An Introduction to Historical Recordings
My love of classical music was with me as a child – I clearly remember my enthusiasm when hearing certain classics like Brahms’ Fourth or Tchaikovsky’s Fifth Symphonies. For a while, however, my love for this form of music waned, despite my study of the piano. It was my piano teacher in Montreal who woke me up to the brilliance of another dimension to music and changed the course of my life.
At the age of 15 or so, I bought a terrible record of the Beethoven 32 Variations (by Bruno Leonardo Gelber, for those who want to know). She was commenting on how thin the record was and took me to her closet to show me her collection of 78s. We had a good laugh as we looked at how thick the records were. She was raving about the wonderful performances when one of the sets she pulled out caught my attention. “Look – Rachmaninoff plays Rachmaninoff.”
Now, I had heard of Rachmaninoff before, although I didn’t know his music very well (philistine that I was!), but what struck me was the concept of a composer playing his own music. I was very disappointed by Gelber’s performance and was hoping for something more authoritative. If only we could hear composers play their own works… And here was a set of Rachmaninoff playing his own compositions!
My parents’ old record player played 78s, so I asked if I could borrow the set and took it home and listened to it. Sure, there were scratches, but the sound was quite clean and it was, of course, an authoritative performance. I began to think about how recording must have been much more complicated in the past, given the more restrictive format of recording on 78s (no tape splicing meant that performances were recorded in ‘live’ 4-minute segments, and sequenced from one record to the next). It seemed natural that as a result, only the best artists would be able to play. Perhaps the quality of musicians would be higher than that of today’s.
And thus began a quest to learn more about the musicians of the past and how they performed. I wondered if with less of a time lag between the time of composition and recording, performers in the 20s, 30s, and 40s might have been doing more justice to the composers. Of course it had not yet struck me that there were still mannerisms of the time that had to be taken into account – Beethoven might have been played with a 19th Century approach that did not necessarily correspond to the style in vogue at the time he composed – yet for a number of composers, it made sense. I was particularly struck by the difference between Rachmaninoff’s own performances and those of pianists 50 years later, even 20 years later. If so much of a change had taken place in so short a period of time, what damage were we inflicting on the likes of Bach and Beethoven?
I felt then (as I do now), however, that the antiseptic attempt at ‘original instruments’ and ‘authentic performance practice’ was missing the point. Following the text with a microscope gives one a better view of the map but not the territory, and clearly the composers would have wanted to explore instruments with greater sonic and interpretative capabilities than those that were available to them. I now believe, as the pianist Dinu Lipatti phrased it, that music lives beyond the means of interpretation used at the time of its composition – this is what renders it timeless. The instruments used were at best an approximation of the sounds that the composers heard with their inner ear. This is what has led me into the realm of electronic music – not the so-called ‘contemporary’ music that seeks to do something new and forgets that music is meant to be beautiful and listenable, but a new form of what Hindemith termed “Gebrauchtsmusik” or ‘music to be used’…electronic dance music.
Despite my activity in this seemingly different school of music, I continue to relish the performers of the past – and those worthwhile talents of today. All musical interpreters worth their salt are performing the same task: expressing emotion through sound. I aim for the highest quality in interpretation as regards both classical and electronic music, and hope to bring to audiences when I perform as a DJ the clarity and dynamism characteristic of the great classical musicians of the past.
© Mark Ainley 2003
