I did a funny post the other day where I claimed that the "experts" in many fields had lost credibility. I got some pushback but I still think it is true for a couple of reasons: 1, in many professional and credentialed fields the opportunists and careerists have worked their way into the top levels with a predictable loss of objectivity and 2, in many areas of knowledge ideology has also come to the fore and what you are told is to someone's hidden benefit, not to reveal a truth.
But, of course, when these factors are not at play, we still have remarkable and admirable kinds of expertise to admire. Here is one I just ran across. It is a delight to listen to Rick Beato describe how he learned about the insider knowledge of record producing:
In so many fields the practical knowledge you need to succeed is very different from the theoretical knowledge you are going to be taught in schools. Much of the really important things I learned about music and performance I learned sitting across from a maestro in a studio or masterclass. These things are never written down. I'm sure this is true in many fields, but especially in music. You will never learn how to phrase a melody from a book.
Here are a couple of old masters, Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau and Sviatoslav Richter, showing how it's done with Schubert lieder.
This is part of one shelf of my CDs. I don't actually feel I "have" a recording of a piece of music unless I have the CD. Like previous physical manifestations, the wax cylinder, 78s, vinyl LPs and, shudder, cassette tapes, it represents the durability of recorded sound. A year or ten years from now they will still be there. Streaming music, which is fast replacing the CD, has enormous advantages, of course. With it you have access to nearly everything. But at the same time, it also has something of the ephemeral nature of musical performance: here now, gone tomorrow. Your preferred streaming service might go out of business or be bought up by another company, might change its policies, might raise its rates, or might for whatever reason cancel your favorite recordings. YouTube is an incredible resource, but I don't feel at all secure that whatever is there today will be there tomorrow, let alone ten years from now.
This observation is part of a more general thought: the private space that we each have is being diminished and hemmed in by an ever-more pervasive public or collective space. This is, of course, a consequence of the growth of the internet and social media. What seemed at first to be an unalloyed good might have its drawbacks.
A few years ago I decided that I wanted to "de-digitize" parts of my life. I was spending too much time online reading ephemera. So I started reading actual books, not Kindle books, every morning. Even more recently, with non-fiction, I have taken up the practice of making pencil notes in every book I read. What am I reading instead of blogs and mass media? The Odyssey, Crime and Punishment, Descartes Meditations on First Philosophy, the King James Bible (so far, just Genesis), Tehillim (the Hebrew Psalms, but in translation), 20th Century French Poetry, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot and so on.
Other ways of de-digitizing: I took up sketching, though that didn't last too long, and journaling, which has, also I now compose with pencil on paper instead of with music software. I have also returned to writing poetry after having let it drop for a few decades.
One result has been to spark the realization that being immersed in the social and mass media space tends to enervate one, leaving you tired and cynical. It also seems that there are some more critical trends, such as that towards what has been called "networked tribalism."
Networked tribalism has rapidly emerged to wage moral warfare in opposition to Israel. We have seen it drive rapid shifts in consequential public perception in the recent past, at both domestic and international levels, in situations ranging from anti-racism (Black Lives Matter) to anti-Russia/Putin/fascism (Ukraine). Tribal moral warfare bypasses traditional media by directly delivering information and moral framing to people using social networks. It has proved highly effective at persuading—and coercing—traditional media companies into alignment with its preferred moral frames.
Networked tribalism is a new phenomenon, derived from changes (including changes to our neural wiring that we struggle to understand) in how we process information and connect with others online.
If this is replacing traditional epistemology, then we have a rocky road ahead of us...
There have been a flurry of very appealing new recordings released in recent months and I am going to have a listen to some of them and review them in this space. Yes, I know, in the past I have disdained doing reviews of new releases, but frankly, that was mostly because they didn't seem that interesting. These new releases are a whole 'nother thing. The first one I am going to get into is from Daniil Trifonov. It is not his latest, which is a Bach program that probably recapitulates the program he gave in Salzburg in August that I attended. This is an older release: Silver Age, which contains Russian music from the first half of the 20th century, a particularly rich era. Here is the program:
A dream program with dream artists, so I am looking forward to that one. But before that, another two disc set is likely to arrive (yes, I prefer to own CDs) and that is this one:
I already have two recordings of the Shostakovich preludes and fugues so I might be able to do some interesting comparisons. Another recording I would love to review is by up and coming mezzo Lea Desandre:
But alas, that is out of stock already. I already posted a video of one selection from the album, a duet with Cecilia Bartoli. There are other samples at YouTube, but it seems the only one I can embed here is the one I already did. So here it is again:
UPDATE: Amazon just informed me that my order of the Trifonov album is coming from the UK via Royal Mail and will arrive sometime in November. Probably. Isn't that a bit weird?
