.. in praise of live classical music

[Roehre]

Sorry, but I've never seen more nonsense per paragraph in an article about live and reproduced music in a very long time. Ah, so Ligeti and Penderecki always sound harsh through speakers do they? Strange I never noticed that...

Some of us have little or no access to live music for various reasons (not to mention the dread dullness of mainstream rep. at concerts..). Oh WHAT a shame we can't enjoy recordings at home, feeling guilty as Maestro Greenwood puts us in our place. Yet another prime example of black&white thinking - the dichotomy of extremes fallacy applied to the ultra-faux "live vs recorded debate"...

Is that a sour note to come back on? It was meant to be! (Would love to know what Nevalti thinks of Johnny G...)
Hope to have more positive things to say about the Glory that is Recorded Orchestral Music soon...

**ps... digital music is certainly NOT just 1s and 0s. The HiFi buff had one over the "Legendary" Rock Producer there...

good to see you back

[Eine Alpensinfonie]

**ps... digital music is certainly NOT just 1s and 0s.

I thought that was exactly what it is.

[richardfinegold]

Sorry, but I've never seen more nonsense per paragraph in an article about live and reproduced music in a very long time. Ah, so Ligeti and Penderecki always sound harsh through speakers do they? Strange I never noticed that...

Some of us have little or no access to live music for various reasons (not to mention the dread dullness of mainstream rep. at concerts..). Oh WHAT a shame we can't enjoy recordings at home, feeling guilty as Maestro Greenwood puts us in our place. Yet another prime example of black&white thinking - the dichotomy of extremes fallacy applied to the ultra-faux "live vs recorded debate"...

Is that a sour note to come back on? It was meant to be! (Would love to know what Nevalti thinks of Johnny G...)
Hope to have more positive things to say about the Glory that is Recorded Orchestral Music soon...

**ps... digital music is certainly NOT just 1s and 0s. The HiFi buff had one over the "Legendary" Rock Producer there...

Good Lord, we've missed you!
Is it being to mundane to mention the sheer conveinence of recorded music?. I don't happen to be able to afford my own Orchestra and Kapellmeister just now, ready to haul them out of bed at my beck and call. How fortunate to be able to reach for my shelves, or my phone, find what I want, and that Reasonably priced equipment can reproduce it at a near concert level experience.

[jayne lee wilson]

I thought that was exactly what it is.

"Jitter, Bits & Sound Quality"...

http://www.stereophile.com/reference/1290jitter/

John Atkinson at his brilliant best. See especially his last two lines...

T&A Audio introduce themselves on their website with the tongue-in-cheek "Actually, we're scientists..."

[french frank]

There may be aspects of this, particularly the penultimate paragraph, that don't seem very sensible ("90% of judgments on classical music are made from hearing recordings" - what sort of 'judgements'?) but does anyone seriously disagree with the proposition that "live" is a better experience? Whether some people are unable to attend live performances, or don't have the opportunity to go often, is irrelevant to that point.

What does distort his view (I think someone has made this point) is that attending a rehearsal is not the same experience as being surrounded by a "live" audience. Mine would (again? ) be a minority view: I DON'T appreciate any enjoyment in a "shared" experience. At all . I would love to have a string quartet playing for me alone.

It seemed to me that he was just expressing a rather naive wonder, albeit couched in somewhat, um, "technical" explanation, at hearing the unmediated sounds of live orchestral music. Most people never do hear it: if he writes about it and persuades others to try it, surely, that's all to the good?

[Roehre]

....
What does distort his view (I think someone has made this point) is that attending a rehearsal is not the same experience as being surrounded by a "live" audience. Mine would (again? ) be a minority view: I DON'T appreciate any enjoyment in a "shared" experience. At all . I would love to have a string quartet playing for me alone..

That makes two of us

[Dave2002]

"Jitter, Bits & Sound Quality"...

http://www.stereophile.com/reference/1290jitter/

John Atkinson at his brilliant best. See especially his last two lines...

T&A Audio introduce themselves on their website with the tongue-in-cheek "Actually, we're scientists..."

