On The Margins: Letting Go Of Live
Tom Davis

Some think that a cultural endeavor reaches its maturity when it’s free to call its own assumptions, and thus itself, into question. Others see such an influx of self-questioning as a sign of decadence — when an enterprise is young, its native energy spontaneously bursts forth in creative work; it’s only at day’s end that it turns on itself in wonder. As Hegel said, the owl of Minerva flies at dusk. Is high-end audio exhausted?

Of course the audiophile press has been belaboring the impending death of the high-end for several years now. Yet nothing has quite so refreshingly turned on itself as Art Dudley’s editorial "Intro" to the Winter 1997 Listener. Having reminded his readers (as he often does) that audio journalism shouldn’t take itself too seriously, Art notes his responsibility, every now and then, to take stock, and looking around now he concludes:

Art may not like the sight, but he’s still editing Listener, and beyond the vague imperative to find a new direction, he’s not clear where his vivid conclusion leaves his own magazine. If NOT THIS (fill in the formula from Stereophile to TAS), then what?

But doesn’t the creative exhaustion that inevitably follows the constant reiteration of formulas also remind you of the current music scene? Doesn’t the first year in which pop and rock sales have joined jazz and classical in refusing to grow suggest that more is at issue here than another classic Stereophile review? I want to use the current twilight of the audiophile press (and the proliferation of magazines, on and off line, is itself a sign of decadence) as a clue to larger concerns. For the recurrent press efforts to grasp just what high-end audio has been, are not just the last nostalgic gasp of a technological moment ready to be superseded by multi-channel home theater; rather, hidden in the confused heart of these reflections is a hint of another orientation, a clue to a creative reappropriation of what music at home can be. To get to that clue, we need to work through the confusion.

The dominant confusion is thinking the point of the high-end is to reproduce a live event in your living room.

Consider Larry Kay’s Publisher’s Page remarks on page 152 of the April issue of Fi. Responding to the first part of a promised two-part review of home theater speakers by Michael Gindi in the same issue, Kay wants to reconsider the differences between "music and movies and the ways those differences could change our expectations of the equipment we use to enjoy those very different art forms." What’s at the heart of their difference?

For Kay, among audiophiles "there is a broad consensus that we want to replicate the sensations of auditioning a live performance (notwithstanding some studio recordings, by the Beatles and others, that could never be duplicated in real life and real time)." In contrast, "The goal of movies is not the recreation of an illusion of a live performance. They are things unto themselves, not a means to an end." Where high-end audio is governed by the "paradigm of perfect reproduction of a live, concert hall listening experience," a movie is "not designed to replicate the experience of viewing a live performance." Thus Kay concludes: "Because our sound systems are asked to recreate life itself, while home theater systems are asked only to recreate a man-made contrivance that has already been removed from life-like reality by human manipulation, it is tempting for an audiophile to conclude that home theater equipment therefore has a lesser and easier job to do. But that’s not necessarily the correct either. We’ll all have to rely on our observations and think more about it."

I agree. Let’s think some more.

Is the point of a sound system is to "recreate life itself"? Gindi puts Kay’s point this way: "High-end audio is unique as a meta-medium. Like Dr. Frankenstein, it aspires to recompose and reawaken life itself." "Meta-medium" here means "If we think of music and film as vehicles for human expression — artistic media — then high end and home theater are each a secondary medium in service to a primary one. We should realize that they are media for media, or "meta-media". Meta in Greek means "beyond," as in moving beyond the boundaries or limits of something. In what sense is Gindi’s "secondary medium" moving beyond the limits of the primary medium? But then just what is the "primary medium" to which the high-end is supposed to be in service? The persistent answer offered here is Kay’s "the experience of hearing live musicians playing acoustic instruments in a real space." That, after all, is what distinguishes (most) recordings from movies. Thus Kay disagrees with Gindi’s use of "secondary" in regard to movies since they, unlike (most) recordings, have no "real" referent. Movies are moving pictures, but those "picture-frames" whizzing by don’t represent something live: they are what they show you; their reality is exhausted in their appearance; everything done to create them exhausts its own reality in the movie itself. But for Kay (most) recordings are intrinsically representational: they are copies of an original. The oft longed for magic of the high-end rests in the transparency of the copy, the magic of music appearing THERE where it is not. Regardless of their disagreement about film, both Kay and Gindi agree on Dr. Frankenstein: the point of the high-end is to "recompose and reawaken life itself."

