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I just got done posting over on Hi-Rez Highway about Jared Sacks's visit to Oakland yesterday (Robert C. Lang's house). Jared, the moving force of the Channel Classics label, was extremely generous with his time and answered all our questions - and I must say, he seemed to hold back nothing. He's a very up-front guy.Anyway, this was an opportunity for me to get some confirmation to a post I'd made here a couple months ago concerning the number of edits on the average classical recording these days. I had been told by someone whose confidence I respect (and who works for another, larger label than Channel Classics) that the average number of edits on a classical recording these days is over 400. This claim was met with some skepticism (not to mention derision!) by at least couple of posters here on the AA Music Board, so I was on the lookout to get some confirmation. So I asked Jared point blank if 400 edits/average CD these days is typical for the industry. His response? "Actually, 400 sounds a little low to me."
So there you have it - I asked if I could quote him, and he said yes. He even mentioned that he knows of one classical recording which has over 900 edits on it (i.e., one every 4-5 seconds!)! In the case of his own label, he said that there's quite a range of variability as far as the editing is concerned. For instance, the third movement of the Mahler Fourth Symphony with Ivan Fischer and the Budapest Festival Orchestra contains only TWO edits. On the other hand, there are some other recordings/tracks where "you wouldn't believe how many edits there are". He did mention that maestro Fischer will sometimes allow a less than perfect take to be used, simply in order to preserve the spirit and the flow of the music better.
All in all, this was a very interesting discussion which corroborated the claim I had made previously. I also have witnesses! :-)
Edits: 11/22/10 11/22/10Follow Ups:
I am not alone in thinking this the greatest jazz solo ever recorded. Yet after listening to it hundreds of times, I can hear 'mistakes': a reed squeak here, imperfect articulation there. I will still take the time-machine illusion of being there at a moment in history over sterile 'perfection'.
If edits require takes, I would imagine Naxos probably is then now the audiophile's choice.
Takes = more wages = higher price.
The logical outcome of this should be the rise of alleged "lo-fi" classical labels, which would in effect only mean, however, that the recordings for cost sake are always "one and done."
This came up in our last discussion. You don't need a lot of takes in order to do a lot of edits. As was also mentioned at that time, some of the edits are there simply to eliminate noises such as squeaky chairs, page turns, etc. Sometimes, the musicians themselves have to cough - I remember on Kubelik's Orfeo release of the Brahms symphonies, which I believe is a studio recording, you can hear a couple of coughs - they must be coming from Kubelik or the musicians in the orchestra! And the coughs were not edited out. :-)
I read a story about the introduction of editing/over dubbing in the recording industry and Klemperer's reaction to it. The story was related by his daughter, who apparently was present. For those who don't know, the introduction of magnetic tape recording allowed for splicing/editing/overdubbing. Prior to that, recordings were committed 'direct to disk'. If a mistake was made, it was either allowed, or the entire take or side had to be completely re-recorded.
When Klemperer saw what the new tape processes was allowing, his daughter reports his face 'grew longer and longer' through the day, until he finally exclaimed "eine schwind". Swindle. It's a swindle. Klemperer instinctively understood the essence of the process, and immediately recoiled from it.
Other conductors never trusted the recording process, and limited their activities in it; in the case of Carlos Kleiber, severely. Celibidache, according to what I've read, reluctantly agreed to record, but only live performances.
I attend a fair amount of live, unamplified concerts. This season, as never before, every concert has seemed as a miracle, a real and true miracle, to me. Why? Think about it. Everywhere you go, virtually every minute of every single day, we're innundated by recorded sounds. Recorded, processed, electronically folded, stapled, manipulated, and mutilated. You think that typical internet hyperbole? Ask any recording producer/engineer/artist whether the sounds they record are completely free of equalization or processing? The very fact that some amount of electronic processing's necessary [even if it's just something as relatively benign as equalization] condemns recording as inherently artificial. Thus, in a world saturated with amplifiers, microphones, wire, loudspeakers, on and on ad nauseum, a concert with none of this, with nothing but musicians playing acoustic instruments really is miraculous.
