Many people have made gaffs by putting limits on what technology is capable of.
If we can put men on the moon, little cars on Mars and send a probe out of the Solar system, one day someone will make a digital as good as an acoustic.
Funnily enough, we already have the technology to replicate what an acoustic piano is capable of; we have the technology to make it feel exactly the same, act exactly the same, sound exactly the same ... and it's called an acoustic piano
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I agree. When I started taking piano lessons as a child my teacher would arrange for all her students to go to piano concerts as a group. We all got dressed up and learned some decorum. I don't recall much about who we saw but I do remember that they were part of a "piano series" with the same artist playing two evenings and one matinee. This occurred about once a month for the entire school year. Everybody could afford to go. We had a group student rate.
Today I don't see one solo piano concert offered except for graduation recitals at out local universities. Of course our symphony features piano concertos now and then, but as far as hearing a big grand piano well played is very rare.
So what do we do? Listen to very compressed digitally recorded CD's and MP3's and fill in the missing sound from memory.
I have recently read a book about Horowitz written by Harold Schonberg. There was a time in his life that, after having moved to the US and having already established himself as a famous pianist, he entered a period where he stopped performing for 12 years. During that time a whole generation of pianists developed whom basically had no idea who he was. At some point he came back to performing and began to re-introduce himself as a performer to many people whom had never heard him play at all, but especially not live. Though some people still knew his name and had listened to his recordings, there was one reporter whom upon his first time of hearing Horowitz play live, said to Horowitz that his recordings don't do him justice (and also informed him that there is a whole generation of pianists who don't know who he is).
I know that people these days feel they have some kind of authority on Horowitz by having listened to his recordings and some people like to boast about not enjoying him. There are probably some legitimate reasonings along those lines, but then there are probably FAR more individuals whom simply have no idea what his actual playing is like, partly because all they have ever heard is recordings. That is not to say that something of value cannot be communicated through recoding alone, because I believe it in fact can be. Reading the reviews that were written in the book I read regarding particular performances, it's actually tempting to think that the reviewers are exaggerating, and that the response Horowitz seemed to elicit from the public was somehow because of a sense of limitation in technology at the time ... that we just weren't as aware back then of just how many astounding musicians there were in the world since we didn't have the same access to recordings and YouTube and everything as we do now. I suspect though, that instead of all of that being exactly true, there was something about Horowitz and what he was and what he represented that was indeed very special. And, perhaps it's nearly true that his death brought the end to an entire era.
The thing is, there are still people in the world whom DO remember hearing him play, and even if technology is more advanced these days, even if there are more people whom are capable of playing with bravura and/or virtuosity, even if we know more about the human body, causing teaching and practice habits to have changed ... I still think there's something generally missing from many of today's ears, that only a few people have had the privilege of ever knowing. If the basic principle behind music is the Art of Sound, I think it's alarming if many or most people can hardly tell a difference from one pianist to another, or even more alarming if there is not much of a difference to be heard.
It is a famous story that JS Bach once walked hundreds of miles to go hear Buxtehude play, the leading organist of the time. Perhaps it would have been nice for Johann to have instead been able to pop in a recording of Buxtehude instead of needing to inconvenience himself with the trip to hear him live. Something tells me though that JS got much more out of that listening experience than most people would out of 50 listening experiences of a modern recording of the same repertoire played by the average virtuoso of today. Something tells me that JS probably knew exactly what he was listening for and that he wasn't lazy about listening. And, something tells me that somehow the very sound was a whole different experience back then.
I am not blaming one thing or another for the fact that the average listener isn't capable of hearing many aspects to music that make it what it is. I guess that has always been the case, probably, in one way or another. JS Bach was known to have better ears than most of the people and even leading musicians of his time as it was. As it relates though to modern days, I suppose I feel that we are now so infiltrated by sound, that our ears and listening have been actually further dulled because of it. That is not to say that we can't use much of what we have available to our advantage, it just takes a very smart approach. It's more a matter of the fact that I think that particular "approach" is so ... unknown ... that I think is maybe a bit sad.
There are particular recordings I feel I can't quite live without where I feel connected to the music and to even the performer and this experience is something I hold very close to me. However, there is still something even more thrilling about hearing that same person on those recordings IN person, and a whole world that is communicated through that which will perhaps stand alone in my memory banks of my personal experiences of actually being there and experiencing it first-hand. I actually feel it would be a tragedy for that Art, which is, I believe, on its own plane of existence, to be lost ... simply because people more and more value convenience over beauty and worse yet, cannot even tell the difference.
Topic: Acoustic pianos losing to digitals?