The Grove Music Online, defines recording as “a term applied to any of the various means by which sound and visual sound and visual images are stored, and to the storage medium”. With this the spontaneous aspect is lost, as you can repeat the recording without no one of the future listeners of that recording notices any difference. As the technical aspects of the recording process improved progressively, we were able to edit those recordings. At this point we can almost choose a passage or a phrase from a piece and have each note played from a different take or even record different passages not on the same day. We can then as a preparation for recording a piece or movement that we don’t plan on performing it on stage we could go phrase by phrase and record them separately, as we can have a complete recording of a movement without having gone through the entire movement once, recording small fragments and putting them together afterwards in the editing phase.
The fact that recordings are accessible very easily this days affects the usage of them from the perspective of the performer. The role of the performer is defined by two ways, the first one is as the composer’s ambassador, with the decisive powers. Secondly, there has been an emphasis fueled by social science to examine the relativities and interdependencies of music –making (Grove dictionary entry for performance, 2. Role of the performer). The first idea that this definition means is that the performer has to take interpretation decisions according to the music he or she is playing. When we introduce the fact of the existence of recordings and the possible use of them as a learning resource for performance (Volioti 2016), we start to take some ideas and get concepts from the recordings that we have already listened from the piece and it will change the way we play it. For example the famous canon from Pachelbel, hasn’t got any tempo indication, as it was very typical in the baroque period, but you can listen to very different tempi in many recordings depending on who is playing it. It might influence our interpretation decisions based on what we have heard before.
Other researchers see recordings as a way of keeping some historical based performances that had been made for other performers or audience to experience what we know about how music was played in the most historically accurate fact. They could be shown as examples for young professionals or music students as how things could sound in the past, according to the written data we have from the critics, the musicians themselves and the theory written works. The biggest problem as a young performer this day is the immense amount of recordings that we have of the most played pieces, and we could face the problem f what to listen to, having no clue on where to start and being impossible with the limited time of preparation for the concert or performance, which version to listen to and why do we listen to that one and not another one.
From the listener point of view recordings also changed their perspective. Before the recordings existed, a potential listener would have to wait for the musicians to rehearse the piece, more or less depending of the period we find ourselves in, the performance to be organized and listen to the music. This process sometimes takes time and effort from the musicians and if the pieces from the concert are required to be played again the musicians will need to rehearse and prepare the repertoire again. With the recordings this process is not needed as you have an object or a file that has the desired piece or movement ready for the listener whenever he or she wants to listen. From the musician point of view this has some implications that should be considered. A recording is something that is stored and can be shared, giving the musician the possibility to reach a greater amount of audience with nearly the same effort as before. Some musicians spent most of their professional career to this recordings, Glen Gould is one of the most famous cases, doing loads of recordings for radio programs or for selling them. He argued in one interview that he felt closer to the audience with this new way of interpreting music. With internet and the easy access we have to the unmanageable amount of information, we are now used to have all the information we seek. Recordings do not differ, as there are many platforms of music streaming that allows us to listen to any recording we want.
The easiness of listening to recordings is also possible for our audience. They can listen to a recording and because they like the recording they go to a concert were the musician from the recording performs and they go with an idea of how it will sound before the concert even starts. This also conditions how our audiences go to concerts. They have expectations and is the task of the musician to match them with their playing. In pop music it depends on the artist but the most common practice is to sing over your own recording, just having to worry about the visual part of the performance on stage. There are also artists who really perform their own music live, or most of it, and there is a sound engineer who is adding the effects that were originally on the song in the recording that was made previously. In pop music, the main purpose of the recordings are the opposite as they are used in classical music. First the song is recorded and then maybe a tour or a live performance is scheduled to promote the album or the songs. The way recordings are treated is differently because we are performing most of the times the same repertoire one time and another and we are bringing back to live music that was composed centuries of years ago.