Is classical music really ‘boring’? How recording fidelity shaped live performance expectations
Is classical music really ‘boring’?
In 2013, a gathering of Sydney-based musicologists voiced a persistent worry: live classical music concerts often struck contemporary listeners as dull. The group suspected that imperfect seating, the occasional cracked note, variable performance standards, and audience coughs made the experience disappointing or uninspiring for people already familiar with the repertoire through recordings. Similar sentiments had appeared in the Guardian more than a decade earlier, where one writer called the concert hall “a relic of another age — an age when people had time and leisure to give up an evening for two or three hours of potentially less-than-perfect music-making.” Modern audiences, he argued, preferred “the sanitised reliability of the domestic music-centre,” where they could compile their own concerts from flawless commercial recordings without commuting or mingling with fellow listeners.
If these observations hold true, then Western classical music has a problem with recorded fidelity.
Why the concert hall lost its audience
Today, the vast majority of classical music listening happens via recorded media. Live performances are special events, not everyday routines. How the genre embraces recording technology is therefore critical to its creative future.
This discussion focuses on the way mainstream commercial recordings represent the historical classical repertoire. It traces how recording practices throughout the twentieth century came to emphasise ‘faithful’ reproductions of virtuosic performances, and it examines several recent case studies in which leading classical organisations continue these long-established methods. The article does not address crossover popular-classical recordings or the role of fidelity in amateur and community music, although the aesthetic standards set by commercial releases certainly influence those areas as well.
The desire for faithful recordings has produced a remarkably uniform sound ideal. The goal is to place the listener in the best seat in the concert hall while preserving the integrity of an acoustic performance. This approach stands in sharp contrast to popular music genres, where the back-and-forth between live and recorded work is far more adaptable, and sonic techniques vary considerably within and across genres. By locking into a single auditory standard, classical recordings may have inadvertently made the repertoire seem unexciting to listeners who use records as their main reference point for live events. Understanding the link between virtuosity and fidelity may help classical practitioners make more deliberate choices about how they present performances, both on disc and in the hall.
Werktreue, virtuosity, and the debt to recording
Both musical notation and sound recording are driven by a fundamental impulse to ‘fix’ and ‘repeat’ music. In the classical tradition, practitioners generally locate the ‘original’ musical work inside the notated score. Goehr explains that the idea of the musical work emerged in the early nineteenth century as a form of “conceptual imperialism,” developing alongside the concert performance of historical repertoire. By reconfiguring past music “into the present, and then into the sphere of timelessness,” thinkers could view music as something without function, stripped of its original local and extra-musical meanings. Musicians were then free to impose new meanings and to “conceive of past music in the romantic terms of works,” which led to the “canonization of dead composers” and the “formation of a musical repertoire of transcendent masterpieces.” As a result, even the stylistic differences between classical and romantic periods faded, and musicians began to treat classical compositions in romantic terms — as the most perfect examples of absolute music. The musical score became the centrepiece of romantic ideas about composition. Composers like Beethoven and Mozart portrayed their own creative processes as forms of divine inspiration, with compositions arriving fully formed, and the world has inherited a “picture of the composer as visionary, articulating truths from another world.”
This inheritance acts as a kind of cultural protectionism. For some people, “the closer any music embodies the conditions determined by the romantic work-aesthetic, the more civilised it is.” Classical music is consequently seen as quintessentially civilised — indeed, as the only genuinely civilised music. Goehr notes that viewing the world’s music “through romantic spectacles” has a direct result: an assumption that different types of music can be conveniently packaged as works, assigned to composers, represented in full score, given fixed structures with clear beginnings and ends, and performed repeatedly as part of a concert programme.
This drive to realise a musical work as the composer conceived it in the score is captured by the term Werktreue, or work-fidelity. According to Goehr, it is an ideal that developed in the nineteenth century and refers to the “fidelity or authenticity” of musical production. The commitment to this ideal established the behavioural patterns that now govern how classical music is composed, performed, and received, and both practitioners and audiences may benefit from considering how far — and at what cost — they have been constrained by it.
