Recording Imprinting

[remdataram]

I would cite in support of my theory (that imprinting is to do with learning) the phenomenon which others know of an extraneous noise (e.g. music stand falling over) in a recording you got to know first (when such noises were sometimes left in) and you anticipate it in every subsequent listening to any recording. I can think of several such instances. Also the 'turnover' break on an LP: this is still with me every time I hear Symphonie Fantastique - the turnover was in the middle of the 'dance' movement.

So something here about that first experience of the music (with noises off) really going into the memory in a deep way.

So very true, the side break on the 2nd disc of Solti's LSO Mahler No.2 (that cost £3-12-6d) still leaves me anticipating the 'gap' today, even though it's a logical break. In turn background noise in the Katchen/Gamba Beethoven Choral Fantasia now seem part of the score!

[gurnemanz]

I started to listen to classical music in the late 60s as an undergraduate doing German, when I realised that German music was an important accompaniment to the literature-based course we were doing, particularly Lieder settings. Among my first LP purchases were Fischer-Dieskau and G Mooore in Schöne Müllerin, F-D again with Schwarzkopf in Mahler's Knaben Wunderhorn and Ernst Haefliger doing Dichterliebe and Ferne Geliebte. When you only have a few discs you listen to them a lot and decades later they are still very much imprinted. The first two are classics which I still have and have upgraded to CD but the Haefliger has been lost along the way and I have never succeeded in finding a CD replacement. I would certainly get it if I found it.

[Ariosto]

I started to listen to classical music in the late 60s as an undergraduate doing German, when I realised that German music was an important accompaniment to the literature-based course we were doing, particularly Lieder settings. Among my first LP purchases were Fischer-Dieskau and G Mooore in Schöne Müllerin, F-D again with Schwarzkopf in Mahler's Knaben Wunderhorn and Ernst Haefliger doing Dichterliebe and Ferne Geliebte. When you only have a few discs you listen to them a lot and decades later they are still very much imprinted. The first two are classics which I still have and have upgraded to CD but the Haefliger has been lost along the way and I have never succeeded in finding a CD replacement. I would certainly get it if I found it.

You won't find replacements for Fischer-Dieskau in my opinion. One of the greatest of the great.

[Petrushka]

My first exposure to Beethoven's Eroica was a Furtwangler recording, a live performance from Vienna in 1944. My sister had bought the lp for $1 in the mid 1970s on a budget label that disguised the fact that it was a historical recording. the sheer intensity of the performance imprinted me--no other Eroica has ever sounded 'right' to me--but I also thought that i could hear bombs exploding in the background. This impression may have been created when I read that in the waning days of WWII concerts in the Third Reich were frequently interrupted by air raids.
Later I acquired a digital restoration of the same performance, and after listening carefully I can't be sure that I hear any bombs. Perhaps they were edited out, or perhaps I had imagined them in the first place and they were the artifacts of a noisy lp played on a cheap turntable. At any rate ,in my mind I still hear the distant sounds of muffled explosions at the same point of the Funeral Marche whenever I hear the Eroica.

That was my first recording of the Eroica as well. A fabulous, fabulous performance quite unlike any I've heard since. It's as if Furtwangler was taking on the entire world with this incandescent performance.

Incidentally, and off topic, by that stage if the war, Vienna had suffered very little bomb damage; that came later. Concerts in the Third Reich were often given in the afternoons in order to minimise the interruptions from air raids and also to enable concert-goers to make for the air raid shelters. This Vienna recording is, I think, not a live performance before an audience but one made by the Reichsrundfunk for radio transmission and given 'as live' for the microphones. The same applies to the VPO/Furtwangler Bruckner 8 recorded on October 17 1944 another incandescent account if you don't know it. If anyone has more information on this I'd be most grateful.

[Ferretfancy]

I first heard Sibelius 7 in the recording by Koussevitsy, and even today if I hear this piece I can remember exactly where the side breaks came --on the 78s of course!

[Petrushka]

I first heard Sibelius 7 in the recording by Koussevitsy, and even today if I hear this piece I can remember exactly where the side breaks came --on the 78s of course!

It must be so much worse for those who first heard pieces on 78s! Richard Strauss tone poems, Ein Heldenleben, Eine Alpensinfonie and Don Quixote are victims of the side break for me, Even in a live performance sitting in the concert hall I still mentally get up and change sides at the appropriate moment. It was for exactly this reason that once I bought my first CD player in 1984 I never listened to another LP again. And I never have.

