Charles Petzold

I’ve recently discovered that I can no longer tolerate listening to conventional recordings of music. My CD collection — accumulated over nearly four decades and obsessively alphabetized by composer — now mostly serves as a 2,000-datapoint histogram of my favorites. My Spotify subscription seems equally obsolete, now relegated to special odd searches of more obscure musicians or composers.

These sources of recorded music now seem to me disturbingly disembodied, and I mean that literally. I know that these recordings were performed by human beings, but their faces and fingers are invisible. Without those visuals, the music seems estranged from the musicians and instruments that produced it, and consequently now sounds to me dehumanized, sterile, and mechanical.

I blame Beethoven. Throughout the year 2020 I celebrated Beethoven250 by immersing myself in performances of Beethoven’s music on YouTube and tweeting my favorites. For many Beethoven compositions, YouTube offered a variety of selections — everything from professional videos edited from multiple cameras, to more modest efforts likely achieved by precariously propping up a phone. But each of them preserves a unique performance with actual visible human beings.

After that glorious year of Beethoven, I’m spoiled. When listening to music, I now need to see the musicians and their instruments, a need that has likely intensified due to the absence of in-person concerts for the past 14 months. That’s why I skip Spotify and instead go straight to YouTube. YouTube is not the only source of video performances. Indeed, with the severe reduction in live music over the past year, we’re experiencing a golden age of music streaming. But YouTube is the most convenient and the most extensive, and despite also being the most uneven, it’s become my preferred source.

Audio recordings made in a studio are designed to be note perfect, and there’s a good reason for that: These recordings are intended to survive repeated listening. Any mistake in the performance does not fade into the background but instead becomes louder and more prominent with each subsequent hearing. Recording engineers dedicate themselves to patching up these errors in various ways to create a “flawless” rendition.

But less-than-flawless performances are inherent in the human condition. So are violin squeaks, broken strings, recalcitrant French horns, sweat, spit, sighs, and myriad flubs and slips.

What I find most unnatural in studio recordings is the complete elimination of those pauses after a long first movement, or before a long finale. This is a time not for applause but for the musicians to catch their breaths, retune their instruments, and finger the score to make sure the pages will turn smoothly. For the audience, pauses between movements are an opportunity to shift in our seats and get all our pent-up coughing out of the way. These pauses are not just dead time; they are intrinsic to the tension inherent in live performances of music, and you have to see them for them to make sense.

The most important advantage of seeing the musicians is to help us to hear the music. I find this exceptionally true for chamber music, which involves a lot of subtle interaction among the instruments. Just as we better understand what someone is saying when we can see their faces, music is more intelligible when we see the musicians.

Of course, nothing will ever come close to the experience of being in the same room with the musicians; breathing the same air; hearing the same ambient noise; sharing the same anxiety, exhilaration, and ecstasy; and having the music delivered to our ears without the distortions of electronic intermediaries.

But live music has been challenging recently. Perhaps that will change soon.