#18: Judgement and recording
Section 1: Josef Suk – Meditation on an Old Czech Hymn ‘St Wenceslas’ Op.35a
This report is necessarily entangled with the multi-layered and intangible matter of judgement. The recording process plays a significant role in this, for there are inevitably differences between a musician’s perception of their own playing, and their response upon hearing the same take played back. This tension, which has often been reported in modern musicians’ experiences of recording sessions, is made still more complex by introducing historical recordings – not least because those sources are not neutral in this respect either (Blier-Carruthers 2020). The boundaries of judgement, then, are intrinsically blurry. Listening and comparing during the sessions provided a useful barometer for our investigation, and we generally found that we needed to go much further than we might have expected, expressively, in order to get closer to the Czech Quartet’s manner. This applied to rhythm most of all: in the moment of performance, our embrace of unevenness often felt vast, extensive, and destabilising, but in listening back it often came across as diluted and inconsequential. This had ramifications for other aspects of the research process.
Blier-Carruthers, Amy. 2020. 'The Problem of Perfection in Classical Recording: The Performer’s Perspective', The Musical Quarterly, 103.1-2: 184-236 <https://doi.org/10.1093/musqtl/gdaa008>