[kernelbogey]

I heard the story - almost certainly on the old Music Magazine - that the record industry in the fifties was considering whether the 12 inch LP or the 7 inch EP was to become the industry norm; and that at a crucial meeting someone said 'How would you like to be interrupted every seven minutes if you were making love to your wife?'. The remark allegedly clinched the decision. Probably apocryphal, but amusing....

[Roslynmuse]

There seems to be general communality of experience related here; I would add that the age at which I first heard a particular piece of music makes a huge difference to how well I 'know' it - anything I knew up to the age of (approximately) 12 is imprinted at a deeper level than pieces I got to know up to (approx) 16; as the mind started to process the music intellectually as well as emotionally after that point, the sense in which I feel I 'know' much music first heard after that is quite different (but difficult to put into words). So, most of Chopin, which I heard before I was 11 (!) is imprinted in a way that feels ages old, as if I never *didn't* know it - similarly the Beethoven Piano Concertos; the music that I got to know in my early teenage years is so bound to time and place and was learnt so hungrily (two hearings and it was imprinted in the memory) that I can't hear it without being taken back to sometimes very specific events (no doubt in the way that pop music does); since then, my learning capacity has slowed and the *way* I remember seems to have changed too. Interesting example - I got to know Heldenleben when I was 14 (and the side-turn has me leaping to the turntable 35 years on); Zarathustra came two years later and although I've probably heard both pieces about an equal number of times, I feel I know Heldenleben far better.

Anyone had the experience of recording onto cassette from the radio and the tape running out before the end of the piece? I tried to cram the Tchaikovsky Serenade onto a C90 after something else and missed the last few minutes of the piece - I always 'hear' the tape finish at that spot even now!

And the sticking LP needle...

[Barbirollians]

I had a tape of Malcolm Binns playing K 271 on Radio 3 ( superbly i must add ) - it has taken me a very long time - namely about 25 years or so to not "prepare" for when the tape had to be turned over .

[richardfinegold]

That was my first recording of the Eroica as well. A fabulous, fabulous performance quite unlike any I've heard since. It's as if Furtwangler was taking on the entire world with this incandescent performance.

Incidentally, and off topic, by that stage if the war, Vienna had suffered very little bomb damage; that came later. Concerts in the Third Reich were often given in the afternoons in order to minimise the interruptions from air raids and also to enable concert-goers to make for the air raid shelters. This Vienna recording is, I think, not a live performance before an audience but one made by the Reichsrundfunk for radio transmission and given 'as live' for the microphones. The same applies to the VPO/Furtwangler Bruckner 8 recorded on October 17 1944 another incandescent account if you don't know it. If anyone has more information on this I'd be most grateful.

In general,Petrushka, you are correct. However, it is worth noting that:
1) The Furtwangler performance in question dates from Dec. 0f 1944
2) Wikipedia states that by the start of 1945, Vienna had been subject to 1800 tons of Allied Bombs. More than 80,000 tons were dropped on Vienna during the last few months of the war in 1945. So clearly the mas of the bombing came later, but quite a bit was done prior to this recording as well.

I am listening to this Funeral March of this recording right now. While my ears are telling me tha there is no sign of any (extramusical) ordinance being detonated, my brain keeps wanting to supply the sounds of the explosions in the places where I formerly had thought they would occur.
Slightly OT here--my reissue dates from 1994. I know that there have been subsequent restorations of this recording that have been discussed in the musical press. Do you have a favorite restoration?

[Ariosto]

I may be wrong but maybe it's different for musicians who have to learn a lot of music during their lives. So the first hearing/imprinting of new pieces goes on late into life. But having said that, I can't remember the first time I heard certain works, in most cases that is. I do remember though the first time I played and heard Schubert's 9th Symphony (or was it number 10?) and the slow movement was imprinted to a high degree, although it was not a particularly great performance and if I do remember correctly, with a rather poor conductor.

[Sir Velo]

I do remember though the first time I played and heard Schubert's 9th Symphony (or was it number 10?)

No.8 surely?

[Ariosto]

No.8 surely?

No, he'd finished the one I heard!

[Sir Velo]

No, he'd finished the one I heard!

Exactly. The Great C Major.

[Ferretfancy]

Schubert 9 finale -diddly dee diddley dee diddly dee diddly dee diddley dee -nice though!