I went to the CD-player this morning, grabbed Grizzly Bear’s Friend EP, and went to put it into the machine. It has two covers of “Knife” on it, one by CSS and another by Atlas Sound. Completely normal state of affairs, nothing really worth calling out. Except that when you compare it to how a symphony or string quartet is billed, it’s completely not normal.
A symphony exists on paper, and the notation on the paper is itself little more than an approximation of the sounds the composer heard. Written instructions can be added, mostly general – “a little louder, ” a little slower,” – and the overall impression is that this paper represents the exact piece of music as its creator intended it to be heard. Every performance of this symphony is, therefore, the performers’ best attempt to realize and make audible what is on the paper in front of them. But we don’t know what the actual sounds intended by the composer were.
But we do with the rock song. Or at least, we know what the writer(s) intended on the day they went into the studio to record it. We know what beat they wanted, what tempo, whether strings or a horn section would be added, any electronic effects, and so on. Any remixes or covers that come after it have a context that the performances of the symphony doesn’t.
Now, every conductor thinks he or she is giving the most faithful performance of the symphony. They aren’t adding a horn section or taking away the violins. (We’ll leave Mahler’s reorchestration of Beethoven symphonies, since no one’s felt the need to rescore them since.) No one would say that it’s simply their impression or meager interpretation – there’s an element of artistic truth involved to how they balance the different instrumental sections, settle on which tempos to employ, and what the composer meant when the composer specifies that the tempo should slow down “but not too much.” The result is a world of conflicting versions of a piece of music, and these interpretations aren’t flagged as “Beethoven Symphony No. 3 by Leonard Bernstein.” They’re labeled as “Beethoven Symphony No. 3.” Bernstein’s name is somewhere on the program page or album label, but no one would think that what is on that recording is somehow fundamentally different from one conducted by Furtwaengler.
And it isn’t, at least it’s not as radically different from what CSS and Atlas Sound do to Grizzly Bear. The differences aren’t as immediately apparent from Bernstein to Furtwaengler. The cellos will still play a D-flat in the opening theme that sounds somewhat out of place, but there’s no backbeat that’s been added. And, very importantly, both will be about the same length. Any difference in atmospherics between the two symphonies is entirely due to the fact that the engineers were using the most acoustically advanced microphones and recording equipment available to them at the time, and they weren’t trying to be all artsy in the production studio and conjuring up some dated or otherworldly sound.
Which brings us to the notion of Fidelity to the Source, or how something can be Right or Wrong. The producers wanted it to sound lifelike, realistic, as if you were in the hall. It’s still the goal today, this recreation of Real. And the performers are still trying to be note-perfect, and not miss any notes, because there are of course right notes and wrong notes. Beethoven plays a joke in the Third Symphony with a horn player entering early and in the wrong key, even though no one really laughs and it doesn’t really register as “wrong” to modern ears. But still, musicians are trained to play G when the score says G, and if it is not G but A, it is wrong.
And this idea that something can be Right or Wrong seems to be the fundamental difference between a cover version of a song, and the performance of a symphony. If a bassist enters early or plays when no one else it, it’s “wrong,” and not an accurate representation of Beethoven’s thoughts. Conductors have it a little easier. If one wanted to race through a slow movement, and could come up with some sort of aesthetic decision that made it valid, he’d probably get a pass. Chalk it up to recent scholarship, or the need to build excitement, or that the composer did something similar somewhere else in another piece. We’d still think of it as “Beethoven Symphony No. 3,” and not as Conductor X’s Completely Unhinged Cover Version.
But give a producer access to the master tapes of a rock song, and the chance to layer in electronics and who knows what else, and you have an entirely new conception of the song, and one that will never be “wrong” no matter how far it departs from the original. There is still the original, and the cover or remix is compared to it, and heard with the other and compared to it. But with the symphony…there’s no such comparison to be made. All that can be done is to compare the version we’re hearing to the versions we’ve heard, and we descend down a bottomless rabbit hole where there is no ultimate truth. (And yet there can still be “wrong” notes…)
This is the point where I’d normally praise classical music for offering up this difficulty, and forcing people to come to terms with a multiplicity of viewpoints of a single aesthetic object. But any time I talk to someone who’s not in the habit of listening to classical music, the first thing they say is how hard it is to get into it, when you go to Amazon and are immediately confronted by hundreds of versions of the same piece. (Actually, this is the second thing they say, the first being how much they liked The Rest Is Noise.) And they aren’t flagged as “Bernstein’s Beethoven,” no, Beethoven is usually the selling point.
It’s a hurdle, an obstacle, this lack of an ultimate truth, or a shared point of reference. I might prefer Stokowski, you might go in for Toscanini, but the industry and the entire classical structure is designed to promote and sell the creator, and not the performers. Even as we plaster faces on posters and brochures, the draw is the Music, and not the performer. (Aside: This holds for virtually everyone not named Lang Lang, Yo-Yo Ma, Gustavo Dudamel and Joshua Bell.)
The performers and conductors are trying to recreate something whose creation they don’t know about, and which in most cases they can’t know about, because the composer is dead. All they have to go on are those black marks on white paper, a shorthand version of what was originally intended. Or maybe there’s a version conducted by the composer out there – but if the oboist was fighting with his wife, or the principal cellist was tired from mowing the yard earlier that day, who’s to say that this is the ultimate, true, hand-on-heart best version to hear? I certainly wouldn’t try to defend it. Maybe the composer’s a hack conductor, too. The means for undermining are legion.
And so we’re left in a world – in classical music, now – where we try to recreate the past, and in which the past is as quiet as a book on a shelf. It’s as if musicians are taking their palettes and paintbrushes to a museum to copy what they see on the walls, but what is on the walls isn’t a painting, but a list of directions reading:
Lower middle of canvas: Wooden table, covered with white table cloth
Behind table, center: Jesus, brown hair and beard, blue and red cloak, arms spread
12 disciples, 6 on either side of Jesus
Food scattered on table, loaves, cutlery
Anyone want to take a guess how many artists could accurately recreate Da Vinci’s Last Supper from such a list? The point is not that there’s more honesty in popular music, or that classical music requires more thought. What remains in classical music is that 99% of concerts involve recreating a past, performing what are at least a version of cover performances, but that no one knows, no one can know, what the original is. We get caught up on “wrong” notes, or some people do at least, since these have been assiduously erased from recordings.
But the “mistake” is usually more telling than a blandly correct reading. It’s more human, and if we’re talking about professional musicians, is often a sign that risks are being taken. As Wynton Marsalis once told a young musician who came up to him after concert and said, “Man, I heard you miss that high E flat,”
“Yeah, but did you hear the phrase?”
It’s that hearing the phrase that needs to come back to classical music, and not the derivative notion of recreating a past which recedes farther away from the day. That’s what’s exciting, and that’s what people want to hear, whether they can verbalize it or not. Maybe they do want to hear the classics played the way they’ve always heard them, or how they imagine the composer meant them to be played…but since they don’t know what the composer wanted, why not take a chance and play it the way we want to hear it? If there is no ultimate truth, then all bets are off.