Age of the Patchwork

The beat began with the insistence of a trip-hammer--chunga-chunga-thump, chunga-chunga-thump. There stood Gary Lewis before the TV cameras, slapping his thighs giddap fashion as he Jet loose with a whine that reverberated-ated-ated like a struck gong Then the three Playboys chimed in with a shivering "Wa-wa-wa-wa-wa" Enter a rampaging electric organ, a cascade of tambourines, an explosion of drums ... But wait. Where was all this sound coming from? And Singer Lewis--his lips seemed out of focus.

They were. And so were the producers of last week's Emmy awards TV show for trying to pass off this performance as live music. In truth, Gary Lewis and the Playboys were pantomiming to a record. This is a convenient ruse known as "lip sync" (lip synchronization) and is used by virtually all rock 'n' rollers when they appear on TV. Records today are so beefed up by electronic gimmickry that most big-beat groups court disaster if they sing with their live voices unelectrified. Pity the poor Beatles. When they appeared on last week's Ed Sullivan Show, one of the very few programs that do not allow hp sync, their cry of Help! was just that--a shallow peeping lost in the din of their electric guitars.

Plastic Surgery. Lip sync is symptomatic of a profound change that has gripped the recording industry. With each new advance in technology, the sound of recorded music--revved up reverberated, splintered, stirred, spliced, multiplied, filtered, equalized--passes further into a kind of aural twilight zone. For every hour that a classical or pop artist spends recording music today, technicians devote an average of four hours to doctoring it. The result, though few listeners realize it, is that the age of machine music is already here, and for better or worse it is reshaping the world of music making.

What has totally revamped the industry is the advent of recording on a 1-in. ribbon of magnetized plastic film Perfected in 1947, tape recording stretches the music out on an operating table where, with the aid of a razor and splicing tape, small miracles of plastic surgery can be performed. Where once the artist recorded a work from beginning to end several times, then selected the version with the least mistakes, now he can do it piecemeal and at his leisure, confident that any wrong notes, known as "clams," will later be snipped out and replaced with the correct ones.

Splice of Life. To capture a symphony on vinyl today, the score is segmented and recorded over and over on some 45,000 ft. of tape. Then the best passages are shredded into as many as 250 snippets, shuffled into order and spliced into a single, note-perfect performance on 3,800 ft. of master tape.

The number of patches range from 16 splices for a 2-min. pop tune to 72 for a 13-min. piano piece.

So refined has the art of splicing become that the incisions are not detectable by the ear, and dubbed-in portions pass unnoticed. This has allowed Pop Artist Lesley Gore, for instance, to make a stab at singing in phonetic German on her overseas records, then have a linguist step in to add all the appropriate guttural accents. An even more remarkable splice of life occurred when Poetess Jean Garrigue, reciting her own works, misread a line. When the mistake was discovered, she was unavailable, so the missing words were painstakingly constructed by borrowing syllables from her tapes.

Reverberating Stairs. The grand designer of these montages is no longer the conductor but the producer, otherwise known as the A.&R. (for Artist and Repertory man). With a mountain of sophisticated machinery at his command, he has become a space-age sculptor of sound. His raw material is the performer, his workshop the glass-enclosed control room. There, hovering over a massive, winking, whirring "mixing console" like a man launching a space capsule, the A.&R. man issues cryptic commands to his engineer: "Goose the oboes" or "Stink" (a certain wah-wah effect from the brass) or "Nashville" (more presence) or "open the pot" (more volume). The engineer responds by busily twiddling and tweaking some of the machine's 150 knobs levers and buttons. Caught up in the swirl of the music, some producers conduct their engineers with all the flourish of a Leonard Bernstein.

Most producers "isolate" a composition into its several parts to allow greater flexibility in playing with the sound. Singers are stationed behind screens; sections of the orchestra are scattered about the studio in a forest of microphones, each of which can be manipulated for volume and tone as they feed into the console. The console in turn channels the music onto as many as eight tracks on the tape, thus permitting the producer to "equalize," i.e., exaggerate, soften or otherwise tinker with, various parts of the music without disturbing the rest.

