During a festival concert in Essen, the Polish Zimerman interrupted his recital of Karol Szymanowksi's Variations on a Polish Theme in B Minor to ask a member of the audience to stop recording on a mobile phone.
With his concentration broken, Zimerman had to take a short break before returning to finish the concert. He told the audience that footage on YouTube had led to him losing recording deals and contracts, stating "the destruction of music because of YouTube is enormous." His comments have been supported by other classical musicians and sympathetic festival organisers.
Zimerman is far from the first musician to speak out about the prevalence of cameras and particularly smartphones at concerts. Clint Mansell, the composer & musician best known for his soundtracks for films like Requiem for a Dream and Moon, recently expressed his feelings on the topic:
A performance is a moment in time.Be present.Be awake.Be there.Be Here.Now.#rantover
— Clint Mansell (@iamclintmansell) April 2, 2013
Mötley Crüe drummer Tommy Lee has previously articulated his opinion in more... colourful Twitter language. Prince is reported to have security guards monitor audiences for phone wielders, while Jack White offers free professional-quality shots for all his gigs to try and discourage people from raising their cameras in the air (like they just don’t care).
Perhaps the most widely publicised recent example, however, was the sign put up by the Yeah Yeah Yeahs before a concert, kindly requesting attendees to put those phones way:
(Photo: Spin)
Counter measures
Meanwhile, various apps have sprung up in an attempt to both counter and encourage the use of mobile phones at concert. With the low-quality of video and sound recording offered by most phones a major drawback of filming at a gig, Soundhalo is attempting to render such footage redundant by offering high-quality professional recordings that are available to download (for a fee) immediately after a gig.
Other apps such as Outlisten take a different approach, using the audience footage to put together a multi-angle recording of the event, with the band able to ‘curate’ the content or even add their own ‘master track’ straight from the mixing desk to supplement the images.
Benefits of recordings?
While musicians and critics have frequently expressed their dislike of the practice, the sheer bulk of concert videos available online suggests it’s still a popular choice for many fans (too popular, the concert-goer distracted by a sea of glowing screens might argue).
Some even suggest they can serve as a valuable archiving facility, with many of the fascinating spontaneous happenings at concerts going unrecorded otherwise - a more widespread extension of the fan-made ‘bootlegs’ that served as the only way to hear some of music’s most famous concerts.
The recent invasion of grasshoppers at a Paul McCartney concert in Brazil, for example, was captured on mobile cameras - several managing thousands of views before McCartney's team uploaded their own higher quality version. Joe McElderry’s ‘accidental’ duet with Beyonce was uploaded by several fans, achieving hundreds of thousands of views (the most popular hovering around the quarter of a million view mark).
Such arguments only serve to refuel debates about the lost art of ‘being there’, many arguably more concerned with capturing the moment for others than actually experiencing it for themselves. With more musicians calling out such habits, it’s possible venues will crackdown more in the near future (we haven’t even gone into the legality of it all).
As smartphones grow more prevalent, it’s possible some audience members might well rebel over their ‘right’ to record their favourite bands and artists even as the same musicians encourage them to pocket the cameras.
