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On Teaching

July 1, 2016
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Gavin Black is director of the Princeton Early Keyboard Center in Princeton, New Jersey. He can be reached by e-mail at [email protected].

Recording Notes II

Last month I recounted some musings that passed through my mind during preparation for my recent Frescobaldi recording sessions, about why one might want to make recordings. Now I offer related musings about what exactly a recording is or should be. This is a pastiche of notes that I took during the weeks before the recording sessions began, blended with some later thoughts arising from perusal of those notes and out of my memories of what I was thinking during that time. 

So, what is a recording or what should a recording be? Should it be a simple record (in the colloquial sense) of something that happened? That is the source of the name that we use for the process of playing music in the presence of machinery that enables someone else later to listen to some other music that is closely derived from what was played in the presence of that machinery. (Notice that it’s hard even to describe the process without actually using the word “record.” I didn’t want to write “that is the source of the name that we use for the process of recording . . .,” so I had to devise something convoluted.) The original concept seems to be simple: this is happening, let’s make a record of it, as we might make a written or photographic record of something. I would think that photography, which existed first, could easily have decided to claim the word “record” to be used as we now use the word “photo.” 

But recording is also something else (as is a photograph). It is the source of artistic experience on the part of a listener. Should that experience be the same as what it would have been for the listener to have been in the room where the recording took place? Or at a similar performance of the same music? Is that possible? Does trying to achieve that lead to a better or a worse potential artistic experience for that listener? Do the answers to any of this tell me anything practical or specific about how to approach this recording? Or anything not too practical or not that specific, but still meaningful?

 

Overhearing the battle

I once listened in on a conversation about the nature of recording that has remained with me for a long time. I have measured and understood some of my own feelings about music by referring back to this conversation. The ways I relate to what I remember was said then have changed. In this conversation, which took place about 1980 and involved two older colleagues of mine, as I remember it, I didn’t have much of my own to say. That was probably just as well: I didn’t have the relevant experience to know what to think. The point was this: two musicians, older and more experienced than I was, both harpsichordists among other things, were discussing Ton Koopman’s recording of harpsichord music of Giovanni Picchi. As it happened, they were both themselves specialists in Picchi. They had studied and performed his music and had various thoughts, feelings, and ideas about it.

The conversation began when one of them commented that the Koopman recording, then quite recent, struck him as too quirky. (At that time there was a lot about Koopman’s approach to rhythm and articulation that was new and seemed startling to many.) Beyond just not liking Koopman’s approach, he asserted that a recording should be objective—that it should present the music “as is” without the imposition of personal whim. The other member of the discussion strongly disagreed. She felt that if a performer were to embrace the idea of recording in an impersonalized way, stripping away whatever that performer would normally add out of his or her own artistic stance and experience, then the result would almost certainly be boring. That approach wouldn’t result in recordings that gave a pure unvarnished version of the music, but with recordings that misrepresented the music as stiff and not alive.

Each of these musicians (both teachers) felt that performers who wanted to approach recording the other way shouldn’t make recordings. “If you are going to make a record of something, show the music as itself without imposing anything on it. If you can’t do that, don’t record,” as opposed to “If you are going to make a record of something, play it the way you really feel it, otherwise there’s no point, so don’t record.” Diametrically opposed ideas. (There was anger involved, something that surprised and disturbed me at the time, especially since each discussant turned to me looking for agreement!) At the time, I tended towards the first view, though with an uncomfortable awareness that it could lead to boring recordings. Now I am only interested in approaching things the second way: a complete reversal for me that has happened gradually over more than thirty years.

There is a concept that people turn to once in a while of a “reference” recording. That phrase can mean a number of things. It probably most often means what the first member of the above-referenced conversation meant: a recording that has an air of objectivity to it, that is trying to stake a claim to be “just the music” and not a performance with any quirkiness to it. As an ideal this has to be based on a feeling that certain ways of playing are more objective than others. That’s complicated. Does objective mean moderate—medium tempi, only a little bit of rubato, and so on—or does it mean specifically true to what the composer wanted? That opens up problems that come with trying to know what the composer wanted.

But there’s another thing: sometimes recordings that are clearly quirky and personal become established as reference recordings because of something about their circumstances. That is true of the Bach recordings of both Glenn Gould and Wanda Landowska. Neither of those performers was striving for a middle of the road objectivity. And although one or the other of them might have wanted to dispute this, it’s clear that neither of them was doing specifically what the composer would have done or would have expected to hear. Nonetheless, many listeners assume that these recordings are somehow “definitive,” and many students assume they should listen to these recordings for the express purpose of learning how they should play the pieces. 

So, either a self-consciously objective or an unapologetically personal recorded performance can come to exercise a substantial influence on how people think about and play a particular repertoire.

 

As the years go by, one’s viewpoint evolves

When I was growing up, I reacted to the Bach recordings of Helmut Walcha as having a quality of objectivity, of being some sort of settled reality, rather than just how one amazingly gifted and thoughtful performer chose to play the music. I got a lot of excitement from basking in the feeling as I listened to his records (drawn from the boxes that I loved so much as physical objects), that I was hearing something as close as would ever be possible to the fingers and feet of Bach himself. Now, as much as I admire Walcha’s extraordinary artistry and skill and still enjoy listening to his recordings, I have moved away from hearing or wanting to hear the for-the-ages objective correctness in his way of playing. 

