Jim Ginsburg's blog
Before I get to the body of this post, a quick news item: album downloads are now available for sale on the Cedille Records web site.
Before any music can be recorded in earnest at a recording session, the recording team needs to get a sound balance everyone likes. This often involves the positioning of players as well as of microphones, along with the "mixing" of those microphones. The way this is done is dependent on the size and type of the ensemble being recorded and the room in which the players are playing.
In a smaller room, where sound bounces back off the walls creating lots of "early reflections" it is usually necessary to "mic" (i.e., put a microphone on) each instrument separately. In a larger hall that isn't overly reverberant, it may be possible to record an entire ensemble of different instruments (e.g., strings with piano) with a single pair of microphones because there is a sweet spot in the hall where the sound blend is absolutely perfect with no loss of detail.
This can also have to do with the philosophy of the recording label and its engineers and producers. The audiophile label Dorian used to record everything it could in the Troy Savings Bank Music Hall in Albany, New York, with a single pair of microphones. However, according to artists who worked with them, it could take a long time for the engineers to find the aforementioned "sweet spot," since it differed depending on the instruments and players involved.
Another label renowned for its sound, Reference Recordings, takes the exact opposite approach: they put a separate microphone on each instrument and rely on their mixing ability to get the perfect amount of blend and detail. And yet their recordings sound as lifelike and "natural" as Dorian's.
At Cedille, we have no overarching philosophy. We just try to get the best sound possible given the circumstances we are working in.
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In my previous post,
Where to Record, I discussed the factors to be weighed in choosing a place to record. Today, I will introduce the members of the recording team.
The person who oversees the whole process of making the recording from beginning to end is the recording producer. This is usually the person (or people – you'll sometimes see two people credited as co-producers of a disc) who runs the recording sessions, although sometimes a separate "session director" may be employed for this purpose. For Cedille Records, I act as producer for the great majority of our recordings. Even for the discs where we use an outside producer – usually Grammy-winning producer Judith Sherman – I act as an uncredited "executive producer," attending the recording sessions when possible and personally weighing in during the various stages of the post-recording process to maintain the quality for which Cedille Records is known.
The other key person at a recording session is the recording engineer. Sometimes the producer and engineer are the same person (Judith Sherman usually engineers the recordings she produces, for example). The engineer is the person who achieves the sound at the sessions – including choosing and positioning the microphones (and often the players around the microphones) and balancing the levels to achieve the ultimate sound "mix." For almost all of Cedille's recordings, veteran engineer Bill Maylone performs this function.
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In my previous post, I raised this topic as a question - What do young artists and ensembles need to know about recording? - since I was scheduled to give a talk on that subject to a young chamber group. Having now given that talk, I return with some answers, which I will present over my next several posts.
One of the first decisions that must be made before recording can begin is where to record. There are many considerations that come into play when choosing a recording venue. These include:
Acoustics
Noise issues (both internal and external)
Availability
Degree of control
Available Equipment
Price
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Before I get to the topic of today's post, I want to congratulate our two Grammy winners (the awards were announced last night) eighth blackbird (Best Chamber Music Performance for their strange imaginary animals album) and Judith Sherman (Producer of the Year, Classical for albums including strange imaginary animals and violinist Rachel Barton Pine's American Virtuosa: Tribute to Maud Powell).
I was recently asked to give a symposium for the benefit of a young chamber ensemble on what they need to know about recording.
I thought I would use this opportunity to ask ChicagoClassicalMusic.org readers what YOU think musicians need to know. If you are a musician with questions about the recording process (or things you wish you had known earlier), please let me know what they are. Even if you are not, if you have ideas on what information would be helpful to an artist or group embarking on recording, please share those ideas.
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I attended Sunday afternoon's CSO "Beyond the Score" presentation on Tchaikovsky's Fourth. What is so great about these programs, which I highly recommend, is how they put masterpieces in perspective in terms of other art of the period - literary, visual, and musical. Right off the bat, three pieces were mentioned as influences on Tchaikovsky's 1878 symphony: Verdi's
La Forza del Destino, Bizet's
Carmen, and Beethoven's Fifth Symphony.
This got me to thinking about how some of the recordings in our catalog try to put great works into musical perspective. While Cedille Records' main mission is to present the work of Chicago's finest musicians and composers, we have a secondary mission of "increasing awareness and knowledge of neglected areas of the classical repertory" (from our Mission Statement). In addition to presenting unrecorded or relatively obscure works, this also means presenting programs that combine the familiar and the unfamiliar in ways that often shed new light on the more familiar work.
