The Best Argument Against

This story has a strong opponent, and he deserves to be heard out at full strength.

He says roughly this. Everything described here as liberation is in fact loss. For thirty-five thousand years music was a matter of the body: breath, fingers, calluses on the fingertips, a back that aches after three hours at the instrument. It was a matter of people who play together and hear each other breathe, slip and pick each other up, and out of their shared mistake sometimes comes something that was in no score. The years at the instrument were not the price paid for the result, they were the music, and the person who went through them became a different person. The machines took from the musician, one after another, everything that made him a musician and left him the choice from ready-made material, that is, the easiest and emptiest part of the work. A song you can get in a minute cost nobody anything, and so it means nothing.