A little bit later I reacted to Alfred Brendel’s Beethoven recordings in a similar way. I don’t know in retrospect how much any of this came from something intrinsic to those recordings and how much came from something about the circumstances in which I encountered them or about me as a listener at that time.

 

Like it or not, the past influences the present

What does any of this say about how I should approach recording now? I have to remember two things that tug in opposite directions. First, I really don’t want to think of what I am doing as having that “reference” quality. I don’t want any of what I create to have a feeling of objectivity, and I really don’t want it to be used to create a sense that this is how it should be. I understand that the amount of dissemination that any recording of mine will have will be modest enough to limit the damage that could come from anyone’s taking it that way, unlike with Gould, Landowska, Walcha, or Brendel. But (ideally) I don’t want anyone to take it that way. Whether I am right, wrong, or neither, to feel that way I have no idea. But I do feel that way. On the other hand, stemming from the relationship for me between recording and nostalgia, I do feel the tug of trying to create the kind of edifice that I thought I was encountering in those Walcha Bach boxes, even as I avowedly don’t want to do so.

That probably means that when I find myself actually sitting there with the tape rolling (so to speak), I have to remind myself not to tighten up, not to mimic, unconsciously, some sort of image of the magisterial, objective, for-the-ages performer. It’s not that I think that those recording artists whose work I react to as having that objective quality necessarily felt that way during recording sessions. They probably didn’t. It’s that I am aware of a pull to try to feel that way, though I know that I shouldn’t, and don’t want to. If I give in to that pull and sit there playing, thinking, “this is a well-crafted, definitive performance,” that will only lead to stiffness. It would also likely be a distraction.

In concert performance, I want there to be an element of spontaneity, something that at least part of the time leaves people reacting as they would to improvisation. (That’s not only my idea, of course: it’s a common ideal and often a fruitful one.) Sometimes this means being willing to do very specific performance and interpretive things that are unplanned and that the player might not do again. Certainly in the areas of arpeggiation, articulation, some sorts of rubato, shaping of certain ornaments, etc., I might do something in a performance that I hadn’t planned in advance and don’t consciously plan even as I am doing it. Some of these things come out as noticeably quirky. Is it OK for that to happen in a recording session? If I play a piece in concert a dozen times and in each of those performances a particular spot in the piece is discernibly different, is it acceptable if the finished recorded product has one of those and not the others? Of course it has to, but does there have to be some sort of hierarchy of how suitable those interpretive quirks are to be “immortalized?” If there is such a hierarchy, does that feed into the quest to make the recording sound “objective?” 

There’s a spot in one Frescobaldi piece where I really love the effect that I get by eliding a certain repeat, actually omitting the final chord of a particular section the first time through and replacing it with the beginning of the repeat of that section. It is appropriate harmonically and can be made to work rhythmically. In no way does the composer indicate this or suggest it. (It could have been indicated with a “first ending—second ending” setup.) I know of no musicology to back it up. It is hauntingly beautiful to me. I usually do it in concert. Should I do it on the recording?

(Did I? Of course as I sit here writing I know the answer . . .)

There are places where I am convinced that the surviving sources have made a small mistake: that something—a note, an accidental, a rhythm—should be different. (Usually by that I mean that the composer actually intended it to be different and that the “mistake” is an out-and-out typo. Sometimes I mean I believe that on further reflection, the composer probably would have done something a little bit differently.) In concert I usually feel absolutely fine about changing the passage to be what I think it should be. What about in a recording? Again the “for the ages” idea comes into play. Any one concert performance is ephemeral. If I try out something that may be “wrong” (Frescobaldi surely meant C# there—the C-natural sounds odd) there’s a limit to how much artistic damage that can be done if it is in fact I rather than the composer or copyist who was wrong. Is it different in a recording because it will be listened to repeatedly (if I’m lucky!) or because it will still be around many years from now? 

We allotted a whole five-day workweek for this series of recording sessions. That’s rather a long time. There’s a bit more than ninety minutes of music in this project. If I want to play everything five times—which is somewhere between average and safe for getting good takes of it all and for having choices among takes—that is about eight hours. In a pinch one could do eight hours of taping in one day. (My first recording for the PGM label was taped in one day, since we only had the venue for that long, and the producer was very eager to use that particular venue. It was a very grueling day!) But we want to allow for noise, tuning, regulation issues, periods of time when I space out and fail to play adequately for several takes in a row, stretching, relaxing, lunch breaks, and in general for it not to be too grueling—no more so than is necessary.

Next month I will present the fruits of the note-taking that I did during each of those five days and close with some thoughts that stem from where I am now: taping done, a bit of listening done (more by the time I am writing for next month), editing begun, but with a long way to go.

Here, as a sort of appetizer, is a link to a short video from the final day of the sessions. The piece is the second Galliarda from the Second Book of Toccatas and Partitas: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YxQgs1m5Hls.

 

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