A few years ago I wrote a short novel entitled The Coming Forth by Day Of Mr. McCone. In it, a couple of young fellows accidentally stumble across an old geezer living upstairs from one of them in a New York brownstone, who not only lives a very hermetic life, but appears at first glance still to be living in the 1940s or 50s. He's an opera nut and a audiophile, but all of his sound equipment is decades old. He almost never leaves his apartment, so he's nearly oblivious to the world outside. The boys befriend Mr. McCone, and they and their little group of Manhattan bon vivants gradually draw him into the contemporary age, at least as regards sound technology. The story was set in the 1980s, so the cutting edge was still VHS recorders hooked up to TV sets with enhanced sound systems. Mr. McCone becomes acquainted with the dizzy world of what was then called "home video," with surprising, unhappy results.
Well, I'm here to say that I am not Mr. McCone. Like most guys I'm fascinated by "neat stuff," which Dave Barry defined as anything mechanical and unnecessarily complicated. This especially applies to sound technology. I don't have the resources to put together a $10,000 home theater system, but you may rest assured that if I did, I would. I'm always perusing the Crutchfield and other high-end video/audio catalogues, drooling over the latest generations of tuners, speakers, amplifiers and such. And although I was relatively slow to join the compact disc revolution -- CDs first appeared in 1982 and I didn't buy my first one until nearly five years later --in the years to follow I threw my arms around the technology to the tune of 1,000 or more of the little buggers.
In 2005 my wife gave me an iPod for Christmas. Again, it took me a few months to "warm" to the damn thing. I not only couldn't quite get the hang of how to use it, but had no clear concept of what a large amount of stuff "20 gigabytes" represented. But eventually, with a little help from my friends, I figured it out. Valerie upgraded me to the 80-gig model this past Christmas. I have something like 400 CDs loaded on it, and it's not half full yet.
So my point is, I may be a little behind the curve, but I'm no techno-troglodyte. And I suspect I have plenty of company in being a little behind the curve. Dare I also suspect that some of that company is as skeptical of the new wave of self-appointed "futurists" as I am? When Amazon introduced its "Kindle" gadget recently -- a digital gizmo that enables its users to treat books the way iPod treats CDs -- Apple CEO Steve Jobs gave an interview in which he proclaimed that books -- paper-and-binding books, that is -- were the last analogue holdouts in a world destined to be entirely digital, and that the age of ink-and-paper is now as defintively over as the age of horse-and-buggy. In the case of music, the war is over. The Futurists have proclaimed that by 2015 even the compact disc will be gone. No more media, in other words. No more books, no more discs, just a phantom world of downloads, downloads, downloads.
Hogwash, pardon my French.
This sounds very similar to -- and for me, anyway, has about as much appeal -- as the world encountered by The Flintstones and the Rubbles in that episode of The Flintstones when the Great Gazoo, Fred and Barney's pal from another planet, zapped the two stone-age families temporarily into the age of The Jetsons so they could get a look at what life in the future would be like. In one scene, they go into a restaurant where, instead of real food, they're served pills they can pop which will have the same effect as the real foods they're supposed to represent.
That's what the phantom world of downloads, downloads, downloads represents to me. I go to order a steak with onions and I get a steak-with-onions pill. Yum.
I've already discussed the aesthetic "disconnect" between the experience of reading, say Tender Is the Night in an elegant leatherbound edition with tooled cover and gilded endpapers, and reading it on a white plastic gizmo that runs on batteries. Ditto music. Something was lost when the experience of purchasing a vinyl disc in a 12" by 12" shrink-wrapped cardboard sleeve, imaginatively decorated with cover art, then taking that disc home, slipping it out of its sleeve and onto a softly-clicking turntable, then watching the needle lower itself into its groove and begin issuing forth music, gave way to buying a hunk of plastic five inches square, pulling another hunk of plastic out of it and tossing it into a machine where you couldn't even see it spinning, just hear the sound it poured out.
Yes, something was lost when vinyl LPs were replaced by CDs, despite the convenience of the smaller, lighter media.
And there's the rub. The Futurists are saying that the next step is to get rid of the media altogether and make it all virtually invisible. Download the album directly from the Internet, pull the list of tracks up on your computer screen, click on the one you want to play, and enjoy. Or download it in turn to your iPod and head out the door. Convenience was never more convenient.
