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Music appreciation mavens used to wield an old saw about the composer-performer-listener triangle. We laughed at its naivete, but it is a good simple model of a classical notion of musical-social interaction. In this model the composer is genius/author, the performer is genius/servant, and the listener respectfully adores both. The receiver of the greater glory, either composer or performer, varies from time to time and place to place. This is a simple-minded perspective but, for the sake of argument, let's take it seriously and think of it as a network with three nodes. There is a conspicuous feedback loop. Each node responds to the actions, abilities and appreciations of the other. Musical revolutions are coincident with the breakdown of the lines of communication. Music is considered to have advanced when the lines of communication are restored--the myth of musical progress. In the intellectual climate of western music, and art in general, this process of breakdown and restoration is thought of as normal. We expect to have to struggle. We expect misunderstanding to be the first step in the advancement of knowledge. The failure to understand is synonymous with the need to be educated. We expect the individual nodes to constantly fuss with their lines of communication to the other nodes. To have read and absorbed Finnegans Wake, is to have become better. This process ascribes a dynamic quality to the lines of communication.
The network needs social institutions to provide a context for this communication and interaction -- typically, concerts, in which some play while others listen. Even with recording today we still think of the concert as the excitation function of this network. We tend to think of recording as documentation of live performance, and perhaps a less than perfect substitute, an illusion. an incomplete and distorted image of reality. From a certain perspective this view describes a very rigid social structure. It is highly conservative in that it provides a conceptual framework which discourages evolution and promotes institutional stability. The degrees of passiveness and activeness of the individual nodes are relatively fixed and the environments in which they behave are designed to accommodate their habits without much fuss or bother. The composer writes, the performer plays and the listener claps. Art must be supported by its showcase, and if it cannot survive in that showcase it must either find some other venue or die. It must be added, however, that this framework is the arena in which some of the greatest intellectual accomplishments of western civilization have been born
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