The Crunch

Jazz Outlaw

2007-01-26T13:01:00.000+01:00

The following is a governmental response to a petition against The Licensing bill 2002-03.

"A great deal of misinformation has been circulating about our modernisation of the licensing laws in England and Wales and we are therefore not surprised at the level of concern that has been shown.

The Licensing Bill received Royal Assent on 10 July and is now the Licensing Act 2003. We believe that the Act will make it simpler and more affordable than now to stage live entertainment in the vast majority of cases and increase opportunities for musicians and other artists to perform. There will be no additional cost to provide musical entertainment on the new premises licence and fees will be set centrally by the Secretary of State to ensure consistency…

Short-term events would also benefit from the more informal system of permitted temporary activities under the Act, which would require a simple notification to the licensing authority and the police and a small fee of around £20. The Act allows for up to 12 temporary event notices to be given in respect of the same premises, subject to a maximum number of 15 days for the same premises during which permitted temporary activities may take place in a calendar year. The period permissible for any temporary event is a maximum of 4 days (96 hours). Furthermore, there is now an order-making power in the Act which - subject to affirmative resolution - enables those limits and the limit on the number of persons attending an event to be amended in the light of experience, should it prove that the balance between the rights of residents and the light touch approach of the system needs to be adjusted…." bla bla bla

Now here’s some of that ‘misinformation’ in a letter from the trumpet player Henry Lowther in which he describes precisely how the government’s new licensing regulations are damaging live music. “In the summer of 2005 I had the good fortune to be asked to play with a quartet, on a regular basis, in the Garden Cafe in The Regent's Park. This was for two mid-week late afternoons/early evenings per week for a period of three months, about 30 gigs in total. It was a delightful experience for all the musicians involved. We usually played outdoors, received generous and friendly hospitality and a good fee. The company who run the cafe, Caper Green, were delighted with the way it went (and so were the cafe's customers) and then invited us to play indoors for four Sunday afternoons prior to Christmas that year.

At this time the manager for the company said he would like us to play again throughout the summer of 2006, commencing at Easter, possibly three times a week and also maybe have us play in some of their other cafes. (Caper Green also run cafes in other Royal Parks, the cafe at Kenwood and also the restaurant in the Roundhouse.) As you can see, all of this would have amounted to a significant amount of employment for four musicians.

Unfortunately this came to nought thanks to the new regulations. In 2006 Caper Green, through their solicitors, applied for a Premises Licence for the restaurant in the Hub, a new sports facility in The Regent's Park, but found dealing with Westminster City Council complicated, difficult and time consuming. "It's a nightmare," were the manager’s words to me at the time. Among many other things, Westminster City Council, for some unknown reason, imposed a limit of no more than three musicians along with the installation of an expensive noise limiter even though the live music would be indoors and the Hub is located in the middle of the park.

All of this totally contradicts the DCMS’s claim that obtaining a Premises Licence with live music provision would be easy. Caper Green's intention was to obtain live music provision for the Garden Cafe once the Premises Licence was in place for the Hub but, as of last autumn, they never bothered, presumably because they had no wish to go through the troublesome and possibly expensive process again.

Prior to the implementation of this legislation, Royal Parks, being Crown land, were exempt from the necessity of a Public Entertainment Licence but are now required to obtain live music provision in their Premises Licence in order to engage musicians.

Why? If the system worked before why shouldn't it work now? This is just yet another example among many of the total logicality and stupidity of this bill. In the meantime the musicians involved lost considerable income with no compensation. In addition the public lost an opportunity of hearing good music in a pleasant environment.

The fact that the new licensing regulations don't require pubs, etc. to have a licence for them to present large screen televised sport or to play often loud background music is nothing less than a major concession to large corporate interests. Instead, this Government has chosen to regulate the performances of mostly minority and increasingly marginalised forms of music. Small venues, pubs, private premises, etc. who wish to present jazz, folk, improvised, experimental or avant-garde music are now in the almost Stalinesque position of having to seek permission from the State to do so and many of them simply don't have either the financial or organisational recourses to deal with it.”

Henry Lowther is one of Britain’s foremost and finest musicians.

The Next Generation - high resolution downloads

2007-01-24T18:06:00.000+01:00

Some good news to herald in - if somewhat belatedly- the start of the New Year: Linn Records, the label of the Scottish audiophile company, has launched what I believe to be Europe’s first high-resolution music download service.

Unlike other companies such as Naxos, who deceptively claim to offer CD quality when in fact what their Music Library provides is a low-fidelity 128kbps stream (CD is 1411kbps), Linn’s catalogue is available for download in true CD quality. Even more interesting, are the Studio Masters, of which there are only half a dozen at present, but which are available at the higher 24bit resolution. All are DRM free, WMA lossless media files and each download includes a Pdf file of the CD artwork, and presumably the CD notes.

This move is a highly significant breakthrough for the classical music (and the wider acoustic music) industry. With CD sales falling month on month the recording industry has been staggering along trying to reposition itself inline with consumer demand. Whilst the comparatively wealthy and agile popular music industry has been able to effect the necessary realignment with the emerging online market by implementing lossy (low-fidelity) downloads such as MP3 and AAC, the shrunken classical music industry has increasingly found itself left flailing behind; an unequal voice in an uncertain market.

And with good reason: if low-fi media files are able to represent the limited dynamic range of heavily compressed pop music tolerably well they are wholly unsuitable carriers for the broad dynamic range of acoustically recorded classical music. But without the support of the wider audio industry the classical music arm has insufficient strength to ensure the successful promotion of either DVDAudio (DVDA) or Super Audio Compact Disc (SACD) both of which are excellent media for classical music. Linn Records is the first to meet this technological challenge head on.

Their website offers an extensive, at times amusing, yet straightforward explanation of how to get the most out of the service as well as the thoughtful inclusion of test files whereby users can identify potential difficulties before making a purchase. But at the same time it does seem to place an unwarranted emphasis on the files being “suitable primarily for use on a PC” - perhaps as a caution to the impenetrable difficulties often encountered by Mac users - but unfortunately this does suggest a certain circumspection about the relatively straightforward process of burning the files onto a CDR for use in a standard CD player. Likewise, while the site makes clear that the Studio Master files can be backed up on DVD it fails to suggest the use of DVDAudio authoring software such as Cirlinca or Discwelder that would allow users to play Linn’s recordings in a standard DVD-A player.

Anyhow, well done Linn!

photo: Phil Hobbs of Linn Records

La Scala says Boo to a Goof!

2006-12-12T23:59:00.000+01:00

Well, it’s nice to see that classical music audiences are indeed still alive and kicking. While Domingo got away with having his knuckles rapped at the Met, Roberto Alagna - never one to be upstaged – has been firmly kicked out of touch at La Scala. It seems unlikely that his behaviour will be deemed acceptable, let alone reasonable, although there seems to have been little open criticism so far.

Certainly opera singing, being a highly rarefied art, demands qualities seldom found in your average Joe, which might've garnered some sympathy for Alagna’s predicament, were it not for the fact that La Scala is renowned for savaging those who are brave enough to confront its highly cultured and discriminating audience without first eradicating all trace of vocal insecurity or human weakness. [Callas, Pavaroti, Caballe and Fleming all having suffered similar assaults]. Alagna can no more hope to invoke sympathy by walking off the Milanese stage in a petulant huff than a heckled comedian can hope to assuage mockery by breaking down in tears. None the less, the human voice isn’t a machine; and the opera singer, lacking even the small protection that a temperamental mechanical contrivance affords other musicians, must display his or her human frailty to a demanding public in all its full-frontal nakedness. Indeed, part of the appeal and success of opera and theatre is the artist’s ability to reach out from the stage and make intimate human connection with each member of the audience. The utter tedium of televised opera represents the flip side of the same rationale: the electronic medium obfuscates human interaction rendering a pale 2-dimensional representation of the real, live experience.

But the rights and wrongs of Alagna’s behaviour interest me less than the audience’s reaction. Opera aficionados seem to be the sole remaining classical music audience to retain the right of veto. I can’t ever remember hearing booing at an orchestral or chamber music concert [except for the odd occasion when some contemporary work displeased a tiny minority]. Even a London performance of a work by Salonen in which an offstage percussionist knocked over a metre high tam tam, tearing open the scalps of 4 concert goers seated in front, failed to elicit anything but rapturous applause. This is perhaps attributable to the starchy straight-laced dilettantism of British concert-going audiences who I suppose typify my experience. But even here in Paris, de rigueur seal-clapping rhythmic applause at the end of every concert is endemic no matter the quality of the performance. I’d be interested in hearing other opinions – but I’d say that applause is most often a meaningless affectation providing one small window of opportunity for an audience to participate in what is all too often a predominantly passive experience where the overriding power of the social occasion dictates emotive conformity. From this perspective, one might conclude that Alagna ought to be delighted at having elicited a lively, active intuitive emotional response – albeit negative.

Is it reasonable to expect artists to perform to the very highest standard on each and every performance? Is it humanly possible for them to do so? I don’t really think so. Surely we have to acknowledge and accept some risk of disappointment on each occasion - regardless of the ticket price. What we should fear more than error is mediocrity. The pressure to be correct at all costs is one of the most destructive, anti-musical influences on modern performance practice.

Museum Tinguely

2006-12-10T17:38:00.000+01:00

Pliable’s reference earlier this week to the Ticinese Swiss architect Mario Botta reminded me of the magnificent Museum Tinguely in Basel, Switzerland. Designed by Botta and built shortly after Jean Tinguely’s death in the early 90s, principally to house the artist’s kinetic sculptures. The museum offers a remarkable sensory experience. Tinguely’s clunky iron sculptures are not only tantalisingly tactile but many, like his Méta-Harmonie works - some of which include a variety of percussion and keyboard instruments amid their riotus construction – are also fascinatingly engaging sonic experiences.
With only 115 000 visitors each year Botta’s architectural space presents a wonderful opportunity to experience Tinguely’s multi-disciplinary art in an uncluttered, clarifying acoustic. His sound-producing machines, although of the most basic mechanical construction, seem compellingly engaging and imperfect compared to the blandness of the high-sheen contemporary sound world to which we are becoming increasingly inured. Long before the conception of Botta’s museum the sounds of many of Tanguely's machine-sculptures were recorded and released on vinyl but unfortunately I’m unable to find any currently available on CD. I'd say such a recording project would be a wonderful way of presenting the artist's work within the museum space of Botta's acoustic design - but then again - no one's asking me.
The museum continues to develop its cross-genre programme linking music and the plastic arts with exhibitions such as “Edgard Varèse – Composer, Sound Sculptor, Visionary”, which took place earlier this year, as well as the periodic Roche n’ Jazz performances, which also encourage an appreciation of interdisciplinary arts within the museum space.

That Old Black Magic

2006-11-25T20:58:00.000+01:00

Not even the dead are safe from the venal machinations of the record industry. Now that the Beatles are crawling out of the vaults to make a 21st century comeback; it seems that Sinatra too has yet to croak his last croon.

Back in 1957 Ole Blue Eyes apparently had the idea of making a TV show performing his favourite songs in front of the camera with only a piano for accompaniment, leaving the Nelson Riddle orchestra to add their blazing brass at a later date. However, for one reason or another, the project fell on its face – the show was never completed and the recorded tracks have been languishing in the Sinatra Co. archive ever since - until now that is. Producer Ken Barnes, the founder and CEO of The Laureate Company - a music and movie restoration company - recently used British session musicians to add the Nelson Riddle arrangements to 28 new tracks during 2 days of recording sessions in London.

The practice of resurrecting the dead to perform with the living is not an altogether new idea: Nat King Cole, that memorable merry old soul, achieved this triumphal feat as far back as 1991 when he was dug up to perform with his daughter Natalie. Moreover, the addition of singers after the fact [though not always dead ones] is common enough even within the classical music fraternity. Indeed, few large-scale opera productions unfold without at least one soloist falling ill or being otherwise indisposed. The inevitable tracking session that ensues rarely attracts much attention, either because the practice threatens the idealised illusion of performance that the industry likes to perpetuate, or because the process invariably cedes discursive musical dialogue between interacting musicians to commercial pragmatism; the results of which are seldom more than a lop-sided dispute across the divide of space and time.

Whether such enterprises really add to the sum of artistic achievement: I’m not sure, but they certainly avert potentially catastrophic logistical and financial consequences for record companies without which, large-scale studio opera recordings would long ago have become a thing of the past.

Now playing – An Operatic First by Madame Cathy Berberian – I want to Hold Your Hand

The Sound of Music

2006-11-25T18:41:00.000+01:00

Audio quality has, as Pliable obligingly points out, been a recurrent theme in my blogging throughout the past year. This is because I believe recorded sound is vital to the future of classical music. It is after all, the most ubiquitous and the most overtly commercial and therefore accessible means of consuming music currently available. Coverage of the elitism versus populism debate, the demise of record companies, and waning concert hall audiences continue to feature prominently in the arts [or more often, Entertainment] sections of the mainstream media as well as on the Internet. And, if recorded sound isn’t at the heart of each of these debates, it's certainly part of the art’s life support system.

