At 8:17 PM -0800 1/29/05, Les Marsden wrote, with feeling!:
Yeah, I love CDs; I've got CDs coming out my ears; I've got all the Bruckner Symphonies on CD -- and not just all nine plus "0" and "00" - I've got 'em ALL in ALL the various versions! Schalk, L�we, Haas, originals; if it's been recorded, I've got it. Anyone else know the recorded works of Heraclius Djabadary? Interesting stuff! I love CDs! But -- for me -- they're ultimately a great reference tool and documents of a performance but as a communicative art form: dead. Once magic has been captured, it's no longer magic.
Beautiful post, Les. THANK YOU!!
I've been waiting for someone else to say this, and maybe I missed it, BUT ...
We're talking about 2 different art forms here. Live performance is one, and recording is another. They have different goals, they require different approaches, and they require different kinds of performers. So far the discussion has been about me, me, ME! What I like. What I value. What I prefer. How about turning this around and looking at it from the performers' point of view.
In my personal experience, live performance and recording became separated during the 1960s. There were a bunch of reasons for it. At the beginning of the '60s, our manager would not allow my group--The Four Saints--to record anything in the studio that could not be done in person. No studio effects, no added English horns, no overtracking additional voices. The mindset was that a recording was an echo of a performance, and the audience should be able to listen to it and have a mental picture of that performance. Recordings were souvenirs and reminders of the living experience. We were entertainers, working in pop music, and that's where the change in mindset first showed up. And I'll hazard a guess that for mainstream classical performers, that mindset is still what controls what is recorded and how it is recorded.
Then came the Beatles. Not only were they phenomenally successful, but their very success drove them off the live stage. The audio technology did not then exist to let them hear themselves over the sound of screaming teenage girls, and they responded by no longer performing live but becoming perhaps the first of the studio-only bands. (Not counting here the studio musicians who worked together in many studios in LA, NYC, and Nashville, but were always contracted separately, or the fantastic Sauter-Finnegan band.) And in the studio, starting with the Sgt. Pepper album, they reinvented the album as a new art form, not just a collection of individual songs but an organic whole. And then came the Monkeys, intended from the very beginning to be a studio-only group, never intended to tour or perform live, although they did have to put together a touring band. And then came the new techniques of tape editing (already experimented with in experimental art music including musique concrete and electronic studios), and the first generation of transportable Moog synthesizers, and equipment making early overtracking possible (also already done, as when Heifetz recorded the Bach Double playing with himself), and the whole concept of multiple tracks (Wow! Three separate tracks to work with! Who woulda thought?!!!). And an elderly E. Power Biggs could have his late albums pieced together literally one note at a time. And Glen Gould could produce albums much more perfect than he could actually play, making his recording engineer a partner in the process.
In other words, by 1970 the tools necessary to make studio recording a new and separate art form were being developed, just as the tools necessary to make live performance at high sound pressure levels possible were being developed. And the mindset had changed forever, at least in the pop world, so that the goal had become to recreate in live performance what had been done in the studio.
OK, I mentioned needing two different kinds of performers. Two different mindsets. A live perfomer--and I'm thinking in the art music world now, not the pop world--has to be able to create a NEW performance every time, not just recreate the same one over and over. The weather makes a difference, the temperature makes a difference, the acoustics of a new hall makes a difference, and most of all each different audience makes a difference. Music is one of the recreative arts. It depends on the composer to provide the blueprint, it depends on the performer(s) to recreate the sonic work of art from that blueprint, and it depends on the audience members to react to that work of art. Theater is also a recreative art, as is dance. The actor or the dancer must be able to recreate each work and make it fresh and new every time, as if it had just been conceived at that moment. It will be different each time, inevitably, and that's part of the art of music, theater, or dance.
So what's different in a recording studio? Simple. The goal becomes developing the ability to repeat something over and over until it is perfect ONCE! (Or to get everything right on the first take, and there are people good enough to do exactly that.) And that take then becomes the work of art, and never changes once it is pressed. Perfection is impossible, of course, or at least impractical. Voices get tired after about 3 hours of takes. Producers' and engineers' ears get tired and often hypercritical. Neither the performers nor the technical people can work forever, and if they could there's a limit to the budget for studio time. So let me rephrase: the goal becomes repeating something over and over until it is as close to perfect as possible in that place at that time, or provides the raw material to create that close-to-perfect product in post-production.
Some performers really bloom in a recording studio, but would get stale quickly in repeated live performances. Others really bloom in front of an audience, and can't do their thing boxed into a studio. And, of course, some really can do both. Same in theater. Making a movie is very much like making a CD: repeat it over and over until it's as close to perfect as possible, or get it right the first time. Some actors are superb at that.
Canned, synthesized orchestra? Interesting concept -- for some sort of necrophilharmonic.
Oh Les, I LOVE that word!!! Well done!
But has anyone happened to notice that the changeover is already here, has been for a long time, and is so common we don't even think about it. I'm talking about movie and TV drama production. I was at a workshop about 15 years ago, given by a composer/arranger who was extremely successful both at writing movie music and at crafting jingles for such as McDonalds that we've all heard over and over. He pointed out that at that point in time, music budgets for movies up to about $20,000 were routinely done by synths, often by the composer him- or herself. And of course we've all enjoyed the TV themes and underscore by such as Mike Post, all synthesized. For big budget movies, using full orchestra, he said that music budgets STARTED at about $120,000. Apply whatever inflation factor you like over the last 15 years (like, maybe double it?), and it's probably very similar in proportion. Yes, bigtime movie directors are VERY aware of the "class" aspect of recording a live orchestra as opposed to a synthesized score, but as always, the budget controls.
And maybe that's the key to the current problems with Broadway producers. Just as there is Broadway, off-Broadway, off-off, etc., maybe the union should support canned music for low budget shows in return for full orchestras for the classy shows on Broadway. Just a thought, and actually they may already do something like that.
Which is why I'm damned proud when my unions - Actors' Equity, SAG, AFTRA -- stand in unity against anyone trying to do away with the human component which provides us our -- humanity. Art is a reflection of humanity; it's arguably the most important remnant left by a civilization.
Amen to that, brother, and don't forget IATSE (probably spelled wrong), without whom no curtain, no lights, no show. As Ben Franklin is rumored to have said, "We must all hang together, gentlemen, or we shall assuredly all hang separately."
John
-- John & Susie Howell Virginia Tech Department of Music Blacksburg, Virginia, U.S.A 24061-0240 Vox (540) 231-8411 Fax (540) 231-5034 (mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]) http://www.music.vt.edu/faculty/howell/howell.html
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