Nietzsche and Runaway Audio Consumption

As is often the case with aphoristic works, it can be helpful to look at the context of the given particular passage. In aphorism 302, Nietzsche writes: "The truly unendurable...are those who, possessing freedom of mind [freiheit der Gesinnung; "freedom of opinion" might be better], fail to notice that they lack freedom of taste and spirit [Geschmacks- und Geistes-Freiheit]" And aphorism 317, entitled "Possessions possess," states: "It is only up to a certain point that possessions make men more independent and free; one step further—and the possessions become master, the possessor a slave...." 

But I'm also reminded, in the context here, of a passage in Hermann Hesse's Steppenwolf (coincidentally, asvjerry above mentions Steppenwolf "the band"). Late in the novel, the narrator "Harry" encounters Mozart in a "magical theater" drug-induced reverie. If I remember correctly (it's been 40 years since I read the book), they're listening to Don Giovanni on a radio together, and Harry disparages it for its poor sound quality (the novel was published in 1927). But Mozart emphatically disagrees! He loves the new technology, and loves his music reproduced by it.

There are maybe two lessons in this scene. First, that the technology of music reproduction is itself a wonderful art, and nothing to be disparaged, even when it is primitive. But second, that the music should be the master, not the technology. Returning to Nietzsche, our possessions can possess us when we obsess over trivialities. For a possession like an audio system, it's a sad irony that such obsession can too easily rob us of the love of music that it exists to promote.

Thanks, hilde45. How do you happen to be reading Nietzsche? (BTW, when asked what a new composer should do, Richard Strauss answered: "Read Nietzsche!")

And thanks, sns, for your insightful questions. They express my dilemma, which is what drew me into this thread—and other threads on this forum. High-end equipment reviews very often praise a piece of audio equipment by saying that it disappears: the speakers under review are successful when they "vanish into the music," when one "stops listening to the system" and becomes immersed in the music. I suspect we would all endorse such praise, and aspire to it in our own systems.

And yet...I wonder. I can only speak for myself, of course, but too often my pleasure in listening comes not from the music itself, but from the reproduction of it. The proof of this is that I will often choose to listen to something that is well-recorded even if it is musically banal, and I privilege good recordings over good performances in most cases (although there are fortunately lots of good performances that are also well-recorded). Bottom line: I love the equipment, especially when it seems to "disappear"! This is a paradox.

Maybe, as sns suggests, this is due to some "corruption" of real passion for music by "the need for material goods." I'm also a musician (cello and guitar), and I know a lot of musicians; none of them—literally, none—are audiophiles. Why is that? And I've had profound experiences with music in very compromised acoustical situations. How can that be, if SQ is the be-all and end-all?

twoleftears: very interesting suggestion. Benjamin was not in my mind when I wrote what I did, but I see your point.

For those not familiar with the famous Benjamin essay, it's certainly relevant. I won't pretend to do justice to its subtlety and complexity, but here's a gist. Benjamin writes: "Around 1900, technological reproduction not only had reached a standard that permitted it to reproduce all known works of art, profoundly modifying their effect, but it also had captured a place of its own among the artistic processes."

However, he goes on to insist that "In even the most perfect reproduction, one thing is lacking: the here and now of the work of art—its unique existence in a particular place." He calls this "unique existence" of the original work, prior to its reproduction (for us, the "live performance"), the work's "aura," and further claims that this is what "underlies the concept of its authenticity." Thus, the problem posed by reproduced artworks (especially music): "The whole sphere of authenticity eludes technological—and of course not only technological—reproduction...: what withers in the age of the technological reproducibility of the work of art is the latter's aura."

Now, this suggests many interesting things, not least of which would be that the recording is its own "artwork" not to be compared disparagingly to some inaccessible "original." Thus, the aim of reproduced music is NOT, as it might seem, to re-create an impossible lost original performance, but rather, to provide an authentic experience of its own, an experience of a new kind of artwork: the collective product of composer, performers, AND engineers (recording engineers, the designers of microphones and amplifiers and speakers, etc. etc.). 

BUT: what is still supposedly missing is the "authenticity" of the uniqueness of the original. In the case of a painting, this is pretty obviously very important, at least for commercial reasons: an "authentic" Picasso original is worth vastly more than a "copy," however accurate the copy may be. 

Here's where I think Benjamin's argument is often misunderstood. He calls this lost "authenticity" the artwork's "aura." But "aura" is a loaded term! It suggests a kind of mystical quality possessed only by some fetishized object; it is NOT an aesthetic value in any straightforward sense. After all, the only aesthetic difference between a Picasso original and an exact technological reproduction indistinguishable from it would be the fetish value assigned to the historical facts associated with the original alone (the artist himself touched it, etc.). These are of interest to the investor, to the art historian, to the museum curator—but not necessarily to the art appreciator.

