twoleftears: very interesting suggestion. Benjamin was not in my mind when I wrote what I did, but I see your point.
For those not familiar with the famous Benjamin essay, it's certainly relevant. I won't pretend to do justice to its subtlety and complexity, but here's a gist. Benjamin writes: "Around 1900, technological reproduction not only had reached a standard that permitted it to reproduce all known works of art, profoundly modifying their effect, but it also had captured a place of its own among the artistic processes."
However, he goes on to insist that "In even the most perfect reproduction, one thing is lacking: the here and now of the work of art—its unique existence in a particular place." He calls this "unique existence" of the original work, prior to its reproduction (for us, the "live performance"), the work's "aura," and further claims that this is what "underlies the concept of its authenticity." Thus, the problem posed by reproduced artworks (especially music): "The whole sphere of authenticity eludes technological—and of course not only technological—reproduction...: what withers in the age of the technological reproducibility of the work of art is the latter's aura."
Now, this suggests many interesting things, not least of which would be that the recording is its own "artwork" not to be compared disparagingly to some inaccessible "original." Thus, the aim of reproduced music is NOT, as it might seem, to re-create an impossible lost original performance, but rather, to provide an authentic experience of its own, an experience of a new kind of artwork: the collective product of composer, performers, AND engineers (recording engineers, the designers of microphones and amplifiers and speakers, etc. etc.).
BUT: what is still supposedly missing is the "authenticity" of the uniqueness of the original. In the case of a painting, this is pretty obviously very important, at least for commercial reasons: an "authentic" Picasso original is worth vastly more than a "copy," however accurate the copy may be.
Here's where I think Benjamin's argument is often misunderstood. He calls this lost "authenticity" the artwork's "aura." But "aura" is a loaded term! It suggests a kind of mystical quality possessed only by some fetishized object; it is NOT an aesthetic value in any straightforward sense. After all, the only aesthetic difference between a Picasso original and an exact technological reproduction indistinguishable from it would be the fetish value assigned to the historical facts associated with the original alone (the artist himself touched it, etc.). These are of interest to the investor, to the art historian, to the museum curator—but not necessarily to the art appreciator.
So, returning to music reproduction: if it were possible (and it very nearly is!) to reproduce in one's living room the acoustic experience of a live performance, what, really, is lost? The social facts of sharing the live performance with others, I suppose. But that's not a feature of the music itself. The fact that, in a live performance, someone might make a mistake—a little like a live Formula One race, where someone might crash and get killed, vs. watching the same race on TV after the fact. But again, these are not aesthetic values.
Admittedly, with larger ensembles, this kind of simulacral reproduction is progressively harder and harder to achieve: the acoustic of the Musikverein can't really be re-created in one's living room. But a chamber ensemble is within the range of possibility—not to mention solo instruments.
Rather than Benjamin, the relevant thinker here would seem to be Beaudrillard. His notion of the "simulacrum," whereby a copy, being more familiar than the original from which it is derived, is actually more a cultural touchstone than the original it is "parasitic" upon, seems to me almost exactly the concept that is at issue. An example: most Americans are more familiar with Disneyland's Magic Castle than with Bavaria's Neuschwanstein, but Neuschwanstein is the original and the Disney "simulacrum" the copy.
So here's the bottom line of these reflections. Listening the the Berlin Philharmonic—or, better because smaller, the Orpheus Chamber Orchestra—in my living room is not a substitute for hearing the ensemble in person, but rather, the thing itself! As Benjamin put it above (modifying the grammar for the present circumstances), "technological reproduction has reached a standard that permits it to reproduce all known works of art, profoundly modifying their effect, but thereby also capturing a place of its own among the artistic processes." Indeed, the spatial specificity of different voices on a good audio system in a good room is superior to what would be experienced live. The "effect" of the "authentic" performance has been "modified," all right, but in a positive way, in order to provide a "reproduction" that is actually superior to the "auratic" original! The only thing lost is fetish value! How cool is that?
