Paradox in the Clash of Traditional Music and Consumer Expectations: Recording the Uilleann PipesEliot GrassoUniversity of Oregon
AbstractWhen creating a fixed document, the Irish traditional musician must deal with conflicting standards on two fronts: concert setting vs. studio setting and consumer ideals vs. traditional music community ideals. A studio setting lacks an audience dynamic and a dimension of spontaneity since the artist is aware that the document will exist indefinitely after publication. As a result, risk-taking, that is, inventive variation, might not be freely exercised. The player is less comfortable because he or she is in an unfamiliar setting.
The uilleann pipes are constructed in such a way that its three constituent parts—chanter, drones, and regulators—may be recorded separately from one another. The recording artist may opt to do this because the instrument’s temperamental nature is exacerbated by studio dryness and poor or unnatural acoustics which present to the piper an inhospitable recording environment. To offset the mal-effects of the studio and ultimately prevent the excess cost of production from being forwarded to the consumer, the piper may engage studio methods to compile a final document in which these three parts are captured separately, a method differing from live performance. Likewise, separately recording these parts allows for variations to be interpolated ex post-facto since there is no drone and regulator sound spill-over into the chanter microphone.
1 IntroductionAt the start of 2008, I had the fortune to observe a lecture on the earliest recordings of Liszt’s music delivered by the renowned Liszt scholar, Professor Alan Walker. After playing several superlative early-twentieth-century recordings of Liszt’s piano étude based on Paganini’s La Campanella, Professor Walker proceeded to bemoan what he dubbed the current “sins of the recording industry.” By recording industry sins, Professor Walker was referring specifically to the tendency of modern pianists to frequently edit in missed or misfired high D-sharps throughout this monstrously difficult étude. His point was that by committing this deceptive act of editing, the pianist misrepresented his technical abilities to the record-buying public while concurrently defeating the whole notion of the étude. While Professor Walker reprimanded recording artists for this egregious act, I pondered why he had taken the time to compile and then read to us a paper free of typos and grammatical errors rather than a rough draft. I wondered what had prompted him to make countless revisions of his benchmark Liszt biography instead of publishing intermediaries potentially containing incorrect data, poor punctuation, and awkward syntax.
What made it acceptable for him to edit his writings while it remained unacceptable in his mind for someone to edit a recording? It then occurred to me that there are often double standards for an artist or author creating an artistic document whether its medium be print or sound. Such standards can often clash with one another thus affecting for the artist a psychological dilemma when considering which set of standards he or she ought to embrace.
In this paper, I will address the apparent binary opposition of a particular set of standards besetting the recording artist when faced with the practical task of recording Irish traditional music on the uilleann pipes. From the Irish traditional community comes one set of standards calling not for pretenses of technicality, but for integrity of representation that is linked to the grit of human imperfection executed in casual performance. In other words, pristine tone, ornamentation, and intonation are not necessarily enough to garner community-wide support and respect for a new recording of uilleann piping. There are many contributing factors of this nature that I will discuss further in this essay. I have come to know these standards by having been immersed in such communities from age seven. While learning to play the uilleann pipes, I have noticed that it is live and not commercial recordings that are sought after should one be in pursuit of authentic models.
Standards that run contrary to those embraced by the Irish traditional community are those of the record consumers. Such patrons, the majority of whom are not practitioners, are not necessarily focused on the processes of recording music and refining execution. I do not mean this pejoratively; they are focused rather on the finished product, the disc—and rightly so! That is where their dollar is going. It is because the consumer base—extending beyond the traditional community and thus maintaining different standards—that the artist may be faced with the dilemma of which set of standards to uphold and in what proportion. Since producing a recording is rarely free of cost, the recording artist must carefully consider how to present his or her music with the integrity expected by the traditional music community while at the same time keeping in mind the expectations of the record-consuming public at large given a finite production budget.
2 The Character of an Irish Traditional Music CommunityI now turn my discussion to the ideals and character of the Irish traditional music community to illustrate the binary opposition between these community ideals and those of the record consumer. Making a recording in Irish music can be in many ways like planning a wedding, particularly when dealing with the issue of personnel. A new recording was released in 2008 by the virtuoso Irish accordion player and All-Ireland champion, Billy McComiskey. After I had listened to the album, I spent some time on the phone with him listening as he cogitated over personnel selection finally stating emphatically, “I didn’t want to make a recording for my mother.” McComiskey was not alluding to matriarchal discord; he was simply implying that there was a larger audience, an extra-familial and extra-community audience, to whom he had to cater. There were musicians who, through community obligation, he had initially felt that he should have included on the album, but not ones he particularly needed on the album. His ultimate decision to choose particular players over others is understandable; too many different kinds of musicians thrown together can compromise the consistency of a recording’s style, sound, and quality.
