LIVE MUSIC

Many of my musician friends, who have invested much (blood and treasure) into developing their talents, lament the fact that professional musicians are not treated fairly. Bar owners or restauranteurs won’t pay them what they deserve. I understand their frustration, because some are very good, but that is unrealistic. The fact is that wherever we go we hear recorded and broadcast music. What would a live musician have to offer? Possibly, you might hear something live that you can’t hear otherwise. But some of the musicians I know want to reproduce without swerve the sounds they learned from recordings, so you can rule them out. So, musicians who improvise have the edge. They can surprise the listener, and respond instantly to the mood of the evening.

But that is only part of the story. An intangible element in live music is physical presence. If you are in a public place, and not far away there is an interesting and animated conversation, you find yourself drawn in and listening. You don’t respond that way to a conversation on the radio, however interesting.

However, what do musicians do? They might be five feet away from the audience, but they are using microphones and mixers. Their living presence and their actual sound-waves are mediated by machines. It is like using a cell-phone to talk with someone five feet away. On the other hand, I have seen musicians who drop their volume to almost a whisper when the audience seems to be drifting. The result, soon there are a dozen people sitting as close as they can without a sound. Other musicians in the same situation turn up the sound system, maybe to drown out conversation, and so people get louder and louder.

We like our toys and technology, but we are blind in our reliance on them. Photography can capture the moment without the labor of painting, but then we miss the pleasure of looking at something and figuring it out over a long period of time. Cars get us quickly where we want to go, but then we don’t care about the place we left in such a hurry, or all the places in between. Recorded music makes the best symphonies or edgiest music available in an instant, but takes away all the fun of making our own music.