All the world’s a stage
There’s no such thing as a live recording. All recordings are, strictly speaking, inanimate: they are bits of information – inert, lifeless stuff that will last as long as the internet survives, surfing an eternal digital temporality that we mortals will never know.
Recordings are, in other words, dead. We are only moved by them through an alchemy of our imagination, a trick of our subconscious, which allows us to hear a recording of a human voice or an orchestra not for what it truly is – an electronic noise – but as an echo of real human experience. When we listen, we have the illusion of human beings communicating with us, across time and culture, to find us in the present tense of our listening. Recordings may be dead, but listening is live.
The power of recorded music only exists because of the essential energy of live music, of which recordings are tokens. It’s not just that we feel Maria Callas singing to us in our living rooms, our cars, our commuter trains: we imagine we’re with her and the rest of the audience at La Scala. It’s the same for Billie Holiday at Carnegie Hall, for Leonard Bernstein at Vienna’s Musikverein or for Mitsuko Uchida at Wigmore Hall. Recordings – even studio recordings – put us into a place with the musicians and, by extension, with an audience, with everyone who’s sharing this experience with us.
Which is why when you’re with live musicians in the same space, the intensity of communication is amplified
We should never again take for granted the communal power of the concert
by their real-time performance, by your real-time listening, and the feedback loop of concentration you create together.
This is the precious and profound alchemy of concerts, and such are the things we might have become complacent about back in the era when they were at the heart of our musical lives. If nothing else, these concertstarved months have shown the ache we all have for live music, and the necessity of never taking for granted again the communal power of the concert.
I’m writing these words having just had the joy of being at the Royal Albert Hall with Isata and Sheku Kannehmason for their BBC Prom. And the thrill of their connection on stage, sharing the empathetic power of their performances of Rachmaninov and Barber cello sonatas with the handful of us lucky enough to be in the hall, and with everyone listening and watching the broadcasts, was overwhelming. It was moving proof of why we human beings need live music in our lives.
Concerts, with audiences, are coming back, and they must. And all of us, as listeners as well as programmers, broadcasters – and politicians – must have a urgent mission to sustain and support musicians whose livelihoods are in danger right now. No concerts means no real musical culture, and no vitalising energy for recordings to thrive on. Life is live, and so must music be.