Back when I lived in Montreal I was approached one day to do a recording for one of Canada's Olympians. She was a dressage rider and, alas, I forget her name. The fellow that approached me, whose name I also forget, employed me to do a recording for him of the first movement of this piece, the Concierto Andaluz for four guitars and orchestra:
This was exactly the music the Olympian needed for her routine. It was planned out in great detail and as a consequence the music needed to be edited to fit her routine. Some sections had to be abbreviated and others, perhaps shifted around. To be honest, I forget! And I no longer have the score. So how were we going to do this? The contractor, who I will call the Producer, had used music software to both do an orchestral accompaniment and a score. He reduced the four guitar parts down to three and I was asked to record the three guitar parts, using a click track, over the computer-generated orchestral accompaniment. It wasn't too difficult to reduce the four parts to three as the real reason this concert is for four guitars is that it was written for the Romero family who toured as a quartet: Celedonio Romero, the father and Celin Romero, Pepe Romero, and Angel Romero, the three sons.
Sadly, I don't have a copy of that recording which I would love to hear about now. I also don't have a recording of my performance of the Concierto deAranjuez with the Victoria Symphony which may exist somewhere in the vaults of the CBC.
When we were working on the project, I think it took about a week or so to learn the parts and do the recording, the Producer said let's go meet the Olympian and her horse who lived on a farm in the Laurentians to the north of Montreal. So we drove up one day and I met the Olympian, a very nice young woman. She took us over to the stables to meet her horse, probably more valuable than every car I have ever owned put together. He stuck his head out of his stall and whinnied. She introduced me and I patted him on the forehead and gave him a carrot. He regarded me with quite intelligent eyes. I couldn't help but think that he was the real star of the show and we were just his assistants. He was the one that was going to dance to a Rodrigo guitar concerto, after all.
I got back from Toronto last night so I can give a bit of an update on the project. First some background: over the last few years I had developed a good working relationship with a recording engineer down here in Mexico. Ken Basman was originally from Toronto and was an outstanding jazz guitarist. He was also a very talented recording engineer with his own studio and an impressive collection of microphones. Sadly, he passed away a couple of years ago so I have been looking for an alternative. I just completed a piece for violin and guitar, Dark Dream, and there was another piece for violin and piano that also needed recording so I approached violinist Valerie Li, first violin with the Afiara Quartet whom I had met when they gave a number of concerts here in Mexico. She was interesting in recording the pieces with me and knew a very good recording engineer in Toronto. As Toronto is also home to some fine pianists, that made the project feasible. I just had to fly up to Toronto in December when the daytime high is often around zero! Never mind, just dress warmly.
The project was a real success. We recorded in the Glenn Gould Studio, a small concert hall in the CBC broadcast centre that is outfitted as probably the finest studio for recording classical music in Canada. We recorded two pieces, Dark Dream, which I just completed a couple of months ago, and Chase, composed three years ago. I flew into Toronto last Wednesday, getting in at 1:30 in the morning. At noon the next day I had a rehearsal with Val which was our first run-through of the piece. As she is a highly accomplished chamber music musician it went very smoothly and we largely worked out the ensemble problems. The next day I attended the rehearsal of Val with pianist Todd Yaniw for the much shorter piece, Chase. That went quite well, though I was not impressed with the beat up piano at the Conservatory. Saturday Val and I had another rehearsal of Dark Dream and Sunday we recorded both pieces at the CBC. Total rehearsal time Dark Dream: 3 1/2 hours and Chase, 1 1/2 hours. Total recording time: Dark Dream, 2 hours and Chase 1 1/2 hours. Dark Dream turned out to be about 14 minutes long and Chase about 4 minutes. I expected Dark Dream to come in at ten minutes as that is how it was originally planned. However, I rewrote the piece three or four times so it just grew!
Here is a look at the Glenn Gould Studio, named after perhaps Canada's most famous classical musician, pianist Glenn Gould who was pretty much resident in the CBC building for much of his career:
Click to enlarge
Inside the control room:
Our recording crew, Paul, technical assistant from the CBC, Pouya Hamidi, our recording engineer, and pianist Todd Yaniw. I believe that Pouya is performing a traditional invocation of the gods of recording for a successful session.