I relay this encounter to make the point that the status of a musician in the Irish tradition is linked not to technique, but to seniority, a position of status cultivated through chronology and interpersonal relationships. While many senior players do exhibit technical proficiency of virtuosic caliber, it is not this alone that necessarily secures respect for a musician in the traditional community. An aspiring instrumentalist must simply experience—just as McComiskey surely did in his youth—the gradual process of watching, listening, and paying his or her dues. Standards (that is, value and status) in a traditional community are assessed through seniority, longevity, and personal character in conjunction with playing ability.
The Irish traditional music community is relatively small and closely knit, so a recording project can be unifying or fracturing for the community in the sense that some musicians may take offense if they are excluded from a project in which they have hastily assumed inclusion. Senior musicians acknowledge the importance of inclusion in a community setting; however, this can translate to inclusion in the recording studio, sometimes at the expense of the quality of the finished product. To the Irish traditional music community, it is the process of repertoire and personnel selection that is of tantamount importance to the finished album. The traditional community is concerned equally with the means and the end and at times, the means may override the end. Such ideals run contrary to the record consumer’s standards which are necessarily concerned more with the quality of the finished product than with the process of its making.
3 Codification and the Sound DocumentA commercial recording—once pressed—is an immutable document much like a published book. By its completion, publication, and replication a recording embodies an authenticity unto itself; its creator relinquishes control of the creation by virtue of the fact that is now a cast, forged, and solidified expression of that individual artist. While during performance the performer perpetrates an act of will by manipulating his or her instrument or voice in real time, the recording preserves this performance. Since the sound produced from said recording represents a silhouette of the performer’s act, the recording itself is no longer an act of will but a representation of will. This solidification idealistically contradicts the nature of the music of an oral tradition because codifying music in this way violates the characteristic flexibility embodied in traditional music and creates a hierarchy of authority. This kind of hierarchy, in which the unchanging document is regarded as the ultimate point of reference for correctness of style and repertoire, is at odds with that unique to the traditional music community, a hierarchy in which acceptance of technical proficiency is predicated on personality and relationships. It is the recording artists who, by tapping into the constructed authority of the unchanging document, may, in the eyes of traditional musicians, garner credibility undeservedly from outside the community by attempting to capitalize on technique divorced of seniority.
Although music—unlike tangible arts using physical media—exists only while sounding, a recording is still very much a document constructed through the compiling and editing of ideas, unless of course the recording is marketed as a live or unedited performance. The term “live recording” is somewhat oxymoronic because if you are not present to experience the actual performance, there is no real way to duplicate that experience by putting a compact disc into a stereo system. Simply put, the artist or artists you are listening to are either playing before you or they are not.
Recording in a studio is not the same as giving a performance because there is no audience and thus no excitement or interplay that an audience would facilitate. Because the settings and formats differ, recordings and performances cannot be assessed by the same ideals and standards. The recording technician is in a different position from the audience because he has not arrived on site with the sole purpose of hearing a performance. He has arrived to facilitate the crystallization of a set of ideas. Likewise, the performer’s state of mind is not the same in a studio recording situation as it would be in a performance situation because the performer is aware that the finished product will be heard repetitively and indefinitely by an unpredictably large and diverse audience.
For example, regardless of whether anyone records a presentation at a conference for future reference, you can truly experience it only once. While you may leave the conference to consider, disagree with, or debate the points made, you will have to do so from memory and written notes. It is because of the philosophical discrepancy between recording as process and the act of performance that Glenn Gould despised public performance: the artist had but one opportunity to relay but one set of ideas (Angilette 1992. p.19). After hearing a paper, your memory will be incomplete and in several days or even hours, you may be left only with a vague impression of the entire experience with perhaps a few details lingering. However, if you have an audio recording of the presentation, you will be able to play back every stutter, mispronunciation, and elision as often as you wish. You will be able to dissect a representative sample of the speaker.
As an extension of the integrity espoused by the traditional music community, I am convinced that there is no grosser negligence toward the record consumer than to release recordings unedited that contain obvious or hidden errors and/or fail to represent honestly the wealth of creativity that the recording artist has to offer. While I cannot speak to the expectations of the entire record-consuming public, I can say assuredly that when I acquire a new album, I am hoping for two things: 1) that it will be free of technical errors and 2) that it will offer some kind of unique and considered approach to the repertoire played. As I surrender my capital to the clerk across the counter, I do so with the hope that I will be receiving in exchange a profoundly moving experience.
