The Wall Street Journal‘s Eric Felten, who normally writes a column on liquors and cocktails, has a wonderful commentary in the Weekend section (if you happen to subscribe) on the use of recordings by star musicians in concert. Using two recent examples — Jennifer Hudson lip-synching the national anthem at the Super Bowl, and Itzhak Perlman, Yo-Yo Ma, & Co. going through the motions at Obama’s inauguration — Felten laments the creeping ideal of perfection in performance. Turns out Felten is a jazz singer and trombonist, and since I too have a musical background, I couldn’t agree more with his argument that synthetic perfection “is at odds with a human conception of artistic beauty.”
“Where,” Felten asks, “does this expectation of flawlessness come from?” His answer includes the dread of immortality on YouTube but doesn’t include my own first thought, which is simply that years of listening around the clock to recorded music has un-accustomed people — especially those who don’t attend a lot of concerts — to hearing sour notes. Apparently Jennifer Hudson’s producer told the AP, “I would never recommend any artist go live because the slightest glitch would devastate the performance.” The slightest glitch, devastate? This remark reminds me of the commentary at Olympic figure-skating events, where we are asked to focus not on achievement but on the constant threat of implosion.
Faking any concert is an insult to the art of performance, but it seems particularly egregious for classical artists because by definition they had to earn their place on the stage with years of intensive training. Describing Yo-Yo Ma’s interview with NPR, Felten writes,
The most disheartening thing about the Inauguration Day quartet’s nonperformance was the lengths to which they went to make sure that nothing they did on the platform could be heard. Cellist Yo-Yo Ma put soap on the hair of his bow so that it would slip across the strings without creating even a wisp of sound. The inner workings of the piano were disassembled.
This is pretty shocking, answering as it does the question raised by the Times article (the Times said the group “matched” the recording “tone for tone,” but clearly that was not true — how could they have done so without anyone hearing them?). Felten wishes the quartet had taken the risk and played their piece, frozen strings be damned. I think they deserve some leeway for trying to avoid snafus that in this case were readily foreseeable; but that leaves us with the question of why a string-based quartet was engaged to play outdoors in winter in the first place. (The Marine Band did fine, because huffing and puffing on wind and brass instruments keeps them reasonably warm.) Much as I enjoyed John Williams’ composition, I’m inclined to think the inauguration committee should have foregone the stringed superstars and engaged, say, singer Dawn Upshaw instead.