Myself, Pouya and violinist Valerie Li, getting ready to do a take:
I will have more about the actual recording in future posts.
While the recording itself went very well, there were a few unexpected challenges. As I said in a previous post, I completely forgot my charging cables for my iPhone, my Chromebook and my Kindle. They were all charged up when I left so it was not a complete disaster. In fact, the Kindle lasted the whole trip. Val had a spare iPhone charger, so that helped. But the Chromebook only lasted the whole time due to stringent rationing! I was going to do a lot more blog posting and maybe watch a few shows on Netflix, but had to keep the usage to an hour or two a day. It turned out that the Chromebook, advertised as having up to 12 hours of battery time, actually delivered about that much. However, taking an Uber to the Royal Conservatory for a rehearsal, my iPhone slipped out of my jacket pocket in the back of the cab. It took several days of phone calls and a significant tip to get the phone back. Luckily, I did! But my recommendation is to NEVER leave anything in an Uber.
On the plus side, I discovered a really good sushi restaurant near my hotel.
This will be a combined miscellanea today with some bits about my trip to Toronto as I am rationing time on my laptop due to my forgetting my charging cable at home. I had my first rehearsal with violinist Valerie Li yesterday and it went very well. Val is a terrific violinist, first violin with the Afiara Quartet, a really outstanding ensemble. Val is originally from Vancouver and attended the Peabody Institute in Baltimore, one of the finest music schools in the US. She and the other members of the quartet came together at the San Francisco Conservatory and later on at Julliard in New York. They just got back from a three week tour of Denmark. I met the quartet in Mexico when they performed a few times in our local festivals. They stood out for me for their superb musicianship, especially in the Beethoven quartets. So when I was looking for a violinist to record some new pieces, she was at the top of the list.
We rehearsed for a couple of hours yesterday and I was very pleased with how it went. Val is a meticulous musician and working on my piece "Dark Dream" for violin and guitar, I had some new insights into what is going on in the piece! How this piece came to be, something I will go into in more detail in another post, was first of all at the conceptual level, then later on I rewrote much of it intuitively. With new music, the details of interpretation will develop as you rehearse the piece. Val was very insightful in shaping phrases and the dynamic layout. Today I will meet her and pianist Todd Yaniw at the Royal Conservatory of Music where I will hear them rehearsing my older piece, "Chase" for violin and piano. I have only written two pieces for piano in my life, this one and a song for voice and piano from a couple of years ago. "Chase" is a pretty straightforward piece designed to be a bit of a romp for both instruments and easily enjoyable for the audience.
* * *
The New York Times has a piece on creativity and asceticism. They recount how artists have often, in the past, been associated with hedonistic excess:
In classical Greece, in fourth- and fifth-century Athens, the major artistic prize of the era, for drama, was given under the auspices of Dionysus, a god of wine and ecstasy. Dionysus is a curious proto-patron saint of the arts, given the story of his birth. Zeus — king of gods, thunder god — wooed the mortal Semele. Hera, Zeus’ wife and the goddess of heaven, tired of her husband’s philandering, learned of Zeus’ latest conquest and convinced Semele to demand that Zeus reveal his true form — lightning — a sight Hera knew would kill her: No mortal can bear a god in full. Zeus assented, Semele died, but Zeus saved Semele’s fetal son, tucking him into his thigh, carrying him to term, earning the child the epithet “twice born”: to a mortal, to a god.
That there is something divine in the mortal act of making things is another part of the lore around creativity. The process of giving artistic birth is said to court a kind of violence that the maker must reckon with. Recent books have wondered about the tension between varieties of addiction and creativity, often by writers who themselves had been alcoholics, booze being a way to blunt or redirect the violence of making.
But the writer, Wyatt Mason, goes on to note that:
if it is fact that a kind of excess often accompanies the making of art, then there’s another kind of excess — less cinematic, for sure — that seems closer to the point: Artists, even the hedonistic ones, are fundamentally, one might say excessively, ascetic.
For the artist, though, asceticism isn’t a fad or a fashion or a mindful cleanse — a thumb of turmeric and a pinch of cayenne — prudently chosen. It is a regimen that evolves out of the need to do something unreasonable that an artist can’t be reasoned out of doing: work, demanded by no one but the self that makes it, because making is what the artist needs and knows.