This evocation of Dr. Frankenstein is oddly revealing. For Mary Shelley’s character was obsessed with achieving a kind of perfection, a creation that would overcome the limits of life by going beyond the limits of death. It was death, not life, that drove Frankenstein’s craving for perfection. "To examine the causes of life, we must first have recourse to death....I paused, examining and analyzing all the minutiae of causation, as exemplified in the change from life to death and death to life, until from the midst of this darkness a sudden light broke in upon me" (53-54, Frankenstein, St. Martin’s Press, 1992). The obsessive drive in his lust for recreation was not to produce new life that would itself pass away but to master the transition from life to death and thereby remake the life he loved untouchable by the passage of time, and thus alien to uniquely human, that is, mortal creativity. In Frankenstein’s fate, as in the fate of his creation, Shelley shows where this lust for an inhuman perfection leads. Here let’s just consider audio.

Is the point of a sound system to "recreate life itself"? No, it isn’t. The point of a sound system, like the point of that "sound system" which is a symphony orchestra, is to make way for the claim of music. There are many different kinds of access, and thus there are many different ways that music can claim you. But no way can claim "special" privilege, because the point is not the mode of access but the claim itself, and the point of the claim is not that it takes place in this or that way, but what you do with the way it claims you.

How does music "live"? It lives through the working out of its claim. Such work can exhaust itself in simply relaxing with "easy listening" music. Or it can exhaust itself in the rumble of the subway near the recording hall that it’s taken you twelve years and $40,000 to catch. Or a claim can work itself out as you find yourself following a line you haven’t noticed before that suddenly reopens the meaning of this movement. Reopens what? Reopens the passing down of musical meaning, reopens the way you now re-inherit the claim of this ongoing work of art.

I’m not exactly sure why it is so difficult for audiophiles to acknowledge that listening itself can be a creative art, and that the kind of listening that high-end audio can invite is itself a unique way to engage in the ongoing work of music. Why then this mad desire to reduce unexplored possibilities of music to a strange idolatry of life, as if the best sense of "life" many audiophiles can summon up is witnessing the THERENESS of the squeaking chair of the first violin? I suspect that the peculiarly deep confusion here about relations between "art" and "life" has to do with the larger issues in the life of music. Consider the comparative states of composition and performance today.

Why is it so perversely difficult for audiophiles to let go of the demand for Frankensteinian life in their living room? In his "Fair Hearings" column from the same issue of Fi, Terry Teachout’s quotes Benjamin Britten on calling the phonograph "the principal enemy of music," adding that "it is not part of the true musical experience." And then continues: "Sitting down in your living room and throwing on a CD is not the same thing as going to a concert, much less playing for your own pleasure. Though it can be intensely meaningful, it is nevertheless experience once removed." Removed from what? Is it experience "once removed" from the ability of music to claim you? No. Is it once removed from the live performance of music by others or yourself? Well of course. But is the claim of music itself reducible to live performance? Most certainly not. Is live performance "essential to making music, music? Not at all, as any composer can tell you.

If I am right, how can confusion run this deep? And what did Britten mean by calling the phonograph the "principal enemy of music" and as "not part of true musical experience"? I suspect that Britten was sensitive to the passivity of listening to a phonograph, the substitution of "easy listening" for the actively creative listening that is native, in one way, to performance, and in another, to composition. But Britten was perhaps still too close to the end of a dominant tradition of musical composition in the West to fully appreciate the attendant rise of the notion that access to music is through perfect performance, that is, through the perfectly passive expectation and demand for technical perfection. Indeed, as the Western tradition moved into the development that would result in extreme chromaticism, it was Liszt who fathered not simply Wagner’s future wife, but the domination of the virtuoso performer, a domination refigured in our time by Glen Gould’s signature performances.

Born well into the exhaustion of a shared compositional tradition, Gould came to realize that the creative possibilities of music lay in its performative recreation, and the logic of this situation rigorously led to the elimination of the audience in favor of the studio. The sterility of digitally edited "perfect" technical performance is a debased market echo of Gould’s desperate insight into the possibilities of the claim of music today. Such debasement is then re-echoed by the kind of euphoria manifest in Gindi’s opening "guest editorial" to the same issue of Fi cited above, as he waxes poetic about the sheer sound of Chesky’s new Sara K. 96kHz/24-bit recording — but that of course is what audiophiles do with the sound of music.

Yet here at the saturation point in which the high-end exhausts its own market potential, when Boomers fret more over their children’s college tuition than the next system upgrade, and Xers scan ads with Don Was awash in the glow of a 17" monitor rocking out to his PC’s multi-media speakers with that other kind of keyboard in his lap — here as audio journalism moves into a dead-end space that offers no new direction for escape, can the high-end still offer an alternative horizon of possibilities for an art of listening that would take its creative clues from a compositional sense of music rather than a performative sense? Is the creative clue for such an art of listening already at work in those recordings that Larry Kay only parenthetically noted; that is, in the tradition of studio-based creativity that for most of us was initiated with the Beatles and now, in fact, dominates the sense of what music has to offer today?

Having looked at confusions in Fi this column, next time out I’ll take up George Reisch’s recent work in Stereophile to help begin to work out what such an alternative might be.

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