I’ve tried to draw attention to the ways we listen to music and the means for doing so – the diminishing ability to appreciate it, and sometimes - with a certain cynicism - to the way in which some developments threaten to limit or undermine our experience.

Anyone with more than a cursory interest in contemporary developments and technology, and the facilities to evaluate the quality of sound recordings might find the following links interesting.

Millennia Media [part of the not-for-profit Millennia Foundation], is a manufacturer of very fine specialist pro-audio products, which has made available a selection of downloadable musical extracts from a 2004 recording of Handel’s Messiah by the American Bach Soloists and Orchestra directed by Jeffrey Thomas. The entire recording is available on the Delos Label but John La Grou presents the downloads in response to what he calls requests “for a ‘tutorial’ series on large-ensemble acoustic recording.”

The extracts, recorded at the Mondavi Center for the Performing Arts at Davis, California are available as 44.1Khz (CD quality) WAV files, and - for those who can’t be bothered to wait approximately 1 minute for the files to download – MP3’s. The interest lies in being able to compare the final multi-microphone mix with a more minimalist version taken from the main pair of spaced omni directional mics.

For those using a PC, if you right click the download links you can save them to your computer hard drive, which will allow you to compare them more easily. If you have the ability to connect your computer to a decent hi-fi, or if you take the trouble to write the files to CD, you will have a much better chance of resolving the differences.

Nevertheless, listening to audio critically doesn’t come naturally: differences are likely to seem insubstantial or trivial at first. But if you focus your attention on specific aspects – such as the sound of certain instrumental sections, or on the acoustic resonance, differences between the two versions will gradually become more apparent.

On a more geeky-techie note; the Aurora Plug-ins site is a tremendous resource. It is “a suite of plug-ins for Adobe Audition” or other Digital Audio Workstations, allowing

“room acoustical impulse responses [to] be measured and manipulated, for the recreation of audible, three-dimensional simulations of the acoustical space.”

The site also includes links to the Ramsete site - a CAD resource for room acoustic modelling on PC, where you can find a Wave Convolver and a complete CD-ROM available for download. The files (you’re not obliged to download the entire disc) include convolution samples and orchestral recordings made in an anechoic chamber, which will be particularly useful for exploring the difficulties of superimposing digital or convolution reverberation upon the existent sound of a recorded acoustic. Unfortunately, the site is rather complicated – and the download manual exists only in Italian!

Russian - Disarmed but Dangerous

2006-11-23T23:28:00.000+01:00

Since September this year, when the terror ensuing from the alleged plot to blow up transatlantic aeroplanes allowed the government to impose severe restrictions on hand baggage, many, many musicians, such as Victoria Mullova, Ralph Kirshbaum, and Stephen Isserlis, have been refused permission to board aircraft with their instruments.

Even before this date, the difficulties of transporting any instrument bigger than a piccolo were considerable. Cellists have always been obliged to pay for an extra seat for their curvaceous companions and violinists could reasonably expect to become embroiled in lengthy negotiations at check in. I remember seeing a student violinist arrested (quite where, I can't remember) long before September 2001, for answering airport security’s inane question concerning the contents of his rather obviously violin-shaped case a little too facetiously - by claiming it concealed “A Tommy Gun.”

Last year, a member of Ryan Air’s ground crew insisted that my girlfriend checked in the spare strings she keeps in her violin case. Being a non-confrontational Swede, she reluctantly obliged but on returning to the boarding gate she met with an even more absurd demand; that she remove the strings from the instrument itself. Thankfully she was able to explain the idiocy of this request and was eventually permitted to board the plane. [She subsequently tried to garrotte a friend with her E string when she reached her destination but found it too short to get a good enough grip]!

Personally, I favour the introduction of a method similar to that, which, for a short time, governed the transportation of certain liquids, which had to be imbibed in the presence of security personal. Which reminds me - I once incurred the wrath of an enormous stentorian customs officer at Frankfurt Airport: A fearful female official who insisted that I verify the authenticity of my camera by taking a photo in her presence. When I raised the camera and snapped a quick one, she turned puce with rage, screaming at the top of her voice, “NOT OF ME!”

However, as of 6th November, “new security measures came into effect for all passengers departing UK airports.” What's more - according to the department for Transport - you no longer have to carry your $3m Strad in a clear plastic bag: “Musical instruments are, as an exception, allowed as a second item of cabin baggage”.

On a less happy note - this change of policy arrives too late for Valery Ponomarev, a 63 year-old former member of Art Blakey’s Jazz Messengers who had his arm broken by French Police at Charles de Gaulle Airport in Paris this September while trying to board a plane armed to the teeth with a Conn Constellation trumpet. According to a spokesman for the airport police, the diminutive [5’5”, 140 lbs] musician “hurt himself by rebelling.” He was finally taken to hospital after being held for 6 hours - without medical treatment and without being allowed to make a phone call. Arthur Gilroy of My Left Wing, describes events less prosaically,

“Valery... pitched a bitch at the gate when some pissed-off functionary at a loading gate decided to pull rank on him. They called security and four "giant asshole cops" took him someplace where there were no witnesses, tried to forcibly take his trumpet away and when he wouldn't let go of it with his right hand, pulled his left arm behind his back and broke it.”

You can read the full article here or (if you can be bothered to sign in) here and hear tiny clips of the man’s music here and here

A Stern Review

2006-11-21T22:17:00.000+01:00

Whether we have Sir Nicholas Stern to thank for his report on the economics of climate change, or the former next president of the US for his film – I don’t know, but lately, environmental matters have reared up in the news like never before. Everyone is either keen to do something to reverse the impending meltdown, or to be seen to be doing something: which is not quite the same thing. Certainly it’s encouraging to see that ways are being sought to bridge the gulf dividing environmental concerns and economic interests. The Stern review makes clear that turning the TV off standby; paying more for long-haul flights or even depriving Arnie of his 8 gas-guzzling Humvees isn’t going to solve the problem. Sir Nicholas, who regards climate change as the biggest market failure in history, believes that we need “a carbon price, technology policy and the removal of barriers to international change.”

This is stunningly good news. Levying a tax on carbon will ensure that environmental costs are translated into financial costs and passed on to the consumer. But surely, the most equitable form of taxation would be a tax on all forms of non-renewable energy- not just carbon-releasing fossil fuel. How about if we were to scrap income tax, VAT, capital gains, car tax – the lot, and slap one big fat tax on all environmentally unsustainable forms of energy - which would include nuclear (fission), hydroelectric energy and, most importantly, food. Given that the average beef burger takes about a hectare of land to produce, the human food trough really ought to be an important consideration in the climate debate. Anyhow - a carbon tax would be a good start.

While the idea that we have the power to regulate, bully, and cajole our way out of environmental disaster with fiscal insentives is encouraging, it lets us off the hook a little too easily by allowing us to believe that we can buy our way out of the problem, thereby evading the full extent of the problem and its underlying causes.

As Jonathan Freedland points out in the Guardian, “governments are limited in what they can do because they no longer control the key economic levers”. Industrial commercial interests are in direct conflict with energy conservation and sustainability. The wholesale take-up of capitalism (which now seems to be synonymous with democracy) condemns us to rampant consumerism. Buying stuff is what we do – conversely; refusing to consume would have a detrimental effect on the quality of modern life. Which of us, for example, would forego re-charging our mobile phone or MP3 player (let alone turn down the central heating or restrict our diet) merely to conserve energy? Such notions are anathema, unthinkable, anti-social even.

The problem is exacerbated by the ubiquitous assumption that industrialisation – or development as it is now called – is necessarily good, useful and inevitable. According to Catton’s Overshoot’,

“…to industrialise the poor will further harm the planet. Because industrial production requires the exploitation of resources, the wealth of one group is always based on the impoverishment of another’s landbase, meaning that on a finite planet, the creation of one person’s(fiscal) wealth always comes at the cost of many others’ poverty.”

Development – which necessitates consumption and therefore destruction – is intrinsically unsustainable. Or, to put it another way: there’s no such thing as sustainable development. Such views are no longer the sole preserve of environmentalists either: Joseph Stiglitz, the acclaimed Nobel Prize-winning economist [at the World Bank and, before that, the White House] – who now fears a backlash against globalisation, makes similar claims and recommendations in his book ‘Making Globalisation Work’.

Catton, among others, conjures up the concept of ghost slaves as a way of Illustrating excessive energy consumption. Each ghost slave represents the energy the average human spends in one day (2-3000 kCal).

“Within two eventful centuries of the time when James Watt started us substituting fossil energy for muscle power, per capita energy use in the United States reached a level equivalent to eighty or so ghost slaves for each citizen…Without reducing population or per capita energy consumption, modern man would require an increase in contemporary carrying capacity equivalent to ten earths.”
He continues with this awe-inspiring comparison:
“The energy expended in two decades by a vast labor force of Egyptians stacking up some 2,300,000 blocks of stone (each weighing about two and a half tons) to form the Great Pyramid of Cheops was less than the energy released in a few minutes by three stages of a Saturn V rocket propelling men toward the moon.”

We shouldn't be fooled into misplacing our trust in the comforting economic palliative of market forces while the overwhelming destructiveness of global commercialisation throttles the life out of the planet.

Watford Town Hall - £10

2006-11-04T21:22:00.000+01:00

Julian Lloyd Webber’s recent article in the Telegraph draws attention to the plight of Watford Town Hall, which is facing closure. In describing the singular importance of the hall as one of the finest classical music recording locations he risks underrating the importance of the venue to the wider community. The hall's demise can't simply be written off as just another sign of waning cultural elitism: anyone who sits back, content to see the destruction of one of the finest classical music acoustics will, in this case, be complicit in abetting the death of one of the most egalitarian public venues in Europe.

The Town Hall, built in 1939 and grandiloquently renamed in 1995 as The Coliseum, has been home to a broad spectrum of public events, from International boxing fixtures to classical music concerts, not to mention, innumerable prestigious recording sessions. Not only does it remain one of the finest acoustic music venues in the world, but, in its heyday, it underwent nightly transformations for wedding receptions, rock concerts and hip hop championships. Now in need of complete renovation the hall's future is under threat.

Despite being located in less than auspicious surroundings, it's ideally situated for development as a major regional arts centre. And according to a review commissioned by the local council,

“taking the lowest projected average per annum from Target Group Index analysis for the UK as a whole then, within a radius of only 12 miles, the potential attendances for classical music are 612,964. At the current capacity of 1,437 seats, this would in theory be enough for the hall to operate at 115% of capacity for 7 days a week, 52 weeks a year,”
which doesn’t seem too bad to me. However, the pursuance of such goals is apparently beyond the means of Watford Borough Council and the development of the hall as a major artistic centre “falls outside existing Arts Council Strategy.” A change of strategy is obviously beyond the bounds of imagination.

Classical CD Review claims that Dorati’s 1959 Firebird was the first recording to be made in Watford Town Hall but there seem to be well-documented references to earlier sessions - such as these Maria Callas tracks - which were recorded there in September 1954. An even earlier anecdotal reference to the hall’s use as a concert venue [featuring the late, daredevil, Sir Malcolm Arnold], can be found among Robert Meyer’s excellent Musical Reminiscences. While the hall has acted as a studio for many thousands of orchestral recordings, more recently it has also been used for a number of prestigious film score recordings including Lord of the Rings.

The Coliseum was already under threat of closure two years ago when it was reprieved by a contract with the BBC Concert Orchestra. But now that the orchestra is set to relocate to the BBC’s new Music Centre at White City, the threat re-emerges.

Watford Musical Heritage, a charitable organisation founded by Jonathan Brett – who is also the director of Classic Concerts Trust and English Classical Players - is charged with the preservation of the Hall. As the website makes clear, the aim

“is to generate a capital sum to provide an annual income with which to fund musical projects”, which would require
“an investment of just £10 for each of the 4 million people who live or work within easy reach of Watford.”

Watford is a Borough Council with an elected mayor and 36 councillors (Liberal Democrat majority) The elected Mayor is Dorothy Thornhill – email themayor@watford.gov.uk

To hire the Colosseum, email: andy.pickard@watford.gov.uk or telephone Andy or Pat on +44 (0)1923 278954.

Notes & Queries

2006-10-28T19:28:00.000+02:00

A recent question in the Guardian’s Notes & Queries - Could a professional symphony orchestra play the standard repertoire without a conductor? – set me thinking. The rather abstruse role of conductor seems strangely anachronistic in today’s pragmatic world. I feel sure that his contribution and importance is widely misunderstood and undervalued – even by musicians, who often resent the high fees that the more notable maestros continue to command. Having worked with one of the top London orchestras on two different recording projects on the same day, I’m fortunate to have witnessed the astonishing impact that a change of conductor can have.

