|
Music Lane It's all about the music, dude! Sit down, relax and listen to some tunes. |
|
|
|
Music Lane It's all about the music, dude! Sit down, relax and listen to some tunes. |
|
In Reply to: Thoughts on MONO... posted by M. Lucky on September 19, 2005 at 11:33:04:
I'll buy that"… and I think the greatest classical performers were born, raised, and trained before its influence became pervasive. By the time stereo came along, it was largely too late."
I think that's a different issue which I'll come back to.
But first, to start back at the first point, I think it is true also in a different way to the one I think you're referring to. I think there are differences in what works for a live performance vs a recorded one. You hear a live performance once and can't repeat the experience. Performers can and do adjust their performance to the audience, and they can do things that work in live performance because you only hear it once, but fail on record where you hear it over and over again. We listen to records in a different way - we play them regularly and become extremely familiar with the recording in a way that we can never become familiar with a live performance.
It simply stands to reason that live performance and recording are different 'tasks' for the artist with different requirements for achieving a succesful performance. The aims are actually different in some ways. Grand gestures can work occasionally in a live performance but soon become annoying when heard several times on record. Subtler things can often be succesful on record because the ability to replay the recording allows us to notice them, often on the second or later playing rather than the first, and to have the time to learn to appreciate them. That's not possible at a live performance - notice and appreciate it first time or never. We can probably identify a whole pile of significant differences as well as those few points.
So I think live performances and recording each offer the artist different opportunities and good artists learn to use those opportunities appropriately to the best effect. Some artists will definitely be better at one than the other, and some - Glenn Gould is the obvious classical music example - will choose one to the exclusion of the other.
And hidden somewhere in that is a belief on my part that we also listen differently to live and recorded performances from which follows a view that live performance is not the benchmark for judging how good a recording is or how well our systems sound. We're dealing with different art forms.
And yes, I think there probably have been problems with the shift to recording as the main way in which people listen to music. Artists will have needed time to adjust to the new form and the form has kept changing as things moved from acoustic to electric recording processes and media changed from cylinders and 78s capable of storing only a few minutes to discs capable of holding over an hour of music. Plus the development of recording technologies that allow editing and assembly of recordings from discrete 'chunks' of performance in ways that can never occur in a live performance. I suspect some artists will always be doing a catchup when it comes to dealing with technological innovation and others will push their personal art through testing the limits of that innovation.
I also think each mode of performance is going to influence the other in strange ways. For a non-musical example, the shift from italic to copperplate handwriting styles came about in part because the method of producing facsimiles of handwriting changed from woodblock printing which could do a very accurate reproduction of the transition from thick to thin line created by writing with an angled chisel point quill, to engraved copper plates which handled the transition quite differently. As people came to be more familiar with the copper plate reproduction and it became the accepted standard for how handwriting should look, the pen changed from using a stiff chisel point nib to using a flexible, fine point nib that produced a wider stroke when the user increased the pressure, and which more closely reproduced the transitions from thick to thin on the engraved copper plate reproductions.
So there's a classic example of how change in a technology used to reproduce a particular art form actually ended up changing the art form itself because the reproduction came to be accepted to a degree as the ideal instead of the original, and people then started copying some features that the reproduction process created when producing new original documents.
I don't think you can judge live performance on the basis of recorded performances or vice versa. You don't judge oil paintings by the standards of watercolour paintings or vice versa. You don't judge handwriting by woodblock or copper plate reproduction standards or vice versa. But we do have to accept that for each one of those pairs, changes in one half of the pair can drive changes in the other half. Different forms influence each other, and often in surprising ways, but each has strengths that the other doesn't have, and also different weaknesses.
And I intend most of the above as a much more general comment that a simple comment on classical recorded music history and performance standards but I would most definitely say that the best recorded performance of anything is highly unlikely to be a live recording.
David Aiken
This post is made possible by the generous support of people like you and our sponsors:
Follow Ups
- "I think recording changed the nature of musical performance…" - David Aiken 14:05:41 09/19/05 (0)
Top of Page ]
[ Contact Us ]
[ Support/Wish List ]
[ Copyright © 2025, Audio Asylum, all rights reserved ]
