Recently, my attention has been focused more on artistic interpretation than on reproduction quality. I think this is a good sign. The decisions of when to hit the string and how long to let the tone ring, as well as how intense each stroke should be, are the aural expression of the artist’s interpretation of the music at the moment of transferring an idea into sound. As an amateur guitarist, I have been confronted with this matter throughout my own experience, and I realize that even a simple three-chord progression can be performed in many different ways by slightly varying the timing and intensity of the strokes.
It is through such fine details that the performer succeeds or fails in involving us emotionally with the music being performed. It is this part of the performance that transforms an intellectual idea, woven into the melodic and harmonic continuity of the music, into the experience of something corporeal – a pulsating, breathing succession of tones produced by plucking, hitting, bowing, blowing, voicing, and whatever other sound-producing technique is being used – that resonates with our internal sense of the music.
Such periods, when I can fully concentrate on the music rather than the reproduction, feel like a blessing. The system disappears, and what remains is the performance and its sheer musicality. It is sort of a reward for having spent a considerable amount of time at the beginning of the year listening for certain acoustical traits of different NOS tubes in the OTO’s preamplifier stage.
But don’t get me wrong, I also enjoy these periods of extensive critical listening, as they allow me to concentrate fully on the timbral richness and the sense of presence of the reproduced instruments and voices. Especially with certain types of acoustic music that are timbrally rich but not overly complex – such as traditional Eastern music or fingerstyle Western guitar – the sheer joy of allowing acoustic vibrations to modulate my emotions without being active on intellectual level can easily bring me to a state of bliss.
I can simply listen to exotic pentatonic music for koto and lose myself in its rich and colorful sound, and, as most often happens, feel refreshed afterwards. We live in stressful conditions, and simple, undemanding music performed on simple instruments often seems to bring greater relaxation after a day of hard work than, let’s say, intellectually demanding Western music performed by an orchestra.
Thank you for stopping by, and as always, happy listening!