The Prospects of Recording

by Glenn Gould Copyright/Source

Part A
Change of Acoustic
An Untapped Repertoire
The Splendid Splice
The "Live" Performance on Records

Here appears the article as it was published in High Fidelity Magazine, vol.  16, no.  4, April 1966, pp.  46-
63, complete with the original quotes for each section

Part A

In the United States, Glenn Gould is known as a brilliant and provocative pianist and as an occasional
author of brilliant and provocative musical commentary. In his native Canada he is known as well as a
radio and television "personality", a magnetic educator of Bernsteinian skill and stature. One of his most
talked-of shows for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation was last year's wide-ranging report on "The
Prospects of Recording," a 90-minute program which examined in some detail the profound effect of
electronic technology on the whole panorama of music, viewed from the standpoint of the performer, the
composer, and the listener. As soon as we heard it, we knew that this radio script contained the basis of a
fascinating and important article, and we asked Mr. Gould to prepare it for this anniversary issue of High
Fidelity. At it turns out, the adaptation delves into the subject far more thoroughly than the broadcast.
"The Prospects of Recording" is a lengthy and occasionally difficult essay, but we consider it well worth
our space and your attention.

Alongside the Gould article are marginal comments on its major themes from various key figures in the
worlds of music, recordings, and mass communications: Milton Babbitt, America's leading composer of
electronic music and a professor at Princeton University; Schuyler G. Chapin, vice-president in charge of
programming at Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts; Aaron Copland, a major force in the development
of American music; John Culshaw, manager of classical recordings for Decca/London; B.H. Haggin,
doyen of American record critics and author of the first over-all guide to music on records; Lord
Harewood, former artistic director of the Edinburgh Festival and present artistic advisor of the New
Philharmonia Orchestra; Goddard Lieberson, president of Columbia Records Inc.; Enoch Light, veteran
bandleader and founder of Command Records; John McClure, director of Masterworks, Columbia
Records; Marshall McLuhan, sociologist of mass communications and director of the Institute of Culture
and Technology at the University of Toronto; George R. Marek, vice-president and general manager of
RCA Victor Record Division; Richard Mohr, musical director of Red Seal Recordings, RCA Victor; Denis
Stevens, musicologist-conductor-critic specializing in early music; Leopold Stokowski, conductor and
long-time recordist. Their comments are excerpted from taped interviews.

IN AN UNGUARDED MOMENT some months ago, I predicted that the public concert as we know it
today would no longer exist a century hence, that its functions would have been entirely taken over by
electronic media. It had not occurred to me that this statement represented a particularly radical
pronouncement. Indeed, I regarded it almost as self-evident truth and, in any case, as defining only one
of the peripheral effects occasioned by developments in the electronic age. But never has a statement of
mine been so widely quoted -- or so hotly disputed.

The furor it occasioned is, I think, indicative of an endearing, if sometimes frustrating, human
characteristic reluctance to accept the consequences of a new technology. I have no idea whether this
trait is, on balance, an advantage or a liability, incurable or correctable. Perhaps the escalation of
invention must always be disciplined by some sort of emotional short-selling. Perhaps skepticism is the
necessary obverse of progress. Perhaps, for that reason, the idea of progress is, as at no time in the
past, today in question.
Certainly, this emotional short-selling has its good side. The afterthought of Alamogordo -- the willingness
to kill off a monster of their own creation -- does more credit to the pioneers of the atomic age than all the
blessings this generation can expect that breakthrough to give birth to. And, if protest against the
ramifications of man's ingenuity is inevitable, and even essential to the function of his genius, then
perhaps there really is no bad side -- just amusement at and, ultimately, acceptance of that
indecisiveness which proclaims the frailty of man's continuing humanity.

In any event, I can think of few areas of contemporary endeavor that better display the confusion with
which technological man evaluates the implications of his own achievements than the great debate about
music and its recorded future. As is true for most of those areas in which the effect of a new technology
has yet to be evaluated, an examination of the influence of recording must pertain not only to
speculations about the future but to an accommodation of the past as well. Recordings deal with concepts
through which the past is reevaluated, and they concern notions about the future which will ultimately
question even the validity of evaluation.

The preservative aspects of recording are, of course, by no means exclusively in the service of music.
"The first thing we require of a machine is to have a memory," said a somnolently pontifical character in
Jean Luc Godard's recent film A Married Woman. In the electronic age a caretaking comprehension of
those encompassing chronicles of universal knowledge which were tended by the medieval scholastics --
an encumbrance as well as an impossibility since the early Middle Ages -- can be consigned to computer-
repositories that file away the memories of mankind and leave us free to be inventive in spite of them. But
in limiting our investigation to the effect of recordings upon music, we isolate an art inhibited by the
hierarchical specialization of its immediate past, an art which has no clear recollection of its origins, and
therefore an art much in need of both the preservative and translative aspects of recording. As a recent
brief prepared by the University of Toronto's Department of Musicology proposing a computer-controlled
phonographic information system succinctly noted, "Whether we recognize it or not, the long-playing
record has come to embody the very reality of music."

