TAKING A BACH SEAT
There's nothing like a Bach Festival to produce usable sound, especially in this year of his 300th birthday. So I went to the Northwest Bach Festival, which, according to its management, was the very first 300th-year festival in the U.S. The festival began around January 9 in Spokane. (Pronounce that like aluminum can.) Ever optimistic, I thought I might pick up a few audio ideas.
However, this festival was very odd. There was no audio. Only one pair of visible mikes, merely for a reference recording that nobody is likely to hear. Do you think this discouraged me? Not in the least. My head was full of audio speculations, if by a sort of inverse implication. As soon as I hit the concerts I knew I was in the right place.
Now I had imagined, as an Easterner, that Spokane must be some kind of Western cow town, or mill town, or mining town, out among the Indian reservations in the deserts of Eastern Washington. Bach in such a place? And there was wintry Montana, just beyond the narrow neck of Odaho! I packed my heaviest Swiss boots and all the wool I could find into an enormous suitcase and set off for Bach, below zero, or worse.
Surprise, surprise. First, I had forgot ten about a small terrestrial barrier be tween Spokane and the Montana blizzards-the Rocky Mountains. Spokane has a Pacific climate, often cold but not boisterous. Each day I was there it was exactly 29° in the afternoon, and a snowfall sat like marshmallow, white and clean, on top of the front-yard evergreens. Switzerland in Washington! That set the scene. When I left Connecticut it was 8° below zero.
Second surprise: Spokane is no cow town, nor even a mining town as it once was I found a handsome and sizable city that seems to have grown easily into the modern age. I quickly discovered that it was a very sophisticated town: Everyone I met read Audio. Engineers, hi-fi bugs, Bach audiences, professional musicians. What more can we ask?
There were big, quiet audiences for Bach. Spokane struck me as more at home with the old man than smaller Eugene, where the big Oregon Bach Festival resides each spring. Eugene is still a booster town, precariously wealthy (from lumber) and avid for culture, surrounded by higher education, yet bravely overreaching itself in vast projects too big to fit. Silva Hall, for instance-an international-type con cert hall and landmark in electronic acoustics as well as architecture (see "Audio ETC," October and November 1983). Spokane seems a more confident city even without a university (the nearest is 25 miles away). The Bach concerts, which might be called esoteric since they were performed entirely on old or "authentic" Bach instruments, attracted astonishingly large and attentive audiences, mostly well turned-out young people who obviously knew what they were getting into. One could guess what this meant: Hi-tech. These must be the new wave of Americans come into Spokane. Not one of them looked remotely like a miner, or even a mine owner.
As we know are into chips and computers and soft ware tend to be brainy and educated as well as youthful. Our own young audio engineers are in the middle of it--they, too, are getting a new and wider education, routinely taking music courses, for instance, along with their audio after the German Tonmeister model. Conversely, young musicians, on their side, now receive an equivalently widened training which often includes some of the elements of audio in relation to music performance and composition.
All this, you see, was embodied (literally speaking) right there around me in Spokane. This is clearly a transformed city though it hangs onto its legacy of gorgeous Victorian houses built by the wealthy miners in its past. A Spokane Bach audience, then, is very much our audience. Need I say more?
I horned right in on the Bach musicians, though they were, of course, extremely busy, particularly the two entrepreneurs who direct the Northwest Bach Festival (part of a year-round series of events put on by their Connoisseur Concerts). David Dutton is a professional musician who plays Baroque oboe and oboe d'amore in the Bach Festival. Beverly Biggs is one of three harpsichordists (one is also an organist) who keep the Bach keyboards running. Not much rest for them. These two more or less operate the Bach show (with a lot of excellent help), doing the chores, feeding the musicians, ferrying them from pillar to post in a van, watching over every detail-and playing music. This was a musician's world, decidedly.
But, if I am right, that pair of micro phones on the stage during each con cert belongs to David Dutton. He sets up the equipment. At home, he and Beverly have a component hi-fi sys tem, and there are tapes and discs lying around, right next to a lovely Broadwood piano of the mid-19th century. This, I remind you, is a profession al musician's home. Interesting? You bet. It didn't used to be this way.
By a sheer coincidence, David Dutton turned out to have been a semi-student of mine as a teenager back in 1959, at a summer music school in Tennessee for young players. My subject there, of course, was music and hi fi, or, as we now prefer to say, audio. That's always my subject. But in 1959 I had a rough time of it. I hauled a car load of equipment and records the length of the Great Smoky Mountains for musical illustration, but the management was, shall I say, so reluctant to allow me any time that after a while I just gave up and left. There was a jealousy of anything electronic-which was anything but pleasant. That was no time to teach audio to musicians.
