Performing the tangible

I have picked my hero-target deliberately this time, instead of stumbling and falling at its feet as I have tended to do so far. Today I want to dance in the network of sound, performance, recording, score, analysis...an unending dance, to be sure.

This post is something of a continuation of my thoughts below, on the Shostakovich concert, and previously on other concerts, liveness, and so on...So, here we go. There is, it seems to me, a series of words - ideas and things and ways of being - that bear down heavily on music and musical experiences and intersect in interesting and complex ways, and I would like to start by naming some of them: score; performance; original; affect; effect; liveness; recording; listening; understanding...These things attach themselves like leeches to our reception of music in various ways, and wherever and whenever they entangle themselves with each other they send anyone who's trying to explain or account for them into a complete headspin.

So, where to start? Whenever I try to untangle one part of the knot, the other parts seem to tighten. In the 'notationally centric' world of music that I was used to and (until embarrassingly recently) used to endorse pretty much wholeheartedly, the score is The Thing. Without the score, the little tadpoles dotted meaninglessly around the page, demanding that they be understood and making little effort to clarify themselves, the music made is not quite as valid. Improvisation, for instance - a flighty little whore, displaying itself for everyone to see with no heed to decorum or the merits of reproduction...Folk - far too gregarious and disrespectful of author-ity, and also showing little care for the possibility of exact reproducibility.

But pop, rock, techno, house, any of those musics which enjoy their circulation primarily as recordings? These also revel in display, displays of technology, of 'authenticities', and are more communally authored as opposed to being validated by a single father figure. But they also often hide behind a single face, forging their author-ity, impostors; and there are so many occasions on which the technology serves to write itself out, covering over its own footprints. The recording also seems to try to circulate as a score, offering itself up as an exact, authentic, authoritative object to serve as a reference point for anyone wishing to reproduce it.

BUT two things...First, that potential for reproduction is always forestalled; and second, The Recording is not always in the singular. To elaborate...There is often more than one recording of a single track, even if they are all author-ised by the same artist or group: an album version and a radio edit, perhaps; or a remix, or a remaster...Sometimes a live version circulates, and then one has to wonder what to make of the audience noise: is that part of the musical object too? Just as, in film, one might ask how to balance diegetic noise with non-diegetic music in the act of listening. And even if one could tie The Recording down to a singular, the figure of the Author is more overbearing than it is in any piece of Classical, Romantic, or other Notationally Centric music: at least I, an amateur pianist, am allowed to play Beethoven; as soon as I leave the Steinway for a Stratocaster, or leave Beethoven for the Beatles, I am no longer a performer but a trespasser. The rules of my freedom of expression are altered, my freedom itself radically constrained, my 'success' always measured against The Recording.

BUT something else: that Recording is already troublesome, before it reaches us. The medium by which it arrives leaves a gap between sound and experience. I spoke before about the intense tangibility of liveness, albeit a temporary one...But I feel increasingly as if that tangibility may be part of the music, like the brush-strokes are part of a painting but not of a print...Oh, so Benjaminian! Sigh. But when it comes to analysis - and by that I mean something I ought to explain in a moment - I am wondering whether the analysis I mean is better facilitated by live performances of music without scores (or deciding not partake of that abominable practice - bringing a score to the performance when such a thing exists).

If we care about the experience of music in our analysis, shouldn't the score come afterwards? Indeed, should it even come at all? Maybe it should remain a private thing, available only to perfomers of music where scores matter, and the rest of us can stay busy with our inadequate transcriptions. We already accept that transcriptions of non-score-based music tend to leave a gap, tend to miss out the level of The Music which makes it worth listening to. I think it's time to accept fully that The Score generally is also inadequate, more inadequate than The Recording. And that The Recording also misses the mark somewhat, since it denies much of the physical possibilities of The Performance. But, until Elvis and Karen come back from the dead, until it is possible for me to have Liveness every time, whatever the music, I have to do with recordings, and I will have to continue with the crude ways I have of enhancing the listening experience, lifting it above mere Listening.