Two Bits on Recording
Since I don't know how to block-quote gracefully in comments, I'll break out my response to Pete's Carlos Kleiber post here, first by reproducing a chunk of one Michael Kennedy's liner note to EMI's CD reissue of a Ludwig/ Wunderlich/ Klemperer/ (New) Philharmonia Orchestra studio recording of Mahler's Das Lied von der Erde, because that album is very particularly a product of studio engineering:
(Maybe our resident manuscript editor knows how to make this clear in type, but I don't so I'll just say it: The first ellipsis above is Kennedy's and the one at the end is mine.)
The traditionally understood tradeoff between studio and concert recordings is precision vs. a semi-intangible focus and energy; I'd be interested in how that would hold up in a blind taste test. I'd also be interested in whether the proportion of studio vs. "live" classical albums has shifted towards the latter as sound engineering techniques have advanced and it has become (I presume) easier to record and mix them with a high level of sophistication.
(For instance, Mariss Jansons' recording of Shostakovich's eighth with the Pittsburgh Symphony from a few years back (apparently it's already out of EMI's catalog as a standalone) was assembled from "takes" from various rehearsals and a weekend's worth of performances, with nary an extraneous sound to be heard. In fact it is paired, peculiarly and rather lazily, with a longish excerpt of Jansons rehearsing the third movement with the PSO. Incidentally, in that clip he makes reference to playing Shostakovich's seventh symphony soon, which he never did with that orchestra; it was planned for the next season but pulled due to budgetary constraints on the number of orchestral players. What they swapped in, though, was the tremendous Shostakovich's tenth that we discussed to some extent here, one of Jansons' most memorable PSO performances for me.)
In terms of the wider cultural impact of listening to recorded music versus live performances: I think the biggest practical issue, and probably the biggest theoretical one if you formulate it right, is that listeners accustomed to records tend to treat "the music" as something of a concrete product in itself, as opposed to something that emerges from a performance and all the attendant glitches in playing, audience noises, acoustical problems, and other such real-life features that tend to get buffed out of the experience of commercially engineered recordings. A by-product of that is a fetishization of the technical quality of a concert and (though I may be reaching a bit on this point) a loss of appreciation of music as a performative act, a product of something that people do rather than as a stream of sound that enters your ears somehow. Thus, a less rich sense of communication with the players, and through them with the composer.
I'm basing a lot of that on comparing how I listened to concerts at first (about a decade ago, now) to how I listen to them now, which may mean that some of it is just a feature of musical maturity. I expect much of it is common, though. It took me a while before I wasn't annoyed if a violin soloist stopped between the first and second movements of a concerto to retune their instrument, or bothered by the reasonable levels of audience noise that attentive listeners can't help but make. (I still have trouble getting past hearing aids being tuned, children twisting balloon animals, or boys rubbing girls' pantyhosed legs. That last one, if you're sitting near a young and not terribly musical couple out on the town, almost invariably starts about eight minutes into the first movement; I know the student union gave you a discount on the tickets, kids, but can you take it someplace where the only person who'll be bothered is the person in the bunk bed above yours?) Listening to a bunch of fuzzy, ill-balanced archival Soviet recordings helped me work past a lot of that; in a way I started to listen past any album's recording quality, even if it was better than what 1960s-era Russian technology had to offer.
As for "truth-value", though I'm not clear on precisely what that means, I'm not sure I buy that a recording puts a fundamentally new layer between the symbolic structures in the composer's or performer's head and the symbolic structures in yours. Except for the mostly practical issues above, I think listening to music is subjective enough that "truth" isn't going to be a meaningful property of a performance, at least as I'm inclined to define it. You could make the claim that our culture's reliance on recorded music comes at the expense of experiencing live performances, but at least for large-scale classical music virtually every choice would be between hearing a piece on record or not at all. I guess you could further say that that very availability of music fundamentally cheapens our experience of it -- there's probably an economic basis for that claim, given some of the incidental points still fresh in my mind from Barry Schwartz's The Paradox of Choice -- but for anyone who's ever torn through one artist's discography or another I think that argument would have to ring a little bit false.
Those who condemn recording as an artificial process compared with live performance, a "thing of shreds and patches" assembled from various "takes" on tape, could cite Otto Klemperer's last recording of Mahler's Das Lied von der Erde ("The Song of the Earth") as a prime example of all their objections... The first sessions were between 19 and 22 February 1964 in Kingsway Hall, London, with Christa Ludwig, followed by more in Studio No.1, Abbey Road, on 7 and 8 November with Fritz Wunderlich. Those November sessions were the last appearance of the original Philharmonia Orchestra before its founder, Walter Legge, attempted to disband it in (more or less) a fit of pique. The players themselves then reconstituted the orchestra as the New Philharmonia and it was under this title that it recorded with Christa Ludwig again to complete the recording of Das Lied von der Erde in Studio No.1 from 6 to 9 July 1966. From start to finish, therefore, the recording sessions spanned 29 months! Wunderlich and Ludwig, who had sung the work in public with Klemperer in London on 13 April 1961, did not meet during the sessions and Wunderlich died in September 1966. Yet the recording is a classic and, by some miracle, Klemperer imposed a sense of unity on it. Few tenors have sung the first movement with such heroic lyricism as Wunderlich (aided undoubtedly by the microphone)...