A good conductor is more than an expensive human metronome and a truly great performance is much more than the consolidation of the musicians’ disparate musical ideas. The rarefied skill of the great maestro allows him – or, less often, her – to impose their own, unified conception of a work, communicating a personal interpretation directly to the orchestral musicians – often without recourse to verbal explanation and sometimes even without any discernable gesture. I've also witnessed the great Rozhdestvensky ‘conducting’ the entire second movement of Rachmaninov’s Second Symphony without so much as twitching a finger - a performance that is preserved as an unedited take on this recording. Such performances are beyond definition, which makes it all the more surprising then that the 21st century maestro has not yet been 'rationalized', out of existence.

Musically speaking, the symphony orchestra is far from being a democratic body; indeed some of the finest conductors throughout history were renowned autocratic tyrants. As Daniel Barenboim points out,

"Any professional conductor can make a professional orchestra play the way he wants them to play. But that's not music. Music is when the conductor and the orchestra breathe as from one collective lung."
Sitting in front of one of today’s great conductors can still be an intensely powerful (if not disturbing) experience: an experience from which most audience members are unfortunately excluded. Can our orchestras look forward then, to the removal of the most tyrannical maestros and the forcible imposition of freedom and democracy on the orchestral world?

picture credit Clive Barda http://www.ljubljanafestival.si/

Happy Birthday iPod

2006-10-23T23:27:00.000+02:00

Happy Birthday iPod. 5 Years old today. A revolution has taken place before our very ears – or so some would have us believe. If the iPod revolution is indeed a revolution it is one of miniaturisation, storage capability and, of course, of sales & marketing. Any revolving in terms of musical or auditory transmission has been in a decidedly backward direction. One can’t help but feel that comparatively recent developments, like DVDAudio and SACD, although still turning, are grinding in terminal entropy like the buckled remnants of a bicycle accident. Whatever happened to hi-fi?

I’m all for choice: but the choices are being made for us. Take hi-definition TV for instance. The medium offers the possibility to radically improve picture quality to previously unimagined standards. And what do we get - 180 channels of pap, whose quality is inferior to a decent PAL TV signal? Similarly, DAB is outperformed by FM radio.

The quality of most consumer goods is determined by the price and quality of the goods you buy. If you buy a cheap watch on the market it’ll be unreliable and won’t work after the first week when the battery runs out; if you buy a Rolex, you get the best watch money can buy. The same has always been true of audio reproduction equipment. If you bought a cheap receiver or player and were happy with the qualitative compromise: that was your choice. But now, we’re moving into an era where compression algorithms and low bit rate encoding are threatening to condemn everyone to inherent compromise. Yes, you can still buy CDs, but for how much longer? Even now, few high street shops have anything but the latest derelict chart toppers on the shelves. The classical department in my local FNAC has now been consigned to the 4th floor, which it shares with religious books and iconography.

So what’s my gripe with compression when millions the world over are as overjoyed as they are awed by being able to cram their entire record collection into one tiny hand-held pod.

I don’t believe audio compression is intrinsically bad, but it is a complex business that rarely receives more than scant attention. Most current forms of lossy compression are based on ill-founded assumptions about the human auditory system. It is widely assumed for example, that a certain amount of masking renders some sound inaudible and therefore unnecessary. Compression algorithms commonly treat stereo signals as highly redundant but a stereo signal carries more than twice as much information as a mono signal because it also contains a phantom image. Consequently, spatial information, ambience and reverberation are lost in translation. These might not be seen as especially important features of rock, pop, trip hop and trance - music that has already suffered severe audio compression - but classical and other acoustic recordings are left substantially worse off as a result.

Evidence seems to be mounting that more and more people are finding compression systems an unpleasant disappointment even though they may not realise quite why. One of the most notable and negative attributes of poor quality audio is its power to bore. Any audio professional will tell you how tiring it is to listen to a second rate reproduction system. In fact, background listening - although anathema to the serious music lover - is one of the best ways of assessing audio quality and the technical success of a recording.

So if the prospect of another 5 years of podding fills you with dread – never fear, the next commodity fad is already twinkling in Steve Jobs’ eye.

Nobel Peace Prize 2006

2006-10-22T22:01:00.000+02:00

Bush and Blair’s slaughter of 655,000 Iraqis, under the guise of introducing ‘freedom and democracy’ to Iraq, is more likely to secure the reattribution of the inauspicious title, ‘Butchers[s] of Baghdad’ than the Nobel Prize for Peace. But they may find it more than a little galling to note that this year’s prize (like last years') has been awarded to a Muslim.

Muhammad Yunus, a Bangladeshi economist has won the prestigious award for pioneering a system of "lending tiny amounts of money directly to some of the neediest people on the planet."* “Bangladesh has been reducing poverty by 2% a year since the turn of the millennium,” thanks to someone actually putting his money where his mouth is!

*Randeep Ramesh - Guardian

Songs from the Larynx

2006-10-15T20:11:00.000+02:00

Sting hopes that the release of his Songs from the Labyrinth on the Deutsche Grammophon label will not provoke a "turf war". But although the likes of Bryn Terfel, Renée Fleming and perhaps even Andreas Scholl would no doubt dearly love a slice of Stings' patch, they're no more serious contenders for his market than he is for theirs.

As Sting quite reasonably claims, Dowland's songs are better suited to a chamber music environment than to the concert hall, so Rock n’ Roll’s intimate microphone technique is a more appropriate vehicle than the overblown operatic voice. It’s a good argument: so why then, is the result so embarrassingly dreadful?

To begin with, acoustic chamber music demands many more qualities of a singer than does amplified music. If Sting’s voice were really unplugged – exposed to a real acoustic and denied the pour-over panache of artificial reverberation - it would be quite, quite unremarkable; just like your average joe. This in no way detracts from Sting’s string of successes. It’s just that his strengths lie elsewhere. He doesn’t have the vocal technique to perform acoustically [especially with only the tiny sound of a lute for support]. Instead of vocal colour and variation – we get only peculiarities.

Sting’s claim that Dowland’s songs were 17th century pop, may have some truth in it but to take this as a sign that they will fit right in with his standard rocky repertoire is taking rather a lot for granted. Contemporary rock and pop performance is just as stylised as classical music. Sting’s pseudo American-pop dialect is no more inherently human or nadural than the overblown voice of an operatic tenor: each is a product of convention, era and tradition. 17th century singers probably sounded closer to the present day notion of a folk singer – who knows - but the truth of how they sounded is largely irrelevant to modern sensibilities. It’s not so much how things ought to sound, as whether they’re pleasing and beautiful to the modern ear.

Perhaps we should take the trouble to re-educate our ear? But the point is that we’re culturally conditioned [by exposure to the world around us] to like what we like. The margins for personal adaptation are small, and necessarily require the conscious overriding of innate predilection. Consequently, we expect to hear the music of Dowland and his ilk performed by classically trained singers – and more recent popular idioms by the innately talented, who do them best.

Each to his own, I say. If you're in doubt – compare these two versions of 'In Darkness let me Dwell'

* Sting * Andreas Scholl

______________________________________________________________

It's unusual to find myself taking a more conciliatory view than Pliable over On an Overgrown Path but having read his article, I can’t honestly say that I think Sting’s motivation was wholly commercial when he embarked on this project. There's an honest resonance to his interview in the Telegraph when he claims that he was far from convinced about releasing a recording of this project until “the very last minute”. And in Billboard magazine, "We really did this for love, and whatever happens next is in the hands of the Gods, really."

Although Sting claims it was the Cecil letter that persuaded him to turn his explorations into a record, I think it might be more revealing if we were to ask who was responsible for bringing Sting’s “labour of love, labour of curiosity” to the notice of Deutsche Grammophon. This, I imagine, is where the commercial exploitation begins – and it exploits Sting as much as the rest of us. An aging rocker, living a super-real life, whose lasting fame is founded on fickle, transitory pop music, is easy prey for a culture monger like DG. I’ve little doubt they sold him the win-win idea of establishing his credentials as a serious artist while broadening his appeal to wider, cultivated audience – quite an appealing legacy.

Everyone I think, admires Sting for his music, his questing and his exploration, but we should do him the honour of giving an honest appraisal of his work without leading him, or allowing ourselves to be led down the labyrinthine path of cynical marketing.

Come on you miner for truth and delusion

2006-10-12T22:05:00.000+02:00

Since finding an LP of Pink Floyd’s 1975 album ‘Wish You Were Here’ in a Parisian rubbish bin the other day I’ve been plunged into reminiscence. I can’t say precisely what sent me into such a welter of wistfulness; whether the lyric, “Remember when you were young, you shone like the sun,” or the indefinable sense of anticipation that an LP still embodies, or simply noticing the fact that the band spent 7 months recording the album – 7 months in Abbey Road Studios! That’s certainly the stuff of dreams today – for musicians, production staff, and not least, for the studio.
Anyhow, some good has come of the wallowing: I’ve turned up some relics – no - gems from the past. For a start, there’s a rich catalogue of recordings made for Conifer Classics, which after disappearing from the market for the best part of a decade, have now re-emerged on the Decca label. And then there’s this unreleased recording I made with a group of Austrian Musicians [Andi Schreiber - violin, Christian Musser - oud, Ewald Oberleitner - bass, Stefan Heckel – piano] in a church somewhere near Graz several years ago. The recording never saw the light of day, mostly because 3 days' of therapeutic acoustic free improvisation turned out sounding unremittingly introvert: a fine recording experience, but perhaps not one to share with the wider world. However, I can recommend that you seek out more of Stefan Heckel’s music and resources. He’s a fine, sensitive musician and an admirable person to know.
Anyone else who fancies “running over the same old ground,” or basking “in the shadow of yesterday’s triumph” should give me a shout – I’ve got this copy of Wish You Were Here to get rid of.

10/11

2006-10-11T21:21:00.000+02:00

9.12pm
It's not often you find a fresh scoop on The Crunch, but here one is! How is it that you can read it here but not on Google News I wonder? Not still working on the facts are they?
No pictures yet I'm afraid, but all I can say is that there's definitely NOT been a terrorist attack in New York. It's an accident - the first of its kind - perhaps a helicopter, perhaps a small aeroplane that has accidentally crashed into the 20th and 21st floors of a building on 72nd street NY.
I imagine we can expect the building to crumble neatly to the ground sometime during the night?

Aziza Mustafa Zadeh

2006-09-27T21:57:00.000+02:00

1 + 1 = 2

2006-07-19T21:36:00.000+02:00

It's too hot to embark on the usual round of agonising about the apparent demise of classical music. So perhaps it's a good time to peer through the wood at the trees - or to draw a simple conclusion from a simple equation. . .

1 + 1 = 2

With thanks to Pliable who blogged here before me

Pogacnik - out of his box

2006-06-25T20:03:00.000+02:00

“If you sit like an empty sack and expect to be entertained, you are lost to music. Music listening is supposed to be sweat, tears and blood. But the musical scene reflects entertainment today – everyone does everything to please the audience, to give them something they are familiar with, something they don’t have to work on. And all this goes back to the passive listening encouraged by recordings.”

Miha Pogacnik, interview with John Harvith and Susan Edwards Harvith, 14 January 1981, in Harvith and Harvith, ed. Edison, Musicians, and the Phonograph

Google violinist Miha Pogacnik and you won’t find a list of Amazon entries, record company sites or any other outlets for the numerous recordings that bolster the career of every other successful musician: he doesn’t even qualify for an entry in Wikipedia. You will however, find over 44 000 other references. Regardless of his abilities and appeal as a virtuoso violinist, Pogacnik has steadfastly refused to have anything to do with the recording industry. Instead, as President of the Institute for Intercultural Relations Through the Arts (IDRIART) he’s carved out a reputation as a cultural iconoclast; somewhere between cultural entrepreneur and itinerant shaman.

IDRIART holds an annual conference in Pogacnik’s native Slovenia, at Castle Borl, which claims to have been the residence of Parsifal’s grandfather. The aim of the conferences, and of Pogacnik’s other activities, is to broaden the awareness of the power and significance of the arts in society.

“In 'indigenous' cultures there was no word for Art...because of her total presence in the wholeness of the societal organism. 'Progress' of the modern world has gradually marginalized Arts to entertainment. Now we have 'working' life and 'leisure' life. But, as crisis of meaning is mounting, we are learning to formulate questions about the true interdisciplinary, 'integrational' role of Art."

Pogacnik

Following the aspirations of Josef Beuys who believed art to be "a genuinely human medium for revolutionary change”, Pogacnik targets the business world with the aim of using the arts as a means of developing business leaders’ emotional intelligence and as a creative force for peace and transformation. You can read some of the ideas here, and here, and there are a couple of rare video extracts of Pogacnik playing and speaking here.

And then you can book your experience here!

