Norman Lebrecht wrote:

>I don't deny the value of recording as a point of reference.  But I do not
>consider listening to a record to be a genuine musical experience.  Music
>must posses the ability to surprise and shock.

But most art is recorded!  A fresco by Caravaggio, a duomo by Brunelleschi,
a sculpture by Michelangelo, a Shakespeare sonnet, a Tolstoy novel - these
are all recorded, set down, set in stone, written in black and white, and
so forth.  Do they then not provide a "genuine" artistic experience? Is it
only if we are there watching the sculptor wield his chisels, the painter
his palette, the writer his pen, that we can have a "genuine" experience of
their art?

Of course not.  So why should music be so different? And why *must* it
imperatively surprise and shock? And why can no recording do that? Here
comes the answer:

>A recording, once heard, remains the same for all time.

Now I suspect that there may be one or two list-members who, like this
one, possess certain cherished recordings that they have played many times
in the past and intend to play again.  Poor deluded fools that we are,
whatever we have experienced playing those records, it was not "a genuine
musical experience".  Mr Lebrecht has told us so.  But he overlooks the
fact that, even though the physical properties of a CD may remain the same
"for all time" (his vision is far-sighted indeed!) the other partner in
this enterprise - the listener - does not.

So go and see a great film, but on no account watch it more than once,
for it is a recorded entity and therefore must cease to surprise and shock,
and therefore cannot be a genuine experience.  Well I have to confess that I
have actually read some novels and poems several times, from the same pages
of the same book, and have got more out of them on each occasion.  Ditto
films.  Obviously a fake experience.

In truth, sometimes you have to get so familiar with a piece of music that
it no longer surprises or shocks, before you begin to find out what it's
really about.  You have to get over that initial hurdle.  And the best
stories, the ones we often enjoy the most, are the ones where we already
know the ending.  Some of the best jokes are too.  The fact is that surface
emotional reactions such as surprise and shock are just that - superficial.
Any cheap "action thriller" can do that for us.  But don't mistake that for
the real experience, of music or anything else.

Alan Moss