requiem for live performance.
disclaimer: this is just my point of view regarding what i do. anyway…
the other day when i was playing around with ideas for scat party i was plagued by a need. that need was that anything that i did had to reproducible in a live context. then it occurred to me…. why?
while there certainly is a place for live performance in the context of modern music, it is only one option of many. musical performance was once the only way to make musical compositions audible. if you wanted to hear the latest chopin, you bought the sheet music and played it yo damn self.
then came that blasted phonograph. you didn’t have to play or know someone who did in order to listen to music. being that we were still attached to the romanticism of show business, the record was seen primarily as a promotional item. you sell the record to get people to come to your shows.
then came that damn magnetic tape. NOW you can not only record, but you can cut up the tape and splice it! thus the divorce from traditional music began. of course, most of the time this was only exploited to its conclusion by high brow avant garde types. the way it was employed in popular music was much more subtle. just to give it some polish.
so electronic music becomes accessible to the masses. computers and such. prior to that inexpensive samplers gave rise to new musical forms. editing became as much a part of the music as any “traditional composition” was.
so at this stage, you’d think that the musical performance would be obsolete. i always found it ridiculous that people would put on electronic shows… i mean staring at a guy on a laptop… i soon learned not to look at the performer but to listen instead. the performer is irrelevant. it’s just hero worship.
why would you want to reproduce a record live? the jazz folks had the right idea. they just improvised on a theme. each time it’s different. i’ll just listen to the record if i want to hear the record. you don’t ask a painter to perform a painting. you just look at the painting.