But David Dutton was there and heard me. Now, though audio is not a special interest for him, he routinely sets up mikes, plays cassettes, and all the rest. You think that isn't something? In 1959 (and before) there was a very deep suspicion among musicians in this country that audio, any form of electronically reproduced music, including recording, was a threat to live music performance. Part of it was a labor question--and we can remember the nationwide musicians' strikes that shut down most recording-but the fear was even more profound. It often took the form of a downgrading, as though recordings were beneath a musician's notice. Canned music! That's what I was trying to sell, it seemed, at my 1959 music school.
At about the same time I was invited to give a lecture/demonstration, the usual, at a large, Eastern state university, sponsored by the engineering and physics people in cooperation, supposedly, with the music department.
The physics and engineering profs were helpful and much interested, even going to the trouble of providing and setting up equipment for me, and they threw a small dinner party after the lecture. Not one member of the music department came to my show, nor did any attend the dinner. It was a science man who showed me through the lavish music building.
Today, large elements of profession al music are still edgy in this fashion, though naturally they take advantage of whatever audio may offer them, which is easy to understand. Why not? But we have come a long way. The change since 1959 has been steady and constructive. As we in audio have become more sophisticated and more knowledgeable in music, more and more musicians have come to realize that they can live with us, with our equipment and with our sound. Not always-but often. In 1985 it was the musicians who entertained me in Spokane, not the scientists.
I didn't meet an actual audio pro until I went on to Seattle (which I'll tell you about in my column next month). His wife was a professional musician; she reads Audio.
There's space for one more idea out of Spokane from plenty that hit me during those five felicitous days of Bach et al. This was a paradox that struck me as I listened to a Bach concerto in a large, wide, modern Lutheran church jammed to the doors with that hi-tech audience. Excellent overall acoustics, a visually handsome and comfortable building-but so big. And so many listeners. How about authentic sound, as well as performance? This was a Bach concerto for two harpsichords and small string orchestra. The instruments were out in front on the church "stage," interlocked like two grand pianos, with the players at opposite ends. The orchestra was spread around them. An interesting scene, and, as I knew from an earlier concert, the sound was good for those who could sit nearby, in spite of big spaces and masses of people further out. But at this concert, I found myself halfway back in the church. (I was, as they say, unavoidably detained; the restaurant had been crowded.) I could not even see the heads of the performers. But what I could not hear was more significant.
Now Bach himself had played this concerto, perhaps with one of his sons at the other keyboard, for a sort of music club that met in a tavern. The place could not have been large, and the audiences were tiny fractions of those in Spokane. The music was tailored to fit. At proper, close range, the harpsichord is not a weak instrument; it can be sturdy and forceful, if not really loud. We hear it rightly today on the recordings we make, where balance and proportion can be built-in ahead of time. The two soloists playing alone, as they often do in this music, would have made an impressive effect. Even with the orchestra, their music would be audible, though in the background. That's the essence of a concerto of this sort. A good recording of the music will bring you exactly that sound.
So now I am listening to the music played live! Is it authentic in sound as it reaches my ears?
Without the orchestra, in solo passages, I could just barely hear the two harpsichords, enough to get the sense of the music if I strained. A distant, faint, silvery tingle-some newcomer might think of it as mystic emanations from another planet, and be entranced. Wrong! Worse, when the small orchestra came in, the so-called tutti (everybody), the harpsichords simply vanished. Not a trace. It was as though old Bach was sitting up there working away at all those notes on a dead keyboard. Is that what you could call authentic?
Always a practical composer, for a large hall or church Bach would have written quite different music or adapted the old-trumpets, drums, choirs of strings and woodwinds. That was his answer. What's ours? We can't very well recompose his music to fit the modern church, but should we not do something?
Throw out most of the audience? Move to a much smaller place? Heaven forbid. That's not the idea at all. We can hardly blame the Bach people at Spokane. They were happy to have so much interest shown and were probably not yet aware of what was happening to the sound. (I did tell one of the harpsichordists, as a challenge.) Nevertheless, it can be argued that this sort of unintended extinction-and in deed any shift of the proper musical effect--is just as much a "distortion" as a poor mike placement or a faulty recording balance. It's not enough to play authentic Bach, I say. We must also hear it authentically.
Musicians are just as aware of hall acoustics as we are and enjoy the right places for their music just as we do. But the thought that carefully con trolled sound reinforcement is the proper solution to the problems of ancient sound in the modern age of big spaces just isn't easy to accept yet. Better no sound at all than "'amplified" sound? Not in my book.
Ah, last spring! I heard Bach chamber music, a few instruments and a harpsichord, in the vast spaces of Eugene's Silva Hall. The electronic acoustics were good, even for this close-up and intimate music. And from a distant balcony seat I could hear every note of the harpsichord continuo, exactly as it should be. The harpsichord was miked. So was the hall. That's the sort of thing we can do when we know what we're doing.
(adapted from Audio magazine, May 1985; EDWARD TATNALL CANBY)
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