Music frozen in amber

Despite frequently expressed concerns that "classical music" is a dying art form, in many ways, listeners have never had it so good. Not only is music performed live by orchestras and artists in virtually every city of any size, but a large number of interpretations of any given piece are available on CD (and vinyl).

Even those of us with the tinniest of ears appreciate that music heard in a concert hall differs from music heard at home on a sound system. Recorded music offers the closest the artist can come to perfection, albeit filtered through an electronic medium; live performance is more spontaneous, and the music may not be free from the performer's small errors or questionable judgments.

How does a musical piece get recorded and packaged for a CD? That's the question that pianist Jeremy Denk addresses in a witty and very well written article in this week's New Yorker. I've heard Denk play a number of times with chamber groups in Seattle. He's a fine pianist, and plays with odd postures and facial expressions that have become -- in my mind, at least -- his trademark. It's a pleasure to see past the guy at the piano to the man worrying about how his playing will sound once it's recorded.

Denk's writing reveals much of himself -- as does his playing itself, I'm sure, to those who know how to listen.

When I go home to visit my parents, my father has his stereo on all day. Surrounded by my junior-high-school spelling and typing trophies, I stew in my room, thinking of all the hours and tears that went into his musical wallpaper. I remember my parents hounding me to practice continuously, with the best intentions but without having to practice themselves. I fall prey to childish resentment: has my dad really earned the music that fills his house?

And he suspects that these recordings to which his dad listens, electronically tuned to perfection, aren't the real thing.

They're manicured artifacts, from which the essential spectacle of human effort has been clipped away.

But then Denk's manager asks him to prepare his own "manicured artifact," to record his interpretation of Charles Ives's "Concord" sonata. And so he shares his experience with us.

The first lesson he teaches is that the artist doesn't just sit down at a piano in front of a mike, flex his fingers, and let 'er rip. Instead, he plays each individual section of the sonata numerous times, varying his interpretations; the final recording is to be a composite of the best sections drawn from many playings. Then, Denk sits down with the sound engineer and listens to what he has played.

Every piano sounds different. Every individual microphone has different characteristics. The distance of each microphone from the piano, the angle at which it's oriented -- all these factors affect the sound that's actually recorded. Even when perfection in the instrument and recording devices seems achieved, the artist feels frustrated:

The most maddening paradox of recording is that what you hear in the playback does not resemble what you're sure you played. You hear two tracks at once: what you desire and what you have produced.

Denk and his engineer work their way, section by section, through the sonata, trying to match the recorded track to the ideal track in Denk's head.

He realizes, as he works, that technical perfection may not even be the proper goal. For example, slight misalignments in the piano's works, where the damper touches the string after each note, can result in what Denk calls an "aural schmear." He works with his engineer to remove all of these imperfections, only to discover that, once they're finished, they have somehow lessened the quality of the listening experience.

Eventually he [the engineer] plays me a schmear-free version. He looks so proud and satisfied that I can't bear to tell him that the result seems somehow sanitized. It's as if the reality of the piano had evaporated. I miss the schmear.

In the end, Denk, with the assistance of his engineer, pieces together relatively perfect segments of the sonata, recorded at different times, into a seamless whole -- resulting in an overall performance more perfect than any musician could achieve in a live concert.

And yet, the perfection achieved is never absolute. And it's in this lack of perfection that Denk actually finds relief -- there will always be something finer to which he can aspire.

No matter how wild the performance, something about the "Concord" always needs even more. I pressed eject on my stereo, thinking, No, you haven't made me redundant just yet. ... I realized that I couldn't wait for the next performance, when I would do it completely differently.

For me, for whom even the most familiar sonata contains subtleties that I can't even understand, let alone sense while listening, it's both humbling and inspiring to realize that a sonata is imbued with so much depth, with such complexity, that I could spend a lifetime simply listening to -- forget about playing -- the sonata and never exhaust what it has to teach me.

As for Jeremy Denk -- he's happy to realize that however perfectly recorded may be the music his dad hears on his stereo, it doesn't compete with the music he plays in live concerts. The near perfection of a studio recording and the spontaneity and "reality" of a live performance: each has its place, and Denk favors us with both.