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'Illusion and Aura in the Classical Audio Recording'

This chapter is one of a series of papers by Johnson on the aesthetics of audio recording. It is published in a volume that won the American Musicological Society Ruth Solie Award for ‘a collection of essays of exceptional merit’, the awarding committee specifically commending the ‘sonic turn’ of the articles, and those ‘building on and surpassing the theorizing of Walter Benjamin and Theodor Adorno’. It is these two philosophers that provide the theoretical grounding for the arguments in this chapter: that the tradition of audio recording of classical works has developed and flourished as a means of preserving the auratic and illusory in classical music. Following both Benjamin and the Adorno of _Aesthetic Theory_, the author argues that audio recordings are artistic products such as may be heard as illusory insofar as they are offered as authentic copies of live performance, and auratic in that they bear the imprint of their own poiesis and history. Recent musicological arguments that musical performance must necessarily be seen to be appreciated are shown to be specious: an audio recording claims its own aesthetic validity. However, Benjamin’s case for technology as affording critique of the auratic is challenged by the aesthetic illusion of the audio recording which, in the contemporary, technologically dominated world, can itself function as cultural critique in Adorno’s sense. This last point is more rigorously argued in a forthcoming chapter by Johnson on listeners’ values, and is developed from historical perspectives in Johnson_02. From the wider musicological perspective, this chapter can be read as an attempt to introduce modern aesthetics – as distinct from the old-fashioned and duly discredited ‘aesthetic ideology’ (Korsyn) – into contemporary musicology. In particular, Adorno’s magisterial _Aesthetic Theory_, despite Max Paddison’s useful introductions, remains mostly unknown to current musicology.