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In Reply to: RE: More on Competitions - competitors had better babe-up! posted by Chris from Lafayette on July 02, 2015 at 09:38:03
I knew someone who was enamored with a certain performer (won't name names), he often watched videos of the performer on YouTube. At a later time, I played a couple "audio only" clips of the performer, taken straight from the videos. He thought the performances were nothing special.
Whenever I do a video recommendation, I almost always run the "audio only" test, just to be sure what I thought I was hearing wasn't being influenced by what I was seeing. I've occasionally refrained from recommending a performance after realizing what I heard was influenced too much by what I saw.
Follow Ups:
Over at the Steve Hoffman forums I used to set up blind comparisons between various pianists playing the same composition. The results were often quite surprising for the participants.
I once got a Martha Argerich fan mad at me.... I was driving a car, a piano work was playing on the radio.... A passenger asked me who the pianist was.... I said "Lang Lang". (I didn't know who was performing, I took a guess.) After the piece ended, the listener commented how awful it was. The radio broadcast then said Argerich was the pianist. I swear, there was steam coming out the guy's ears.
Lang Lang was one of the pianists who surprised a lot of people in one of the blind comparisons.
... exactly what the music meant to people back in the day. Your post reminds me of this. Performances can be re-created but social events cannot."Why divorce performing art from performance?" Good question that begs another question: Why is so much of the most popular classical music of the 18th and 19th centuries so rarely listened to today?
Edits: 07/03/15
"Why is so much of the most popular classical music of the 18th and 19th centuries so rarely listened to today?"
Because I think the American pop media culture from the late 1960s to today has marginalized it and, in more recent time, flat out starved airtime of this music to the masses.
This is why I think American (but not European or Asian) classical audiences have been predominantly elderly. The American media at one time didn't deter the masses from listening to classical music. Prior to 1965.
This is also why a lot of Americans recognize Leonard Bernstein as an orchestral conductor, but never even heard of his NYPO successors. While the last concerts were being aired to national audiences, Bernstein happened to be the music director of the New York Philharmonic.
It's interesting that music is a performing art, and yet, in our modern times, we often divorce it from actual performance. Studio recordings are far from "live" performance, and recordings of actual performances are listened to without the visual aspects of attending the performance.
Does this ability to divorce the audio from the visual enhance, undermine, or distort the *performance* aspect of music as a performing art? I suppose it is rather the same as watching dance without the "distraction" of the accompanying audio, dance as just pure "body in motion" in silence. Anyone who has done this (and I do with modern dance sometimes) has a very different experience of the art. Is it more "pure" divorced from sound? Some dance is intentionally performed without music, other dance is performed with accompanying sound effects that doesn't really qualify (at least to me) as music.
I find that, with opera, I must have the visual. I cannot stand opera as an audio-only experience. I enjoy attending live performances of music, because I enjoy the visual aspect of music as a performing art as well. But I agree that the visual makes for a different experience of the music. We can often overlook or forgive weaknesses in the music-specific aspects because we are engaged in the visual as part of the larger experience. We make allowances for the deficiencies of audio in a less than perfect venue and we are more forgiving of errant notes and odd noises.
But I agree with your point, Todd. With the abundance of options available for music, separating the audio from the visual makes sense when trying to make judgments of the music alone. Since I rarely actually *watch* videos on YouTube, mostly just having the music playing while I do other things online, I don't get caught up in that very often.
In fact, it's only when the music I'm hearing is something special that I will then actually choose to view the performance, pulled in to see the musicians playing.
"Life without music is a mistake" (Nietzsche)
And if I may get off topic a bit here (but related to your specific post), I think we've all had the experience of driving in our cars and tuning to a station midway through a performance (i.e., not having heard the announcement of the performers), and being so impressed by what we hear that we have to pull off the road to hear the rest of the performance as well as the post-performance identification of the participants.I had one of those experiences just a week ago with the Beethoven First Symphony, which I tuned to midway through the first movement. I kept thinking to myself, "Wow! This is totally outstanding! The balance, the verve, the accentuation, the phrasing - everything!". And I did pull off the road to hear the last movement and the announcement. It turned out to be Rene Leibowitz and the RPO - a great recording from the 60's. I actually had that CD already in my collection (in its Chesky CD incarnation), but for whatever reason, hearing it as an unidentified performance in my car made me appreciate it even more! These experiences are also useful sometimes in getting past one's musical preconceptions and prejudices.
