The legacy of recordings

Abstract

The most enduring visual image in the entire history of recording is surely that of Nipper the dog, peering wistfully into the enormous horn of an old gramophone. The caption, of course, is ‘His Master's Voice’. In some ways this was a curious choice for a record label, for it speaks of absence: the master has long departed. Music recordings speak more characteristically of presence, of performers' voices and of real, sounding music. Perhaps it is because recordings are so much a part of our daily lives that we routinely accept them in lieu of the live performance. Somehow we manage without the visual contact between performer and listener or that intangible sense of the music taking shape before us. We accept that the virtuoso passage will always be executed in the same way, and that it probably took the performer a dozen takes to achieve its level of perfection. And we do not routinely hear a professional recording as less authentic than a live performance: on the contrary, it asserts its authority over the transient, soon-to-be-forgotten concert performance. Even so, recordings have not replaced the live event: they provide an alternative mode of musical production, of proven value for performers and their audiences and for scholars and composers.

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