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EDUCATION
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MUSICAL AVATARS
Crystal Chan
For a few glorious minutes, you
become Haydn. That’s the idea
behind the Schulich School of
Music Centre for Interdisciplinary
Research in Music Media and
Technology (CIRMMT)’s latest star project.
The first-ever recording using CIRMMT’s
cutting-edge ‘room-capture’ technology
celebrates the 200th anniversary of Joseph
Haydn’s death. Virtual Haydn, a NAXOS
four-Blu-ray-disc set of the composer’s
complete keyboard works performed by
pianist and professor Tom Beghin, was
released last month.
Before this, capturing period music had
obvious flaws. Most recordings take place
in or approximate the sound of concert
halls. But those were uncommon until late
in Haydn’s day. Recording in-studio and
reproducing authentic performance
spaces’ acoustics only in post-production
means musicians play in dry, acoustically
perfect rooms with little reverberation and cater
their performance to this unnatural setting.
Move the recording on-location, however, and
one finds 18 th century concert spaces now surrounded
by modern noise and traffic. Myriad
other factors get in the way: instruments such
as square pianos and clavichords are rare, for
example, and original instruments’ response
and tone have degraded from aging.
Frustrated by these flaws, Beghin and Martha
de Francisco, a noted recording engineer and
producer, decided to collaborate on a revolutionary
recording on their first day of teaching at
McGill in 2003. Smooth-playing replicas of seven
historically accurate instruments were commissioned,
many the first of their kind in modern
times; some can play then-common elements
such as “Viennese short octaves” (requiring
wider chords), which cannot be played on modern
keyboards.
THE OLD MUSIC
BECOMES MODERN
TECHNOLOGY AGAIN
The tables really turned when CIRMMT
founding director Wieslaw Woszcyk came along:
what if, he suggested, their studio was transformed
into Haydn’s study, or the Esterháza
Castle in Hungary, where Haydn was the resident
composer, or the Holywell Music Room,
where Haydn played during the English tours
that gained him celebrity status?
To do so, they developed technology capable of
capturing the acoustic characteristics of these
and six other rooms. These characteristics can
then be plugged into a studio. Back in Montreal,
Beghin performed pieces on specific instruments
and ‘in specific rooms’ according to the carefully
researched music history of Haydn’s repertoire.
The music is manipulated live, so Beghin can
hear the music as if he were in one of Haydn’s old
haunts as he performs—no traffic or plane tickets
necessary. Some sonatas are even recorded ‘in
Haydn’s study’ at his clavichord, with the microphone
configuration directing the sound from
the player’s position. It’s the closest one can get
inside a composer’s head.
“The old music becomes modern technology
again,” said Beghin.
This crowning jewel of the historically
informed performance movement comes with a
making-of documentary and one-minute clips of
the same music played in all possible pairings of
room and keyboard for the listener to compare. ■
www.thevirtualhaydn.com
- TOM BEGHIN
PHOTO : JACQUES ROBERT
OTHER NEWS FROM MCGILL
The popularity of the graduate program at
McGill’s Schulich School of music has compelled
the school to create a second orchestra (the
McGill Sinfonietta) to provide students with
more performing opportunities. Invited artists
for the school’s Year of the Woodwinds include
bassoonist Carlo Colombo, flutist Jeanne
Baxtresser, oboist Stefan Schilli and clarinetist
Larry Combs while percussionist Joe LaBarbera is
this year’s Jazz Visiting Artist. New on the faculty
include Matthias Maute and François Ouimet
in the choral department and Richard King in
Sound Recording. David Lefkowich will guest
direct Opera McGill’s January production of
Stravinsky’s The Rake’s Progress. Don MacLean,
who is in his last year as Dean, hopes to raise the
$10-million needed to complete the School’s
world-class sound recording studio.
Wah Keung Chan
Novembre 2009 November 65