Some odd things in that article:

At the 1990 AES Convention in Montreux earlier this year, I sat in on a workshop examining the audibility of peculiarly digital distortion, including the effects of jitter. On pure high-frequency tones, low levels of sinewave jitter could easily be heard.

It would have been interesting to hear what kind of audible effect such sinewave jitter presented - since the major effects would appear to be at least 80dB below the signal, and concentrated on two frequency peaks on either side of the main signal peak - figures 2,3 and 5. The caption on figure 1 barely makes sense - was there simulated jitter or not?

Figure 6 shows the effect of a more random simulated jitter signal - white noise - and this shows an effective SNR greater than 100 dB across a wide frequency range.

Whether this is really significant could be hard to decide. As the (wanted) signal level drops - quiet passages in music, the quantisation noise SNR will increase, and if the system behaves at all like a linear system, would probably swamp the noise due to jitter. I'm not suggesting that jitter or quantisation induced noise is always inaudible, or does not have any audible effects, but rather that generally I'd expect such effects to be very small, unless they become somehow concentrated in areas where human hearing is particularly sensitive.

Sometimes we are very good at detecting lisps in speech, and often it seems to me that some distortion produces similar effects - even for reproducing speech by people who have no noticeable speech defects in normal situations. The effect on music may be harder to determine.

[aka Calum Da Jazbo]

some points since i take only a modest position in all this ...

to say that the experience of live music is qualitatively different to recorded music [and in more than the psychophysics and squittery jitteries] is not to denigrate either as sources of delight &c ... spare us the false accusation of positing superiority in making such a claim

recorded music has made serious music available to oiks like me at a young age and in cornucopian amounts long before i coud afford the gods at the RAH or Southbank; but one is essentially a consumer and solitary in the delights of recorded music and this great advantage of availability comes on a sea of commercial market dynamics and psychology

going to a free recital at an esteemed and very democratic music college and hearing the Holliger Oboe Study was a truly sublime moment in my life; hearing school pupils attempting seriously hard music every week at lunch time in the local church has also educated my musical mind more than fed my appetite [ and occasionally been sublime and wondrous] all i had to do was get there, no social process of exclusiveness or pricing lies in my path

i once had the immense good fortune to hear Martin Roscoe perform the Appassionata at the Uppingham School Piano Week; he was utterly transcendental and transfixing, none of us could move after he finished ... later we were all, [parents, pupils, professionals], convinced we had been at one of the very greatest musical moments in history [truly!] ... not in the least possible on a recording i believe [either wiggly analogue of stringy digits]

i linked to the piece because it touched my experience and i feel as he does - indeed live performances have been for me the only way to appreciate the chamber music of Britten for example [on radio the off switch takes a rapid hit]

we are all, as French Frank shows above [the aloneness matters], persons of distinct approaches to life, our personality matters in our aesthetics ... i am utterly addicted to recorded music, possess thousands of cds, digital files and until recently analogue tapes and LPs; the moments listening to martin Roscoe's Beethoven or young student's Holliger can not be substituted nor repeated - they were shared experiences of astonishment and joy in small corners of the world, devoid of any illusion of possession, or possibility of repetition - the experiences were life affirming .... utterly devoid of the accidie of the denial of mortality

Ludwig Van B would i believe have much preferred the live performance of the 9th at the Fall of The Wall than any recording that 'immortalised' his work ....

[MrGongGong]

[Eine Alpensinfonie]

"Jitter, Bits & Sound Quality"...

http://www.stereophile.com/reference/1290jitter/

John Atkinson at his brilliant best. See especially his last two lines...

You mean this?

Does anyone still feel that "bits is bits"? With jitter applied to the datastream, bits may indeed still be bits, but only if you never convert them to analog—a truly Zen situation!

Never a truer word spoken.

[aka Calum Da Jazbo]

it may depend on who is smoking what in it imho ....

[Richard Barrett]

Of course it's nice to see a piece of journalism enthusing about hearing orchestral music live, but Jonny Greenwood is what? in his early forties I think? and he's only just taken the time to notice this? and then only by accident, so to speak, when working on his own music? How incredibly self-obsessed and unadventurous he must be... (I don't have much time for Radiohead either I must say.)