The arsenal of sound at the producer's command is awesome. By pushing one button, he can send the sound ricocheting through an enclosure often a wooden box with a bedspring-like affair inside, that lends the echo-chamber effect. For years the echo chamber at Columbia Records was a stairwell. "Sometimes we distort sounds to confuse people," says A.&R. Man Bob Crewe. "I like nothing better than to have someone ask, 'What is that?' " It could be anything from a chain dragged across a washboard to a Grand Canyon echo effect achieved by recording in an elevator shaft. Says one recording-company executive: "In the pop field, 70% of a record is the creation of the A.&R. man."

Garden to Boudoir. Another favored technique of the knob jockeys is "over-dubbing"--recording two or more layers of sound on the tape. Thus Jascha Heifetz can accompany himself in Bach's Concerto in D Minor for Two Violins, Patti Page performs as a one-girl quartet, and Les Paul and Mary Ford can come on like the Mormon Tabernacle Choir in ragtime. A standard practice of rock 'n' rollers is to overdub their songs again and again to end body to their voices.

If a principal in a musical or an opera s not up to singing on recording day o matter. He can dub in his part later even though the person he sings a duet with is not present, as happened in a portion of Tenor Franco Corelli's contribution to Cavalleria Rusticana. So as not to unduly tax the singers, recordings of operas are taped in jumbled sequence and stretched out over several weeks. To lend an air of realism to stereo exits and entrances are simulated by having the singers move like chess pieces across a huge checkered floor plan under a bower of strategically placed microphones. To pursue his paramour from garden to boudoir say the lovesick tenor is directed to walk from square 7 to square 52. Other effects, such as the clunk of Scarpia's fallen body or the hum of spinning wheels in the Flying Dutchman, are dubbed in later.

Tenor Transformed. The variations introduced by tape are endless--and not always ethical. A few years ago, when the late Kirsten Flagstad was unable to hit two high Cs during a Tristan und Isolde recording date, Elisabeth Schwarzkopf was called in and did it tor her. One producer, saddled with a Metropolitan Opera coloratura who was unable to reach an E flat, manufactured his own by excerpting her D and playing it at a slightly increased speed.

Such transgressions have raised questions as to where art leaves off and artifice takes over. London Records Producer John Culshaw contends that one complements the other. For a special vocal effect in the first act of Goetterdammerung, he unabashedly transformed Tenor Wolfgang Windgassen into a baritone by playing his voice at a slower speed. Explains Culshaw: "Had Wagner lived to know the possibilities of sound recording, I am sure that he would have wanted them used not only for the sake of music, but also for the drama."

Concerts Passe. So overpowering has been the effect of patchwork recordings that they--and not the performance itself--have become accepted as the norm. As a result, some pop singers faced with a live performance feel compelled to wire their microphones through a tape recorder backstage that supplements their voices with an almost instantaneous echo-type playback called tape reverb." The Ray Conniff Singers and Orchestra are a case in point Aware that an unenhanced live performance would be a "letdown" for his record-buying followers, Conniff first experimented with bouncing his music through the tiled men's room of the Santa Monica Civic Auditorium, finally resorted to traveling with a 40-ft van crammed with two tons of electronic gear. Only when the music was routed through a dozen microphones, a mixing console in the audience, an echo chamber, amplifiers and five speakers did the audience respond. "The simple fact" says Conniff, "is that people today get a lot better sound on records than they do in live concerts."

Though the purists cry "Heresy" many people agree. They argue that the human ear, adaptable instrument that it is, after repeated hearings of a note-perfect performance of Tchaikovsky's Fifth Symphony in all the glory of living stereo," will never again be satisfied with a fallible human performance. Pianist Glenn Gould has not played a concert in a year and a half because "that way of presenting music is passe. If there is a more viable way to reach audiences, it has to be through recordings. Concerts as they are now known will not outlive the 20th century."

See & Hear. Some performers, like Van Cliburn and Maria Callas, have resisted the "dehumanization" of tape splicing, prefer to leave in the clinkers to preserve the spontaneous thrust of a live performance. Says one violinist-Name me the recording that can give you the electricity, the magnetic quality that you get from a great live performance. It's like hearing Laurence Olivier instead of actually seeing him play Hamlet." But soon, with new video-audio tapes now under development the home audience will see Olivier as well as hear him.

So the controversy rages. Perhaps the late Artur Rodzinski said it all during a recording session with Pianist Paul Badura-Skoda. Listening to a patched-up playback of one of their tapes Badura-Skoda exclaimed: "Listen! Isn't that magnificent?" "Yes," replied the maestro dryly, "don't you wish you could play that way?"

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