Is It Live Or Is It Memorex?

Is It Live Or Is It Memorex?

A few years ago, well, 26 years ago to be exact, my wife and I

visited Moscow where a highlight was a performance of the

opera “Faust” in the Kremlin. It was a truly grand production,

including members of the Bolshoi Ballet, outdoing the “Faust”

we had seen at the Met in New York. The Communists” use of

culture and top-notch entertainment as opiates to compensate for

the people”s otherwise drab and servile existence was clear. The

tickets were very reasonable in price and the audience obviously

included the “working class” as well as the affluent.

I”m ashamed to confess that, until this year, we lived in New

Jersey for over 46 years without once going to a New York

Philharmonic concert. Recently we attended a concert which

began with a pleasant Mozart piano concerto performed by a

charming Mitsuko Uchida. In contrast, the other piece in this

pre-lunch program was heavy stuff indeed. For the first time, the

Philharmonic was performing the hour-long Shostakovich”s 11th

Symphony, which won the USSR”s Lenin Prize in 1958. The

basis for the symphony is the “dress rehearsal” for the Russian

revolution of 1917, the 1905 massacre of some 130 and

wounding of hundreds of other people in the Palace Square in St.

Petersburg. The Russian born conductor, Yakov Kreizberg,

describes the experience of conducting this work as akin to being

“hit by a train.” (Kreizberg actually was enrolled as a child in

the Glinka Choir school right next to Palace Square and once

performed in the choir with Shostakovich only a few feet away in

his box seat.) Well, at the end of the hour I think all of us in the

audience felt that we had indeed been hit by a train. As the baton

fell at the last note, Kreizberg stood facing the orchestra,

obviously exhausted. There was absolutely no applause for at

least 5 seconds; the audience was so thoroughly drained and

emotionally involved. We left feeling that we had truly

experienced something quite special.

Naturally, when I got home I immediately thought of the

relatively new blue light emitting diode (LED) and the

limitations of listening to or watching a concert via the media of

compact disks, videotapes or TV. How many of you still use (or

have even heard of or used) the old fashioned long-playing and

single records played on turntables with diamond tipped needles

or styluses? Just the other day I saw an article stating that many

audiophiles still maintain that the digital modes of recording

musical performances do not begin to capture the true sound of

the symphony orchestra or the operatic aria. The sophisticated

music lover alleges that, despite the occasional pops or

scratchiness of the record, the emotion just is not captured in the

technological stolidity of the CD. This article appeared just as

we were discussing the fate of our disgracefully overflowing

basement and the collection of records contributing to the mess.

Now I must resurrect our long neglected turntable and see if the

comments ring true. Unfortunately, or perhaps fortunately, my

hearing has probably degraded so that I won”t be able to tell the

difference.

Oh, “What about the blue laser?” you remind me. You may have

read my earlier column on red, green and yellow LEDs. The

Holy Grail for LED workers had been for decades the

achievement of a viable blue LED. Some of you may remember

that years ago there was a big improvement in the color rendition

of our color TVs when someone, I believe it was at Sylvania,

came up with a better blue phosphor. This allowed increased

intensities of the other colors and the skies were bluer and the

roses redder, as we see today. With red, green and blue LEDs

the possibility of combining these colors to give any other color

comes into play. Back in the early days of the LED, we had

hopes of making flat panel TVs using LEDs but didn”t have the

blue. Later, it turns out that the common liquid crystal displays

in the laptop computer filled the bill in a satisfactory and much

cheaper fashion.

But what does this have to do with music? Well, blue light has a

significantly shorter wavelength than red or infrared light. This

is important in the compact disk or the DVD that is now

appearing as standard in your multimedia computer. The music

or video stored on the disk is really just a bunch of little holes on

the surface of the disk. The holes are burned into the disk by a

laser. Now a semiconductor laser is essentially a fancy LED that

emits a narrow beam of light that doesn”t spread out like the light

from a light bulb. The size of the hole that can be burned into

the disk depends on the wavelength, the shorter the wavelength

the smaller the hole. When the disk is played, the presence or

absence of a hole is picked up by a laser in your CD player;

again, the smaller the wavelength the smaller a hole the laser will

detect. By using blue lasers, an offspring of the blue LED, a

very sizeable increase in the amount of information that can be

stored on a disk will result. Will this increase translate into a

more realistic sound and picture clarity? I don”t know the

answer but I”d be willing to predict that nothing will ever match

the experience of a live performance.

A couple months ago, we saw on public TV a “Live at Lincoln

Center” simulcast of a tribute to Duke Ellington in which

Wynton Marsalis and the Lincoln Center Jazz Orchestra joined

the New York Philharmonic in a program of Ellington music.

My wife and I agreed that the program was not very inspiring

and in fact we regretted that, coincidentally, we had tickets to the

very same concert two days later. Well, being there in person

vividly demonstrated the limits of technology in conveying the

essence of the musical experience. As with the Shostakovich, we

thoroughly enjoyed and were caught up in every piece and the

enthusiasm of Kurt Masur and the members of both orchestras

was something to behold. The joint was really jumping! And

the sound emanating from those instruments were totally foreign

to our concert in our home.

This reminded us of the time we attended one of Frank Sinatra”s

last concerts, at the Garden State Art Center in New Jersey.

Fortunately for us, Old Blue Eyes” voice was in good form that

night but what impressed me most were Nelson Riddle”s

fabulous orchestral arrangements. The sounds were like none I

had heard. For the first time, I realized the genius of Riddle and

of Frankie himself in the perfect blending with and enhancing of

his voice by the orchestral accompaniment.

Allen F. Bortrum

[Editor: Dr. Bortrum has been travelling extensively in Europe

the past few weeks. Upon his return I will encourage him to

answer some of the questions that a few of you have been

asking.]