[Dixielandjazz] Natural vs. Amplified Sound

[Steve barbone]

CAVEAT: Long, and about Opera. HOWEVER, if you were interested in past
threads about natural vs. amplified sound in music, you will find this
article very interesting because it ties in with OKOM and amplification.

Cheers,
Steve


Amplifying the Classics

Pipe Down! We Can Hardly Hear You

By ANTHONY TOMMASINI NY Times January 1, 2006

WHEN "Doctor Atomic," the much-anticipated opera about J. Robert Oppenheimer
and the Manhattan Project by the dynamic American composer John Adams, had
its premiere in October at the San Francisco Opera, the critical reaction
was all over the place. But whatever one's take on the opera - I found it,
over all, a courageous and musically haunting work - surprisingly little was
made of one of the production's most unorthodox attributes: the sizeable
orchestra had 30 microphones positioned among the players, and the singers
wore body microphones.

Not that long ago, the use of microphones in a major opera house would have
provoked critics and buffs to denounce the perpetrators with blood-chilling
Verdian curses of "Muori! Muori!" A love of natural sound, the unaided human
voice and traditional instruments have, after all, been hallmarks of
classical music and opera. But electronic amplification has been insinuating
itself into the opera house and the concert hall, much as it did on Broadway
starting in the early 1960's. To the dismay of traditionalists, the public,
by and large, doesn't seem to mind.

Is it the beginning of the end? The answer requires some historical context.

All art forms change over time. And the technology of amplification is more
sophisticated than ever. As a composer who grew up in the age of rock and
has immersed himself in electronic music, Mr. Adams, a modern master of
orchestration, a digital-age Berlioz, has every right to incorporate all
such resources into his works. Obviously, using body microphones for "Doctor
Atomic" is not the same as using them for "Don Giovanni."

Still, there's no denying it: in the last few years, the increasing embrace
of amplification has brought classical music to a technological crossroads.

In 1999, the New York City Opera, long frustrated with the dry acoustics of
the New York State Theater, introduced what it called a sound enhancement
system. The company's decision provoked cries of protest from opera purists.
Would the technique of singing as it had been taught for nearly 400 years
continue if the practical reason for it began to disappear? But for the most
part audiences were compliant. Today City Opera rarely receives complaints
from patrons about its sound enhancement system. And critics have mostly
stopped mentioning it.

AMPLIFICATION systems, whether called that or not, have popped up everywhere
in recent years. The Opera House at the Brooklyn Academy of Music has one,
as does the Houston Grand Opera. The Boston Lyric Opera, which performs in
that city's historic Shubert Theater, has "recently and happily experimented
with sound enhancement" in the words of Stephen Lord, the company's music
director, to rectify acoustical deficiencies in certain areas of the
theater. 

This fall, just a week after the premiere of "Doctor Atomic," the Caramoor
center presented a production of Bernstein's short opera "Trouble in Tahiti"
in the commodious, wood-paneled music room of the House Museum. The cast
includes a trio of amplified singers who evoke radio jingles of the 1950's.
But Michael Barrett, Caramoor's artistic director, found that the singers in
the main roles of Sam and Dinah, a quarreling suburban couple, were being
overpowered by the band. In the old days you would fix this by working on
balances. Mr. Barrett simply hooked up body microphones to these two trained
operatic vocalists.

Though technological fixes like this may be convenient, they come at a high
cost. The mezzo-soprano Marilyn Horne, who has watched with distress as
amplification systems have been installed even in European concert halls and
opera houses, calls sound enhancement the "kiss of death for good singing."

When I was 16, I heard Renata Tebaldi sing Desdemona in Verdi's "Otello" at
the Metropolitan Opera. I stood in the winter air to get a standing-room
ticket, stood during the performance and then went back the next week and
stood through another performance. I can still hear the rich, poignant and
enveloping sound of her pianissimo tones floating throughout the house,
seemingly without effort. That sublime exposure to the human voice hooked me
on opera. How many young people today who say they are indifferent to opera
have had the experience of hearing such a voice?

How many young people with no feeling for the symphonic repertory have heard
a great orchestra play Beethoven's Seventh or Stravinsky's "Firebird" at a
glorious concert hall like Carnegie? Or have heard a string quartet play in
an intimate room suited to chamber music, like the one at the Frick? Today
even sermons in churches and temples are almost always carried through
loudspeakers. If Abraham Lincoln were to reappear at the Great Hall of
Cooper Union, where he gave a historic speech as a presidential candidate,
exasperated audiences would be shouting at him to use a sound system. The
spread of amplification, even in classical music, is inseparable, I fear,
from another growing national problem: hearing impairment.

According to a Newsweek cover story last summer by David Noonan, baby
boomers who exposed themselves to blasting rock bands are now suffering the
consequences. More than 28 million Americans, many in this age group, have a
significant degree of hearing loss, and the number is expected to swell to
78 million by 2030. Mr. Noonan reported that more than 5 million children
and teenagers between 6 and 19 have some hearing damage from amplified music
and the general noise they encounter every day, a good deal of it funneled
directly into their ears. "If they don't take steps to protect their
hearing," he wrote, "the iPod generation faces the same fate as the
Woodstock generation. Or worse."

At concert halls and opera houses, I sometimes hear a maladjusted hearing
aid start to buzz with that high-pitched ring that can cut right through the
collective sound of an orchestra, at least at low volumes. Yet many in the
audience seem not to be at all bothered. Could they not be hearing it?
Sadly, it would seem so.