Fête de la Musique

2006-06-21T01:12:00.000+02:00

Celebrations throughout Europe during the next couple of days will vary from country to country but all are linked to some extent with the summer solstice or equinox. The Swedes set out to enjoy themselves on the 23rd in a typically Nordic fashion with phallic maypoles and as much Bacchanalian revelry as good Puritanism will allow. The Danes and Norwegians do something similar by lighting bonfires and burning the effigy of a witch.

The British, finding little to celebrate - having done with their seasonal ritualistic burning in November - blunder through midsummer more or less unaware, with the exception of a few druids and new-age pagans who attempt a pilgrimage to Stonehenge, only to be thwarted by the Somerset Police.

France, (as well as Switzerland, Belgium, Luxembourg and others), celebrates midsummer’s eve with the Fête de la Musique, one colossal music festival featuring every imaginable musical genre; all free, thanks to the French government.

Organised concerts in churches, museums, cultural centres, jazz clubs, parks and gardens, courtyards and bars are matched by an equal number of spontaneous events taking place on just about every street corner. Each year the Orchestre Nationale de France gives a concert in the Musée du Louvre. This year it's Dvorak’s New World Symphony under the direction of Kurt Masur. Those not fortunate enough to be in the area can listen in live on Radio France Musique.

One of the most interesting world music attractions will be Iran’s Bakhtiari Band, a group of nomads from Farsan, Chaharmahal-o Bakhtiari Province in Northwestern Iran.

The Bakhtiari tribe who make their annual 200-mile trek from the high summer pastures to low winter pastures by crossing the 12,000 ft pass in the Zagros Mountains were the subject of the first ever feature length documentary film, Grass: A Nation’s Battle for Life, made in 1925.

An Extraordinary Rendition

2006-06-19T23:37:00.000+02:00

I await with interest the result of the (SNCF) French state railway’s appeal against the recent historic judgement condemning it for nazi collaboration during the Second World War by running trains of extraordinary rendition. Presumably we can expect a raft of similar claims following the alleged use of a number of privately owned charter jets for similar purposes more recently. Although the process of tracing many of the plane’s owners often collapses in an interminable paper chase, some planes are clearly registered to people or companies that do actually exist. The legal representative of the law firm, which according to the Boston Globe represents the owners of one such plane, was unfortunately

“not at liberty to discuss the affairs of the client business, mainly for reasons I don't know,"
which seems an oddly impenetrable excuse. Another, which according to the Daily Kos and the Boston Globe belonged to Phillip H. Morse, vice chairman of the Boston Red Sox, was also used by the CIA to fly to Guantanamo Bay and other overseas destinations.

I can only hope that those suffering the ignominy of illegal abduction were able to elicit some small pleasure from their luxurious mode of travel in the Gulfstream 5 before enduring years of torture and imprisonment without trial. Georges Lipietz and his associates were less fortunate in 1944: they were sent 3rd class and transported in cattle wagons.

Written evidence of the Joint Committee on Human Rights.

The Axis of Idiocy

2006-06-15T23:54:00.000+02:00

The General Director of Toronto’s new opera house, Richard Bradshaw, has made it quite clear that the Canadian Opera Company “didn’t want to build a compromise”. Unfortunately nothing suggests the uniform conformity of democratic decision making more powerfully than its utterly uninspiring moniker, the Four Seasons Centre for the Performing Arts. Anyhow, credit where credit’s due – the authorities have at least spent some effort and more than a little money trying to achieve the best possible acoustic result; or at least, to ensure that the hall is properly insulated against external noise, which is not quite the same thing.

Unfortunately for Mr Bradshaw, the design of modern concert auditoria is predicated on compromise. The old-fashioned shoebox shape is widely regarded as a classic design and the most likely to render the finest acoustic. But the problem with halls such as the Concertgebouw in Amsterdam is that a few good seats command the ideal position consigning the rest of the audience to an evening of neck-craning and ear-straining.

The design (Soundspace Design, Fisher Dachs Associates) and construction (Diamond & Schmitt architects) has not met with unbridled enthusiasm. Christopher Hume writing in the Toronto Star describes a utilitarian construction designed by acousticians as “a machine for performing opera” continuing with some bitterness to condemn the hall’s architectural design as a mediocre monument for the city.

He may well be correct – I’ve not been to Toronto to find out – but that the authorities have for once valued acoustics and considered sound above visual aesthetic considerations is, I would venture, refreshingly laudable.

An altogether more encouragingly optimistic article by David MacFarlane in Saturday’s Globe and Mail asks why anyone who has no interest in opera should give two hoots about this new development? His inspiring, cogent and anecdotal answer not only tells Toronto’s public why it should be proud of The Four Seasons, but turns out also to be an astonishingly convincing critique of commercialised contemporary civilisation.

Civilisation, he says, should not pander to ignorance but should instead encourage curiosity rather than depend on
“a balanced exchange of information from someone who knows something to someone else who already knows the same thing. That, if I'm not mistaken, is the axis of idiocy on which a good deal of contemporary life is already based. That is reality TV.
Civilization is about another kind of exchange — from someone who either knows a lot about something or is very good at it, to someone who doesn't know as much, or is nowhere near as good but who is either interested enough to learn or curious enough to become interested; who is, in other words, alive.
The ideal consumer, I sometimes think, would be deceased enough to stay permanently within his or her demographic, but alive enough to still be spending money. As markets get more and more narrowly focused, anything that appears to be outside the confines of a target audience — anything that might arouse something as uncontained as curiosity or as broadly based as learning — is either deleted or explained to death. And as the media increasingly surrenders to the commercial demand to level the relationship between those who send out information and those who receive it, those of us who enjoy the serendipity of general interest, and who depend on the expertise of others to point the way to knowledge or pleasure, or even, perish the thought, to wisdom, look elsewhere for sustenance.

“The one responsibility a city has is the encouragement of the possibility of excellence.”

Taint Modern

2006-06-13T18:54:00.000+02:00

At the end of his recent Guardian article, ‘Isms come back with a vengeance’ Adrian Searle worries that the problem with the Tate Modern is its popularity.

“It is difficult to see how it can reasonably cope with the volume of visitors, many of whom will have little chance to pause and savour either individual works or their new contexts. They won't get the gags, they won't be moved or touched. Instead, they'll be crushed.”
Not a new problem for art museums and galleries: the Museé du Luxembourg here in Paris, to name only one, is regularly full to bursting point and the queues that extend around the building by day, and on occasions, late into the night, show no sign of shortening even inside the exhibition hall. But visitor numbers for the Tate exceed the Pompidou Centre, the Museum of Modern Art in New York and the Guggenheim in Bilbao.

So how is it that the plastic arts are able to wallow in a popularity that the art of serious music can only crave? Deyan Sudjic in an Observer article [May 1 2005] covers most of the ground in explaining the Tate’s laudable success although he swiftly glosses over the fact that entry to the museum is free, which I’m sure is of more than passing significance.

The Beeb and the usual pundits made much of the series of free downloads that were available from the BBC last year – expressing astonishment that “The take-up has been absolutely enormous!” While the rather more cautious, considered response from Noseda now seems laden with a certain amount of satirical pessimism.

"I'm thrilled that our performances have reached such a large, new audience and hope this trial will encourage more people to experience and enjoy orchestral music live in concert."
I wonder if it has?

Both of these examples are unquestionably marketing success stories; the former, for reasons explained in Deyan’s article, and because museums remain high on the cultural tourist’s itinerary; the latter because large numbers of people now have conspicuously redundant, acquisitively hungry portable media devices hanging about their necks.

Classical music – or at least the idealised sound of classical music - still has a certain cachet. By appealing to widespread dilettantism it inspires an intellectual elitism, which is why it remains popular in film scores, and why orchestral samples pervade serious news bulletins, ads etc. However, shifting the audience’s transitory interest from the periphery to the core is quite another matter: a matter not of marketing, but of education.

To make any sense of the statistics we’d need to know a few more details. For example: what proportion of the average 103-minute visit do Tate Modern visitors actually spend looking at paintings - as opposed to ascending and descending the various stairways, visiting one of the largest art bookshops in the world and pondering the range of hot or cold beverages? Similarly, we’d need to know how many freeloaders were sufficiently impressed or inspired by wall-to-wall Beethoven to cough-up their hard-earned cash and attend a live performance?

Adrian Searle needn’t worry; if the Tate becomes over-popular they can always starting charging an entry fee. Besides, Nicholas Serota, (the Tate’s director) is struggling with a rather different problem:

“…to deal with the single greatest challenge facing the Tate - its inability to afford to buy new works in an exploding art market. We need people to give us great works.”
And we need musicians to give us great performances – and we too are unable, or unwilling to pay.

More Reciepts than Beats

2006-06-06T00:34:00.000+02:00

One could be forgiven for mistaking the online debate between Greg Sandow and his New York chum, Alan Kozinn for a dispute between two accountants. The music industry is at the heart of their debate – by which I mean the business of commerce - not music itself - let alone the love of music.

In my humble opinion there’s a crucial distinction between the parlous state of the music industry, and the condition of classical music, which by contrast, is increasingly threatened by it’s own defenders. Am I even allowed to venture the opinion that sales figures and statistics are not necessarily the only (or even a very useful) indicator of the level of interest in classical music?

I appreciate that these guys are drawing on statistical evidence to back up their assertions but it’s possible to draw all manner of conclusions from such selective data as we can see by the disparity of their views. On a number of occasions (notably in his online book) Greg Sandow has sited the greying and shrivelling of concert audiences as evidence of the imminent demise of the art form. But as this reflects the general demographic throughout much of the western world it’s neither as surprising nor as significant as he’d have us believe.

That the classical music industry is in trouble seems to me as plain as day but the methods used to remedy the problems are in themselves part of the cause. The widespread reverence for contemporary management and marketing practices often has us barking up the wrong tree. Despite Klaus Heymann’s best efforts, I don’t believe that the sales technique of a peanut vendor is a pertinent means of propagating the fine arts. The last 20 years of business development, have left few arts organisations, whether orchestras or major record companies, with a musician or even a serious music lover at their head. Instead we find a businessman/woman leading a large enough team of under managers to form a small orchestra of their own. Decca Records now has more staff than ever before, yet not one of them is a record producer. The LSO has more than 5 times the administrative staff it had 20 years ago – 7 of them engaged in marketing alone. Interestingly enough, in the 1980’s they chose

“a revolutionary orchestral manager plucked from the ranks of the LSO’s cellos to run the orchestra on the basis that he had owned an antique shop and therefore knew how to read accounts – he took on the job without actually knowing what the crisis was. He cleared the deficit in two years – and took the risk in 1985 of mounting Claudio Abbado’s costly – but highly successful - ‘Mahler, Vienna and the Twentieth Century’ festival.”

The LSO: A Century of Triumph and Turbulence by Richard Morrison

But now that we’re in the 21st century, arts organisations no longer have the remit to lead public opinion: to recommend, inform, or educate. Instead they follow popular creed – chasing trends and market share. Some of the small independent record companies still have some success because, for the most part, they continue to be led by a team – or by an autocrat – with clear vision and passion for a particular branch of music. Meanwhile, the so-called majors plunge ever deeper into the pit of mediocrity.

Post Musical

2006-06-03T00:02:00.000+02:00

The time is coming when machines will supersede musicians. Once sampling technology is capable of quantifying all the criteria that characterise performance we’ll have no further need of professional practitioners. Such a time is getting closer and closer... The better sample libraries have already amassed gigabytes of samples that codify attack, duration, decay and release. Even slurred liaisons between notes are captured and enshrined: each with every possible type of articulation. All the user has to do is bolt all the bits together in a convincing fashion.

Quite obviously, that’ll take a bit of practice – somewhere around 20 years would be usual if professional musicians are to be believed, but fortunately it’s now possible to buy the New Performance Tool Tutorial DVD-ROM (for a only $39 – which is nothing, when you’ve already spent close on $5K for the big box of audio Meccano) in which Paul Steinbauer

"deliver[s] the expert knowledge you need to maximize your investment in the Symphonic Library. "

But on the other hand, it’ll become increasingly difficult for musicians to maximise their investment, but we’re going to need people who are able to drive this machinery. And without knowing how, when, and why a particular attack follows a particular decay, it’ll be impossible to compose, construct, or even re-construct any convincing performances at all! I’m sure Mr Steinbauer and his counterparts have got this angle covered too, but nevertheless, it’ll be a tricky procedure - at least until they’ve analysed and codified the almost infinite number of variables in this sphere too!

So perhaps there will be some work here for musicians after all. While the boffins are busy quantifying everything from sympathetic secondary resonance to individual characteristic head resonance, we’ll need someone to operate the increasingly complex software – and who better than musicians? After all, they’re already equipped with the expertise: they won’t even need to read the manuals. They might however, need to do a bit of practice from time to time, just to remind themselves how the old instruments actually worked; how gesture translates into sound and how other similar niceties added character to performance. In fact, with such vastly complex sample libraries I can imagine that they might even prefer playing their old acoustic instruments to activating the increasingly complex if perfectly cultivated samples.

