Theodore Gracyk

Sound recordings have many functions, but the encoding and playback of music is among the most ubiquitous. Recordings of music have a dual nature. Originally they were artifacts that represented some of the sonic features of a particular music performance. However, they are also artifacts with their own characteristics, which vary as the technology developed. Consequently, recorded music can be approached from dual perspectives: as documentation of music performed in the past, or as an artwork in itself. Walter Benjamin was therefore wrong in his prediction that modern reproduction methods would negate the "aura" of artworks. The essay illustrates the issues with extended discussion of the Grateful Dead’s 1969 album *Aoxomoxoa* as compared to live recordings of the group made at this time.

Opinionated and example-filled, this extremely concise and accessible book provides a survey of some fundamental and longstanding debates about the nature of music. The central arguments and ideas of historical and contemporary philosophers are presented with the goal of making them as accessible as possible to general readers who have no background in philosophy. The emphasis is on instrumental music, but examples are drawn from many cultures as well as from Western classical, jazz, folk, and popular music

Howard Singerman's Art Subjects is a study of the training of visual artists in American universities from 1912 to the present. More precisely, the book is an account of how two philosophies of education have competed to inform that training. At the outset, Singerman announces that the book explores a long-standing "struggle between vision and language" (p. 10) that culminates with a decisive privileging of language. The book mimics its putative subject in at least one interesting way. As it was for art and the training of American artists in the twentieth century (at least on Singerman's account of them), so it is with the book. Each moves from a practice grounded in objective reality to a jargon-ridden discourse that limits entry to anyone outside of its acutely self-regarding disciplinary field. Although the book's acknowledgments segment thanks one individual for demanding that Singerman "come to a real conclusion" for the book, readers should note Singerman's subsequent admission that it may not have one. At times it even appears that Singerman goes out of his way to avoid drawing one. Drawing on his own life, he operates from a framing question: if he has a M.F.A. in sculpture but never learned to sculpt, what does his professional degree signify? The answer is that it indicates that his work is no longer facile. He has progressed from the realm of the artist whose work is professional, displaying facility, to the stage where he is professional. He has progressed to the point where being an artist is the artist's true subject: "Artists are the subject of graduate school; they are both who and what is taught" (p. 3). If this progression is best indicated by an artist's lack of facility in producing works of art, that is the price of professionalism. In the post-World War II university, art training is "founded on the primacy of theory over practice" (p. 181).