TT: Home alone

I’m still getting mail about “A Shift in Time,” the posting in which I discussed the decline of the movie theater.

Here are three more letters that caught my eye:

“Movies will still be made if the only way to see them is on DVDs, but classical music is different. Chamber music groups (and big symphony orchestras, too) need audiences. Many groups make their living by touring; some record, others don’t. Their live repertoire is always greater than their recorded repertoire. Long-lived quartets or trios get their particular sound by playing together again and again, and you wouldn’t have that kind of signature sound from ad hoc quartets gathered together just to record the late Beethoven cycle….I think that watching movies alone is a loss, too. I love Netflix and tinker endlessly with my queue, and it’s great to snuggle up with your beloved or kids and watch a movie on a rainy night. But I can still remember going to see particular movies at the Orson Welles Theater and the Brattle Street Cinema in Cambridge thirty years ago with a bunch of friends. One doesn’t remember viewing DVDs in the same way–one remembers the movie itself and the fact that one has seen it, but not much else about the circumstances. There’s a communal aspect to art that you’re not accounting for. Reading has always been solitary, and the meditative, lost-in-an-armchair quality is part of the reading life. Blogging and emails and cyperspace are sort of in between–you’re both alone and connected though in a phantom way. But music is different. I wouldn’t imagine saying this to the author of