Werktreue provides a framework for evaluating interpretation and reception. It asks audiences to judge how faithfully a performance realises a musical work. Only the most elite, technically adept performers are invited to perform publicly at the highest level, because access is mediated by ideals of virtuosity. These ideals of work-fidelity and virtuosity thus intersect around trust and accuracy: the performer must be technically brilliant enough to realise the composer’s vision, which is precisely why the artists featured on mainstream commercial recordings are those deemed to demonstrate virtuosity.
Scholars such as Godlovitch champion human virtuosity as the source of primary value in classical music. In his view, the display and consumption of virtuosity and tradition occur through live manual-human performances. He likens performance communities to professional guilds that regulate membership by long-established common standards and clearly defined hierarchies of accomplishment. The “fully skilled performance” carries the most value because it is “objectively a record of greater mastery” and therefore a legitimate expression of virtuosity. Recording and performance technologies, however, disrupt the physical work of the player and cannot generate the same value, because the listener cannot verify the performer’s craft. Recordings thus serve to circulate musical works to a mass audience, but their real purpose is to point toward the place where legitimate performance happens: the concert hall.
The path of popular music was quite different. During the second half of the twentieth century, pop, rock, and other genres eagerly embraced the creative possibilities of recording technology. Producers and musicians built highly variable sonic environments using audio effects, processing, and editing. Classical repertory artists largely rejected these same technologies for a creative compositional role, choosing instead what Symes calls “phonographic verisimilitude” — a transplanted “best seat in the house,” lifted from the hall to the living room. The construction of acoustic environment thus marks a key divide between classical recordings and non-acoustic popular genres. Contemporary classical producers do of course edit performances, overdub, apply auto-tuning, equalisation, compression, and artificial reverb; in orchestral soundtrack work they often blend virtual instruments with live players to create the impression of a larger ensemble. The techniques are therefore quite similar to those used in popular music, but the difference lies in the degree to which spatial motion, colouration, and acoustic artefacts such as ambient reflections and background noise remain undetectable to the listener.
Real concert halls and opera houses have different acoustics, of course. The recorded concert hall is simulated by positioning instruments in the stereo field as if on stage, by equalising, processing, and balancing levels to ensure clarity and highlight the soloist, and by applying reverb or ambient recording techniques that echo a real venue. At the same time, genuine but undesirable background sounds and the blemishes of performance are removed. Any effects, editing, or processing are intended to be invisible, preserving the illusion of a seamless live take. While popular music mixes frequently shift spatial and dynamic locations of instruments to direct the listener’s attention, classical mixes tend to fix an instrument’s position in order to sustain the façade of a stage performance throughout the entire track.
It is therefore natural, given that classical performers are judged on their ability to reproduce repertoire virtuosically and audiences enjoy that quest, that recording processes would aim for a perfected instance of the musical work inside a reconstructed concert hall. This relationship was most clearly articulated by pianist Glenn Gould, who declared that technology allowed him to “transcend the limitations that performance imposes upon the imagination,” yielding performances “far superior to any single, real-time performance.” Driven by Gould and others, the pursuit of perfection in performance and the ideal of perfect reliability on recordings inextricably tied Werktreue, virtuosity, and recording fidelity together. The demand for a flawless, polished sonic surface necessitates the removal of wrong notes, breaths, clicks, or any other intrusive artefacts. If such imperfections remain audible, they damage the fantasy of the idealised work, making the listener anxious by reminding them that players fallible musicians.
Recording technology has significantly changed how music is perceived and, in turn, how performance styles have developed. Researchers such as Chanan, Ashby, Philip, Day, and Katz have investigated these shifts. Katz argues that recording provided the “necessary condition” for a new style of violin vibrato to arise, while Day and Philip use recordings to track significant changes in interpretation across the twentieth century. In Philip’s analysis, the most fundamental trend in twentieth-century Western art music induced by recording was a process of “tidying up performance.” The broad availability of recordings, he says, has driven “a general globalisation of styles, standards, and expectations” that is a mixed blessing: it raises standards to an extraordinary high level while also placing enormous pressure on individual musicians to conform to the globalised norm.
