New Yorker piece on audiophiles

[ahofer]

It appears to me that live music struggles to find an audience. Assuming this is true, is this good or bad for music?

Interesting question. One of the drawbacks of sampled/simulated music is that sometimes creators don't have to pay their dues. But there are also many examples of people who work exclusively with samples, absolutely paying their dues and making soulful, interesting music. I don't think there are any substitutes for 1) gaining your expertise on an instrument or banging your head against composition/arranging and 2) working with other musicians in live practice/performance for a significant period of time. As the latter is most relevant to your question, I'd say a declining audience for live music is probably a bad trend for musical development, unless it is replaced by a rise in 'salon' live music (or let's say"chamber music", in its original meaning) practice.

 

[Robin L]

Rick “not arguing in any way against the validity of studio creations” Denney

The one musician I've had the greatest obsession for the longest time is Beethoven. I was lucky enough to be given a promo copy of the big, fat volume of the Oxford History of Music by Richard Taruskin that covered Beethoven's music. I didn't know until I read that book that when Beethoven went deaf, he started reading baroque music extensively and started incorporating more and more ideas from Baroque music into his own compositions. I'm thinking here, Beethoven no longer has the feedback of performing his music in public. His musical thought processes become increasingly dependent on recognizing visual patterns that "work". Much as Colin Nancarrow did. This is another case of the composer not really composing for an audience but mostly for himself and a few friends who can afford to pay him enough to keep on composing, no matter what.

 

[q3cpma]

Yes, but there are lots of people who care about photography who use large-format cameras for which there is no digital replacement. Larger formats use longer focal lengths for the same field of view and that has visual (and measurable) consequences. There are also the image-management features of large-format cameras, which can be emulated in software to some extent but at the expense of usable resolution. I would only use film for nostalgic reasons myself if an affordable (true) 4x5” digital back that would mount in my Sinar camera and be portable and robust for field use became available. But I don’t think that would be that much easier to use than film. It would be more convenient. Like Ansel Adams, I prefer time in the field with the camera and the subject to time in the “darkroom”.

Not all photography genres are fully served by current digital offerings, though I often make do out of necessity. I love the images I get from my big digital Pentax just as much as I love the way the camera works in my hands, but there are things it will not do. My own genre depends on working slowly and with as much deep consideration as I can muster. Many other genres demand facile speed and extreme portability. I would hate for those other genres, however popular they are at the moment, to de-equip those like mine.

Never said the opposite.

Question (and back to music): Would I buy a software-driven electronic tuba in place of my real acoustic tuba if they made one that sounded the same and was easier to play? This is a serious question. Many movie and TV scores are already recorded using digital samples and software.

That's the difference between a pure musician and a pure compositor. It's the compositor that creates (inb4 rabid jazz fans comparing self-indulging improvisation to careful composition) and the musiciance that enjoy the playing of the instrument. Once again, probably very rare to have a compositor that doesn't play (electronic music?).

Next question: It appears to me that live music struggles to find an audience. Assuming this is true, is this good or bad for music? There will always be music, of course, but there may not always be professional musicians. I agree that some music is intended to be studio creation for artistic reasons, but what about the music that isn’t?

Even when it isn't, it doesn't mean it is worse. For example, orchestral music is made to be played live, but a recording allows for retries until desirable perfection is achieved, and for sound engineers to optimize the noise floor/instrument mix way more than what is possible in a live hearing and to negate the variability amongst seats.

 

[rdenney]

The one musician I've had the greatest obsession for the longest time is Beethoven. I was lucky enough to be given a promo copy of the big, fat volume of the Oxford History of Music by Richard Taruskin that covered Beethoven's music. I didn't know until I read that book that when Beethoven went deaf, he started reading baroque music extensively and started incorporating more and more ideas from Baroque music into his own compositions. I'm thinking here, Beethoven no longer has the feedback of performing his music in public. His musical thought processes become increasingly dependent on recognizing visual patterns that "work". Much as Colin Nancarrow did. This is another case of the composer not really composing for an audience but mostly for himself and a few friends who can afford to pay him enough to keep on composing, no matter what.

Of course composers seek to please themselves and work from mental aural imagery, whether their hearing is limited or not.

