Timekeepers Page 7

  When a revised version of Rudolf Kolisch’s talk was published in the Musical Quarterly fifty years later, it included Beethoven’s earliest written reference to Mälzel’s metronome. He called it ‘a welcome means of assuring that the performance of my compositions everywhere will be in the tempi that I conceived, which to my regret have so often been misunderstood.’7 We shouldn’t forget that Beethoven had a maniacally high opinion of himself; he once derailed one critic of his work with the suggestion, ‘Even my shit is better than anything you could create.’ (And of course his opinions changed over time. Before he championed the metronome, the value he attached to the tempo of his compositions appeared much looser: on one occasion he suggested that his markings should apply only to the first few bars; on another he wrote, ‘Either they are good musicians and ought to know how to play my music, or they are bad musicians and in that case my indications would be of no avail.’)

  Perhaps only the most challenging and gifted of composers deserve to be reinterpreted anew at each performance; perhaps only a masterpiece can withstand this new scrutiny on a regular basis. Or perhaps even the most exacting of a composer’s musical timings should provide only the loosest guidelines: to provide, as the aesthetics professor Thomas Y. Levin has suggested, a frame within which music may simply live. Because everything else, ‘its breathing, its phrasing, the endlessly complex and subtle structuring of time within this constitutive constraint remains, as always, the responsibility of the performer’.8

  But does the responsibility of the performer vary with the generations? Our innate measurement of time today may be quite different from two centuries before. The Swiss-born American conductor Leon Botstein confronted these issues in 1993 when he was in a great hurry to catch a train. ‘I was driving a car on a back-country road and found myself behind a black semi-covered carriage pulled by two horses,’ he wrote in the Musical Quarterly a few months later. ‘What struck me was that the horses seemed to be going really quite fast. This was not a Central Park tourist drive. Yet as I tailgated the contraption I became painfully aware how intolerably slow it moved.’

  Botstein grew agitated, and began to wonder how long it would take him to reach his destination if this was the top speed of all forms of travel – which once, of course, it was. ‘By the time I could pass it, my anger turned to free association. Was it at all significant that Beethoven probably never experienced motion any faster than the velocity of this carriage – that his expectations with respect to time, duration, and the relative possibilities of how events and spaces might be related to one another in time might be radically different from our own?’

  Beethoven’s metronome marks, which appeared to Botstein much too fast, are countered by many works that appear too slow. Schumann’s markings for Manfred appear sluggish; Mendelssohn’s marks in parts of St Paul painfully so; Dvořák’s final movement of the Sixth Symphony also has markings that appear to the musician to be quite out of keeping with the energy of the music. It begs yet another unanswerable question: should the musical time allotted to a work at a particular period in history necessarily feel correct in a modern, faster life many decades later? Will innovation always date? The world spins and the impact of an artistic revolution turns from shock to analysis. Cubism is a movement not a controversy; the Rolling Stones are not a scary parental proposition.

  And there is, of course, more to an interpretation of a masterpiece than mere timings on a manuscript or CD insert. There is intent. When Wilhelm Furtwängler famously chased down the final movement of the Ninth Symphony at the Bayreuth Festival in 1951, he was following more than a metronome. He was following the Second World War. Contemporary accounts suggest that sometimes he appeared not even to be paying heed to the notes, let alone the tempo, with his direction carrying enough indignation to burn through the score. Passion is an overused word these days, but Furtwängler’s audience and his orchestra may have been reminded of the passion of Beethoven himself, flailing at the premiere, furious at the noise in his head.

  There is yet another realm of exploration: the notion that there was, in Vienna in 1824, very little acceptance of what the concepts of speed and quickening time might yet entail. Viennese society was not yet a modern one, and conducted itself much as it did two or three centuries before. Clocks were not always accurate timepieces, time ran liberally fast and slow, and there was little need for greater accuracy and synchronisation. The railways and the telegraph had not yet transformed the city. Throw a precise and unforgiving metronome into this mix and you had an explosion big enough to deafen the world.

  Perhaps it is inevitable with Beethoven that the story always returns to deafness. Stanley Dodds, a second violin with the Berlin Philharmonic, has wondered whether it isn’t freedom itself that underlies the key mysteries of Beethoven’s Ninth: ‘I ask myself sometimes if when you become completely deaf and music exists only in its imaginary form in your head, it of course loses a certain physical quality. The mind is completely free, and this would explain and helps maybe to understand where this enormous creativity, this freedom in his compositional creativity, came from.’ Dodds was interviewed for a digital tablet app that forensically contrasts performances of the Ninth by Ferenc Fricsay from 1958, Herbert von Karajan from 1962, Leonard Bernstein from 1979 and John Eliot Gardiner from 1992.9 He also finds Beethoven’s metronome values to be ‘rather ridiculous’ and much too quick. The recordings that attempt to honour those values ‘sound a little bit like music notation programmes which just play it off as a machine would play it off’, and humans require something else.

  Music itself, when executed in its physical form, has a little bit of weight. That weight could be defined as the weight of a bow, which needs to moved up and down and turned at every bow change, or even just the few grams of the lips which need to vibrate to cause the brass instrument to sound, or the timpani skin which needs to oscillate. A double bass sound, for example, seems to take longer to travel.

