Recordings as Memory Machines
It is very infrequent that creative magic is serendipitous and usable as-is, but when it does happen you have to capture it and protect it from "contamination." Good ideas can easily get lost attempting to fix pitch and timing problems. Production can either enhance the final product or just make it a Product.
What is important with songs is their capacity to exist inside and outside a production. You should be able to experience songs with the basic elements (chords, melody, and lyrics), as well as with electronic treatment. What songs need, traditional or otherwise, are sculpting, both by assemblage or construction or by progressive reduction to form, then repeated, similar to what writers do with re-writes, until the work starts to resolve (or as Daniel Dennett uses as a title in his recent book, "From Bacteria to Bach and Back"), evolve in an iterative process. This doesn't happen in classical music--save for interpretations of a conductor, or a reworking or adaptation of score by the composer.
What is also remarkable is what happens when older songs get technology upgrades. Something gets lost because you get too enchanted with the new options and start adding things just because you can. One can get also too rapt with the song itself, which can result in the "fixing" of what you didn't like about the art that was created as a Recording as an interpretation or arrangement of harmony and melody. A good example of this was the "reduction" of 10cc's "I'm Not in Love" back to its chords and melody when the real magic achieved was in how they constructed the song using the studio as the main instrument (before we referred to it as such). After being a huge hit in the mid-70s, merely playing the song per the lead sheet is really just Muzak--an old audio portrait of where it started. It is nice that there's a residue after the production is taken away or a set of instructions on how to recreate it. Musicians will automatically do this if the artist didn't, for example, "Sergeant Pepper", which the Beatles never performed as they did with Rubber Soul and before, but cover bands did. Now revisionism has been replaced with Experientialism, where it doesn't matter that it is recorded or recreated, except as a re-experience of the actual event, such as in VR. It is then a replay of memory, not a recording. It is interesting to think that those two things might merge in the future, as a reminder that a recording is a memory, or for the purpose of reactivating it. What earworm(s) do you have now? It was a recording as a memory, and perhaps of an experience encoded with it.
What is important with songs is their capacity to exist inside and outside a production. You should be able to experience songs with the basic elements (chords, melody, and lyrics), as well as with electronic treatment. What songs need, traditional or otherwise, are sculpting, both by assemblage or construction or by progressive reduction to form, then repeated, similar to what writers do with re-writes, until the work starts to resolve (or as Daniel Dennett uses as a title in his recent book, "From Bacteria to Bach and Back"), evolve in an iterative process. This doesn't happen in classical music--save for interpretations of a conductor, or a reworking or adaptation of score by the composer.
What is also remarkable is what happens when older songs get technology upgrades. Something gets lost because you get too enchanted with the new options and start adding things just because you can. One can get also too rapt with the song itself, which can result in the "fixing" of what you didn't like about the art that was created as a Recording as an interpretation or arrangement of harmony and melody. A good example of this was the "reduction" of 10cc's "I'm Not in Love" back to its chords and melody when the real magic achieved was in how they constructed the song using the studio as the main instrument (before we referred to it as such). After being a huge hit in the mid-70s, merely playing the song per the lead sheet is really just Muzak--an old audio portrait of where it started. It is nice that there's a residue after the production is taken away or a set of instructions on how to recreate it. Musicians will automatically do this if the artist didn't, for example, "Sergeant Pepper", which the Beatles never performed as they did with Rubber Soul and before, but cover bands did. Now revisionism has been replaced with Experientialism, where it doesn't matter that it is recorded or recreated, except as a re-experience of the actual event, such as in VR. It is then a replay of memory, not a recording. It is interesting to think that those two things might merge in the future, as a reminder that a recording is a memory, or for the purpose of reactivating it. What earworm(s) do you have now? It was a recording as a memory, and perhaps of an experience encoded with it.
