What is meant by the "inflection" of a phrase
Posted by: mikeeschman on 15 February 2009
When you are engaged in a conversation with someone, a lot of her meaning is in the way she says things. Things that are difficult to see in the printed word. That part of the conversation is where the love might live - or something more sinister.
An orchestral performance is always, at least in part, a conversation. Who ever assembled 90+ pieces on stage for an audience of 1500, without some intention of mutual communication?
In the orchestra, one of the most basic of conversations is the conversation between the instrumental groups. Each group has a characteristic inflection. That inflection is a blending of accent and intent. It conveys a mood and a feeling, an undercurrent of meaning to the notes being played. When you hear this, everything changes. It's like walking towards a corner, with a conversation occurring just around the corner.
Suddenly you turn the corner, and you can make out what is being said. They turn to greet you :-)
To me, that is one of the great joys of attending a live concert. You never know when that sort of thing might happen. It's not every time ...
Recording sometimes captures this. For instance DGG 4D recordings are particularly apt to preserve this quality, no doubt at the expense of a number of other qualities.
Still, it's something i enjoy hearing when i can.
This sort of compromise is common to collectors of music. It's one reason why they buy multiple recordings of the same works. Why pick your poison if you can have them all?
I hope to hear from GFFJ, to get his take on things.
and anyone's thoughts.
An orchestral performance is always, at least in part, a conversation. Who ever assembled 90+ pieces on stage for an audience of 1500, without some intention of mutual communication?
In the orchestra, one of the most basic of conversations is the conversation between the instrumental groups. Each group has a characteristic inflection. That inflection is a blending of accent and intent. It conveys a mood and a feeling, an undercurrent of meaning to the notes being played. When you hear this, everything changes. It's like walking towards a corner, with a conversation occurring just around the corner.
Suddenly you turn the corner, and you can make out what is being said. They turn to greet you :-)
To me, that is one of the great joys of attending a live concert. You never know when that sort of thing might happen. It's not every time ...
Recording sometimes captures this. For instance DGG 4D recordings are particularly apt to preserve this quality, no doubt at the expense of a number of other qualities.
Still, it's something i enjoy hearing when i can.
This sort of compromise is common to collectors of music. It's one reason why they buy multiple recordings of the same works. Why pick your poison if you can have them all?
I hope to hear from GFFJ, to get his take on things.
and anyone's thoughts.
Posted on: 15 February 2009 by Wolf2
yes, there are differences in popular music, Take Nat King Cole's "At Last", he's such a classy singer it's very romantic, Etta made it her own with her interpretation.
Posted on: 15 February 2009 by mikeeschman
quote:Originally posted by Wolf2:
yes, there are differences in popular music, Take Nat King Cole's "At Last", he's such a classy singer it's very romantic, Etta made it her own with her interpretation.
and wolf2 instantly places a finger atop the idea of inflection. Nat King Cole and Etta James doing "At Last". inflection electrifies every note in both these renderings. without it, the tune is inanimate.
Posted on: 16 February 2009 by u5227470736789439
I agree that "inflection" of the phrase is what breathes life into music.
It is an immense act of subtlely valuing every note with the phrase and cherishing it with its own dynamic, tone colours, length [within the possibly elastic rhythm], its shape, its relative emminence compared to its sister notes before and after!
Dear Mike,
In recording I have a view that may not quite co-incide with yours on this, but forgive me posting it in your thread, and possibly we may discuss this aspect.
Most halls used for live musical performance tend to the overlarge, for economic reasons of getting the largest possible audience for the cost of promoting the concert. This leads to such things as a piano being the usual instruments for Bach keyboard concertos, whereas the the harpsichord in an intimate setting is definately what Bach had in mind, and the music reflects this.
The result of oversized halls is relatively more reverberation and distance from the performers to the premium seats. It also requires that the performance be more projected than necessarily ideal.
With recording there is no reason to emulate these overlarge performing spaces [and yet recording very often do reflect this patern], and in past times the trend was to reduce the element of accoustic space as more space and distance reduces the amount of expressive inflection which can be perceived in the audience, compared to the same performers producing the performance in a more intimate space with less projection.
