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Technology is good but let's not lose the 'human factor'
I TOOK part in a recording session at the weekend. All the details later. For around five hours Valley Voices and a small group of chamber musicians worked their way through quite a complex score to put the work on CD.
The atmosphere is completely different from a concert, when you turn up, do your stuff and go home.
There are numerous takes to get the balance right and then takes and retakes to ensure that when we get down to the final editing and mixing process, the end result is as perfect as we can get it.
Inevitably, there are times when technical adjustments have to be made and long periods when singers and musicians have nothing to do but sit and wait.
During one of these breaks I was chatting to the recording engineer, who told me of the revolution that digital technology has brought to even the most humble recording sessions.
For example, it's now possible at the flick of a switch to apply the acoustics of world famous concerts halls and opera houses. On the playback you could be singing at Sydney Opera House, La Scala or the Albert Hall.
As I took up my baton again for yet another take, the question came into my head of what my grandad, who nurtured my early interest in music, would have made of it all.
I remember him loading battered but treasured 78rpm shellac discs on to a wind-up gramophone with a huge metal horn to amplify the volume and settling back to enjoy the sounds of Caruso, the young Gigli, Heddle Nash and John McCormack.
I remember sitting in a tin bath in front of the fire on a Friday night before Christmas while Sir Malcolm Sargent on the radio took Huddersfield Choral Society, the Halle Orchestra, distinguished soloists and an assortment of whistles and crackling through a performance of Handel's "Messiah".
To the three-year-old in the bath this was just noise. To my grandad, settled back in chair, eyes half-closed and his pipe beating time, this was a magic world of sheer delight.
The whistles and crackling from the airwaves could be mentally filtered out and all my grandad heard were the pure notes of Kathleen Ferrier or young Richard Lewis.
Nowadays, when you listen to remastered versions of performances from those days, one thing immediately strikes you – those primitive recordings actually captured the individuality of the singers and their idiosyncracies.
Count John's creamy tone and Irish brogue would surely be considered out of place for a modern recording of "La Traviata", Heddle Nash would not have the steel for a Don Jose and the impeccable Ferrier would possibly be thought a little too matronly in sound for Elgar's Guardian Angel in "Gerontius".
The technology today, which tends to make all singers sound the same and almost interchangeable, seems often to miss out on this vital quality.
When you apply this thought process to other areas where technology has taken over huge swathes of our lives, perhaps you will see there's always danger of "dehumanisation" in the rush for efficiency and perfection.
Perhaps it's time we stepped back and considered putting the "human-ness" back into vast areas of technological progress, before it's too late.
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Weather for Clitheroe
Sunday 27 May 2012
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Temperature: 12 C to 25 C
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