Can We Still Hear the Music?

Pseudonymous history professor Rufus F. remarks on the difficulty we have hearing—really hearing—music that is mediated by digital technology :

I’m always amazed to read essays on classical music from the 18th and 19th centuries. The writers, often with no more musical training than I have (i.e. none), also would have necessarily had to listen to the pieces performed live, maybe only once. And yet, their attention was such that they picked up on nuances that elude me after hearing these works dozens of times. There are many works I have never heard unmediated by some form of recording and playback technology. And I wonder if music, possibly the most abstract of the arts, doesn’t demand direct attention bordering on meditation. When I read Proust’s description of Swann’s total rapture at the “little phrase” of Vinteuil’s sonata (fiction, but seemingly rooted in a common experience of the late 1800s), it’s hard not to wonder if the technology that we now live our lives steeped in doesn’t somehow objectify music, turning it into a thing that can be easily chopped up, replicated, and manipulated, or silenced and neglected; if it doesn’t also handicap our aesthetic and emotional response by reducing the spiritual in music to its empty digital husk.

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