So, returning to music reproduction: if it were possible (and it very nearly is!) to reproduce in one's living room the acoustic experience of a live performance, what, really, is lost? The social facts of sharing the live performance with others, I suppose. But that's not a feature of the music itself. The fact that, in a live performance, someone might make a mistake—a little like a live Formula One race, where someone might crash and get killed, vs. watching the same race on TV after the fact. But again, these are not aesthetic values.

Admittedly, with larger ensembles, this kind of simulacral reproduction is progressively harder and harder to achieve: the acoustic of the Musikverein can't really be re-created in one's living room. But a chamber ensemble is within the range of possibility—not to mention solo instruments. 

Rather than Benjamin, the relevant thinker here would seem to be Beaudrillard. His notion of the "simulacrum," whereby a copy, being more familiar than the original from which it is derived, is actually more a cultural touchstone than the original it is "parasitic" upon, seems to me almost exactly the concept that is at issue. An example: most Americans are more familiar with Disneyland's Magic Castle than with Bavaria's Neuschwanstein, but Neuschwanstein is the original and the Disney "simulacrum" the copy. 

So here's the bottom line of these reflections. Listening the the Berlin Philharmonic—or, better because smaller, the Orpheus Chamber Orchestra—in my living room is not a substitute for hearing the ensemble in person, but rather, the thing itself! As Benjamin put it above (modifying the grammar for the present circumstances), "technological reproduction has reached a standard that permits it to reproduce all known works of art, profoundly modifying their effect, but thereby also capturing a place of its own among the artistic processes." Indeed, the spatial specificity of different voices on a good audio system in a good room is superior to what would be experienced live. The "effect" of the "authentic" performance has been "modified," all right, but in a positive way, in order to provide a "reproduction" that is actually superior to the "auratic" original! The only thing lost is fetish value! How cool is that?

Nietzsche and Wagner met in 1868 at a party in Basel, and talked all night about their common passion for Schopenhauer. They were close friends for the next several years; Nietzsche's first book, The Birth of Tragedy Out of the Spirt of Music, is in large part a polemic in support of Wagner, who was extremely controversial at the time. In a nutshell, Nietzsche "argued" that Wagner's music incarnated the vitality of the ancient Greek culture all good German Romantics admired, but translated into an appropriately German idiom. Nietzsche was an overnight guest when Wagner presented his "Siegfried Idyll" to Cosima (not yet his wife) at their villa Tribschen on Lake Lucerne on Christmas Day—her birthday—in 1870. The following Christmas, Nietzsche was again, and for the last time, Wagner's guest when he presented Cosima with his own birthday composition: "Nachklang einer Sylvesternacht"—which, apparently, reduced Wagner to laughter. This, and several other Nietzsche compositions, are available in various performances; three of his more successful brief songs were recorded by Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau. All of his musical compositions rank as juvenilia, however.

What Nietzsche meant by "spirit" (Geist) is complicated, but in this passage it's not a mystery, and hilde45 has quoted it tellingly. A perennial issue on this forum is the relationship between a love of music and a love of music reproduction. The latter is the real focus of "audiophilia," for better or for worse. But the former is the "spiritual" reason for audio equipment in the first place. Pride in one's audio system is what Nietzsche is criticizing here; development of one's taste by means of one's audio system is what he is trying to praise.

nonoise: in China, and also in Japan, there is a serious market for the kind of hand-painted artistic copies you describe, to the point that particular "forgers" who are exceptionally skilled can sell "their" work for huge sums. The quotation marks here are necessary, as you surely see. Is a copy of a famous painting a "forgery" if it is not intended to deceive, but rather, is meant almost as a kind of tribute to the artist who created the "original" that it is based on? In many Asian countries, artistic values do not derive from "originality" at all, but rather, from successfully imitating some ideal. I spent some time years ago on a house boat on Dal Lake in Srinigar. All the house boats are elaborately painted, and all in much the same way. The artists don't try to be "unique," but rather, to most successfully express a Universal. As a philosopher, this makes me think of Plato's theory of Forms, according to which all sense objects are just copies of ideal archetypes. 

sns: I really like what you say about how even a poor copy can perhaps provide "greater cultivation of spirit" than the original painting because we are not distracted by "material value" or even "the artist's technical skill." That's a really interesting suggestion. Perhaps it has something to do with the decline in straightforward representation in painting, an historical fact often said to be related to the technological development of photography, which rendered realistic painting superfluous. But your insight is much more interesting than this commonplace "fact." Perhaps the "expression" managed in a genuine artwork has very little to do with "accuracy" (representational accuracy in painting, or "high fidelity" sound quality in music reproduction). There are some recordings of very poor sound quality that nevertheless are tremendously moving. My favorite performance of Brahms' First Symphony, for instance, is an old monaural recording by Furtwängler; every other interpretation of that work disappoints me.

And if this may be so, it brings us full circle. What is valuable in art, finally, is not something quantifiable: not "measurements" in audio equipment, surely, but also not exactly "SQ" either. Rather, aesthetic value comes from the expression (call it "spirit," since we've been using this word freely in this conversation) of the artist.