personal connection with the performers, no excitement of ‘being there’. This effectively takes the music out of context, save for electronic music that could not be performed any other way. An advantage to this, though, is in its portability. Music means different things based on its surroundings, and we can experience it in new ways never before possible: “…we can listen to opera while riding the underground, Mahler while driving along the motorway, or Spanish monks singing Gregorian chant while flying high above the ocean…”(Chanan 8) People are able to use music as a ‘soundtrack’ to their day, making their lives much more enjoyable.
Despite all the business that the recording industry has amassed, in recent years it has been struggling. When recording technology advanced to digital, the industry had no way of knowing the implications of such a move. The combination of inexpensive personal computers and the internet allowed the file sharing craze of the early 21^st century. Digital formats have reduced the physical media to nearly irrelevant. CD sales dropped about 25% from 1999 to 2005 due to the distribution of music over the internet. Luckily for the record companies, music is now often purchased digitally rather than simply shared; from 2005 to the first half of 2006, legal music downloading increased by 457%. Yet even with the success of digital purchasing, the internet has nevertheless produced an age where merely listening to music is no longer enough to satisfy the consumer appetite.
Digital media has produced an age where anyone can listen to virtually any music at no direct cost. The newest generation of listeners have no sense of novelty in recorded music the way there was at the turn of the last century, it is just expected to be that way. What results is a desire for even more, a further dimension to the recorded experience. In a world used to multiple camera angles, the visual experience has come to be depended upon just as much as the auditory one.
What may be observed is a renaissance of the performing venue. Not that live music went on any sort of hiatus while the recording industry took off, but it became a sort of secondary experience. Now that recorded music has become such an integral part of society, from commercials to video games, a person must do more to actually feel a part of the music. A significant contributor to this idea is the evolution of the “rock concert” over the past few decades. Subwoofers in sound reinforcement systems are a relatively new development, and hi-fidelity reproduction at such volumes is a luxury that wasn’t available 30 years ago. The development of intelligent lights and visual effects and video projections over the past two decades or so have dramatically changed the experience of a live contemporary show. With digital technology being implemented in all aspects of a performance, developments are making leaps and bounds every year.
The end result is that a live performance isn’t about simply the music, and it never was. Two centuries ago a venue was the only way to experience that music, and that experience came with the whole bargain. After stripping the music away from its performance, we’ve come to find that there is so much more to be found in a live setting than people may have realized at the advent of recording, and now we’re spending more time trying to experience it.
A step further may be to say that musical performance has become almost a “genre” in itself. Many independent bands have a grassroots promotional campaign involving simply the internet and as many live performances as they can book. Recording and performing have become markedly different in the modern age where recording often takes place in an acoustically deadened room to a click track, one instrument at a time until the final piece is produced until satisfactory. Live performances, meanwhile, are often composed of remarkable on stage energy and showmanship. This is art on more than a purely musical level. It has musical elements but also the factor of visuals, lights and atmosphere coupled with the actual performance on stage of the musicians. These are two completely different ways of producing music with completely different results.
I think that it is reasonable to say that live performance has made a return as a major way that patrons appreciate music after being surpassed so much by recorded media for nearly a century. It has a new place, one not as an exclusive outlet but rather of a more appreciated one where a listener can truly experience everything that the artist has to offer, not just the mere acoustic representation of his or her work.

Works Cited

Bernstein, Arthur, Naoki Sekine, and Dick Weissman. The Global Music Industry. New York: Taylor &
Francis Group, 2007. Print.

Chanan, Michael. Repeated Takes. New York : Verso, 1995. Print. 

Barbec, Jeffrey, and Todd Barbec. Music, Money, and Success. New York: Schirmer Books, 1994. Print.



"Music." Wikipedia. N.p., n.d. Web. 8 Oct. 2009. .

"Art music." Wikipedia. N.p., n.d. Web. 8 Oct. 2009. .

"Music industry." Wikipedia. N.p., n.d. Web. 8 Oct. 2009. .