Quote:
Originally Posted by Davey Moore
The purposeful arrangement of music to create an overarching piece of work is nothing new. Think of symphonies. Mozart's Requiem is meant to be played and listened to as a whole, and the whole is better than the sum of it's parts.
LPs are essentially that concept but veiled behind the relative newness of the technology itself.
However I do agree with you that live music is the way music is meant to be heard and played. Nothing beats it, because there is much more of a connection between the artist and the listener, and the listener to all the other people in the crowd.
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I think symphonies are a good analog to the album from an artist's perspective, but I was more commenting on the physical existence of the album within our society as a whole. Prior to the invention of the gramophone, symphonies were some of the only preserved music, something that certainly doesn't correlate to their minuscule existence at the time. There was plenty of other music out there besides classical, and hardly any of it preserved for posterity.
Another thing to consider is the emerging disconnect today between how an artist sounds on record and how they sound live -- a product of the album's inherent focus on "making a band sound good" rather than "making a band sound real". I'm not suggesting that modern production hasn't resulted in some enormous works, but this disparity between how an artist records and how he performs is expanding. And in some situations (like, say, 100% of pop music), the album becomes a much greater work of the producer and engineers than the actual performer.
So no, I still don't consider the album sacred.