Musicians might even be persuaded to endorse personalized sample libraries so that it’d be possible not only to replicate the sound of the Vienna Philharmonic, but also to build one’s own unique orchestra of rising stars.

One small difficulty springs to mind though. Once today’s rising stars have peaked and waned, and the erratic, imperfect performances of our past no longer appeal to what will be the contemporary taste for the uniformity of stylised perfection – there won’t be any performers left for us to imitate, replicate and sample!

Populitism

2006-05-23T23:37:00.000+02:00

Thinking about Daniel Barenboim’s recent assault on elevator music and the way in which major classical works are demeaned by their association with commercial products set me wondering why the great masterworks should appeal to the brand-mongers in the first place.

Perhaps we should be pleased that there are elements of these old-fashioned idioms that still have some appeal. Were I an incurable optimist, I might subscribe to the tiresome and ubiquitous view that such uses serve to popularise the genre. But having watched Nigel Kennedy traipse through the 80’s laden with the responsibility of bringing cultural discernment to the masses, which even then, was even less likely than Henman winning Wimbledon - I have no such illusions. [Kennedy now seems to be consigned to perpetual limbo, in which he is doomed to perform the 4 Seasons for the rest of eternity with a Polish Chamber Orchestra]. However, if as I suppose, it’s the characteristic sound and dynamism of orchestral music that appeals, more than the power of the musical composition itself, we can’t expect even this fascination to last much longer: sampling and recording technologies are idealising and stylising the sound of classical music so rapidly that for the great majority of people, the real acoustic experience of an orchestra within a concert hall will soon become an utterly alien and overly demanding experience.

So why, on the one hand, is classical music facing the claim that it needs to become more popular and less elitist, while on the other, marketing companies hi-jack it with the express intention of exploiting its appeal to the widest possible public. Is it just an overt attempt to inveigle middle class snobs into the dilettantism of associating their classy purchase with an overtly elitist art form - or is the 'sound of classical' now more appealing than the music?

Look Back in Anger

2006-05-14T19:43:00.000+02:00

There’s a lot of talk about what ought to be done or what needs to be done to remedy the many and varied ills that thwart the progress and inhibit the evolution of classical music. The predominant view though, is that we’ve done OK thus far: if only we could maintain the status quo, and perhaps find a way of imbuing the art form with a tad more popularity. Few critics, practitioners, commentators, industry insiders or outsiders have the courage or conviction to declare that the musical world has gone horribly wrong – and not only slightly and recently - but profoundly, if not irrevocably.

John Boyden has no such inhibitions. As the founder of the New Queen’s Hall Orchestra he’s clearly a man with a mission – to rescue the symphony orchestra from the grip of stylised mediocrity. A maverick he may be, but he’s not alone: he has the support of the entire New Queen’s Hall Orchestra, although its website, and the Edwardian floral design of its new CD give little indication of the revolutionary spirit contained within.

From the outset Boyden entreated the orchestra to take risks and to break the conventional boundaries:
“I don’t care if you don’t play together and I don’t mind if you are out of tune, but I care like hell if you don’t phrase. Every phrase must grow or die. We want none of the static quality that is now so widespread.”

But it’s not only the orchestra’s philosophy that sets it apart; its entire make up harks back to another era. The strings play on gut strings, the flutes are wooden, the 19th and early 20th century French oboes, clarinets and bassoons generally produce a much lighter more astringent texture than their lush modern counterparts. The natural horns, like the narrow bore brass, have a brighter tone than modern instruments that pierces the orchestral texture without overwhelming or submerging it.

It perhaps seems rather strange that performance practices, so fundamental to exponents of baroque music, have until now been largely ignored insofar as they concern the performance of 19th and 20th century repertoire. Boyden’s suggestion that the answer for this lies between the two evils [my adjective, not his] of Americanisation and the introduction of phonographic recording may be a sweeping generalisation but it does at least serve to introduce his other bête noire: classical music recording practices.

"Rather like cosmetic surgery, digital editing is most attractive to people desperate to appear in the best possible light. Once hooked on the idea that removing wrinkles leaves nothing behind but perfection, visits to the surgeon’s knife become routine. Yet, with each nip and tuck the humanity of the person is compromised. Control-freak record producers and their nervous artists are similarly drugged and will spend days and weeks nipping and tucking away at their recordings in an effort to present the smoothest possible surface to the world. No doubt, at one time such lack of incident was attractive to the critics, just as factory-engineered artifacts once seemed preferable over the handmade. Perhaps their hope is for a result so lacking in ‘flaws’ that critics are denied a chance to gain enough of a foothold to find specific fault. After all, the majority of fancy post-production work sets out to impress the critics with the infallibility of the team engaged in the recording rather than enhance the music being performed."

The New Queen’s Hall Orchestra’s recording, recorded live in Fairfield Halls Croydon, testifies to Boyden’s claim that unlike other so called live recordings, it really is the real unadulterated truth. The concept behind this enhanced CD [that also includes a veritable manifesto of ideas] aligns it more closely with the homespun records now so favoured by the pop music world than with the manicured consumer product wherein lies its heritage. The important difference being that these are not untrained amateurs striving to find a voice, but some of the industry’s consummate professionals railing at the status quo. The NQHO

“attracts many of London 's finest orchestral musicians, keen to enjoy the freedom denied them elsewhere.”

That the musicians of the NQHO have had the courage to release a warts-and-all performance is greatly to their credit: that they have dared to do so in our sterilised age of uniformity should earn them our thanks, praise and encouragement.

In Pursuit of Passivity

2006-04-29T23:51:00.000+02:00

Amidst all the debate about the cultural threat to classical music, few commentators seem to be addressing the causes of its unpopularity. Instead, they tend only to address the effects - and even then, they generally propose employing the self same ills that assault culture in the first place: namely fashion, marketing and advertising.

Harry Sinclair Lewis

Our value system has changed radically – there are fewer and fewer respected proponents of high art than there used to be. This is not because there are fewer orchestras, broadcasting organisations, record companies or critics than there were, but because they neither command much respect nor have much influence on the wider public. In the past, such bodies were influential - not just among the cognoscenti - but within the public at large. When a major orchestra gave a concert, fronted by a well-known conductor, it was widely assumed to be an event worth attending. The yellow label of Deutsche Grammophon was a badge of excellence, not only signifying the calibre of the musicians and their performance, but a high technical standard of recording and manufacture.

Such organisations carry little sway in the modern world. Instead, advertisers constantly extol the ubiquitous so-called choice, while passive amusement replaces traditional culture. We increasingly pass our leisure with whatever gives least bother. We no longer waste our time trying to convince the public that active participation in the arts is actually extremely rewarding; preferring instead to realign the art form to improve its passive appeal. The media and advertisers are today’s informers. They have no need for depth,

“simply multiple surfaces. But the surface is the very breeding ground of parody. "Those who go beneath the surface do so at their own peril," warns Oscar Wilde but "those who remain on the surface, however, fail to experience anything whatsoever. Dismissal, not antipathy is the real danger.”

In a recent article [from which I’ve taken the previous quotations], On the Necessity of Listening As Confrontation, Chadwick Jenkins draws attention to the decidedly active verbs that were once invoked when referring to taking or pursuing one’s pleasure. He goes on to point out that,

“… involvement is the price of desire that I am willing to pay; indeed the payment, the exertion figures into the very nature of the desire itself and becomes the essential substrate of my enjoyment. But too often we are concerned only with "receiving pleasure".

The power to enjoy and understand our culture was acquired by tradition – In his novel Babbitt, Sinclair Lewis describes a civilisation that had no tradition and could therefore only work, or amuse itself with rubbish; it had heard of the past, but lacked the power to enjoy it or understand. EM Forster warned that although life without culture will not necessarily be a nightmare,

“There will be work for all and play for all. But the work and play will be split; the work will be mechanical and the play frivolous. If you drop tradition and culture you lose your chance of connecting work and play and creating a life which is all of a piece.”

We can’t employ marketing techniques to make classical music popular when it’s these very same agents that atrophy thought and active engagement. Reward comes from participation; from wrestling with the difficulties and complexities of a work of art - not from lying back and letting it wash over us.

E.M. Forster, Benjamin Britten and Eric Crozier working on Billy Budd at the composer’s home, Crag House, Aldeburgh, 1949

www.Popmatters.com - Variations on a Theme: On the Necessity of Listening As Confrontation – 20th April 2006 Chadwick Jenkins.
EM Forster – Two Cheers for Democracy - Pub Arnold 1951
The Picture of Dorian Gray – Oscar Wilde - 1891 Ward, Lock and Bowden
Photo Sinclair Lewis - AFP/AFP/Getty ImagesPhoto Babbitt - Fenwick Library George Mason University

Ambiguity, Political Correctness and Uniformity

2006-04-22T20:16:00.000+02:00

“the world that we live in…makes it ethically more and more difficult to make music, because it is a world which gives us answers, even when there is no question.”

Once again, Daniel Barenboim hits the nail on the head in this week’s Reith Lecture, ‘The Magic of Music’. As ever, he’s not afraid of addressing a number of neglected, misunderstood and politically inconvenient subjects.

He wades deep into his own cerebral landscape, lauding ambiguity in music where it is
“a doubtful quality” in life, expressing thoughts and ideas that are anathema to the modern world of precision, quantification and circumscription. Nevertheless, a fascination with ambiguity and incompleteness is central to the work of many artists and it is a perfect analogue of how art demands the active participation and involvement of its public. Barenboim says so much more about the much-debated subject of the future of classical music in two sentences than other, more prolific theorists are able to convey in acres of web space.

“classical music as we know it…will not survive unless we make a radical effort to change our attitude to it and unless we take it away from a specialised niche that it has become,”

But his view, unlike that of most others is not that we should re-align classical music to suit modern trends by making it “immediately accessible” - but through education. He stresses how it must be central to our lives:

“Not something ornamental, not only something enjoyable, not only something exciting, but something essential.”

I long to inhabit the Maestro’s world where the courage to have a point of view is rewarded rather than repressed, where ambiguity is prized instead of being crushed and where responsibilities are inseparable from rights.

Reith Lectures 2006

2006-04-07T19:25:00.000+02:00

Having just listened to Daniel Barenboim give the first of this year's Reith Lectures I'm rather stuck for words. Or at least, I don't have anything to say that approaches the intuitive elegance of the Maestro.
How does he manage to express himself so forcefully and express such abstruse ideas so equivocally in a foreign language?
I'll be intrigued to hear what the world at large makes of his speech and of his equally compelling responses to the pre-ordained, mostly self-referential questions. While I’m still wondering how such a being found his way into the 21st century – he seems to be perfectly at ease.
Don't miss it!

CHARM offensive

2006-04-03T00:10:00.000+02:00

I recently wrote an article for Tokafi.com asking why classical record producers are unknown to the public when their counterparts in the of pop music world are often highly regarded - even notorious. One of my conclusions was that classical music producers have ceased to be innovative; an idea confirmed by David Patmore of the University of Sheffield in a sympoisum for the Centre for the History and Analysis of Recorded Music (CHARM) last September.

Happily, the objective of CHARM’s academic team is to “promote the study of music as performance through a specific focus on recordings”. But unusually for such an academic body, its remit is not limited to historical research: a forthcoming symposium in June will investigate why there “has been no concerted attempt to transform the classical audio recording into a creative commodity”, and why “the interventionist production techniques commonplace in recordings of popular music have had little if any impact on classical audio recordings”.

I look forward to this CHARM offensive with interest and enthusiasm.

Royal Holloway, University of London, Egham, Surrey - the home of CHARM

An Acquired Taste

2006-03-28T00:43:00.000+02:00

It seems that the concept of ‘an acquired taste’ is becoming an anachronism. Instant gratification is much more appealing – and more easily marketable. Acquiring a taste for something takes time, thought and effort. What used to be a sign of maturity and cultivation is now deemed elitist and old-fashioned. Traditionally, it’s children who like sugary sweets, simple delights and crave the uncomplicated, whereas adults thrive on refinement, educated taste and the joy of plunging into the pleasures of anticipation. Such sophistication isn’t reserved for fine wines and gastronomy either, but permeates every field of the arts and most of the pastimes associated with them.

Ever since the advent of LP – and even before - there’ve been a keen bunch of music lovers [and a sizeable pack of nerds], who are more or less passionate about furthering the development of realistic recorded sound and all things audiophile. Each new technology has its detractors as well as its enthusiastic advocates – this was true with the change from acoustic to electrical recording, from LP to CD, and from analogue to digital. The relative merits of each technology have always been a source of protracted debate – until now. The classical hi-fi enthusiast has become a lost voice: overwhelmed by the welter of misinformation, publicity and hype: as far as the mainstream is concerned – the audiophile is as scarce as the paedophile is prolific. Everyone is apparently happy enough with the ubiquitous MP3 and lossy audio codecs that bleed the opulence out of high quality sound, stripping it down to the bare essentials?