DESPITE the proliferation of microphones, and the effects they have had on
audiences, most lovers of classical music still cherish the experience of
hearing voices and instruments without any electronic boosting, thank you.
And most opera companies that have installed sound systems in their houses,
like the New York City Opera, have drawn the line at hooking singers up to
body microphones. 

In "Doctor Atomic," which crossed that line, the young tenor Thomas Glenn
sang the role of the physicist Robert Wilson, an acolyte of Oppenheimer. Mr.
Glenn was a last-minute cast change, taking the place of Tom Randle, a fine
singer and agile actor whom the production's director, Peter Sellars, has
said he respects enormously. But young Mr. Glenn exuded youthfulness, which
may be why in the end Mr. Sellars gave him the role.

Mr. Sellars would not say. I suspect that another attraction of Mr. Glenn
was that his sweet and smallish voice came across beautifully through the
amplification. Like a fledgling musical theater performer, he adapted
naturally to the body microphone in contrast to, say, the experienced
mezzo-soprano Kristine Jepson, who portrayed Kitty Oppenheimer. Ms. Jepson,
who has a rich and vibrant voice, seemed rattled on opening night by the
miking, as if she did not know whether to sing out normally or to adjust the
volume of her voice.

Mr. Glenn had a shining moment. But with this success behind him, will he
now return to tradition and work on supporting his breath and beefing up his
sound the old-fashioned way?

For clues as to how amplification can affect an art form, opera could look
to the musical.

In its thrilling early decades the Broadway musical was a bracingly literate
genre in which clever words were mixed in ingenious ways with snappy, snazzy
or wistfully tuneful music. In its essence, though, it was word-driven art
form, which is why stylish singers with small voices, like Fred Astaire
thrived on Broadway. Look at reviews of Astaire in Gershwin and Porter shows
and you never read that he could not be heard. Why? Because composers wrote
songs suited to his style of delivery and kept orchestrations light. More
than that, audiences knew that when hearing a glorious belter like Ethel
Merman you could sit back and bask in her singing, but when hearing Astaire
you had to learn forward and pay attention.

Consider this. In 1949, Mary Martin, a queen of Broadway, joined Ezio Pinza,
the great operatic bass, in "South Pacific." Though they came from different
worlds, vocally they were not that far apart. They essentially used the same
techniques to project their voices and make words take off.

But when amplification took hold on Broadway, audiences inevitably grew less
alert, more passive. It began changing every element of the musical, from
the lyrics (which grew less subtle and intricate), to the subject matter and
musical styles (the bigger, the plusher, the schlockier, the better).
Musicals became less literate and more obvious, and stars like John Raitt,
who had a burnished baritone voice of operatic dimensions, became
marginalized. 

The nadir came in the 1980's with melodramatic spectacles like "Phantom of
the Opera" and "Miss Saigon." Whatever one thought of the music in those
shows, no one paid much attention to the sappy lyrics. (Throughout this
period Stephen Sondheim, the most literate composer in the history of the
musical, remained a world unto himself with his own devoted audience.)

Though there are still plenty of schlocky musicals on Broadway, in recent
years the literate musical has been making a comeback - works like
"Falsettos," "Parade," "Urinetown" and "Caroline, or Change." Still, it is
notable that several of these shows and others like them played in smaller
theaters that were more conducive to works where words really matter.

"The Producers" is a verbally dexterous work that is still going strong at a
large theater, the St. James. So, the Broadway musical would seem to have
made peace with amplification. But the peace treaty has involved a tradeoff.

On the upside it has enabled actors with modest voices, like Matthew
Broderick - whose elegant style I love - to evolve into appealing musical
theater performers.

On the downside, we will never again experience the rapt atmosphere of
Broadway theaters in the days when musicals relied on natural vocal talents
and nurtured attentive audiences, even though there are some big-voiced
stars, like Brian Stokes Mitchell, who would surely have thrived in an
unamplified theater. To put the best spin on things: The musical has
creatively adapted to amplification. But in doing so the art form has
diminished, or at least become something different.

What might the history of the musical imply for opera? There is no doubting
the right of contemporary classical music, including new opera, to use
electronic resources. I sometimes wish that there could be at least two
branches of opera as the genre continues to develop. The traditional branch
would remain an unamplified art form and cultivate singers with traditional
techniques. The works themselves need not be traditional: Thomas Adès's
adaptation of Shakespeare's "Tempest" was a recent, thrilling example of a
musically audacious opera that relied on traditional techniques of singing
and a mostly acoustic orchestra.

But there would also be an experimental branch where works embraced all
manner of electronic and digital resources and were presented in special
venues, like the Cube, as the Massachusetts Institute of Technology calls
its big, adaptable black box performing space.

It probably won't work out that way. Breaking down barriers and assimilating
different traditions is the vogue right now.

More adventurous opera lovers and critics routinely complain that the
Metropolitan Opera is a great but tradition-bound company. Yet, the Met
insists that it would never, ever introduce any type of amplification into
its house. What will happen when, as expected, "Doctor Atomic" comes to Met?
Will the singers use body microphones? Company officials say they will
respect the composer's wishes. I suspect that this matter will actually take
some hashing out.

This could be one time in which opera buffs are counting on the Met to be
its old, stodgy self.