(Maybe our resident manuscript editor knows how to make this clear in type, but I don't so I'll just say it: The first ellipsis above is Kennedy's and the one at the end is mine.)
The traditionally understood tradeoff between studio and concert recordings is precision vs. a semi-intangible focus and energy; I'd be interested in how that would hold up in a blind taste test. I'd also be interested in whether the proportion of studio vs. "live" classical albums has shifted towards the latter as sound engineering techniques have advanced and it has become (I presume) easier to record and mix them with a high level of sophistication.
(For instance, Mariss Jansons' recording of Shostakovich's eighth with the Pittsburgh Symphony from a few years back (apparently it's already out of EMI's catalog as a standalone) was assembled from "takes" from various rehearsals and a weekend's worth of performances, with nary an extraneous sound to be heard. In fact it is paired, peculiarly and rather lazily, with a longish excerpt of Jansons rehearsing the third movement with the PSO. Incidentally, in that clip he makes reference to playing Shostakovich's seventh symphony soon, which he never did with that orchestra; it was planned for the next season but pulled due to budgetary constraints on the number of orchestral players. What they swapped in, though, was the tremendous Shostakovich's tenth that we discussed to some extent here, one of Jansons' most memorable PSO performances for me.)
In terms of the wider cultural impact of listening to recorded music versus live performances: I think the biggest practical issue, and probably the biggest theoretical one if you formulate it right, is that listeners accustomed to records tend to treat "the music" as something of a concrete product in itself, as opposed to something that emerges from a performance and all the attendant glitches in playing, audience noises, acoustical problems, and other such real-life features that tend to get buffed out of the experience of commercially engineered recordings. A by-product of that is a fetishization of the technical quality of a concert and (though I may be reaching a bit on this point) a loss of appreciation of music as a performative act, a product of something that people do rather than as a stream of sound that enters your ears somehow. Thus, a less rich sense of communication with the players, and through them with the composer.
I'm basing a lot of that on comparing how I listened to concerts at first (about a decade ago, now) to how I listen to them now, which may mean that some of it is just a feature of musical maturity. I expect much of it is common, though. It took me a while before I wasn't annoyed if a violin soloist stopped between the first and second movements of a concerto to retune their instrument, or bothered by the reasonable levels of audience noise that attentive listeners can't help but make. (I still have trouble getting past hearing aids being tuned, children twisting balloon animals, or boys rubbing girls' pantyhosed legs. That last one, if you're sitting near a young and not terribly musical couple out on the town, almost invariably starts about eight minutes into the first movement; I know the student union gave you a discount on the tickets, kids, but can you take it someplace where the only person who'll be bothered is the person in the bunk bed above yours?) Listening to a bunch of fuzzy, ill-balanced archival Soviet recordings helped me work past a lot of that; in a way I started to listen past any album's recording quality, even if it was better than what 1960s-era Russian technology had to offer.
As for "truth-value", though I'm not clear on precisely what that means, I'm not sure I buy that a recording puts a fundamentally new layer between the symbolic structures in the composer's or performer's head and the symbolic structures in yours. Except for the mostly practical issues above, I think listening to music is subjective enough that "truth" isn't going to be a meaningful property of a performance, at least as I'm inclined to define it. You could make the claim that our culture's reliance on recorded music comes at the expense of experiencing live performances, but at least for large-scale classical music virtually every choice would be between hearing a piece on record or not at all. I guess you could further say that that very availability of music fundamentally cheapens our experience of it -- there's probably an economic basis for that claim, given some of the incidental points still fresh in my mind from Barry Schwartz's The Paradox of Choice -- but for anyone who's ever torn through one artist's discography or another I think that argument would have to ring a little bit false.
5 Comments:
What I was trying to get at with "truth-value" is this:
With classical music, before recording, say, or at least while the fidelity of recordings was rather low (a too-arbitrary attribute to begin with, probably), any given performance of a piece would revert fundamentally to either the text (the score) or to the ever-building active matrix of prior performances of the given piece in the mind of the listener. With recordings, especially obsessive recording listenings, the performance is no longer experienced as either as an engagement with a text or other live performances, but is heard against the specific memory of a recording. The text, in the end, is the core of the piece, and the performance a gateway to engagement with it, and recordings detract from an active engagement, thus negatively influence that truth-value.
Or something like that.
And also, I think somehow, my timezone is messed up - 'cause when I post, it shows up as happening an hour earlier than when I really did it. weird.
I think I fixed the time zone thing. Blogger didn't automatically switch to daylight time for some reason.
If this comment says 8:35 or so, it worked.
Oh, and Nate, you don't need to put ellipses at the end of quoted material. I don't know off the top of my head whether you distinguish sources' ellipses from your own, but I imagine that if it's important you just put a quick note about it in brackets.
Too sleepy to respond to substance of discussion right now, but in terms of ellipses: I put them at the end of the quote because I chopped off the back half of the last sentence. Is it still okay not to use an ellipsis in that case -- do you just stop when you're done quoting the source, regardless of what you're in the middle of at the time?
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