Hearing Glenn Gould's Body: Corporeal Liveness in Recorded Music

Abstract

Live music does not exist without its recorded other. In other words, the concept of liveness in music was unknown until there was something not live-recordings-with which to compare it. Sarah Thornton describes the conventional ideology of liveness, which derived from a live/recorded binarism, as historically giving "positive valuation to ... performed music. [The word 'live'] soaked up the aesthetic and ethical connotations of life-versus-death, human -versus-mechanical, creative-versus-imitative ... Liveness became the truth of music, the seeds of genuine culture. Records, by contrast, were false prophets of pseudo-culture" (1995:42). Liveness, at least as historically constructed, signified the authenticity of human musical production and performance, always considered in contrast with the artifice of electronic reproductions.