I've been to another concert. Quite a remarkable experience for an inveterate
hi-fi man like me. Especially when there's audio in the background.
I've played a lot of records in my lifetime, and sometimes, just for the experience, I like to reconvert to what I once was before LP and tape came along- a real 100 percent concertgoer. This last summer, on a particularly hot Saturday afternoon, I did just that. After so much super-digital and direct-to-disc it was an unusually interesting thing for me to do and the fi was superb. I'd almost for gotten.
As a young concertgoer I used to keep a weekly "calendar," derived from the Sunday New York Times, of all the New York concerts I wanted to hear in the coming week. I fairly haunted Town Hall and Carnegie and even the old Met Op era House, not at Lincoln Center and much dowdier. I had a subscription to the New Friends of Music on Sundays (next to Artur Schnabel's box) and a season ticket to the Philharmonic, under Toscanini himself, a tiny figure I saw week after week a quarter-mile down from my modest seat in Carnegie heaven. It was exciting.
Anyhow, I moved on into audio and tape and LP and pretty soon there was neither time for concerts nor musical energy. I had music to burn, and have ever since. So now every concert is a memorable one for me.
MusicMountain Miking
As it turned out, this one was even more. The place was not New York but Music Mountain, out in rural north west Connecticut, which last summer celebrated its 50th season of summer performances in its own auditorium, Gordon Hall, named after the founder, Jacques Gordon and his Gordon String Quartet which played there from 1930 until Gordon's death in 1948. I was on hand in those early years and often thereafter. Much later, in the same hall, I taped extensive experiments in binaural sound for headphones while the Berkshire Quartet, successor to the Gordon, played its routine twice-a-day working rehearsal. I taped close-to, middle distance, far back, with mikes wide apart, mike close together--every combination, given the facilities I had on hand, which did not include such niceties as M-S and Ghent. Just two ordinary omnis, but the Gordon Hall acoustics made them shine. I still have the tapes.
Gordon Hall is a lovely and simple auditorium, both inside and outside, of a sort we dreadfully need in this day of zany modern concert acoustics.
Outdoors, you see a long, white rectangle, clapboarded in the New Eng land manner, against green shade trees and lawns. Inside, there is a high inward-sloping wood ceiling supported by an intricate structure of wooden beams, all the interior in natural wood color. On the plain floor are rows of church-like wooden pews (cushions can be had for sensitive bottoms), and along each side wall are double screen doors open to the green outside-
many people sit outdoors just beyond them. Everything is wood in this building except maybe the nails. And it doesn't matter where you sit, the sound is big, bright, never harsh. It has been that way for all of the years I can remember it.
What started me on this writing was a glance ceilingward after I had got myself a seat (unreserved) some 20 minutes ahead of starting time. (Every body comes early to get a "good" seat even though they are all good.) I was studying the elaborate wooden beaming and the interesting planes of the ceiling, with gambrels inward in several steps on each side like a New England barn turned inside out. Somebody, I said to myself, knew his concert hall acoustics, back in the Twenties. What a superbly functional way to cope with architectural stresses and at the same time insure a complex randomness of sonic reflection! Must we have those blob-like reflectors and islands floating in the air, when randomness can so simply be achieved as functional structure ... Then I saw the mikes.
Most unobtrusive.
Not one in a hundred people would have noticed them.
This was a live con cert. No signs saying SILENCE, no red lights, not even a mention in the pro gram, but it turns out that everything we were hearing was also being broadcast. Or taken down for broadcast.
Could our two worlds of music, the live and the miked, really exist together as easily as this? Could my two worlds, so to speak, cohabit? There I was, in that "other" world from ours, immersed in the living concert goings on, and the only evidence I had for a vast and major part of my life were those little black objects overhead.
Now you would think that moments after this discovery I would have rushed backstage like a good audio re porter to get the facts, survey the semi-
portable studio equipment that undoubtedly was there and maybe inter view the attending engineers. Strangely, though, I felt rooted to my seat.
had come as a concert listener, I would stay as a concert listener. I had the unshakable feeling that if I moved so much as two feet towards that equipment, the sanctity of this fine music would somehow be violated. That's imagination! So I stayed put.
Binaural vs. Primary Locations
But, of course, not my mind. What sort of sound might they be getting, up there, through those mikes? You think I could help wondering? What I saw were two fat, round units with screens, undoubtedly omnis, placed far apart and halfway back in the hall from the low music stage, suspended from the bottom rank of wooden beams overhead. One mike was right over my head; this was the place I had chosen to sit for best sound.
No coincidence that in my earlier binaural experiments I had found this exact area to be musically the most effective for a pure binaural headphone recording. I repeat, as I always do, that binaural mikes are placed where the sound is best for normal pairs of living ears. No coincidence, too, that some friends who had asked me where I thought they should sit were right across the hall from me, directly under the other microphone of the pair. And, I thought, there is a good stereo principle here, too; surely this same "best" area in any good hall is also the very best bet for stereo ambience mike placement. A mystic unity, if you wish.
Or just plain good acoustics.
This was a pickup for loud speaker stereo sound, however; so the mikes I saw overhead must obviously be just that, stereo ambience mikes. The primary pickup would have to be much closer to the music, as it always is for loudspeaker reproduction. Glancing forward accordingly, I saw the primary mikes, far up ahead of me and fastened to the same lower beam structure only a few feet in front of the musicians. Aha! No stereo separation-no pairs of microphones to right and to left; instead, one big complex array hung in the exact middle. Did that tell a nice story.
This would have to be one of the various dual-mike stereo systems, cross-mike, M-S and so on, that operate center-front from a single point.
