Repeatability: the biggest benefit of a recording
August 14th, 2007 Posted in classical music, mp3, portable audio
There’s been a recent furore regarding whether MP3 based music competes with actually sitting in the concert hall. Over at Sounds and Fury, A. C. Douglas is quite insistent on the superiority of the real thing. A recent follow-up to his original article has someone pointing out that with all the sweet-wrapper crackling, coughing, snoring, muttering, etc. in the concert hall, one might well get a more enjoyable and immediate acoustic experience sitting in front of the stereo. The chairs are comfier at home, too. And you can have a nice cup of tea while listening. Try doing that in Carnegie Hall.
However, I think the biggest advantage of recorded music is one of it’s most obvious and intrinsic characteristics: you can play it many, many times. This is massively important with classical, since it takes so long to get the hang of a piece. If I had had to understand Prokofiev’s Symphony No. 2 (for example) by relying purely on orchestral performances… well it’s never played so I wouldn’t have heard it… but if it were, I would have had to see it about fifty times before it made any kind of sense. That’s a lot of concert.
Generally it seems hugely preferable for me not to hear a real live piece until I’ve listened to it a bunch of times in the comfort of my apartment. I want to understand the piece first, instead of trying to piece together the themes in the concert hall. I want to be able to twine along the melodies while the orchestra is playing, to make newer and deeper bridges and uncoverings and connections. Things spring out and bite you when the music is on the stage, instead of stuck in the stereo – but it’s so much more potent when the latter has already built a bed from which the former can ascend.
My MP3 player is a perfect foundation builder. It knows it isn’t the real thing, that it’s an imitation – but it’s an imitation which lets me isolate myself from the outside and dive and delve into a greater and greater understanding of whatever it’s currently holding onto. It’s portability is perfect for letting one slip off into a bit of a listening session whenever someones opus number something starts slithering around your head.
The more I listen to a piece and understand the ins and outs and backs and twists and fronts, the more I want to hear a real, true, orchestra playing it. No matter how much I’ll fall in love with a particular recording, the ultimate goal is always to hear a great, real-life performance.
But without that build-up, without all of those not-quite-real versions of a piece, for me the reality isn’t nearly as rewarding.
August 14th, 2007 at 2:50 am
I used to “learn” symphonies etc. from records because there was hardly any live classical music in the city, and the county, where I grew up. Eventually I’d hear the music in person, but more often than not the performance would come off second best in every way: execution, audible detail, even interpretive conception. If that was how it was going to be, what’s the point of the trouble and expense of going to live performances at all?
Now it’s the other way around. I *want* to hear a piece for the first time in live performance, to make whatever impression on me that it may. Then I decide whether I want to hear the music again and again, and if so buy a record. If indeed it’s been recorded; often enough it hasn’t.
First impressions matter, and I’ve found that music makes a stronger first impression on me if I’ve invested the time and trouble to go out and hear it. There are no interruptions, unless someone’s cell phone goes off; my attention is more focused; I get the full dynamic range of the music, including huge climaxes that recordings can’t deal with; and if there are visual features in the music, such as the two orchestras in BartÃ?³k’s Music for Strings, Percussion and Celesta, or the cadenza visuale in the Schnittke violin concerto #4, they’re part of my first experience of the piece and not a later add-on.
Once I realized that Schnittke was for me, after a concert including two of his works, I didn’t wait for further live performances to hear more, or I’d still be waiting. But I’m glad I started with him the right way, or at least the right way for me–and wish I’d had as much luck with the Eroica Symphony.
August 14th, 2007 at 8:12 am
Reasons I don’t go to more live concerts:
1. Cost – the cheapest tickets are usually $20-25. If I take my wife, it costs $40-50, plus another $25 or so for a baby sitter. For that cost, I can buy 5 CDs which I can listen to repeatedly at my leisure.
2. Time – It’s a 30 min. drive each way from my house to the concert hall. Plus, you need to make sure you are early so you can get to your seat on time, and there will be an intermission. Probably 3 hrs for an hour and a half of music.
3. My wife – she doesn’t like symphony concerts. She’ll go to an opera because it has the added visual drama. But we have small children and since we rarely have a chance to get away, a concert is low on the list of things to do together.
I do enjoy live concerts, and I try to pick out one a season that I want to hear. The Virginia Symphony is playing Bruckner’s 9th in the spring and I am going to make a special effort to get there. I never thought I’d get to hear Bruckner live.
I think the situation is similar with sports. I love baseball and football. I went to a major league baseball game a month ago and it was great to be there close to the field and the players, be involved with the other fans, etc. But at the same time, I can actually follow the game more closely on TV.
August 14th, 2007 at 8:30 am
For what its worth, thinking of the Bruckner concert reminded me to go ahead and order the tickets. Nothing available at the $24 dollar level, and two tickets for seats somewhere other than the last row under the balcony was over $100. I could order two complete Bruckner cycles on CD for the price of two tickets to the 9th.
August 14th, 2007 at 9:50 am
Apparently, some people who listen to a lot of classical music on recordings before their first live concert experience actually do complain that the real thing was a let-down. I guess they get so use to the artifacts of the recorded sound that real sound doesn’t appeal to them.
But I think the interesting thing is that, before recordings, people couldn’t bone up like this before hearing a complicated piece. They had to get it the first time, and in many cases it would be the only time they heard it in their lives, so in a sense we are probably much lazier today in our listening habits. Of course, they had their aids to comprehension too: there were piano reductions of orchestral works that could be played at home (a lot more people could play piano in the old days than now, of course), and they could study printed scores (ditto for the number of people who could read scores in the old days compared to now).
August 14th, 2007 at 12:14 pm
Ben,
I could not agree more. And, moreover, we’re not the only ones:
“I can’t believe that people really prefer to go to the concert hall under intellectually trying, socially trying, physically trying conditions, unable to repeat something they have missed, when they can sit at home under the most comfortable and stimulating circumstances and hear it as they want to hear it. I can’t imagine what would happen to literature today if one were obliged to congregate in an unpleasant hall and read novels projected on a screen.” – Milton Babbitt
I seriously doubt Babbitt is actually opposed to concerts (he would certainly be a hypocrite if he were!). The point, rather, seems to be that it’s madness to view a single performance as one’s first and only encounter with a piece of music. Why should music be a “one-shot-deal” any more than any other form of art?
Indeed, this attitude may have a lot to do with the “difficulties” of twentieth-century music. People have this idea that if they don’t “get” a piece of music the first time they hear it, then it must not be good music. But that’s just silly.
August 15th, 2007 at 8:23 am
Great comments everybody! I’ll discuss them in my next post.