Or experience more sterile. I currently have, in my sun room, no less than five different ways to listen to music. I have my choice of terrestrial radio, satellite radio, compact disc, iTunes and Internet stream. Lately I've gotten into the habit, as have many people, of buying a CD, loading it into my iTunes library, then stashing the actual CD in the basement. But when I go down into the basement, I look at these stacks of CDs in their jewel boxes with just a hint of a sigh. "You spent 20 bucks for that recording of Britten's War Requiem," a little voice in my head says, "and here it sits, collecting dust. It's been transformed into nothing more than an invisible presence in your iTunes library."
Do we really intend to divorce the listening experience entirely from the tactile? Have our lives really become THAT compartmentalized?
Actually, I need to re-think this whole paradigm. Because I'm finding increasingly that when I sit down in my sun room to read or surf the 'net or whatever, if I decide to listen to some music while I do it, iTunes is generally my last choice. I'll switch on WETA, or go to one of the Internet streams on Live 365, before I'll go poking around in my own iTunes library. People, as we all know, tend to take the route of least resistance. And it's just simpler to switch on the radio or select a stream from a menu of streams than it is to go scrolling through my iTunes library and choose something to listen to. The truth is, there is so much stuff on my iPod and in my iTunes library now that I can't possibly remember everything that's in there. And whereas in the old days (four or five years ago) I might go to my shelf full of CDs and pick out something, I'm less inclined to go scrolling through a list of tracks. The sense of visual pleasure in perusing a panorama of CD packages isn't there, and therefore I'm less inclined to bother. I switch on Live 365 instead.
It's been more than 40 years since Glenn Gould predicted the death of the public concert and its replacement by the interaction of listener and stereo system. "Dial twiddling" would replace sitting in a darkened hall actually watching and listening to a breathing human being interpret a piece of music for an audience of other breathing human beings. And while the technology of dial-twiddling has advanced by light years since Gould made his bold prediction in the 1960s, the public concert is very much alive. But while he forecast the death of the concert -- a bit of wish-fulfilment, by the way; Gould was a "control freak" who hated the concert stage because he couldn't manipulate its environment as he could a recording studio -- he still envisioned music as something of a participatory ritual for the listener, at least insofar as he or she was expected to make "dial twiddling" part of the experience. But with the age of the download, the participatory experience is vanishing. The listener is merely being acted upon by something initiated in invisible space by a mouse click, not in any sense taking part.
This is not necessarily a good thing. At some point we need to have a serious discussion of where convenience trumps the basic human need to feel a concrete connection between the object being contemplated and individual doing the contemplating. In ancient Greek theater the audience was part of the performance. Modern opera continues this tradition, as do public concerts at their finest. All that is obvious enough, but even with the flourishing of recorded music, slightly more than 100 years ago, the listener was still as much participant as listener; there is that wonderful chapter in Thomas Mann's novel The Magic Mountain in which the hero, Hans Castorp, makes the delightful discovery that the mountain sanitorium where he is recovering from tuberculosis has purchased a brand-new, state-of-the-art grammophone. Castorp lovingly operates the machine, takes charge of locking it up when it's through being used, monitors the use of the needles, takes care of the records, marking and cataloguing them. He isn't just listening to the music, he's an active participant in making it happen and seeing that it will continue. His creator, Mann, was said to sometimes play records for friends on a Sunday afternoon, and if the needle skipped or got stuck, he would be as embarrassed as a pianist who had made a faux pas in concert.
While I have done my share of downloading, and am sure I will continue to do so, I also have down in my basement an "old-fashioned" stereo system. By "old fashioned" I mean one that has nothing whatever to do with a computer. You know, the old architecture of tuner, speakers, turntable (yes!) CD and cassette players all hooked up together. When it's time to get away from the computer, (and there is such a time, believe it or not) I savor the experience of going down there, hunting through my old LPs for say, the old Jascha Heifetz recording of Saint-Saens Sonata in C minor, taking the disc out of the box, putting it on the turntable and watching it spin, crackle...and play. It's playing. We're playing. And music never sounded so good.
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