Yesterday I picked up Steve Reich’s Phases, a 5-disc Nonesuch retrospective of his phasing compositions of the ‘60s and ‘70s. When I looked it up on Amazon to see what other people had to say, I was surprised to see that – for a set of classic works – it was receiving some low ratings*. It turns out that the Nonesuch recordings are generally somewhat recent, from the 80s to early 2000s, and aren’t what many consider the “definitive” recordings of the pieces. Coincidentally or not, for these reviewers, definitive seems to be synonymous with “first”. It’s not that those were Reich’s own recordings and the Nonesuch versions are farmed out to various sub-par ensembles; many of the pieces, including “Music for 18 Musicians” and “Drumming”, are performed by Reich and his own group of musicians. Regardless, the reviewers dismiss these recordings as overproduced, criticizing things like mic placement and overall sound quality (too good); a common theme was that the recordings lack the immediacy and character of a live performance. To me, this sounded a lot like the griping generally heard from hard-line rock critics and fans. It was, of course, an appeal to authenticity. Since these tracks don’t recreate the feeling and sound of a live performance, they’re lacking. Never mind that the composer himself played on many of the recordings, and likely had a good deal of oversight during the recording process. In such a case, how are the new recordings any less authentic than the old? Particularly if they represent the artist’s evolving vision of the work.
Classical music presents an interesting contrast to rock music in that the pieces are written to be performed at different times, often by a variety of different ensembles. Pieces are generally written for live performance in front of an audience, rather than for recording. Classical music isn't designed to be consumed in the same manner as rock music - its variability is built in and assumed from the beginning. It's not a band writing a song for itself to perform, it's a composer writing a piece that could be performed by any number of ensembles. (It's interesting to note that in this sense, classical music bears more similarity to pop songwriting, ie. the Brill Building model, than it does to the traditional paradigms of rock music.) Thus, a recorded piece of classical music will always be lacking, and I think, as long as you keep this in perspective, it’s a reasonable attitude to take. These compositions are designed for live performance, to be heard in the concert hall, to be seen. Particularly for pieces like Reich’s phasing works, the dynamics and reverberations of a room can have a significant effect on the sounds created by the overlapping patterns. For an example, see my earlier post on “Clapping Music”. In the video, the sound is aided by the acoustics of the room, as well as the microphone of the video recorder, giving the sound a lo-fi quality that allows the single claps to occupy even more sonic space, filling out the sound beyond even the natural density created by the gradually shifting pattern. Compared to this, the studio recording off of his Early Works album sounds thin and precise, it is a little too perfect, but I don’t think this makes the recording any less essential.
The main problem that the detractors have is that they seem to expect the recorded pieces to be able to recreate the experience of the live performance – something they allege the original recordings were able to do. The short response to this is that nothing can recreate the live performance. Every live performance, no matter how perfect the ensemble’s performance, will be different. Every listen to a recording will be the same, even if the recording is of a live performance. By recording studio versions, the pieces are presented as a kind of blank slate – the piece performed as nothing more than the notes on the page, a perfect form that can never be replicated in a live setting. Just as such a perfect studio recording isn’t exactly ideal; I don’t think a live recording is either. Yes, a good live recording will capture the variables at work that day, that one moment in time, but once on record, those variables will never change, but even they will be degraded and altered by the recording process. Also, if you’ve only ever been exposed to one live recording of a piece, would you even be able to identify the variables as such? Is this any more true to the spirit of the piece than the perfect studio recording? Or are they both imperfect in their stasis when compared to the living sound of the live performance?
If we’re willing to acknowledge that a significant part of a piece of music’s beauty is found in its variable nature, to criticize a recording for lacking that variability is ultimately meaningless. It only serves to underscore the fact that the ideal setting for classical music is the live one. The only way to even begin to recreate the experience of variables that comes from the live performance is to listen to a variety of different recordings, noticing the differences in sound of all of them, in which case the studio recordings would have as much utility as any live recording. In this way, they serve their own purpose; these recordings are just as essential or definitive as any other.
*Some of the criticisms referred to below were found in reviews on the Amazon pages for the individual Nonesuch CDs, not the box set. However, these are the same recordings that are found in the set.
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