96 performance and the classical paradigm
Or it may be taking place in a studio for the sole and express purpose of
making the recording. In listening to the recording of Brahms’s Hungarian
Dances by Jascha Heifetz and Brooks Smith, for example, we assume that we
are hearing a recording of what we might have heard had we been present in
the studio on April 14, 1956 when Heifetz and Smith performed the piece.
This impression is even stronger if we listen to the recording of the John
Coltrane Quartet’s live performance of “My Favorite Things” at the Newport
Jazz Festival on July 7, 1963. In such cases, we do not expect the recording
to reproduce all of the relevant sonic qualities of the performance. In this
sense, a recording has a tertiary status for our appreciation of a classical work
- the work itself is realized in the performance of which we are listening
to the recording. And perhaps it has a secondary status in our appreciation
of the work in the jazz example, if, as Stephen Davies suggests, we take the
work in this case to be the performance itself.
A little reflection on classical and jazz recording practice suggests that this
intuitive view of such recordings stands in need of some qualification. For
example, while the “take” of the Hungarian Dances occurred on a single day,
the take of Brahms’s Sextet in G major, Op. 36, contained on the same CD
took place on two consecutive days, the different movements being recorded
separately.^2 More generally, it is standard practice in classical recording to
splice together different takes in the interests of obtaining the best overall
rendering of the piece. The recording of an individual live performance may
not allow for the splicing of takes, but it does allow for various strategies that
serve a similar interest. As Theodore Gracyk brings out very clearly in a cri-
tique of the idea of sound recording as capturing “what one would have heard”
(1996, 87–90) the recording of the performance by the Coltrane Quartet
involved various techniques for miking and mixing to produce a sound that
could not have been heard by any individual listener at the Newport Jazz
Festival. The recording of a live performance is importantly aperspectival
whereas our hearing of that performance is always perspectival. Also, the
recording may provide a better balance of the individual contributions than
would have been available during the live performance, either because of
dynamic differences between the instruments or because of failings in the
system of amplification used on stage.
However, even when we modify our view of recordings of classical and jazz
performances in light of these kinds of considerations, performances retain
a certain primacy, for the purposes of appreciation, over recordings. The
recording aims to present what was performed in a way that does best serv-
ice to the achievements of the performers, even if this departs significantly
in the ways just described from “what would have been heard” when those
performances took place. Theodore Gracyk (1996) has argued, however, that
the same does not apply to the central works of rock music by artists such