What do we create when we record?
For classical musicians, especially younger professionals in the 21st century, recording is integral to our working process. We might record instrumental lessons to review in the present things we cannot hear during live action. We most certainly record auditions - both orchestral excerpts and movements from the core repertoire - for jobs, scholarships, festivals, etc. We record concerts, finished ‘objects’ that are unchangeable and ‘complete’, that we might put on YouTube or our own websites for portfolio purposes. But now we also have ‘unfinished’ (or ‘deeply unfinished’, to borrow from Charles Quevillon’s discussion in a recent workshop) recordings as well, a relatively new phenomenon, the byproduct of both social media and a global pandemic. Recordings that previously did not have a space - those of practice sessions or preparations or experimentations - have now been put out for public consumption. (Or for an audience of specialist listeners?)
What becomes then the purpose of a studio recording? Has it changed?
The studio recording, that entity completely separate from a live performance as I wrote about over a year ago, is an object of value because it is artistic musical creation that is not possible through live performance. But the objectives of accuracy or perfection or perfect execution still linger, the same as they would in an audition tape or other captured live performances. The recording is expected to be more precise than a live concert, without blemishes, mistakes, ‘disclarities’, obscurities, and unwanted sounds (unless initially left there). Yet what is often magical in a recording is a sense of space and spontaneous creativity - those things we seek in live performance. The opposition of risky experimentation in the name of creative originality and perfectly polished ‘finished’ artistry seem irreconcilable.
This year, I have been recording my first CD. It contains all works for clarinet and electronics by Finnish and American contemporary composers. All but one of the works has never been commercially recorded. Unlike many, or most, classical studio recordings, I did not play any of these works live in concert before recording them. Some might call that a mistake, I prefer to think of it as a conscious execution of my artistic hypothesis that recording should be a different music-making process than live performance. Ultimately, this CD could be considered an experiment of what that process sounds like. For some works, playing them live in concert before recording probably would have made no difference. For other works, I suspect beginning with a live performance could have ultimately generated a better recording. Or not.
In any case, the amount of artistic decision-making required during the recording process was much more extensive than I anticipated. And more than I was used to from live performance experiences. My recording situation was unique in the sense that I acted as both artist and director for the album. Decisions regarding recording, editing and mixing were made between sound engineer Tuukka Tervo and myself. With the exception of the two chamber music works, where both composers were present in the sound booth, ours were the only ears making the call. Might it have been better to have another set of ears? Perhaps. But I do not think my personal development through this project would have grown in the same way had there been a separate artistic director. Recording, editing and mixing would probably have been easier and faster with another person, and maybe alone would have created a better finished product. But in trying to figure out what ‘value’ is created from this recording, the personal process I went through plays a big role in that. And while I am uncomfortable with such a self-centered perspective, I think the changes made to me as a player will be carried forwards to future projects, recorded or live.
During the recording process, my musical decisions, in most of the pieces, focused on execution of the clarinet part. This involved a different relationship to the notation; I felt a ‘zoomed in’ approach to realising the notation that involved making musical decisions regarding expression without considering how those would have had to be executed in a ‘real time’ performance situation (where I would not have the luxury to stop and go back). Editing, or an awareness of editing, made it possible to take greater risks in musical choices without having to worry about losing my place on a timeline with the electronics. I could always go back and do it again if something did not line up properly. But a freedom in execution created more space for experimentation than I think will ultimately carry into a live performance.
My perspective of time, of music as sound and silence in time, and of the passing of time through sound was altered through the recording experience. As blind auditions (and listening to recordings) inform us, the ear attunes differently to sound without a visual. Not only does this mean a more acute perception of aural details, but also a different relationship with the absorption of musical material passing through time. I think this experience is particularly strong with contemporary art music, where the ear can be stimulated in new or complicated ways. Often seeing the performer helps to clarify or explain what we are hearing, but in a recording of contemporary music, this explanation is absent.