Envision it: nothing but musicians playing musical instruments, the hall, and the air you share with them. From this musically corrupted 21st century perspective, it seems so amazing as to be almost beyond reality.
And yet, Stereophile, ostensibly devoted to, and entrusted with, the preservation of the pursuit of reproducing live sound without alteration [something called "high fidelity"] either implicitly, or more recently, explicitly rails against live, unamplified music in favor of recordings. And, they're getting militant about it. A recent editorial vehemently condemned unamplified concerts, while extolling the virtues of artificial sound [recordings].
Gee, Mike - I think that's a bit extreme. I do appreciate your enthusiasm for live performances and being there with the musicians however.OTOH, I also appreciate that the microphones on a recording can give me an ideal spatial perspective that I could never get at a live concert, even when I'm able to sit in the best seats (which is not all that often!). Recordings do illuminate the music in ways that I can't get at live concerts - not to mention that they give me access to repertoire I would never hear if I waited around for a live performance. If that's somehow corrupted or artificial, then so be it.
To me, the large number of edits is just another component of the modern recording process, and, going back to my original post from months ago, it's a piece of information that is probably not well enough understood by the concert-going public at large. Concerts and recordings: two distinct (and valid!) ways to get to the music.
Edits: 11/24/10
People tell me all the time they're disappointed over how many mistakes they hear at live classical concerts........ I tell them they shouldn't be....... What's done to recordings is a travesty, in my humble opinion.
OK, remove the real whoppers, but otherwise leave the performance alone.
This is one thing that has Vladimir Horowitz spinning in his grave...... His performances with a bunch of wrong notes destroys many pianists' "perfect" performances.........
. . . he joked that other pianists could play an entire concert just by using the notes that Rubinstein missed in one of his! :-)
He congratulated him on a fine performance.'Ach, I made two mistakes!' Rubinstein thought he would have given anything to make only two mistakes. (Rubinstein autobiog, from memory, so an approximation.)
Two things. The first and most basic is that you cannot create something good simply by removing everything that's bad. A great performance is organic, created from the ground up, not the top down. It's a balancing act. You obviously cannot have something jarringly out of whack in a recording, but to try and fix every last slightly out of tune note or poor attack is to kill the spirit of the performance. If someone's only criterium for judging a performance is by how many wrong notes there were, then they have a bit to learn about what makes great music. It reminds me of the old joke about someone asking a sculptor how to make a statue of an elephant. He replies "it's quite easy. You just get a big block of stone, then take a hammer and a chisel and knock off everything that doesn't look like an elephant!".
The more insidious problem is that editing practices have given listeners a preposterous expectation of perfection. This in turn has trickled down to orchestral playing, especially in the process of auditioning to get the jobs. It's now play all the notes at all costs. This climate has created a careful, don't take any chances kind of performance practice that leads to whitewashed, cookie-cutter performances. I asked an orchestral musician friend of mine what it was that he liked so much about European orchestras' performances from years ago. He replied "it's that they seemed to play as if they thought that they were going to die in their sleep that night!"
There's much, much more to it, of course, and I don't mean to oversimplify things. The most notable problem is the lack of rehearsal time. Orchestral musicians work as hard as ever, it's just that a much higher percentage of an orchestra's services are performances than in years past. Obviously, they need to make as much money as possible to stay afloat. Even a poorly attended concert costs the orchestra less than a rehearsal. I generally avoid the first performance of the week, as often it really should have been the last rehearsal.
I am a musician, and I have been involved with the recording process as a player, conductor and on the production side. We had all of these same conversations when I was in music school 35 years ago, but I think we've gotten much farther down the road with the problems. I don't know how this got so long-winded (or why the Hell I'm not asleep!). Sorry to go on, it got me thinking. There is a lot of great music and great orchestral performances. It just could be better yet. Good Night!
When I was in school, 35 years ago, one of the professors told the class that he thought that the edited perfection of the recordings made at that time (i.e., with razor blades) was going to breed generations of neurotic musicians, who, just as you say, would be focused on not making any mistakes, to the exclusion of any other interpretive values.
