Divertimento

I rarely link to my friend AC Douglas' anymore (of course I rarely post at all these days, having said most of what I have to say) because ACD has very wisely taken to eschewing commentary on urban design and is posting almost exclusively on music, a subject about which I have thoughts & feelings but so little knowledge that it would be fruitless to inflict them. But his post on The iPod Sensibility Enters The Concert Hall — read while listening to the marvelous Percy Sledge on my third generation iPod — prompts a comment.

ACD disparages something he calls the "iPod sensibility" but oddly distinguishes it from the physical iPod itself. He says (and I may be misunderstanding him) that the problem is that the iPod is emblematic of "... an entire generation walking about out there that imagines what they're hearing through their iPod headsets is what music — genuine music; classical music — really sounds, and ought to sound, like."

OK. The idea is that if you don't hear music in the physical context for which it was originally written/performed, then you are not getting the correct program. Maybe so. But wouldn't that mean that, for instance, listening to any music on a record or CD also partakes of this horrible "iPod sensibility?"And listening to a string quartet or any chamber music in a large symphony hall be false?  Further, wouldn't it mean that watching a movie designed for a theater on a 27" screen also be substandard?  etc etc If the only true way to experience a performance is in its original context, then aren't we all rather out of luck?

What originally raised ACD's ire was the installation of "...an 'electroacoustic architecture system' in Zellerbach Hall. [Berkeley] It involves lots of microphones and speakers, a supersonic mixing board, computers, and all sorts of digital equipment."

I don't have any particular opinion about what they are doing at Zellerbach but there is a larger issue at hand. It seems to me that it cuts across all media and arts. ACD objects to an "electroacoustic architecture system" not because he has heard the results there but because it will change (as it must, I assume) "the sound" and thus our experience of what the composer wrote. Fair enough.

But wouldn't the better test to be whether it enhances the performance? The pleasure? etc. If the principle is that we should not monkey with anything in the way of how a piece of art is performed/received, then by ACD's test, as I understand it, we should not read The Odyssey but only listen to it (and in 12th century BC Greek, to boot) as that was how its creator(s?) formed it. That seems rather self-defeating.