Put on several recordings of the same symphony from the 1950s or 1960s, and one hears almost immediately how deeply an orchestra’s place was once audible in its sound. One does not merely hear several interpretations of Brahms or Beethoven; one hears several locales. The Philadelphia Orchestra under Ormandy does not inhabit the sound world as Cleveland under Szell does, and Chicago under Reiner is another creature altogether. Vienna, Berlin, London, New York, and a multitude of others: each possessed, to varying degrees and in different repertories, some recognizable manner of speech. It might declare itself in the song of the winds, in the weight of the strings, or simply in that more elusive matter of phrasing, where several dozen small habits are obfuscated to the listener and but somehow register immediately.
Listen in the same way to orchestras today and those differences are harder to find. This is not because orchestral playing has deteriorated. In the most obvious sense the opposite is true: the best orchestras of the present day play with a technical security that would have astonished many earlier musicians, and the general floor of professional competence has risen enormously. Difficult scores are dispatched with a cleanliness once exceptional, and there are still intense performances, sometimes great ones. Yet ask a different question—could one identify the orchestra after twenty seconds?—and the answer becomes less certain. Berlin remains a magnificent orchestra, but magnificence is not the same thing as a distinctive house style.
What has been lost is best understood as accent, and an accent is not a defect in a language. It is evidence that the speaker came from somewhere.
The usual word for what replaced it is cosmopolitanism, though that seems to confuse two very different things. Proper cosmopolitanism depends upon difference. The cosmopolitan city is interesting because peoples bring their own manners and assumptions into contact with one another; exchange occurs because there is something to exchange. If every place eventually acquires the same habits, the same forms, and finally much the same manner of speech, cosmopolitanism has defeated itself. What remains is a homogenized culture distributed geographically.
The orchestra has undergone something similar, and for reasons so numerous and ordinary that tomes could be written on the transformation. The airplane alone did a great deal. Conductors and players could circulate through the musical world with a speed that would once have been physically absurd. A young oboist might study in Austria, continue his training in America, and eventually take an orchestra position in London. None of this is bad in itself, and migration among musicians is hardly new. American orchestras were built in considerable measure by Europeans; the early New York Philharmonic and Metropolitan Opera were full of them. But there is a difference between musicians emigrating in groups to create a strong local musical culture and musicians circulating continually through an international flux. In the first case, movement may create a new and shared accent. In the second, it tends gradually to smooth the old speech patterns away.
Conductors have circulated in much the same fashion. The modern music director may hold more than one position while guest-conducting freely across continents, and even where he holds only one directorship he commonly spends a modest part of the season with his own orchestra. There was travel before, and there were famous itinerant conductors, but the proportions have changed. The older maestro who remained for years with one ensemble had the opportunity not merely to obtain performances from it but to alter its reflexes. A conductor who arrives for two weeks can produce a thrilling concert. To produce a culture requires a steady relationship.
Recording may have done still more, because it changed not only how music was heard but how it was learned. This is one of the few respects in which I am prepared to call recordings evil, although I own many thousands of them and have spent a large part of my life listening to them. Their evil is the familiar evil of the representation which becomes so convenient, so abundant, and finally so authoritative that it begins to displace the act itself.
A recording is not music. It is the preserved image of music: evidence of something that happened during an afternoon, an evening, or a number of afternoons and evenings, assembled less or more honestly according to the engineering practices of the day. The distinction now sounds unnecessarily philosophical because for most people recorded sound is the principal form in which music exists. Yet musical life was built upon living relations: the student learned, the performer played, the teacher passed something on. Recording eventually entered all of these relations. The student who wished to learn a symphony no longer encountered it chiefly through the score, his teacher, and the concert hall. He could hear Toscanini, Karajan, Bernstein, or Solti whenever he wished on record. Later he could hear everybody via an app.
There could scarcely be a greater gift to the serious musician, and yet the gift carries its own poison. Once every player can hear every other player, peculiarities are exposed to comparison. An unusual portamento is no longer simply how the violinists in one city play; it becomes an interpretive decision which can be compared with dozens of alternatives. A local wind texture becomes one sound among many. A conductor hears what another conductor achieved in a difficult passage, an orchestra hears itself against the recorded standard, and that standard gradually enters the rehearsal as an expectation of how clean and balanced an orchestra ought to be. We acquire unprecedented knowledge of one another and, by degrees, cease to resemble what formed us.
Teaching follows the same movement. Conservatories now feed an international labor market, and such a market naturally prizes transferable excellence. The modern orchestral audition is revealing not because the audition itself is new, but because it has become increasingly standardized: musicians trained in different places compete through much the same repertory of excerpts, under criteria designed to travel easily from one orchestra to another. It can determine whether an applicant possesses intonation, rhythm, control, and mastery of the usual phrases; it is less capable of discovering whether he carries within him the inherited sound of Dresden or Munich, especially when there may no longer be any settled local inheritance for him to carry.
The modern orchestral player thus emerges as a formidable technician, trained around the excerpts upon which employment depends. There were such musicians in every earlier generation, but technique more often existed inside a recognizable school of playing. A violinist belonged to a teacher, the teacher to another teacher, and both to a place. Today the lineage may still be traceable on paper while the audible result becomes increasingly international. If the orchestra itself no longer possesses a language, the entering player can hardly be expected to learn it.
Instruments contribute to the change as well. Makers, models, and techniques circulate internationally, and standards converge because the professional world converges. Here Vienna remains the great instructive exception. The Vienna Philharmonic has consciously retained instruments and playing traditions specific to itself, including the Viennese oboe and horn, and treats its characteristic sound as something to be taught and protected rather than trusted to survive by accident. One may like the result or dislike it; that is secondary. Vienna has understood the more important point, which is that an inherited style abandoned to the general current will eventually disappear.
