ABSTRACT
John Butt writes that 'music is crucially dependent on a creative element in the capacity to hear'. Jane Davidson and Daniela Coimbra found that expert judges in a music college setting responded directly to visually expressive features of classical vocal performance. Historically informed performance developed at around the same time modernist composition was breaking up, and demonstrated that there were different ways of playing music from the past, but without challenging the underlying ideas of faithfulness to score, composer and historical context. Simon Shaw-Miller observes that 'the harder music tries to hide the visual, the more effective sight becomes in showing itself, as always, surprisingly present'. The paradox is that while the discourses of classical music have represented recordings as reproductions of live music and placed the use of creative production techniques off limits, concerts effectively ape recordings. Alex Ross complains about 'the vaguely Edwardian costumes, the convention-centre lighting schemes, the aggressive affectlessness of the average professional musician'.
