“Yes, one’s attention is drawn away from the essential things and towards the inessential ones, namely, away from the music as an end and towards the means, the

“Yes, one’s attention is drawn away from the essential things and towards the inessential ones, namely, away from the music as an end and towards the means, the manner, in which the keyboardists and wind players and string players are playing it. But I’d like to point out that these irritating practices are well established in the techniques of all forms of mechanical reproduction. In radio and in many gramophone recordings one also encounters a predilection for accentuating so-called principal voices or so-called melodies out of all proportion to their place in the musical fabric. This is the fault of the sound engineers, who subsequently engage in fundamentally quite unmusical procedures by surgically extracting these voices, which is quite in keeping with their—if I may say this—unartistic intuitions and is also congenial to the highly problematic taste of the public. … What results from this is that certain middle-of-the-road so-called euphony, that culinary seasoning of the sound at the expense of all the structural elements of the music.”