While recording, I also felt myself experiencing time on a magnified or microlevel. It seemed that everything, musically, took longer and more was happening in a shorter span of time. This, despite the presence of a click track or time line in most of the works. In listening back during the recording and editing processes, I sensed that I was required as a performer to deliver more musical material, and more musical details, than I might otherwise in a live performance situation.
Another difference in the recording process was viewing the music-making as constructing rather than executing. Often when preparing for live performance, even though practicing is where and when most of the musical ideas are generated and developed, the live performance is viewed as the ‘final product’ where those ideas are executed to the best of our ability. The performance is then a finished product that cannot be changed, rather we embody its occurrence, and carry that experience and knowledge to the next performance. In recording, the music-generating continues from preparation into and through the recording process. While I do ‘execute’ the recording, because I go back and constantly listen and make adjustments between takes, I would that the construction, normally isolated in the preparation phase, continues even in the performance. There are alway spontaneous acts of creativity, or ‘construction’ in a live performance, however I would argue that this process happens ten-fold in a studio recording situation. Music is created/built/adapted/generated constantly through the entire recording, elongating the ‘performance’ and also enabling a different kind of musical execution.
This extension of what I would define as a performance carries also into the post production process as a form of performance without playing. While live performances cannot be altered in any way once they are executed (and recorded), a studio recording undergoes many stages of transformation after I take the clarinet out of my mouth. However, it is an odd phenomenon that as you work and develop the recording in the post-production process, you still cannot go back and change what went into the microphone. Of course, one can always re-record, but for practical reasons (time, money, the project would never finish), you ultimately have to ‘settle’ with what you have. In a live situation, you can always make changes for the next concert. But in post-production, your musical ideas and creativity about the work continue to evolve, while having to work with sounds that were generated many stages earlier in the creative process.
Post-production made me aware of the endless possibilities in the musical direction of works with electronics as well as the creative pressure that comes with recording works that have never previously been recorded. In contemporary art music, recordings are a constant and important presence. One of the only ways for a work to have repeat performances, or for it to spread in popularity amongst performers, is to have a recording that other musicians can listen to alongside the score. In starting this project, a studio recording existed for one of the works, Le Fantome du Vent (on Heikki Nikula’s Piping Down the Valleys Wild) and there live recordings of four others. While I normally avoid recordings of works I am playing so as not to influence my creative approach adversely, in this situation, these recordings aided in determining the balance and alignment between electronics and clarinet particularly in post production. However, even when there were recordings to reference, I was still left with questions about mixing regarding balance, mixing, overtones, and determining blend with the electronics. I also found that answers could not always be found from the score, or from the composers themselves.
The gap between what information came from the score and what was needed to create the ‘finished product’ was most pronounced when creating a phonographic space for the sound. When we play live, we usually do not have to build the space we are performing in. Many of the fields of the postproduction process – balance, reverberation (room echo, but also to make distance), actualising and adding live electronic effects (distortion, freeze, delay, etc), shifting overtones, panning (both as acoustic effect and to separate sounds) – work to create a space for the disembodied sound and merge the electronics and clarinet (to the extent that they are intentionally or unintentionally merged). While working in stereo reduces the dimensions of that space, there is still a tremendous amount of room left to play with.
The recording, any recording, is an artefact. It is an audio record of a specific place and time and of the musical ideas generated in that space and time. Studio recordings, more so than live or informal recordings, have an undue amount of pressure applied to them. There is an expectation that they should be perfect, even though there is no such thing. There have always been artists who rebel and allow signs of humanism into their recordings (loud breathes, singing, creaking furniture, even wrong notes!). But questions of worth or artistic merit still remain.
What do we create when record? I believe we make an artistic document displaying a specific type of sound creation. It is a type of performance distinct from live performance, that satisfies similar and dissimilar purposes. The document is not intended as the only version, or the most perfect version, but as a contribution to the artistic file of myself, the composer, the repertory.