'Music they heard within themselves'

Philip Clark explores the link between recording and listening, from Stokowski's dreams to Cage's realisations, and towards 21st-century ideals of immersive listening

Is John Tilbury's Cage disc a recording, or an objectified view of a recording?

Leopold Stokowski: contemplating future possibilities (photo: Tully Potter Collection)

Matthew Herbert: returning Mahler's Tenth to a work in progress (photo: Dino Wend / DG)

Considering they had recently been duped into thinking that a Martian landing was underway by an Orson Welles radio play, you wonder quite what Americans made of Leopold Stokowski’s alternative future for sound recording, as mapped out in his 1943 book Music for All of Us. “The first step is to make music [sound] exactly like the original,” he wrote. Nothing controversial there. But then a prophecy that, to Average Joes everywhere, could only have sounded like a fantasist’s pipedream: “The next step is to surpass the original and, through the future possibilities of recording, to achieve the dreams of musicians – of making music still more beautiful and eloquent, music they heard within themselves but which was unattainable in the past.”

And if Stokowski’s dream sounded like a future, the Classical Establishment has proved curiously reluctant to wake up. In the parallel universes of rock and jazz recording, studio-specific techniques like overdubbing, flipping material between tracks, tape reversal and manufacturing instrumental shadings not possible acoustically is common practice. Producers Teo Macero, George Martin and Phil Spector (working with Miles Davis, The Beatles and The Beach Boys’ Brian Wilson respectively) wired the process of recording into the circuitry of the music itself. Miles Davis’s 1969/70 album Bitches Brew was finely structured and “orchestrated” at a mixing desk after his musicians had already left the building, Davis and Macero puréeing hours of source recordings into a 90-minute montage of abstracted blues forms which triggered the jazz-rock revolution. As it appeared on vinyl, Bitches Brew could never have been re-played live.

As the composer and onetime Henry Cow reedsman/keyboardist Tim Hodgkinson put it in the 2007 Awards issue of Gramophone: “Rock music was born along with the idea of exploring what you could do creatively with recording. If you’re going to record your piece, how are you going to record it? Even today classical musicians don’t think that way and the idea that a recording could be more than just documentation of a piece seems alien to that culture. There are sharp people like Pierre Boulez who have explored having instruments in different places from where they should be in the stereo, but that’s been the exception rather than the rule.” So why does the culture of classical music regard recording as a secondary, functional activity? And what of musicians who are thinking through Stokowski’s future possibilities of recording? This music that was unattainable in the past – is it really more beautiful and eloquent than what went before?

Well, imagine music suddenly liberated from physical, bodily realities – from the topography of lungs and fingers operating instruments producing those recognisable contours of ‘music’ on which Bitches Brew, for all its state-of-the-art plumbing, still relied. Imagine music constructed from infinite sustains, from immeasurably subtle nuances of tuning or hairline rhythmic ratios too complex for the human brain to add up. Imagine a whole new syntax and gestural language. Imagine recording not just capturing the moment in a studio, but the process of recording as music.

When the German electronic music composer Florian Hecker released Acid In The Style of David Tudor on the Editions Mego label in 2009, his title provoked puzzled amusement. David Tudor, John Cage’s pianist of choice, a composer himself later, put against Acid House, the sonic heartbeat of rave culture – druggy hedonism in the style of the master interpreter of the non-intentioned piano piece? The connection is…? As it turned out, Hecker’s title was more perceptive than anyone thought, encapsulating as it did the development of electronics from first generation pioneers like Cage, Stockhausen and Pierre Henry towards a new wave of electronic composers like him, who had arrived at their art via electric pop and rock, and the rave scene.