Audio, Etc. (Apr. 1981)

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Where in Heaven's name is big time classical recording going these days? If you ask me, straight in the wrong direction by approximately 180 degrees. And this in spite of the huge roster of international greats who are under contract to produce re corded music.

It isn't only the cost, which is predictably enormous. What bugs me, as they used to say, is that in the very face of our increasing knowledge of what recorded music can do and is good for, the big labels are tying themselves ever tighter and tighter to the LIVE music business.

That's crazy, I think. It's unnatural.

Because LIVE music and recorded mu sic are basically different media, in pro found respects, for every type of music.

Each medium has its own values -- neither the one nor the other is "better." But those values are NOT the same. Folly, I say, to tie them together as though they were.

It's discouraging. Here I've been shouting this message for a good quarter century and more, and I might as well have kept my trap shut. At least as far as the Big Brass up there is concerned.

They don't seem to be listening. And yet look at the mess they've got in lately! Near -total disintegration, wholly new teams brought in for rescue, drastic cuts and curtailments. And of course, "new" policies. That's where I groan.

Not just me, certainly. Over the decades, an ever-growing host of recording people have learned what recorded mu sic can do, as DIFFERING from live music, and nowhere more obviously than in the pop field, though that is not my story.

We have an immense accumulation of knowledge now, not merely of recording techniques and, of course, home play back techniques but, even more profoundly, of the very music we choose to record and its special effects via the re corded medium, contrasted to the live.

The music that we choose to market, if you wish. We know what "works" in terms of home sound, home listening, not to mention listening in car and boat and so on. Utterly different from LIVE music! Does it really need to be said? From the beginning of electrical re cording, for instance, it has been increasingly obvious that exploration into new musical territory is the strongest thing records can do, with their peculiarly spaceless and timeless quality. Where else do you suppose the popularity of Baroque music came from, and that old Baroque pro, Antonio Vivaldi! Definitely not from the famous concert artists and the major symphony orchestras. Those people haven't yet learned to play Baroque right, even with the proper "reduced" forces. The impetus for Baroque music has come from recordings, out of distant places mainly, by small groups of the type that sound best in home reproduction on anybody's equipment. Inherent. That's why good Baroque has been so widely popular.

It is also why there is so little of it -- and so bad -- among the great solo artists and the big symphony orchestras. It isn't their music. It's ours. No offense! Each to his own. That's what I mean.

So it has been with the whole enormous repertory of recorded classical that has grown up with us on LP since the 1960s and, even before that, on the limited old 78. The recorded medium has propagated all this music. Not the big time concert world, which has latched onto it, late, mainly through OUR influence -- the impact of music on records.

The present-day big-time virtuoso mu sic business is a creation of the 19tti century, the pre -electronic era of the large public concert and the monumental grand opera, when volume meant sheer physical music power -- LOUD voices, LOUD instruments, ever more enormous ensembles. That was the only' way to create bigness and it worked to perfection. That age is still with us and it still works, mikes or no mikes. Curious.

The LIVE sound of a full symphony orchestra is a marvel to hear when the mu sic is well designed for it, as plenty is.

Those big voices, huge pianos, potent violins (rebuilt for volume in the early 19th century) fit remarkably well into our Carnegie Halls, Gewandhauses, Concertgebouws -- even Avery Fisher.

They match, they are built for one another. It's a glorious tradition. And so is the music. LIVE.

Yes, we can record this music. We do wonders. But the idea is not truly natural.

For optimum recorded music, the best in sound, we need -- and we use -- smaller, clearer sounds. We have all the volume we need. In the living room, a string quartet is just as loud as a 100-piece orchestra, a rather important difference from LIVE music. This is our medium! We live with it, not in LIVE concert halls but in our own listening spaces.

Don't misunderstand me. We are doing, and have done, a noble job in the "translation" of big music into living-room terms. It is a mainstay of classical recording, obviously. Yet it is a fantasy job, too, a wonderfully imaginative adaptation of big music to a medium inherently not well suited to it. Big music was never intended for small spaces. It was never intended for recordings. Virtuoso performance absolutely demands big audiences. Big audiences need big voices, potent violins, enormous pianos, high -power drama and what the actors call "projection" -- out into vast spaces, to crowds of worshippers. That's the essence of big-time LIVE music.

And so all this big-time razzle-dazzle of publicity we now experience is quite properly aimed at the LIVE music circuit.

What else? It works! It still does. Nobody in his right mind complains about big time LIVE music.

But recordings? In the big-time LIVE music context they are no more than a kind of after-effect or a before -effect, a branch of publicity, to boost up the ticket sales. Yes, they can do that. GO TO THE CONCERT! And PLAY THE RECORD! The all-out tie-in. Every piece that gets played LIVE on a big-time stage can be put out on a record too. But what a limitation on the recorded medium! It can do better, it can go further and wider, as we very well know.

Yet the big record labels (notably those that are American -based) have latched onto the international LIVE music biz, in all its ramifications, as if their life depended on it. Play up the virtuoso as never before, grab the latest "in" sensation (LIVE), and get him out on records fast, re-record all those same old concert works, the chestnuts, Virgil Thomson's famous "fifty pieces," with NEW, NEW artists. Plug them LIVE in a thousand cities, plug their concert records in the same.

