I must confess that this sort of thing leaves me cold. It is comforting how easily this demonstrates the gulf that lies between the physical arts and modern technology. In many ways the digital age feels like a giant leap backwards artistically. A faustian bargain in order to facilitate speed, mass communication and greed. How shallow the sounds that reaches millions feel comparted to that from a corner street musician.
I remember finally seeing some of the paintings that once graced the walls of Gertrude Stein at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. I had grown up with these pictures because of my mothers love of Stein's life and work. The thing that struck me was how alive the pictures were compared to their reproduction in books. They had depth and texture and cracks. They were real.
I'm grateful to be have had the experience of having directed people in orchestras and choirs, to have played and listened to music around the world. Every day it seems harder and harder to do that. Do people even care? Do people miss something that they don't know exists?
Great artists exist in a place and time. Their work feeds off the past and fuels the future. It springs for a respect for craftsmanship and integrity and the labor of all the thousands who came before them. I look at these things and I see none of that. It is because it can be and nothing more.
Maybe it's the isolated click clicking, or the flat, low res flickering of the monitor. Maybe it's the lack of the crowds gazing in awe at the virgin sacrifice unfolding before them. Maybe I'm old. Maybe I'm right.
()-()
\"/
`
|