Classical Corner Featured — 22 September 2012
By Lawrence Schenbeck
It’s French, and it’s pronounced tamˊbər. Back in his salad days, Pierre Boulez told us that all music can be described using just four parameters: pitch, duration, dynamics, and timbre. Pitch delivers melody, harmony, and various musical textures. Duration turns into rhythm, the most fundamental parameter: longer, shorter, faster, slower, syncopated. Dynamics refer to amplitude or volume. And timbre?
Ah, timbre. Audiophiles seem to value timbre a lot. It’s also called tone color, “harmonics,” or overtones, as in this short definition. But there’s more to timbre and how it’s perceived than such definitions would lead you to think.
Although the Western classical tradition emphasizes the first two parameters—pitch and duration—as primary content carriers, we have also developed timbre to a fairly high degree. Think of all the “tone colors” available in the modern orchestra. Strings high to low; woodwinds ditto, but with distinctive timbral signatures as well (piccolo, flute, clarinet, bass clarinets, oboe, English horn, bassoon, contrabassoon, saxophone, et al.). Brass both blatty and mellow, “lean” or “round.” And percussion? Don’t get me started.
Grey & Gordon’s timbre-space chart, enhanced by Hans-Christoph Steiner
Some eras in music history seem relatively unconcerned about timbre. You can re-arrange almost anything by Bach for a different instrument or group of instruments and the basic musical message still comes through. Consider Eric Crees’ masterful arrangement of the great C-Minor Passacaglia and Fugue BWV 582 for brass choir, which appears on the recent Chicago Symphony Orchestra Brass Live album:
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Although Crees’ adventurous re-imagining of this work was criticized in some quarters, I think Bach would have understood. After all, he absorbed the style of various composers by copying out their music, often re-arranging it for other instruments, as he did for various Vivaldi concertos (see BWV 592–7 or 972–87). He also recycled his own scores, for example the violin concertos he turned into harpsichord concertos (BWV 1052–8). In the latter, he often took care to adjust textures or figuration for the new instrument. That doesn’t mean he was responding to timbral difference. Rather, such adjustments reflect his sensitivity to idiom, the recognition that different instruments were better or worse at doing certain technical things—playing scales faster, playing more notes at once (or not), and so forth.
As the orchestra developed during the 19th century, composers paid increasing attention to timbre. The Romantic era’s unquenchable addiction to novelty, its pursuit of a broader range of expressions that could be presented in quicksilver succession, made timbral mastery an absolute requirement for Tone Poets everywhere.
Early in the century another Frenchman led the way. Hector Berlioz (1803–69) literally wrote the book on orchestration, and his music made wholesale use of the latest techniques in timbral innovation. Look at almost any page of the Symphonie fantastique, for example, and you’ll see his written instructions to the players, telling them just how to do things they otherwise wouldn’t have done: “2 drummers to use sponge-headed sticks”; “col legno battuto [strike the string with the stick of the bow].” Or listen to this—you’re hearing various combinations of four timpani players, tuned mostly a whole step apart, plus a single English horn:
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A shepherd pipes, and in the distance we hear thunder. It’s hard to imagine that passage, or much else of Symphonie fantastique, rescored for a piano trio or a saxophone quartet. Timbre is crucial in establishing the emotional moment that Berlioz wants here.
A number of composers—Germans, by and large—continued to emphasize traditional structures and the primacy of pitch and duration. You know them well: Schumann, Mendelssohn, Brahms. Often their orchestrations resort to “blended” timbres, e.g., violas and horns together on a line, or cellos and bassoons. But by the same token, composers experimenting with structure often increased their attention to timbre. The most extreme example of this tendency was probably Anton Webern, who together with Arnold Schoenberg came up with the concept of Klangfarbenmelodie, which literally means tone-color melody. Why not use a succession of different timbres, rather than pitches, to create an identifiable “melody”? This was an especially attractive idea to them because they had pretty much trashed traditional melody by then anyway. Here’s a snippet of Klangfarbenmelodie from Webern’s Five Pieces for Orchestra, op. 10:
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See what they were getting at? Lovely sounds, but not capable of sustaining an extended discourse. The Impressionists Claude Debussy and Maurice Ravel found better ways to enhance timbre in their music without deconstructing either pitch or rhythm. Recently, I’ve gotten enormous pleasure from revisiting Debussy’s orchestral works courtesy of Stéphane Denève and the Royal Scottish National Orchestra. Their new double-disc set explores this repertoire with relish. Let’s use a couple of tracks to discover the secret—if that is possible—of Debussy’s timbral style. First, that archetypal citation of Impressionism, the first few bars of Prelude a l’apres-midi d’un faune:
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Note that Debussy facilitates emphasis on timbre by isolating individual colors at the outset. First we hear just the solo flute. Then, in response, horns, supported by a delicately voiced woodwind chord (no flutes) and a flourish from the harp. Silence. Then, the horn figure repeats, supported this time by muted strings and a second harp; the first harp again provides a glissando flourish. Now the flute returns, and its solo is supported by a larger body of strings, divisi and tremolando, providing slightly more weight and presence but no competing timbres.
