More recording thoughts
Sharon's Weekly Head Dump
I was back in the recording studio to record the Fanny Mendelssohn Hensel G Minor sonata—the original version that the concerto I played in June was based on.
Each time I return to the studio, I get a little better at this strange process. (The irony is not lost on me that while I’m still learning to be comfortable with the recording process, more people know my playing from listening to my recordings than hearing me play live.) Glenn Gould thought of recording as being a purer, more honest form of music-making than performance—while I see his argument, I feel the exact opposite way. The heat and uncertainty of live playing, of drawing on the audience’s energy, toying with their expectations in real time, the inevitable imperfections, the ecstatic moments of brilliance that disappear immediately, never to be experienced by anyone again—that’s real to me, far more real than generating repetitions in a small empty room.
Recording is the most un-musical way to make music that I know of. In live performance you never want to play anything the same way twice; in recording you’re trying to hit your marks, turning out consistent takes that are as identical as possible. In performance, playing any piece is about the journey from beginning to end—you’re creating and shaping a single narrative arc, conscious of the music’s overall structure and pace; in recording you fixate, repeatedly, on fragments out of context. In performance you can throw everything you have—all your energy—into the music, because you only have one go; in recording you have to conserve your energy for hours of nonstop playing, yet you have to make it sound like you’re giving it your all, take after take.
It feels strangely intimate, recording; there’s no audience to see or hear you, but there are so many microphones intruding in your space in a way you would never let a person. It’s not like being in a practice room, where you feel free; you’re aware that the engineer is listening to every note, every breath, every pedal tap, and watching you sweat and make faces and wiggle your arms to stay loose between takes. The feeling that you’re all alone, but that you’re also being closely watched, is so unnerving that it seems like these are impossible conditions in which to make music.
And yet there’s a very different kind of focus that recording forces you to have: to draw on energy you didn’t know you had, to give and give and give to this hyper-listening empty room, to catalog every split or wrong note in your mind (knowing that each mistake requires, minimum, 1-2 more takes) while trying not to get disheartened by each mistake (because the moment you get disheartened the focus and the energy evaporate), to steel yourself into some kind of machine that always has one more take in you, to hear yourself as the engineer outside of the room hears you, to cast your mind into the future and anticipate how said engineer will have to edit these takes together, adapting your fingers and pedaling in the moment to ease those edits and aid in the illusion of a single unbroken performance.
One of the mental traps I fall into, constantly, in each recording session is that I start wondering how I measure up to other pianists, even though I have absolutely no data on how other pianists work. How many takes over how many hours does Yuja Wang need to get clean coverage of a 20-minute work? Jeremy Denk? Stephen Hough? Martha Argerich? Jonathan Biss? They’re certainly not telling anyone.
The cruel, unhelpful voice in my head, at some point in every recording session, whispers “I bet other pianists don’t need this many takes. You’re probably the only person who is bad enough to need multiple tries to get that passage clean. I bet the engineer is thinking about how crappy you are compared to the other musicians he usually records.”
I played 80 takes over 2.5 hours, no breaks, for the Fanny Mendelssohn Hensel sonata. I walked out of the room feeling both accomplished and a little shameful—I’d booked a two-hour session, so surely going over by half an hour meant I was a total failure.
“That’s a big piece,” commented the engineer, a lovely man who I realized didn’t remotely think any of the horrible things I imagined him thinking. “Most people would need at least a four-hour session to record it, but you’re pretty quick.”
All the shame and guilt I’d been storing up over the session evaporated instantly. Here I was thinking I was taking way longer than other people to record this piece, and turns out I’m actually really efficient?
It’s starting to dawn on me that I might actually be kind of good at what I do. (What a concept!) I’m also realizing that recording—a process I have a lot of thoughts and feelings (clearly) and emotional baggage around—is something that does get easier the more I do it.
I know! Practicing makes things easier! This is a lesson I have definitely never learned in my life! I look forward to not applying this takeaway to anything else I do.
P.S. After I wrote all that, I remembered that I had written out some similar thoughts after my recording session in May of this year, and then read them over and realized I’d already written out very similar things, just with different sentence structure. Hey, clearly my work to be more consistent is paying off.
See you next week
I know that normally I write more in these posts about other stuff I’ve been doing or thinking about, music I’m listening to, etc. but this is the first real stretch of no-immediate-deadline-time I’ve had all year, so I’ve been in mental puttering mode: resting, reading, and taking care of all the random chores, errands, and tasks that you inevitably let pile up when you’re focused on other priorities.
Apparently when I’m in mental puttering mode I don’t have the wherewithal to write much, so I think I’ll end this post here for now. See you next week! 🎹