4 Specific Relevance to the Uilleann PipesI will now address the second half of this paper: recording the uilleann pipes. Glenn Gould, although not an uilleann piper, was drawn to recording specifically because it was through this medium that the artist could adjust interpretation at will and thus “generate new artistic ideas or simply overcome the limitations posed by the instrument or acoustics” (Angilette 1992. p.19). To truly understand and commiserate with the latter half of Gould’s philosophy is to try to maintain a set of uilleann pipes. This instrument poses many challenges with respect to morphology, but one benefit remains: the instrument is built of three distinct parts capable of operating independently of one other. These parts are the chanter, which plays the melody, the drones, which sustain three octaves of pedal point of the same pitch class as the chanter’s bottom note, and the regulators, rows of keyed pipes played with the heel of the right wrist set up to play sustained or rhythmic tertian harmonic accompaniment with the tune on the chanter.
The entire setup is powered by dry air taken in through the bellows and forced via bag pressure over the six reeds of the instrument. Because the reeds are dry blown, the chanter is capable of two chromatic octaves. Despite the benefits of being the most dynamic bagpipe to have ever come out of Western Europe, the trade-off for such capabilities is that the instrument is vulnerable to the slightest changes of temperature and humidity. Moving the instrument from a practice space to a recording studio, where humidity is generally low to preserve recording equipment, can severely disable the instrument’s tone, intonation, and overall pressure balance.
Pipers are not always lucky enough to have the luxury of selecting the location of their recording site, never mind the technician, room acoustics, or weather on the day of recording. The uilleann pipes are much dependent on the acoustics of a performance space. While virtually all instrumentalists and singers will claim the same necessity, it is ever so much more important for the pipes for two reasons: 1) the reeds have a minute resonating body and 2) the sound emanates multi-directionally from the instrument itself. While string instruments have the box to resonate, and the oboist has the interior of the head cavities to resonate, the uilleann pipes have neither such bodies for amplification nor capacity for resonance. Acoustically, it is like an organ without a church. The parts of the instruments are spatially disparate from one another with a distance of up to a meter between sounding parts. Therefore, improper resonance in a recording space can be catastrophic in a recording scenario, when, upon receiving limited feedback from the room in which one is playing, the piper increases bag pressure to achieve the desired resonance thus putting the entire set out of balance by overblowing the reeds.
It is for the reason of a less-than-ideal playing situation relative to both climate and acoustics that I advocate the separate recording of the chanter, drones, and regulators. Some purists of traditional music might well bring such a practice under scrutiny, however. They would accuse the piper of the same “sins” levied against the wayward pianists disdained by Professor Alan Walker. While piano and uilleann pipes could not be more different in terms of mechanics, the image of a rebuking personage is evident in both traditions. I am in no way advocating that the piper manipulate his instrument beyond what is capable through standard ergonomics nor am I suggesting that it is permissible for the piper to contrive a level of competence that cannot be demonstrated in a live performance, for this issue is at the root of Walker’s objection. I am merely suggesting that because the musician can never divorce an artistic rendering from its context, a unique instrument in a unique playing scenario may call for unique means of execution.
I would further counter the purist’s charge by reiterating that it is irresponsible to deliver an inferior product to the consumer. The party purchasing the recording has a right to a product both devoid of error and rich with interest. The buyer cares not whether the recording was made in one day or in one decade as long as the album meets these criteria. While the speed with which a recording is compiled might excite momentary interest, it ultimately carries the same relevance as the location of the studio or the age of the artist. Such details, as interesting as they may be, bear no necessary correlation to the quality of the finished product.
Glenn Gould, recognizing the compositional potential of a studio setup, sought to produce a carefully compiled, thoroughly scrutinized collection of variation takes rather than an unabridged recording of the Goldberg Variations because he thought that a constructive approach had more to offer than a standard, restrictive, concert-performance run-through and certainly more than “conventional musical ideas” (Angilette 1992. p.26). Likewise, the piper separately recording the chanter, drones, and regulators acknowledges what Gould realized. By recording in this fashion, melodic variations may be interpolated ex post-facto by virtue of having the instrument’s constituent parts independently recorded. Such variations, being the hallmark of masterful and inventive playing in Irish traditional music, add interest to the tunes played thus acknowledging and preserving the idea of flexibility in living tradition. If all chanter, drones, and regulators are recorded simultaneously, then adding variations becomes difficult and impractical because the constancy of six reeds (three double and three single) cannot always be retained session-to-session or even hour-to-hour. Moreover, a stroke of genius may not always be fully formed in a preliminary trial. Such an idea need not be discarded if it can be recovered and interpolated. Such variations occur in the moment and have about them an intriguing tinge of the unexpected; subsequently, over-practicing such variations for the sole purpose of recording can leave them sounding stale and contrived. I am not advocating partitioned recording practices so that the artist may proceed with the intent to add variations, but given the odd epiphany that strikes while listening back to a take, it is comforting to know that such options are available.