The prevailing view now seems to be, “what’s the point in bothering about the quality if you can’t tell the difference?” Where are the fierce defenders of analogue who were so outspoken when digital recording muscled in and ousted the LP, and why are they silent?

Advocates of compression technology usually claim that in tests, most people were unable to distinguish between 160kbps and CD quality. So what? 8 out of 10 owners said their dogs preferred Pedigree Chum. I’d like to hear the voice of the dogs that preferred something else! What is happening to the ongoing quest for higher fidelity? We may not be doing too badly thus far, but we’re still a long way from audio-recreation that’s indistinguishable from real, live sound. If we’re ever to attain that goal we must persevere with technological improvement. And that requires investment. Yet there will be no monies to invest if we sit back and say – hey, that’s good enough - besides, who can tell the difference anyway? The prospect of future development in an already impoverished industry is likely to be severely circumscribed if we all blithely accept the standards of mediocrity.

The classical music market is of particular importance in this sector of the music industry because it has always been the leading edge of qualitative improvement – primarily because the wide dynamic range of acoustic music is so much more dependent on high quality sound than popular music forms, but also because the music is less transitory.

But leaving aside the greater good of the classical music industry, why should we trouble ourselves with the acquisition of something as insubstantial and nebulous as a taste for hi-fidelity audio? Why waste time agonising over computational algorithms when you could be enjoying the music?

I’d say that there’s pleasure to be found in the quest for something of value. Instantaneous gratification, the most insubstantial of pleasures, is fine but it seldom lasts – here one minute gone the next, usually without so much as a lingering taste to savour. The greater reward of more lasting pleasure is only obtained by effort, perseverance and serious intent. Indeed, much of the pleasure lays in the quest itself, in the anticipation rather than the result, the pure and simple. After all, the acquisition of a taste for fine wine, or gourmet food is not generally deemed to be tiresome or unrewarding.

Audio quality is notoriously difficult to evaluate. One has to devote a lot of time to listening and learning to appreciate the differences and nuances: they’re not obvious – at least, not so obvious that they’ll hit you in the face the moment you switch on. It takes time to familiarise yourself with the recorded sound before learning to distinguish the effects of data compression. Consequently, it’s very easy to say no one can hear the difference, when few people yet recognise the telltale artefacts of the technology.

The same is true of any and every new technology. We’re swept away on the first tide of awe and enthusiasm. It happened with the invention of the first popular synthesizer, the Yamaha DX7, it happened with CD players, and it continues to happen with every new piece of computer software that hits the market. Only time and familiarity make us aware of the crudeness of the earliest implementation and drive practitioners to strive with greater determination to master the technology and learn to exploit it without succumbing to easy temptation. Anyone who’s noted the way in which the Vocoder inveigled itself into 90% of 70s pop songs ought to be familiar with this problem.

The danger is more apparent to industry professionals who spend their days listening to recordings. I’ve a colleague who claims to hear almost every edit in every CD. It’s no idle boast, but a source of regret that detracts from his pleasure of recorded music. The point is that what is inaudible at first, becomes apparent after some time. Therefore, to state coolly and equivocally that it’s impossible to hear the difference between high-resolution recordings and compressed audio data files is as narrow-minded and luddite as denying that recent technological advances have revolutionised the listening experience for millions of music lovers.

Acquiring the taste for, and the ability to appreciate high-quality audio, takes time and experience: not because it’s difficult or requires the hearing of a bat, but because its not easy to know what to listen for. I can’t begin to explain how to evaluate audio quality, except to say that it’s no longer a question of spotting the arcane resonance of early 78rpm recordings, or the hiss and crackle of the LP. Classical music engineers endeavour to capture the space that surrounds the musicians and to re-construct the 3-dimensionality of live music performance. Such qualities are often the first casualties of data compression. Nevertheless, their absence is not that easy to spot – you don’t know what you’re missing, particularly if you have no comparison! But what I can say is that without the benefit of good hi-fi and the best possible media, we’re ill equipped to judge the efficacy of engineer’s work.

...oh and another thing.

2006-03-20T12:06:00.000+01:00

In the last blog I forgot to mention one of the finer Parisian acoustics - The Auditorium de la Sorbonne.

But it was otherwise 'occupied' this weekend.

Now closed until further notice.

New Symphonic Halls in Paris

2006-03-16T17:24:00.000+01:00

As Mr Downey notes in a recent blog, Paris is to be graced with not one, not two, but three new - or newly renovated - concert halls: The Salle Pleyel, due to re-open this September, a new concert hall for Radio France, and yet another at Cité de la Musique.

Such investment in the arts is very welcome and one hopes that the best-laid plans are not laid to waste by the black art of acoustics.

We’ll discover what’s become of the Salle Pleyel at the end of the summer, but the existing concert hall at Cité de la Musique is acoustically utterly unremarkable, and the Salle Olivier Messiaen - the largest studio at Maison de Radio France - has the musty, tired, characterless sound so common to radio studios - although I can see the benefit of having a sort of blank slate – it's like a fashion model - not very interesting, but adaptable.

However, one might have hoped that more would be made of the Salle Gaveau, (click here to view) which has only 15 concerts in March, 6 in April and 5 so far in May. If it were run along the lines of the Wigmore Hall, it would be a real boon to chamber music in Paris.

Even the Salle Cortot, designed by Auguste Perret, [architect of the Théâtre des Champs-Elysées] and which according to Cortot, “sounds like a Stradivarius” has a busier season – although as part of the Ecole Normale de Musique it seems to be tied up with student activities much of the time.

top left - Salle Pleyel 2003 (going on 1970) ~ centre left - Cité de la Musique ~ bottom right- Salle Cortot

Lookalikes

2006-03-11T18:43:00.000+01:00

Has anyone noticed the similarity between The Beaux Arts Trio logo and Homer Simpson?

"Silence is a sounding thing...

2006-03-09T13:47:00.000+01:00

...To one who listens hungrily” - Gwendolyn Bennett

How long will it be before I can download silence to listen to on my iPod? I want silence – I like it – I am not afraid of it, or of myself. But I can’t have it: Sonic assault abounds. In bars, restaurants, supermarkets, shops, busses, and now, thanks to the ubiquity of the tizzy leakage from insufficiently well plugged ear buds, on trains too. Background muzak has wafted into our lives just as smoke has drifted out. And in my view, passive listening is just as bad for one’s health.

It’s not the apparent ceaseless need to listen to music that worries me: but that I don’t really believe most people are actually listening at all. We’re inured to media bombardment on all fronts; advertising is almost continuous in one form or another, and it is into this corporate realm that music now tempts and teases us.

Microsoft’s refrain (with its annoying, poorly executed fade) at PC start-up and the repeated jingles on commercial radio are the more overtly irritating anti-musical strains that violate our sensibilities. But the vast panoply of music that is produced, owned, and distributed by giant corporations and which assaults our senses and insults our intelligence is commercial branding, designed to be inescapable rather than listened to. Music provides a backdrop and the soundtrack to the increasingly idealised lives that we are encouraged to buy into. It is not, for the most part, created to stimulate, nor to encourage thought or engagement, but to pacify, calm, soothe and inevitably, to sell.

Popularity’s proximity to conformity encourages and enhances this effect. No doubt the world is brimming with original musical acts, but those who achieve mainstream commercial success will seldom threaten the status quo. This is truer now than ever before – thanks to the rapaciousness of contemporary commercialism, where record companies prize saleability above originality. This quest for popularity for its own sake is conceited and culturally stultifying.

The same insidious conformity threatens classical music too. If we want to know why audience numbers are dropping and fewer people are buying classical music recordings, we would do well to look a bit closer at the products that advertise musicians: namely CDs. The shackles of potent commercialism force classical music into an invidious position. Popularity and demanding art forms are rare companions.

A recording used to be representative of a musician’s concert performance. Indeed, it is widely assumed that the objective of a good classical recording is to re-create the sense of a live performance. But the way records are made has changed; recordings have assumed unwarranted influence, and in doing so, have altered the way musicians perform and, to a lesser extent, the way audiences listen to concerts. CDs - impeccably honed, unthreatening, perfect and as stylised as a supermodel - have become the standard by which musicians are assessed.

It is astonishingly rare these days for musicians to release live recordings. Sure, there are plenty that claim to be live, but they usually involve editing between a number of performances and a series of post-concert patches. The concoction that results from this elaborate hoax is rarely more than a cheapskate substitute for a studio recording bearing few of the human qualities present in real live performance.

Accuracy is of course something of a prerequisite to a fine performance but it is not an end in itself. If a performance – or a recording – is merely accurate, it might at best be considered impressive. If it has no other, more inspired and inspiring qualities, it is worthless because it will communicate nothing. Herein lies the problem. Classical music, like all demanding art forms is not easy, either to perform, or to listen to. But like any human communication, if it is to convey something, it must have humanity: it must have soul. CDs rarely do: they exist to be sold. And in order to appeal to the widest possible public, they must be unthreatening and conform to the norm. Consequently, they commonly have little to offer beyond the academic. This is not because the musicians are soulless or incapable but because they are entangled in a vicious circle that compels them to equal the idealised performances enshrined on disc. As a result, performances are in danger of becoming constrained and narrow: when risk becomes too risky - conformity rules.

We can reclaim music from the corporate giants if we so desire. But we need to use our heads, and we need to give ourselves space to think - and to listen. Once we re-establish listening as an active pastime we’ll have come some way toward this goal. Listening is not doing nothing. Music need not be – and should not be merely background. We can pod-to-our-heart’s-content while we’re 'multitasking', but lets not fool ourselves; distraction is not listening – music and musicians deserve our full attention.

Read Barenboim's The Phenomenon of Sound

£ per Kilo

2006-03-08T00:51:00.000+01:00

Given that record companies are avoiding many of the costs associated with CD sales [blank discs, pressing costs, artwork printing costs, some of the distribution costs etc] is it not reasonable to expect music downloads to be cheaper than CDs? Well, if the labels were seen to be sharing profits more equitably with artists, I might say no. If they were investing in whopping servers with unimaginably broad bandwidth in order to facilitate faster download times of larger files, I might say no; charge us the full price and keep up the good work! But as neither of these, nor indeed any other real qualitative improvements are apparent, I think yes – they are too costly.

Clearly the price of recordings has little to do with the cost of production – at least, not on an individual basis, otherwise one might reasonably expect an orchestral recording to cost substantially more than a solo guitar record. It wasn't so many years ago that the cost had some bearing on quality – the quality of a performance, and the calibre of the musicians imbued a disc with added value: Decca and Deutsche Grammophon for example were among the bastions of recorded classical music. Nowadays, one is just as likely to find a first class performance on Naxos at a third of the price.

The arrival of the high-resolution formats, DVD-A, SACD and their ilk, were supposed to persuade us that it was worth paying a higher price for improved technical quality. And now, at 99 cents for 2½ minutes of music, we’re paying for a full price CD, but what we get is an impoverished squashed file squirted into our computers with the assurance that is near CD quality.

My concern is whether people really know what they’re getting. If they do, and don’t care, then that’s up to them, but if they’re having the wool yanked down over their bulging eyes while a shiny new slim line iPod is stuffed into the clammy paw, then I think they might prefer to be better informed – or at least - not to be misinformed. Naxos’ claim that

“ CD Quality sound (128Kbps; broadband required) and/or Near-CD Quality [at] (64Kbps)”
is, quite frankly, risible, but they are not alone in promulgating such misleading misinformation.

The British Federation of Audio stuck in its oar this week.

"The UK's specialist AV consumer electronics trade body has come out saying it's concerned that consumers aren't getting the enjoyment they could from their portable music devices or hi-fis, with today's music fans happy to download and listen to low bit-rate music files - which often don't come even close to CD quality. Listening tests carried out by various members of the Federation reveal what most of us already know, namely that the standard recording rate of around 128kbits per second is audibly inferior to CD by a wide margin. And although higher bit-rates of 256kbps and above deliver a far better performance it's still not as good as that from CD."

It’s not so surprising that quality is not of great concern when most listening involves portable media players with ear buds, or in an environment that is far from ideal.

“Among 1,031 adult respondents to a consumer-behaviour survey published last year by the CEA (Consumer Electronics Organisation), 34% said they listened to music at home primarily on a PC, compared with just 26% who said they used a stereo or surround-sound receiver as their main home listening system”

We can only hope that as hand-held players become integrated into home hi-fi systems high-end audio components will reveal the inadequacies of compressed file formats.