* * *
I have long been a fan of Esa-Pekka Salonen both for his conducting and as a composer so I am delighted to read that he will be the next musical director of the San Francisco Symphony. This orchestra, unlike many others in North America, does not change conductors on a whim. The current director, Michael Tilson Thomas, has been at the helm for a quarter-century. Joshua Kosman writes in the San Francisco Chronicle:
The 60-year-old Finnish musician’s arrival in 2020 to succeed Michael Tilson Thomas promises to be an exciting development on every conceivable front. It’s going to mean a high level of musical execution from an orchestra that already plays like one of the best in the world. It’s going to mean a healthy infusion of contemporary music and a broadening of the repertoire, and it’s going to mean a range of new approaches to the very structure of orchestral music-making.
It’s really something of a coup.
If that assessment sounds a little breathless, consider that it could not have been made about any other conductor the Symphony might have chosen. There are fine conductors out there, but there’s simply no one on the orchestral scene today who can boast the range of musical and leadership skills that Salonen is poised to bring with him.
* * *
They don't link to the story and I can't find it, but Arts Journal mentions a piece by critic Jennifer Gersten that sounds interesting:
Classical radio stations promote their programming as “calming and refreshing,” an “oasis,” or “an island of sanity.” Playlists on YouTube and audio streaming services have titles like “8 Hours Classical Music for Sleeping”; inexpensive compilation CDs offer “The Most Relaxing Classical Music in the Universe.” Jennifer Gersten, winner of the 2018 Rubin Prize in Music Criticism — identifies at least one reason why the industry keeps falling into this rut, and argues that the habit sells both the music itself and potential listeners very short.
Well, sure. The thing is that while I, and some of you as well, look to music for an enlivening, occasionally transcendental experience, a lot of listeners just hope for a respite from the hectic stress of everyday life.
After decades of performances at its home base at the Royal Theatre, the Victoria Symphony has announced that it is being forced out of the Theatre due to exorbitant rental increases and curtailed access to booking dates.
Recent changes to rental fees and newly created priority scheduling policies and procedures developed by the Board of the Royal Theatre have created an untenable situation for the Victoria Symphony. ‘With the new policy our rent will increase by 100%, and combined with significantly reduced access to available dates in the Theatre we can no longer continue to offer our series of concerts,’ says says Chairman Alan Hollingworth.
The Symphony will pull out half of its season offerings from the Royal and take them to the Farquhar Auditorium at the University of Victoria.
I played the Concierto de Aranjuez by Joaquin Rodrigo with that orchestra on that very stage. This isn't quite as bad as it sounds because the Royal Theatre is an older facility with frankly, minimal backstage amenities. The newer auditorium at the university is a better performing space.
* * *
Ending with a bit of whimsy, Yuja Wang's agent, Mark Newbanks, has, according to Slipped Disc, dropped her because she is too "high maintenance."
The boutique artists’ manager Mark Newbanks has dropped the pianist from his elite list, apparently for being too high maintenance.
Mark erased Yuja from his website this month and she has reciprocated in kind.
This is an uncomfortable situation for an international artist, but she won’t be alone for long. The vultures are circling quite low in the sky.
* * *
Which brings us to our envoi. One of my favorite orchestral clips, Esa-Pekka Salonen conducting an orchestra of young students at the Verbier Festival. This is the last movement of the Symphony No. 5 by Sibelius:
I am in Toronto for the next few days recording two pieces with violin. While I am here I will take a few photos and share some experiences with you. In the planning for a good part of a year, over the next few days we will hopefully get good performances of two recent pieces of mine recorded. We used to say "in the can" or "on tape" or maybe "on vinyl" none of which longer apply. "On hard drive" just seems odd.
Anyway, I got in late last night on an Aeromexico flight which, apart from leaving a half-hour late, was excellent. I have been worried about my guitar ever since I booked the flight a few months ago. As I have mentioned before, my instrument was built by Robert Holroyd in Vancouver in 1983 and it has been my sole instrument ever since, undergoing a couple of repairs and restorations over the years. It is a superb guitar and irreplaceable since Bob passed away decades ago. I will not let it travel in cargo. My travel agent assured me that the policy on Aeromexico was that musical instruments can travel as carryon luggage as long as the case is less than 1.15 meters in length (which I guess lets out cellists). My case is 1.07 meters, so I should be good. But I was extremely apprehensive because of many bad experiences over the years where I was often lied to and sometimes forced to check my guitar. When I showed up for checkin in Mexico City yesterday there was no problem. I held up my guitar case saying, "this is my carryon" and they simply said," that's a guitar?" and waved me on. It came to me that all the bad experiences I had back when I was touring, were with Canadian airlines, who seemed to actually hate guitars.
