Aural Presence

When musical technology arrived on the beginning of XX century, it wasn't a synthesizer, but a gramophone which first caused a great stir inside the circles of musical lovers. The widest circles of music lovers of the time (who were, understandably, mostly into classical music) were upset. This revolutionary invention, that would be expected to cause a rupture of delight, was instead seen as a subversion. The antipathy towards these machines was maybe best described by German writer Herman Hesse in his novel “Stephen Wolf”, where on one place he writes of his fantasy about Mozart playing him music from a radio device – as they were at the time, with sheet-metal funnels and muffled, distorted sound:

“It was a radio-device, which he set up and turned on, and then also the loudspeaker, and said: 'From Munich Concerto grosso in F-major from Handel can be heard.' Really, on my indescribable surprise and horror, the devilish sheet-metal funnel soon began spitting out that mixture of bronchial mucous and chewed gum, which is by owners of gramophones and radio subscribers by some agreement called music – and behind that vague slobbering and shrieking, as behind a thick layer of dust, a sight of the precious picture could indeed be caught, the noble structure of godly music, kingly work, cold spacious breath and saturated, wide sound of strings. – Oh, my god – I screamed terrified – what are you doing, Mozart? Are you seriously arranging this mess? To play at us this disgusting device, the triumph of our time, it’s last weapon in it’s destructive war against art! Does it have to be, Mozart?"

Hesse soon could not use such colorful epithets to express his loathing, since a few decades later devices were perfected to the level of almost total fidelity of the sound – when they were called High Fidelity sound reproduction systems, or short, Hi Fi devices. But Hesse was certainly aware that the problem is not so much in sound quality, as in the fact that the music is now heard outside of context of live concert performance.

Throughout tradition music had to be conjured and listened to exclusively on live performances, and while people were coming to musical concerts in order to be emotionally engaged, they still necessarily experienced all sounds as consequence of physical happenings in theirs surrounding. Actually, in musical world live interpretation was being so much taken for granted as the only way of producing music, that estheticians of art embedded that assumption in the very basics of aesthetic theories of music.

But with invention of gramophone, for the first time sounds and music could be heard without being physically surrounded with the original source of sounds, and therefore listener for the first time could experience sound without being aware of its physical origin. Such awareness of pure sound we will call aural presence.