GG: sexy piano playing, etc

[Bradley P Lehman <bpl@UMICH.EDU>]

Quoth Signor Elevator:

> (...) scratch an Analog and Vacuum Tube fanatic, and you often find
> someone who believes water fluoridation is a Communist mind-control plot.

Speaking of that, have you heard Peter Sellers' recording where he
declaims the Beatles' "She Loves You" using his Dr Strangelove voice?
Yowsa.

> Gould would have immediately jumped on the digital bandwagon because of
> his commitment to the "perfection" he believed he could get from heavily
> edited studio recordings. Compared to razor-blade analog tape-recorder
> editing, the digital editing process is an astonishing revolution. Each
> mistakes can be instantly "undone"; 90 percent of the tedium and
> frustration is banished forever; and digital editing (by the time the
> supporting software became sufficiently sophisticated) offered artists
> and engineers thousands of new possibilities analog editing never allowed. If
> you can explain what you want to the computer in mathematical lingo, you
> can get the effect you want out of the speakers. A digital splice
> suddenly offered the engineer an instant a thousand times more precise and
> specific than an analog razor-blade splice.

As Glenn-san would say, quoting Marshall-san, "The medium is the message."
The "perfection" of execution that is made so easy by the digital medium
has become a standard by which musical quality is judged.

And I think that's disastrous.  It is the imperfections, no, strike that,
_irregularities_, in musical performance that make them worth listening
to.  That's where the art happens.  That's where the communication
happens.  But the digital age has trained many people to expect
"perfection" rather than real musical communication, rather than art.

Even live recordings are sanitized: edit out the coughs, edit out the
final applause, replace the ending with one from rehearsal (i.e. no
intruding applause), fix any other embarrassing burbles.  After a while it
might as well not be a live recording.  Welcome to the slippery slope.

It started with magtape editing, and then got worse with digital editing.
The "perfection" of recordings has changed listeners' expectations.  Glenn
Gould embraced this as a virtue.  Some of us don't take it as that much of
a virtue.

As Glenn-san would say, quoting Kurt-san, "And so it goes."

Some days I can't stand to listen to anything recorded after 1950, because
the artificiality from all the editing bugs me.  Yes, on such days I'd
rather hear _real_ performances in crappy sound reproduction than
sanitized assemblages in hi-fi or stereo or digital.

Speaking of McLuhan, how about that scene in Woody Allen's "Annie Hall"
where a jackdonkey academic type is standing in queue for a movie,
expounding McLuhan's theories to a woman he's trying to impress, and then
McLuhan himself steps out of queue and tells the guy off?

Speaking of Vonnegut, how about that scene in Rodney Dangerfield's "Back
to School" where he hires Vonnegut to ghost-write his term paper about
Vonnegut, and it gets an F?


Bradley Lehman, Dayton VA
home: http://i.am/bpl  or  http://www-personal.umich.edu/~bpl
CD's: http://listen.to/bpl or http://www.mp3.com/bpl

"Music must cause fire to flare up from the spirit - and not only sparks
from the clavier...." - Alfred Cortot