But music exists as sound, and without sound never reaches its intended expression. Don’t underestimate Beethoven’s ability to hear notated music in his head—he wasn’t always deaf, after all.

I find the description of increasing Baroque content interesting. My own impression is that Beethoven ushered in the Romantic era, becoming increasingly so throughout his career. The 3rd Symphony is much more Romantic than the first two, which are solidly Classical to my ears. The 5th even more so. The 9th is the great seminal Romantic symphony, and that opinion was held by most all the great German Romantics that followed for the remainder of the 19th Century. I have difficulty hearing much Bach or Handel in it, but I hear the 9th in much of Schubert, Berlioz, Bruckner, Wagner, and Brahms.

Of course, that’s biased.

We can think of compositions as notated as a model of what the composer had going on in his or her head. The skill of the composer and the clarity of that aural image and idea affect the accuracy of that model, but also the ability of performers to understand that idea from the notation and perform it accurately (and expressively). Beethoven was in tune with every step of that path even when he was deaf. Without performance, a music composition sits like a film negative in the photographer’s files.

Rick “thinking about this a lot during Covid” Denney

 

[TulseLuper]

Of course composers seek to please themselves and work from mental aural imagery, whether their hearing is limited or not.

But music exists as sound, and without sound never reaches its intended expression. Don’t underestimate Beethoven’s ability to hear notated music in his head—he wasn’t always deaf, after all.

I find the description of increasing Baroque content interesting. My own impression is that Beethoven ushered in the Romantic era, becoming increasingly so throughout his career. The 3rd Symphony is much more Romantic than the first two, which are solidly Classical to my ears. The 5th even more so. The 9th is the great seminal Romantic symphony, and that opinion was held by most all the great German Romantics that followed for the remainder of the 19th Century. I have difficulty hearing much Bach or Handel in it, but I hear the 9th in much of Schubert, Berlioz, Bruckner, Wagner, and Brahms.

Of course, that’s biased.

We can think of compositions as notated as a model of what the composer had going on in his or her head. The skill of the composer and the clarity of that aural image and idea affect the accuracy of that model, but also the ability of performers to understand that idea from the notation and perform it accurately (and expressively). Beethoven was in tune with every step of that path even when he was deaf. Without performance, a music composition sits like a film negative in the photographer’s files.

Rick “thinking about this a lot during Covid” Denney

Consider the late quartets.

 

[rdenney]

Consider the late quartets.

I will do that—not in my listening repertoire in sufficient detail at present but I’ve been meaning to add them.

Rick “always willing to extend the horizon” Denney

 

[TulseLuper]

I will do that—not in my listening repertoire in sufficient detail at present but I’ve been meaning to add them.

Rick “always willing to extend the horizon” Denney

I like the Takacs recordings from 2017 but am not an expert. As a former brass player I always focused more on the symphonies. Lately, though, it's the quartets for me.

 

[Sal1950]

The thing about Art is, what one person perceives as genius, another perceives as pure garbage.
And there's no objective measure of the difference.

 

[q3cpma]

The thing about Art is, what one person perceives as genius, another perceives as pure garbage.
And there's no objective measure of the difference.

Plato disagrees. But what's for sure, is that if it is possible to formalize the judgement of objective beauty, it won't be easy nor will it be a one-size-fits-all system.
The other thing that is hard to accept for some people is that it's possible to not be able to formalize it without proving that objective beauty doesn't exist.

 

[Wes]

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2020/09/14/how-can-we-pay-for-creativity-in-the-digital-age

 

[Robin L]

Of course composers seek to please themselves and work from mental aural imagery, whether their hearing is limited or not.

But music exists as sound, and without sound never reaches its intended expression. Don’t underestimate Beethoven’s ability to hear notated music in his head—he wasn’t always deaf, after all.

I find the description of increasing Baroque content interesting. My own impression is that Beethoven ushered in the Romantic era, becoming increasingly so throughout his career. The 3rd Symphony is much more Romantic than the first two, which are solidly Classical to my ears. The 5th even more so. The 9th is the great seminal Romantic symphony, and that opinion was held by most all the great German Romantics that followed for the remainder of the 19th Century. I have difficulty hearing much Bach or Handel in it, but I hear the 9th in much of Schubert, Berlioz, Bruckner, Wagner, and Brahms.

