Sound or Unsound: An Exchange - 达人(bachianas)

2007/05/27 | Sound or Unsound: An Exchange
类别(屏踪碟影) | 评论(0) | 阅读(44) | 发表于 12:01: Sound or Unsound: An Exchange
between Glenn Gould and Yehudi Menuhin

Glenn Gould and Yehudi Menuhin meet under the eye of CBC producer John Thomson. Photo by Fred Phipps of CBC. Scanned from The Music of Man by Yehudi Menuhin and Curtis W. Davis

From The Music of Man a book of the T.V. series Yehudi Menuhin did for the CBC:

...It has even happened while recording Beethoven's Sonatas no 7 and 10 with my sister Hephzibah that I have completed an entire work, playing it three times without a break in the morning, like a concert performance, and doing the same in the afternoon. When we were done we simply told the producer to pick the best one. Recordings made in this way to me have something immediate and compelling in them, which is lacking in recordings pieced together. Audiotape is a wonderful safteynet, but acrobats are not re-engaged for the following season if all they do is fall off and climb back up. Of course an obvious mistake should be corrected, for it can be tolerated in the concert hall as a passing disturbance, but if it were perpetuated in a disc, it would no longer be accidental.

Among the artists who have wrestled with the problem of recording, none has done so with more brilliant, provocative results than the Canadian pianist Glenn Gould. Now that he is retired from the concert platform (his last public performance was in 1964), he has devoted himself to a unique career in the media of recordings, radio and television. His artistic integrity and searching spirit are of that high order to which every musician would do well to aspire. At the same time, Gould has frequently taken positions on artistic matters which are at odds with many of his colleagues in issues of interpretation as well as recording technique. It has been my pleasure to perform with Glenn Gould a number of times in the recording studio, and we talked not long ago about the difficult question of reality versus verisimilitude in recordings.

GG: (completing the playback of a Bach gigue, recorded 'close up') Now, Yehudi, you've got to admit that you would not be likely to encounter a sound like that in a concert hall.

YM: I would still recognize your playing. Whatever you've added electronically does not add to the clarity and perfection, or the relationship of the voices, which is your inherent way of playing.

GG: The point is that, if I were to play that piece in a concert hall, as I have done many times-- in fact, it used to be one of my party pieces-- I would not be free to select the perspective we just heard; it represents a tight, clinical, X-ray-like view of that work, precise and at the same time intimate, which enables me to dissect it in a special way. On the platform, I would be forced to accept a compromised perspective-- one which would be more or less equally acceptable to the listener down at the lip of the stage and to the standee up far beyond the far balcony. I don't need to tell you that, ultimately, one ends up with a perspective which is appropriate, if at all, only for the listener in row L of the orchestra.

YM: Not having your extensive experience with the recording studio, I simply play and the hall does the rest. But doesn't all this technology for quadraphonic recording presuppose that the ideal listening point at home is a spot somewhere in the middle of the room? As soon as you have three people listening, two of them will be in the wrong place.

GG: It is an absurd concoction when you think about it, because it means implicitly that in Germany, the father will have the optimum seat, in America it will be the mother, in France, the mistress.

YM: I agree there is music written today which demands the metamorphosis you can achieve on these amazing consoles if it is to survive. But the music that concerns me, the single-voiced violin, even though I sometimes play two strings or even three, is not materially affected by the choices available on that console.

GG: We've had this conversation before, Yehudi, and I suspect that what inhibits you from making full use of the technology is the fact that it compels the performer to relinquish some control in favor of the listener-- a state of affairs, by the way, which I happen to find both encouraging and charming, not to mention aesthetically appropriate and morally right.

YM: You must admit the pianist starts out with an instrument which is remote from him to a degree. The sound is made through mechanical connections, therefore the electronic side is yet another mechanical manipulation, which is acceptable considering the vast spectrum the pianist controls. But the violinist's approach is intimate, personal, and this machinery appears almost as an intrusion. I believe both attitudes are valid. Splicing the tape, for instance, is what you feel enables you to achieve perfection.

