Glenn Gould's Edits

[robcat2075]

IF you should feel shame over editing your YouTube recordings, know that the pros have been doing it for a long time... and not just tiny fixes.

The Morgan Library & Museum

A famous recording comes into focus!

While the German composer Johann Sebastian Bach achieved only modest fame during his lifetime, by the twentieth century he had come to be seen as an essential icon of European culture. The twentieth-century Canadian pianist Glenn Gould was known for his correspondingly iconic recordings of Bach’s keyboard music. For his second recording of Bach’s Goldberg Variations, with CBS Records in 1982, Gould marked the score heavily to show which takes were to be used in the famously complex edit of the recording.

I suppose the irony is that, for all his precise choices, this second effort is not more loved.

1982. Digital audio recording existed at that time but all indications are that this edit was done by physically cutting/splicing recording tape. Ouch.

GGouldEditsBach.jpg

I recall taking a "new music methods" class c. 1985 and one of the projects involved physically splicing tape. By then, learning to make crumhorn reeds would have been a less-doomed skill.

I had known of tape editing for a long time. When I was little my mother recorded audio books for the blind on a reel-to-reel machine. She would proof-listen to them and if she detected a mistake that was too early to just punch-in and re-record to the end, she'd record the small correction involved, get out a razor blade, and splice it into her reel.

I learned that this might have some musical use upon reading a review of Walter Carlos' "Switched-On Bach" where a critic asserted it was a valid performance "even if the master was white with splicing tape."

And I remember a tale in an audio magazine where a producer is playing the edited tape of a young pianist's debut recording to him and says, "Don't you wish you could play like that?"

[LeTromboniste]

Yup. Pretty much every album is edited. Even a lot of "live" or "concert" albums, while not necessarily employing patching takes, use a mix of at least two full takes. Even not for album release that can be the case – I've played in numerous concerts that were recorded for later radio broadcast, and where the dress rehearsal, while not constituing a full take, was nonetheless recorded to offer some patching options in case they're useful.

With my own videos, some are truly not edited, simply because they're from a concert where we didn't have the option of recording extra takes. But some videos from the very same concerts are edited because we did have time to make extra takes for one or two pieces.

I don't think it's a problem, or that it should be controversial. A live concert and a recording listened to at home on a stereo or headphones are two different media, and different listening experiences. There are concert performances that are absolutely thrilling and amazing in the moment, but if you heard a recording, you wouldn't enjoy them nearly as much. And while with recording there's an expectation of "perfection" that we have to try to approach, it doesn't mean edits are fraudulent or misrepresent one's ability. The musician(s) did play every note on the album. And it's not even always the best take of everything that makes it onto the album. Sometimes the cut is impossible and you just can't include the best take. Sometimes there's a take that is absolutely perfect musically and clearly "the best" overall, and you'd be delighted to ever replicate it in concert, but it also has one problem that's small but of a kind that you just can't tolerate on a recording. Also sometimes there's even just really weird stuff that's due to the recording process itself. I've had it happen where there's intonation problems you find in post-prod that nobody heard in person, nobody in the booth heard, and one can't even hear in the rough mix of the same take, but then you listen to the edits rendered with the final mix, and with that different balance you get more of one mic or another, that picked up some weird reflection and suddenly one instrument sounds out of tune with itself...

[mbarbier]

IF you should feel shame over editing your YouTube recordings, know that the pros have been doing it for a long time... and not just tiny fixes.

The Morgan Library & Museum

A famous recording comes into focus!

While the German composer Johann Sebastian Bach achieved only modest fame during his lifetime, by the twentieth century he had come to be seen as an essential icon of European culture. The twentieth-century Canadian pianist Glenn Gould was known for his correspondingly iconic recordings of Bach’s keyboard music. For his second recording of Bach’s Goldberg Variations, with CBS Records in 1982, Gould marked the score heavily to show which takes were to be used in the famously complex edit of the recording.

I suppose the irony is that, for all his precise choices, this second effort is not more loved.

1982. Digital audio recording existed at that time but all indications are that this edit was done by physically cutting/splicing recording tape. Ouch.


GGouldEditsBach.jpg



I recall taking a "new music methods" class c. 1985 and one of the projects involved physically splicing tape. By then, learning to make crumhorn reeds would have been a less-doomed skill.

I had known of tape editing for a long time. When I was little my mother recorded audio books for the blind on a reel-to-reel machine. She would proof-listen to them and if she detected a mistake that was too early to just punch-in and re-record to the end, she'd record the small correction involved, get out a razor blade, and splice it into her reel.

I learned that this might have some musical use upon reading a review of Walter Carlos' "Switched-On Bach" where a critic asserted it was a valid performance "even if the master was white with splicing tape."