Seated next to me on the flight was a gentleman who commented on my case and asked me if I was a classical guitarist. He turned out to be a Mexican guitarist who just started teaching at the University of Toronto and he gave me a copy of a recent album he recorded that I will review when I can get to it. So that was a nice coincidence.
I got in very late last night--it was snowing lightly and around 0 degrees (32 Fahrenheit), but the hotel folks were very nice. That is the first thing I notice, Canadians are polite to a fault! Now, yes, I do realize that I am in fact Canadian, born and raised, but I have not actually lived in English Canada for the last twenty-eight years so I do feel a distance from English Canadian culture. The first eight of those years were in Quebec, which is quite different, and the last twenty in Mexico, which is really different. It is fascinating to view one's own culture from the outside, as it were, which is what I am doing. I have never spent much time in Ontario (apart from a summer back in the 80s) and I have not been in Toronto since around 2000. One of my first goals will be to see if I can find some Montreal smoked meat!
I am writing this on a new laptop, an Acer 15.6 inch Chromebook that I purchased from Amazon for $213. Yes, not a misprint. There was a charge for shipping and import duties to Mexico, but not that much really. Why so cheap? Chromebooks are much cheaper because they do not include hefty fees for the Windows operating system. They take some getting used to because they do not run any of the usual programs, but for web browsing they are perfect and you can use Google docs instead of the usual Office programs. I find that, for most purposes, they are ideal. They boot up in a few seconds and shut down instantly. This is the third one I have owned and I love them when I travel. My Macbook Pro is a bit too heavy. Plus, 15.6 is a lot of screen on a laptop, which I appreciate. I can't do any composing on it as it will not run Finale. I should look and see if there is any music software available.
I managed to completely forget all of my charging cables so I will have to ration my computer time. It says that the average battery life is twelve hours (!) so that gives me two hours a day as I charged it up before I left. Fingers crossed! My iPhone is going to die a lot sooner, so I am going to leave it turned off most of the time. Why did I forget the cables, which I usually remember? I think it was because I was mostly focused on packing everything I needed for the recording. I haven't traveled with my guitar for twenty years so there was a lot to remember:
guitar
extra sets of strings (2)
sandpaper (2 kinds) for the nails
polishing board for the nails and nail file
clipper for the strings if I have to put a new one on
metronome/tuner
scores for both pieces
music stand
foot rest
Often the most challenging part of being a musician is simply the logistics of getting there with everything you need.
I am staying in a Marriot just a couple of blocks from the CBC building where we are going to be recording and while a modest, older hotel is quite suitable. The room is great--it has a kitchenette with a fridge, stovetop, dishwasher and kitchenware so I can actually cook here. I wonder if I can find a decent bagel? I am told I have to visit the Kensington Market, which I vaguely remember from years ago. I won't be here very long and every day involves either rehearsing, recording or editing, but maybe I can fit that in.
We finished our recording sessions on the weekend of my Songs From the Poets, a set of twelve songs I wrote a few years ago, but have been waiting to get a good recording of. Now we have a couple of days of editing and fine-tuning to do in order to get to the final version. All together, to record the twelve songs, it took about twelve hours of studio time. A lot of that was spent on working out placement of the microphones and musicians and even more on editing together different takes. Some songs were recorded in one or two takes.
Here are a few photos from the sessions to whet your appetite for the music. The singer is Hannah Pagenkopf from Calgary, Alberta. The recording engineer is Ken Basman from Toronto, Ontario and I was born in Alberta, lived a long time on Vancouver Island, British Columbia and quite a while in Montreal, Quebec. Both Ken and I have lived in Mexico for quite a while as well.
You can see larger versions of all the photos by clicking on them.
The studio
Soprano extraordinaire, Hannah Pagenkopf
Hard-working guitarist, me
Not a lot of shots of Ken Basman, but here he is with Hannah in the control room
Listening to some takes
It's an all-Canadian effort as even my guitar was built by a Canadian builder, Vancouver's Robert Holroyd.
I am in the middle of a recording project this week and had some interesting experiences connected with it. As I think I have indicated in a lot of places, though not in so many words, I am a musical empiricist. No matter what ideology you have based your music on, or express in it, if I don't think it works as music, I am going to say so. Same with writing about music. I was critical of Suzanne Cusick's essay the other day because it was NOT empirically based on music or individual circumstances, but was instead a vaporous expression of her ideology. So, in the recording studio the other night, I had to deal with my own ideology!