Thus I find the relatively more direct, older style of recording before the mid-sixties usually is more communicative of the intentions of the musicians in respect of their expressive apects in performance, brought out with the very inflection we are discussing.
I know you will qite possibly consider the multiple close microphone technique - typified by the 4-D recordings of DG - as presenting the inflections more readily than the more usual long distance recordings of the post early sixties time.
And this may well be where we might not quite agree, for I do agree that close miking does relay the intention of the individual musician, closely miked up, .... But for me the relative close old style microphone technique that eschews spot miking of individual players, as found in normal pre 1964/5 recordings, also bring the bound together sound of the ideal slightly smaller than usual performance space, that is really, IMO, the ideal. It give the full sense of inflection, and also the sense of playing in ensenble, of teaming up to give a performance of many individuals sublimating their own genius to the wider whole and that is a great thing for me. It is why great orchestras like the VPO or LPO are so remarkable - each player could be a soloist, and yet the combination of sixty or eighty potential soloists is even more incredible for the corporate beauty of the result!
Team inflection if you like!
ATB from George
It is an immense act of subtlely valuing every note with the phrase and cherishing it with its own dynamic, tone colours, length [within the possibly elastic rhythm], its shape, its relative emminence compared to its sister notes before and after!
Dear Mike,
In recording I have a view that may not quite co-incide with yours on this, but forgive me posting it in your thread, and possibly we may discuss this aspect.
Most halls used for live musical performance tend to the overlarge, for economic reasons of getting the largest possible audience for the cost of promoting the concert. This leads to such things as a piano being the usual instruments for Bach keyboard concertos, whereas the the harpsichord in an intimate setting is definately what Bach had in mind, and the music reflects this.
The result of oversized halls is relatively more reverberation and distance from the performers to the premium seats. It also requires that the performance be more projected than necessarily ideal.
With recording there is no reason to emulate these overlarge performing spaces [and yet recording very often do reflect this patern], and in past times the trend was to reduce the element of accoustic space as more space and distance reduces the amount of expressive inflection which can be perceived in the audience, compared to the same performers producing the performance in a more intimate space with less projection.
Thus I find the relatively more direct, older style of recording before the mid-sixties usually is more communicative of the intentions of the musicians in respect of their expressive apects in performance, brought out with the very inflection we are discussing.
I know you will qite possibly consider the multiple close microphone technique - typified by the 4-D recordings of DG - as presenting the inflections more readily than the more usual long distance recordings of the post early sixties time.
And this may well be where we might not quite agree, for I do agree that close miking does relay the intention of the individual musician, closely miked up, .... But for me the relative close old style microphone technique that eschews spot miking of individual players, as found in normal pre 1964/5 recordings, also bring the bound together sound of the ideal slightly smaller than usual performance space, that is really, IMO, the ideal. It give the full sense of inflection, and also the sense of playing in ensenble, of teaming up to give a performance of many individuals sublimating their own genius to the wider whole and that is a great thing for me. It is why great orchestras like the VPO or LPO are so remarkable - each player could be a soloist, and yet the combination of sixty or eighty potential soloists is even more incredible for the corporate beauty of the result!
Team inflection if you like!
ATB from George
Posted on: 16 February 2009 by mikeeschman
george is a man with a taste for buried treasure, sifting through a century with an eye for beauty, putting the clearest, most perfect stones in his sack as he finds them. and there is much to find and cherish.
if i may speculate what runs through his head, i see the thought "if this piece has been played 100 times, which were best ?" it may be that question will be answered best by the dead, not the living.
His treasure quest has benefited me more than once, and i expect that will continue for the foreseeable future.
Meanwhile, i have an insatiable interest in instruments and performance practice. i am always asking "and how is that done today?"
i would like to occupy each player's skull for the duration of a performance. i would like to know what they know, feel what they feel.
my recordings span about 1958 to the present,
and contain performances that date as far back as 1932. and my latest new recordings include 2007-2008 performances by concertgebouw, vienna, berlin, london and chicago. these are the top 5 orchestras in grammophone's list, and i wanted to hear what they did to so impress, as well as place a marker for today in the collection.
recording style changes due to technical advances, or fashion, or both.
however "they" may have recorded a performance at the time, a decade down the road it is what it is for good.
it is important to remember some things about recordings, if you want to enjoy them for what they are :
- a recording is never a live performance, even when it is a recording of a live performance.
- the balances of a recording work best when they enhance the amount of detail available to be heard, with more always being preferred to less.
if you leave detail out, you can never put it back.
in the concert hall, i have found "inflection" to diminish as you move farther from the orchestra. you get a more balanced blend of sound, missing many of the intricate details of the individual lines.
the recording is a historical record, and i intend to get all the detail that i can, when i can.
4D, Sony SuperBit and to a large degree Telarc are absolute masters at retaining the details of a performance.
but i am dancing around the central issue :
All the details of inflection are the very heart of the musical meaning of a performance. the balances an orchestra achieves in a hall is a mere detail of the group's accommodation to a building.
conductors rarely conceive a work as a response to the sound of hall or a band, and instrumentalist in my experience never do.
like actors, they focus their energy on breathing life into the lines they read.
i have never heard a recording from the 30s that preserved that quality.
many of my recordings from the 50s and 60s hint at that quality.
4D and it's contemporaries often deliver that quality in full measure.
to sum up :
the heart of a performance is hidden in the details of each participant's phrasing, and unlike live performances, a recording can reveal these details.
this is a good thing, that i will never get enough of.
there is something else that keeps me on the lookout for the new - the orchestras of today are better than the orchestras of the past. they had very good teachers and learned all their lessons. then they rewarded the efforts of those good teachers by advancing their art. we are in a period of ascendancy for performance practice.
george will say they achieved that perfection by judicious editing. i don't think that is so. For example, in Gardiner/ORR on Beethoven's 6th Symphony, there is a single outtake in the fourth movement (where there is also a french horn entrance that was flubbed and left in the performance). frankly, i wish they had fixed the french horn entrance too.
one edit in an entire piece is not exactly chopping it to pieces in the editing booth.
and mistakes are always less interesting than getting it right. especially in a recording, which may be listened to many times.
so, as george has said before, we all listen in different ways. For example, if you survey my list of 4D recordings on the 4D thread, you will find that most of the music is music that george would have no interest in. that can impact what you want in a recording, the music you want to hear ...
give me the details :-)
if i may speculate what runs through his head, i see the thought "if this piece has been played 100 times, which were best ?" it may be that question will be answered best by the dead, not the living.
His treasure quest has benefited me more than once, and i expect that will continue for the foreseeable future.
Meanwhile, i have an insatiable interest in instruments and performance practice. i am always asking "and how is that done today?"
i would like to occupy each player's skull for the duration of a performance. i would like to know what they know, feel what they feel.
my recordings span about 1958 to the present,
and contain performances that date as far back as 1932. and my latest new recordings include 2007-2008 performances by concertgebouw, vienna, berlin, london and chicago. these are the top 5 orchestras in grammophone's list, and i wanted to hear what they did to so impress, as well as place a marker for today in the collection.
recording style changes due to technical advances, or fashion, or both.
however "they" may have recorded a performance at the time, a decade down the road it is what it is for good.
it is important to remember some things about recordings, if you want to enjoy them for what they are :
- a recording is never a live performance, even when it is a recording of a live performance.
- the balances of a recording work best when they enhance the amount of detail available to be heard, with more always being preferred to less.
if you leave detail out, you can never put it back.
in the concert hall, i have found "inflection" to diminish as you move farther from the orchestra. you get a more balanced blend of sound, missing many of the intricate details of the individual lines.
the recording is a historical record, and i intend to get all the detail that i can, when i can.
4D, Sony SuperBit and to a large degree Telarc are absolute masters at retaining the details of a performance.
but i am dancing around the central issue :
All the details of inflection are the very heart of the musical meaning of a performance. the balances an orchestra achieves in a hall is a mere detail of the group's accommodation to a building.
conductors rarely conceive a work as a response to the sound of hall or a band, and instrumentalist in my experience never do.
like actors, they focus their energy on breathing life into the lines they read.
i have never heard a recording from the 30s that preserved that quality.
many of my recordings from the 50s and 60s hint at that quality.
4D and it's contemporaries often deliver that quality in full measure.
to sum up :
the heart of a performance is hidden in the details of each participant's phrasing, and unlike live performances, a recording can reveal these details.
this is a good thing, that i will never get enough of.
there is something else that keeps me on the lookout for the new - the orchestras of today are better than the orchestras of the past. they had very good teachers and learned all their lessons. then they rewarded the efforts of those good teachers by advancing their art. we are in a period of ascendancy for performance practice.
george will say they achieved that perfection by judicious editing. i don't think that is so. For example, in Gardiner/ORR on Beethoven's 6th Symphony, there is a single outtake in the fourth movement (where there is also a french horn entrance that was flubbed and left in the performance). frankly, i wish they had fixed the french horn entrance too.
one edit in an entire piece is not exactly chopping it to pieces in the editing booth.
and mistakes are always less interesting than getting it right. especially in a recording, which may be listened to many times.
so, as george has said before, we all listen in different ways. For example, if you survey my list of 4D recordings on the 4D thread, you will find that most of the music is music that george would have no interest in. that can impact what you want in a recording, the music you want to hear ...
give me the details :-)
Posted on: 16 February 2009 by u5227470736789439
it is important to remember some things about recordings, if you want to enjoy them for what they are :
- a recording is never a live performance, even when it is a recording of a live performance.
- the balances of a recording work best when they enhance the amount of detail available to be heard, with more always being preferred to less.
if you leave detail out, you can never put it back.
in the concert hall, i have found "inflection" to diminish as you move farther from the orchestra. you get a more balanced blend of sound, missing many of the intricate details of the individual lines.
the recording is a historical record, and i intend to get all the detail that i can, when i can.
I think we agree on the fundamentals!
Maybe we don't quite agree about modern recording technique, but it would be very dull if we agreed on everything, don't you think!?
I actually will search out almost any recording from an artist I admire, whether recorded in 1926 or 2006! I don't deliberately buy old recordings jst because they are old - some of them take some forebearance! But if I were forced into a choice between say a Klemperer or a Boult performance recorded in mono in the early fifties, or say Marriner in a modern digital stereo recording, I will go with the old masters, because I find them more reliably and consistently illuminating. I usually cannot afford to have both.
What is lovely is to discover a wonderful new artist in the concert hall and follow their progress, and eventually buy some of their recordings as well.
Sometimes I like to point people at recordings from artists now so long dead that their reputation has in some ways become a sort of esoteric pass time, to be spoken of, but not much examined in the aural musical sense.
One of the delights for me is that with the possibilities brought about with digital restorations, even some fairly intractible old recordings are shown to contain far more musical detail than I ever thought was possible from their early LP or shellac incarnations.
Not everyone agrees of course, but sometimes people are sent toward a revelation with no modern parallel in this way, which they are pleased by. I do not find it sad that sometimes a person I highly respect, actually cannot enjoy what I do!
Very best wishes from George
- a recording is never a live performance, even when it is a recording of a live performance.
- the balances of a recording work best when they enhance the amount of detail available to be heard, with more always being preferred to less.
if you leave detail out, you can never put it back.
in the concert hall, i have found "inflection" to diminish as you move farther from the orchestra. you get a more balanced blend of sound, missing many of the intricate details of the individual lines.
the recording is a historical record, and i intend to get all the detail that i can, when i can.
I think we agree on the fundamentals!
Maybe we don't quite agree about modern recording technique, but it would be very dull if we agreed on everything, don't you think!?
I actually will search out almost any recording from an artist I admire, whether recorded in 1926 or 2006! I don't deliberately buy old recordings jst because they are old - some of them take some forebearance! But if I were forced into a choice between say a Klemperer or a Boult performance recorded in mono in the early fifties, or say Marriner in a modern digital stereo recording, I will go with the old masters, because I find them more reliably and consistently illuminating. I usually cannot afford to have both.
What is lovely is to discover a wonderful new artist in the concert hall and follow their progress, and eventually buy some of their recordings as well.
Sometimes I like to point people at recordings from artists now so long dead that their reputation has in some ways become a sort of esoteric pass time, to be spoken of, but not much examined in the aural musical sense.
One of the delights for me is that with the possibilities brought about with digital restorations, even some fairly intractible old recordings are shown to contain far more musical detail than I ever thought was possible from their early LP or shellac incarnations.
Not everyone agrees of course, but sometimes people are sent toward a revelation with no modern parallel in this way, which they are pleased by. I do not find it sad that sometimes a person I highly respect, actually cannot enjoy what I do!
Very best wishes from George
Posted on: 16 February 2009 by mikeeschman
quote:Originally posted by GFFJ:
I do not find it sad that sometimes a person I highly respect, actually cannot enjoy what I do!
george, i hunt down recordings you recommend the way a bird dog goes after a duck. but i still love my 4D recordings :-)
it's two different takes on things. why should i settle for one or the other?
and if i told you i had an old wax cylinder of beethoven playing his own works (by some miracle), i think you would fly here and break into my house!
one aging conductor i am quite taken with is Boulez. i find his precision with meter sorts out any number of works from the 20th century and just before. what was murky becomes clear. for me, that is the essence of "illumination".
Posted on: 16 February 2009 by Wolf2
We have a local DJ that has a Sunday morning program usually interviews with music. Or he takes one piece and gives you segments to see how the greats have done it. At the end of the hour he'll play the last movement of his favorite. Enlightening to say the least.
Posted on: 16 February 2009 by u5227470736789524
quote:Originally posted by Wolf2:
We have a local DJ that has a Sunday morning program usually interviews with music. Enlightening to say the least.
Available by podcast ? or live stream ? What are the station call-letters ?
Thanks
Jeff A
Posted on: 16 February 2009 by u5227470736789439
quote:Originally posted by mikeeschman:quote:Originally posted by GFFJ:
I do not find it sad that sometimes a person I highly respect, actually cannot enjoy what I do!
george,
it's two different takes on things. why should i settle for one or the other?
and if i told you i had an old wax cylinder of beethoven playing his own works (by some miracle), i think you would fly here and break into my house!
Dear Mike,
First thing is to emphasise is the not in your quotation from my post! I delight in a very wide church in respect of musical taste. The only thing that makes me sad is when music gets rubbished, by those who never took the trouble to try to like some of it! Not much of that in this lovely place thank goodness!
If you had a cylinder recording of Beethoven, I might swing for it! If only! Or Bach at the organ!
Really the glory of the "gramophone" as a cultural record of over a century of music making - a modern thing in historic terms - is its signicance as record of what may no longer be heard in the concert hall, at least that is the case for me. But I see no reason to prescribe any way of enjoying its fruits, be they recorded last year, last decade, or last century!
It has democratised music in a way that is all to the good! Of course it has possibly devalued it for some, but I suspect that those for whom it is devalued by great ease of access would never have been great music lovers even without the overflowing cup we have today!
ATB from George
Posted on: 16 February 2009 by Wolf2
oh hiya jeff,
KUSC it is on podcast I"m sure, Jim Svejda, he has a weeknight show and the Sunday record review. He has great taste in the past and I learned a lot. He was an oboe player I believe and Czech heritage and can pronounce all those eastern european names which baffle me. LOL
Lately tho for past few years he's had on more and more movie composers and I just hate that. When he has guests sometimes he just fawns over them too much.
They just finished their pledge drive so happy listening. They have some one funny DJ, Alan Chapman in the afternoon. I hear him talk before the symphony and some operas. Great speaker, he also teaches.
http://www.kusc.org/new/index.php
KUSC it is on podcast I"m sure, Jim Svejda, he has a weeknight show and the Sunday record review. He has great taste in the past and I learned a lot. He was an oboe player I believe and Czech heritage and can pronounce all those eastern european names which baffle me. LOL
Lately tho for past few years he's had on more and more movie composers and I just hate that. When he has guests sometimes he just fawns over them too much.
They just finished their pledge drive so happy listening. They have some one funny DJ, Alan Chapman in the afternoon. I hear him talk before the symphony and some operas. Great speaker, he also teaches.
http://www.kusc.org/new/index.php
Posted on: 16 February 2009 by u5227470736789524
quote:Originally posted by Wolf2:
oh hiya jeff,
KUSC it is on podcast I"m sure
http://www.kusc.org/new/index.php
Thank you !
Posted on: 16 February 2009 by mikeeschman
quote:Originally posted by GFFJ:
Really the glory of the "gramophone" as a cultural record of over a century of music making - a modern thing in historic terms - is its significance as record of what may no longer be heard in the concert hall, at least that is the case for me.
for me as well, and we have numerous people on this forum who are bird-dogging each small part of that century.
what i find "new" today will still be in the collection 20 years hence. i hope my daughters will continue the search into the next century. think about what this collection will be like after three generations ...
something good has to come of that!
and one final thought george, if you listen to 4D recordings on speakers that are 4 inches apart, you are hearing something quite different than what was intended. if you want to hear them in all their glory, move your speakers 6 or more feet apart! just as old mono recordings have their physical requirements for replay, modern recordings are no less demanding ...
Posted on: 16 February 2009 by u5227470736789439
Dear Mike,
Abbado and the BPO sound just swell in those Brahms Symphony recordings with the speakers just as they are!
ATB from George
Abbado and the BPO sound just swell in those Brahms Symphony recordings with the speakers just as they are!
ATB from George
Posted on: 16 February 2009 by Mat Cork
Just my opinion.
I love virtually all genres, but (emotion in the context described here) is an area where I think classical struggles, as Miles Davis said 'it's people playing other peoples music' - generally (I think he actually said 'white people'). Most other genres are more immediate...and the emotion is more apparent.
I was listening to Brahms violin concerto the other night, and I was actually thinking along similar lines, I could hear Christian Ferras desperately struggling to eek something out of it that was 'his own' - in my mind anyway. It's just the way I hear it, I then listened to Nick Cave and he was almost in the room spitting bile, but you could tell he was almost joking (an inflection if you will) of a very different message.
I like electronic music as well, but I think it also suffers in this respect.
I love virtually all genres, but (emotion in the context described here) is an area where I think classical struggles, as Miles Davis said 'it's people playing other peoples music' - generally (I think he actually said 'white people'). Most other genres are more immediate...and the emotion is more apparent.
I was listening to Brahms violin concerto the other night, and I was actually thinking along similar lines, I could hear Christian Ferras desperately struggling to eek something out of it that was 'his own' - in my mind anyway. It's just the way I hear it, I then listened to Nick Cave and he was almost in the room spitting bile, but you could tell he was almost joking (an inflection if you will) of a very different message.
I like electronic music as well, but I think it also suffers in this respect.
Posted on: 16 February 2009 by mikeeschman
quote:Originally posted by Mat Cork:
Just my opinion.
I love virtually all genres, but (emotion in the context described here) is an area where I think classical struggles, as Miles Davis said 'it's people playing other peoples music' - generally (I think he actually said 'white people'). Most other genres are more immediate...and the emotion is more apparent.
I was listening to Brahms violin concerto the other night, and I was actually thinking along similar lines, I could hear Christian Ferras desperately struggling to eek something out of it that was 'his own' - in my mind anyway. It's just the way I hear it, I then listened to Nick Cave and he was almost in the room spitting bile, but you could tell he was almost joking (an inflection if you will) of a very different message.
I like electronic music as well, but I think it also suffers in this respect.
here is an important concept for classical orchestral music :
the more music you find, the less there is of anything else. so in the best pieces, there isn't anything at all - except the sound of it.
yet within that world of sound, there is always the possibility of reading it in a different voice, if you hear a voice.
it is the same as literature needing to be read and art needing to be seen. each time something different is seen or heard.
Those voices tell a tale.
jazz players do the same thing when they redo a standard.
i can't speak for anything else.
taking Beethoven's 3rd Symphony i.e. the "Erocia" as an example, i have received radically different messages from Reiner, Stokowski, Jochum and Gardiner. I consider each of them irrefutable.
i hope to find more in future.
and in that symphony, i always hear the clear strong voice of something, a future just out of reach.
it keeps me coming back.