The governing principle is to make a few key colors stand out. Usually those are wind instruments. The string section provides a neutral bed upon which those isolated colors are displayed, like gems on velvet. Even in a much more complicated passage, these two roles remain intact. Listen, for example, to the middle movement of La Mer, which features a succession of timbres so rapid that it calls to mind Webern’s Klangfarbenmelodie. No wonder Boulez speaks of its “bold and radical conception of timbre” in service to an “elegant, condensed, and elliptical syntax.” That pretty much nails it.
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This rapid montage of different colors accompanies the simultaneous presentation of two or three or more musical ideas. In fact, Debussy’s use of contrasting timbres is an essential part of the musical ideas themselves; their timbral identity helps us keep them distinct in the mind’s ear as we listen. It’s an astonishing accomplishment.
Debussy also knew how to turn the timbre knob up or down, depending on the music’s function. Take Jeux, a ballet score written well after both the Prélude and La Mer (and which Denève and company offer in a superlative performance). Here the composer was quite conscious of the need to create sounds for a scenario that would be expressed visually by dancers. The music thus becomes not a world unto itself but rather one component of the whole experience. So: motives lengthen somewhat; they are often repeated immediately; and Debussy reins in his tendency toward constant timbral fluctuation. Instead, rhythm and dynamics come to the fore.
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Just as Debussy didn’t remain a textbook impressionist in every work he wrote, so were other composers able to borrow a page or two from his playbook without losing their own identities. A few days ago I received a review copy of a new recording of Prague and A Summer’s Tale by Czech composer Josef Suk (1874–1935). The contrast between the two works is instructive. Prague (1904) is a romantic-nationalist portrait of the great city, alternating between evocations of “eternal mystery” and the historic conflicts that shaped its destiny. A Summer’s Tale (1912–13) retains romantic style but makes greater use of impressionism, as in this scherzo-like movement titled “In the Power of Phantoms”:
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Listening to A Summer’s Tale helped me realize another important principle about timbre. If you keep varying it, listeners will notice. If you maintain consistent timbre throughout a piece, that timbre—no matter how unusual—will gradually become less remarkable. Its power as an expressive device will be altered if not diminished. Listen to this passage from another movement of A Summer’s Tale, “Intermezzo: Blind Musicians.”
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The scoring is unusual: two harps, two English horns. Later—much later—we hear solo violin, solo viola, a small string group. But the unvarying timbral presentation of the first three minutes has its intended effect: we are transported to a dusty road outside the little town of Sedičany, where Suk encountered two blind musicians continuously playing the same dull tune, hoping to collect a coin or two from passersby. The combination of double-reeds in duet, which would have been striking in a shorter passage, here becomes emblematic of pathos and disengagement because of its unrelieved repetition. I suppose that if Suk had scored this for, say, two clarinets or two flutes, he would have lost the bitter undertone that the English horns supply. Thus something remains of the power of timbre, even when someone chooses to run a single timbre into the ground.
When we move beyond the orchestral realm, we still do not lack for a range of colors. Consider the piano! ECM has recently released Russian pianist Alexei Lubimov’s interpretations of the Debussy Préludes for piano, Books I and II. But Lubimov recorded Book I on a 1925 Bechstein and Book II on a 1913 Steinway. As Robert Levine points out in the October Stereophile, you can distinguish the Bechstein’s “clean, sharp tone and very forward hammerstrokes” from the Steinway’s “smoother, matte sound . . . and exquisite pianissimi” if you just alternate tracks from each Book. But who’s going to do that? Really, it’s equally rewarding to immerse yourself in the sound of each piano—and each Book—for a nice long stretch of time. Here’s Lubimov on the Bechstein, giving us the exquisite whole-tone scales of Voiles from Book I:
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And here he is at the Steinway for Book II’s La terrasse des audiences du clair de lune:
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With his student Alexei Zuev, Lubimov tackles two-piano transcriptions of the orchestral Trois Nocturnes and Prélude à l’aprés-midi d’un faune. Here’s a bit of the latter, with Zuev at the Steinway and Lubimov on the Bechstein. At times you can easily make out which piano is contributing what, and at other times they blend gloriously together:
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Want more? Consider the fortepiano, which is what we now commonly call the “early” piano. One of my favorite keyboard artists, Andreas Staier, has long restricted himself to harpsichords and fortepianos. His new recording of Beethoven’s Diabelli Variations is one to cherish.