I should note that almost all our program ideas come from the Chicago musicians we record. The champion in finding ways to illuminate renowned works is violinist Rachel Barton Pine. Her 2003 recording of the Brahms Violin Concerto with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra conducted by Carlos Kalmar made quite an impression, not only for the great playing but because she coupled it with the great (but very rarely recorded) "Hungarian" Concerto by Joseph Joachim, which one critic called "the Holy Grail of Romantic violin concertos."
The reason this was such an illuminating choice was
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(Okay, so I'm a little late to the party.)
My personal discovery came as the result of a request from Steve Robinson, head honcho (officially Senior Vice President) of WFMT. Steve asked if we would be willing to offer a "fully-loaded" iPod containing every track from all 100+ CDs in the Cedille Records catalog as a premium for the station's November fund drive.
So I asked our engineer, Bill Maylone, to make a prototype I could listen to. Of course, this item has become my constant companion when I'm out of the house and a wonderful way for me to reacquaint myself with discs I produced years ago. Often, I'll have a sudden desire to hear a particular piece or performance and can call it up instantly. I remember especially the exhilaration of listening to the brisk scherzo and finale from Jan Vaclav Hugo Vorisek's Symphony in D Major (1821) while biking home through a violent thunderstorm this summer.
Equally fun is putting the iPod on "shuffle" and hearing the most eclectic mix of classical music imaginable.
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Cedille Records has just released its final recording for 2007, Snowcarols: Christmas Music of William Ferris, with the William Ferris Chorale, conducted by Paul French. The disc contains Ferris's big Christmas cantata, Snowcarols, along with shorter Christmas-themed choral works. As I like to do when we release a new project, I have asked someone intimately familiar with the project to guest blog the "backstory" of the recording -- in this case, Ferris Chorale Artistic Director John Vorrasi. Before I turn this over to him, I should note that the new disc and all full-price Cedille recordings are part of the Holiday Sale at our Newly Redesigned Web Site. I hope you will give it a look and let us know what you think of the new site. Thanks and Happy Thanksgiving, Jim. Now here's John's post:
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Friends have recently sent me articles suggesting the usual doomsaying about the death of classical music has never been more wrong. First came an excerpt from pollster Mark J. Penn’s book “Microtrends,” a small portion of which I will reprint here:
Classical music is growing in popularity, not shrinking. And in the coming years, we should expect it to grow even more.
The reasons are empirical, demographic, and cultural. Empirically, the doomsayers are ignoring some key numbers. In 2000-01, there were over 32 million concert tickets sold, up more than 10 percent from a decade before. Whereas season subscriptions dropped – for example, by 5 percent in Baltimore – single-ticket sales rose 46 percent at the same time. That suggests not only that classical music regulars, including retirees, have busier lives than ever, but also that more people than ever are dabbling in classical. Most industries would call that growth….
Here’s my favorite counter-stat. According to Gallup surveys, the portion of U.S. households with a member who plays a musical instrument – 54 percent – reached its highest point ever in 2003, the last year the study was conducted. And it may be that part of that growth was due to the fact that piano lessons aren’t just for fidgety kids anymore. According to the Music Teachers National Association, 25-55 year-olds are the fastest-growing group of new piano pupils.
Even putting aside, for the moment, all the proof points that classical music is thriving and not withering, the big takeaway here is that the doomsayers’ key metrics – CD sales and presence on TV and radio – are completely irrelevant. Musically speaking, the Internet is the place to be. And apparently – even though the cliché classical music listener is stodgy and gray – classical music is more popular on the Internet than it was in stores. Whereas classical music made up only 3 percent of CD sales in retail stores, it actually accounts for 12 percent of all sales on Apple’s iTunes.
This last point is the subject of the “A Critic at Large” segment in this week’s New Yorker, authored by Alex Ross, titled The Well-tempered Web: The Internet may be killing the pop CD, but it’s helping classical music. In it, Ross interviews Klaus Heymann, who founded Naxos Records – now the world’s largest classical recording company – in 1987:
Until about two years ago, for me this whole music business was a hobby, an expensive hobby,” Heymann told me. “Only since 2006 or 2007 has there been a piece of return on the investment, through the digital.” Digital sales now account for twenty-five per cent of his revenues, and, because of drastically lower production and distribution costs, he makes much more profit on each sale. Hence the venue for our meeting: a forty-first-floor hotel suite overlooking Central Park.