I can understand too that the importance of quality depends on the type of music. Eric Dahl of PC World claims that in tests he made with colleagues

“Most of those 192-kbps files were indistinguishable from files that used lossless compression. And not just to my ears: in the audience we had an acoustical engineer from NHT (Now Hear This), in Benicia, California, and the owner of Audio High, a high-end stereo store in Mountain View, California. But we found that as you drop below 192 kbps, the difference in quality becomes noticeable pretty quickly.”

I wonder though, what sort of recordings were used for the tests – not acoustic classical music with a wide dynamic range I’ll warrant? Anyhow, I’ve fired off an email to ask. As I pointed out in an earlier posting, classical music and other acoustically recorded music are heavily dependent on hi-fidelity to give the best representation of their wide dynamic range. Modern pop, in contrast, has almost no dynamic range at all – what little remains after recording and mixing is generally expunged in the mastering process.

Contrary to what might be imagined, loud music does not necessarily require more data than soft music to create a faithful representation. The following chart shows a screen shot of iTunes lossless downloads of Vaughn-Williams’ A Sea Symphony. The variable bit rates for each of the movements adapt according to the demands the music makes on the data compression system. What is interesting is that the softest movement (track 13) requires the highest bit rate for adequate representation. Consider then the mastication that must inevitably occur under higher compression.

Self-styled pundits are too quick to dismiss the idea that it is possible to distinguish compressed files from their full bandwidth originals. Blind tests – notoriously difficult to set up accurately - are conjured to convince us of the efficacy of data compression techniques. I have yet to see evidence of either the techniques or equipment used to carry out these tests, or what recordings were blessed by being chosen. As the BFA point out in their press release,

“Customers eager to take advantage of the excellent home entertainment options now available – particularly plasma TVs, are spending an inordinate amount on the TV monitor – several thousands of pounds in some cases - yet will only spend a small sum on the audio section, especially the loudspeakers, of the system. Perhaps this explains why test comparisons reveal little. No mention of the hi-fi components or quality is ever made. It’s now assumed that any system is good enough.”

What connoisseur would be at ease making a rash evaluation of a fine wine after taking one gulp from a dirty goblet whilst chewing on a mouth full of peanuts? How can we be so certain of what is - and what is not good enough, after evaluating an MP3 on ear buds in the metro?

I doubt neither the integrity nor the earnestness of those who carry out such tests: just the ease with which they reach their resolute conclusions. I know from my own experience that it is very, very easy to mislead oneself and, how extremely difficult it is to reach definitive conclusions. However, I am also quite convinced that extended listening over many hours to high-resolution audio is rather less tiring than listening to poorer quality sound; a view confirmed by at least one blogger. Quite why this should be the case, if there is no discernable difference, suggests to me that the subject may at least merit somewhat more protracted consideration than it presently receives.

Not all music is transitory. Not all recordings are perishable goods. Classical music might, one would hope, have a rather longer life expectancy than most pop music, which is by nature here-today-gone-tomorrow. For this reason alone, we ought to preserve our recordings in the highest quality available – those at least that are important to us. Once a file is compressed with a lossy codec, it is irretrievably altered: it is impossible to recover the jettisoned information. As Randall Stross pointed out in his article in the New York Times last March,

“… we should be looking out 5 years, or even 50 years, and that's why, when we are building collections from scratch today, we should have the option to collect with true CD quality.”

I like his naïve notion of ‘true CD quality’, but even CD quality is no more than a step in what should be a continuous quest for improvement; not some absolute, beyond which it is impossible or inadvisable to venture.

In the mean time, isn’t it about time we started paying for our downloads by the Kilobyte? Then we’d know that we were getting what we paid for.

Freedom Fried

2006-02-23T23:15:00.000+01:00

The notion of ‘freedom’ is rarely out of the news at the moment. Most often because it features heavily in the missives emitted from the White House. It seems to go hand-in-hand with democracy, but present circumstances have blurred and befuddled this comfortable coupling. On the one hand there’s Hamas: democratically elected by the Palestinians - and the ever-tightening grip of Britain’s nanny state on the other. Then there’s the infamous Danish cartoon: freedom of speech, or insensitive prejudice?

This week, I counted 20 different types of marmalade in my parent’s local supermarket. That’s freedom of choice. Unfortunately, I couldn’t compare the choices with those available in any other shop, because, owing to the overbearing dominance of the aforementioned outlet, there’re no longer any other marmalade-mongers in the town.

With continuous CCTV surveillance there’s little need for the responsibility that was once the traditional partner of freedom. The introduction of identity cards and a raft of other hurried, ill-considered laws scrabbling onto the statute books there are fewer and fewer liberties left to protect.

Why is the public so complicit in its loss of freedom? Fear is perhaps one possible reason. Terrorism, militant Islam, lung cancer, rogue states, the axis of evil and Al Qaeda are only a few of today’s fearsome threats. And then there are the perpetrators: Bin Laden, Saddam, Abu Hamza etc, who are nothing less than international bogeymen. Surely we’re not safe in our beds with the likes of these roaming the mountainous wastelands of Afghanistan and Finsbury Park.

As a result, it seems a surprisingly simple task to pull the wool over the public’s eyes and force through a raft of new authoritarian laws. Freedom implies choice – no, it doesn’t imply it: it necessitates it. If I am a free man, I am free to commit, as well as not to commit crimes: and it's imperative that I have the choice. If I drive along the street and I know for a fact that to exceed the speed limit will result in a speeding fine – I no longer have a real choice. It follows then that I am relieved of my responsibility in equal measure. I no longer drive at a speed that I believe to be safe, but at a speed at which I will not invoke the wrath of the law. That is not freedom.

Six men went on trial last week for the theft of Edvard Munch’s Scream from the Munch Museum in Oslo. Security at the museum was pilloried because it was so lax and because the security staff, unlike the thieves, were unarmed. Of course, it is easy to laugh at misplaced trust after the event, but what makes people most trustworthy? Imbuing them with trust, or depriving them of responsibility? Trusting is risky and all too often gives way to abuse, but that’s the nature of freedom. Which is preferable – to live in a world where crime is rife but where the majority trust one another and reap the multifarious benefits that ensue – or to quest for the eradication of crime by all available means, including the sacrifice of freedom? That ‘violence breeds violence’ is a truism, but we keep on with the bloody war on terror anyway.

Freedom of choice is about more than marmalade, and having 120 TV channels. It's about whether to be social or anti-social, whether to prize one’s own rights more highly than the preferences of others. But it cannot be absolute in any society because one person’s freedoms will inevitably impinge on another’s, which is what happened to the Danish cartoonist. Europeans are [quite justifiably] adamant in defending their right to print such material, while at least as many Muslims are outraged; not necessarily by our freedom of expression, so much as our wanton lack of respect in exercising it.

With the world in its current condition, one might hope that the western - so called democratic free world - might have the self confidence not to need to become quite so defensive when the Muslim community [already squaring up to those it sees as its oppressors] feels the need to defend itself and its beliefs. We may well have had a justifiable right to publish and re-publish those images, but would it not have been more respectful and wiser in the circumstances to have apologised for the offence and quietly let the story die - especially in the light of the string of subsequent climb-downs, suspensions and resignations? Besides, I have to wonder quite why it took the Muslim community at least 4 months to find out about the cartoons. Who told them and when? The term Agent provocateur springs to mind for some reason… after all, where would we be without the ‘War on Terror’ and its bogeymen? It’s time we assessed what we mean by freedom, and decide whether it’s something we want to cherish, aspire to, or proscribe.

ultimate choice - absolute freedom

2006-02-13T18:10:00.002+01:00

The Internet is quite wonderful. Its appeal, in presenting almost unlimited choice is a truly contemporary phenomenon. Any musical group, no matter how esoteric is now able to present its music to a truly global audience. What idealistic egalitarianism! The record buyer, or consumer as they are now termed, is no longer at the mercy of cynical marketing executives in large multinational record companies. Freedom and liberty prevail.
Only one small question remains. How do we select the music we want to hear from the plethora available?

The mainstream media is continually cajoling the public to vote for the greatest of them all: whether it be the most famous historical personage, the greatest ever Britain or the latest and best teen pop idol. Such votes reveal little beyond the abject wretchedness of uninformed democratic choice.

When we buy books or CDs online we are regaled with other products bought by other of our supposedly like-minded contemporaries. The intention of such marketing is clear but why should we suppose that our fellow consumers are any better informed than ourselves? Do we really want our choices informed by nothing more than the uniformity of popularity?

Besides, whoever said that the public are only interested in discovering the very best? Uniqueness is surely a more desirable trait, and this is to be found in differences between one performance and another, between one interpretation and another. The quest for the best not only devalues variety, it denudes music of its humanity and its capacity for expression.

New systems are becoming available to help online music lovers to make new musical discoveries that suit their taste. Websites, such as Pandora, develop databases by using feedback and by monitoring patterns of usage in order to be able to recommend other music that they deem likely to be to the user’s taste. To me, such systems seem to be stultifying in the extreme. The cleverness of the site is terrifying, compelling and patronising in equal measure. But Pandora's claim to be able “to capture the essence of music at the most fundamental level” by analysing “the unique and magical musical identity of a song” including “everything from melody, harmony and rhythm, to instrumentation, orchestration, arrangement, lyrics,” is truly wide of the mark. Whilst musical analysis can be fascinating, stimulating and no doubt rewarding, what it has never been able to do with any success is to predict, prescribe or otherwise quantify the essence of music and what determines its appeal. It is common to speak of music as ‘a language’. If this is so, then it is a language beyond words: irreducible and impossible to paraphrase – wherein lies its power.

Unguided, unconsidered, disinterested recommendations may have something going for them, but if we don’t take pains to develop and inform our tastes they will be subsumed by mediocrity.

Record company artist and repertoire personnel used to guide the public through the contemporary musical landscape. Even the brand names of the larger labels suggested quality and musical maturity. The role of today’s A&R representatives are so circumscribed by the bean-counting executives to whom they answer that their choices are less recommendations than attempted predictions of up-and-coming stardom.

If the Internet is to offer real choice and to free us from the ravages of rampant directionless commercialism it must not abandon us to the desert of proliferation - an excess of choice is as baffling and inhibiting as a dearth. And like freedom, choice is not especially desirable when absolute.
“The record listener is a child of the supermarket. His self-expression is almost entirely a matter of selecting among packages that someone else designs. And he tends to think that these packages exhaust the possibilities. That kind of freedom can be tyrannical.”
Evan Eisenberg The Recording Angel

hi-fi dummed down

2006-02-05T14:58:00.000+01:00

Everything is black and white these days: Right and wrong, good and evil, for us or against us [by the way - we’re against you George]. Whatever happened to the grey areas: to subtlety, to the implicit, to ambiguity, to the transitory? Not everything can be deconstructed, quantified, referenced and categorised – least of all, music.

We could be forgiven for overlooking this annoying anomaly of the contemporary world when music industry professionals present us with a simple choice between lossy and lossless audio. The terms themselves are clear enough – insofar as they describe types of audio data compression. But the fact that they make no mention of the quality of the original recording can be misleading. As far as I can tell, iTunes files are limited to 128Kbit/sec, which they claim to be ”high-quality format that rivals CD quality”! Not much of a rival in my estimation – variable bit rate or not. To compress these files with a lossless encoder saves nothing, when 90% of the data from the original recording has already been jettisoned.

The name Compact Disc doesn’t merely describe a format, or data carrier, it also defines a clear standard of quality: at least the commercially available (Red Book) CD does. Typically, Apple (and it is not alone in doing so) suggests that iTunes makes it wonderfully easy to create your own custom music CD. Well, what they are describing here is not a CD in any qualitative sense, but as the public, quite reasonably associates the carrier with content; I think that such claims are misleading.

For the last decade and more, classical engineers have encoded their recordings at 20, and later at 24bit resolution – presenting a data stream of more than 2000Kbits/second, a quality only available commercially on a comparatively limited number of HDCDs and DVDAs. This chasm between state-of-the-art Hi-fi and what the public seem to be prepared to accept [in the name of portability] leaves the industry professionals in an invidious position: are we to continue making recordings at the highest possible quality, or follow the market trend, and record in lo-resolution?

Such an enquiry deserves to be left in rhetorical limbo but it does pose another question: what actually is contained in all that apparently redundant data? It’s all audio information after all. We’re told that it’s a pile of stuff of no real interest that we probably can’t hear anyway. I for one don’t believe that it’s quite so easy to define what we can and cannot hear. Besides, I find it extraordinary that less than 20 years ago not only hi-fi enthusiasts, but music lovers in general, were embroiled in heated debates about the relative merits of vinyl and CD. It wasn’t an esoteric debate either; the exclusive preserve of woolly-bearded audiophiles, but was of concern to everyone who wanted to ensure that an unscrupulous industry shouldn’t fob them off with a substandard product.

As Andrew Dickson noted in the Guardian, "Classical's not dead - it's discerning. Fans aren't uncooperative - they're uncared-for".

