Norman Lebrecht takes a backward glance at the Sony Walkman on the occassion of its 25th birthday, and decides that the devices were the source of much evil in the world. According to Lebrecht, the advent of the personal stereo not only brought with it sub-standard audio reproduction, but also a disconnection of music from its context of place. Here he sees the body blow to musical experience:
The decline in classical concertgoing may be partly ascribed to the Walkman, which devalued magnificence and rendered it utilitarian. A Bruckner symphony buzzing away while you brush your teeth is an altogether different experience from attending a Vienna Philharmonic concert in the Musikvereinsaal.The social pleasure of sharing music was terminated when people clamped plugs in their ears and tuned into a selfish sound. Music in the Walkman era ceased to connect us one to another. It promoted autism and isolation, with consequences yet untold.
He also suggests that the emergence of digital audio devices such as the Apple iPod have only extended the evil to a wider world:
…25 years of Walkman usage has destroyed any sense of a piece of music having a place in the world, in time, in our personal lives. Music, made portable, is removed from any frame of reference. It becomes a utility, undeserving of more attention than drinking water from a tap.
Missing from Lebrecht’s argument is the idea that personal stereo devices (especially those with massive storage such as current players) are actually making music more a part of people’s lives, and that the control they now have over their ‘life soundtracks’ may actually change the way they understand and engage with creative expression — since the curation of that soundtrack is an act of creation in itself.
There’s certainly a difference between ‘mediated’ musical experience — through headphones or stereos or mobile phones or satellite radio — and ‘social’ musical experience. But so what? The growth of one doesn’t cheapen the other, as long as we understand them as fundamentally different things.
Lebrecht’s rant does have striking similarities to another arts commentator back in 1913, when recording disks were making the first steps of separating music from its natural habitat of the concert hall:
At a time like ours, in which mechanical skill has attained unsuspected perfection, the most famous works may be heard as easily as one may drink a glass of beer, and it only costs ten centimes, like the automatic weighing machines. Should we not fear this domestication of sound, this magic that anyone can bring from a disk at his will? Will it not bring to waste the mysterious force of an art which one might have thought indestructible?
Or so said Claude Debussy. Little did he know that such ‘domestication of sound’ would actually serve to extend and revitalize his music for generations to come…admittedly out of the context he had intended. But as we say in the high-culture world of academia: ‘tough noogies.’
