Mozart toured Europe in 1762. Sometimes I think about being in the audience, listening with a sense of the rarity of the event. Each movement of a piece, each phrase, comes, exists for a time, then fades. Without the knowledge that you could re-listen to something on an MP3, the listener would be on the edge of her seat, rapt. Of course the piece that you're listening to might be played again in a few seasons. Perhaps you could purchase a piano version of the piece and play it for yourself. But still, a tantalizing phrase would haunt you, a melody would float up unexpectedly, pieces would come back to you when you dream.
Maybe there's something of this same kind of tantalizing temporariness when modern day drama. I saw a Zoom version of a play, "Zero Cost House," that I'd never heard of and that probably can't be found in Amazon. I can't go back and re-read certain phrases or compare my memory with the actual text. The play exists for me only now in memory.
I'm wondering if recordings of things that are designed to be verbal -- plays, speeches, poems -- become less valuable because they're often easily able to be re-read. (I know that most poetry now might be "designed" to be read. This is just for argument.) Maybe the fact of being reproduced, or the capability of being reproduced, makes them easier to glance over, with partial attention, because it's easy to think that we'll go back to it later (which we rarely do!).
I'm not saying that the spoken word is more primary, just that when a listener thinks that this is the only chance to hear it, they will attend more.
Phonocentricsm is the belief that the spoken word is superior to the written word. I myself was attentive enough in graduate school to know that such a belief is held to be passe and laughable. (The sense that some things were passe and laughable might have been the main 'learning' that I did in graduate school. A learning that spoiled a great number of ideas for me.)
But maybe the fact of temporariness makes things more valuable. I'm thinking again about The Sheltering Sky quote I can't get out of my head:
“Death is always on the way, but the fact that you don't know when it will arrive seems to take away from the finiteness of life. It's that terrible precision that we hate so much. But because we don't know, we get to think of life as an inexhaustible well. Yet everything happens a certain number of times, and a very small number, really. How many more times will you remember a certain afternoon of your childhood, some afternoon that's so deeply a part of your being that you can't even conceive of your life without it? Perhaps four or five times more. Perhaps not even. How many more times will you watch the full moon rise? Perhaps twenty. And yet it all seems limitless.”
In class, what if students never got to READ a play? What if it was only watched?
What if students never got to READ poetry, but could only hear it? I wonder how that would change student's appreciation of it. As a teacher, you could still ask students to comment on it, choose favorite lines, etc. But the primary ability to apprehend the work would be through the ear (or eye for hard-of-hearing students!).
Maybe the experience for them (and I'm thinking about for me and you) would be better if it happened only once, a time that is made more precious by it's rarity. What happens if I read a book of poems to Jennie, and she read a different book to me? I could ask her to read it again, but not to show me the page. How would that change the experience? Would it be better?
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