Why Some Music is Better Recorded than Live

While a few posts ago I made a case for live music, actually there is a good bit of music that probably is best heard recorded. One thing I noticed over the years after finishing my music degrees was I listened less and less to recordings of Classical music of the type I might actually perform as a soloist or with orchestra. Why? Because a recording is basically a pale representation of the way it feels to really experience this music in a live hall, especially for those that have performed a good bit on the professional level.

That said, there are whole categories of music that in the great scheme of things I would prefer to experience as recordings. Speaking generally it is music created in a recording studio environment.

One good example is a CD that was a favorite of the family on our recent trip, Herb Alpert: Definitive Hits. My older brother bought basically everything Alpert put out when it was new in the early 1960s and I listened to it all growing up on LPs. For my kids it is all new and coming back to it now and listening to it again with fresh ears what makes the arrangements pop is the fact that they were recorded in a studio. Sure, the arrangements could mostly be done live, and the video below is an example of that which is interesting to check out even with the low quality of the video as it is so rare to see a real live performance of this material. If you don’t know this music well feel free to skip ahead to the 2:30 and 5:15 marks, these tunes are among his most popular.

What would it sound like sitting there in the audience? It would have been memorable for sure but the overall sound could not have been nearly as good as the commercial recordings which had many interesting studio effects. But on the plus side you would be able to see in the room just like on the video that at the very end the second trumpet player takes the high notes, something you would not easily guess from a recording.

And of course on our long road trip the “best of” recording was a great thing to have for portable entertainment.

In short, there is a place for recordings and sometimes recordings are better than live music, but in other cases the live music is certainly the way to go if you can. It just depends what it is.

One final example I would give for comparison is the opening of Strauss Also sprach Zarathustra. The Phoenix Symphony has it on the schedule for next year and it has an opening that while impressive on good speakers I think we would all agree is much more impressive when performed live by a fine orchestra in a fine hall.