Music Quote by Donal Henahan

Henahan lands the punchline with a jail cell built out of paper. “Prisoners of Gutenberg” isn’t just a cute jab at classical musicians; it’s a diagnosis of a culture that treats the printed score as both scripture and surveillance. The line “not really possible or desirable” is doing sly double duty: it questions whether spontaneity can survive the archive, and it suggests that the classical world may not even want it to. The institutions that venerate “great works” also venerate repeatability, a fantasy that Beethoven can be reliably reassembled on schedule at 8 p.m.

The subtext is less anti-notation than anti-aura. Once masterpieces are fixed in print, performance becomes an act of curatorship rather than risk. Musicians aren’t only interpreting; they’re litigating fidelity. Every deviation reads like an error unless it can be defended as “informed,” blessed by scholarship, editions, and tradition. That’s how a technology that democratized music-making also narrowed the acceptable range of musical behavior.

Contextually, this sits inside a modern anxiety about authenticity in an age of reproduction. Printing created shared standards and mass pedagogy, but it also hardened the idea of a “correct” piece, encouraging conservatories, critics, and audiences to hear freedom as undisciplined and discipline as truth. Henahan’s irony is that the very tools that preserve greatness can quietly extinguish the live-wire conditions that once made it possible: uncertainty, improvisation, and the permission to fail in public.