GG: I believe this whole question of splicing is a red herring; I think it's become all mixed up-- and improperly so- with the idea of 'honesty' and 'integrity.' Naturally, it's antithetical to the concert process, where you go from first note to last, but that antiquated approach has nothing whatever to do with the major precepts of technology. It matters not to me whether I am 'successful' in creating a performance through one take, or whether I do it with 262 tape splices. The issue is simply not important.

YM: You are building a structure corresponding to your vision and anything that helps is legitimate. But take the Beatles, who started out as playing publicly spontaneously; by the time they became accustomed to crutches which enabled them to record tracks separately and put them all together, to add notes and take them away, they could no longer play in public because the public expected something else, having become accustomed to this form of recorded creation.

GG: In a sense, that is also what happened to me. I found I was competing with my own recordings, which nobody can do really. My recordings represent my best thoughts.

YM: I refuse to believe that. I've heard you play and I know that if you wanted to you could carry off a performance in a concert hall which would be as staggering as anything you do in the recording studio.

GG: But doesn't it come down to this: if an actor wants to deliver a proper 'to be or not to be,' he may do it in the context of the play Hamlet or he may do a traveling routine in which he reads excerpts, as Sir John Gielgud used to do. In any case, he doesn't have to run through the first two acts in his head in order to find the appropriate tone for that soliloquy.

YM: The point is that he must know the work as a whole inside of him, to know what feels like even if he never performs it. There is a point beyond that, and that is that I often find greater satisfaction in reading a score rather than hearing a performance. You first have to hear it in your mind before you can play it.

GG: But how do you explain the strange notion that the musician who sometimes happens to be a recording artist should be subject to different laws from the stage actor who may on occasion appear in films. It is quite legitimate for the film actor to have a series of emotive moments that appear in real time. The interior may be shot on a Hollywood lot, if such things still exist, and the exterior in Tierra del Fuego, yet the relationship between the shots is seen as perfectly logical. Yet if you explain to people that this is precisely what you do in making a record that satisfies your best thoughts on a work, they think it's fakery, cheating.

YM: I think it is a confusion of two different worlds. The one is accustomed to a living thing through, which is the final result the public wants and considers real. Those who use techniques to enhance the dramatic effect would look upon the concert performance as old-fashioned, not taking advantage of the available means, and perhaps shoddy because people are satisfied with something less than perfect. Let us say a film about a mountain climber can be done in sections, a mockup mountain can be used. The actor can take it easy, and probably won't want to go up anyway. But there is another risk, the danger to a climber who actually goes up the mountain and cannot do it in bits and pieces. He's got to do the whole thing as a consecutive effort.

GG: Yes, but it seems to me, Yehudi, that what technology is all about is the elimination of risk and danger. I suspect that this is where we really part company, because I don't think one should deliberately cultivate situations that have built-in elements of risk and danger, not if they can be removed by superior technology. That is the problem of the concert hall when things fall apart, the horn can crack, and so forth.

YM: Has technology really reduced this risk and danger, apart from music. Isn't there a risk of losing the sense of life, the sense of risk itself?

GG: Obviously, technology has its own dangers, but I think the purpose of technology is to give the appearance of life.

YM: Are you satisfied with the appearance of life only?

GG: Well, a recorded performance is not exactly real life.

YM: So we have to live on two different levels. When we satisfy a natural urge we can't do it in bits and pieces. It has its own built-in timing. You can only stretch it to a point.

GG: I can't agree. If your ideal 'to be or not to be' is something you carry around in your head, you might well repeat it to yourself one line at a time. Why, then, should you not assemble it in a composite, taking advantage of the benevolence that technology permits, the blanket of charity that it throws over everything you do?

YM: I doubt this blanket of charity would evoke from the piano such playing as yours from anyone but you, with all the help it can give.

GG: Compliments aside, why do you resist the idea that it is possible to cut in on a particular note and say: 'That is the mood, the tenor, the emotion behind that note?' It really needs only the context which one carries in one's head.

