Re: [ARSCLIST] Triage, heroic efforts, and economics

[George Brock-Nannestad <pattac@xxxxxxxx>]

From: Patent Tactics, George Brock-Nannestad

continuing the thread, Karl Miller wrote:

...........................

> 
> Would you say we preserve the printed word because we see it as being
> something more than just entertainment?

----- no, I just think it preserves itself. When temporary democratisation 
came in that brought acidic paper, access increased tremendously, but the 
storage life, even for non-ephemeral interest, decreased terribly, and some 
had to be salvaged by de-acidification. But that meant converting to 
something that more or less preserve itself. So the cheap and democratic 
access came at a price to be paid later. The same with Compact Cassettes.

> 
> As I think about this, and quite frankly for much of my life I never gave
> these considerations much thought as preservation just seemed to be a natural
> imperative...I wonder what information is contained in our audio...certainly
> some history, both through word and music, histories of what sound says about
> us and our time in history...so what are we trying to preserve? As a musician,
> I find the sound of a speaking voice saying so much more than a transcript of
> what was said.

----- oh, I absolutely agree. I still somewhere have a copy of Edward Tatnall 
Canby's description of the Columbia Oral History Project in AUDIO magazine, 
in which he reported that after transcription, they reused the tapes. Shaving 
the Brahms cylinder, indeed.


 I find the music making of another saying a great deal about
> their time, far more so than the printed score. Is it that we value print more
> than audio in that print allows a wider range of interpretation of an idea
> than the specificity provided by a recording?

----- it has added an image of an interpreter, which the printed score cannot 
do. I have Ignaz Friedmann's edition of Lieder ohne Worte as well as his 
recordings of (some of) them, but I have never compared them. But what if his 
edition is a simplified version for the home pianist? Then they will be 
different, anyway. I also have Mark Hambourg playing a Keith Prowse upright 
on a demonstration record, but the dynamics are obviously wrong.

> 
> I am reminded of a tenet of educational psychology which suggests that we
> retain better what we see versus what we hear. I wonder if that reduces, in
> the minds of many, the value of preserving what we hear.

----- no, nothing like that - it is only the difference in convenience, in my 
view.

Kind regards,


George