Firat, I agree with nearly everything you three are saying. But this
conversation reminds me of a group discussion I was a part of , some
years back, one in which a lady older than I was wistfully saying that
the last lighthouse on some island somewhere had closed, and it was a
shame, etc. etc., and everyone was agreeing with her that all the old
things were going away and all the new things were no good, etc. etc.
Finally I felt forced to interject that probably the reason the
lighthouses were closing was that that there were now better ways to
keep ships from crashing onto the shore, and that most of the time
the reason new technology replaced old technology is that it is actually
better.
Yes, Sousa was right:
"These talking machines are going to ruin the artistic development of
music in this country. When I was a boy...in front of every house in the
summer evenings, you would find young people together singing the songs
of the day or old songs. Today you hear these infernal machines going
night and day. We will not have a vocal cord left. The vocal cord will
be eliminated by a process of evolution, as was the tail of man when he
came from the ape."
Recordings have devalued and replaced live music to a degree even he
could never have imagined - but the gain has been tremendous. And the
new technology, at which we can share rare recordings by MP3 around the
world in seconds - is fantastic.
And as far as the new technology for composers - it has freed me, who is
both a terrible pianist and could never get an ink pen to work worth a
darn. Back when I had to copy stuff out by hand I got a fraction of the
music written that I do now, and it wasn't played as much, and the music
wasn't as good. (I love the ability to play it back.) And I still keep
sketches, some in pencil and some on the computer, if anybody but myself
ever wants to look at them.
(John, there _are_ available copies of the different MS of books of the
Bible, BTW. And many good translations will have good notes of the
significant differences, also, but that is another subject, as you say.
And all of the apocryphal books are out there, also. It's not nearly as
sinister as you are making it out to be. Go to a good seminary library.)
Raymond Horton
John Howell wrote:
At 7:00 PM -0500 3/6/08, Christopher Smith wrote:
On Mar 6, 2008, at 6:16 PM, Kim Patrick Clow wrote:
Some even suggest that the concept of the album is pretty much dead.
Oh, I forgot to add:
In the case of jazz albums, some of the most accurate and
well-written jazz scholarship appears (appeared?) on album covers.
Reducing these albums to collections of mp3's reduces their value
considerably for the usual well-informed jazz listener who considers
the reading almost as important as the listening! Personnel lists,
dates, producer notes, technical notes; all these are invaluable
information that is largely lost to the mp3 generation.
Yes, and literary scholarship is changing as well, as authors adopt
word processing rather than making longhand drafts, and earlier drafts
are trashed or overwritten. Same thing with composers, at least those
who now work directly to their computers. The times, they are
a-changin', and these are minor adjustments that go along with those
changes (although they might not seem so minor to specialists!).
Case in point. I just did a program of music from the Roman de Fauvel
of 1316. That was a bitterly satirical poem first written in about
1310. It survives in 12 copies, each hand-written of course, and each
having differences from the others, some minor, others including
entire new sections. But the single manuscript from 1316 is unique in
also containing over 120 musical examples, carefully chosen to comment
on and amplify the story line. The invention of printing started us
on the road to standardization, and mass production technology took us
further along that long road.
Don't even get me started about all the varying versions of the books
of the Bible, from which the present "approved" books were selected by
a committee in the 4th century, and even then the Hebrew, Catholic,
and Protestant versions have significant differences.
John
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