YM: On the other hand, once you've made the recording, are you sure you aren't ignoring your listener to an extent? Are you sure he is listening to it with the same devotion and concentration as he would in the concert hall? He might be interrupted by frying bacon. In the concert hall there is something compelling; besides, certain types of music are communal experiences, for instance the St. Matthew Passion. The whole congregation was meant to feel and react as one.

GG: 'When two or three are gathered together,' I suppose. But it seems to me there is no greater community of spirit than that between artist and listener at home, communing with the music. I would even go so far as to say that the most appropriate thing technology does is to free the listener to participate in ways that were formally governed by the performer. It opens up options he didn't have before.

YM: That still doesn't invalidate the concert hall, the experience of which is essential, and remains the standard against which everything else is judged.

GG: Nonsense, Yehudi. It was the standard until something else came along to replace it, which is exactly what the recording did; and the recording, surely, is now the standard against which the concert must be judged.

YM: If no one is ever going to climb the mountain again, and we have to be satisfied with films about it, where are we?

GG: We are without people who can climb mountains, which I think is a profoundly good thing. It will save a number of deaths per year.

YM: No, you mustn't say that. You'll make up with ignoble deaths on the road.

GG: If I had the technology to prevent them, I'd do that too. I'm sure it will come. But the point is that the listener becomes something more than a consumer, he becomes a participant. For example, I've been doing some solo piano recordings, when repertoire is appropriate, not with two or four tracks, but with eight-- the idea being to find a way of merging many perspectives, which are all miked simultaneously, but differentiated subsequently, and subjected to rather cinematic techniques. For example, one perspective might involve a 'shot' taken from inside the piano, jazz-style, with the mikes virtually lying on the strings, while another might relate to a 'shot' involving back-of-the-hall ambiance. The advantage is that you combine these perspectives in a kind of acoustic choreography and do so, moreover, after the fact, when you've put as much distance between yourself and the recording session as possible. You then prepare a master plan-- not unlike a film director's shot list-- and in the right music-- Scriabin, for example-- it works exceedingly well. I'm sure that Scriabin, with his mystical theories about a perfumed union of the arts, about transcendent mountain-peak experiences and all that sort of thing, would not disapprove.

YM: It is true the piano does lack something which a studio can lend it. The piano has a quality over its whole range, whereas the harpsichord can give at least three or four combinations. The violin has four strings. Bartok in his Melodya starts off in the G string, then the next phrase is on the D, then the A, then the E. He rises and goes back down. Each of these strings has a totally different quality. It would be guilding the lily to enhance still more of the contrast between those strings. But with the piano, I admit that you need techniques which give each section of work a different perspective.

GG: I wasn't thinking about that primarily but what you say about the relationship between the two instruments is certainly true. What I was thinking of, rather, was that we always proceed on the assumption that a piano sits, in recording terms, midway between the left and right speaker. It has often occurred to me that no one, including those who work in 'quad' has thought very much about the question of perspective. I admit that it might not be appropriate to use multi-perspective techniques on Haydn quartets or Bach fugues, but it's fascinating, in late-Romantic repertoire, to mix perspectives as one would stops on the organ. One can, for example, get great clarity-- great proximity-- and combine it with great range-- great depth-- and those two things are normally antithetical to both concert hall and to conventional recording.

YM: I'm sure you've added immeasurably to the aesthetics of music, for the piano is a static object. It needs redemption of some kind, and you have redeemed it more than anyone else possibly could.

Lord Yehudi Menuhin (1916-1999)

耶胡迪。梅纽因勋爵

耶胡迪。梅纽因国际音乐学校：

www.yehudimenuhinschool.co.uk/index.asp

Since 1964 the School has been situated in Stoke d'Abernon, a small village in Surrey, south west of London.

www.culturekiosque.com/klassik/features/rhemenuhin_e.html

Glenn Gould 1932年9月25日—1982年10月4日

格伦。古尔德

www.rci.rutgers.edu/~mwatts/glenn/fminor.html

www.glenngould.ca/conference/2007; 0

http://bachianas.5d.cn/

评论Comments