And I remember a tale in an audio magazine where a producer is playing the edited tape of a young pianist's debut recording to him and says, "Don't you wish you could play like that?"

I totally hear you and definitely think people need to be aware of how common editing is, but Glenn Gould and Wendy Carlos are slightly odd/outlier examples.

Gould wrote quite articulately about his use of the recording studio as an instrument rather than simply documenting performance- he basically stopped performing to fully explore the medium and how to use the studio as an instrument. I feel like that dichotomy is a pretty common tension between our expectations of what records are and how one can utilize recording technology. There's a book titled "Audio Culture: Readings in Modern Music" that has an article Gould wrote about the studio as an instrument. I'm on the road for a bit, but if you (or anyone else) is interested I could scan and send it. It's a really fascinating and articulate look at his approach to using the studio. Similarly the radio plays he made, especially The Idea of North are a really fascinating example of his approach to editing that get one's ear away from musical editing.

Similarly when Wendy Carlos was making the Switched on Bach records, they had to be heavily edited. The mix of timbres she was creating with the Moog at the time were often only able to produce one voice at a time. The level of timbrel variety and musical sensitivity she was able to create specifically because of the editing is mind boggling. Truly her work was incredibly virtuosic for the time, editing included. I feel like that has a lot to do with why her recordings have lasted to so long, none the less the effect her work had on synth development.

Totally agree with everything you wrote- they're both just very specific kinds of situations that had a huge part in laying the groundwork for a lot of modern recording approaches.

But it's also wild how much "live" recordings are edited. A good friend does the edits for a the LA Phil live recordings. His cue sheet is often more than 150 cuts per movement (cutting between 3-4 live performances). That's not to bash them or say they don't play as well as their recordings- all the nights were excellent, it's just a totally different approach. And so many pressures to be perfect- as Maximilien pointed out- with an orchestra especially there must be so many demands to remove tiny little imperfections no one would've noticed in concert.

[harrisonreed]

A recording is like a painting. You don't blame the artist for painting over sections of their work to improve it into a masterpiece. Nobody watches someone paint a masterpiece live. They watch Bob Ross paint live, and that is a different experience, though equally rewarding, than viewing a Rembrandt.

This statue is a masterpiece, and it was made as a masterpiece, and you get to view the same masterpiece over and over again:



Nobody blames the sculptor that it isn't live.

Likewise, seeing Hamlet live is an incredible experience. Nothing else is like it. But so is watching the film "There will be blood". Nobody is mad at the director that his film isn't done in one continuous take. It's a masterpiece.

The issue, I think, is when people try to fool their audience on YouTube and make it seem live when it is obviously over-processed and edited. Fake lip sync playing, etc. Nobody likes to watch badly done lip sync music videos. If you're going to do that, the visual art must be up to snuff with the audio art.

[robcat2075]

I was eight when my dad got "Switched-On Bach" as a gag gift. I'm not sure he ever played it but I found it fascinating.

Meanwhile "2001" had come out that year and created much speculation about what computers could do.

My general notion was that this electronic music was somehow made and performed by a computer.

I knew nothing about studio recording technology and I'm sure the general public didn't understand where live performance stopped and studio manipulation began in the records they were buying, even though the Beatles and other pop acts were employing quite a bit in that regard.

I recall my mom pointing me to the "Today Show" early one morning as they were interviewing someone about this album and "the Moog synthesizer". It must have been (still then) Walter Carlos but they only talked for a minute or so and then the camera stared at the synthesizer while they played a track.

[robcat2075]

Nobody blames the sculptor that it isn't live.

Or do they?

I wonder what the paid attendance per year for sculptures is vs. the paid attendance for live performance.

I'm going to guess they are not similar and that audiences reward live performance much more than sculpture.

We have a sculpture museum here in Dallas. It is only crowded when a live performance event is staged in it.

Does the clamshell that contains a Big Mac count as sculpture? That might even out the dollar score.

The prof teaching a "media history" class i took insisted that piece of Styrofoam would be a very significant cultural artifact in a thousand years.

[LeTromboniste]

The issue, I think, is when people try to fool their audience on YouTube and make it seem live when it is obviously over-processed and edited. Fake lip sync playing, etc. Nobody likes to watch badly done lip sync music videos. If you're going to do that, the visual art must be up to snuff with the audio art.

That's an interesting point, and one that can be argued either way as well.