As concerns its relations to the immediate past, the recording debate centers upon whether or not
electronic media can present music in so viable a way as to threaten the survival of the public concert.
Notwithstanding the imposing array of statistics which testify to the contrary ("Ladies' Lyric League Boasts
Box Office Boost 3rd Successive Year"), I herewith reaffirm my prediction that the habit of concert-going
and concert-giving, both as a social institution and as chief symbol of musical mercantilism, will be as
dormant in the twenty-first century as, with luck, will Tristan da Cunha's Volcano; and that, because of its
extinction, music will be able to provide a more cogent experience than is now possible. The generation
currently being subjected to the humiliation of public school solfège will be the last to attain their majority
persuaded that the concert is the axis upon which the world of music revolves.

It is not. And considering for what a brief span the public concert has seemed predominant, the wonder is
that pundits allowed it ever would be. To its perpetuation, however, a substantial managerial investment
is currently committed ("For Rent: Complex of Six Caustically Charming Auditoria. Apply, J. Rockefeller."),
and we must realize that to reckon with its obsolescence is to defy the very body of the musical
establishment. It cannot be overemphasized, however, that the fate of the public event is incidental to the
future of music -- a future deserving of far greater concern than is the fiscal stability of the concert hall.
The influence of recordings upon that future will affect not only the performer and concert impresario but
composer and technical engineer, critic and historian, as well. Most important, it will affect the listener to
whom all of this activity is ultimately directed. It is to an examination of some of these changes that this
present anniversary issue of High Fidelity is devoted.

The concert is an antique form as it now stands. Most

towns cannot afford the best concert artists and I don't
see the advantage of seeing a second-rate artist over
hearing a superb one. - LIEBERSON

With all the progress that we have made in the

reproduction of sound, I have yet to hear on record
what I hear in the concert hall or what I hear in my
mind when I read a score. - MAREK
 In a recording an artist can be encouraged to give a
more immediately intense performance than he could
under concert or theatre conditions. - CULSHAW

For me, the most important thing is the element of

chance that is built into a live performance. The very
great drawback of recorded sound is the fact that it is
always the same. No matter how wonderful a
recording is, I know that I couldn't live with it -- even of
my own music -- with the same nuances forever.
- COPLAND

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 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. - BABBITT

Many people have come to the concert hall expecting

to hear the glowing, glossy, beautiful performances
they have heard on records only to be shocked by the
natural acoustics. The Dvorák Cello Concerto on a
recording can easily have the soloist as the absolute
protagonist, with great presence, whereas he is often
drowned out by the orchestra in the concert hall. But I
also think that many more will feel that the adventure,
the accidental excitement of a live performance is
much more stimulating and satisfying than just
listening constantly to a record. - CHAPIN

I think that records have already replaced concerts for

a great many people and have affected a great
number of others in their concert and operagoing. If
you push this logically, to the complete replacement of
concerts by recordings, you would have complete
disaster. For then you would have no artists coming
up, trying out in halls, making careers for themselves.
It would be disastrous not only for live music but for
the gramophone. - HAREWOOD

Top of page

Change of Acoustic

IF WE WERE TO TAKE an inventory of those musical predilections most characteristic of our

generation, we would discover that almost every item on such a list could be attributed directly to the
influence of the recording. First of all, today's listeners have come to associate musical performance with
sounds possessed of characteristics which generations ago were neither available to the profession nor
wanted by the public -- characteristics such as analytic clarity, immediacy, and indeed almost tactile
proximity. Within the last few decades the performance of music has ceased to be an occasion, requiring
an excuse and tuxedo, and accorded, when encountered, an almost religious devotion; music has
become a pervasive influence in our lives, and as our dependence upon it has increased, our reverence
for it has, in a certain sense, declined. Two generations ago, concert-goers preferred that their occasional
experience of music be fitted with an acoustic splendor, cavernously reverberant if possible, and pioneer
recording ventures attempted to simulate the cathedral-like sound which the architects of that day tried to
capture for the concert hall -- the cathedral of the symphony. The more intimate terms of our experience
with recordings have since suggested to us an acoustic with a direct and impartial presence, one with
which we can live in our homes on rather casual terms.

Certainly I conduct a performance for a recording

differently than I would for a live performance. In a
recording what we are really striving for is to express
the physical and emotional nature of the music in
terms that will both be eloquent and convey the
composer's ideas in the average living room.
- STOKOWSKI

Apparently, we are also expected to live with it in the concert hall. Some of the much heralded links in that
prodigious chain of postwar auditoria catastrophes (Philharmonic Hall of Lincoln Center, at Festival Hall,
etc.) have simply appropriated characteristics of the recording studio intended to enhance microphone
pickup, the special virtue of which becomes a detriment in the concert hall. Proof of this is that when the
audience is sent home and the microphones moved in close and tight around the band, Philharmonic
Hall -- like many of these acoustical puzzles -- can accommodate surprisingly successful recording
sessions.

