“We are still speaking of a point of disappearance, a vanishing point, but this time in music. I shall call this the stereophonic effect. We are all obsessed with high fidelity, with the quality of musical “reproduction.” At the consoles of our stereos, armed with our tuners, amplifiers and speakers, we mix, adjust settings, multiply tracks, in pursuit of a flawless sound. Is this still music? Where is the high-fidelity threshold beyond which music disappears as such? It does not disappear for lack of music, but because it has passed this limit point; it disappears into the perfection of its materiality, into its own special effect. Beyond this point, there is neither judgment nor aesthetic pleasure. It is the ecstasy of musicality, and its end. The disappearance of history is of the same order: here again, we have passed that limit where, by dint of the sophistication of events and information, history ceases to exist as such.”
- Jean Baudrillard, The Illusion Of The End
“In the last eighteen years, I was trying to record, but I’m realizing more and more that music is not an audio experience, it’s something more than audio. And the digital technique actually showed me this. It so clearly transmits the sounds, that you can’t hear the music anymore. […] From the very beginning of the digital recording, I had a problem in the studio. Because I had too many informations concerning the sound, and music is not sound. We are using the sound for creating music, but music is actually more [a way of] organizing people’s emotions in time. And it’s more the time flow, it’s more the story you are telling, using the sound. Going by a more and more perfect sound, you are not necessarily achieving a better story, or are able better to tell the story. Because there will be a lot of factors which will start to disturb the listener. The perfection of sound, which is a kind of over-exposing of itself… And on top of this, I would say, there is a very interesting function of distortion in the audience. We always have some distortion. In the concert hall, we have tremendous distortion; there is never a total silence in the concert hall. So, there is a basic hum, a basic level of distortion, which is something we can lean at, we can play with. And if you look at old recordings - for example, I had a beautiful recording, Preludes, Chopin Preludes by Cortot. The man is really playing with these distortions, he is really diving under it, sometimes does not play half of the notes. And that, I only realized after someone gave me a cleaned version of this recording. It’s awful, absolutely awful. And this man gave it [to me] with a great satisfaction, and said: look how he’s cheating with the left hand, he doesn’t play most of the notes. I said, well, this is terrible, because for this media he recorded it for, it did not matter. So this man had an intelligence, of playing that what was important, and hitting exactly that region in which he could transmit his art to the listener, not bothering about all the other things, which were unimportant. And now, cleaning this recording, is like going to the Louvre and undressing the Mona Lisa, and realizing she does not have very clean pants this day! This is unfair, because the picture is about her smile, not about her underwear - and that’s exactly what digital technique did to us.”
- Krystian Zimerman