Godlovitch argues that few musicians and fewer live performances ever achieve sufficient virtuosity because, at each generation, “there is never room at any one period for more than a handful of virtuosi who … define new horizons of skill and thus new objectives for the remaining membership.” The fact that recordings have sharply defined what counts as acceptable technique, driving standards continually upward, does not threaten the role of live classical music as a testing ground for virtuosity. On the contrary, recordings have entrenched virtuosic ideals more deeply by providing a fixed benchmark against which a player’s skill can be judged. When a performer equals or surpasses the recorded version, the listener has proof that the craft is authentic and admirable.
Yet if those Sydney musicologists were right, and live classical music is less engaging for present-day audiences, then Godlovitch’s model of spectacle — where the audience watches performers surpass formidable technical hurdles — may have lost its grip. It is possible that listeners today place less value on virtuosity itself, or that the polished perfection available on recordings has outrun the ability of live performers to provide the same thrill through genuine manual skill, making the ticket to the hall less attractive. Experimental audience-reception research could clarify whether this hypothesis holds.
High fidelity and the classical industry
Schafer coined the term schizophonia to describe “the splitting of sounds from their original contexts,” capturing the change in perception wrought by technologies for separating sound from its source. Feld notes the deeply concerned tone underlying that word. Recording styles that imitate concert halls seek high-fidelity reproductions, attempting to evoke value and to bridge the distance between performance and recorded listening experience. In audio engineering, fidelity denotes a device’s ability to accurately generate or re-create a sound.
Morton explains that “high fidelity” began its life as a marketing concept in the 1930s, promising “truth to the original source of sound.” Manufacturers have employed the term continuously until today, and Morton traces the complex relationship among the classical music industry, recording equipment makers, and audio engineers. Leaders of the industry have consistently promoted high fidelity as a measure of value, hiding any sign that the recorded performance is an artificial construction. This has, in turn, shaped both listener expectations and the sounds heard in live halls. The listeners trained on clean, reverent recordings grow unsettled by the mess created auditorium noises, variable dynamics, and small errors sneak differently attention, hollow the fantasy, anxiety crack illusion no surprise emerging discomfort concert scenario imagined. If continue expected craft themselves. Emphasistically bridging idealized separate places might require.
The record industry sought to establish recording as a "positive cultural influence" by linking the medium with classical music (1999, p. 611-613). They viewed "high culture music" as representing "an unassailable social good that record companies could hold up to counter accusations that their products undermined good taste" (1999, p. 611-613). Morton also connects the enthusiasm driving technical development of “high fidelity” audio equipment to the passion for high culture that record companies "nurtured quite independently of their commercial aims" (1999, p. 616-617). Recording technologies were designed with classical music in mind, and because of this, Morton argues, the technical trajectory of recording served the interests of a (powerful) minority of consumers (1999, p. 623-624). These technologies and the notions of fidelity that motivated them were adopted into new recording devices, which are now "embedded in more recent inventions used to produce popular culture, and seem destined to stay there" (1999, p. 633). Morton contends that the recording culture formed during this process redefined aesthetic values and concepts of authenticity, which filter through to science, business, and both elite and popular culture (1999, p. 636-637).
Yet while classical music proved useful for the development of recording technologies, its bond with those technologies was not entirely smooth. Ashby notes that whereas popular music merged with recording "in symbiosis", concert art music encountered technology and "threw off sparks" that left both "irrevocably changed" (2010, p. 8). This stemmed from the fact that the nature of classical music works, and their worth as unique—and therefore valuable—cultural artefacts, was challenged once they could be reproduced and distributed en masse.