When these 33 variations are played on a historically appropriate instrument by a master like Staier, the effect is transformative. Timbre is generally brighter and more “forward.” The lower half of the instrument’s pitch range emphasizes fundamentals rather than overtones: you don’t get bass octaves smothered in delicious chocolate sauce. But the fuller, more closely voiced left-hand chords in Beethoven don’t get smothered either.
Staier deftly characterizes each variation, creating the true kaleidoscope of expressions that Beethoven intended. He also has fun with the special pedals that came with many fortepianos in the early 19th century. For Variation 20, a restrained change-of-pace turn, we get the “moderator” pedal:
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For the explosive Variation 23, Staier calls on the “janissary” pedal, which allows the pianist to simulate the percussive presence of a Turkish band at key moments:
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If all that Beethovenian energy drains you, try relaxing for a while with the sounds of Antonio de Cabezón (1510–66). Naxos has just released his Complete Tientos and Variations, played on a harpsichord constructed after early North-European models and tuned to a “modified sixth-comma meantone temperament, a=415 Hz.” What matters is that the timbre fits perfectly with Cabezón’s music, which—as the album title implies—comes in two basic flavors. He was the greatest early exponent of a genre based on the great polyphonic church motets of Josquin des Prez, Johannes Ockeghem, and other Franco-Flemish masters. Elsewhere called ricercari, in Spain they were known as tientos. The term means “to search out”: keyboard players adapted sections of motets or else created similar new instrumental works with plenty of counterpoint and thematic development. Here is a sample:
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The second disc in this set focuses on Cabezón’s diferencias or variations, and these are mostly based on Renaissance dance tunes—pavanes, galliards, passamezzi—or else popular secular songs. Not surprisingly, they are more rhythmic and virtuosic:
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I didn’t expect to be attracted to this music. But every time I tried to jump from the middle of one track to another, I couldn’t do it. I had to listen to the very end. In 1610 an anonymous Frenchman wrote
Who can say (if he has any sense at all) that he has never felt the force and effects of music, hearing some excellent player sing on his instrument? As for me . . . having sometimes heard . . . the Spaniard Antonio Caveçon playing and singing on the organ . . . I was so ravished and so deeply moved, that I could nevermore doubt the power, efficacy and influence of music.
It’s time to close. But can I draw your attention to one more instrument that can make an unusual and effective contribution to your timbre world? I refer, of course, to the accordion.
This is where the jokes would go, if we had the space. Thankfully we don’t. There’s a groundswell of interest among living composers in the unique properties of this ancient and still very popular instrument. Here is an excerpt from Concerto Piccolo for accordion and strings by Danish composer Anders Koppel (b. 1947), who begins with an accompaniment figure borrowed from Haydn:
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It’s included on a terrific new SACD from Da Capo featuring accordion whiz Bjarke Mogensen and the Danish National Chamber Orchestra. “It all began,” the booklet notes tell us, “with Ole Schmidt’s Symphonic Fantasy and Allegro,” also on this disc. Schmidt himself (1928–2010) allowed that
I disliked the accordion immensely, but when I met [accordionist] Mogens Ellegaard, my opinion of the instrument completely changed in less than an hour. . . . Ellegaard said to me: “Feel free to write with as much virtuosity as you like. There’s hardly anything that can’t be done on the accordion.”
He’s right. The album offers an impressive assortment of music, ranging from the tonal neoclassicism of Schmidt to the postmodern wit of Koppel to more avant-garde offerings by Martin Lohse (b. 1971) and Per Nørgård (b. 1932). Try it, you’ll like it.
Bjarke Mogensen
Or get yourself volume 7 of the Poul Ruders Edition, from Bridge Records. Ruders (b. 1947) is one of the most significant living Danish composers; I first became aware of him through his stunning operatic realization of The Handmaid’s Tale, Margaret Atwood’s novel about a misogynist dystopia.
This is what Ruders discovered about the sound of the accordion. As a wind instrument, it lends itself to “quite different opportunities for kinship and timbral blending” with other wind instruments. But—according to Malcolm MacDonald’s excellent booklet notes—if you write a unison with a clarinet or flute, “the difference in their intonation creates a sonic frisson of overtones” or even “makes them very slightly dissonant to one another.” I might add that whereas wind players produce sound by blowing their own warm breath into an instrument, accordionists depress a key that directs air from a bellows toward a reed. Accordions resemble organs in that respect.
