kagablog

The problems of recording

I have touched on this problem twice already. I said that documents such as tape-recordings of improvisation are essentially empty, as they preserve chiefly the form that something took and give at best an indistinct hint as to the feeling and cannot of course convey any sense of time and place. And later, that it is impossible to record with any fidelity a kind of music that is actually derived from the room in which it is taking place -its size, shape, acoustical properties, even the view from the window, and that what a recording produces is a separate phenomenon, something really much stranger than the playing itself, since what we hear on tape or disc is indeed the same playing but divorced from its natural context.

A remark of Wittgenstein’s gives us a clue as to the real root of the problem. In the Tractatus he writes; “The gramophone record, the musical thought, the score, the waves of sound, all stand to one another in that pictorial international relation, which holds between language and the world. To all of them the logical structure is common”. (4.014) This logical structure is just what an improvisation lacks, hence it cannot be scored nor can it be recorded.

All the general technical problems of recording are exacerbated in the recording of improvisation, but they remain technical, and with customary optimism we may suppose that one day they will be solved. However, even when these problems are solved, together with all those that may arise in the meantime, it will still be impossible to record this music, for several reasons.

Simply that very often the strongest things are not commercially viable on the domestic market. Pure alcohol is too strong for most people’s palates. Atomic energy is acceptable in peacetime for supplying the electricity grid, but housewives would rebel against the idea of atomic converters in their own kitchens. Similarly, this music is not ideal for home listening. It is not a suitable background for social intercourse. Besides, this music does not occur in a home environment, it occurs in a public environment, and its force depends to some extent on public response. For this reason too it cannot happen fully in a recording studio; if there is hope for a recording it must be a recording of a public performance.

Who can be interested purely in sound, however high its ‘fidelity’? Improvisation is a language spontaneously developed amongst the players and between players and listeners. Who can say in what consists the mode of operation of this language? Is it likely that it is reducible to electrical impulses on tape and the oscillation of a loudspeaker membrane? On this reactionary note, I abandon the topic.

News has to travel somehow and tape is probably in the last analysis just as adequate a vehicle as hearsay, and certainly just as inaccurate.

cornelius cardew
towards an ethic of improvisation