My absolute contempt for recordings is nearly impossible to convey in these few words written here. I have attempted on several occasions to compose essays or lectures explaining the exact reason for my passionate animosity, and the results never match my intent.

It is not merely a matter of recording technology being incapable of documenting and reproducing acoustic instruments. This is certainly a contributing factor since capturing sound and recreating it through a different source is impossible.

Neither is it a matter of editing. Obviously an edited recording is an artificial construct and no one has illusions of this being an actual performance.

Nor is it a matter of end-user applications. The artist loses musical control over the final sound and manipulation when a listener simply utilizes tracks and sections as background noise. The speakers, the room, the intent, are all contrary to the original idea. Music cannot be made without someone making it.

We must also realize that recordings falsely imply an attainable perfection. This is plain to see for most people, and yet student after student believes in the search for an elusive pinnacle.

These are all good reasons to question the validity of recordings, but none really speaks the whole truth. They are but unfortunate results brought about by the public forgetting a cardinal rule: music only happens once.

Music is a performance art, to be performed by an artist, and it exists only in the present. Once it passes by, it is gone forever. Another performance may be made, but it will be different. By capturing a single performance, we automatically assign it a distorted status.

Even if someone recognizes the inherent faults of recordings, they still accept the process as a necessary evil for the propagation of music. I maintain that recordings are not just neutral and accepted means of transmission, but rather commodities of truly damaging characteristics.

Music only exists during performance; it is attached to the present time by an artist. Upon completion, that music is banished to the past. Any attempt to recreate or repeat it necessarily fails as the artist has moved on with the flow of time. Whatever circumstances, decisions and emotions led up to that moment of music are lost. Recordings are false archives -- devoid of any context or input from the artist, they simply do not exist as music.

If you still want a recording featuring my playing, click here.