68 ❧ chapter three
and standing screens that could be used to adjust the acoustics. However, it was
insulated from the outside in such a way as to preclude any ventilation whatso-
ever while the studio was in use. After a six-hour working day of recording and
listening to playbacks, I sometimes staggered out gasping for air. In their rela-
tively small control booth, the engineers were practically asphyxiated. These
conditions prevailed for all subsequent recordings through 1965.
But the principal undertaking of the summer was the recording on the clav-
ichord of Book I of the Well-Tempered Clavier. I attached much importance to
the making of a double recording of both books of the WTC, complete on each
instrument. Quite against my wishes and ultimately, I think, to the detriment
both of the purpose and of the propagation of this double recording, the two
sets were issued under separate labels at widely spaced intervals of time.
While favorable to the harpsichord, the Paris studio was much too large
for the clavichord, and a smaller area of resonance had to be devised. With
upturned orchestra platforms and tipped-over acoustical screens, the whole
held together at the corners by the legs of uptilted chairs, we produced some-
thing that had just enough space inside for me, the clavichord, and the micro-
phones. A small opening was left through which I could travel in and out. The
whole construction looked like something one saw on the New Jersey fl ats dur-
ing the Depression. This vision was so astonishing that for years afterward our
chief engineer carried a snapshot of it in his wallet.
After much experimentation and listening to playbacks, the fi nal balance
and placing of microphones had been achieved. All of Europe was affl icted
with a heat wave that summer, and the skylights of the studio permitted the sun
at different times of day to cause an enormous variation in the temperature
and hence in the humidity of the studio. The constant fl uctuations between
morning, noon, and afternoon temperatures obliged us to equally constant
rechecking and retuning. In order to insure complete control over the quality
of the clavichord sound, I have always felt it necessary to do the tuning myself.
Furthermore, the WTC imposes at all times the maintenance of a rigorously
equal temperament of all the twenty-four major and minor keys. It goes with-
out saying that the better-tempered I kept the clavichord, the more ill-tem-
pered I myself became. Only long prior discipline and what must be a certain
native fortitude can have kept me from exploding every fi ve minutes.
But this was not all. On sunny days, by the middle of the morning, the exces-
sive heat caused the roof beams of the studio to crack as they dried out, making
a sound that might have passed unnoticed at an ordinary recording level. But
in order to survive the processes that convert the initial recording to a disc, the
clavichord must be recorded at a level at least six times higher than that neces-
sary for the harpsichord. Thus, every crack of a studio beam when recorded
assumed the proportions of a thunderclap or cannon shot. We could not use
the studio at night, so we spent the summer trying to avoid the hotter part of
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rick simeone
(Rick Simeone)
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