Seamus Ennis, an uilleann piper and music collector of the twentieth century who is survived by many commercial and private recordings, was dubbed a master during his lifetime, a reputation that has maintained for decades. However, examination of any number of tracks made prior to digital technology reveals squeaking reeds along the order of a false ‘E’ played on the fiddle. Such occurrences in no way discount this man’s mastery of the instrument, but given the opportunity and the proper editing equipment, who is to say that he would have left in the squeaks? It would be ludicrous to discount his expertise since the musicality and technical fluency remain either way. Such a change to the recording would merely render unto the listener a smoother ride between notes and serve to highlight Ennis’ creativity. Such squeaks do not really come to bear on the seasoned traditional musician because he is well aware of where the music is in the recording he is hearing. However, it is unrealistic to expect those outside the traditional music community to have the same degree of seasoned listening experience in this genre and embrace the same standards. The traditional musician prizes the fourth-generation tape of a live performance whereas the non-traditional consumer is likely looking for a shrink-wrapped recording that is acoustically and technically tidier.
Logistically, editing two seconds of music is far more efficient and cost-effective than re-recording an entire set of tunes. Performing quick, minor edits prevents such costs from being passed on to the patron. Furthermore, it is common practice to track other melody players and accompanists when recording Irish traditional music. There is even precedent for multi-instrumentalists to record themselves over other tracks they have prerecorded. In any event, when such edits are properly done, it is impossible to tell when this has occurred just as Gould’s test listeners could not tell where the variations had been spliced (Angilette 1992. p.21).
5 ConclusionAdmittedly, such issues are indeed specialized and may not be applicable to other scenarios involving other instruments in other genres. With two conflicting sets of standards embraced by the traditional music community and the record-consuming public, I underscore the confounding nature of the paradox created because it affects the very real practice of creating sonic documents. The former community is concerned equivalently with the means and the end while the latter is concerned more with the finished product and holds expectations that may be informed by an unpredictable number of other musical sources and styles. It is difficult to choose which set of standards to embrace and perhaps deciding takes a lifetime of musicianship. While a musician obviously cannot make everyone happy with a single artistic offering, it is still important to weigh such issues when making decisions that may at some point in the future be codified and out of our control.
I will state in conclusion that while the consumer should be considered when compiling an album of Irish traditional music, the availability of technology is neither license nor excuse for someone to misrepresent his or her technical abilities or artistic consistency. The temptation to abuse the process by contriving a fictitious self-sample should not be underestimated. Arnold Schoenberg once pointed out that some composers over-orchestrate a poor idea in order to pull the wool over the listener’s ears (Schoenberg 1984. p.240). Perhaps the apostle Paul said it best when he remarked in a letter to Corinth that “Everything is permissible, but not everything is beneficial. Everything is permissible, but not everything is constructive” (1 Corinthians 10:23 NIV). Just because we can record parts separately does not necessarily mean that we should, especially if the result is either an inferior product or a false representation of our technique. Community values may also be at stake if the recording artist attempts to procure status in a traditional idiom that has not been acquired by traditional means. Committing either may inadvertently create and perpetuate false standards thus disillusioning concert audiences and effecting a drop in attendance.
Thus, wisdom must be applied when dealing with conflicting standards so that the ultimate goal is not merely self-glorification, but an approach that is respectful of tradition while remaining committed to creating a consistent, honest, and captivating document.
6 AcknowledgmentsFor editorial counsel, fiduciary assistance, and creative impetus, I gratefully acknowledge Dr. Anne Dhu McLucas, Dr. Marc Vanscheeuwijck, the Graduate Office at the University of Oregon School of Music and Dance, and Na Píobairí Uilleann.
ReferencesAngilette, Elizabeth. Philosopher at the Keyboard: Glenn Gould.
Metuchen, NJ; London: The Scarecrow Press, Inc., 1992.
Hamm, Charles. “Technology and Music: The Effect of the
Phonograph,” In C. Hamm, B. Nettl, and R. Byrnside: Contemporary Music and Music Culture. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1975.
Schoenberg, Arnold. Style and Idea. Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1985.
DiscographyGrasso, Eliot. 2007. ‘Up Against the Flatirons’ Na Píobairí Uilleann
Grasso, Eliot. 2004. ‘Standing Room Only’ illen odyssey records
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