Recorded Music as “Overhearing”

The reason why gramophone music is so unsatisfactory to any one accustomed to real music is not because the mechanical reproduction is bad - that would be easily compensated by the hearer’s imagination - but because the performers and the audience are out of touch.  The audience is not collaborating; it is only overhearing.

- Collingwood

HT: Peter Leithart

Bach and World War II

Even in the winter of 1940, it was difficult to buy or rent a piano; not that the Germans were responsible (their pillage was directed to more useful ends) but because music had become all at once a very real need: for many young Frenchmen J.S. Bach was a powerful and safe ally in the Resistance against Hitler.

H.I. Marrou; Earl F. Langwell, The Review of Politics, Vol. 8, No. 1. (Jan., 1946)