First Published on Classeek Showroom. Please click here for the full article!
The steady descent started with the first recording.
Think about it. What is music for us now? Music is the most readily available commodity in our lives. It plays on the subway trains from a caustic mixture of headphones, buskers, and inconsiderate narcissists and their varied speaker systems. It is in every shop, restaurant, grocery store, cafe, even on the street when cars drive past with their windows down. It creates a space for every individual with a set of headphones that is completely hermetic and cut off from those around them. It is on our laptops, computers, phones, soundsystems. It is purchased, it is streamed, it is unconsciously absorbed.
Picture a world of silence. A world where music was something that had to be experienced in person; where to hear something, you had to create it or be physically present when someone else created it. In the above picture, only the busker can claim any real connection to this form of listening.