Performance

"What interests me is . . . one of the most constant aspects of American music: its composite character, its emphasis on 'performance', and its diffuse, strenuous desire for a history, for an identifiable genealogy."

In his 'Commenti al Rock' (Rivista Musicale Italiana, I, May/June 1967), from which the above quotation is taken, Luciano Berio stresses the continuity that exists between jazz and pop as essentially performing arts. It should not be forgotten that the contines of pop do not correspond to those of the record industry. There is a whole 'live' tradition closely related to the blues and constituting a legitimate development of that tradition which cannot adequately be represented on record and which is fundamentally unsuited to the 'single' format. It is no coincidence that the singles of the most talented performance groups—Cream and the Jimi Hendrix Experience, for example—have rarely made much impression on the record charts. Their music, if suited to recording at all, demands the duration of the long-playing record. Its volume moreover cannot be reproduced domestically. It is the volume of the best rock music that is one of its most remarkable features. Records are unable to recreate the effect of a 1000-watt beat-group—most domestic amplifiers having at the most 50 watts. Records therefore represent a kind of abstraction from the music, a 'reduction' in a literal sense, corresponding to the nineteenth-century piano reductions of orchestral and operatic music for domestic use. The 'acoustic aura' of live rock music, whereby sheer volume creates a flood effect transcending mere loudness, is something unknown even in the loudest 'straight' music. For me it constitutes an important extension of musical means at the disposal of all musicians..