about recordings and recording in the arts

Kokopelli  About Kokopelli

As far as the arts are concerned, recording has played a vital role in human affairs since the dawn of civilization. Today, recording is common to all the arts, and in both the dim and the recent past recordings have contributed to the conduct and expansion of virtually every art form. Where would painting be without media such as oils or without recording "devices" such as canvas and easel? Where would motion pictures be without cameras, photographic emulsion, and strips of cellulose film? Where would poetry or prose be without paper, ink, and pen?...or without the word processor, for that matter.

Recording is as old as culture itself. Pictures of bears began turning up on ber shrines in Europe, perhaps as long ago as 100,000years. About 75,000 years ago, in the Paleolithic age, the earliest chipped stone tools began to appear. Of course, bear shrines were produced for worship and stone tools were produced for hunting, not for art; but these artifacts left a record of those who carved them. Men must have created shrines for group, not solitary, worship; they must have fashioned tools and hunted with them in groups. These are our first records of human culture.

Since the advent of these primitive chipped stone tools, technological, artistic, and aesthetic innovations have accumulated at an ever-increasing pace, first with development of crude antler and bone artifacts, later with engravings of patterns in bone and stone objects and on ornaments worn for decorous purposes. Of course, insofar as adornment is aesthetic, it may be said to be art.

Recording with art as its purpose may have begun later, with sculpted figures, paintings, and engravings on the walls of caves and rock-shelters that first appeared in Africa roughly 40,000 years ago, during the early phases of the Stone Age. Yes, in the minds of the ancients who fashioned these displays, these objects may have had purposes other than making records for others to see; they may have meant them for adornment or to propitiate the gods or to express religious or psychedelic experiences. But equally, these designs were the outcome of a desire to record these adornments, propitiations, and experiences; and anyone examining these paintings will have difficulty denying they are art.

• Explore some of these early cave paintings. See samples of art work on the walls of the cave at Lascaux at the Muse Of Fine Arts page called Lascaux: click here.

Recently, evidence has emerged to suggest that modern art, such as contemporary man conceives and fabricates it—art which is aesthetically expressive and valued for its own sake—may well have begun in Swabia, a region between modern day France, Switzerland, and Bavaria, some 35-40,000 years ago. Artifacts dated to that period and place have been uncovered that take the form of carvings of animals in motion and humans with animal heads. A flute with finger holes carved from bird bones has been discovered there which clearly was fashioned to play music.

Since these earliest days, varied advances in recording have been made unabated all over the planet. In modern times, the quantity, scope, and quality of recording have rocketed almost out of sight. Today, all aspects of recording are advancing at a phenomenal rate, a rate which can expected to escalate indefinitely.

What a difference the ability to make recordings has made in our lives. How progress in recording has enriched us in the last 100-odd years! Remarkable advancements have been made in improving faithfulness of reproduction, convenience, storage life, capacity, and compactness. Time has also brought an almost unbelievable richness in the extant body of recorded objects, media, and performances—so many performers, so many brilliant performances that will not be lost to the ravages of time, like those of Beethoven and Mozart. The impact of these advances on the arts is staggering.

In art, recording has many functions. In part, it is the vehicle by which man renders his internalized aesthetic sensibility incarnate. Recording also has a major to play in fulfilling man's basic need for self-expression—his need to communicate with others, with the external universe, with the supernatural, and with himself. If recording only served to make self expression possible, the impact of recording on the arts would be immeasurable. But in actuality, the impact of our ability to record goes much, much farther.

The overwhelming weight of evidence points to the indisputable fact that an aesthetic sensibility is ingrained in the instinctual nature of mankind. Art is the product of this sensibility and recording is its objectification.