Ulvi Yurtsever goes some way towards making my point for me:

>Wait!  There is no "there" there, unless you have a recording which
>is a seamless take from a live concert (which happens very rarely).

Which is why "you" couldn't have been there, as the "there" we're talking
about wasn't there anyway.  Probably.

Let me try that again:  Even being physically and geographically present
during a recording is not comparable to being present during a live
performance, because recordings are not usually single continuous
performances and therefore the kind of performer-audience interaction
that can occur in live performance cannot occur during recordings.

>A recording, produced according to the common practice, is something
>very different from a performance; it is more like a mosaic edited from
>different (probably incomplete) "takes" (kind of like the way I often
>listen to (and play) music).

And so do I.  Perhaps we can agree to the proposition that recordings
and live performance are two very different modes of presenting and
experiencing music, and each has its own positive and negative features.
Each of us is somewhere on a scale from one to the other, and I seem to
have settled to a position pretty near to one end.  As far as CM is
concerned, my early experiences contained a high proportion of live
concerts, and then the balance shifted more to recordings.  In the later
years, I've come to find the best live performances so much more meaningful
to me than even the best recordings that I've stripped my record / CD
collection down to little more than a tenth of its former glory, and I
don't miss the departed discs at all.  But I do still buy new recordings,
although not at the rate that I used to.

Don Satz gave an eloquent description of some of the drawbacks of the
concert hall, and I have to agree with him.  I'm far from being the
sociable type and I dislike crowds as much as anyone.  It's just that the
"highs" I get from good live performances are, to me, worth the things I
have to go through to get them.

Ian Crisp <[log in to unmask]>