Of course, that’s biased.

We can think of compositions as notated as a model of what the composer had going on in his or her head. The skill of the composer and the clarity of that aural image and idea affect the accuracy of that model, but also the ability of performers to understand that idea from the notation and perform it accurately (and expressively). Beethoven was in tune with every step of that path even when he was deaf. Without performance, a music composition sits like a film negative in the photographer’s files.

Rick “thinking about this a lot during Covid” Denney

I realize this is going deep into the weeds, but this is also the sort of byway that makes audio gear and recordings desirable. Also the sort of digression that The New Yorker would go into, at least during its heyday.

I'd say Beethoven went "full deaf" by the time he composed the Opus 101, A major sonata for piano. And a lot of what I'm pointing to is in the following:

I'd point in particular to about 6:28 in, where the false beginnings of a fugue turn into an actual fugue. The kind of a fugue where the melody paths lead to dissonances instead of resolutions. This happens repeatedly in Beethoven's music from this point on, and it reminds me of both Ives and Nancarrow in that he seems to be seeking out music that naturally leads to difficulties, like a force of nature, as if the difficulty is the point. Claudio Arrau has said as much. That creation of the "romantic sound" is one aspect of Beethoven, probably the best known, but his baroque influences come to the fore in his later works. I think it's worth noting that Beethoven first made a name for himself with performances of selections from Bach's "Well Tempered Klavier" along with improvising tunes on the spot as a "child prodigy". I can hear Bach's influence in just about all the piano sonatas. And there's some aspects of the Late Quartets closer in construction to French Suites than Haydn's Quartets. It's interesting that Beethoven was so influenced by music he probably never heard in performance, only in his head.

I recall Glenn Gould making a comment along the lines that the finest music is best heard in memory. Again, this all points to the notion that performance, in the usual sense, in "real time", is not the necessarily the best possible realization of music and not necessarily the best possible mode of experiencing music.

 

[Robin L]

I like the Takacs recordings from 2017 but am not an expert. As a former brass player I always focused more on the symphonies. Lately, though, it's the quartets for me.

I'm close enough to 'expert' be classified as an official "maven". The Takacs set is great [possibly my favorite now, due to the symphonic sound they produce], as are most of the other sets. Performers do not casually engage with this particular music. A surprisingly good set is the Guarneri Quartet set for Philips, playing the music as if it was composed in the Late Romantic era and doing so convincingly. And in just about any of the sets of the Last Five Quartets and Grosse Fuge, there will be one performance that really stands out.

 

[TimF]

Which is why I play LP records despite their flaws, and CDs despite the trouble of sustaining the players. It’s a listening ritual that establishes intention, which is an important part of the listening experience, for when I’m in the mood to listen in that way.

And even though I also do digital photography in addition to film photography, I approach it in a film-like fashion, with the same sense of intention, by using a large camera that is happiest on a tripod. And then I make prints (or sometimes books).

When operating my stereo (that archaic word), I’m looking at my own photographic prints, made on real paper and mounted in real frames. One must do that on purpose. That the experience is devalued for everyone else makes me sad for them, but it doesn’t diminish my own satisfaction.

Rick “always preferring the three-dimensional experience” Denney

Lava fields forever.

 

[MattHooper]

my point is that the people for whom music was trivialized by its ease of consumption didn't care that much about music in the first place. I mean, it's basic deduction, isn't it?

Only insofar as it ignores important real world variables, and insofar as people like myself can know from personal experience that your inference is false. (It's similar to the inference that someone who cares about sound reproduction therefore doesn't really care about the music he's listening to).

Your logic implies that I don't care much about music. I could go on at length about my passion for music, but suffice it to say for now, I can know
from my own experience - my own passion for music - that your deduction is unreliable.

Not to mention the logic would imply that pretty much everyone on this site doesn't really care about the music, because...look at the time we are putting in to selecting our audio gear! You don't need all this accuracy stuff to appreciate music, so: (insert non-sequitur) people here don't really care about music.

What's missing in your deduction, I think, are the facts about how different people are in how they experience things like music (or movies or art) and how it's entirely reasonable for some people who are passionate about something to care about how they experience it.