Similar debates had already flared in the early twentieth century, following photography’s ability to capture and duplicate an image, a subject Walter Benjamin explored in The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction (1936). Symes characterizes these arguments as a "cultural war" waged around "the legitimacy of mechanised music" (2004, p. 6). He contends that "many people questioned the phonograph’s authenticity as a vehicle of music, whose conditions it effectually destabilized", while others concluded that "phonographic music needed regulation lest its influence became unmanageable" (2004, p. 6-7). Symes states that classical musicians leveraged these discourses to rally support for the phonograph, while preserving the idea that "the concert was the ultimate articulation of music and the phonograph should defer to it" (2004, p. 7). Mimicking the aesthetics of live concert performance in the making of recordings became a way to enforce this deference. Similarly, because recording technologies were developed to advance classical music, production “fidelity” offered a point of contrast between classical and popular music.
The notion that recording should defer to live performance persists today, and in certain ways has gained "economic imperative" over the past decade, as digital music distribution began challenging traditional revenue streams tied to recording and distribution. During this period, classical music institutions have eagerly adopted communication technologies to create new schizophonic live performance “concert halls” by recording live performances in conventional venues and transmitting them live on other platforms. Although this started with live television and radio broadcasts of opera and classical concerts in the latter half of the twentieth century, the current focus is on paid spectatorship of HD (high definition) reproductions. A prominent example is the Metropolitan Opera Live in HD, where a television crew films a Metropolitan Opera production and broadcasts it live, via satellite, to participating cinemas worldwide (Metropolitan Opera, 2011). These cinemas offer high-resolution audio and video playback, and the live feed is augmented with pre-recorded “behind-the-scenes” footage to create a more intimate experience (2011). Similarly, the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra launched paid streaming of live concerts from their website under the tagline “Any Place, Any Time” (Battle, 2009, p. 12). According to Olaf Maninger, "each performance is captured by a complex system of microphones and high-definition, remote-control cameras, which zoom in on performers and scan the audience like one of Renoir's opera-box flaneurs" (2009, p. 12). 2,500 people watched the first concert stream in 2009, and more than 10,000 viewers had registered with the service by March 2009 (2009, p. 12). Artistic director and chief conductor Simon Rattle stated that the goal of the Digital Concert Hall "was not simply to pioneer a new concert-going experience but also vastly to increase the public's access to the orchestra, and to music in general" (2009, p. 12). Rattle felt the Digital Concert Hall fulfilled a necessary service because people now expected to receive art in their homes "like water" (2009, p. 12). These statements, along with other marketing materials for the project, suggest a continuation of the historical ethos that providing access to classical music through recording and broadcast media offers a social-cultural benefit.
While the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra cannot guarantee their online audience is watching concerts on HD-capable playback devices, high fidelity remains the cornerstone of the concert-hall aesthetic they aim for with their online streaming. The perceived value of “high definition” is imparted onto the product regardless of the audience’s equipment. The logic underpinning both the Metropolitan Opera’s and the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra’s paid live simulcasts is that HD more authentically reproduces the experience of attending a concert hall or opera house. HD is presented to the audience as something extra they can gain from the experience, beyond what standard broadcast media offer, thereby justifying the ticket price. Correspondingly, capturing a performance for HD streaming means concerts can later be sold on traditional recorded media, generating a secondary revenue stream. However stylized these live feeds may be, they allow classical music institutions to resell the experience of risk that attending live performances can generate. Battle says the Digital Concert Hall streams deliver a "palpable sense of drama" because "live performance is unique because of its risk and unpredictability" (2009, p. 12). Arguably, the drama and risk that classical music enthusiasts enjoy through these services stem from real-time assessment of a performer’s virtuosic craft—albeit mediated by HD close-ups, balanced microphone levels, and equalized, compressed audio mixes.
The reproduction of live performance has been pushed even further by the Australian Chamber Orchestra, which launched ACO Virtual in 2013. Described by Artistic Director Richard Tognetti as "immersive technology" (McClellan, 2013), ACO Virtual "features projections of 13 musicians surrounding you on all sides, with the sound of each player coming from the direction of their projection" (Australian Chamber Orchestra, 2013). Participants stand in the middle of the installation and control performance elements via a touchscreen. Tognetti says ACO Virtual "meant the audience could do what other orchestra audiences couldn’t - stand in middle of the orchestra", while ACO General Manager Timothy Calnin notes the project provides "a richer experience than watching on TV" (McClellan, 2013). Both Tognetti and Calnin anticipate that ACO Virtual will boost the orchestra’s presence in regional areas, educational environments, and other community spaces (McClellan, 2013). The immersive nature of the installation is intended to make participants "feel like you are in the orchestra", with Calnin adding that ACO Virtual achieves this through its "remarkable realism" (McClellan, 2013).
