Live or Recorded; A Faustian response

I'm with Greg and Albert for the same reasons.

Shubertmaniac, interesting that you call responding to recorded music more passive than reacting to a live event. Obviously we are all different. I personally get drawn into the music here or there, especially if my system gets the gestalt of the piece more or less musically right. That is indeed a live, a vital experience, not a surrogate for something, because the system functions as a musical instrument, if you will. Furthermore, at home I enjoy the absence of coughing, of tweaking chairs, of untimely whisperings or the distraction, the perfume of a young woman sitting in the next row in front may cause me. So what you call the social aspect, can in fact be detrimental to the musical experience. On the other hand, the whole audience in a hall enthralled by an extraordinary performance, be it Zinmann in the Tonhalle or the Alban Berg Quartett at the Zurich Opera is an experience, even the best of systems cannot simulate. All the same however, being touched by music per se, no matter what its source, can in my opinion never be a passive affair. Music, no matter its source, even a car radio will do sometimes, will elicit all sorts of emotional responses, which can lead you into an active,conscious and reflective dialog with what is happening on a myriad of planes .

Please show me an experience you go through, which is NOT authentic as an experience per se? Even if I would only hallucinate, that I'm writing this at the moment into my computer, it is still authentic, as MY experience of writing this at this very moment.

I don't believe in music. As far as my experience goes, you might call music a catalyst, which sometimes gives a clearer view into the " Lichtung des Seins", to quote H., a view into where I am at the moment. It is indeed an open question whether life has a meaning or not. It is one of these big questions, which we know since Kant, that we have no answer for. What we do know however, that it is essential for the well being of our psyche, to have meaning, which is not an intellectual process at all, we fall in and out of meaning, like falling in or out of love. It happens to us. Religions, secular humanism are ideologies, which can be a surrogate for meaning. Faith can give meaning, but that does not necessarily coincide with the belief in a religion or any other form of ideology, because it is basically a personal form of relationship between the individual and the Great Unknown. Music is here a very powerful catalyst indeed. I've had rare moments, when listening to music, that gave this feeling of meaning, sort of safely being enfolded in it. You might call it a religious experience in the old Latin sense of the word, "religere" meaning being tied back to, reconnected to what is essential. To get back to the thread, I rather have this at home, because there is less distraction, compared to music in a concert hall, but it has happened there to me too once, during Mozart's Requiem.

By the way, if someone should feel offended, I make a difference between "religion" as a body of theological concepts, which has developed through the centuries into creed and a "religious person", which to me is synonymous to a person who has faith, hence meaning.