No Taste, No There

The Buddha once pointed out, with his outstanding gift for noticing the obvious that most of us miss, that if you throw paint into the air, not only does the paint fail to stick to the air, but the air doesn’t get its knickers into knots about thrown paint. The air doesn’t give a flying fig about flying paint. Or thrown food, or projectile vomit, or really anything. Stuff just passes through the air.

We’ll allow that the Buddha was speaking during pre-industrial times when nobody knew that stuff could indeed “stick” to the air—hydrocarbon pollutants, acid rain, etc. It’s an analogy. So we needn’t make like a bunch of prissy pantywaists all a-twitter with pettifogging objections. We all get the general drift of the analogy, and that’s all that matters.

I flashed on that handy saying of Gotama Siddhatta’s while reading an exceptionally tiresome review of a hi-fi product. All hi-fi reviews are tiresome. There’s only so much you can say about an amplifier or pre-amplifier or DAC or whatnot. Me think it sound pretty. Me think it sound not so pretty. Me like big round volume knob. Me like big round volume knob on other hi-fi product better; it bigger; it rounder.

This review ran the usual course of such blather. The recipe is simple enough; start with an innocuous lead paragraph, then sketch the history of the company in question, then toss in a bouquet garni of facts, figures, and specs. Then swan-dive into poetic fantasy, Dadism, and surrealism. A ripe, rich, and opulent soundstage emerging from utterly inky blackness convinced me that this was no ordinary AC power cable. Then indulge in faux-theological murkiness; air-this, defined-that, light-something-else. Tiresome, as I said.

Then the other shoe dropped. The reviewer made the colossal error of gushing over his test recording. It was the original Broadway cast album of Wicked. At that point I stopped reading, because nothing this person could say would convince me that he was anything other than hopelessly, irredeemably, and terminably tone-deaf. That’s because Wicked is utter drivel. Apparently he thought nothing of evaluating a $50K stereo system with puerile nincoompoopery masquerading as music. Apparently he likes the thing. Apparently he admires it.

Chacun a son goût and all that. But no amount of postmodernist relativism will convince me that chicken shit is chicken salad. I don’t care how well-recorded it is. I don’t care how utterly inky the background or how much air there is around the voices or how balanced the mid-treble or clear the mid-bass. It’s the original cast album of Wicked, for pete’s sake. It’s a sow’s ear, and there is no silk purse in sight, not for $50K, not for $100K, not for anything. It simply cannot be done.

Which leads me to the distinction between recorded music and the gizmos we use to play that recorded music. There’s something absolute about a recording, in that there’s hardly any there there in a recording. Think about it: right now I’m listening to Arturo Toscanini conduct the BBC Symphony in Beethoven’s Leonore Overture No. 1. Passionate, detailed, beautifully paced, strong performance. Jim-dandy orchestra, clear recording. And yet it was made in 1939—just a short time before London would be shivering under Nazi bombardments. Back then Toscanini had to consult with the engineers to figure out where to split an eight-minute piece to fit on two four-minute sides.

But I’m not listening to it on a two-sided 12” 78 rpm shellac, although there’s one in excellent condition sitting on eBay right now. Even that one isn’t an original; it’s an RCA Victor pressing, meaning that RCA licensed the recording from HMV, a fairly common state of affairs in the pre-War years. There are several other copies on eBay. One is an LP from Odeon, combined with Beethoven Symphony No. 4. Another is a 3-LP box set from Angel/Seraphim records. There are about five copies of an EMI LP of various overtures that includes the Toscanini/BBC Leonore No. 1. In short, there are a lot of copies on eBay.

I’m not listening to any of those. My copy came from a CD from EMI’s “Icon” boxed set of Toscanini’s complete EMI recordings. Yet I’m not listening to the CD. I ripped the CD to my computer, so I can play it from either my home office or my living room, just by selecting it in my computer-based player of choice. When you get right down to it, there’s no visible or palpable trace of a physical medium anywhere. Somehow the physical reality of the recording has vanished into the inscrutable vastness of a spinning hard drive, while its essence remains in a highly refined and nearly idealized state—remastered to extract the last drop of music in those old grooves, and now utterly impervious to wear or decay. Well, a hard drive crash could do it in—but I keep backups, so a bit-perfect doppelganger would take its place.

So I’ll be damned if I really know just where that recording is. Back in 1939 Toscanini and the BBC Symphony toiled through a long morning to create those sounds that have defied the passage of time. But now? Would the real Leonore No. 1/Toscanini/BBC Symphony 1939 stand up? But there’s nothing there to stand up, is there? Because it doesn’t exist in some concrete, once-and-for-all way.

I grow tiresome myself. My point is that no matter what the medium, no matter what the equipment, no matter what the year or the location or even the weather for that matter, Arturo Toscanini’s splendid recording of Beethoven’s Leonore Overture No. 1, with the BBC Symphony, remains an exemplar of gold-medal, class-A, can’t-do-it-any-better music making. The manifold strengths shine forth undimmed by time or errors in reproduction. The recording—whatever and wherever it is—transcends playback equipment.

I’ll agree that Wicked resides in that same discographic Bardo as Toscanini/Leonore. All recordings do. In that one aspect, all recordings are equal, but as George Orwell pointed out, some recordings are more equal than others. Toscanini/Leonore will be around in 2139 on whatever magical invisible medium has been developed by then. But Wicked? I have a sneaking suspicion it’s going to be dwelling in some very dark, musty, and mostly forgotten corner of the Bardo.

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