The advent of recording technology did away with the accessibility constraint imposed by live music performance. Anyone could listen to any piece of music that was committed to a recording, whenever and wherever they liked, and the aura of the live musical performance was greatly diminished. If you could afford a seat at a recital you could still bask in the proximity of the performers, perhaps receiving some part of the contagious aura around the performers as they corporeally manifested the musical material. You could even potentially imbibe some of the ritual energy created by publicly witnessing how the auditory sausage was made, and being seen and acknowledged doing so. But if you couldn’t attend music performances in the flesh you could still turn to a studio recording, which to the extent it was fully accessible still undeniably provided a simple acoustic phenomenon that conveyed the absolute musical totality. A thing quite unlike a meal in that it would be no better or worse if it were made right in front of you by the artist. Theorists like Walter Benjamin thought this would spell the end of the prestige accorded to live musical performances. They were, he was, premature in that judgement.
Not only has aura returned, it has returned in a new, hypermobile form that attaches exclusively to live musical performances. Even as the spatiotemporal exclusivity of live music performance gathers its audience up into a spontaneously arising cult of authentic and vulnerable musical experience it excludes everyone not physically present to witness the spectacle. The discursive activity of concert attendees, and the cottage industry of concert review and reaction content, reify the identity of concert-goers as the audience segment uniquely qualified to identify and celebrate the full range of aesthetic qualities possessed by the music. But do concert-goers really get something aesthetically valuable from the music that those who listen to it privately on a studio recording don’t?
There’s a Difference? You’ll Hear it!
Music probably came before language, growing out of biological capacities like vocal signaling, sound imitation, motor coordination, and problem solving. It shares many structural parameters, including pitch, rhythm, meter, tempo, dynamics, articulation, and timbre, with language. But perhaps the most important commonality between music and language is that they’re both auditory[i] phenomena.
Much like language before writing and recording systems music could only be produced and consumed in in-person settings. Chats, chanting, and chanson with or without instrumentation all depended structurally on the co-presence of speaker and hearer, performer and audience. In the state of nature, before the formation of the state and differentiated social statuses, you had to be there to hear and be heard as a matter of physical necessity. And, just as not everyone could be part of every conversation not everyone could audit every musical performance. Being spoken to, or allowed to listen to a musical performance, assumed initiation into a social group with access to speaker/performer presence.
After the emergence of the state, and social classes, hierarchies with varying levels of access were imposed through bureaucratic evolution. Lower ranking members of society now couldn’t normally speak to their superiors, removed as they were from access by chains of hierarchical command which had to be negotiated by petitionary bureaucratic rituals involving gatekeepers. Parallelly, the courts and salons where musical performances were arranged for an elite audience were not always accessible to a wide public. Thus, the aura of the musical performance as a live event— though it couldn’t be otherwise—was individuated by its spatial and temporal exclusivity. You couldn’t hear a musical piece unless you were deemed worthy of admittance to the venue where and when it was being performed.
Live Performance Flatters Recording with Imitation
By the 1970s recorded studio albums started sounding significantly better than live concerts. This marked a radical reversal in the culture of music, as now every performance of a piece needed to answer to the standard set by its studio recorded version. It was not a secret that live concerts sounded inferior. But performers made up for the acoustic failings of their live performances with visual spectacle, and by cultivating social interaction rituals that encouraged emotional contagion—a secular variant of religious ecstasy. Music, lacking some of its full quiver of auditory powers, was leavened with the visual, kinesthetic pageantry of stage presence, audience interaction, and with the promise of a personal—albeit parasocial—relationship with the creative force through post-performance meet and greets, autograph signings, and photo ops.
Audiences are willing to pay quite generously for this auditorily lacking but otherwise multi-sensorially enhanced musical experience. Unlike a recording which stops making money after it is sold, even though it retains an enduring capacity to permit access to the absolute musical idea, a live performance can be charged for every time it is presented. It stops being accessible the minute it is finished and even recordings of it forever lack the spontaneity and cathectic striving that were embodied in the original performance which was realized at a fixed time and place.
Streaming services monetize the enduring repeatability which a physical record gives away at the price of admittance. But as compared with live performances they are in the same boat as studio recordings, lacking the non-auditory oomph which makes live performances irreducibly vital to those who prefer them over the bare musical idea.
