Sonic Grading, Part 3: The Temp Track Illusion

I thought I was hearing something solemn and church-like. I hadn't considered how far that impression had traveled from the springtime world of the text.

In Part 1, I described the heavy, organ-like sound I heard in “Veris leta facies” from Orff's Carmina Burana. In Part 2, I used that impression to guide my room, choir, and EQ choices.

The recording was Michael Tilson Thomas conducting the Cleveland Orchestra in 1974 (MusicWeb International). I had heard it as something weathered and liturgical, but I was treating that impression as though it told me how the recording had been made.

What I found in the recording

The three things I'd been trying to separate in the temp were useful here: the composition, the performance, and the production. Looking into each one gave me reasons to reconsider what I'd heard.

• The composition: The text of “Veris leta facies” welcomes spring with birdsong, flowers, love, and “a thousand joys” (Los Angeles Master Chorale program). That's a very different starting point from the oppressive, ritual quality I heard against the picture. The original orchestration also includes two pianos and celesta, but no organ (LA Phil).
• The performance: Critic David Hurwitz described this interpretation as “Orff seen through the lens of Stravinsky's Les Noces,” contrasting its obsessive rhythmic precision with the warmth and folksiness of Eugen Jochum's recording (Classics Today). I was listening to a particular reading of the work, one that brought different qualities forward. The conductor and performers had already shaped what reached me.
• The production: Reviewing the reissue, Nick Barnard describes how producer Andrew Kazdin planned the sessions for four-channel, quadraphonic sound (MusicWeb International). The performers were arranged in the round, and the placement of instrumental and choral groups changed between sections (MusicWeb International).

The sessions took place at Masonic Auditorium in Cleveland and Columbia's 30th Street Studio in New York; Barnard also comments on the cavernous sound of the Masonic venue (MusicWeb International). I haven't established how the particular stereo version I streamed was made, and I can't attribute its sound to a specific transfer process.

What struck me was how much had happened between the springtime text and my experience of the temp. I had heard a performance and a production, placed against a violent scene, and supplied my own explanation for the result.

What I brought to the listening

I wasn't hearing what I thought I was hearing. The chapel was an image I brought to the recording, shaped by the scene, the director's feedback, and the cue I was already beginning to imagine.

There isn't actually a chapel in the film. “Dusty chapel” was my way of describing a sound: the weight, the roughness, and the sense of space I wanted around the ensemble.

That imagined place was shaping what I built. It helped me choose an organ, blend the choir libraries, and work toward a particular room sound, even though I wasn't matching a location on screen.

The three-part checklist had helped me look beyond the notes, but the film and my own expectations were influencing how I heard all three parts. My response was useful; my explanation of where it came from needed more care.

As the music changes hands

The meaning of a piece of music is not fixed at composition. It accumulates. What interested me here was how each person could carry something forward while also changing what the next person heard.

A conductor's interpretation, a producer's recording choices, and an editor's use of the track can all give the music a different character or purpose. Then a director responds to it, and a composer like me tries to understand what made it work. By that point, the original idea has passed through a lot of hands.

That was the realization I'd missed at first. The springtime text hadn't changed, but by the time I heard this interpretation against the film, I was responding to something heavy and threatening. The performance, recording, picture, and my own associations had all become part of its meaning for me.

My cue wasn't another arrangement of Orff. But it grew out of my response to that recording, so I was carrying something from it into a new piece, for a different story.

The dusty chapel was my contribution to that process. Once I understood it as an idea for the sound rather than a fact about the reference, I could use it without needing the temp's history to justify it.

That's what I'll take into the next cue: listen for what the director is responding to, but leave room for what the music might become in this film. Understanding where a reference came from matters. So does recognizing what I'm adding as it passes through my hands.