  The sum of all these slight practical delays might mean that Beethoven’s notations are not actually physically realisable. ‘But because Beethoven was imagining it in his mind, in your mind you are completely free. I know from my own experience that I can think about music in a way that is much faster than actually when I am playing the music.’

  Beethoven died three years after his Ninth Symphony first brought the house down in Vienna.10 The city came to a standstill for his funeral; the clocks stopped in his honour. His final months were spent revising earlier works specifically to add marks for the metronome, for he could think of nothing more important to fortify the future performances of his work. We know things didn’t work out that way. But there is one further peculiar twist to the story, and it didn’t happen for another 150 years.

  ii) Just How Long Should a CD Be?

  On 27 August 1979, the chief executives and leading engineers of Philips and Sony sat around a table in Eindhoven with the simple intent to alter the way we listen to music. Decades before the term was invented, they planned disruptive technology on a grand scale. The grooved vinyl LP had hardly changed in 30 years, and was blighted by dirt, dust, scratches and warping, and a truly tedious limitation: how could you lose yourself in even the shortest symphony if halfway through you had to lift the needle, remove the fluff, flip the disc and start anew? (The LP was, of course, also beautiful, tactile, warm of sound and transformative, but progress is progress.)

  And so the compact disc was born, or at least conceived. The idea was to combine the neat modern ease of the compact cassette with the aural durability and random access of the videodisc, and in so doing persuade music lovers to become gadget lovers.11 The CD was to be a smaller object, a digital recording read optically by a laser, and what it lacked in aural warmth it made up for in dynamism, accuracy, random access and a wipe-clean surface. (It was also a cool new thing, and although few who handed over their money for Dire Straits’ Brothers in Arms could have anticipated it, the CD was also the public on-ramp to the nascent digita
l universe.)

  There was one problem to overcome before this could happen: the format. Stung by the video wars between Betamax and VHS, during which two competing technologies slugged it out for the consumer to the detriment of all, Philips and Sony now agreed to work together on an unprecedented scale.12 Both had developed a similar technology and announced it to the world in March 1979, but they differed on the specs; consumers would again face an incompatible choice of players. They needed a united front, particularly if they were to convince music lovers to buy the same music they already owned.

  But precisely how compact should the disc be? And how much digital information should it contain?

  The meetings between chief executives and engineers took place over several days in Eindhoven and Tokyo, and resulted in the industry standard manual known as the Red Book. Summarising the agreement years later in IEEE Communications, the journal of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, a long-standing member of the Philips audio team named Hans B. Peek took great pride in contributing to a product that nudged the culture. Peek suggested that the LP was simply out of time: in an age of miniaturisation it just stood there, the records stout in the stacks and the player bulky on the sideboard. Peek wrote of the tiny ‘pits and lands’ of the CD grooves and how the pitfalls of the digital registration of audio signals were mastered. Unlike the LP, a CD would be read from the inside to the outside edge. Skipping, clicking, dropouts – all the errors of optical reading that could be caused by such a simple thing as fingerprints on the disc – had to be overcome, and an agreement had to be reached on information density. Prior to Sony’s involvement, the diameter of the disc was agreed at 11.5cm, the same as the diagonal length of a cassette. The initial playing time was set at one hour, a nice round figure and a considerable improvement on the LP.

  In February 1979, prototypes of a CD player and discs were played to audio experts at PolyGram, the newly formed record company founded by Philips and Siemens (a synergy that provided access to the entire catalogue of Deutsche Grammophon). The PolyGram people loved it: crucially, when several samples of music were played, they could detect no difference between the playback of a CD and the playback of the original master tapes. Journalists got to hear a CD for the first time a month later; again, the sound astonished: on one of the earliest recordings, a complete collection of Chopin waltzes, one could hear the pianist’s assistant turn the pages. The media also liked what they didn’t hear – there was no sound at all as they paused music in the middle of a track: the precision pause button, the suspension and elongation of musical time, was itself revolutionary. The CD also offered something else: a whole new consciousness of musical time. It’s a thrill, really – seeing the first seconds of the track appear on a digital read-out in green or red, with the ability not only to pause, but also to repeat and scan back. The operator was in charge of time in a novel way, everyone a DJ with precise control, Abbey Road in everyone’s road.

  Philips then went to Japan to talk manufacturing partnerships. Representatives spoke to JVC, Pioneer, Hitachi and Matsushita, but only Sony signed a deal. Norio Ohga, Sony’s vice-chairman, arrived in Eindhoven in August 1979 to begin hammering out the details of what would become the industry standard, and it wasn’t until further meetings had concluded in Tokyo in June 1980 that an agreement was reached and final patent applications were filed. By then, the original formats proposed by Philips had changed. According to J.P. Sinjou, who led a team of 35 at the Philips CD lab, the 11.5cm disc was changed to 12cm on the personal wish of Norio Ohga. The extra width would allow Ohga, who was a trained baritone and passionate classical music lover, to extend the duration of the disc by a crucial amount. ‘Using a 12cm disc,’ Hans B. Peek wrote, ‘a particular performance of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, a favourite of N. Ohga with a length of 74 minutes, could be recorded.’ Other issues were met with even neater solutions: ‘J. Sinjou put a Dutch coin, a dime, on the table. All agreed that this was a fine size for the hole [in the middle of the disc]. Compared with other lengthy discussions, this was a piece of cake.’13

