Recorded Music as Museumkunst

Together with our Utrecht partner Hifi Studio Wilbert, we are embarking on a unique adventure. Normally, as a festival, we do everything we can to make live music sound its absolute best – with flesh-and-blood musicians, for an audience on the edge of their seats. But in this series, we turn our focus to recorded music.

For many musicians, recording is crucial: it captures how you defend music at a particular moment in your artistic journey, alone or alongside kindred spirits. Recordings are often powerful statements. In a sense, they are museum pieces: they bear witness to a musical moment that once was.

Is recorded music therefore inferior to live music, ‘the real thing’? Or is that a false assumption? After all, in practice, only a tiny fraction of the music we hear is live. How different things were centuries ago!

Festival director Xavier Vandamme will discuss these musical museum issues with three top musicians and an audio equipment designer. Together, they will tackle questions of recording, listening, and memory. And we’ll listen along to their favourite recorded music – on a high-end audio set that you may only experience once in a lifetime.