“A recording is valuable chiefly as a mirror…walk away from subjective experience and look at it.”
–Stravinsky
any change in musical behavior—whether listening, performing, or composing—that has arisen in response to sound-recording technology. A phonograph effect is, in other words, any observable manifestation of recording’s influence.
–Katz
“In America I had arranged with a gramophone firm to make records of some of my music…This suggested the idea that I should compose something whose length should be determined by the capacity of the record. And that is how my Sérénade en LA pour Piano came to be written.
–Stravinksy
“The service a singer performs for me satisfies my aesthetic need, but what I consume exists only in an action inseparable from the singer, and as soon as the singing is over, so too is my consumption.”
–Karl Marx
“Even the most perfect reproduction of a work of art is lacking in one element: its presence in time and space, its unique existence at the place where it happens to be.”
– Walter Benjamin, 1936 “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction”
live performances are unique; recordings are repeatable
–Katz
no recording equipment, from the simplest acoustic horn to the most sophisticated microphone, is sensitive to sound in the same way as the human ear.
–Katz
