3 October 2020 • What Kids Lack

Kids these days will never know the adventure of traveling to a special music library, climbing the steps, locating the correct LP record, and placing it into the record player (which had a needle). In the 1990s, this was the only way one could listen to Hofmann’s live recording of Chopin’s 4th Ballade. I have suggested that the most amazing pianists (Hofmann, Godowski, Rachmaninov, Lhevinne, Horowitz, Cortot, and so on) were those who grew up without radio and recordings, when all music was live music. Today, it struck me that until the invention of the camera, all pictures were drawn by hand. In other words, Giotto, Angelico, and Botticelli couldn’t look at paintings in a book, because the printing press had not been invented—and there was no such thing as photographs! I would like to explore this topic more…