The emphasis on providing participants with a "realistic" "experience" is evident throughout the descriptive material on the ACO Virtual webpage, which states listeners can immerse themselves in "performances of music by Bach, Grieg, Smalley and Piazzolla" or "take charge of the band via a controller inside the installation" by spotlighting "one musician or many" (Australian Chamber Orchestra, 2013). Participants are encouraged to:
See how fast the musician's fingers move; Hear the sounds of each instrument whirl around you; Experience what the cellos sound like on their own, or the violas, or even just the double bass; Follow along with the projected musical score; Bring your instrument and play along with the installation; Feel the energy of playing with a world-class ensemble; Take the helm of the “greatest chamber orchestra on earth” and stand in for Richard Tognetti himself (Australian Chamber Orchestra, 2013).
The use of sense and action verbs like "see," "hear," "feel," "experience," and "play" in the promotional material for ACO Virtual aims to impress upon readers that it will engage participants through an affective, realistic representation of the Australian Chamber Orchestra and its repertoire. The stated goal of this “immersion” is to give "a unique understanding of how music is constructed" (Australian Chamber Orchestra, 2013). Technology enables this immersive experience. At the project’s launch, reporters noted ACO Virtual was "created in the same studio used to film Keanu Reeves in the Matrix films, Mod used 13 cameras to capture audio and 3D images of the orchestra" (McClellan, 2013). A “making of” video on the ACO Virtual webpage outlines the technical complexity of the project’s production process (Australian Chamber Orchestra, 2013). Cutting-edge, cinematic technology used in ACO Virtual is intended to function as a signifier of validity and prestige, thus adding value to a pre-recorded encounter with the Australian Chamber Orchestra. An HD video played in schools or regional venues would likely not be novel enough to distinguish itself from existing HD experiences of classical music. In this encounter, 3D, surround, audiovisual technology is used both to substitute for and generate excitement about a real-world performance. Arguably, while the Australian Chamber Orchestra may lack the resources to create a Virtual Concert Hall competitive with the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra, they have developed a viable substitute—a movable installation that tours regional Australia to (potentially) cultivate new audiences. Like the Virtual Concert Hall, ACO Virtual generates additional income streams through touring revenue and sales of merchandise at the installation site.
In Liveness: Performance in a Mediatized Culture (2008), Auslander argues that mediatization’s influence on live events has shaped live performances to such an extent that they are "now literally made for television":
In many instances, the incursion of the mediatized into the live has followed a particular historical pattern. Initially, the mediatized form is modeled on the live form, but it eventually usurps the live form’s position in the cultural economy. The live form then starts to replicate the mediatized form. This pattern is apparent in the historical relationship of theatre and television... To the extent that live performances now emulate mediatized representations, they have become second-hand recreations of themselves as refracted through mediatization (2008, p. 183).
Auslander, drawing on ideas from Jacques Attali and Walter Benjamin, considers this transformation possible because audience perception and expectations "shape and are shaped by technological change and the uses of technology influenced by capital investment" (2008, p. 184). This echoes Rattle’s stated reason for the Berlin Philharmonic establishing a digital concert hall: their audience simply expected to receive performances in their homes "like water" (Battle, 2009). Classical music audiences have become accustomed to performances of repertory that have been carefully edited, polished, processed, and amplified on recordings. They appreciate that, and so they like when similar processes are replicated in live performance. The distinction between live performance, recordings, and other forms of mediation is becoming less important than the choice and availability of the experience. Auslander rejects arguments "for ontological differences between live and mediatized cultural forms", suggesting instead that liveness is "a historically contingent concept continually in a state of redefinition," meaning the meanings and uses of live performance must be assessed within specific cultural contexts (2008, p. 184). While Auslander’s discussion centers on popular culture and music, a parallel transformation is occurring in classical music, with audiences embracing increasingly mediatized interventions in performance events—such as the incorporation of amplification in the Metropolitan Opera House auditorium and the successful international uptake of the Metropolitan Opera Live in HD cinema broadcasts. Similarly, the Australian Chamber Orchestra appears to be redefining the experience of performance by using their recorded media installation to substitute for regional and school tours. Recalling Tognetti’s remark that ACO Virtual audiences "could do what other orchestra audiences couldn't: stand in middle of the orchestra" (McClellan, 2013), its marketability rests on providing an alternate performance experience that the orchestra could not offer through its traditional concert program.