Such protection is difficult because genuine style consists of hundreds of assumptions which nobody thinks to write down until they begin to disappear. How should a note begin? How much latitude may a player take inside ensemble? How does a Viennese waltz lean without becoming a parody of itself? These are not quite rules, and they cannot be preserved by handbook or committee. They belong to the accumulated practice of people who have worked beside one another long enough for preference to harden into custom and, eventually, into a sound world.
There are still conductors whose performances can be recognized. Manfred Honeck is an obvious example, particularly because his long association with Pittsburgh has allowed his habits to become something more than a succession of guest-conducting effects. Teodor Currentzis is another, although his individuality is of a different kind: part of what makes him recognizable is his refusal of the settled modern orchestral manner, often through devices associated with an element of historically informed performance—pure tone, reduced vibrato, hard articulation. There are still conductors whose manner can be recognized, but they are exceptions, and the orchestras before them have usually lost much of the local character which an earlier conductor might have inherited, resisted, or intensified. The old ideal was not merely a distinctive conductor or a distinctive orchestra, but the encounter between the two: a strong musical personality working through an ensemble which already possessed habits, memories, and a sound of its own.
Historically informed performance offers the strongest objection to the entire argument. Hear Brahms played by a modern HIP-influenced ensemble and then by a large conventional symphony orchestra, and no one could plausibly claim that orchestral style has disappeared. Articulation, vibrato, balance, and instrumental weight may differ radically; even the conception of what constitutes Romantic expression may be altered. HIP has therefore accomplished something invaluable by restoring the possibility that familiar scores might speak another language.
Its success contains an irony, however, for HIP itself is frequently international. A French conductor may lead a German ensemble according to ideas developed partly by English and Dutch musicians from research into nineteenth-century Viennese practice. What has returned is not necessarily the old local accent but a new dialect, intellectually recovered and then distributed across borders. It may be a fascinating dialect and, at its best, revealing; still, the manner survives because it has become conscious enough to be taught as a manner.
The older orchestral styles were seldom programs in this sense. Philadelphia did not wake each morning and decide to possess the Philadelphia Sound. The tradition accumulated. Players entered an institution in which older players already knew how matters went, and the newcomer learned by proximity, imitation, correction, and those innumerable small accommodations by which any living craft perpetuates itself. An accent in speech is acquired in much the same way. The child does not resolve to adopt the vowels of his parents. He merely speaks.
Perhaps this explains why modern orchestral performances can be so superb and still leave an occasional impression of safety. Standards are extremely high because everybody knows what is possible, but everybody also knows what is acceptable. The roughness that once accompanied individuality is easier to remove than individuality is to preserve. A peculiar attack may indeed have been technically inferior; an eccentric balance may genuinely have concealed something in the score. A conductor's sudden acceleration may have endangered ensemble. Correct each fault separately and the argument for correction seems irresistible. Do it everywhere, to everything, for several generations, and eventually one discovers that the faults were entangled with characteristics which cannot so easily be put back.
Automobiles provide a vulgar but visible analogy. There were pervasive fashions in the 1950s and 1960s, and no manufacturer designed in isolation, but a Citroën did not look like a Cadillac, nor either of them like a Mercedes. National traditions and individual designers could operate within common technological requirements without arriving at one international automobile. Today the average car is safer, more efficient, and more reliable than its ancestor, yet one may walk through a parking lot and find that much of the world has converged upon approximately the same shape. Nobody would sensibly trade modern brakes for tailfins; nevertheless something was lost when improvement became inseparable from resemblance.
Cities are exposed to the same pressure. Nobody travels to Rome in order to discover New York, or to Chicago in order to find Paris. The pleasure of movement depends upon the persistence of place, and there is something self-defeating in a globalism which makes movement ever easier while reducing the difference between destinations. Cosmopolitanism, properly understood, brings unlike things into relation. It ought not to require them to become alike.
No reasonable person would answer this by forbidding musicians to travel, smashing recordings, restoring inferior instruments, or requiring an oboist to remain within fifty miles of his birthplace. One cannot simply reconstruct the older musical world, nor should one wish to recover every habit it contained. Technical excellence is not the enemy, and an orchestra is not improved by making it play badly.
The loss lies elsewhere, and it is considerably greater than the disappearance of a few attractive regionalisms. What has weakened is one of the principal means by which musical culture was once transmitted: the passage of style from player to player, conductor to orchestra, teacher to pupil, until a body of musicians possessed ways of hearing and doing things which belonged neither to an individual nor to a written rule. Such traditions could contain mannerisms, provincial habits, and even technical deficiencies, but they also contained knowledge—knowledge which existed only because generations of musicians had practiced it together. Once that continuity is broken, it cannot be recovered merely by studying old recordings or deciding that an orchestra should sound distinctive again.
This is why the technical superiority of modern orchestras does not settle the question in their favor. We have gained extraordinary precision while surrendering a degree of character that precision cannot replace. An orchestra capable of almost anything is not necessarily an orchestra that has something to say. When Philadelphia, Chicago, Berlin, or London once sounded unmistakably themselves, the difference was not decorative. It was the audible consequence of separate musical cultures, each carrying its own inheritance into the common repertory. Beethoven was the same Beethoven, but he did not arrive from the same place.
That plurality was one of the great riches of orchestral civilization, and its diminution is a profound loss. The musical world is larger, faster, better connected, and in many respects more accomplished than it has ever been; yet in learning to speak so fluently to itself, it has forgotten many of its accents. What disappears with those accents is not merely color, nor even memory. The notes remain unchanged, but the world capable of discovering all that they contain has narrowed.