Classical music is more dependent on hi-fidelity than popular music for the simple reason that it requires a much wider dynamic range to capture effectively both the nuances of low-level ambient sound and the blazing fortissimo of a full symphony orchestra for example. Dynamic range refers to the difference between the softest and loudest sounds that a system can reproduce.

A broad dynamic range is not a prerequisite of most popular music forms for a number of reasons. Consequently, it is comparatively common to employ audio compression techniques to reduce or compress recorded sound. Audio compression is a delicate craft used to reduce the range in decibels between the loudest and softest audio signals. The sound of a whispering voice, for example, depends less on the absolute sound pressure level than on the character of the sound. It is quite usual to hear a very soft voice quite clearly above an entire rock band [Think of Moorcheba for example]. This is obviously not a natural acoustic phenomenon but the crafty work of audio compression. Its effect is to render popular music quite effectively within a limited dynamic range, thereby allowing us to appreciate the full range of softly spoken lyrics and full-bloodied screams without needing to make continual adjustments to the volume control. It also allows sound engineers to balance the very different natural sound levels of soft acoustic instruments with much louder electronic instruments.

Many of the elements which comprise modern popular music are electronic but even those which originate in acoustic sound become heavily stylised in the production process; acoustic instruments and voices are close miked to exclude acoustic reflections or reverberation and recorded sounds are often treated with special effects or given an unnaturally liberal coating of artificial reverb to enhance the raw, natural sound. Indeed, it is rarely the intention for popular music forms to even attempt to re-create a real acoustic. Moreover, audio compression has the added benefit of facilitating listening in the car, on portable players, and in noisy environments without undue disruption from background noise, and it makes it much easier to data compress the resultant audio with little sacrifice to the sonic fidelity.

The objectives of classical music recording differ from those of popular music recording in its attempt to capture and reproduce the experience of listening to music in a real acoustic space. [Artificial reverberation and other effects are used only to enhance the sense of reality or to try to re-create the concert hall experience.] Audio compression is not an effective solution because the intension is, as far as possible, to preserve the illusion of listening in a real acoustic space – or to capture the true essence of a live performance. Rather than making soft sounds louder we need to hear, and feel the difference between soft and loud – the full dynamic range of natural acoustic music.

These are not easily quantifiable qualities to capture or reproduce but if we are to improve the quality of recorded music we must continue to forge ahead with technological developments and to pass these on to the public: the alternative path of least resistance leads only to mediocrity.

Why isn't elitism popular?

2006-02-03T18:07:00.000+01:00

When we’re not plunging into the tired old hi-brow versus populist debacle, we’re worrying about how the world’s greatest symphony orchestras are going to validate their existence by dragging sufficiently large audiences into concert halls.

But who exactly is doing the worrying? If the throngs at so many of the European music festivals or the wealth of sense one reads in blogs and even in the mainstream media are taken as signs of vitality, classical music is very much alive and kickin’. So what’s changed? What is it that has sparked a panic?

We ought not to confuse reduced spending with disinterest. If there are fewer concertgoers than formerly, it could well be a rejection of the type of concerts on offer rather than music per se. Serious classical music fans are unlikely to clamour to renew their subscriptions when so many of the concerts are billed as ‘An evening with the stars!’ and other such bile-brewing monikers. By employing popular marketing techniques PR agents alienate the musically literate in their misguided attempts to appeal to the lowest common denominator or, as they prefer - a wider audience: they sacrifice an established audience in vain hope of attracting a new one.

Classical music recordings represent another manifestation of the same problem, (one to which I’ll return another day) but even wholesale abandonment of the commercial spick-n-span, cellophane-wrapped characterless pap that is the modern classical music CD wouldn’t necessarily signify an inherent disinterest in the music contained within.

Modern PR methods that value image above integrity sit uncomfortably alongside high art forms such as classical music. The tools are necessarily blunt, the techniques brutal and the returns must always be measurable, which as Andrew Clark points out “is anathema to the philosophical/mystic ethos of serious music. Marketing eulogises the spectacular and emphasises the superficial. It aims to maximise sales on a short-term basis. It places a premium on visual presentation, not inner substance. All this marks an enormous shift for a sober, demanding art form that was never intended for a mass market.”

The tiresome truism that classical music needs to attract new audiences is now accepted as fact, but the public at large, generally speaking, are not all that bothered about classical music – and they never have been. You cannot make an elitist art form popular by whipping up a bit of ill-conceived spin. Besides, to convert the masses you need missionaries not spin-doctors. Today’s classical music missionaries - those musical exponents who, as truly great artists, care with a passion for their art - are for the most part, un-flashy, introvert and unmarketable. As a result, they remain in comparative obscurity as far as the wider public is concerned.

Instead of widening the audience for classical music, PR merely despoils it for short-term profit. The exploitation of an art form for profit where there is no objective quantification of good, is manipulative and patronising.

Classical Music Unplugged

2006-01-25T17:54:00.000+01:00

OK, I've sat listening to the on-going debate about the future of classical music for long enough. It's time to dive in.

The form of classical music, as discussed by Greg Sandow in his blog is not central to the problem. Neither is its typically aged audience. Though these issues, and many others have a bearing on the future of this increasingly abstruse art form, at the core of the problem is, I believe, the public’s diminishing ability to listen to acoustic music.

There is a fundamental difference in the perception of real sound, and electronically reproduced sound in the same way as our appreciation of theatre differs from our appreciation of cinema.

Film is a powerful and influential medium, but its persuasiveness depends partly upon the passivity of the audience. I’m not suggesting that cinema audiences are unintelligent, only that film is essentially a passive form. The director has the power to direct our attention by focusing the camera on the screen characters that he wants to appear most prominently and to use the music soundtrack as a key to our sensibilities. Of course, we are aware of the manipulation and complicit in it, but everyone knows intuitively with which character to empathise. Nevertheless, self-abandonment to pleasurable manipulation is one of the delights of cinema.

Theatre on the other hand is more demanding; and I don’t mean in the sense that it is necessarily difficult. Rather, that it demands our involvement; we have to decide where to direct our attention and on whom to bestow our sympathies. It has become an accepted aspect of theatre that it asks more questions than it answers without telling us what to think. Consequently, the emotions that theatre evokes are real, whereas the emotions of the cinema are merely realistic.

The appreciation of recorded music, and electronically amplified live music is akin to cinema in that it is an essentially passive activity. The sounds that one hears in either instance are not the original real acoustic sound waves but a stylised electronic reproduction. This is equally true of recorded classical music as it is of a rock concert. In both instances the sound engineer assumes the role of arbitrator of our sonic taste. Of course, the audience is able to assess the fidelity of the engineer’s reproductions: but even then, its judgements are based on experiential preconceptions, [derived mostly from the work of other sound engineers] rather than on real acoustic sound.

Take for instance the sound of a grand piano. How many people ever get to hear one – for real, in the flesh? Aside from the classical piano recital, which, for the sake of argument let us assume that almost no one attends these days, these instruments are to be found in the living rooms of pianists and the very wealthy; neither of which are likely to be frequented regularly by the average person. So, our conception of how an acoustic grand piano sounds is derived from recorded music, amplified concerts and the sound model portrayed by an electronic piano or synthesizer. Yet, notwithstanding the limitations of the virtual sound world, I expect most people believe themselves to have a pretty clear idea of how a piano ought to sound.
We begin to realise just how circumscribed our notions of sound are when we realise that the public’s sense of sound is conditioned by the work of sound engineers, who are themselves no different from the rest of us in as much as they are bound by accepted taste to ensure that their work conforms to the norm. They too listen to popular music where the piano appears in its stylised guise. They also work with samples, where the sounds of only one or two pianos are now the benchmark building blocks of film scores, TV advertisements and even music recordings. As a result, when in the course of practicing their craft, they reproduce the sound of a real acoustic piano they will be impelled [by their own tastes] and compelled [by the desire to please the producer, musicians and the public] to transcribe a stylised sound without challenging the accepted model of the virtual world – even if it does little to reflect their direct acoustic experience.

The classical music concert is not a passive stylised experience. Like theatre, it demands the involvement of its audience. The very act of listening actively and attentively, as opposed to hearing [having sound impinge on one’s consciousness] requires effort – a skill that is seldom required and even discouraged in the modern world [See Mike Zwerin’s article in The International Herald Tribune]. This is especially true considering the very low sound levels and the comparative dominance of reflected or reverberant sound produced by acoustic music in a large concert hall. The black art of artificial reverberation is a subject to which I will return, but the beautifying bolt-on version with which we are all quite familiar in recorded and amplified music is very, very different to the real thing.
The proliferation of naturally decaying sound or reverberation obfuscates direct sound in real acoustics in a way that recording engineers know how to avoid or turn to their advantage, but it makes concert listening much more difficult. With few concert hall seats offering the ideal vantage point, each audience member hears something slightly different to his neighbour – each, more or less confusing, and all rather less than perfect. Listening and understanding therefore requires effort, interpretation, discernment and patience; in short, a rather large slice of mental activity.

Am I suggesting then that classical music is unpopular because the public is too lazy to listen? Perhaps, but only in as much as laziness is endemic in the modern world, which promotes conformity while disguising the pleasures and rewards of searching, seeking and development, behind the more obvious luxuries of instant gratification and impassive comfort.
_____________________________________________________________
Now follows a discussion with Greg Sandow on the subject of his book, The Future of Classical Music.

GT: Looking forward to reading your ongoing contributions to this perplexing question. Don't know what you've got in store, but I wonder if, amongst the many questions to resolve, you've considered what I regard as the diminishing ability to listen to acoustic music. I've started on the subject (here - Classical Music Unplugged). {please excuse the first glib reference to your blog - it was intended to sound provative - but not necessarily to provoke you)

G Sandow: Thanks for the comment, and you raise an Interesting point. But then on the other hand, there's been a great upsurge of acoustic music in pop during the past couple of decades, marked most notably by the popularity of "MTV Unplugged" in the '90s. I remember Mariah Carey doing that show in the early '90s, with really complex acoustic arrangements of some of her songs, involving more than 20 instruments, if I remember correctly, including a harmonium. (I know I'm remembering that one right.)Though of course the ultimate pop acoustic sound is just one singer, with an acoustic guitar. We could get into complicated discussions of live vs. amplified live vs. recorded sound, but the current pop audience, or large niches within it, are completely comfortable with this version of an acoustic aesthetic.

Posted by: guthrytrojan at February 20, 2006 12:44 PM Mmm. I realise that acoustic instruments haven't disappeared entirely - that's partly why I chose the title I did for my blog article. But my point is that people only hear these so called, 'acoustic concerts' via an amplification system - so they are not hearing acoustic sound, but amplified acoustic sound, which as I explained, is idealised and stylised and quite another thing from the actual acoustic experience. To many people these days, [unamplified] acoustic music is alien, demanding and unappealing.

G Sandow: Well, maybe. But it's worth asking whether what you say is really true. Is it based on real experience with the people we're talking about, or is it a hypothesis? A reasonable one, I'd add, but still a hypothesis. I think a lot of people play the guitar at home, for instance, or have friends who do, or play the piano, or hear marching bands. And I'm not sure that for me, at least, the experience of hearing (lightly) amplified acoustic music in a club has quite the effect you describe. I haven't noticed that it seems amplified or stylized, any more than classical music does on a good recording. If the miking is done well, you just get a more audible version of the original acoustic sound, complete, very likely, with the sound of fingers moving on the nylon strings of a guitar. An example from a record might be "You Had Time," an Ani DiFranco song, which starts with a lot of apparently improvised solo acoustic piano. I don't know what the difference would be between hearing this on a record and hearing a Beethoven piano piece. And if she plays this part when she does the song live, I'd think it would be even less idealized, because you'd see her playing it.

Posted by: guthrytrojan at February 22, 2006 03:47 PM
Obviously my views must necessarily be an hypothesis to some extent, but it's one which I've gleaned from direct experience of working with others. For example, at the moment I'm engineering a solo piano recording. At the start of the sessions, the producer [who one might expect to know better] asked if I could make the sound "a bit more stereo" - by which he meant that he wanted to hear the high notes on the left, and the low notes on the right. Anyone whose ever listened to a real piano in a real acoustic - without having his head glued to the sound board - will know that such expectations are quite foreign to the real acoustic experience. To your second point ["I'm not sure that for me, at least, the experience of hearing (lightly) amplified acoustic music in a club has quite the effect you describe"] - I would say that the fact that you've not noticed any change in sound indicates that the engineer has done a good job rather than that the sound is not idealised. 'The Sound' is always idealised to the extent that it represents one single perspective among an infinite variety of different perspectives. The sound of any acoustic instrument appears to change as one moves around it in the same way as an object looks slightly different depending on the angle and the light in which it is viewed. The differences are subtle, but they are nevertheless differences. Once it's amplified - even a little bit - the sound is immutable. And yes, I agree, it is so on recordings too. That's the craft of audio engineering and that's just the point!