As for "with sonically complex contemporary music such as Ligeti or Penderecki, mics and speakers make things sound harsh and discordant", well, much of the music written by those composers is intended to be harsh and discordant, in a beautiful kind of way, but this and many of the other ideas in the article just seem confused and ill-considered to me.

And as for what composers "would have preferred" (that old chestnut!), this particular one derives great fulfilment from the experience of his "sonically complex" (considerably more so than in Greenwood's examples, in most ways) music in live performance, but also from the experience of recording and production, these being two quite different kinds of process whereby music finds its way to listeners.

Yesterday I was listening to a DVD-A of John Cage's orchestral piece 108 (for that number of players), recorded using extensive overdubbing by a total of only eleven players. (The way the composition is constructed, from mostly sustained sounds without precise coordination between performers, makes this more of a practical proposition than it might appear to be.) Leaving aside how seldom such a piece would be played in concert by a "real" orchestra - never within travelling distance of me, at any rate - hearing it in this "unperformable" way struck me as quite legitimate merely because of how beautiful it sounds to this listener, whatever the composer "would have preferred", and in any case why should composers (or one's image of them) be any kind of final arbiter over how their music "ought to" be heard? - but that's another discussion.

[Beef Oven!]

Of course it's nice to see a piece of journalism enthusing about hearing orchestral music live, but Jonny Greenwood is what? in his early forties I think? and he's only just taken the time to notice this? and then only by accident, so to speak, when working on his own music? How incredibly self-obsessed and unadventurous he must be... (I don't have much time for Radiohead either I must say.)

As for "with sonically complex contemporary music such as Ligeti or Penderecki, mics and speakers make things sound harsh and discordant", well, much of the music written by those composers is intended to be harsh and discordant, in a beautiful kind of way, but this and many of the other ideas in the article just seem confused and ill-considered to me.

And as for what composers "would have preferred" (that old chestnut!), this particular one derives great fulfilment from the experience of his "sonically complex" (considerably more so than in Greenwood's examples, in most ways) music in live performance, but also from the experience of recording and production, these being two quite different kinds of process whereby music finds its way to listeners.

Yesterday I was listening to a DVD-A of John Cage's orchestral piece 108 (for that number of players), recorded using extensive overdubbing by a total of only eleven players. (The way the composition is constructed, from mostly sustained sounds without precise coordination between performers, makes this more of a practical proposition than it might appear to be.) Leaving aside how seldom such a piece would be played in concert by a "real" orchestra - never within travelling distance of me, at any rate - hearing it in this "unperformable" way struck me as quite legitimate merely because of how beautiful it sounds to this listener, whatever the composer "would have preferred", and in any case why should composers (or one's image of them) be any kind of final arbiter over how their music "ought to" be heard? - but that's another discussion.

But shouldn't we be careful not to discourage people like Jonny Greenwood?

Does it matter what age someone is when they have a 'music moment'?

I fear that we might be unwittingly putting people off, from joining in.

[richardfinegold]

But shouldn't we be careful not to discourage people like Jonny Greenwood?

Does it matter what age someone is when they have a 'music moment'?

I fear that we might be unwittingly putting people off, from joining in.

This is an extension of the argument that Classical Music is elitist fare, and that we should be more inclusive and accessible.
I couldn't disagree more. If others have that perception of us (CM aficionados), that is their problem. We should have high standards for excellence and be allowed to indulge our tastes without feeling the need to pander to others. Some people will be attracted to the Music, and others won't. It never was a mass popularity phenomenon.

[teamsaint]

This is an extension of the argument that Classical Music is elitist fare, and that we should be more inclusive and accessible.
I couldn't disagree more. If others have that perception of us (CM aficionados), that is their problem. We should have high standards for excellence and be allowed to indulge our tastes without feeling the need to pander to others. Some people will be attracted to the Music, and others won't. It never was a mass popularity phenomenon.

One persons high standard is another persons low standard,so such things need careful handling.

If Greenwood can use his fame , profile, talent to bring new and interesting music to those that admire him, then that is all to the good.
The article does seem to come from a rather inaccessible place, for most people, as well as appearing rather dismissive of the channels that brought his own music to so many people.