by Edward Tatnall Canby
I HAVE been saying for years that the business of audio is music. In the home,
at least, 95 percent of our audio is music in spite of a respectable area held
down by recorded speech. The other day, then, I received a recording of music
with a note enclosed from the Editor of a well-known audio publication saying "This
is a must review Gene." Of course I played it toute de suite. And in two
shakes of a stylus' tail I knew that it merited much more than a mere mention.
Or even a mere review.
The disc is entitled, with classical simplicity, Portsmouth Sinfonietta Plays Popular Classics, licensed to Columbia by an English outfit called Transatlantic Records, Ltd. A sober black jacket with color photo of the Sinfonietta indicates what you might expect, a proper classical offering.
Unless you happened to notice, as I did, a dim Columbia K designation-KC 33049-in the upper left corner. K (in place of M for Masterworks) could mean Special Show Stuff? A hint that perhaps more than meets the eye is about to assault the virgin ear. A closer look at the photo said even more-but more on that in a moment.
If I may say so, the British taste in popular classics is rather more restricted than our own, tending towards such amiable chestnuts as Peer Gynt (Hall of the Mountain King, etc.), The Nutcracker, Air for the G String (early pornography?), the Blue Danube, all of which appear on this disc.
In addition there are some foreshortened arrangements, elements of the Fifth Symphony, a fragment from Holst's The Planets (astrology to the fore) and ha! an eye and an ear for 2001-the ominous opening of Also Sprach Zarathustra. Not the first disc to capitalize on that film classic. All in all, a rather tame repertory for a Sinfonietta. One might have anticipated at least an early Mozart, a bit of Henry Purcell and a few of Vivaldi's Seasons.
Let us not beat further about the bush. Put stylus demurely to this disc, side 1 band 1 (Peer Gynt), and presently the most appalling noise you have ever heard sails loudly out of your loudspeakers, whether by two or by four. How can I describe? Thirtytwo classical players here, if I count
'em rightly, and a representative of every orchestral element of usual interest-each of them sounding precisely as it might if you sat down to an oboe, a fiddle or a trombone, trumpet, horn, string bass, sax, viola, cello, for the very first time, and barged right in, all unafraid. And I mean you, the audio buff, not one of those talented pop players who tosses off solos on any of a dozen instruments without half rehearsing. You, who never before had a musical instruments in your hands. Or hardly ever.
There are the fiddles, ear-splitting squeals, like a hundred alley cats at two in the morning but much less melodious. Cats with tails caught in doors. Cats with sore throats and hernias. Then, oboes, like a worn-out automatic auto transmission about to freeze into a solid lump. Sheer agony.
Oboes like sharp buzz saws. (Ed, the jacket doesn't mention oboes.-Ed.) And clarinets as strident as geese (the analogy is close: a conical bore with single reed and suppressed odd overtones). Screaming flutes, tromping trombones, horny horns, trumpets รค la cub scout. Plastered percussion, pig-grunt string bass, oink oink. How can I go on? And the whole of this hopelessly, tantalizingly out of time and, oh yes, o my yes, OUT OF TUNE. So unbelievably out of tune that I ran to get me an onion to peel so I could cry properly. Of these and other classical sounds, there are no less than an interminable and unremitting eleven cuts, two whole sides, in sure-enough stereo. Enough to last a life time.
The most uncanny sound of all, in all this cacophony, is the occasional sweetness of a genuine professional note or two, right in the midst. I suppose that a few legits were taken in to keep a semblance of order which, alas, there is, most of the time, more or less. But the effect of those beauteous distillations of normal music in such a situation is worse than manic, it is maniac. How do they do it? And the more I think about it, how do any of these performers do it? Not a bang nor a whimper of audible laughter, from start to finish. Self control, in respect to giggles and break-up, which is simply beyond understanding. Deadpan seriousness. Not a muscle quivers anywhere. Just look at the picture on the album. No smiles. Not one. That's precisely the way it sounds, as though these young players were uncomprehending zombies going through a sort of subhuman act, in deadly earnest.
It is you, the listener, of course, who will fall into pieces in seconds. You will gasp, then gape, then pull in a huge breath and dissolve into hysteria. Just try not to. And what is most astonishing is that-as you will see when you look really closely at the Sinfonietta performers on the cover of the album-this is a youth orchestra. I couldn't say whether they are still wet behind the ears, since only two pairs of ears are completely visible, one of those a girl's. But the quantity of hair per head and the paucity of male bearditude indicates a teenage average. Also the green shoes, the fluorescent red socks, the blue pants, and the open shirts. These, in a word, are kids. With aplomb. So much so that I really wonder-are they faking it? Could they, indeed? I doubt it.
Oh yes, I have a few morals to point. I think the most vital is that here, astoundingly, is the obverse of something we take entirely too much for granted in life, and especially in record listening-professional technique.
The trouble with so much of our audio music is that it is so polished, so pro, so utterly expert in performance right down the (recorded) line, that nine-tenths of our soft-bellied listeners haven't the slightest idea how much sheer technique, what incredible skills go into those easy sounds nor how many thousands and thousands of painstaking hours of practice stand behind each smoothly tailored phrase of music of whatever sort.
And to think that so much of it ends up as musical wallpaper, elevator (lift) music, background stuff-measured by the yard or the minute, reduced to the nearest approach to nothing which ingenuity can devise. A crying shame, I always say, and what musician will disagree? Now, in this recording, we have the sound of music without technique, and it is for most of us a revelation.
Who would know, otherwise? How many of us, for instance, have tried out an oboe or a clarinet or a trombone or a fiddle in person? Have you heard a beginner at one of these? Your own child? Well, at least you know! I tried an oboe, just once. I thought it might be for me, if I could manage.
