Interesting point, Whilst I agree entirely that there's a huge danger of loosing touch with the art of real, live musical performance - It would be a catastrophe if that were to happen - ...
@Another User said:
but lets not call this music making for the sake of the musicians that are playing the works of debussy(and the like) and have worked for 8 hours a day there whole life and born with talent to do it.
This is where the debate becomes interesting: does music-making stop when the instrument used is not a violin, a clarinet, a flute...? To me, if the artistic elements of musical expression are all there, then I'm happy to apply the term 'musician' to the person responsible. Of course, the work was meant to be played by 70 or 80 musical personalities, brought together by one more: the conductor. In this case, we heard the result of just one musical personality 'performing' the work. But that's not enough to me to invalidate it as a work of artistic musical performance.
I'd add just one more thing: you mention live performance, and this is something completely irreplacable, both musically and experientially. But compare this track to an orchestral recording, and the edges get blurred. Records are [often] one big illusion. There might be 800 edits on the CD. That's 800 notes, the timing of which was NOT a result of the musicians who played, but of the editing engineer afterwards. That's 800 moments where the artistry of the editor 'played' the music. Let's put it another way: the CD was 'played' by the editor using 800 'samples'! I know this is bending the terms a long way, but the divisions are far from clear-cut. Using samples is like a recording made with an edit for every note (happens sometimes in difficult passages, BTW). The more edits (extreme case: sampling) the more the musicality has to come from the editor (or Andy B in the case of the track we're discussing), rather than the instrumentalists. We've shifted the centre of music-making - but we've not REPLACED it. And I'm confident that we never will.
That's all. Long answer, but I felt this should be said.
Thanks,
Simon