  Could it be that its initial length was really inspired by a lengthy recording – Furtwängler’s interpretation at Bayreuth in 1951 – of Beethoven’s Ninth? Wouldn’t that be wonderful? The story is quoted only as an ‘anecdote’ by an engineer, and doubts have crept in. Another version suggests the Beethoven fan was not Mr Ohga, but his wife. It may be that the Beethoven story was concocted in retrospect, an inspired marketing wheeze. And there was one further twist: Furtwängler’s 74-minute performance could technically be accommodated on a single CD, but it couldn’t be played; the earliest CD players could only handle 72 minutes. It was a fate the conductor was to share with Jimi Hendrix’s Electric Ladyland: today both masterpieces fit on a single disc, but initially they were split between two.

  But who buys CDs these days? Who but the purist has time to visit a record shop and buy a physical product when a song may be downloaded in three seconds? In an age of SoundCloud and Spotify, who has time to even listen to an entire uncompressed album as it was conceived by the artist? The format no longer restricts the art form; but once, as we shall see from the records kept by the cashier at Abbey Road, the format used to be very strict indeed.

  iii) Revolver

  A little hush now please: the Beatles are about to record their first LP. It is early in the morning on Monday, 11 February 1963, and Studio 2 at Abbey Road is booked for three sessions: 10 a.m.–1 p.m., 2.30–5.30 p.m. and 6.30–9.30 p.m. The timings comply with standard Musicians’ Union rules. A session may last no more than three hours, from which no more than 20 minutes of recorded material may be used. Each artiste will be paid the same amount per session – 7 pounds and 10 shillings – and you have to sign your chit at the end of the day to get your Musicians Union Fees from Mr Mitchell, the Abbey Road cashier. When they first register for payment, the band are an unfamiliar presence: John Lennon gives his details as J.W. Lewnow of 251 Mew Love Ave; the role of bass guitarist is credited to George Harrison.

  The fact that the Beatles are there at all that day is unusual. When the studio was booked, the group had released only one single; when Parlophone’s label chief George Martin broke the news that the band were going to make a long-player, it was a remarkable announcement. Pop music was restricted to singles. The biggest-selling LPs in Britain over the previous two years were not by Cliff Richard or Adam Faith, or even Elvis Presley: they were by the George Mitchell Minstrels with songs from The Black And White Minstrel Show.

  The morning session began with the Beatles recording an original song called ‘There’s a Place’, inspired by ‘Somewhere’ from West Side Story.14 There were seven full takes, and three false starts, with the last take, lasting 1.50, being credited on the studio recording sheet as ‘best’. Then it was straight into a song listed as ‘17’. There were nine takes in all, including false starts, and after playback it was decided that the first take had been the best, and within a few days the title had changed to ‘I Saw Her Standing There’ and it was decided that the song should open the album, just as it opened many of their live shows. But George Martin sensed there was something missing – a certain dynamism that the Beatles displayed when he had recently seen them play live at Liverpool’s Cavern Club. So at the very beginning of take one he spliced in the four words that Paul McCartney had used at the start of take nine: ‘One-two-three-FOUR!’ And then it was time for lunch.

  So much happened in 1948 – the establishment of the state of Israel, the Berlin airlift, the birth of the NHS and the Marshall Plan – that the launch of a 12-inch record that spun at 331 3 revolutions per minute seems like a minor thing in comparison. But the impact of the LP was astounding. The possibilities of 22 minutes per side, rather than 4 or 6 on the older 10-inch or 12-inch 78 rpm records, changed the way composers and musicians thought about music and wrote it. It changed the way a generation obtained much of their pleasure and enlightenment, and it’s not for nothing that Philip Larki
n dates the start of sexual intercourse around the time of the Beatles’ first LP.

  It would be simplistic to claim that the standard lengths of musical performances have been determined largely by the technical constraints of recording them. But before the wax recording cylinder and the gramophone there was certainly far less need for structure. Songlines on the African plains rang continuously through the centuries; in medieval courts, entertainment lasted for as long as it pleased the throne, or until the money ran out. In more recent times, performance merely tested human patience: how much could we concentrate, and how long would we behave ourselves? A concert would often end when the candles ran down. It was the same with ancient theatre: how long would an audience sit in an unheated space without demanding the Roman equivalent of a choc ice?

  But the recording of music – which effectively began in the 1870s – did change our capacity to hear it. The two-minute and then four-minute limit of the early Edison and Columbia wax cylinders concentrated the mind like a guillotine. Likewise the 10-inch shellac 78 rpm record lasted about three minutes; the 12-inch record (before the micro-grooved long-player) ran about four-and-a-half. The 7-inch 45 rpm vinyl single, introduced in 1949, varied little from this, perhaps three minutes, before the grooves wound so tightly that the sound would deteriorate and the needle would skip.15