Squawked like an old crow for a few moments, and that was that. Also a clarinet, on which, to my astonishment, I produced nothing but a strangled hissing. When 'the thing finally did speak, it gave such a realistic duck quack that I jumped. And the reed tickled my lips until I sneezed. Like many an amateur, I ended up with a recorder, on which I could produce some mildly pleasant sounds if the music was slow enough. Great little instrument for the frustrated. Flute? As far as I am concerned, it is merely an animated steam pipe. I get steam sounds out of the mouthpiece, nothing more, though I go red in the face.
These things one must know and experience, before one can really appreciate what a musician can do when he does things right. Trumpet? My trumpet sounds exactly like my farmer neighbor's stud bull, come spring. A real desperate sound and very expressive, but not yet Beethoven.
Curiously, this Portsmouth recording falls into an honorable British tradition of great age and popularity, though in the U.S. it is rare. I mean performing humorously out of tune and unlikely and unseemly sounds.
Perhaps the recent quintessence of this was in the famed Hoffnung Festival recordings, which Angel took down from live concerts that were done up on a monumental scale before immense audiences. Remember the concerto for vacuum cleaner hose? With the great horn player Dennis Brain (or was it his father, Aubrey?). You can still get these on Angel. And then there are those Flanders & Swan things, and their successors of the sort; come to think of it, the whole British "music hall" tradition comes straight from the same aura of tunelessness and may be said to have had a potent effect upon our own musical comedy heroine, who sings exactly the same way. Somehow, though, we don't double up with laughter quite as quickly as the British do at the hint of the musical grotesque, the off-tune, off-beat parody. Peter Sellers. Even he. And maybe Ringo Starr, who sings so perfectly off tune.
Now I do call to mind a number of similarly healthy excursions into atunality, serving to make precisely the same point as do the inscrutable youth players of Portsmouth. One example, and no youth by a long shot, was the cryptic diva, Florence Foster Jenkins, who for many years gave song recitals to piano accompaniment by a man with the unlikely name of Moon, was it Cosmo Moon? Mr. Moon played impeccable Schubert, Brahms, Puccini, what have you, even Mozart, on a very in-tune piano, a visible and sonic picture of propriety.
Ms. Jenkins, though, first got herself up in outlandish costumes, sometimes changed to match each piece, and at the end of every number she threw armsful of rosebuds into the ecstatic audience then retrieved them so she could toss them again.
But the singing was what mattered.
Such excruciating, incredible, absolutely astounding out-of-tunedness. that in itself it amounted to sheer genius. Audiences instantly collapsed--but the lady seemed unaware, and sailed along as though every note were the acme. Did she know? Was it an act? Was she just amiably insane? Nobody ever really could tell, which was the best part. It was all acutely, deliciously embarrassing, and the more so for those who held off, out of a false propriety, for fear of offending. Not a chance! The more they howled, the more she beamed. And yet it was cruel in a way, like making fun of a cripple. A final monster concert was organized, with every Beautiful Person who could be dug up for the occasion, and the lady died within the week, as I remember.
Yes, she made a few scratchy 78 records. Some were once issued on an RCA 10-inch LP. That deadpan act is what really gets me. For, you see, I have been in a few ventures of this sort myself, directly or indirectly. In the 1950s I went to one of those folk dance and recorder playing summer camps. Having learned a bit of good music on the recorder, I signed up for a recorder ensemble class and turned up bright one morning to play. Well, there were a dozen or so ardent ladies with soprano recorders in hand and the instant the first piece started I got the giggles.
Such an incredible squalling you never heard (except thanks to Portsmouth). Each lady tuned her own, and all of them were blissful. Things beat, each instrument against the next, so that the composite was a fiercely potent brrrrr, ear-curdlingly treble. A synthesizer with a dozen oscillators in square wave might roughly approximate it. Needless to say, I was frowned upon, and as a matter of fact I was quite helpless because you simply cannot giggle into a recorder. It sounds like one of those whistle cutouts they put on mufflers of high powered cars in the 1920s, ker-TWEET, TWEET, snort.
An even worse occasion happened when I found myself involved in a performance of Haydn's Toy Symphony, before an audience. This little piece is in fact a joke, though most ingenious, and there are even Toy-Symphony kits, furnished with tin horns and one of those water-filled birds that you blow into for a realistic gurgly bird song. They had them in the 18th century. When played soberly, the music is delightful and funny-but how to play it soberly? (Imagine the recording sessions which have somehow got it down on LP. See catalogue.) OK when everything is 100 percent pro, on time and in tune. But then the fun is minimal; it's much nicer when the sounds are truly rustic, as Haydn so obviously intended.
He was a wise, gentle soul and fond of humor, much less sadistic than the younger Mozart, who wrote out horn parts in wild colors for his horn playing friend and penciled in unspeakable jokes at crucial points to break the poor man up in performance.
Anyhow, I came bravely on stage with my performing friends and my recorder and we started-you may call it nerves but within three seconds I exploded with one of those loud TWEET-snorts, and from that moment on, try though I would, I could not produce two notes in a row before another explosion occurred. I was totally undone. And so were the others, mostly. It was a shambles. I was utterly remorseful, but what could I do? It takes an experienced and imperturbable pro to play an amateur part of that sort. Maybe like these Portsmouth kids.
So go listen to Portsmouth and more power to you. And do not ever again forget (after you have recovered) what it means to play a musical instrument well. Even for wallpaper music.
(Source: Audio magazine, Mar. 1975, Edward Tatnall Canby)
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