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Splicing Records

Splicing music, for those who don't know, involves recording multiple takes, splicing them, and putting the best segments together seamlessly (one would hope). The public is of many minds on this practice. Many (myself included) consider it to be a kind of subterfuge and condemn it. Others say, Who cares if the records are spliced? What matters is the final product - the music. (This second group of people no doubt also considers imitations of great works of art to be no different from the originals.) Still others say, Everyone does it - what're you gonna do? And finally there's Charles Rosen, who gives a performer's view on the whole thing.

Rosen says, It's not fair to the performer to expect him to give a perfect performance of a piece in one take. Maybe he's having a bad day, or maybe he had an unfortunate slip-up in a particular passage. It's unfair to immortalize these mistakes on record and have the public characterize him by them forever. Live performances are different, because the audience only retains the quiddities of a performance in memory. Records are forever. Rosen says that splicing records is a great blessing to a performer. That may well be the case.

Interestingly, Rosen argues that splicing is in principle not a whole lot different from recording multiple takes until the performer finally gets the desired result, as Rachmaninoff apparently was in the habit of doing. Both are artificial in similar ways.

All excellent points. Still, I think there's a fine line, if any, between splicing records and outright deception. Let's look at some extreme examples.

Horowitz in 1965 gave his "Historic Return" concert at Carnegie Hall, during which he made a particularly egregious mistake in the second movement of Schumann's Fantasie in C Major, Op. 17. So egregious, in fact, that it was guaranteed to be in the public memory long after the audience had left the concert hall. When the recording of the concert was released, however, people were astonished to find that the mistake was not on record. Horowitz had stayed back in the hall and given a second performance of the Fantasie in order to splice it up with the actual live recording and market this chimerical performance as "live".

Then we have pianists like Krystian Zimmerman, whose reputation for being a "flawless" pianist and one of the "finest" pianists alive is built on his obsessive tendency to do things like recording 76 takes of the Liszt Sonata before he can finally be satisfied with his performance. Is this that much different from attempting 76 free throws before finally getting one in and being hailed as a sharpshooter because of that one basket?

And finally, if the end result is all that matters, then people should have no problem with pianists like Joyce Hatto, who built a career on recordings made by other pianists that were released under her name. The story of Joyce Hatto gave critics a good hearty laugh and caused their monocles to pop off their faces and land on their tweedy paunches; but the critics were forbearing, and future emulators of Joyce Hatto may not find themselves so well treated.

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