Daily Bow: The Case for Live Music

As classical musicians in a modern world, our community finds itself living in something of a crossroads, a strange confluence of old and new. In a sense we are historians, preservationists, and stewards of a centuries-old tradition. Music predates all science as we know it today, and all literature–in fact, all other artifacts of humanity. Having grown from the human voice and vocalizations, it is the most organic of all forms of expression, and it has transformed through the eons into the form it takes today. The tradition of Western classical music has been with us for centuries, and many musicians see it as their duty to preserve the will and intention of the composer in the closest form possible to the original. The world in which we live, though, is one of constant change, progress, and evolution, and we as a community are hardly historians, and, as the wildly diverse classical music scene illustrates, our concert halls are not museums. Indeed, the world in which we live today is crackling with technology and overflowing with convenience–we can buy recordings of virtually any piece with the click of a button, download scores from the internet with barely any more effort than that, and, with distance learning, we can even learn our craft without ever really needing to set foot in a teacher’s studio.

We live in a record-breaking age, and when this age passes and the next one comes, it will be even more superlative than the last. A quick look at the Olympics every four years shows records of previous Games falling like so many dominoes. New technology is barely out of the gate before it is improved upon and made obsolete, and children are achieving more and earlier than we had imagined. We see it in our own community–pieces that made heads spin with their near-impossibility fifty years ago are now practically teething rings among up-and-coming pre-high school students. With the advent of technology to distribute and edit recordings, clinical-grade perfection is within the easy grasp of any musician. The result is thousands upon thousands of recordings, each more perfect than the last in terms of quantitative parameters, ready for a listen at a moment’s notice. The benefits of this massive library of recordings are equally massive. Students can hear the heights to which they can aspire, musicians from across the globe can hear at a great distance what each other has to say, and the very best sounds that an instrument can make are captured and delivered to an audience waiting to be inspired. World-class playing, once something that an avid concertgoer would travel miles to hear, is now delivered without ever requiring one to leave the living room.

So why bother going to a concert hall?

If any recording can–and often is–edited within an inch of its life, what’s the role of live performance in today’s classical music scene? Live performance, as any musician can tell you, is a scary thing. It’s an inexact science, a high-wire act, and it’s one of the most vulnerable experiences a person can have, speaking from a musical, physical, and emotional standpoint. Let’s be frank. There is a huge number of things that can go wrong. Memory slips, physical gaffes, equipment failure (has anyone else seen that video of Yuri Bashmet’s bridge collapsing in concert?), audience noises, unexpected power outages…all of these and more tend to show up in performance horror stories with more regularity than most of us would like. There’s something that keeps us going back to live performance, and that goes for both the performer and the audience.

Music is a temporal art form; it exists truly only for the fleeting time that it is heard, and then it is gone. Certainly, we have scores, but without a performer to realize them, they’re only inert road maps. This ephemeral aspect of the musical performance adds great dimension to the role of the classical musician, for the performer of a piece is simultaneously steward of the piece’s legacy and the sole arbiter of the course of that music in that single instant. In learning these pieces we seek to absorb and assimilate as much of the accumulated wealth of experience as possible, but, on stage, for a short time, we have the ability to breathe life into a piece as an artist blows shape into glass. It is ours to shape, mold, and create, and that which we create exists only for the lifespan of the sound. There’s a spontaneity and a connection that exists in live performance that doesn’t translate into recorded audio. The feeling of the unpredictable is a palpable one and a powerful draw for people; that feeling in the concert hall is a distant cousin of the curiosity we all feel about train wrecks and bar fights and public marriage proposals. We all simply want to see what happens, and, until we know how it’s all going to end, the suspense creates a hum of electricity that becomes a physical force. The electricity of a live musical performance is perhaps a more refined, nuanced, and emotional relative of the basic human curiosity, but it leaves us no less enraptured. Indeed, we’re perhaps more drawn to what we see and hear in a concert hall, because the spectacle there is one that feeds all of our senses. We can hear, see, and feel the music happening without anything being expunged or cleaned up, and that makes it feel all the more human and immediate.

The human element in live performance is the one that seals music’s fate as an enduring art form. Just as the phone is no real replacement for a face-to-face conversation, recordings will never match the thrill of live performance, even if for the simple virtue of being able to see, in the flesh, the faces of the person–the real person, right in front of you–who is producing these sounds that only you, the musicians, and everyone else in the audience will ever experience as you are experiencing it. After the performance is done, there’s no record but what the participants take away in their heads and their hearts. Live performances offer the potential of foibles in execution; there are few, if any, live performances that can match engineered recordings in their technical flawlessness. But does a flawless performance always mean a more compelling one?

Self-doubt and perfectionism run rampant through the musical community. Musicians everywhere, young and old, often find themselves falling prey to the impossible barometer of seemingly easy perfection established by recorded performances. It’s hard to find a musician who hasn’t been demoralized after a perfectly good live performance because it wasn’t perfect. Perfection is not human, and it is not attainable for us, nor, really, should it be. However, the widespread use of editing in recorded performances has contributed to an pervasive belief that we should be able to play as perfectly and consistently as our recordings do–despite the fact that, in the case of most studio-produced recordings, the original artist rarely plays the piece straight through and releases it as it is. In some cases, audiences have also been trained to expect studio-pristine performances. Most audiences, though, will agree that in spite of, and often because of, the imperfections of live music, live performances are the most enthralling.

Imperfections are what mark us as human, and that humanity is at the end of the day what each of us on stage is trying to speak to in each of our audience members. The imperfections in playing on stage do not necessarily detract from the urgency or clarity of the emotional message we bear. Maybe in the heat of the moment, a note skips out under too much pressure from the bow, or a note splits on a brass instrument. It’s the same effect as one’s voice cracking when saying “I love you.” The sentiment is somehow enhanced by the flaw in the  sound; it speaks of authenticity, sincerity, and total immersion in the moment. The same goes for the electricity of a player who is performing at the very edge of his physical ability. The raw energy, the effort, and the urgency created by the effort is palpable in a concert hall, whereas in a recording (with a microphone placed, as usual, uncomfortably close to the instrument), the playing would simply sound imperfect.

Century after century, people have flocked to live performances, looking to be moved in a real, human way. The purpose of attending a live performance is the same as the goal of music as an art form–to connect people with their humanity and to give them, through a few minutes of music, a chance to share an experience. Each time a piece is performed live, it will never again exist in exactly that way again, just as it never existed in that way before. There’s something incredibly personal and profound about offering a glimpse of one’s soul through music, just as there is in seeing it and hearing it. For all parties involved, that moment in time will never happen again, but the connection forged by the performance is one that can last forever.

As musicians, that incentive, that thought that maybe someone in the back of the hall will feel what you feel when you play, is enough for us to bear the nerves, fear, and vulnerability that comes with live performance. As a performer, if even one person feels something they’ve never felt before, it’s worth it. And as an audience member, that one moment of emotion created by a live performance can be worth a slew of intonation problems or at the very least the price of the ticket or the hassle of coming in to the concert. Live performances can’t be bottled, jarred, or sold, but they’re happening all around us. Now, more then ever, we need to keep the soul of classical music alive and to keep its heart beating. Support as many live performances as you can, seek out new unknown performers, and get in touch with the very human side of classical music–you’ll be glad you did.