The Recording Angel by Evan Eisenberg

If, like me, you’re an avid listener to music, allow me to impress upon you the importance of reading this book. Its subject is the impact of recording upon music itself and it’s full to the gills with insight, cogent argument and wit. Here’s a representative, arguably pivotal, paragraph:

The life of the touring blues musician, Charles Keil has observed, furnishes all the loneliness and jealousy he needs to sing the blues he needs to sing the blues authentically (…) The recording situation is an even stronger and more representative extract. The glass booths and baffles that isolate the musician from his fellow musicians; the abstracted audience; the sense of producing an object and of mass-producing a commodity; the deconstruction of time by takes and its reconstruction by splicing – these are strong metaphors of modern life. Their mirror images in the listener’s experience are solitude; the occlusion of the musician; the use of music as an object and a commodity; the collapse of a public architecture of time and the creation of a private interior design of time. Since they contradict everything that music-making once seemed to be, they are paradoxes.

(page 130)

Although Eisenberg’s perspective occasionally appears rather conservative, his doubts give necessary pause for thought. The book was first published in 1985, the second edition includes an interesting afterword for the 1996 Italian edition and a brilliant flight of fancy for the current edition penned in response to the massive changes in the music world prompted by the internet.

The Recording Angel is mandatory reading and it’s available for £8.36 + P&P from Amazon marketplace vendor The Book Depository (who supply as print-on-demand). What are you waiting for?