It'll work, for the moment. But it is wrong, dismally misguided, if we consider what recordings are and can do. It's bad policy because it flatly denies the true usefulness of recorded music at its own best, which is not ever merely to record live music, but to present music itself in an alternative and DIFFERENT medium. Frankly, all this is demeaning to the highly developed art of recording, a not very subtle insult in the name of immediate rescue profits. I think most re cording engineers will agree.

The little record labels tell a different story. They seldom have access to the big -name personalities (except in elderly reissues); they can't afford the tag. They are lucky. They save millions. Do not suppose, however, that the "name brand" musicians, as the LIVE music biz people would have you think, are the only good musicians around. The music world is crammed everywhere with excellent performers, many of whom can do a better job on records than the overly -potent big virtuosi -- who often simply cannot tone themselves down for the living room. The small labels, perforce, make use of this much greater pool of talent, and at a fraction of the cost of top artists. They have no choice -- but they are right. The best of them know very well that they are onto something good, for records.

Similarly, the little companies seldom can afford big symphony orchestras and, again perforce, must feature many kinds of smaller ensembles for their mu sic. Right! These are the sounds that are inherently best for the recorded medium. In the same way, these outfits also mostly avoid the standard concert works, already heavily recorded, to explore new music, new musical areas.

Right again! And more often than not, these new areas provide better sonic material, inherently, than the power house sounds of big-time concert music.

Still right!

Much as we love the great artists (and who doesn't) in their own proper LIVE environment, we are bound to feel, I think, that the big record companies look rather foolish now, tying themselves so fiercely to this particular musical bandwagon for their current output. It puts them in such a secondary position, depending on the primary energy of the LIVE business.

I don't mean to imply that this is all we get from them. Nor that the actual re cording is less than adequate. It does the job beautifully, for the most part. The European giants in particular still record big music, big artists, in terms of recording as an almost separate art. (If their publicity makes concert tie-ins, it isn't necessarily basic recording policy, after all.) I would hate to think that our own brand-new big -label classical execs didn't have at least SOME of this sense for recording in its own terms.

A word more about big-time classical.

It's hardly new -- it has an honorable tradition. Before the present jet age, moreover, big-time music had a special reasonableness, when famed performers were rare beings and their concerts were in the nature of unique events. To see and to hear a great pianist like, say, Paderewski (as I did when a child), or an operatic great like Caruso, in the flesh, right there before you, was an unbeatable experience. People travelled great distances for the privilege. The trains and the ocean liners took these artists far, but slowly. Jenny Lind did it all back in the 1850s -- imagine it! No wonder her concerts were big events.

Even in the 1930s, when classical re corded music first became mature via electrical recording, travel was not yet airborne and much of the old mystique remained; musical celebrities still were primarily in-person artists who took themselves, their actual bodies, to their audiences. The miracle of early recording, both acoustic and 78 electric, was that it did indeed, at last, give us a sense of the actual music of these artists, right in our homes, and for the first time in history. That was a lot, as plenty of us remember. I don't know when Caruso went gold, but it must have been early.

Before that, you bought your ticket and you heard your music once, and that was that. To get to know the music better, you had to read a score. Or play the piano. Countless "piano reductions," often for four hands to divide the work, were issued in the 19th century of every kind of music from symphonies to grand opera -- just to satisfy this need to get to know. But the sounds were mostly pretty feeble substitutes for the original. How enormously better, then, to have an early phono disc, a semi-reproduction of actual, real music. And later, the entire work, the whole concert, if in four -minute slices! This I can remember - I was there. And it was a real, legitimate "tie-in" between LIVE and recorded music, born of sheer necessity. We listeners ourselves made the tie-in, mostly, along with moderate efforts by the record companies themselves. But, mind you, they had learned that recorded music went far beyond LIVE tie-ins and should not be limited at all in that fashion. Are we forgetting? Now look at things today. The jet has made hash of that whole aura of rarity which once surrounded a virtuoso live performance and fueled its mystique.

Now, the great artists are everywhere, and the result is almost TV-like, though live. The same artists, the same music, wherever you are, from Calgary to Sydney, New York to Tokyo. It's remarkably like TV and the movies. And every city or town has to have its semi -identical Per forming Arts Program, complete with vast Cultural Center (as vast as funds al low, anyhow) -- inhabited by exactly the same artists and music as every other city on the map. How much of this meets a true musical demand, how much is sheer civic boosterism? In all truth, the concert biz is much like TV, and probably it should be, that being what's important in our day.

So this is what we live with in big-time music. And it is this LIVE music, the same wherever you go, onto which our big record labels have latched them selves. OK! Nothing wrong from the LIVE viewpoint. And maybe Pavarotti & Co. and all the others will help our record companies (our record divisions, I should say, in deference to the implacable holding companies up above) turn a satisfactory financial corner before it is too late.

Too late? I should say so! There is every reason to think that the big-time classical recording might simply vanish, and not too far from now. Why? What about the big-time "TV disc," in all its formats? The TV disc, if it catches on, is going to be .better. It is inherently big time and it will do a far better job at publicizing live music (among other things) than any mere "audio disc" will do. I can see this sword of Damocles hanging right up there, in every audio big-label front office.

If so, then our enterprising small record companies (audio only) are in for a field day. A new era! They'll take over.

They're on their way already. And on the RIGHT track. Absolutely.

 

by Edward Tatnall Canby (adapted from Audio magazine, Apr. 1981)

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