Ross ends the article with a hopeful story:
For a little while the other day, a surprising name appeared at the top of Amazon.com’s Top MP3 Artists, outperforming even Kanye West: Richard Wagner.
Read the article and see what you think. Do you have evidence that classical music is on the rise, or on the wane? Have you availed yourself of the new technologies including digital downloads? (And if so, how?) Anecdotes are welcome here…. Click here to continue reading
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This month marks the release of Composers in the Loft, Cedille Records catalog number CDR 90000 100 – the one hundredth album in our main line of recordings featuring the work of musicians and composers in and from Chicago. (Cedille has also issued some lower-priced compilation discs and samplers, and one recording on its midprice Cedille FOUNDation imprint.)
It is particularly appropriate that this landmark recording was planned in collaboration with Chicago’s acclaimed Music in the Loft series of chamber music concerts, as a way to showcase the series, and in particular the work of its five composers in residence to date (prior to the current concert season).
Here is Music in the Loft Founder and Artistic Director Fredda Hyman’s description of how her composer in residence program has worked. The names of the composers and their pieces on the CD are highlighted:
In 2000, I decided to add another component to our Music in the Loft series. It would be to feature some of the works of a young composer as well as a specially commissioned piece to be played on our series. For our first composer, I chose Ricardo Lorenz, and his piano piece Bachangó was one of the works performed on our 2000/01 series. Carter Pann, the second composer I selected, had five of his chamber works performed, one of which was Differences for cello and piano. In 2003/04, Pierre Jalbert was the composer-in-residence and his Trio for violin, cello, and piano was performed as well as a commissioned piece written to a Billy Collins poem that will be included on a future “Billy Collins Suite” CD to be produced by Cedille Records. Our next composer-in-residence was Stacy Garrop; four of her chamber works were featured on our 2004/05 series, including the commissioned String Quartet No. 2, “Demons and Angels”. In 2005/06, Vivian Fung was our composer. Her first quartet was performed as well as a piano piece and Miniatures, a commissioned work for clarinet and string quartet.
No person should be the judge of their own case, but I am convinced that you will find as much pleasure in listening to the music of these gifted young composers as I found in bringing their work forward.
– Fredda Hyman
To celebrate this milestone release, we are offering Composers in the Loft on our web site at 25% off the regular price through the end of the month. Since this is the month of Halloween, we are also running a web-only, $10 special (through the end of October) on two particularly appropriate Cedille titles: violinist Rachel Barton Pine’s Instrument of the Devil album and Chicago Opera Theater’s chilling recording of Gian Carlo Menotti’s great ghost-story opera, The Medium.
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I thought I should use my space on this blog to call attention to a chilling article that anyone who cares about personal freedom and the arts (or just personal freedom) should read. A week ago, the NY Times reported the story of a teacher at Mills College who was denied re-entry into the U.S.:
Nalini Ghuman, an up-and-coming musicologist and expert on the British composer Edward Elgar, was stopped at the San Francisco airport in August last year and, without explanation, told that she was no longer allowed to enter the United States.
Her treatment can only be described as something out of Kafka:
Ms. Ghuman’s descent into the bureaucratic netherworld began on Aug. 8, 2006, when she and Mr. Flight [her fiancee] returned to San Francisco from a research trip to Britain. Armed immigration officers met them at the airplane door and escorted Ms. Ghuman away.
In a written account of the next eight hours that she prepared for her lawyer, Ms. Ghuman said that officers tore up her H-1B visa, which was valid through May 2008, defaced her British passport, and seemed suspicious of everything from her music cassettes to the fact that she had listed Welsh as a language she speaks. A redacted government report about the episode obtained by her lawyer under the Freedom of Information Act erroneously described her as “Hispanic.”
Held incommunicado in a room in the airport, she was groped during a body search, she said, and was warned that if she moved, she would be considered to be attacking her armed female searcher. After questioning her for hours, the officers told her that she had been ruled inadmissible, she said, and threatened to transfer her to a detention center in Santa Clara, Calif., unless she left on a flight to London that night.
Outside, Mr. Flight made frantic calls for help. He said the British Consulate tried to get through to the immigration officials in charge, to no avail. And Ms. Ghuman said her demands to speak to the British consul were rebuffed.
Despite numerous appeals on her behalf, over 13 months later, nothing has changed for Ms. Ghuman. For all the gory details please read the whole article.
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