A discussion is raging (well, maybe not raging) on the Music Theory Society chat line about appropriate models to use to teach various musical syntactical procedures. One professor pointed out that students were likely to be more bored with a recording of [famous pianist] playing Mozart than by a recording of Bing Crosby singing "White Christmas."
Here we have a beautiful example of a fundamental flaw in our system of commercialized music: Because Mozart is supposed to be all by itself better than Irving Berlin, less artistry is required in recording it, right? Just put a famous name on the label, take out all the errors (read, life) and it will sell. Lousy model. Poor Wolfgang.
But for I. Berlin we will do everything we know how to do with mikes, with reverb: we will pull out all the recording stops to assure success and long life to the artifact that is the recording.
Apparently even musicians aren't aware of how much more sophistication/art goes into pop recording than into the classics. Hello!!!