Yes, we all have a little ideology running through our veins, even if we try to avoid it. Some people pretty much live their lives with ideology, but that's their problem. In principle, I am opposed to ideology. So what is the difference between principle and ideology? Some cynical folks might say that it is just a matter of perspective: I have principles, but the other idiots just have ideology. Not true. Here is an example of a principle: the proof of the pudding is in the eating. That is a nice empirical principle expressed in a folk adage. And a very useful and true one. Here is an example of an ideology: the environment is fragile and constantly being threatened by human action, the most salient example being anthropogenic climate change (global warming). The difference between the two is that the folk adage tells you to refer directly to empirical facts, while the global warming one simply assumes its conclusion.
Here is a list of characteristics of ideology taken from the Wikipedia article:
David W. Minar describes six different ways in which the word "ideology" has been used:
As a collection of certain ideas with certain kinds of content, usually normative;
As the form or internal logical structure that ideas have within a set;
By the role in which ideas play in human-social interaction;
By the role that ideas play in the structure of an organization;
As meaning, whose purpose is persuasion; and
As the locus of social interaction.
The purpose of an ideology is to control public opinion as is revealed in numbers 1, 3, 4, 5 and 6. It helps the persuasiveness if there is an internal logic of course. But there is something huge that is missing: empirical truth. Ideology does not have to be (and almost never is) true, it just has to be useful. It is always helpful, in evaluating an ideology to ask, first of all, if it is true, and second, who benefits from it. Examining the structure of the climate change ideology would be a very useful exercise.
But this is getting away from the real topic: music recording. The project is to record my twelve songs, written for voice and guitar. To this end we have brought down a very fine singer from Canada and booked time in a local studio. The owner/engineer of the studio is also a Canadian. I have worked with him a few times before and he is very good at what he does and has excellent equipment. Also very good ears!
The first day we ran into some real problems: the voice, in the upper register, was so powerful that it was coming through the guitar mikes as strongly as the guitar was! Let me back up a bit here and describe the setup. We were both in the recording space, a room about 20 feet by 10 feet with sound baffles. The singer, a soprano, was on a $4000 Neumann microphone and the guitar was being recorded with a pair of smaller mikes (I didn't notice what they were exactly) set at 90º to one another. This is pretty standard for guitar. But the blend was not good and the resulting sound was problematic. We tried separating the voice and guitar as much as possible and adding some sound isolating baffles, but there was only slight improvement and the sightlines were poor.
This is where my ideology kicked in. Nearly all my recording in Canada was done in CBC studios in Montreal and Vancouver. They achieved excellent results by putting everyone in the same recording space and positioning microphones appropriately. Also, if you look at photos of classical musicians recording, it is also done the same way: everyone in the same room with a small number of microphones acting as a kind of imaginary ideal listener:
The engineer wanted to go more the way that popular recordings are made: each instrument on a separate channel, which meant that we had to be in different rooms, with headphones and seeing one another through a window. I thought this was a terrible idea for ensemble and sound: classical musicians don't record this way. So I put my foot down and insisted that we try again, but using a different microphone placement. The results were ... terrible! The voice sounded like an amateur recording in someone's living room and the guitar sounded like it was in a barrel.
At this point the engineer begged us to at least try his approach. He did a couple of things. The guitar (played by me, by the way) was going to stay on the stereo 90º mikes, but for the voice, now in a separate room, he swapped out the $4000 Neumann for a small mike worth about $600! The reason being that the Neumann was just over-sensitive to the voice in a high register and he had had excellent results before with the smaller mike for voice. And so it was. When we tried a take with the new setup, we instantly adjusted to the separation and the voice and guitar, recorded separately, each sounded just as they should. An enormous added benefit was that if either the voice or the guitar made a small flub, that passage could be re-recorded separately. It's called "punching in" and saves an enormous amount of time and wear and tear on the musicians.
