Harp Column Blogs: Carl SwansonArchive

I thought of something this morning that I wanted to share.  I'm not sure why, but I hope it inspires some comments.  In a conversation I had with Sam Milligan sometime this past year, he mentioned that he had heard Grandjany in live performance numerous time.  "Those performances were some of the greatest concerts I have ever heard," he told me.  "The atmosphere at his concerts was just electric.  Somehow his recordings do not convey that excitement."

I don't think recordings ever communicate that excitement, with rare exception.  When you change the format for hearing  a performance from live to recorded, it changes the way you perceive that performance.  I never watch opera on television because of this phenomenon, and I rarely watch movies on TV either. Operas and movies each have their own format that they were designed for, and changing that format alters them too much.  There is a reason why movies made to be shown in a movie theater and anything made for TV are shot differently.  Closeups are done differently in particular.  And wide angle vistas are almost unheard of in made-for-TV movies.

Susan Mcdonald's 1975 Harp Conference opening recital is now out on CD.  I was there, and I still remember that recital as one of the pivotal, and most awsome events in my harp life.  I was thunderstruck by her technical and musical ability, and the atmosphere there was, as Sam said about Grandjany's performances, electric.  I have the CD, and it is just as gorgeous as I remember it.  But the electricity and excitement(on the part of the listener) is really not there.  Heaven knows it's not her fault.  It's just that the format has changed.  Maybe it's that all recordings have to be, and are, so technically perfect that we are too used to that kind of perfection.

There is, whether we like it or not, a sound distortion on any recording of any musical instrument.  If you listen very carefully, and critically, the harp(and even more the piano), do not sound at all like they do in live performance.  We've gotten used to the distortion and so we don't think about it.  But it's there.  And maybe when we hear recordings of harp or any other instrument, our minds say, this is a recording.  It is not a live performance.  There is no risk here, no physical presence.

I said earlier that there are rare exceptions to this phenomenon, and one that comes to mind for me
are two CD's of Rachmaninoff playing.  The CD's are called A WINDOW IN TIME, VOL. I AND II.  The original recordings are from the early 1920's, and were made, not with standard recording equipment of the day, but on a reproducing piano.  Unlike a player piano, which plays all of the notes at one dynamic level, a reproducing piano was able to record all of the nuances of the performance on a paper roll.  Some computer wiz took those original rolls and translated them into a computer code that could be played on a modern piano.  These recordings give you a sense of what Rachmaninoff must have been like in live performance, and the result is dazzling.  I think the excitement in this case comes from the fact that he has so vividly been brought back to life.  I recommend that everyone listen to these recordings.  And I recommend that everyone make a bigger effort to hear live performances.  Recoirdings are just not the same.