Instant gratification: it gets more instant every . . . instant. On Thursday night Sir John Eliot Gardiner, the English Baroque Soloists and the Monteverdi Choir continued their Mozart tour with a performance at the Cadogan Hall in London. Nothing out of the ordinary, you might think, however lovely — except that if you enjoyed the music so much that you wished you could hear it all again straight away, well, you could. A recording of the evening was made there and then and was on sale as the audience left the hall.
The Pixies, apparently, tried this first; but now the more sedate world of classical music is joining in the fun. Five years ago the South Bank Centre tried it out to mark the 75th birthday of Pierre Boulez; more recently the Gürzenich Orchestra in Germany has made quickie CDs. “Maybe the studio has had its day,” Gardiner said. “I don’t pooh-pooh it, because it was a fantastic period . . . but there’s something artificial about studio recordings. I always tried to create a live ‘feel’.”
However, there is something about this desire to capture every moment of pleasure so it can be played and played again that troubles me. Because of it, it seems, we have less reverence for the power and beauty of memory, and the mind’s ability to interpret our experiences.
Of course, no one was forced to purchase a CD at the end of the evening. But I find myself thinking back to a night I spent in a concert hall a few years ago. I was at the Barbican, watching the film of Koyaanisqatsi, while beneath the screen Philip Glass and his own small orchestra played his remarkable, hypnotic music. I had seen the film before, and listened to the music; I had heard the music separately too on a CD.
But the evening I sat and heard Glass himself with the film on screen above him lives in my mind. It lives because I have made it do so; I consider it, I revisit it. This isn’t any kind of effort, and, obviously, doesn’t involve any kind of note-by- note reconstruction. It was one evening of my life but an evening that seemed — for a combination of reasons — transparent, crystalline, perfect. It won’t ever come again, but it is part of me now, though its immediacy has faded.
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Cultural capture is a pretty recent phenomenon in human history. There’s the kind of capture that we know is fragmentary, and seems, at any rate, to have only a sidelong connection with art — who is that annoying person next to you, taking pictures of absolutely everything on his mobile phone? But even books haven’t been with us that long in the overarching scale of things; recording and photography for an even smaller fragment of time. Permanent forms of art — wall paintings in caves or frescoes on the walls of churches — existed, but were available only to those who stood before them.
I’ve long been an advocate of storytelling, which is not just “for children” but is simply literature as it used to happen, before the pen and before the book, on the hoof, from the mouth and to the ear, and all the more vivid for that.
Art that is ephemeral is not impermanent. To the considered listener/ spectator, it can be all the more permanent, because in order to survive it must be fully incorporated into the self. The performance becomes a part of you and you become part of the performance. This occurrence is rare and precious, and a true part of what it means to be human.
I’m not saying: don’t buy the CD. But if you really listen while the music is there before you, you may find you don’t need to.
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CDs from Thursday are available online at www.monteverdi.co.uk Storytelling for Adults is at the Barbican, EC2 (020-7638 4141), Wed-Fri