Now, if you can’t attend a live performance then you are in some sense limited to a bare, simple acoustic phenomenon. A pristine experience that’s faithful to the absolute musical idea as conceived and realized by the artist, but lacking the overlay of contagious emotions that only the personal presence and ritualized performance by the artist can confer on organized sounds produced freshly in the moment for you.
Music in its recorded form is thus once again reduced, at least for those not satisfied by the auditory totality alone, to something that can be improved on by being made right in front of you, fresh for your consumption.
The Live Performer is a Tragic Hero, Defying Human Limitations to Achieve Authenticity
To the extent that a live performance reproduces the original piece with high fidelity to the composer’s intention and vision it is equal to the original piece of music as an object of aesthetic contemplation. The ideal performance of a piece of music preserves its original sonic perfection and control: there are no performance mistakes, the mix is balanced with EQ, reverb, panning, and other effects creating the same spatial depth as in the recorded piece. Of course, such a perfect performance may be impossible, and the slightly wanting performance may then only be considered superior to its recorded version in non-auditory—indeed, non-musical—terms.
Parallelly, if a perfect performance preserves all the auditory, or musical, features of the original studio recording then it only really improves upon it in non-auditory, or non-musical, terms. The contagious energy and presence of the performer may enhance the listening experience in a manner of speaking, but these impress themselves on the listener via other perceptual routes than the ears.
It is often said that the fallibility of live music performance, the performers’ inability to embody the exact same auditory totality as the studio recording of a piece music, brings the human touch to the music. The imperfections of the performer are seen as evidence of authenticity and vulnerability, which can foster a sense of connection with listeners who share those musical incapacities contingently with the performer. However, one doesn’t usually think the artist who delivers a performance completely indistinguishable from the studio recording is being inauthentic or performative in the pejorative sense—except in genres like jazz which value musical improvisation and exploration more.
The perception of authenticity, or vulnerability, in a live performance of a piece of music becomes legible only when it noticeably veers from the recorded piece. The recorded piece comes before its authentic and vulnerable live performance. It is aporetically neither authentic nor vulnerable, but makes both authenticity and vulnerability legible as dispositions embodied by the performer in a moment and place inaccessible to future audiences of the recorded piece. It cannot be authentic as its perfect execution of the absolute musical idea is achieved in most cases by splicing the best fragments of multiple performances; it always already strikes a triumphalist pose. It resists a vulnerable presentation by achieving a perfect realization of the musical idea that conceals the physical and mental labour that goes into producing the spontaneous seeming triumph of the studio recording. This triumphalist posture in a studio recording of the musical totality gives it its perceptible, public-facing auditory identity, one that provides a standard of comparison in relation to which live performances will later earn their authentic, vulnerable bona fides.
The Aristocracy of those Dancing to Music Others Can’t Hear
If one is wedded to a view of music appreciation in which authenticity and vulnerability—as good-making features in music—are only realized by the physical co-presence of performer and audience and the performer’s audible departure from the recorded musical totality, then it is natural to think a live performance is almost always better than the studio recording of a musical piece. Such a view takes an exclusionary, even aristocratic, attitude to music appreciation and invests musical performances with an aura of non-fungibility only by removing access to live musical performances capable of evincing authenticity and vulnerability from those lacking the means or the desire to attend such performances.
Like in times before recording technology, music once again under this view demands to be appreciated in conditions that can only be created by physical, socioeconomic, geographical, access to a particular live performance. People who attend live concerts and in general privilege them over studio recordings interpret access to live performances as pro tanto evidence they have a sensitivity and normative orectic disposition that affords access to genuine authenticity and vulnerability in music.
If these qualities are legible only in light of, and after, a recorded original version then they must be somewhat accessible in the recorded original version as well. The access afforded by live performance attendance is not uniquely privileged as a mode of music appreciation in that the piece of music would be what it was even were it never performed live. But the enduring access afforded by the studio recording makes endless future listening as well as authentic and vulnerable live rearticulations of the musical totality possible.
To the credit of that aristocratic view of music, there is no obligation that one’s theory and practice of music appreciation be democratic. There is no problem per se with thinking that people with no access to live performances are really missing out on the truest, most authentic, and vulnerable expression of the musical totality. But then it is rationally incumbent on aristocrats of music appreciation to demonstrate that the aura of the live performance adds something musically significant, auditorily legible and of positive aesthetic value, to the experiences reported by audiences who listen to recorded music preferentially. They must identify something that one is missing out on when one doesn’t attend a live musical performance.
