Three kinds of recording and the metaphysics of music

British Journal of Aesthetics

Volumn 39, Issue 1, 1999, Pages 24-39

  Edidin, Aron ^a  

^a NEW COLLEGE OF FLORIDA   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 61049325631     PISSN: 00070904     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1093/bjaesthetics/39.1.24     Document Type: Review

References (12)

1. Some of these are: (i) Music is apt to be heard in private rather than in public. (ii) Music is apt to be heard in the presence of more of life's ordinary distractions and activities rather than in circumstances in which other activities are suspended for the purpose of listening. (iii) The power of the auditors is dramatically enhance by the possibilities of turning the music off, changing the record or radio station or volume or balance, and so on. This and the previous change are largely consequences of the next: (iv) Performers are not making music in the presence of the audience. Many features of the social significance of recorded music are explored in Evan Eisenberg, The Recording Angel (New York: Penguin, 1987)
2. This claim is elaborated and defended at length in Aron Edidin, 'Performing Compositions', British Journal of Aesthetics, vol. 37, no. 4 (1997), pp. 323-335
3. Lee B. Brown, 'Musical Works, Improvisation, and the Principle of Continuity',Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, vol. 54 (Fall 1996), p. 360
4. 'Live' recordings of rock music tend to be of this kind. See Theodore Gracyk, Rhythm and Noise: An Aesthetics of Rock (Durham, NC: Duke U.P., 1996)
5. Brown, 'Musical Works', p. 365
6. Paul Berliner, Thinking in Jazz (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994). See the many passages cited in the index entry 'recordings, learning from' (p. 874)
7. Eisenberg, The Recording Angel, p. 109
8. Adapted from Edidin, 'Performing Compositions', pp. 331-332
9. Linda Ferguson, 'Tape Composition: An Art Form in Search of its Metaphysics',Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, vol. 42 (1983), pp. 000-000
10. Gracyk, Rhythm and Noise
11. Ferguson, 'Tape Composition', p. 17. This definition (as the name 'tape composition' suggests) excludes such kindred compositional forms as Conlon Nancarrow's studies for player piano, produced by directly cutting piano rolls to obtain the desired results when played back on the player piano, and compositions whose medium is the computer program rather than the magnetic tape
12. Regarding the second, cf. Edidin, 'Playing Bach His Way: Historical Authenticity, Personal Authenticity, and the Role of the Classical Performer', Journal of Aesthetic Education, forthcoming