Ultimately, therefore, it is perhaps best to just accept that live music and recorded music are two different phenomena. I appropriated the title of this months "As We See It" from Evan Eisenbergs book-length essay, The Recording Angel: Explorations in Phonography first edition, McGraw-Hill, 1986; second edition, Yale University Press, 2005, which is essential reading for anyone who, like me, is fascinated by the art of audio recording. Eisenbergs thesis is that any attempt to capture the sound of an original event is doomed to failure, and that stripping a concert from its cultural context by recording only the audio bestows a sterility on the result from which it cannot escape. The recording engineer may be able to pin the butterfly to the disc, but it sure doesnt fly any more. For a recording to make the grade as a work of art, therefore, more is needed than merely darkly echoing the original event.
In Eisenbergs words, "In the great majority of cases, there is no original musical event that a record records or reproduces. Instead, each playing of a given record is an instance of something timeless. The original musical event never occurred; it exists, if it exists anywhere, outside history."
