Classical compositions from 19988/25/2023 Frith also considers the act of listening to popular music recordings as performance (1996, pp. In Katz’s configuration there are composer-performer-artists but equally there are listener-performers and listener-composers (2004, p.47). Katz argues that musical performances and musical works ‘are no longer clearly distinct’ because recordings ‘can take on the function and meaning of both’, with recordings being ‘heard as spontaneous interpretive acts, their repetition can transform them into compositions, works that can be analyzed, historicized, canonized, politicized, and problematized’ (Katz: 2004, p.47). The act of making a recording or listening to a recording can constitute an act of performance according to Katz and Frith. In popular music, there are few limitations on what constitutes performance, beyond the occurrence of an event that incorporates music. Popular and classical music genres apply sound recording and related broadcast and distribution technologies to reflect different relationships between the listener, the performance and the musical work. However, as this article will explore, classical music performance has been profoundly changed and challenged by recording, broadcast, distribution and social media technologies. Classical music aficionados compare recorded performances of repertoire to live performances in order to verify or disprove the virtuosity of an artist, and the tension between these performances creates a site of pleasurable engagement. As such, classical recording quality is primarily concerned with the virtuosic reproduction of repertory works. The way that classical music negotiates quality on recordings is encumbered by the way that classical music has regulated itself as an elite performance craft tradition over the last four centuries (Klein: 2014, pp.112-125). Musical Performance and the Recorded Concert Hall What these case studies show is that performance virtuosity, as a marker of quality, has been unsettled by the accessibility of orchestral sonorities and the drive towards participatory cultures of classical music. Similarly, YouTube ensembles disregard ideals of elite individual performance and the concert hall environment in favour of mass participation and online access. This threatens the way that classical music institutions have used performance as a means of regulating the tradition via the demonstration of virtuosic human craft. Virtual orchestras simulate orchestral timbres in increasingly convincing ways, reducing or removing the need for human players. The case studies are virtual orchestras and YouTube ensembles, each of which problematise traditional notions of classical music performance. The article then examines two case studies, and uses them to illustrate the tensions that arise when performance and technology intersect within the classical genres. An equivalent acoustic construction does not exist in popular music genres, which have adopted variable mix aesthetics in recordings since the 1960s. In particular this article looks at how virtuosic live performance is used to reify the tradition of classical music itself, and how this has oriented twentieth century classical sound recording practice around a single aesthetic paradigm, the reproduction of a “concert hall”- like listening experience. It does so by drawing together key academic literature on classical music recording practice and classical music performance in order to demonstrate their interrelationship. The purpose of this article is to discuss how nostalgia for classical music performance traditions has shaped classical recording practice, and also how the use of sound recording technologies is challenging these same nostalgic tendencies.
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