Whereas I have written before in defense of live performers (“Who Needs Performers?”), I found the recent attacks on performers who used pre-recorded music rather lacking in substance. In particular, the 2009 inauguration performance and the national anthem at the 2009 Super Bowl were written about by Eric Felten in the Wall Street Journal in an article titled “That Synching Feeling”.
Here are some of the reasons offered by performers as to why they would use pre-recorded music:
This occasion’s got to be perfect. You can’t have any slip-ups.
The slightest glitch would devastate the performance.
There are too many variables to go live.
The performers care too much about their art to risk presenting something substandard.
A true gem of a thought that I can not resist periodically shows up on Orchestralist, the international forum for orchestra professionals. One such post recently came up that contained such good points that I am still mentally working my way through my own thoughts regarding the questions posed.
The author paraphrased Jared Diamond’s book Guns, Germs and Steel with a list of factors that may be the most important factors in whether an orchestra will present a new work.
On my drive home yesterday, I was listening to NPR, as I am usually apt to do. I was struck by some thoughts presented in a report by Andrea Shea, “Conceptualizing Sol LeWitt’s ‘Wall Drawings’.”
Although Sol LeWitt died last year at 78, one of his biggest installations, “Sol LeWitt: A Wall Drawing Retrospective” will open to the public soon, at MASS MoCA in North Adams, Massachusetts and be on view for 25 years. LeWitt hired a number of artists to execute his ideas over the past several years, including the time after his death.
LeWitt was one of the pioneers and masters of the “conceptual art” movement. For him:
In conceptual art the idea or concept is the most important aspect of the work. When an artist uses a conceptual form of art, it means that all of the planning and decisions are made beforehand and the execution is a perfunctory affair. The idea becomes a machine that makes the art. — Sol LeWitt, “Paragraphs on Conceptual Art,” Artforum, June 1967.
“For years, [William Weber] has been gathering data on late-eighteenth- and nineteenth-century performances, and he summarizes his findings in graphs showing how works of dead composers came to dominate concerts in Paris, London, Leipzig, and Vienna. In 1782, in Leipzig, the percentage was as low as eleven. By 1830, it was around fifty, going as high as seventy-four in Vienna. By the eighteen-sixties and seventies, the figure ranged from sixty-nine to ninety-four per cent (in Paris). Matters progressed to the point where a Viennese critic complained that ‘the public has got to stay in touch with the music of its time… for otherwise people will gradually come to mistrust music claimed to be the best,’ and organizers of a Paris series observed that some of their subscribers ‘get upset when they see the name of a single contemporary composer on the programs.’ These quotations come from 1843 and 1864.”
This summary comes from Alex Ross of the New Yorker in an article called, “Why So Serious?“