With today's multiple microphoning you really have to

be careful not to achieve too surgical a line. I think it
important to have touch-up microphones in front of the
winds, or the basses, but most composers have
written for instrumental sections rather than for
individual instruments in the orchestra, and we must
make sure that these sections are in the proper
balance with each other. The microphone must not
become too analytical. - LIGHT

Just how great a change has come about can be seen in a comparison between recordings made in
North America and Western Europe and those originating in Central and Eastern Europe, where -- for
reasons both economic and geographic -- the traditions of public concertgoing retain a social cachet
which for North America's split-level suburbia has long since been transferred to twelve-tone doorbells,
nursery intercom, and steam room stereo. One need only compare a typical Continental reverberation
such as that present in the Konwitschny recordings from Leipzig or (though it somewhat contradicts the
geographical assumptions of my argument) in Van Beinum's from the Concertgebouw with the Studio 8H
sound of Toscanini's discs of the late Thirties and Forties or with the Severance Hall balances for George
Szell's recent Epic recordings to appreciate the modifications that the North American attitude to
recording can impose on even the most resolute martinet.

The ideal for a phonograph record is the concert hall

illusion, or rather the illusion of the concert hall illusion,
because you can't transfer the concert hall into the
dimensions of a living room. What you can do is
record a work so that you think you are in a concert
hall when you listen to it at home. - MOHR
A more precise comparison can be found between the discs made by Herbert von Karajan with the
Philharmonia Orchestra in London for EMI-Angel and the same maestro's recordings for DGG in Berlin.
Any number of the latter (I am thinking now of such releases as the 1959 performance of Ein
Heldenleben with a distant brass and all but inaudible timpani) suggest a production crew determined to
provide for the listener the evocation of a concert experience. The EMI recordings, on the other hand,
provide Karajan with an acoustic which, while hardly chamberlike, at least subscribes to that philosophy
of recording which admits the futility of emulating concert hall sonorities by a deliberate limitation of studio
techniques.

Further evidence of this curious anachronism can be found in some of the recitals recorded by Sviatoslav
Richter in Eastern Europe, of which the magnificent performance of Mussorgsky's Pictures at an
Exhibition, taped in Sofia, Bulgaria, is a good example. Here is a great artist with an incomparable
interpretation transcribed by technicians who are determined that their microphones will in no way
amplify, dissect, or intrude upon the occasion being preserved. Richter's superbly lucid playing is
sabotaged by some obsequious miking which permits us, at best, a top-of-the-Gods half-earful. Unlike
their colleagues in North America, who are aware of serving a public which to a considerable extent has
discovered music through records and who evaluate their own presence in the booth as crucial to the
success of the end product, the production crew in Sofia, off-stage in the wings of some palace of
municipal amusement, made no such claims for the autonomy of their craft. They sought only to pursue it
as an inconspicuous complement of Richter's performance.

Personally, I don't like the present fashion of close-up

miking, not even for the piano. I prefer perspective. I
don't believe the engineer should intrude between the
composer, or performer, and the listener and suddenly
make you hear a flute or trumpet. I think the next step
will be a regression back to the old days, with fewer
microphones placed further away both to give
perspective and to let the ears listen on their own. If a
composer wants to write the other way, he should
frankly call his piece a String Quartet for Four
Instruments and Four Microphones; that is quite a
different sound than for instruments alone.
- LIEBERSON

The North American and Western European sound strives for an analytic detail which eludes the Central
European displacement. By virtue of this Westernized sound, recording has developed its own
conventions, which do not always conform to those traditions that derive from the acoustical limitations of
the concert hall. We have, for instance, come to expect a Brünnhilde, blessed with amplification as well
as amplitude, who can surmount without struggle the velvet diapason of the Wagnerian orchestra, to
insist that a searching spotlight trace the filigreed path of a solo cello in concerto playing -- demands
which contravene the acoustical possibilities of the concert hall or opera house. For the analytical
capacity of the microphones has exploited psychological circumstances implicit in the concerto dialogue,
if not within the ability of the solo instrument itself, and the Ring cycle as produced by a master like John
Culshaw for Decca/London attains a more effective unity between intensity of action and displacement of
sound than could be afforded by the best of all seasons at Bayreuth.