Thus in Ruders’ Songs and Rhapsodies for wind quintet and accordion, a dialogue between the mechanical and the human also seems to take place. Listen:
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It’s no accident that Songs and Rhapsodies is coupled with a substantial work for organ and orchestra, Ruders’ Symphony No. 4. The timbral contrasts enabled by that combination are equally fascinating. We’ll have to examine several such works—but in a future Classical Corner!
Featured Recordings
Chicago Symphony Orchestra Brass Live. Works by Gabrieli, Bach, Revueltas, Prokofiev, Grainger and Walton. CSO Resound 901 1103. CD/SACD, 2011.
Berlioz: Symphonie fantastique; Marches. Detroit Symphony Orchestra, Paul Paray cond. Mercury Living Presence 475 6622. CD/SACD, 2005. (Originally recorded 1958/59.)
Webern: Five Pieces for Orchestra, Op. 10; Schoenberg Five Pieces for Orchestra, Op. 16; Berg Three Pieces for Orchestra, Op. 6; Lulu Suite. London Symphony Orchestra, Antal Dorati cond. Mercury Living Presence 432 006-2. CD, 1990. (Originally recorded 1961/62.)
Debussy: Orchestral Works. Royal Scottish National Orchestra, Stéphane Denève cond. Chandos CHSA 5102(2). CD/SACD, 2012. A remarkable achievement. Not only does Denève bring considerable insight to the scores, but producer Brian Pidgeon and chief engineer Ralph Couzens do their usual expert work of capturing the color and power of these works in a hall acoustic that highlights their best features.
Suk: A Summer’s Tale, Op. 29; Prague, Op. 26. BBC Symphony Orchestra, Jiří Bělohlávek, cond. Chandos CHSA 5109. CD/SACD, 2012. I have other recordings of op. 29, but none that capture the special world of Suk as well as this one. Getting the earlier tone poem on the same disc further sweetens the offering. Highly recommended.
Debussy: Préludes, Books I and II. Alexei Lubimov, piano; with Alexei Zuev on transcriptions of Trois Nocturnes and Prélude à l’après-midi u’un faune. ECM New Series 2241/42. CD, 2012. Even without the special attention to historic piano timbres, these would be exceptional interpretations. The program booklet, with worthwhile notes by Jürg Stenzl, also delivers more than we often get.
Beethoven: Diabelli Variations. Andreas Staier, “fortepiano after Conrad Graf.” Harmonia Mundi HMC 902091. CD, 2012. Besides Beethoven’s 33 variations, Staier includes selections from the 50 Veränderungen über einen Walzer von Anton Diabelli by other composers, including Czerny, Hummel, Kalkbrenner, Liszt, and Moscheles, plus his own improvised “Introduction” to the Beethoven set. Altogether enjoyable, and a must-have for piano aficionados.
Cabezón: Tientos and Variations. Glen Wilson, Harpsichord. Naxos 8.572475/76. CD, 2012. Wilson, who is both a performer and a musicologist, contributed his own notes for this recording. They provide a thorough introduction to Cabezón’s achievement and a most necessary account of the troubled publishing history of his works, beginning with the error-riddled 16th-century editions. Wilson’s reconstructions of the scores have made it possible for us to hear the actual music for the first time in centuries.
Accordion Concertos. Bjarke Mogensen, accordion. Danish National Chamber Orchestra, Rolf Gupta cond. Da Capo 6.220592. CD/SACD, 2012.
Poul Ruders Volume Seven. Symphony No. 4 “An Organ Symphony”; Trio Transcendentale; Songs and Rhapsodies. Flemming Dreisig and Nicholas Wearne, organ. Frode Andersen, accordion. Athelas Sinfonietta Copenhagen. Odense Symphony Orchestra, Roberto Minczuk, cond. Bridge 9375. CD, 2011.
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Soundminded
“Ah, timbre. Audiophiles seem to value timbre a lot. It’s also called tone color, “harmonics,” or overtones, as in this short definition. But there’s more to timbre and how it’s perceived than such definitions would lead you to think.”
This time you really hit the nail right on the head. But the subject is even more complex than you’ve implied because timbre is but one aspect of the even larger concept of tonality. What’s the difference? IMO timbre refers to the characteristic relationship between fundimental and harmonics that defines the sound of one type of instrument and another, one instrument of the same type an another. That alone is so complex a subject you could write a whole book about it and barely scratch the surface. Each instrument has a characteristic first part, a transient attack, a steady state tone, and a decay. There are variations within a give type of instrument depending on how it is constructed, a specific instrument depending upon how it is played, the condition it’s in at the moment (how it’s tuned, what temperature it’s at and other factors. Ever hear someone say their piano has a cold?)
