If recorded sports events are so boring to watch, what about recorded music?

An interesting essay pondering our disinterest in watching recorded rather than live sports events.

Okay, I'm being provocative with the title of this item.* Discuss.

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*While I think Klosterman is spot-on about recorded sports and find his distinction between rational and irrational reasons to be extremely perceptive, tentatively, I'd say that my own take on recorded music (excluding music composed specifically for fixed recorded media) is different from my take on recorded sports. As audiences I believe we return, in memory, to music, in a fundamentally different way from sports, in that revisiting some stretch of music can reliably and sustainably comfort or disturb us in manifold ways and music happens to be so rich in such stretches that (a) we don't really ever play the same piece in the same way twice and (b) we don't really hear the same piece in the same way twice, so that playing it again, Sam, is not necessarily a boring proposition.

Beyond a small handful of remarkable plays (say Cal-Stanford '82 or Bob Beamon's jump in '68) , repeated viewing in sports simply does not carry the same detail- and connection- rich charge, so that revisiting some stretch of a sporting event is of interest primarily to specialists, for example coaches attempting to improve or recreate particular tactics or in evaluating prospective players or opponents.

Also this: the relationship of parts to the whole in a sports event has a bottom, carry-away, line: the final score and while the dynamics of these parts in their whole-game context may contribute to the immediate sense of drama, the value of the drama diminishes when the game enters memory, and viewing a recording of the game when the final score is known to exist — even if it is unknown to you personally — makes the viewing anticlimactic, diminishing its original temporal proportions, thus we are able to grab the remote and fast-forward with abandon. Music, even with the experience of sampling all around us, is much more protective of its continuity, leading to a very different sense of eventfulness with scores rarely parseable into discrete moves and plays. Yes, a football game or a hockey match can exhibit — and thrill with — considerable sense of momentum, but this sense is seldom recoverable, while the design of a musical work does not resolve to a score with a winner and a loser.

That said, it's obvious that a recorded performance of a work of music is fundamentally different from a live performance because the recording is fixed in ways a live performance cannot be, and a live performance is unpredictable in ways a recording cannot be. Being able to operate within the range of possibilities offered by this distinction strikes me as very useful and interesting. I happen to avoid recordings in preference for live performances, but your possibilities and preferences may well be different from mine. In any case, it would be a loss not to have that variety.


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