Top of page

An Untapped Repertoire

ANOTHER ITEM to be added to our catalogue of contemporary enthusiasms is the astonishing revival in
recent years of music from preclassical times. Since the recording techniques of North America and
Western Europe are designed for an audience which does most of its listening at home, it is not surprising
that the creation of a recording archive has emphasized those areas which historically relate to a
hausmuzik tradition and has been responsible for the triumphant restoration of baroque forms in the years
since World War II. This repertoire -- with its contrapuntal extravaganzas, its antiphonal balances, its
espousal of instruments that chiff and wheeze and speak directly to a microphone -- was made for stereo.
That prodigious catalogue of cantatas and concerti grossi, fugues and partitas has endowed the
neobaroque enthusiasm of our day with a hard core of musical experience. A certain amount of this music
has then found its way back into the concert hall and re-engaged the attention of the public audience --
sometimes indeed through considerable musicological enterprise. New York's Jay Hoffman, perhaps the
last concert impresario truly deserving of that once proud title, offered his audience on consecutive
evenings during Christmas week, 1964, comparative versions of Messiah according to G.F. Handel and
other editors. But this scholarly exactitude has come about by virtue of a recorded library which enables
such works to be studied in great number, in great privacy, and in an acoustic that fits them to the
proverbial T.

Now that people have such a vast command of the

musical literature on records, they can compare more
and see where the structural, and even the tonal,
similarities lie between the old and the new. We hear a
lot of talk about so-called "totally organized music",
nowadays. But this is reflected in earlier disciplines to
some extent, as in the totally isorhythmic motet, where
the exact rhythms of a piece of music were specified.
Similarly, one could say that early Stockhausen is
closer to Dunstable than to anyone else in between.
But to appreciate this, one needs good recordings of
Dunstable and these are hard to find. - STEVENS

From a musicological point of view the effort of the recording industry on behalf of Renaissance and pre-
Renaissance music is of even greater value. For the first time, the musicologist, rather than the
performer, has become the key figure in the realization of this untapped repertoire; and in place of
sporadic and often as not historically inaccurate concert performances of a Palestrina Mass or a Josquin
chanson, or whichever isolated items were heretofore considered approachable and not too offensively
pretonal, the record archivists have documented a new perspective for the history of music.

Archive recordings must have a future one way or

another. But a commercial record company can go on
producing these albums for only so long and I think
that what must develop in the recording field is what
has developed in the book business, where it has
taken the form of the university press. I've already
approached one of the large foundations to ask them
to interest themselves in this problem. Some kind of
central warehousing of all esoteric recordings would
be an appropriate function for a foundation.
- LIEBERSON

The performer is inevitably challenged by the stimulus of this unexplored repertoire. He is also
encouraged by the nature of studio techniques to appropriate characteristics that have tended for a
century or two to be outside his private preserve. His contact with the repertoire he records is often the
result of an intense analysis from which he prepares an interpretation of the composition. Conceivably, for
the rest of his life he will never again take up or come in contact with that particular work. In the course of
a lifetime spent in the recording studio he will necessarily encounter a wider range of repertoire than
could possibly be his lot in the concert hall. The current archival approach of many recording companies
demands a complete survey of the works of a given composer, and performers are expected to undertake
productions of enormous scope which they would be inclined to avoid in the concert hall, and in many
cases to investigate repertoire economically or acoustically unsuitable for public audition -- the complete
piano works of Mozart which Walter Gieseking undertook for Angel, for instance.
 In the presentation of early music the performance
very often precedes knowledge of the score. Indeed
there may be only a single manuscript somewhere. It
would be difficult to make this manuscript available to
the general public, but a recording can at least show
what it sounded like. As a musicologist, I find
recordings constantly a challenge, because they help
me to hear scores which have not been performed
since the thirteenth or fourteenth centuries. But they
also pose problems: record jackets very rarely give
enough information. - STEVENS

But most important, this archival responsibility enables the performer to establish a contact with a work
which is very much like that of the composer's own relation to it. It permits him to encounter a particular
piece of music and to analyze and dissect it in a most thorough way, to make it a vital part of his life for a
relatively brief period, and then to pass on to some other challenge and to the satisfaction of some other
curiosity. Such a work will no longer confront him with a daily challenge. His analysis of the composition
will not become distorted by overexposure, and his performance top-heavy with interpretative "niceties"
intended to woo the upper balcony, as is almost inevitably the case with the overplayed piece of concert
repertoire

It may be that these archival pursuits, especially where the cultivation of earlier literature is involved,
recommend themselves both to the performer and his audience as a means of avoiding some of the
problems inherent in the music of our own time. One is sometimes inclined to suspect that such
phenomena as the baroque revival provide refuge for those who find themselves displaced persons in the
frantically metamorphosing world of modern music. Certainly, the performance traditions indigenous to
those areas of repertoire revived by the microphone have had an enormous influence upon the way in
which certain kinds of contemporary repertoire are performed, and have, indeed, bred a generation of
performers whose interpretative inclinations respond to the microphone's special demands.