Tonality enompasses a lot more than timbre though. It includes for example dynamics. How loud or softly can it play. Does the timbre change when the dynamics change? (great instruments and voices don’t change timbral quality as they get louder and seem to have limitless capacity displaying the loudest and most powerful sounds called for by the music without any sign of strain or change in timbre. Tonality also incudes the perceived size of an instrument. A grand piano is a huge source of sound. It’s not just that it can play very loudly, its sound is big. In a concert hall it fills the hall easily to the last row of the highest balcony. In a home it dominates a room literally fililng up its half of the room with sound. Studying how it makes sound shows why. It radiates its powerful sound in all directions. If you do not sit in direct line of sight of the strings, sounding board, hammers, harp, the elements that create the sound and the lid is not propped open, all of the sound you hear from it has reverberated around the room before you first hear it and many times afterwards as each note decays and dies out. Comparing that with the way loudspeakers produce sound and it’s easy to see why our technology even at its best can’t duplicate the tonality of many musical instruments from recordings.
And then there’s the place the instrument is heard, the performance venue. Out of doors with no artificial amplification, not even a bandshell, no walls to reflect sound, at all but the closest distance acoustic instruments produce feeble tones. A horn must be pointed right at you to blare. Notice how Salvation army musicians usually position themselves near the entrance of a building to take advantage of reflections. Even an entire symphony orchestra out of doors in the open air sounds feeble from any distance away and thin, lacking in power. Now put that orchestra in a concert hall and the same orchestra sounds powerful. If you stick your ear aganst the wall you will hear….nothing. That’s why it’s so hard to believe that most of the sound we hear at a live performace actually comes from the walls, ceiling, floor, and all other reflective objects in the room. Only a small fraction, usually 10% or less of it comes from the instruments directly. This not only affects the perceived timbre and tonality of musical instruments but affects the way they are played, the music written for them. The jazz pianist Peter Nero once said in an interview on NPR that he and an assistant would go to a concert venue early in the day and wheel the piano around the stage to find just the right spot where it sounds best in the audience. And so this critical interaction between instruments and the room they’re heard in plays a crucial role in the music we hear. If you can’t duplicate it, a recording can’t sound like actual music, it’s a poor facsimile of the real thing. Everything suffers including tonality and timbre.
Speaking of the real thing, I think there is a crucial difference between so called acoustic instruments and electronic musical instruments. Acoustic instruments create sound strictly by using human energy, the life force of the musician to create sound. Whether by breathing, bowing, plucking, striking, you are hearing energy transformed coming directly from another human being. In a recording, broadcast, or an electronic muscial instrument you are hearing energy from burning coal, oil, gas, splitting atoms, capturing sunlight, wind, but not something directly from a human being. The sole exception may be a modern pipe organ where the windchest bellows formerly powered by humans has been replaced by mechanical air compressors. This is why real music is a direct communication between one human being and another and a recording isn’t.
Lawrence Schenbeck
Very well said. I couldn’t help thinking, for example, of a recital I heard Thomas Hampson give several years ago at Emory University. The essential timbre of his voice did not seem to change, regardless of whether he sang pianissimo or fortissimo — and he easily, effortlessly filled a rather large hall with his sound. I doubt if there’s any way to capture that sensation on a recording, although the effort is worthwhile.
Soundminded
“I doubt if there’s any way to capture that sensation on a recording, although the effort is worthwhile.”
Take my word for it, it can be done. But not by any technology you can buy today. It will take people who have far greater insight into the nature of sound and how it is perceived than any working on the problem now as reflected by the products offered commercially or by what is reported in the media including over the internet. Such technology as is required is not yet known to exist. What we get instead is a pale nearly lifeless facsimile that reminds us of music (if we’ve had any experience with real music.) To those who haven’t, it’s become a substitute for music, it’s what they call music, and it is a redefinition of what the word means. They don’t know what they’re missing.
Lawrence Schenbeck
Speaking of those who “don’t know what they’re missing” — perhaps you have read Benjamin Britten’s remarks “On Receiving The First Aspen Award” in 1964. I have always been impressed by his comments on recorded music and its place in the universe. This part begins on page 261 of “Britten On Music”:
http://books.google.com/books?id=UhGmm8wOjcQC&pg=PA255&lpg=PA255&dq=britten+on+receiving+aspen+award&source=bl&ots=sZKdzn6Xou&sig=oSpmB-n_RrjUv9QLaqfYy7e8nzs&hl=en&sa=X&ei=VuddULTcFYbI9gSbtoDoCA&ved=0CD8Q6AEwBQ#v=onepage&q=britten%20on%20receiving%20aspen%20award&f=false
with the words “Anyone, at any time…” There is also a booklet with just the speech, published separately by Faber.
