Music, Playing

The “when” and “where”

Sound performance has more than a 40,000-year history. Aristoxenus and Ptolemy thought about music in the 4th century b.c.e. and 2nd century ce., respectively, and an association between play and music flourished in ancient Greece. As Carol Gould and Kenneth Keaton write, musicians of the Middle Ages and early Renaissance rarely worked from scores, but instead improvised and memorized most of their pieces. Singers also added embellishment during the Baroque period to compositions by Corelli and Handel. Later composers quickly grew impatient with such “disfigurations” and “distortions” of their work. The original and its copy began to receive different interpretive weights.

Modern-day forms of technology reconfigure times and spaces of musical play. Contemporary recordings simulate new imaginative worlds where performers seem present precisely because of their absence. We envision our favorite band member or singer in a remote studio when we listen to a recording. We also move and dance in response to a recording's inherent demand for an embodied reaction by gestures encoded in its disembodied sound, as Philip Auslander observes. Our perceptions of original performances change with the introduction of new technologies and their copies.

Material apparatuses such as computers collapse space and time, bringing musicians from rural areas into closer contact with urban collaborators. Mechanical tools also modify the physical and mental skills essential to the organization of labor, as Jon Frederickson [Page 408]reminds us. A performer may “lay down” a single track today for a producer who cuts and pastes everything together tomorrow. Historically, musicians made “on the spot” changes in response to conductors or colleagues gathering at the same place and time, yet click track tempos have imposed an inorganic and isolating clock on the recording process.

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