Simon's Blog

Last night I watched a fascinating programme called the Sound of Song.  Perhaps the most profound statement was that being able to record music actually changed what music was.  Before recording there was only live performances and these, by their nature, were fleeting.  Now once you are able to keep the performance as a recording then the whole nature of music changes, especially when music is made in a studio rather than just recorded live in a concert.   Now music can be manipulated, refined, retuned and remixed.  Permanence permitted perfection or so the music industry would have you believe.

Come forward a hundred years and the whole thing is unravelling and now we have live music once again taken precedents as this is the only way that a musician or band can ensure that they will get paid for their performance.  Which brings me to Spanish Harlem by Rebecca Pidgeon

I have just watched the HBO movie Phil Spector which I found really enjoyable.  Of course it was nonsense in the sense that most of the scene were made up but it was full of bravado performances from the likes of Helen Mirren and Al Pacino.  However, the show was stolen by the the performance of Spanish Harlem by Rebecca Pidgeon, who also appeared in the movie,  at the end.  So I thought I’ll get a copy of that but unfortunately that is not possible as it seems it is only available in the States.  Of course I no doubt could find an illegal download of the song but I don’t like to do that for two reasons.  Firstly it is illegal but secondly, and I think this is most important in all this, the artist doesn’t get rewarded for their work.  Now I know this is such an old fashion concept but without paying for music how is professional music going to survive? A hundred years ago we would not have had this dilemma.

So I am left with the YouTube video of the song and the vain hope that iTunes or Amazon decided to put the track on their service.  It does, however, raise the much broader question of what exactly are you purchasing, I am not talking about the terms and conditions agreement over licences etc, when you consume music or other art forms on the internet?  Is it is in any sense real? The image above is not real but rather a series of electrical currents that your computer decodes as the pixels in the image.  But it is not real.  Is iTunes or Amazon Music real?   I think we all assume it is but it is not.  This is not Schrödinger’s cat question but more to do with the way that the internet has warped our understanding of reality.

As some of you might know I spend a lot of my time going to art galleries all over this country and Europe and one of the main reasons is to smell the painting.  I know this sounds daft but every painting has its own distinct smell and you only get this by standing in front of it.  Once you are their you are able to look in detail at the way the paint has been applied and also get a sense of something existing in front of you.   Today we seem to be content just to accept what we see on a screen as reality when in fact it is nothing of the sort.  I am as guilty as anyone of doing this as I have been on the web longer than most of the people on the planet having had a web presence from 1995.  Sometimes I wish we would just get out and smell the paintings.

I smell therefore it exists as Descartes didn’t say.