ABSTRACT

For centuries, all forms of music were realized by musicians at a specific place and unfolded organically in time. Accordingly, music was, without exception, only accessible to those who were there when it was performed, and that the audience was always able to link the sound they heard to a visible and present source. These specific and defining qualities of music did not change until the invention of the phonograph in 1877, which occasioned the cultural shift to an era of what Canadian composer and writer R. Murray Schafer (1969) has labeled schizophonia, to draw attention to the newfound ability to separate (schizo is “split” in Greek) the sound (phōnē in Greek) from its source and, importantly, from the performative moment.