The recordings of Robert Craft, those prodigious undertakings on behalf of the Viennese trinity
Schoenberg, Berg, and Webern -- not to mention Don Carlo Gesualdo -- tell us a good deal about the
way in which performances prepared with the microphone in mind can be influenced by technological
considerations. For Craft, the stop watch and the tape splice are tools of his trade as well as objects of
that inspiration for which an earlier generation of stick-wielders found an outlet in the opera cape and
temper tantrums. A comparison between Craft's readings of the large-scale orchestral studies of
Schoenberg, especially the early post-romantic essays such as Verklärte Nacht or Pelléas und
Melisande, with the interpretations of more venerable maestros -- Winfried Zillig's glowingly romantic
Pelléas of 1949, for instance -- is instructive.

Craft applies a sculptor's chisel to these vast orchestral complexes of the youthful Schoenberg and gives
them a determined series of plateaus on which to operate -- a very baroque thing to do. He seems to feel
that his audience -- sitting at home, close up to the speaker -- is prepared to allow him to dissect this
music and to present it to them from a strongly biased conceptual viewpoint, which the private and
concentrated circumstances of their listening make feasible. Craft's interpretation, then, is all power
steering and air brakes. By comparison, in Zillig's reading of Pelléas (on a now withdrawn Capitol-
Telefunken disc) the leisurely application of rubatos, the sensual haze with which he gilds the
performance as though concerned that clarity could be an enemy of mystery, point clearly to the fact that
his interpretation derived from a concert experience where such performance characteristics were
intuitive compensations for an acoustic dilemma.

The example is productive of a larger issue with which the techniques of the recording studio confront us,
and I have deliberately chosen to illustrate it with an example from that area of twentieth-century
repertoire least indigenous to the medium. Whether Craft's analytic dissection of such repertoire is
appropriate, whether there remain positive virtues to the presentation of late-romantic fare in the concert
hall, is not really the point. We must be prepared to accept the fact that, for better or worse, recording will
forever alter our notions about what is appropriate to the performance of music.
 Top of page

The Splendid Splice

OF ALL THE TECHNIQUES peculiar to the studio recording, none has been the subject of such
controversy as the tape splice. With due regard to the not so unusual phenomenon of a recording
comprised of single-take sonata or symphony movements, the great majority of present-day recordings
consist of a collection of tape segments varying in duration upwards from one twentieth of a second.
Superficially, the purpose of the splice is to rectify performance mishaps. Through its use, the wayward
phrase, the insecure quaver can, except when prohibited by "overhang" or similar circumstances of
acoustical imbalance, be remedied by minute retakes of the offending moment, or of a splice segment of
which it forms a part. The anti-record lobby proclaims splicing a dishonest and dehumanizing technique
that purportedly eliminates those conditions of chance and accident upon which, it can safely be
conceded, certain of the more unsavory traditions of Western music are founded. The lobbyists also claim
that the common splice sabotages some unified architectural conception which they assume the
performer possesses.

As for the morality of splicing, I suppose there should

be no objection to Toscanini's not liking what an oboe
did on the first take and not liking what a flute did in
the second and then taking the best parts of each take
to make a whole. It's still essentially Toscanini.
Whatever moral uneasiness I have about such things
is just a holdover from the past and perhaps I should
adapt myself to the possibilities of the present. But I
don't like the idea of Schwarzkopf putting her high C
on Flagstad's recording. - HAGGIN

It seems to me that two facts challenge these objections. The first is that many of the supposed virtues of
the performer's "unified conception" relate to nothing more inherently musical than the "running scared"
and "go-for-broke" psychology built up through decades of exposure to the loggione of Parma and their
like. Claudio Arrau was recently quoted by the English journal Records and Recordings to the effect that
he would not authorize the release of records derived from a live performance since, in his opinion, public
auditions provoke stratagems which, having been designed to fill acoustical and psychological
requirements of the concert situation, are irritating and antiarchitectural when subjected to repeated
playbacks. The second fact is that one cannot ever splice style -- one can only splice segments which
relate to a conviction about style. And whether one arrives at such a conviction pre-taping or post-taping
(another of the time-transcending luxuries of recording: the post-taping reconsideration of performance),
its existence is what matters, not the means by which it is effected.

Tape splicing isn't a moral question at all, any more

than the number of stagehands used backstage at a
play production is a moral question or the number of
revisions of a book is a moral question. It's really the
product that counts. The consumer's only concern
should be what he hears and how he reacts to what he
hears. He has a legitimate complaint only when the
splicing technique actually does affect the final
product, when the impact or the over-all line is
damaged because of obvious inserts. - McCLURE

A recent personal experience will perhaps illustrate an interpretative conviction obtained post-taping. A
year or so ago, while recording the concluding fugues from Volume I of the Well-Tempered Clavier, I
arrived at one of Bach's celebrated contrapuntal obstacle courses, the Fugue in A minor. This is a
structure even more difficult to realize on the piano than are most of Bach's fugues, because it consists of
four intense voices that determinedly occupy a register in the center octaves of the keyboard -- the area
of the instrument in which truly independent voice-leading is most difficult to establish. In the process of
recording this fugue we attempted eight takes. Two of these at the time were regarded, according to the
producer's notes, as satisfactory. Both of them, No. 6 and No. 8 respectively, were complete takes
requiring no inserted splice -- by no means a special achievement since the fugue's duration is only a bit
over two minutes. Some weeks later, however, when the results of this session were surveyed in an
editing cubicle and when Takes 6 and 8 were played several times in rapid alternation, it became
apparent that both had a defect of which we had been quite unaware in the studio: both were
monotonous.