This article does not end with a formal conclusion, but instead takes a speculative and provocative position on fidelity and mediatized performance, which the author hopes will generate discussion about the implications of standardized aesthetics for classical music repertory recordings.
Significantly, the development of digital, virtual concert experiences occurs at a time when journalists like Mark Vanhoenacker declare the death of classical music, citing convincing financial and statistical analyses to support their claims (2014). However, it is important that analysis of classical music sales and audience trends does not become limited to a sort of voyeuristic scorekeeping—tracking rates of decline and the closure of established repertory ensembles, organizations, and venues. If traditional performance modalities inherited from the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries are potentially "boring" for audiences accustomed to highly mediatized versions of repertoire, and if remaining audiences demand increased enhancement and access through technology, then the ways technologies are applied to classical music warrant careful scrutiny. These kinds of explorations require significant capital investment, and since they are still emerging as performance formats, they also carry an element of risk. The world’s most elite repertory ensembles can absorb the risks and costs of exploring mediatized performance. But as these technologies continue to evolve, so too will the benchmarks for high definition and high fidelity media production, prompting further investment and exploration if such values remain privileged in the presentation of classical music repertory.
By consistently representing the ideals of fidelity and virtuosity through a singular, fidelity-centered aesthetic of media production, notions of faithful performance and faithful reproduction become linked. Auslander argues that live performance forms come to replicate their mediatized representations (2008, p. 183), a pattern demonstrated by studies examining recording’s impact on classical music performance styles, discussed earlier. Audiences expect that high-quality live performances will emulate an experience of repertoire found on recordings. This creates a kind of circular logic where it becomes increasingly difficult to realize virtuosic, "authentic" repertory performance in a live context because audience expectations are continually expanded by engagement with high-definition, immersive media forms that in turn claim to emulate or surpass the live performance experience. Smaller repertory ensembles must compete with expectations set by mediatized representations produced by the world’s most elite institutions, such as the Metropolitan Opera, the Vienna Philharmonic, and the Australian Chamber Orchestra. This establishes criteria where the value of repertory music performance gets defined by those ensembles and organizations most capable of affording extensive media production resources. In effect, by linking the ideals of fidelity and virtuosity to
My argument has been that conditions concentrating value-generation on elite ensembles — or on those best able to mimic and produce live performances through such high-fidelity media forms — make it easier for audiences to disengage from local live repertory performance, because the economics of value have become unsustainable. This position demands further investigation if perceptions of classical music are to be revived.
Returning to Auslander’s observation that performance remains “a historically contingent concept continually in a state of redefinition” (2008, p. 184), this article has shown how practitioners’ choices — deliberate or accidental — shape relationships among virtuosity, fidelity, and performance practices in today’s classical landscape. Because audiences primarily encounter classical music through recorded or broadcast media, the way performances are constructed such that the making of and media has far-reaching consequences. If live repertory performances fail to engage compared with their recorded counterparts, the problem may stem from expectations shaped by recorded media. Popular music genres show the flexibility afforded by variable production aesthetics. Now that we have moved beyond McClary’s “century of repetition,” perhaps it is time to acknowledge that presenting classical repertoire as a single, polished, unbroken surface serves neither listeners nor musicians. There may be room for recording technologies to bring more than fidelity onto the concert stage.