The Ultimate Musical Experience

Despite my addiction to recordings, I never find myself convinced. No doubt, I can choose from a far wider range of music than I'll ever find in any city's musical season (where might I encounter all 27 of Nikolai Miaskovsky's symphonies except in my collection?), and no doubt there are many truly great performances worth re-hearing. Those are some of the reasons I have all those recordings. But give me an opportunity to go to a concert, and I'm there in a heartbeat. Why? After all, am I truly likely to hear an Eroica Symphony performance to equal my 1944 Furtwängler recording?

But the key word there is equal. Musical experiences should not equal each other - they should differ from each other. We have a mad desire in our culture to rank artistic experiences as if they were sports achievements; this team finished ahead of that team. But that is not the essence of art. Each artistic experience is, or should be, unique. There is of course some value in hearing that Furtwängler Eroica again. But to reduce one of Beethoven's greatest work to a performance carved in stone, never to change, would surely be to minimize its greatness. It is the unexpected, and the visceral impact, of being in the concert hall - even with occasional coughs and jangling bracelets, that is the ultimate musical experience.

And then there is the fact that we human beings are, for the most part, communal animals - beings who actually find value in the shared experience. If I want to see the details of a basketball or baseball game, I can see them much better on television than I can at the stadium - and with the advantage of instant replay in slow motion, I can see it even better. And yet, offer me a ticket and it's just like a concert: I'm there in a heartbeat. Why? Because of the emotional value of the communal experience - of sharing that game with thousands of others - some sitting near me, and some I'll never actually cross paths with on the other side of the stadium. Different as the concert experience is from a baseball game, the idea of the shared experience is not so different. There is something very special, and not possible at home, about one or two thousand of us in a room experiencing the same artistic impact at the same moment, each in our own way. My record collection will never replace that.