man tells all

a column by bass player and musicologist Hans Mantel, on his current state of mind

maestro mantel

A matter of record

Recently I attented a social event where a group of people were discussing music.

More specifically, a recently released recording of Purcell's Dido and Aeneas. Opinions flew back and forth,

heated discussion ensued and I found myself looking around the room for one of the waiters in order to

seek shelter in a cocktail or two.

The evening became much more interesting to me after I had become dimly aware that someone in the

group had asked me a question. Without trying to reconstruct the question I asked him: 'Tell me something;

can you record music?'

'What do you mean', he said, not prepared for something out of left field.

'Exactly that, ... can you record music?'

Let's ponder the implication of this question. If you write down music in a score, you have written down a specific

set of symbols and instructions that only represent the music. It's not the music itself.

Recording (on whatever medium) therefore encodes the music and makes it transportable, repeatable, reproducable.

To achieve this, it has had to remove the music from the time and place in which it originated. Music has become a thing.

But in the case of a CD, what have we recorded?

One of the more populair notions among lovers of music is that music

is a language. It is not. If it were, specific answers could be given to specific questions and there would

be a thesaurus of this language. It would also mean that everybody in the world would have the same

understanding of what was being said musically. On a recent radio show I listened to a Greek song under

the solemn impression that I was listening to a very sad tale of unrequited love.

Then I found out I had just heard a very funny story with decidedly blue lyrics.

Music is not a language, not even in a wider semantic sense. But parallels are there and they can be useful.

Can you record language? No, you can't. What you can record is sound. Language is a body of knowledge

that we carry around in our heads. It is this knowledge that enables us to succesfully interpret the sounds

that come out of someone's mouth. A language that is totally foreign to us is still recognizable as spoken word and

as some form of language, but there it stops.

In music it's the same way. What we record is sound, not music. The music is in our heads. More specifically,

the understanding of music is the shared body of knowledge. If we hear new experimental music outside

of a concert siuation, we may not even be aware that we're listening to music if nobody told us it was going on.

It is the body of knowledge that is the deciding factor when it comes to succesful interpretation of what reaches us

by means of a set of speakers. Only when we have this body of knowledge does the speaker's sound make any sense.

To fully benefit from what there is to hear on a recording we need to expand that body of knowledge.

This we achieve, for the largest part, by listening to as much music as we can.

On a very coarsely printed newspaper photo, our eyes see white and black dots. It's our brain (body of knowledge) that

tells us what there is to see in the picture. In music the discernable notes are the black and white dots and

our brain tells us what there is to hear, what it all means.

So while we can't record music we can use the recorded information as a sort of ZIP file. Our brain unpacks it and

lets the music blossom to its full beauty in our heads.