Person A may become number more quickly to easy access or repetition than person B. ( I love bread and cheese. So does my wife. But she can and does eat it literally every day of the week. She doesn't actually like it more then me; she's just constituted, like her Dad, to enjoy repetition, it doesn't dull for her, where for me as much as I love it, the repetition day after day would have the effect of turning me off).

Reminds me of when my best friend and I would go to the movies. Both of us movie fanatics (we went on to make films together). But over time he (something of a curmegeon about people) became ever more distracted by other people in the movie theaters. Some guy opening a candy bag two rows over would distract him terribly, but wouldn't even register to me. It got to the point where he insisted on seeing movies at matinees (least amount of people), sitting in the back row (no one behind him to bother him), as solitary as he could make the experience. Whereas I LOVED seeing movies with a full house, and wasn't distracted. We had to stop seeing movies together. Does his being picky about how he experienced seeing a movie mean he was less passionate? No, it was a symptom of how passionate he was about the movies, and that he didn't want a second of a movie "ruined." It's just that his personality meant he had to take steps I didn't have to, in order to preserve or enhance his movie experience.

I went to great lengths to build a projection-based home theater, whereas I know many who are watching movies on a laptop. Does their obliviousness to how they watch a movie mean "they" are the ones who "really" care about the movie? I think that would be a false deduction: I put all that effort in driven by my passion for movies, and caring to see them in as engrossing and high quality manner as I could.

Similarly, the ubiquitous nature of digital music, and the million-tracks-at-a-finger-tip nature of streaming may not affect your ability to simply select an album and concentrate, but it does for me. And since I truly care about music, I'm sensitive to how MY EXPERIENCE is affected by the way in which I access it, and so I take steps to protect or enhance MY experience of music. And I find unplugging from digital life, and the physical nature of LPs helps me focus and enjoy music. That wasn't the case back when I was spinning CDs. But once music became accessable more like surfing the web, then it had wider-ranging impacts on how I experienced music. YMMV as always.

 

[Sal1950]

Plato disagrees.

Plato wasn't around to see much of what is put out today as "modern" art.
Stuff that, if you weren't told different, could just as easily be done by a 3 year old.

 

[Sal1950]

And I find unplugging from digital life, and the physical nature of LPs helps me focus and enjoy music in this digital life.

And for me, all the weaknesses of vinyl, from pops, clicks, and surface noise, to having to jump up every 20 minutes or so, kills my focus and enjoyment.
How ya gonna keep em down on the farm after they heard CD.

 

[MattHooper]

And for me, all the weaknesses of vinyl, from pops, clicks, and surface noise, to having to jump up every 20 minutes or so, kills my focus and enjoyment.
How ya gonna keep em down on the farm after they heard CD.

Yup! Which speaks to my point. There would be plenty of people who listen to records (and not even audiophiles) who would say "I don't know why you are distracted by some clicks and pops. I just listen to the music. I guess you must be an audiophile who cares about all that other 'sound quality' stuff rather than just the music."

People are different.

 

[Sal1950]

I guess you must be an audiophile who cares about all that other 'sound quality' stuff rather than just the music.

So, for a guy who only cares for the music and not the SQ, how much you have invested into your vinyl playback gear?

 

[audiofooled]

To me personally, this is just another fine example of the endless circle of an average audiophile learning and using poetry as a tool to describe what he would like to hear only to unwittingly evoke emotions which are instigated by the same poetic words he previously used by the other poets who would deploy them as means to recall the same emotions which would in turn make him empty his wallet. Then the wallet gets full again and he uses more poetry to justify the previous purchase and brag about the gear that he has but only to find out that there is even better poetry out there that plays with his emotions again so the poor wallet is back to square one.

 

[MattHooper]

So, for a guy who only cares for the music and not the SQ, how much you have invested into your vinyl playback gear?

Where did I say I don't care about the SQ of my music? Obviously I do. As I've said, I'm fine calling myself an audiophile because I'm enthusiastic about high quality sound reproduction. Which I'm sure we all agree is not mutually exclusive to being passionate about music. That some people's passion for an art drives them to want to experience it in high quality was part of the point in what I'd written.