Actually, I don't think it's quite that bad, especially, as you suggest, in Europe. As I posted a couple of months ago, we saw the LSO play the Strauss Duet Concertino at the Barbican, and the couple of minor squeaks from Andrew Marriner's clarinet probably resulted from his willingness to take chances. But you know those squeaks would never make it on to an LSO Live recording. :-)
"The first and most basic is that you cannot create something good simply by removing everything that's bad. A great performance is organic, created from the ground up, not the top down."
A different take would be that music has a deep, background metric pulse. This pulse will between pretty much every performance, even by the same performers. Collating different performances will upset that underlying rhythm and produce an odd, unsatisfying effect.
(non-political)
It's fascinating to read certain opinions in groups like this, where some (but by no means all) praise modern recordings made to an almost ridiculous level of technical perfection and viciously skewer anything with a hint of a flaw in it.
To some extent, this is probably inevitable. Slight flaws that do not detract from or even enhance a live performance can become irritating as hell when heard repeatedly on the same recording. And I'm certainly not immune to this way of hearing/thinking myself, with thousands of modern recordings on my shelves.
We shouldn't take the view that so many edits equals some kind of travesty.
Until the last two decades, record labels got away with paying orchestras next to nothing for recording sessions, allowing them to do numerous takes so a very polished performance could be captured on tape. Musicians rightfully fought for higher wages over the year.
The real question you should be asking, is how much recording time do labels get with orchestras now compared to the 1960s and 1970s.
Further, over the last 20 years orchestral recordings are predominantly being made live because it's too expensive to pay studio fees. When there are mistakes in a passage, you cannot have the orchestra go back and replay it until they get it right -- you have no choice but to piece together the various performances that were recorded live. And with live recordings, producers try to cut out all of them ambient noises from the audience.
If there was a way to do 400 edits during the analog era to produce flawless performances, recording prodcucers would have. There are plenty of mistakes in these old recordings that I'm sure the musicians and producers wished they could have fixed. For instance, earlier this year I got the new remastered box set of Bernstein's CBS Mahler recordings. This was the first time I had listened to the recordings in years, and I was shocked how many errors there were. But this is to be expected because the music is difficult to perform. I'm pretty confident that if the ability existed to go in there and snip out a few of the offending mistakes, Bernstein would have told CBS to do so.
Totally agree!
If you consider, say, the Louis Amstrong Hot Fives and Sevens recordings,
or Jelly Roll Morton's recordings of the 20s and 30s, you come away with
a greatly increased appreciation of the sheer talent of these guys. No
edits possible - only alternate takes.
MK
exactly which recording they have edited has over 400 edits. It gets kinda tiresome when people say things like I know of "....one classical recording which has over 900 edits on it...." but won't say what that recording is and how they know. Why didn't the guy from Channel mention which of his own label's recordings has over 400 edits on it?
For a 60 minute cd to have 400 edits - which your Channel guy said was actually a low figure - there'd be an edit every (and I do mean EVERY) 9 seconds. 600 edits would mean an edit every 6 seconds, 800 edits would mean an edit every 4.5 seconds. To use kind of a middle # of edits according to your sources, look at your watch's second while listening to, say, a recording of Brahm's 3rd Sym. and see what an edit EVERY 6 SECONDS for the entire duration of the piece really means.
Please tell me what the hell is being edited every 4-9 seconds on an orchestral recording. I can only repeat what I said last time.....I have literally never heard a live performance by a world class orchestra, chamber ensemble or opera company that would require 400 edits to sound damn good. I know some people are Pro Tool wizards, but its hard to imagine that editing a classical cd played/sung by world class musicians 400-900 times would result in an improvement.
I guess you'll think I refuse to accept reality, but having been intimately involved in some editing/mixing sessions using Pro Tools, I'd have to see the edits on the screen to believe the "average" recording of world class orchestras/conductors has over 400 edits, let alone 900.