So I instantly tossed out my obsolescent ideology about how classical musicians are "supposed" to record. Turns out that the best way, at least in our situation, was to go with what the pop guys do: each track separately. Here is a video of a voice and guitar recording in the conventional way for classical musicians:
Wow, looks like two Neumanns plus two, maybe AKG? mikes on the guitar and a couple more Neumanns (with "pop" screens) on the voice. In a nice resonant studio. And maybe they did do it just this way. But, you know, I kind of wonder. The voice and guitar are too perfectly balanced. Anytime that the tenor sings a fairly high passage he is going to be about twice as loud as the guitar. So how do you balance that as his voice is going to be feeding strongly into the guitar mikes as well? I also know another recording by this same (very fine) guitarist, Xuefei Yang, the Concierto de Aranjuez with orchestra, and a notable feature of that recording is how overbalanced the guitar is versus the orchestra meaning that they used some kind of recording wizardry to change the natural balance. So it might have been the case with this recording that they did the tracks separated and then shot the video later, lip-syncing with the pre-recorded tracks. Or not, I'm not certain! Here is something we can compare. This is a video of Ian Bostridge and Xuefei Yang performing the same song at the 2013 Gramophone awards live, i.e. without any recording wizardry. Notice how the guitar is often covered by the voice, rendering what it is doing nearly inaudible?
So the bottom line is: what are the results? If you are not getting the right sound, then don't be afraid to try any solution, even if it is outside your ideological envelope. And listen to your engineer!
The mark of an ideology, as opposed to a principle, is that it does not conform to the facts in the real world, but rather to an idealized goal. Best to pay attention to the facts.
Coincidentally I ran across two unusual performances this week, both rather, uh, up in the air. The first one is by Janice Martin, "aerial violinist". Here, have a look/listen:
That, to me, seems to be at the crossroads of all the most superficial trends in current classical music performance. Which probably means that it will be a Big Hit (though with only 9000 and change hits on YouTube it's not a big hit yet). Let's run the checklist:
Pop crossover, Kashmir, by Led Zeppelin with extra marks for pseudo-world-music status: check!
Glitzy costumes: check!
Fancy stage choreography: check!
Contemporary classical tune with folk references: check!
Vivaldi, Four Seasons: check!
Did I miss anything? Oh, right, attractive female soloist: check!
Alongside this rather tired attempt to enliven crossover with some gymnastics let's juxtapose a rather more original effort: the first music album to be, partly at least, recorded in space. Here is the article in the Globe and Mail: "About to launch album debut, Chris Hadfield talks recording music in space." You remember Christ Hadfield? He is just starting his third career. First he was a fighter pilot in the Royal Canadian Air Force, then an astronaut with the Canadian Space Agency where he spent 166 days on the International Space Station. While there he did a lot of interesting things in his spare time with photography and social media. Yes, he is one of the few people to post photos to the Internet from orbit. I posted about him way back in May, 2013 when he released a cover of the David Bowie tune "Space Oddity" that he recorded on the space station. Now there's a first! Here it is:
The voice and guitar were recorded on the space station, everything else on the ground. With over 26 million hits, it rather puts Janice's acrobatics in the shade.
But, as we learn from the Globe and Mail article, that was just the beginning. Chris, a veteran of various bands over 25 years, also wrote and recorded several original songs and they will be released on Oct. 9. One interesting bit:
“It’s hard to play guitar on a spaceship, because there’s nothing to hold the guitar stable,” he pointed out. “Almost always, the guitar slips in your hands. If you’re a guitar player, I tell people to try playing while standing on your head.
“The producer who was helping me, Paul Mills, said: ‘Your guitar playing is a little messy,“’ he added with a laugh. “I said, yeah, you come up here and play guitar.”
You bet! I tried to practice guitar while on a five-day train trip across Canada and I know exactly what he means. On a train (or in a car) you are constantly being jolted in different directions so it is basically impossible to play guitar. Stability is pretty much a necessity. There is one tune from the album on YouTube. Here is "Feet Up":
Well, ok, there's your pretty good Canadian soft rock. Chris Hadfield gets full points for versatility!
I have just decided to upgrade my sound system because I am doing a lot more listening these days and, especially with orchestral music, you need a decent system. For several years I have used an Aiwa micro hi-fi component system with a built-in cassette player that I bought mainly because I had some old concert recordings on cassette. Most of these I have transferred to CD so I probably don't need this system any more. It is ok, but there are probably better available.
The scene today is really different from when I was starting out in music. With the help of a friend I actually built my first decent stereo amplifier/receiver from a kit. Took several days and a lot of soldering. I forget the brand. Who was it used to offer amps in kit form? We also built our own speaker cabinets and I remember it was from a Wharfedale kit. They provided the speakers (two per enclosure) and the plans and you had to build the cabinets. I see from Amazon that they are still in business. Alas, not long after I put this quite decent component system together, I went to Spain for a year to study guitar. So I sold it.