(Surely not a Ghent mike? That new type also works from a central point but SQ-encodes a dual signal from four mike elements, aiming itself 360 degrees front and rear and thereby including a selective rear ambience as well as the forward pickup. Ghent is now being used for stereo.) More likely something much simpler. What I saw (as I listened to Schubert) was a long, thin unit facing forward, surely a cardioid, plus a cross-member mike at right angles to it, probably an omni.
So, thought I, do we have here a matrix setup? M-S? Not, of course, the "matrix" some readers may still remember, as op posed to "discrete!" Matrices (pl.) have been around a long time, and even your phono cartridge is a matrix of sorts, as between lateral/vertical and 45/45. (Except the Decca; See Audio for August.) So you matrix the signals from these two mikes, in central position, and you come out with stereo. A stereo spread. It works. At Music Mountain, it seemed, you also mix in some of that splendid wide-apart rear ambience to supplement the front mikes' product.
All in all, I mused (as I listened to Hindemith's Der Todes Tod, a song cycle of 1922 for soprano, two cellos, and two violas and a real musical rarity only published in 1953)--all in all, this was a well-conceived and intelligent arrangement for broadcasting this particular concert and I would anticipate a fine musical signal just by the sheer look of things, sound unheard. That is, miked sound unheard; the living sound was all around me.
Live vs. Recorded "Live"
Credit Public Radio. That's who was doing the job. And, since the previous summer's Music Mountain concerts, 1978, were then being broadcast from various PR stations I assume that next summer, or at least some time in 1980, you will in fact be hearing the very same concert on Public Radio that was hearing live. Keep it in mind Schubert, Hindemith and the Beethoven Opus 132. So even though our two worlds are separated in the time sense they remain together, out of the same human musical effort.
So, to finish, what is it really like to go to a 100 percent "real" concert? As compared to a Saturday afternoon with your tuner or records? Well, it's an effort. Honestly, it isn’t easy. I'm not speaking of the musical content. Only the physical. True, you get real music in the flesh, as musicians never tire of pointing out. And a concert like this gives you an LP-and a-half of music for only $5.00, which isn't bad, even if you get to hear the music only once. But still-it is an effort. Every concert is. Always problems.
At home, for instance, you always have the "best seat" in the hall, assuming a responsible microphone technique. But in too many live concerts, alas, one often gets if not the worst seat, then one of hundreds of much-less-than-best seats in the hall.
I've suffered from sheer concert inaudibility a lot more times than I like to remember. Though not at Music Mountain. And just look at the time it takes. Not all of it painful, of course, and a lot of it most pleasant-but time! Plenty. Look at what it took me for this one.
First, the dressing up (more or less) for an event, complete with shave and shower. Then the long drive over bone-rattling gravel mountain roads to the parking place, far out in a field as usual. Then the waiting in line at the box office, snail's pace, meeting friends and still other friends, all of us gradually edging towards our destination, a seat inside the hall-a total of maybe 25 minutes just from car to seat. An amiable 25 minutes, but still time. Then the long wait to get started, while conversation roars ever louder and humidity rises in spite of a breeze that isn't enough to support so many hundreds of working respiratory systems. It's usually that way, at any con cert.
Finally the slowly blinking lights the concert is about to begin. More waiting and at last there is the measured entrance of the performers, to long applause and much bowing. This, though, is not followed by music.
Instead, a protracted on-stage shuffling around and tuning-up and settling down, amid preparatory audience coughs and wheezes and scrapings and bumpings as the inevitable late people come in. And then, at LONG last, the music itself! It's already been hours.
True Ambience Live music and a lovely sound, yes.
But there are those endless heads that get in my visual way and dampen my acoustics-my neck is sore from shifting around for a clear channel. There's the over-breathed air. People, people everywhere, close and all around. The pretty girl in front of me who looks bored to tears and almost is. The elderly man nodding dangerously, about to slide into his neighbor's lap. The lady behind who wheezes and the man in front who sneezes. People who whisper in loud tones, kids who won't shut up, the dropped pair of glasses crash!-and the loud crackling of pro grams as pages are turned. Not to mention jet planes and hot rods, dogs and shouting people, all about six inches outside the open doors by the sound of them. Signal to noise? I'd hate to guess. And you complain about LPs.
Never been to a concert? Let's go on. Intermission. All the hundreds of people rise up and move ponderously to the outside, where they talk, and talk, and TALK. It's the Social Hour and it's forever. Then creep, creep, back they go snail-like again for the rest of the concert. By this time you could have played four LPs.
Now the second half, and every body is fast fagging out, but bearing up. Even the musicians. Oh, for a re take or two, or a rest break, like a re cording session! Not in a concert. They just wilt, and fag out, and play on to the end. Wild applause, even from the just-awakened, and off they go back stage. Then on again. And off again.
And on again. And off again, while we continue to beat our hands numb. It's over! It was lovely! What a relief! So, now to another Social Hour on the endless way out to the parking lot, then a long wait for traffic to untangle and back over the bone-rattling roads to home- and another shower. It's needed. It was a hefty afternoon.
Yet concerts do go on and people are always around to go to them. Nor is it only the live music, nor yet that yen for "cultyah," that drags some of them out against their better sense. A concert, you see, is a social event in the most profound way, a Gathering of the Peoples. Not like a gathering of one or two around the home hi-fi. We are gregarious animals, and every one of us predictably reacts to that feeling of being a part of a mass of people together, for a purpose. It is an instinctive, a gutsy thing, whether at Music Mountain or Woodstock. A concert can get to you as no recorded classical music is likely to, and that's why there are still concerts. And people who go to them. In a human way, it's worth all the trouble.
I loved Music Mountain and I'll do it again. I loved the sound--the live music. And I loved the ambience--the gutsy feeling. You really oughta try it sometime, when you're tired of taking it easy in the living room.
(Adapted from: Audio magazine, Nov. 1979; Edward Tatnall Canby )
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