<"The Record Effect">, from the New Yorker

[fiefoe]

Since I couldn't get through Walter Benjamin's "The Work of Art in the Age of Reproduction", Alex Ross would do here. (Link from this mefi thread.)

• Why would we want an orchestra in our living room? Isn’t the idea of sitting in a room listening to a tape of five hundred people performing the Mahler Eighth Symphony totally bizarre—the diametrical opposite of the great communal ceremonies that Mahler yearned to enact? So says the party of doom. The party of hope responds: Audiences generally ignored or misunderstood Mahler until repeated listening on LPs made his music comprehensible.
• You could try to find some consistent theory behind these statements, but the short version is that Stravinsky was confused.
• German engineers perfected the magnetic tape recorder,..., during the Second World War. Late one night, an audio expert turned serviceman named Jack Mullin was monitoring German radio when he noticed that an overnight orchestral broadcast was astonishingly clear: it sounded “live,” yet not even at Hitler’s whim could the orchestra have been playing Bruckner in the middle of the night.
• Recording has the unsettling power to transform any kind of music, no matter how unruly or how sublime, into a collectible object, which becomes décor for the lonely modern soul. It thrives on the buzz of the new, but it also breeds nostalgia, a state of melancholy remembrance and, with that, indifference to the present.
• Perhaps it’s no accident that concert dress stopped evolving right about the time that Edison’s cylinder came in.
• Most of all, classical music in America suffered from being a reproduction itself, an immaculate copy of European tradition. We’ve been listening to the same record for a century and a half.
  

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The Log Lady from "Twin Peaks": They move so slowly when they are not afraid.