I hope I don't own any of 'em :-)
/
Rick,
Actually, Jared did mention some recordings on his own label which contained a significant amount of editing, but requested that the specific ones not be mentioned because the MUSICIANS might find it embarrassing. In fact, we listened to one track where he mentioned that there had been a significant amount of editing (on the order of one every nine seconds or less). No one there at the listening session could tell! He also mentioned that there is MORE editing on solo and chamber music recordings than there is on orchestral recordings.
If you will promise not to reveal/publicize which recording it is, maybe I can provide the example for you via e-mail?
Jeez, I can't imagine any of the guys I know who play in the Met band, ABT, sub in the NYP etc. needing anything remotely like that degree of editing for a chamber ensemble recording. They all play their asses off. I've stood right off the pit at the Met and heard damn near perfect performances by that band.
I also have first hand experience with analog tape editing, and worked with a couple of engineers who had amazing splicing/editing chops. But again, I find it hard to believe that recordings like my LP's of Stravinsky chamber pieces (such as his wind octet, Soldat etc.) are chock full of edits.
Dunno if I'll be familiar with any examples you tell about, but don't worry about me revealing what you tell me. However, I can't rule out a reply to your e-mail in which I say something like "That can't be true" :-)
"The orchestra, fresh from a European tour (the first “Elijah” rehearsal took place in Luxembourg), played well enough except for a few vagaries in the winds." Nobody's perfect not even NY Phil. And they have great woodwind players.
nt
Rick, when you say "Jeez, I can't imagine any of the guys I know who play in the Met band, ABT, sub in the NYP etc. needing anything remotely like that degree of editing for a chamber ensemble recording" I know just what you mean. I know some of these same people, as we have discussed privately.
But consider the possibility that even though these people don't "need" so much editing, or even any editing, it's often done anyway, in order to achieve something that is otherwise impossible to achieve in live performance. I have many historic recordings from the 20s, 30s and early 40s, of the greatest and most famous performers, which were not only done without splicing, but usually in a single take. They very rarely achieve the artificial (IMO) technical perfection that is routine with any major release today. I could go into specific examples, but this post is getting too long and boring even for me. And I have no idea who is right in your debate with Chris. But like both of you, I sure know people I could ask!
A young classical pianist was recording a piece he had not yet learned completely. So he played one page over and over until it sounded OK. Then the next page. And so forth, until he had enough to have them edited together. Playing the tape for a more old-fashioned colleague, he said "Sounds pretty good, doesn't it?" "Yes," the older pianist replied acidly, "Don't you wish you could play like that!"
I'd say, "yes."
When you become accustomed to knowing there's a "fix," you must get sloppier. That's why public performance, on a regular basis, is critical to a musician.
This probably explains why so many fans of legendary rock groups were highly disappointed in the performances they attended.
Is musical performance part circus act? :-)
Yes - I heard that was Badura-Skoda and Rodzinsky.
Hi Chris, I'm on a Ballet Orch Recording with Cellist Zuill Bailey, on Telarc. The engineer, who we had worked with before ( NOT Michael Bishop!), literally made us stop every few bars, and he edits his recordings from LOTS of short takes, it's his Thing. Zuill didn't like it all, the stopping was driving him ( and us!) crazy, but the Engineer prevailed. With Pro Tools, literally Anything is Possible. I know the SF Sym does touchup Sessions after their Live recording Weeks, and the Performances are edited from All the takes+touchups. A minute or so of Hall Ambience is also recorded to use when necessary. And Intonation And Tempo are completely adjustable. Maybe the San Francisco Air Symphony is Next!
In a series of recordings of wind-band repertoire made in the mid- to late 90s using players (faculty) from leading music schools around the U.S., I was surprised in how much of the product was based on the engineer's electronically piecing things together. Given that the conductor's fame had begun decades earlier (partly) due to a reputation for single-take recordings, I was also surprised that he put up with it. In any event the sessions were comprised of playing a movement once with no stops, followed by slogging through it again, bits and piece at a time. And then on to the next movement. Some great reviews followed the releases and some of the recordings are still getting air play but I can't stand listening to any of them.