Britten was an idealist, and his notion of individual responsibility as applied to the concertgoer would not sit well with many people, but I think he had a point.
Soundminded
IMO listening to a recording is hearing music only in the broadest sense of the term. In my narrower sense of the word it’s hearig a facsimile of music, not the real thing. At best it’s a filter and a fairly strongly distorted one at that. To critical ears that are familiar with real music played by real musicians it is even with the best technology a poor facsimile. It’s a facsimile in the same sense that looking at a photo of the Grand Canyon is not the same as visiting the Grand Canyon. Once I saw a specially made film flying over the Grand Canyon at very low level a few hundred feet or less over the ground until you reached the Canyon. The movie screen was 110 feet tall, 170 feet wide so it filled your entire field of view no matter where you sat. Quite a experience but it was not the same as actually being at the Grand Canyon. And it never made any pretense that it would be. But that was the promise made a long time ago about recordings of music by those in an industry who justify their ever escalating prices for their ever changing best efforts. I don’t hear that claim much any more, they admit defeat in that area. They say it can’t be done. The equipment for most of those who buy and use it has become an end it itself. I suppose if you haven’t spent a lifetime around machinery it has its attractions for some but for me these are just machines turned out more or less by cookie cutters in factories. People get excited about cars, cameras, and other paraphenalia in the same way. It doesn’t excite me however.
The first time I heard a recording of Pavarotti’s voice it was on a phonograph record of Tosca. I couldn’t understand why people were so excited about him. First time I heard a CD of his voice I began to understand the range, purity, and power it had. But even on the best equipment I can only imagine what it must have sounded like at La Scala, in Buenos Aries, or at the Cathedral of Notre Dame. That sound not just in the same room with you but filling up all that space, echoing again and again as the power of only his lungs died out on each note. You don’t get this from a recording. And you don’t get the timbre either because as those echoes die out their relationship between the fundimental tone and the harmonics and among harmonics changes, the higher harmnics die out faster. And that alters the timbre. All of these factors are inter-related, they are all different aspects of the acoustic effect of the reflections you don’t hear on a recording. They are the reason why Metropolis conducting at Carnegie Hall before they changed from oil to latex paint and ruined the acoustics had to take a tempo almost half of Toscannini’s for the same composition. He had to wait for the echoes of the loudest sounds to die out or the sounds would overlap and become a blur. It would lose definition. Absense of these reflections also sharply reduces dramatic impact especially at those stop chords at the climax of certain musical passages. The rest measures as those echoes die out builds the tension for what comes next. That must be adjusted for each acoustic environment by the conductor or musicians. Without those reflections the discontinuity of musical notes becomes even more obvious at these dramatic moments than it usually is. The limitations of recordings literally destroys in part what the music had to give. No amount of tweaking of the current technology will change this, it’s an inherent flaw in the method.
Lawrence Schenbeck
Interesting! And yet here we are discussing this matter on a Website dedicated to recorded sound, more or less. This suggests to me that all absolutist pronouncements made on the futility of chasing the “absolute sound” are nearly as futile — or at least as pointless — as chasing after the sound itself. It’s a bit like lamenting that we are mortal and don’t possess superpowers. Whatcha gonna do about it?
Perhaps in part because I can’t afford obscenely priced equipment, I still get a kick out of hearing what a decent system can do with well recorded material. This summer we visited some friends in NYC who are quite well known as musicians there, and in their apartment one of them played an old recording — John McCormick or someone — on one of the wind-up Victrolas he collects. The emotional immediacy of that voice was astonishing. I was literally as blown away, if not more so, by my friend’s Victrola and scratchy old 78 as by the YG Anat III I had heard a bit earlier at a local audio show. (And believe me, I enjoyed hearing that Anat III.)
OTOH I heard Pavarotti “live” twice and was underwhelmed each time. It was a relatively small voice, and he could be lazy. When he wasn’t surrounded by the likes of Joan Sutherland and Sherrill Milnes, knowing that the most important London critics were in the audience, he sometimes coasted. We have all had similar experiences with live performances, whether they featured the great, the near-great, or the obscure.
Just as I’ve stopped making lists of “top 5 opera recordings” or “best Missa Solemnis” etc. etc., I’ve decided to relax and enjoy the music, even if it ain’t Karajan in 1962 or John Culshaw sitting at the producer’s table. And what I think I’ve discovered is this: sometimes it’s better.
