Sergiu Celibidache, the Romanian conductor who spent the last seventeen years of his working life with the Munich Philharmonic after a long itinerant career that took him through Berlin and Stuttgart and Stockholm, refused for most of his life to make commercial studio recordings. The reason he gave, in the interviews he gave to people who could be trusted not to flatten it, was that music is a transcendental event that occurs once, between specific musicians and a specific audience in a specific room, and that a recording -a phonograph, a CD, a stream- is a different object entirely, related to music in roughly the way a photograph of a meal is related to dinner. He was not making a metaphor. He thought commercial recording was a category error, and that the entire industry that grew up around it had taught a century of listeners to mistake the negative for the thing.

Toward the end of his life he conducted Bruckner -the late symphonies in particular, the Seventh and Eighth and Ninth- at tempos that, by the published metronome markings in the scores, are something on the order of thirty percent slower than what is now considered standard. The famous Munich Eighth from 1993 runs over a hundred minutes. The Adagio alone takes nearly half an hour. The orchestra under him produces a sound that does not feel slow in the way a tired performance feels slow; it feels slow in the way a cathedral feels slow, which is to say it makes the speed of everything else look like inattention.

These performances exist in recorded form against his explicit wishes. They were broadcast by Bavarian Radio, in the contractual way that orchestras with public-broadcasting partnerships are obliged to be broadcast, and the tapes were preserved, and after his death in 1996 his son authorised the release of a substantial portion of the archive on EMI, partly to fund the foundation that bears his father's name, partly because the alternative was bootleg circulation in steadily worse generations of dub. I have a copy of the 1993 Eighth that I have been listening to this morning on a pair of headphones I am told I overpaid for, and the slowness in it has a quality I have not been able to find words for except by reaching for words I do not entirely trust; it has the shape of a particular kind of religious attention, the kind that is willing to wait inside a phrase long enough for the phrase to stop being a phrase and become a place.

The Andalusi poets who treated oral recitation as the only proper performance medium are available to me now only because somebody, against the grain of the practice, wrote them down. The principle that says the work belongs to its moment is only preserved across moments by being betrayed at the level of media. There is no clean version of the position. The conductor who refused to record is loudest in the recordings.

I am going to put on the Adagio again now. It is the only thing the afternoon wants. #Music