Tape splicing borders on immorality because there are

many artists today on the concert stage or in the opera
house who cannot give you the performance in life that
they can give you on records. - MOHR

Each take had used a different style of phrase delineation in dealing with the thirty-one-note subject of
this fugue -- a license entirely consistent with the improvisatory liberties of baroque style. Take 6 had
treated it in a solemn, legato, rather pompous fashion, while in Take 8 the fugue subject was shaped in a
prevailingly staccato manner which led to a general impression of skittishness. Now, the Fugue in A minor
is given to concentrations of stretti and other devices for imitation at close quarters, so that the treatment
of the subject determines the atmosphere of the entire fugue. Upon most sober reflection, it was agreed
that neither the Teutonic severity of Take 6 nor the unwarranted jubilation of Take 8 could be permitted to
represent our best thoughts on this fugue. At this point someone noted that, despite the vast differences
in character between the two takes, they were performed at an almost identical tempo (a rather unusual
circumstance, to be sure, since the prevailing tempo is almost always the result of phrase delineation)
and it was decided to turn this to advantage by creating one performance to consist alternately of Takes 6
and 8.

Here's the dilemma. You get an extraordinarily

beautiful take of a movement, but there are two or
three flaws -- a horn didn't quite make it, or the
pizzicati weren't together, or something. Now you go
back and retake the movement, but somehow the men
and the conductor can't recapture the same peak of
expression. What do you do? If you're sensible and
not involved in moral issues, you fix those few
mistakes in the first take with inserts from the inferior
take -- using as little as possible, to be sure -- and
what you end up with is something far beyond what is
normally possible at a concert. - McCLURE

Once this decision had been made, it was a simple matter to expedite it. It was obvious that the
somewhat overbearing posture of Take 6 was entirely suitable for the opening exposition as well as for
the concluding statements of the fugue, while the more effervescent character of Take 8 was a welcome
relief in the episodic modulations with which the center portion of the fugue is concerned. And so two
rudimentary splices were made, one which jumps from Take 6 to Take 8 in bar 14 and another which at
the return to A minor (I forget which measure, but you are invited to look for it) returns as well to Take 6.
What had been achieved was a performance of this particular fugue far superior to anything that we could
at the time have done in the studio. There is, of course, no reason why such a diversity of bowing styles
could not have been applied to this fugue subject as part of a regulated a priori conception. But the
necessity of such diversity is unlikely to become apparent during the studio session just as it is unlikely to
occur to a performer operating under concert conditions. By taking advantage of the post-taping
afterthought, however, one can very often transcend the limitations that performance imposes upon the
imagination.
When the performer makes use of this postperformance editorial decision, his role is no longer
compartmentalized. In a quest for perfection, he sets aside the hazards and compromises of his trade. As
an interpreter, as a go-between serving both audience and composer, the performer has always been,
after all, someone with a specialist's knowledge about the realization or actualization of notated sound
symbols. It is, then, perfectly consistent with such experience that he should assume something of an
editorial role. Inevitably, however, the functions of the performer and of the tape editor begin to overlap.
Indeed, in regard to decisions such as that taken in the case of the above-mentioned A minor Fugue, it
would be impossible for the listener to establish at which point the authority of the performer gave way to
that of the producer and the tape editor, just as even the most observant cinema-goer cannot ever be
sure whether a particular sequence of shots derives from circumstances occasioned by the actor's
performance, from the exigencies of the cutting-room, or from the director's a priori scheme. That the
judgment of the performer no longer solely determines the musical result is inevitable. It is, however,
more than compensated by the overwhelming sense of power which editorial control makes available to
him.

Splicing presents a great temptation when you're

putting something together and you know you can
make it almost flawless. You can't help wanting to do
it. I suppose it's the human aspiration to perfection.
But there is always the possibility that you could get
something absolutely perfect and it would be
absolutely boring. - MOHR

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The "Live" Performance on Records

THE CHARACTERISTICS enumerated on our inventory represent the past rendered in terms that seem
appropriate to the electronic age. Although they compile, by themselves, an impressive list of present-day
convictions about the way in which music should be performed, they do not, except by implication,
suggest a direction for recording to pursue. It is quite likely that these preferences engendered by
phonographic reproduction -- clarity of definition, analytic dissection by microphones, catholicity of
repertoire, etc. -- will determine to a considerable extent the kind of sound with which we shall want our
musical experiences to be endowed. It is less likely that the recording industry will always concern itself
primarily with an archival representation of the past, no matter how painstakingly embalmed, but for a
long time to come some portion of the industry's activity will be devoted to merchandising the celebrated
masterworks which form our musical tradition. Before examining the larger ramifications for the future of
recording, I should like to consider here some hardy strains of argument that perennially decry the
influence of recording upon standard items of the repertoire and upon the hierarchy of the musical
profession. These arguments sometimes overlap each other, and it can become rather difficult to detect
the area of protest with which each is concerned. However, under a general heading of "humanitarian
idealism" one might list three distinguishable subspecies, which can be summarized as follows:

1. An argument for aesthetic morality: Elisabeth Schwarzkopf appends a missing high C to a tape of
Tristan otherwise featuring Kirsten Flagstad, and indignant purists, for whom music is the last
blood sport, howl her down, furious at being deprived a kill.

2. Eye versus ear orientation: a doctrine that celebrates the existence of a mystical communication
between concert performer and public audience (the composer being seldom mentioned). There
is a vaguely scientific pretention to this argument, and its proponents are given to
pronouncements on "natural" acoustics and related phenomena.
3. Automation: a crusade which musicians' union leaders currently share with typesetters and which
they affirm with the fine disdain of featherbedding firemen for the diesel locomotive. In the midst
of a proliferation of recorded sound which virtually erases earlier listening patterns, the American
Federation of Musicians promotes that challenging motto "LIVE MUSIC IS BEST" -- A judgment
with the validity of a "Win with Wilkie" sticker on the windshield of a well-preserved '39 LaSalle.
As noted, these arguments tend to overlap and are often joined together in celebration of occasions that
afford opportunity for a rear-guard holding action. Among such occasions, none has proved more useful
than the recent spate of recorded "live" performances -- events which straddle two worlds and are at
home in neither. These events affirm the humanistic ideal of performance; they eschew (so we are told!)
splices and other mechanical adventures, and hence are decidedly "moral"; they usually manage to
suppress a sufficient number of pianissimo chords by an outbreak of bronchitis from the floor to advertise
their "live"-ness and confirm the faith of the heroically unautomated.

Even if I were to grant all the things that are possible

in the making of a record, I would still want certain
performances live. You get something there
sometimes which you just can't achieve in the
recording studios. The live concert hall performance,
or even such a performance recorded, could very well
have qualities that are preferable -- with all their
imperfections -- to one assembled from recording
studio takes. - HAGGIN

They have yet another function, which is, in fact, the essence of their appeal for the short-sellers: they
provide documentation pertaining to a specific date. They are forever represented as occasions
indisputably of and for their time. They spurn that elusive time-transcending objective which is always
within the realization of recorded music. For all time, they can be examined, criticized, or praised as
documents securely located in time, and about which, because of that assurance, a great deal of
information and, in a certain sense, an emotional relation, is immediately available. With regard to the late
Dutch craftsman who, having hankered to take upon himself the mantle of Vermeer, was martyred for a
reluctance to live by the hypocrisy of this argument, I think of this fourth circumstance -- this question of
historical date -- as the Van Meegeren syndrome.

Hans Van Meegeren was a forger and an artisan who, for a long time, has been high on my list of private
heroes. Indeed, I would go so far as to say that the magnificent morality play which was his trial perfectly
epitomizes the confrontation between those values of identity and of personal-responsibility-for-
authorship which post-Renaissance art has until recently accepted and those pluralistic values which
electronic forms assert. In the 1930s, Van Meegeren decided to apply himself to a study of Vermeer's
techniques and -- for reasons undoubtedly having more to do with an enhancement of his ego than with
greed for guilders -- distributed the works thus achieved as genuine, if long-lost, masterpieces. His prewar
success was so encouraging that during the German occupation he continued apace with sales destined
for private collectors in the Third Reich. With the coming of V.E. Day, he was charged with collaboration
as well as with responsibility for the liquidation of national treasures. In his defense, Van Meegeren
confessed that these treasures were but his own invention and, by the values this world applies, quite
worthless -- an admission which so enraged the critics and historians who had authenticated his
collection in the first place that he was rearraigned on charges of forgery and some while later passed
away in prison.

The determination of the value of a work of art according to the information available about it is a most
delinquent form of aesthetic appraisal. Indeed, it strives to avoid appraisal on any ground other than that
which has been prepared by previous appraisals. The moment this tyranny of appraisaldom is confronted
by confused chronological evidence, the moment it is denied a predetermined historical niche in which to
lock the object of its analysis, it becomes unserviceable and its proponents hysterical. The furor that
greeted Van Meegeren's conflicting testimony, his alternate roles of hero and villain, scholar and fraud,
decisively demonstrated the degree to which an aesthetic response was genuinely involved.

There is no excuse at all for recording live concerts.

