(Question posed by Lawrence Kramer in The Sunday New York Times 6/3/07)
ANSWER: Yes! Museums of sound, with the exception that, unlike other museums, you can't browse, you have to pay attention and be quiet! Oh, and sit still, turn off your cell, don't chew gum, jiggle your leg, talk, all the rest of the seventh grade discipline. It's a drag! On my iPod, I can listen to what I want when I want, while I'm doing all of the above bad behavior and more, replay it, rehear it, rethink it, relive it. I can re-experience the melodies of Mozart after 200 and some years, the musical thoughts of all the great geniuses of music. Why do I need to go sit still and behave to watch a bunch of musicians re-create the great symphonies?
Fact is, going to hear music played live by musicians - REAL music of whatever stripe (as opposed to pop), is itself slowly becoming obsolete. Oh, we go for the EVENT, whether it be dress up to the Philharmonic, or jeans to the rolling stoned. But to really listen, we buy or download the CD.
To get the musical ideas of the composer or improviser of honest-to-God music, it's much better to listen to it on a personal headset or in a well-equipped stereo-room. Even to get the subtleties of the performers. Actually, the future of performers, especially performing their own compositions, is YouTube, where you can see them interpret their own compositions. In the end, the transmission of the musical ideas of the composer to the appreciative mind of the listener is what it's all about, and as technology allows us to eliminate all the in-between folderol, even the performers become less important to musical purists.
Composing music, or any art, is a form of mental self-gratification. The composer does it for himself, sets it down just as he wants it, to hear it perfectly reflected back to him exactly as he thought it up.
Up to now, the way it works is: The composer either goes and plays the music himself, or finds an entity with cash to finance the production and performance of his musings so an audience can listen. But just imagine, if Mozart had all the technology we have available today, would he do all that? Or would he get out his music program to make his own Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart MP3? And guess what... If he did do that, using 100 voices on his computer instead of 100 musicians playing in a hall or studio, making the whole Jupiter Symphony or Eine Kleine Nachtmusic at his desktop, skillfully using all the musical dynamics and inflections and accents his computer and its application are capable of producing, I venture to say a large majority of listeners wouldn't be able to tell the difference.
That's a direction music is taking - away from the human performance and interpretation, and directly from composer's brain to listener's brain, or soul to soul. The rest is just commerce - selling tickets to an audience that will attend and listen. The final destination is the listening, and we can do that through earphones plugged into a computer (An iPod IS a computer after all). The art is in the composition, in the direct transmission of an idea, or feeling, or impression, from one mind to another, so the less in-between "stuff" needed to do that, the better. Like writing a letter, or blogging. Me to you.
This is already being done - by lesser minds than Mozart - but it IS being done, for example at John Henry Music where all the music is composed in the mind of one person and notated on the computer, which then "plays" the music back just as the composer wants it. This is in its early stages, but there it is. And there will be more. Keep listening, keep watching on YouTube, and reading on Blogspot. It will all be there sooner than you think. Then the halls shall truly be museums.
Henry Francisco, Special to
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