Chicago Classical Music

Because this post comes on the day before Halloween, I thought I would devote it to stories of strange sounds encountered during recording sessions I have produced over the years. 

Troubles in the studio 

Most of these stories come from “on location” recordings, but our very first such encounter occurred in the WFMT performance studio at their previous location at Three Illinois Center (WFMT now shares a building with television station WTTW, next door to North Eastern Illinois University). There we were recording the monumental “Concord” Piano Sonata of Charles Ives with pianist (and composer) Easley Blackwood, arguably the piece’s greatest living exponent. 

Every time Prof. Blackwood hit a certain note, we heard a buzzing sound in the studio. We searched in vain for anything rattling in the piano or on any surface in the studio. Then someone looked up. Somewhere in the 22-foot-high ceiling a light bulb was not screwed in all the way and was resonating with that frequency. Fortunately, we found a gripping device attached at the end of several lengths of flexible metal tubing that was made for reaching up to the lights. We grabbed each light until we found the one that was loose and screwed it back in tightly. 

Those sessions also included the only time I witnessed a string snap on WFMT’s 9-foot “Steinway D” grand piano. It was as Blackwood played one of Ives’s thunderous chords. The professor noted with some pride that the string that broke was from a key he struck with his pinky! I guess he ate an extra bowl of Wheaties that morning. 

You can’t go back again 

We made two recordings of Bach organ music with organist David Schrader on a wonderful German-style organ (modeled after the kind of instruments on which Bach himself played) in a small church in Wausau Wisconsin. The first recording, Bach: Complete Toccatas & Fugues went off without incident. So a year later we returned to make Bach: Fantasies & Fugues for organ. Unfortunately, the main road, which had been comfortably far from the church the previous year had been re-routed to take drivers right past the church. This forced us to record very late into the night (when there was less traffic), to record dozens of extra takes, and forced me to pick through those takes to get around the rumble of cars and trucks going by anytime such sounds were not covered by loud low notes from the organ. 

What’s the frequency? 

The most bizarre incident in my recording experience occurred on our next recording project, Soler: Quintets for Harpsichord & Strings Nos. 1, 2 & 3. We recorded this disc late at night in St. Luke’s Church in Evanston. Around midnight of one session I suddenly heard talking in my headphones. I rushed out to see who could be there so late at night, but we were the only ones in the church. Then I listened a little more carefully to the “talking” and recognized it was the old-time radio show that WBBM-AM used to broadcast weekday nights! Somehow, the church’s loudspeaker (used to project sermons) was picking up that radio station’s frequency – and there was nothing we could do about it. Fortunately, it was not loud and it was winter, so we were able to muffle the sound to the point where it didn’t get into the recording by putting a heavy coat over the speaker. 

Things that go chirp in the night 

We made our first recording with the choir His Majestie’s Clerkes (now known as Bella Voce), a disc of English Romantic Choral Music, in Willmette’s Mallinckrodt Chapel in the winter of 1997. The old radiated heating system in the chapel made so much knocking noise each time it started up that we had to wait a full half-hour for the noise to subside before we could continue recording. So we thought we were being smart by making our next CD with the Clerkes, devoted to Chicago composer Frank Ferko’s Stabat Mater (a truly amazing piece), in mid-summer. But these were evening sessions, and we didn’t count on the crickets and the cicadas! The amount of noise those little bugs can make! The “singing” of the cicadas ended once the sun went down completely, but there was nothing we could do about the crickets, who picked up where the cicadas left off. 

When the choir was singing, it usually drowned out the chirping outside the chapel walls. Where it became a problem was at the end of movements or sections: as the chorus’s final chord decayed, up came the sound of the little critters. Cedille Records’ engineer, Bill Maylone spent many hours hand-designing special filters to notch out the different frequencies our insect friends produced and then fading the filters in where the chorus wasn’t covering the bugs. The filters had to be brought in very carefully so as not to affect the actual music. 

Happy Halloween 

I’m sure you’ve noticed our banner ad at the top of this site’s home page announcing the Halloween sale at Cedille Records’ web site (full-priced CDs reduced to $13), which will end Tuesday night. I thought I should mention two of our recordings that are ideal for this time of year: violinist Rachel Barton Pine’s Instrument of the Devil and our recording with Chicago Opera Theater of Gian Carlo Menotti’s great “ghost story” opera, The Medium.

Happy Halloween, everyone. 

–Jim Ginsburg

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