“In a year off from Radiohead, I’ve been writing scored music for small string groups—first a residency with the Australian Chamber Orchestra … and, more recently, the London Contemporary Orchestra (LCO),’ writes Radiohead guitarist Jonny Greenwood in Friday’s (6/13) Guardian (U.K.) ‘It’s intended for concerts instead of recordings, which is a new way of thinking about music for me. It’s led me to think differently about live music…. Listening to the ACO rehearse Shostakovich string quartets was the musical highlight of my trip to Australia, and watching the LCO play is a thrilling experience that recordings can’t match. I love the impermanence of the music live…. I still enjoy recording studios and … am so often seduced by electronic music…. And yet, applied to acoustic classical music, all bets are off…. They approximate and inflate rather than distil and concentrate. And with sonically complex contemporary music such as Ligeti or Penderecki, mics and speakers make things sound harsh and discordant.… When an orchestra starts from silence in a quiet room it’s glorious.… If you’re interested, hunt out live classical music…. Think of those speakers as barriers instead of amplifiers, and listen to the real thing whenever you can.”
Posted June 16, 2014
