While looking for an accessible translation of the Borges story I learned of a jazz group that I wasn't familiar with - Mostly Other People Do the Killing - which, according to their Wikipedia entry, is very well respected. It turns out that in 2014 the group released a note-for-note recording of Miles Davis's iconic jazz classic Kind of Blue. (Their recording - I doubt if it could be called a rendition, nor should it be referred to as a version - of All Blues is accessible via SoundCloud.) It seems to me that "reproducing" a written text as Borges attempted to describe it, is considerably different from reproducing a recording. I have no doubt that the musicians are highly professional. They definitely devoted serious effort to making their project a success. But Borges (probably) wanted us to consider the importance of the framework in which a work is produced, and even if that was the intent of the Kind of Blue reproduction, something tells me that the aural experience of an exact reproduction is fundamentally different from the experience of reading a re-production.

There's no intent here to fool the listener into thinking that this is the original. Because there isn't, the recording isn't like a fake painting that can be sold for a fortune because it fools us. If anything, it's perhaps similar to a Paint by Number kit, except that the people using the kit are exceptionally good at their jobs. We might view Paint by Number kits as a means by which amateurs can have a sort-of Pierre Menard experience, but again, Mostly Other People Do the Killing are far from being amateurs. Painting seems to lend itself to this more readily than literature or music, though Music Minus One recordings may give amateurs the rush of playing with an orchestra. I suppose that for most Paint by Number enthusiasts the end product, such as it was, was more important than the process, but perhaps some of the people who used these kits found themselves experiencing, at least to some extent, what the original artists experienced. And that can't be a bad thing.