I replaced it with several lesser systems over the years. Short of funds when I moved to Montreal in 1990, I bought used components from a repair shop. But, realizing that my speakers just could not do the job of transmitting clearly what was going on in the bass with Shostakovich symphonies, I broke down and bought a good set of Cerwin-Vega speakers. They were excellent. So good in fact, that when my wife and I threw a party for the McGill triathlon club, people from two houses away were phoning the cops. I think it was the Rolling Stones at maximum volume!
But again, when I moved to Mexico, I had to give them up. For a few years I didn't do very much listening and got by with a speaker bar that fitted onto the bottom of my computer monitor. Then I got some very crappy cheap speakers that plugged into my laptop. They were low end Logitech speakers and I can't recommend them because of a serious amount of distortion.
My iMac has a pretty good built in speaker system, but I have upgraded it with a Bose Mini Soundlink, that is excellent for the size:
But that is just for listening to stuff at/on the computer. For real sit-down listening to CDs, I am getting something better. It's a weird situation these days. Twenty or thirty years ago, when I lived in Canada, I always knew of a store where the audio buffs went to buy their serious component systems. Mind you, back then it was all Shure cartridges and heavy turntables and big speakers--vinyl, dude, vinyl! Apparently it's all coming back. A good friend of mine, music director at a big Canadian theater festival, used to have a really serious sound system and he said he really preferred analog and vinyl to the relatively new digital CD sound. The point was though, that digital CDs sounded better on cheap systems.
Anyway, I wasn't quite sure what to look for in the current environment and where I live there are no stores for audiophiles, just Radio Shack with crappy boom boxes:
Amazon to the rescue, of course. But the problem is that most sound systems are cheap ones. So how do you find a good one? Turns out that some of the old famous names are still around, like Wharfedale. I thought of Bang & Olufsen, but Amazon shows only one system (with terrible reviews) for a thousand dollars that doesn't ship to Mexico--and a bunch of cables. Hmm, browsing around, turns out Klipsch is still around and makes some nice components. But I was looking for a small, though good quality, system. I considered the Bose systems, they make a nice compact one that is well-liked, but I finally decided on this one from Harman Kardon:
Mmm, nice. Contains two 30-watt bass reflex speakers. I just ordered it on Saturday and they say it will be delivered on Thursday. You have to love Amazon.
I am quite eager to set it up. Wait, there is no setting up these days, with all those speaker wires and stuff. Remember getting out your knife and trimming your speaker wires? These days it is just open the box and plug it in. I'm getting that eager feeling to hear what it sounds like. Back in the day, when I got a new sound system or speakers, I had to go back and listen to all my favorites all over again, to see what more I could hear. This year, my favorite record is actually the box of the complete Haydn symphonies with Dennis Russell Davies conducting the Stuttgart Chamber Orchestra, so it might take a while!
And that gives me my envoi:
Why don't you treat yourself and upgrade your sound system?
I'm working up my first suite for guitar so I can record it later this month. The problem with most recording spaces is that they are designed for the use of popular and jazz musicians--not surprising as they comprise the majority of working musicians. But the technique of recording this kind of music is radically different from that of recording classical music. Most recording spaces are designed to be dead, with very little resonance. Instruments are recorded separately on different tracks and mixed together. They are often processed in various ways with limiters and compressors to get more 'punch'.
Classical music is recorded quite differently. The CBC (Canadian Broadcasting Corporation), for example, since they record so much classical music, has specially designed studios. They are much larger, often large enough to contain an entire orchestra, and have a natural resonance. The ones I am familiar with have wooden parquet flooring, for example. Wood makes for a lovely natural resonance. Then, if recording a solo instrument like guitar, a pair of microphones are used, about ten feet back from the instrument and they pick up both the direct and reflected sound. Churches are often used--the Naxos series of guitar recordings are all done in a church in Toronto. Churches have a lot of resonating space and a long decay, which really favors the guitar.
Sometimes you see recital spaces that are designed for classical music with banners to increase or decrease the amount of reflected sound. For a guitar you want the maximum, but for a brass quintet, much less.
In any case, I've been keeping an eye out for a good recording space. I have an excellent engineer, but his studio is small and acoustically dead. Yesterday I tried out a private home with a huge living room. It has a high vaulted brick ceiling like a chapel. Just an amazing sound! Makes the modestly-voiced classical guitar sound huge. So we will be going in there in a couple of weeks to record my Suite No. 1. Should be fun.
Here is a picture of the kind of ceiling I'm talking about:
