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© Copyright 1999, Jim Loy
Mistakes in recorded music are much rarer nowadays than they were. High tech allows editors to weed out the distracting noise of coughs, dropped objects, batons breaking. We still hear these things, but less often. And performers can go back and correct a wrong note.
I have an old recording of Richter playing Mussorgsky's Pictures At an Exhibition, in which he hits a very loud wrong note (according to my score (sheet music) of that piece). I was listening to a piece for two pianos by Olivier Messiaen, with my head phones, and I though I heard someone knocking on my door. No one there. I went back to my listening. Another knock on the door. No one there. It was the noise of one of the pedals on one of the pianos. I find the clip clop noise from a bassoon very ugly and distracting. I suppose we are stuck with that. Glenn Gould sang (moaned, actually) while playing Bach on a piano. It sounds bad.
I was recently listening to Oxygene II, by Jean Michel Jarre. It seems to be a pleasant recycling of his earlier Oxygene. The last piece (Oxygene 13, I believe) has a highly repetitious rhythm played on those two sticks, that you knock together, that Latin American music often has:
2 measures: | . . . . . . . | . . . . . . . | 10 clicks: | | | | | | | | | |
I find it distracting (and interesting) that the performer makes two mistakes in this piece (losing most of a measure, in one instance). Of course, the mistakes could have been weeded out. But, this is a recording of electronic music. The only performers are Jean Michel Jarre and someone else listed as "additional keyboards." The percussionist seems to have been one of these two people, on a keyboard. These clicks could have been performed by a computer, and thereby come out perfectly. But nobody cared?
Addendum:
I am told that rigidly timed and played electronic music sounds too impersonal, and so performers intentionally add "mistakes" to their music. I can't argue with that, but I still object to actual, obvious flubs. Recording artists have been erasing their mistakes from recordings for over a century. But some very bad ones have been recorded, so that we can hear them forever.