It's a lazy and cheap way to make records. Only if your
artist -- and he must be an important artist -- is old or ill
and there is no other chance to record him do I see
any reason for these "live" recordings. Then you have
a duty to preserve the concert as an historical
 document -- warts, coughs, and all. I really doubt that
anyone really plays better with an audience than
without. They may think they do. But actually they only
feel better. Listen to a transcription of a recorded
concert that had the audience feeling "My God, that
was wonderful" and you will find that it really wasn't
that good. But it was an occasion, like a funeral, and
one is excited and moved by having been part of the
audience. When somebody buys the record he feels
that he has been swindled if he doesn't go crazy like
the audience of 2 000 or 3 000 that was present and
so he doesn't apply his usual critical faculties… He is
a conditioned dog. - CULSHAW

Some months ago, in an article in the Saturday Review, I ventured that the delinquency manifest by this
sort of evaluation might be demonstrated if one were to imagine the critical response to an improvisation
which, through its style and texture, suggested that it might have been composed by Joseph Haydn.
(Let's assume it to be brilliantly done and most admirably Haydn-esque.) I suggested that if one were to
concoct such a piece, its value would remain at par -- that is to say, at Haydn's value -- only so long as
some chicanery were involved in its presentation, enough at least to convince the listener that it was
indeed by Haydn. If, however, one were to suggest that although it much resembled Haydn it was, rather,
a youthful work of Mendelssohn, its value would decline; and if one chose to attribute it to a succession of
authors, each of them closer to the present day, then -- regardless of their talents or historical
significance -- the merits of this same little piece would diminish with each new identification. If, on the
other hand, one were to suggest that this work of chance, of accident, of the here and now, was not by
Haydn but by a master living some generation or two before his time (Vivaldi, perhaps), then this work
would become -- on the strength of that daring, that foresight, that futuristic anticipation landmark in
musical composition.

It may be my imagination, but I sometimes think a live

performance does have more electricity, more
excitement. There are more mistakes, of course, but if
the artist is really in the vein, it can be more authentic,
more vital. Many musicians freeze up in the recording
studio as soon as the red light goes on. - MOHR

And all of this would come to pass for no other reason than that we have never really become equipped
to adjudicate music per se. Our sense of history is captive of an analytical method which seeks out
isolated moments of stylistic upheaval -- pivot points of idiomatic evolution -- and our value judgments are
largely based upon the degree to which we can assure ourselves that a particular artist participated in or,
better yet, anticipated the nearest upheaval. Confusing evolution with accomplishment, we become blind
to those values not explicit in an analogy with stylistic metamorphosis.

The only justification for "live performance" recording

is if it's a legitimately historic and unduplicatable
occasion. Otherwise I don't advocate it. We find that
the critics and the public are no longer willing to take
recorded recitals or concerts in lieu of carefully
prepared studio recordings, and I must agree with
them. - McCLURE

The Van Meegeren syndrome is entirely apropos our subject because the arguments contra the
prospects of recording are constructed upon identical criteria. They rely, most of all, upon a similar
confirmation of historical data. Deprived of this confirmation, their system of evaluation is unable to
function; it is at sea, derelict amidst an unsalvageable debris of evidence, and it casts about in search of a
point by which to take a bearing. When recordings are at issue, such a point cannot readily be found. The
inclination of electronic media is to extract its content from historic date. The moment we can force a work
of art to conform to our notion of what was appropriate to its chronology, we can attribute to it, arbitrarily if
necessary, background against which in our analysis it can be portrayed. Most aesthetic analysis
confines itself to background description and avoids the foreground manipulation of the object being
analyzed. And this fact alone, discarding the idle propaganda of the public-relations machines, accounts
for the endorsement of the recorded public event. Indirectly, the real object of this endorsement is a
hopelessly outmoded system of aesthetic analysis -- a system incapable of a contribution in the electronic
age but the only system for which most spokesmen of the arts are trained.

Recordings produced in a studio resist a confirmation of such criteria. Here date is an elusive factor.
Though a few companies solemnly inscribe the date of the studio sessions with each recorded package,
and though the material released by most large companies can, except perhaps in the case of reissues,
be related to a release number that will suggest an approximate date to the aficionado, it is possible that
the music heard on that recording will have been obtained from sessions held weeks, months, or indeed
years apart. Those sessions may easily have been held in different cities, different countries taped with
different equipment and different technical personnel, and they may feature performers whose attitudes to
the repertoire under consideration has metamorphosed dramatically between the taping of the first note
and the last. Such a recording might currently pose insuperable contractual problems but its complicated
gestation would be entirely consistent with the nature of the recording process.

It would also be consistent with that evolution of the performing musician which recording necessitates.
As the performer's once sacrosanct privileges are merged with the responsibilities of the tape editor and
the composer, the Van Meegeren syndrome can no longer be cited as an indictment but becomes rather
an entirely appropriate description of the aesthetic condition in our time. The role of the forger, of the
unknown maker of unauthenticated goods, is emblematic of electronic culture. And when the forger is
done honor for his craft and no longer reviled for his acquisitiveness, the arts will have become a truly
integral part of our civilization.