Soundminded
“Perhaps in part because I can’t afford obscenely priced equipment”
There was a time not too long ago when I could. Well if I really wanted to I suppose I still could. But it makes no sense. At least not to me. If you’ve read my other postings you know I’ve gone off in my own direction insofar as equipment goes. Is it impossible to recreate the sound of a live musical performance from a recording? IMO not with any technology you can buy at any price today. One day it may be possible in a laboratory but not in a home. However, far better than we have now is possible and much more like the real thing than you’d imagine. But it’s not even on the horizon yet. Nobody working on this problem AFAIK has the “smarts” to do much more than just try to tweak their last efforts. That won’t be nearly good enough. So for me, shopping for this kind of equipment is a fools game.
“Whatcha gonna do about it?”
Now that’s a whole different topic.
As for Pavarotti, he might have been having an off year. He might have been in decline in his older years. In the real world, things like that happen. In the world of cds, you hear the same performance every time you play one.
Soundminded
Listen to the sound of this recorded cello. We can only get an inkling of what it sounded like where it was played. The sense of envelopment created by the reflections that was heard live is absent in the recording. The sense of power to the tone of the instrument, its ability to fill up the space we’d have perceived for an extended time for each note is gone.The relative strength of the reverberation may have been even greater than the recording suggests. Had the microphones been any farther from the cello to capture more of it, all we might have heard from the recording was a blur. That probably would not have happened hearing it live even from a much greater distance. There are no surround sound systems you can buy that can duplicate that effect. By my calculations, the perceived power of musical instrument heard in a typical concert hall is from 40 to 43 db greater than heard from a home sound system playing at the same loudness, even the best of them. That’s a factor of 10,000 to 20,000 times the perceived power. IMO this may explain why audiophiles often play recordings at ear shattering levels even knowing that they might injure their hearing, possibly permanently. The recordings are typically a feeble facsimile. Playing it louder to provide greater stimulation to the auditory centers of the brain is an attempt to compensate in loudness for the missing dimensions of time and space.
Lawrence Schenbeck
I’m sorry to disagree, but I find that even in a wretched YouTube offering like this, the power of a great artist like Maisky, playing a great work like Bach’s G-Major Cello Suite, essentially comes through. At any rate we get far more than an “inkling” of what’s important in the music. Would I rather hear it in person? Of course. Would I rather hear it captured in DSD or DXD or at least 24/96 and played back not through my humble computer speakers but even a modest system like, say, an oppo bdp-95 to a NAD integrated to a pair of better psb monitors? Of course again.
There is a demonstrable law of diminishing returns that applies to the price of audio equipment, and we know that sometimes the prices of higher-end pieces are inflated by cosmetic or other considerations that have no effect on sound quality. But it seems to me that’s no reason to scorn the efforts of those who continually strive to design speakers or source components or whatever that provide at least incrementally better results at a realistic price point.
For what it’s worth, I also sense that the middle-aged men who routinely play their systems at ear-bleed levels are not merely trying to compensate for the lack of real-world information in their recordings. They are probably also trying to turn back the clock, to hear the music as they heard it the first time, with 17-year-old ears. (The 17-year-olds who play music loud, on the other hand, probably just don’t know any better.)
Soundminded
Lawrence I didn’t think our agreeing would last very long. BTW we have the whole Maisky/Bach set on DVD on the DG label. If you like this clip, I highly recommend it. Here’s another performance he gave of the same sonata and it’s entirely different. Notice how fast and flat his playing is here, not to my liking at all.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wk8QNzkzwYg
Once again there is an unusually high degree of reverberation in this recording. The difference of the sound of the venues is pretty much disguised by the nealy complete lack of spatial dimensionality in the recording/playback process. Nor will surround sound systems fix it.
“There is a demonstrable law of diminishing returns that applies to the price of audio equipment”
Personally I don’t see any correlation between price and quality of high end audio equipment at all. Nor do I see that newer is necessarily better. Frankly this industry as it exists today makes no sense to me at all. I’m not even sure I understand why it’s still around.
About playing recordings at very loud levels, IMO this fulfills a need to stimulate the auditory areas of the brain to a stronger degree. Lacking dimensions of space and time, there’s an effort to compensate by increasing loudness. This phenomenon came home to me by accident one day while I was walking around downtown in Manhattan in the financial district. I was hot and tired and so I stepped into a Church where I sat in a pew while the organist was softly practicing. I was amazed at how powerful the organ sounded even though it wasn’t being played loudly, probably out of consideration for visitors who’d come in to have a quiet moment or pray. I noticed the same thing again in Bermuda. The sound seemed far more powerful than organs on recordings played at far louder levels even heard from very high quality loudspeakers. One factor is certainly bass content but that’s only part of the story.
