« Just Jack the lad - Independent | Main | Classical Music/Opera Listings - New York Times »
August 28, 2009
Nonesuch recording
Today we had a sometimes rip-roaring-ly productive, sometimes stressful 9-hour recording session at in the wonderful recording studio at Chicago home of classical music radio, WFMT. (Wonderful? Clear, easy-to-hear, not-too-dry, nice piano.) We were laying down both sextet parts of the Pulitzer Prize-winning Steve Reich Double Sextet.
Some technical notes: After much too-ing and fro-ing via email, it was decided that we would work through the piece in 100-150 measure segments, recording the Sextet 2 part first (with piano and percussion listening to a click-track) then record Sextet 1 over the “best recording” of Sextet 2 (with everyone listening to this “best recording”). One small detail changed in the session today. After just one attempt at recording the Sextet 1 part with our pre-recorded selves piped into our ears, the “quartet” (flute, clarinet, violin, cello) decided to abandon the headphones and go it alone, relying for tuning purposes solely on live piano and percussion and our own stability of intonation (gulp!). The proof of the pudding will be in the eating, so we shall see if this turns out to be a good move!
Recording “momentum” is an elusive beast. After dragging our way through the first 150 measures (The Kap: “Probably the toughest part of the piece”), we were suddenly on a winning streak, gaining more and more momentum (200 measures done! Another 100! Hooray!). When you have that impetus, when everything seems so “in the pocket,” jokes are entertaining (not dark and tinged with bitterness) and people are good humored. A momentum-stopper can come from nowhere, but it always comes where you least expect it. This first movement is all piano and percussion madness, and, as the Kap said later, “That was actually much harder than I thought it would be.” They were doing amazing work, but the Kap decided to shift the tempo up very slightly for the last third of the first movement, and this eventually sent the recording booth into a technical tail-spin, and suddenly it was taking 5 minutes to begin a take in an unusual place. Now we’d suddenly lost momentum and were in the deep quicksand of recording limbo, where the adage “time is money” brought a heightened sense of stress to the proceedings, and jokes weren’t quite so good-natured and people easy-going.
We strained to the end of movement one, and then, after a quick break decided to begin tackling the slow movement (Nick: “Guess we have to play in tune now…”). Steve Reich dropped something of a musical bombshell from (one that we had mostly anticipated): “You’re playing it very romantically, which is totally justified given what I’ve written, but I’d really like it a different way.” He wanted significantly less vibrato, and for the middle-of-the-phrase eighth notes to more obnoxiously “stick out.” This needed a couple of takes to “bed down,” but with some very positive vibes coming from the booth, we made it over that hurdle and then appeared to be on a roll again. Very odd. Suddenly we were plowing through the slow movement, jokes were coming left and right, people were laughing again, and Judy even gave us a very nice compliment (during the “still center” of the movement: “That was really Vox Humana you guys”).
It was a long day, but we ended it on a high note. Just one more day to lay down the final movement.
After discovering that my swanky, far-too-hip-for-my-lame-ass iPhone could post video directly to Twitter, I was tweeting clips all day today, until I realized I had been shooting everything sideways… So join our Twitter feed for some really awesome, 90-degree-wrong bits from our session. I’ll be trying to do a better job tomorrow.
Originally posted by Tim from thirteen ways, ReBlogged by newmusicrebloggers on Aug 28, 2009 at 05:12 AM