One point we can bring up on that topic is that many great (in some cases absolutely legendary) "live" performances are in fact pre-recorded and "lip-synched", often for practical reasons. That includes, among countless examples, Yo-Yo Ma's performance at Obama's inauguration, Pavarotti's famous final appearance, at the 2006 Torino Olympics (actually pretty much any orchestral performance at any Olympics, and probably a lot of the non-classical performances too), or Whitney Houston's legendary national anthem at Super Bowl XXV. The biggest distinction between that and people "faking" their "live" YouTube videos is that when it's big stars who everyone knows actually can play/sing exactly that well, there is no notion of "fraud", and nobody bats an eye. It used to be extremely common for bands going on TV shows to promote their albums to give lip-synched performances, and sometimes it was extremely obvious because the audio was literally the track from the album! But people were thrilled to see their favourite band playing on TV.

I'm in a number of videos that were "lip-synched", as I'm sure are most other pros here(?). I'll say that it's a very unpleasant experience to produce. It feels wrong and silly to stand there and pretend; you still have to play to make it look realistic, but if the audio is being played back to you, you have to play extremely soft while pretending to play loud, so that every other musician can hear the audio playback, and not what is being actually played live; and you just know it will never look as good as if the video was captured simultaneously with the audio. But sometimes it's necessary, for any number of practical reasons. For example, maybe you can only get the video crew for a short period of time and need to capture the video really quickly, but don't want to compromise on the quality of the audio track that's going to be on your album (for such a case, I'd personally prefer to capture a couple of truly live audio+video takes for the video only, and not use the album audio track, but when it's not your group, you shut up and do what you're asked. Also that would mean extra costs for editing two different audio tracks of the same piece, a bit wasteful). Or maybe you have to record the audio late at night to minimize background noises, but you need the video to be shot in daytime for lighting and visual reasons. Or you want the video to be shot in a environment that will look really good but would sound awful. That's just a couple out of many many reasons you might have to do it. A case can also be made that having a ton of mics and stands and wires visible is a very particular aesthetic, with a certain making-of/behind-the-scenes feel to it, and that's not always the aesthetic you want for your video. That all speaks to the very blurry line between making a "performance video", and making a "music video", where the visual is as important as the sound, and where the video is usually expected not to be shot simultaneously.

Ultimately it's more a question of whether it's well done or not, than a question of principles. As Harrison writes, "if you're going to do that, the visual art must be up to snuff with the audio art."

[harrisonreed]

Nobody blames the sculptor that it isn't live.

Or do they?

I wonder what the paid attendance per year for sculptures is vs. the paid attendance for live performance.

They don't. The attendance at the New York Phil, during a 90% capacity year, was about 75,000:

https://www.wjbf.com/lifestyle/u-s-worl ... 20on%20Oct.

The Boston museum of fine arts recently had an annual attendance of 971,000. In 2019, that number was significantly higher.

https://www.mfa.org/annual-report/annua ... 24/numbers

If you want to argue the semantics of those visits not being solely to see one sculpture, or whatever, I'd argue that it is similar to there being more than one piece and more than one genre on the program at the Phil.

I'm leaving pop groups out of this, although I'm sure the Louvre would give them a run for their money. Plus they are not always really playing live, anyways.

[harrisonreed]

This is what The Stranglers would do when forced to lip sync:



And the same program made the mistake of requiring them to lip sync AGAIN:

[sf105]

Famously, the orchestra was miming during the opening ceremony of the Paris Olympics during a biblical rainstorm. Every instrument except the brass and the tubular bells would have been ruined if they'd been real.

For guarantee liveness, there are always the BBC promenade concerts--now including the Aurora Orchestra playing from memory.

[robcat2075]

The Boston museum of fine arts recently had an annual attendance of 971,000. In 2019, that number was significantly higher.

That's quite a few people but, that museum has 500,000 objects in its collection, so it's drawing less than two people per object.

And they are open for visits 50+ hours per week, year round and numerous ways to gain admission for free.

Meanwhile the google says more than 3 million tickets to live music performance were sold in Boston in 2023.

[harrisonreed]

The Boston museum of fine arts recently had an annual attendance of 971,000. In 2019, that number was significantly higher.

That's quite a few people but, that museum has 500,000 objects in its collection, so it's drawing less than two people per object.

And they are open for visits 50+ hours per week, year round and numerous ways to gain admission for free.

Meanwhile the google says more than 3 million tickets to live music performance were sold in Boston in 2023.

Generally people aren't going to the orchestra just to hear one of the violinists perform live. They go for the total experience. You go to the museum for the total experience too, not just for one piece of art. Not to mention that not all 500000 pieces are displayed at once. Most stay locked up and are not displayed. You must also know that, being an artist yourself.

In any case, ONE museum in Boston has 1/3 of the audience of ALL live music tickets sold in the same city. There are quite a few more museums in that one city, too.