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In the Forum: Playback Listening
In the Thread: Performers
Post Subject: Neutrality, classical and jazzPosted by Manuel on: 8/29/2007

some chaotic ideas here:

- emho there´s not an absolute reference for what a "perfect sound of music" should be:
every concert hall has its own sound, its own reverberant environment
every seat in the hall has its own sound
the instruments also sound different depending of our position. think of a grand piano, sit lower than the open tap and the sound will be dead, stand higher close to the strings and it will loose some resonance or body
and also instruments sound different, it´s not the same a stradivarius than a plain good violin
it´s a matter of personal taste

- there´s not the absolute neutral recording, all of them are manipulated by recording engineers
recordings need some amount of compression to be heard at home, or we would be jumping in our seats with crescendos, or we would not hear thesoft passages
or we would not hear the soloists, for example, a concert for guitar and orchestra, how could we hear an acoustic (not amplified) guitar against a full symphonic orchestra? recording engineers solve that raising the volume of the guitar

- then there´s not the perfect audio system, all of them are faulty, we accept compromises, and we take them also depending of our personal taste

- when a composer thinks of music, emho he does not think of halls, recordings or audio systems, he thinks in terms of his own idea of how it should sound, something like Plato´s theory of ideas? he has an idea of perfect notes played in a perfect environment, that does not really exists, and I don´t think it has any importance

- and every performer makes its own performance of the same theme (I think I´d always prefer Lorraine Hunt over Cecilia Bartolli, the later has impressive technique, but no meat on the bones)

about the superiority of classical music, because of its complexity, it may be true if you think of instrument layers and the use of large orchestras, but I also think that jazz is "superior" (this is not the exact word) in terms of time-rhythm and harmony freedom.
time: an african primitive rhythm can be very musically elaborated for a occidental listener, yet simple to reproduce in an audio system
harmony: a John Coltrane theme from the 60s can be impossible to follow "harmonically" the first time you listen to it, it is unpredictable, you don´t know where he will go, which note will have sense, but when you listen the note you see the meaning of the whole. I remember an interview to an old Elvin Jones (classic John Coltrane quartet drummer) crying when saying that he had to leave Coltrane because at a given moment he could not follow Coltrane´s music evolution anymore.

sorry for the chaos ...

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