ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses particularly on improvised music performance, the living status of which seems particularly relevant. Perhaps all music performance may become grist for the mass art mill. The technological medium may already have worked its way so deeply into the message that recordings may no longer function as documents of music performances but as works of mass art in their own right. The philosopher, Theodore Gracyk, agrees, with respect to most music recordings. A recording, he says, stands between the audience and the music like "the sheet of glass that protects a painting from the audience in the art museum". The problem is that mass art music industries can simply override this subtlety by treating all music sources as fodder to mix and match, without regard to their original status or the niceties of the process by which they were originally created. The attention of consumers can easily follow suit.