Among my memorable auditory experiences were street buskars, a flute player in a connecting tunnel between platforms in the Paris Metro and a jazz saxophonist at the Cannery near Fisherman’s Wharf in San Francisco. I’m a real reverb freak and I’ve been studying it for nearly 40 years. I’m trying to understand what it is about it that I like so much. Reproducing the reverberant sound field whether from a recording or live so that it sounds natural, spacious, accurate, and pleasing is one tough trick. Just ask Leo Beranek if it isn’t so.
Lawrence Schenbeck
Soundminded, if you are a reverb freak I’ve got just the thing! At least it’s one of the more astonishing and satisfying uses of natural reverb I’ve ever heard. Accordionist/composer Pauline Oliveros and trombonist Stuart Dempster lowered themselves into an abandoned Defense Department water cistern somewhere in Oregon I think and recorded the results of their improvisation:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0at5DrXpJj8
The whole album, “Deep Listening,” is stil available through Amazon and other sources, and as a pure sound experience I think it has merit. Whether it’s good music will be a matter of your own taste.
When it comes to the “problem” of capturing the total experience of the acoustic on a recording, you’re undoubtedly right — bearing in mind, of course, that sometimes such “failure” is a blessing.
My own experience as a working musician fell into three areas: superb halls, acceptable halls, and disastrous halls. There are just as many of the disastrous variety as of the superb, maybe more. Last thing in the world you want in those places is for the recording engineer to “succeed” in reproducing the hall acoustic. As it is, you often have to fight your way through the piece, making whatever adjustments you can with seating arrangements or tempi and dynamics. And if you are (un)lucky enough to be having it recorded, then everyone will be grateful if the engineer mics you closely enough so that the hall plays as small a role as possible.
I would go even further and suggest that some of the most celebrated recordings we know do not necessarily convey the absolutely authentic experience of the venue, and that is okay with me. For example, I am fairly familiar with the acoustics of the Church of St. Ignatius Loyola, on Park Ave. in the 80s. I have attended services there, concerts also, and have on one or two occasions gotten a private demonstration of their remarkable organ. When I listen to Graham Ashton and Anthony Newman’s famous brass and organ SACD, however, what does NOT astonish me is the degree to which they capture the room acoustic. Clearly the producer and engineers on that project balanced consideration for the room with other considerations, and I am glad they did. It’s a better recording for that.
When I attend concerts in that venue, incidentally, I make sure to grab a seat fairly close to the performers. The further back you go, the less likely you are to hear the music, and the text, with acceptable clarity. For me that’s paramount.
But then you know all this already, and you have presumably made similar choices and adjustments all your concertgoing life!
Soundminded
Lawrence, thank you for that clip. It might make a good soundtrack for a sci fi movie. I’d read a similar story some years ago about how musicians and audience in Russia descended regularly 150 feet into an ice cave because of the acoustics of a natural ampitheater in it. I’ve done more than study echoes and reverberation, I’ve experimented with them and mathematically modeled them. Unlike acousticians who refer only to late reflections as reverberation, I lump all reflections into that word (any point of distinction of where early reflections end and reverberation begins is arbitrary.)
The effect of acoustics which are in essence the reflections of sound has on music is IMO profound. It’s not just that in most public performance venues reflections are 90% or more of what the audience hears, they’re qualitatively different from the direct arriving sounds. It affects not just the perceived power of sound by amplifying it in time and space but affects tonality and dynamics as well. It creates new harmonies and dissonances as late reflections of one note arrive at your ears as the first sound and early reflections of successive notes are heard. It is the cement in time that holds the notes together. As you have observed, too much reverberation blurs the notes together in what is referred to as loss of definition. It’s a tradeoff. The tempo music is performed at, even what kind of music is performed at a particular venue can be affected by how much and for how long reverberation lasts. One crucial effect reverberation creates is a sense of envelopment. This cannot be duplicated by todays machines for playing recordings. What defines the difference between what is qualitatively good and what is qualitatively bad reflections is something that’s barely been studied (the whole science of acoustics is only slightly more than 100 years old.) Beranek has some good papers on his website. They’re opinons of “golden ears” mostly conductors comparing their preferences for 58 concert halls in one case and about 20 opera houses in another with measured paramenters trying to find a correlation.
IMO unless and until these reflections of sound are sufficiently studied, measured, and duplicated, recordings of music will upon comparison to live music exhibit severe temporal and spatial distortions. Merely refining the existing technology simply isn’t good enough. As an analogy, even the sharpest largest most contrasty black and white television picture can’t begin to compare to an early color television set.