Art & Creativity Quote by Charles Rosen

Rosen is pointing at a quiet regime change: not just how we hear music, but what we think music is. When recordings become the default, “performance” stops being an event you attend and starts being an object you own. That shift smuggles in new expectations. We begin to treat a piece as if it has a single, definitive form, because the record sits there like evidence: repeatable, identical, seemingly authoritative. In the concert hall, interpretation is something you witness in real time, with risk built in; on record, interpretation hardens into a reference track that can be replayed, compared, ranked, and fetishized.

The subtext is slightly chastening: technology doesn’t just distribute art, it edits the listener. The recorded medium rewards polish, balance, and microscopic control. It punishes the kinds of fleeting electricity that live in a room and vanish when the last note dies. As recordings take over, listeners become connoisseurs of “accuracy” and sonic finish, sometimes at the expense of the messier virtues of presence: pacing that breathes with an audience, the performer’s improvisatory nerves, the one-night-only sense that something might go wrong and therefore matters more.

Rosen, a pianist-critic who lived through the LP era’s rise and the studio’s growing power, is also hinting at how the canon gets enforced. Once a famous performance is “the” version, future musicians play not only the score but the accumulated sediment of recordings. The result is a modern musical imagination shaped as much by replay as by live encounter.