This column was first published in the May 2024 issue of EMAg, the Magazine of Early Music America
Music is really about doing it. Or is it? Does the music happen when my favorite Baroque orchestra plays it, or does it happen only while I’m hearing it? Both? Neither? Some would say that the score of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony is a masterpiece, that the music is there, perhaps waiting to be realized, but there nonetheless; others might say that the score is the cookbook, and the performance is the cooking, and the listening is the savoring. Whatever it is, we know it when we hear it, when we play it, maybe even when we see it or analyze it.
In recent decades, the business of music — or classical music, at least — has done several about-faces. There was a time when an artist or a group needed to be successful enough at home to be able to afford a performance in New York, in order to get a review, in order to get a record contract, in order finally to begin making money. Then things changed so that now we release an “album” so that we will get enough followers to be able to give live concerts, which for some artists is where the money is. And the streaming world has turned everything upside down again. And so has COVID. Who knows what the future holds?
The many hybrid solutions that performers have adopted have been very creative indeed. Online concerts, some recorded in advance and others given in real time (and recorded for future online streaming), are efforts to reach as many people as possible. A single event — the performance of a trio sonata, say — might be given in a radio station’s studio, before a live (and paying) audience, broadcast live to an offsite (but paying) audience, be recorded for online non-synchronous streaming (for a paying audience), and become part of an album released by the group at a future date for yet another (paying) audience.
It’s an effort, and a lot of technology and timing is required. But such arrangements might help to support the many superb performers who deserve to be heard, and heard often.
I confess that I’m of two minds about all of this. Sometimes I’m at an event where the musicians are so swamped by apparatus — starting with music stands, pedals for turning electronic pages on a tablet, microphones on huge booms hanging over the performers like bats out of hell, wires all over the place, and one or more people wearing huge headphones sitting in front of yet more apparatus — that it can feel like a trio sonata on life support. I get what they’re doing, and why they’re doing it. But it makes me feel that I’m a third wheel in something much more important than my own enjoyment in the moment.
Quite honestly, it would suit me much better to feel like Frederick the Great, having Mr. Quantz or Mr. Bach play just for me — or, maybe even better, grabbing my flute and joining them in a trio sonata. Either way, the music that is happening now, for the audience that is here, has a special value. And it has even more value when I consider what might have been: microphones, wires, people with mixers and headphones, blocking my view, and my enjoyment.
It’s a lot to ask, I know, because there’s efficiency in playing and recording and streaming all at once. But music played right now, just for me and my friends, has a special value that we all recognize, but perhaps can’t afford. I guess we should either find someone to pay for this live music, or learn to play it ourselves. Those are, come to think of it, two highly desirable solutions.
Thomas Forrest Kelly is Morton B. Knafel Professor of Music at Harvard. He previously directed early-music programs at Wellesley, the Five Colleges, and Oberlin. He is past president and long-time board member of Early Music America. He is the author, most recently, of Capturing Music: The Story of Notation (W.W. Norton).