EDIT: I just checked the price on Amazon for that Chesky CD. Used copies are starting at $113.07! But I'm sure I've seen those performances available on Spotify. And some folks contend we're not going to be streaming most of our music in a few years? ;-)
Edits: 07/02/15
I've seen the complete Leibowitz Beethoven symphony set on LP for not too much money. On CD too, I think.
I had the same experience with my car radio listening to a great Schubert Arpeggione sonata. I thought I was hearing a new young cello sensation. Maybe even a babe, who knows?
But it turned out to be a new reissue of Rostropovich and Britten.
Ah, but then, music often sounds different in a car than it does in any other environment. Many stations compress the audio. Those that don't, the dynamic range of the audio is often not ideal in the auto environment, and the surround sound is not like other listening environments.
"Life without music is a mistake" (Nietzsche)
That's funny. I never use YouTube for music listening (yuck), in fact I pretty much never watch and only listen to music unless I'm at a live performance. So I'll take the fat and ugly great performers any day.
I guess there are many who are as interested in what they see as what they hear, especially with today's technology. That would also help explain the declining interest in classical music, jazz, and anything else that benefits from careful, intelligent listening.
Maybe if more people had easy access to *seeing* classical and jazz music performed by attending live concerts that would help curb the declining interest in classical and jazz recordings.
And perhaps if there wasn't such an attitude of exclusivity and pompousness towards classical and jazz music among so many of the "connoisseurs" then maybe those genres would not have fallen into decline to begin with. Hard to say. But I am sure that didn't help the cause of either genre.
Visual spectacle has always been a major aspect of any musical performance. It was recording technology that created this artificial dichotomy between what we see and what we hear. I honestly don't see any value in it. IMO you actually really do hear more of a performance when you see the artist perform it in person.
A dumpy bald guy in a tux who could really play the violin could once be the hottest ticket in town. Now we have music videos featuring the buck naked Miley Cyrus.
A dumpy bald guy in a tux still can be the hottest *classical* ticket in town.
I don't think celebrity porn has changed anything at the classical box office.
But when David Oistrakh made his American debut in Carnegie Hall in 1955, an intelligent, well read, knowledgeable classical music fan named Marilyn Monroe was there. Times have changed, alas. Edit: iow, classical music has only a fraction of the pop culture buzz it had in those days.
Edits: 07/04/15
yeah but that change happened overnight the following year. We can pretty much divide popular music in two categories. BE and AE. before Elvis and after Elvis. The decline of the classical music superstar celebrity predates Youtube. It even predates MTV. Rock and Roll stole the celebrity show in the world of music years and years ago. And despite this fact there still have been the occasional break out classical star since 1955 and thus far none of them have been hot chicks. Go figure....
Classical music began to fade in the late 50s early 60s. Part of that was TV bringing too many other things to the table.
Watching a classical music performance on screen (with or without sound) will only put most people to sleep. If I'm going to watch a classical music performance, even if it's an opera, I need to watch it "live". I need to be able to sense the ambience and energy within a venue, voices and instrumental textures need to be felt as well as heard. If it's not live sound, the use of cinematic magic doesn't help me much. If I can't have it "live" I'd almost rather just close my eyes and listen.
Edits: 07/04/15 07/04/15 07/04/15 07/05/15
I don't think that's true. There's a lot of youtube videos of classical music. I don't think they are there as a cure for insomnia. Heck, Valentina Lisitsa built her career on her youtube success. There's plenty of classical music out there on DVD these days.
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"I guess there are many who are as interested in what they see as what they hear, especially with today's technology. That would also help explain the declining interest in classical music, jazz, and anything else that benefits from careful, intelligent listening."
Well-said.
Dave
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