Why do aristocrats bear the explanatory burden? Well, that there are differences between a studio recording and any of its live performances is a point of agreement among aristocrats and democrats about musical appreciation. But only aristocrats think that these differences make live performances musically superior to studio recordings.
A thought experiment will serve to show what is at stake when talking about the difference between a studio recording of a musical piece and its authentic and vulnerable performance.
Mary is a perceptive music aficionado who is, for whatever reason, forced to listen to music only through headphones in private at home. She specialises in music theory and historical musicology, and acquires, let us suppose, all the theoretical and practical information there is to obtain about what goes on when we listen to a Bach symphony, or a technical death metal album, inspect its written score with performance notes, and use terms like ‘contrapuntal’, ‘metric modulation’, and so on to describe it as an auditory totality with a distinct musical identity…What will happen when Mary is made to attend a live musical performance of a piece she has heard many times privately on headphones? Will she learn anything new of musical significance about the piece of music which she didn’t know before attending the live performance, or not?
If my reader is persuaded by my arguments in the previous sections, they’ll see why I think Mary learns absolutely nothing of musical significance from attending a live performance of a piece of music which she has previously heard only as a studio recording. Nothing is learned by way of the ears, at the very least. And, so, it seems tendentious to insist that the things she learns—if there are such things—are musically significant generally, or specifically significant to understanding the piece in question as a musical totality.
The aristocrat about music appreciation also owes an explanation of how authenticity and vulnerability of live performance are not parasitic on the inauthenticity and invulnerability of the absolute musical idea as realized in its definitive studio recording. That is, why one ought to value qualities in a piece of music that are not of primary concern in its definitive studio recording, and are only retrospectively legible in the future, and furthermore at certain fixed times and places. Such an explanation, if successful, would show what it is that Mary misses out on if she only listens to studio recordings and never attends live performances; something you can hear and recall that sets the piece of music apart from all others.
I think ceteris paribus the definitive studio recording of a piece of music is always better than a live performance of the piece. I invite aristocrats, and others who have different intuitions about music appreciation to consider the following thought experiment, and explain their choice in light of their commitment to the superiority of authentic, vulnerable live performances over perfect studio recordings.
A beloved band about to retire after a final performance is offering up the following ludic predicament. Either fans can attend the final performance where previously unreleased/unperformed music will be performed and no recording will be allowed or made available. Or, fans can download a pristine recording of the previously unreleased/unperformed music and there will be no final performance before the band retires from music immediately. As a fan you must either: 1. Choose to attend the performance selfishly denying yourself and the rest of the world enduring access to new music composed by an artist you enjoy and respect in their late career, or 2. Choose to forgo the live performance selflessly, so you and the rest of the world can enjoy enduring access to new music composed by an artist you enjoy and respect at a late stage in their career.
If you chose option 1, you must think that the quality of musical experience at the final live concert is sui generis and so valuable that it is better for the piece to only be performed once for those who will attend in person and be forgotten when they forget how it went. That’s a puzzling attitude to take to a potentially mind-expanding piece of music; you’re ensuring it will be scarcely known for a time and then be irretrievably forgotten. It’s so precious you’d rather it be forgotten than countenance the enduring existence of a lesser version realized and preserved forever in a studio recording. You’re like Chesterton’s property rights-respecting thief who only steals that he might respect property more properly.
If you chose option 2, you must be willing to sacrifice a unique, unrepeatable personal experience so that a potentially mind-expanding piece of music will enjoy a communal existence that will likely outlive you and the artist. This makes sense if you think the music is valuable independently of the artist and their contemporary audience. You value the judgement of posterity, and the right of those who haven’t heard to hear and judge the music on its merits. It’s so precious you’d rather everyone has enduring access to a lesser version of it, lacking authenticity and vulnerability, as realized in a studio recording than enjoy it yourself in its richest expression only to let it die with you.
As someone who finds choice 2 the only acceptable one, I think everything of value in the music is already there in its ideal studio recording. The live performance is an afterthought, and auditorily, indeed musically, speaking, beside the point.
[i] We’ll ignore sign languages, and Braille, from consideration for the present discussion.
Also see: A talk on Walter Benjamin: ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction ‘https://youtu.be/fLSSYF9e2qM
