been reduced to something coming out of stereo speakers or headphones. In performance, sound comes from an infinite number of points— even if the performer is in front of you, the sound is bouncing off walls and ceilings, and that’s part of the experience. It might not make the performance “better” in a technical sense, but it is absolutely more enveloping. Various people have attempted to bridge these irreconcilable differences, and some odd hybrids, as well as wonderful developments, have resulted.
In his book Perfecting Sound Forever, Greg Milner argues that the conductor Leopold Stokowski was a visionary who changed the way orchestral music sounded over the radio and on recordings. He loved the idea of amplifying classical music; he felt it made it bigger.7 His stated ambition was ultimately to use technology to get the compositions to sound better than what the composer had originally conceived. There’s a little hubris involved there, but I don’t think too many composers complained. Rather than having pushers and shovers, as the early recording studios had, Stokowski conscripted studio technicians to move the mics around during the recordings of orchestras. Anticipating a counter-melody from the French horns, for example, he’d signal a mic to be wheeled into position in time for their “solo.” He realized—as film-sound recorders and mixers do—that we hear with all our senses in a live situation, and to just stick a mic up and expect it to capture what we have experienced, well, that wasn’t going to happen. Recreating the subjective “experience” meant one had to do more than that.
In a live situation, the ear can psychoacoustically zoom in on a sound or isolate a section of players and pick out a phrase or melody—the way we can pick out a conversation at a noisy dinner table if we can see the person talking. Stokowski recognized this phenomenon and made adjustments to help bridge that perceptual gap. All of his innovations aimed to get the experience on disc, and possibly even surpass it by, for example, exaggerating dynamics and shifting perspectives.
Sometimes he went the other way: rather than exaggerating, he would attempt to mask some aspect of the original. At one point he proposed that a big problem inherent in opera performances could now be solved. He pointed out that “the lady who plays the part live may sing like a nightingale but she looks like an elephant.” Stokowski suggested that svelte actresses learn to lipsynch to pre-recorded vocals so that the opera visuals could finally match the composer’s intention. I saw this done once for a filmed version of Wagner’s Parsifal directed by Hans-Jürgen Syberberg. He had great actresses and actors playing the parts, lip-synching to great singers. I thought it worked, but this approach never caught on.
FROZEN ARCHITECTURE
Recordings freeze music and allow it to be studied. Young jazz players used to listen to Louis Armstrong’s recorded solos over and over until they figured out what he was doing. Later, amateur guitarists would use recordings to break down Hendrix and Clapton solos in the same way. Tenor saxophonist Bud Freeman found that listening to other players in clubs was too distracting—he preferred records. With a recording you could stop time by stopping the record, or you could make time repeat by playing part of a song over and over again. The ineffable was coming under human control.
But learning from records has its limitations. Ignacio Varchausky from the Buenos Aires tango orchestra El Arranque says in the documentary Si Sos Brujo that he and others tried learning from records how the older orchestras did what they did, but it was difficult, almost impossible. Eventually, El Arranque had to find the surviving players from those ensembles and ask them how it was done. The older players had to physically show the younger players how to replicate the effects they got, and which notes and beats should be emphasized. So, to some extent, music is still an oral (and physical) tradition, handed down from one person to another. Records may do a lot to preserve music and disseminate it, but they can’t do what direct transmission does. In that same documentary, Wynton Marsalis says that the learning, the baton passing, happens on the bandstand—one has to play with others, to learn by watching and imitating. For Varchausky, when those older players are gone, the traditions (and techniques) will be lost if their knowledge is not passed on directly. History and culture can’t really be preserved by technology alone.8
Recordings uproot music from their place of origin. They allow far-flung artists and foreign genres to be heard in other parts of the world, and these artists sometimes find a wider audience than they ever imagined they could have. John Lomax and his son Alan traveled thousands of miles to record the music of the American South. Initially they used a large and bulky disc recorder. This would be like having a mastering lab in the back of your station wagon, but it was as portable as one could get at the time, if you could call something the size of a small refrigerator portable.
In one instance, John and Alan went to a Texas plantation to record the black “residents” who would, they hoped, sing for them. The fact that those men could be “commanded” to sing might have been the primary reason to go there, but their experience did prove to be enlightening in a way that they hadn’t expected. They were looking for someone who could sing the song “Stagolee.” It seems slightly suspicious to me that these guys already knew what they wanted—how do you find the unexpected if you know what you want? Milner tells the story like this:
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