But maybe the engineer was the producer?
Sounds hellish to me.
Yer ideal engineer is familiar with the space and his or her gear, sets up pretty close to final mic placement straight out of the box, has sufficient experience to get levels quickly and then gets RIGHT OUT OF THE WAY, until told by someone with musical expertise that something else needs to be done - a drop in here, a section there.
I find it hard to believe that a producer could allow this sort of carry on - but then, I don't run a label.
I do believe that this level of fiddling happens, but the situation is absurd: here we are dealing with competent players, presumably rehearsed, who know how it starts, middles and ends and are well directed in common purpose. It's not as if they're sucking up a few cones waiting for inspiration to strike so they can decide between going G minor to G minor seventh or just adding more shred.
On the other hand, I can imagine soloists and small ensemble players being so concerned for the quality of their musical testament that they insist upon correcting every nuance, real or imagined. ("... that second violinist! You wouldn't believe ...") A bit like many, sorry, some audiophiles, really - inclined to lose the wood for the trees.
Again, a robust producer can in this situation say, "Enough!"
/
Actually, your post reminds me of a couple of experiences I forgot to relate in the original discussion too.
I used to accompany Natasha Paremski, and she went to Russia to make a couple CD's of piano/orchestra works. It was the same situation you describe in your recording with Zuill Bailey: the engineer kept stopping the musicians every few bars. Natasha said she just hated recording this way!
On another occasion, pianist Ivan Moravec told me that his recording of the Dvorak Piano Concerto (which is one of the few Moravec recordings I have not heard) was recorded in much the same way too. Like Natasha, he was very displeased at having to make the recording in this way, although he implied that his other recordings were made with long takes.
It's terrible when engineers kind of "lay down the law" with the musicians like this!
Well, it may be possible to do a much greater range of editing techniques or manipulation with the latest digital technology than was possible at the start of the analogue era, but from what I've read, the introduction of magnetic tape quickly made heavy editing a routine fact in many classical recordings.
Glenn Gould, famous for insisting upon and closely supervising the heavy editing of his own recordings, wrote extensively about the phenomenon. Obviously, some performers and even conductors resisted it, staying away from the recording studio almost entirely.
But as I said in the last thread, I think our ears have become so accustomed to the unnatural lack of flaws in these recordings it has affected our expectations, even of live performances. But as I also said, I have only anecdotal evidence of this and I know some of you disagree.
The Prospects of Recording and, somewhat less seriously, The Grass Is Always Greener In The Outtakes: An Experiment In Listening, both originally articles in Hi Fidelity and both republished in one of my favorite classical music books, The Glenn Gould Reader (Knopf 1984).
I think Gould's writing, like his playing, wouldn't be so outrageous and entertaining if there wasn't more than a grain of fundamental truth in it.
This doesn't surprise me at all, and is one of the reasons I typically prefer listening to vinyl. Over-processed audio + endlessly-edited music just (to me) results in a rather characterless, sterile product. Sure, I buy SACDs and CDs, but only to fill a specific need or interest. And as far as actual listening time, I'd say that 80% of the time I spend listening to music is vinyl, 15% DVD video, and only 5% CD/SACD. This is really unfortunate, given the talent of today's musicians and orchestras, but there were great performers and orchestras decades ago as well, with more musical sounding recordings.
"Life without music is a mistake" (Nietzsche)
There were some razor blade and tape Masters. Robert Craft wrote about the amount of Tape Editing on Records, back in the 1950's, some famous Jazz Solos were edited from 2 or more takes. Recordings are Products, not Documentaries.
Yes, multiple takes spliced together did occur. But hundreds of edits per album? No. And a lot of the recordings, even in studios, were done in one session, maybe 2 or three takes, and they'd choose the best take for the release. (And then release the alternate take years later.) That's true of classical and jazz.
"Life without music is a mistake" (Nietzsche)
. . . c'est la vie! :-)
And really, I don't find (classical) recordings made these days any more (or less) characterless or sterile (on average) than in the LP days. I guess we just disagree.
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