Open Features: The Song Of The Nightingale
Paul Serotsky tells of the time when he faced up to the nerve-jangling task of "inserting'' the song of a nightingale into a peformance of Respighi's The Pines Of Rome by Slaithwaite Philharmonic Orchestra, which is based in Yorkshire's Colne Valley.
Paul delights in classical music, lives for classical music, thrives on classical music - but he is not a musician. He has been recording concerts given by the SPO since 1989, and became a firm friend of their then conductor and publications editor, the legendary Adrian Smith.
The "studio'' from which the recordings are made is little more than a cubicle carved out of the crush area stage left, at the back of the choir stalls, in Huddersfield Town Hall. To provide the nightingale's song Paul had to come out of the studio onto the stage, just behind the tympani. There was no direct view into the concert hall. All monitoring had to be done via a video camera.
Liz Pearson, who obtained a CD of bird song, is a flautist and piccolo player in the SPO, and also works for the local council, Kirklees.
For more information on Slaithwaite Symphony Orchestra visit www.tromboni.fsnet.co.uk/spo/spo.html
Once upon a time, when the world still had a bit of common sense, you could order the parts for Respighi's The Pines of Rome and they would come complete with a gramophone recording of a nightingale singing. In those bygone, halcyon days, at the appropriate moment (and having given the handle of the gramophone one last crank for good luck) a back-desk violist would pop the pickup onto the record, and hey, presto! (I won't demean myself with any facile comments about the wisdom of entrusting this to a back-desk violist).
That was then. This is now: the work is out of copyright, and the supplier of the parts can't be bothered faffing around with records - get off your butts and find your own! So, my 'phone rang. Could I sort out a nightingale? Well, I could sort it out, if I had a record of one. So, I tried to find one, and so did Adrian. My search drew a proverbial blank, and I was considering, in all seriousness, hooking up a microphone to a borrowed portable MiniDisc recorder and stalking a particularly mellifluous and loquacious blackbird that was then frequenting the environs of my workplace. Not a nightingale, but pretty close, and (I tried to convince myself) it would add some local flavour.
Then good old serendipity stepped in. Adrian had delegated his end of the search to Liz Pearson, who had managed to obtain a CD of bird-song via Red Doles Lane Library, Liz suspected that it would be no good - only a very few seconds of nightingale, and with other bird sounds around it, However, Allan Booth, one of the Town Hall stewards, heard of our search, and remembered that he had, many years previously, bought an LP of birdsong in the hope of educating his children, He promptly offered the loan of this disc.
End of story? Not by a long chalk! CD and LP duly arrived in my hands, I tried the CD first. It was even worse than Liz had let on. I tried the channels separately and mixed down to monaural, but there was too much extraneous twittering. Anyway, it really was far too short, So, I looked at the LP. With all due respect to Mr. Booth, 'many years old' just about summed it up. I tried it, and (eventually!) located the nightingale, Terrific! There was plenty of it, and, apart from at the extremes of the passage, very little 'dawn chorus', Unfortunately, this was partly because it was drowned out by the abundance of 'Rice Krispies' and a venomous 'gas leak', After an hour or so of diligent cleaning, of both LP and pickup, I made a test recording, Much better? I could hear the nightingale quite clearly amongst the insistent hissing. I scratched my head awhile, then realised (you see, scratching does do some good) that I was transcribing it in stereo. Mixing it down to mono would cause the out-of-phase components to cancel out. Bingo! We could maybe just about get away with that. Having prepared and trimmed the MD transfer, I timed it, and compared the timing with those of my three recordings of the Respighi. Hum! If Adrian was feeling expansive, we could be right up the creek. So, I copied the track, combined the copies, and then very carefully found and clipped out a section across the 'join', to preserve continuity and sound-level. After three evenings' work, I was fair cursing those blasted publishers.
End of story? Lick that chalk again! Much as I'd have liked to simply hand over the MD to a back-desk violist, things aren't quite that simple (says he, treading on eggs). My MD recorder would be in use, recording the concert, so I had to borrow another. I decided (for artistic reasons, i.e. I'd be stumped if the video monitor went on the blink) to set it up behind the tymps. at the back of the platform. David Rothwell gave me permission to extricate the amplifier and a loudspeaker from the Hospitals Radio studio. And so it came to pass that, a couple of hours before the rehearsal, having struggled to disentangle the kit, I discovered that I had been slightly mis-advised about the connections - none of my cables fitted (and the studio cables, which obviously did fit, were all too short). After a little calm deliberation, and much frantic scrambling around, I had a functioning setup courtesy of the ultra-sophisticated technology of bits of matchwood, cardboard, and plastic sticky-tape.
Next came positioning the speaker. I was aiming for a focused sound, but distant and with a relatively indeterminate source (is that inconsistent? I don't know, and was past caring!). Oh, and I needed to minimise that residual noise. Strangely enough, this bit was easy-peasy: I laid the speaker, facing upwards and a little backwards, on some cushioning on top of the right-hand side of the organ console, so that the high frequencies would scatter from the organ frontage. Sound-test time! Setting the MD track to auto-repeat, all I had to do was set the volume, and take a trip round all parts of the hall to listen, then adjust the volume, and. . . by the time I had it right I was (how shall I put this?) somewhat fatigued. Sitting myself down, I caught my breath, and thought, 'That's the easy bit over. Now I have to face the Man with the Pointy Stick!' I was trying to leave nothing to chance. At home, I had listened to the end of that movement umpteen times over, and knew intimately every sound. I had also sorted out precisely on which notes of the closing clarinet solo I would press 'play', press 'pause', press 'play' again, and then advance the volume control. Unlike those early, wind-up nightingales (and more like the CD-precise twitterers we get these days), this one was going to sing right on the button.
At the rehearsal, I found out what the cymbal-player in Bruckner's Eighth went through (except that he, even if at the wrong moment, was at least guaranteed to make a noise!). Heart in mouth, I kept my eyes glued to the equipment, and my ears glued to the sound of the orchestra and, miraculously, it was spot on! But, then came the baleful blow: 'Er, Nightingale, you came in a bit late. I cued you, but you weren't looking. Oh, and you were too soft' (or summat like that!). I quickly realised what the trouble was. Audio equipment is not like a musical instrument: if I'd started with the volume already up, it would have made a most unmusical "bump", and if I'd advanced the volume too smartly, it might have overshot the optimum volume, earning the consequent Huddersfield Examiner headline, 'SPO Tympanist gets the Bird!' The added complication was that the required setting was very low on the amplifier's scale, where setting differences produce disproportionate differences in subjective volume. I'd simply been over-cautious. The second time went much better - at least, there were no complaints from the front this time.
Before the concert, I was worried sick about the connections, and checked the sound at least half a dozen times. With a wariness verging on the paranoiac, I loaded the disc before the second part of the concert started. MDs sometimes get spat back out by the machine, and in any case make a bit of noise going in. I sneaked on during the big climax of the second movement, so that any door-squeaking would be drowned out. That gave me plenty of time to get acclimatised, which is a euphemism for 'panic-stricken'. As the Big Moment approached, all I could think was, 'For Heaven's sake, don't push the buttons in the wrong order!' Plus sundry other don'ts. 'Don't faint', for one. Once I'd got the nightingale singing sweetly, all I could think of was what Gerald Moore famously said, 'Am I too loud?' Oh, and something to the effect, 'Orchestral musicians do this sort of thing for fun?'
Afterwards, having sweated cobs over the re-assembly of the studio that was added to my usual packing up, I heard something which put the icing on the cake. Forthcoming comments generally boiled down to 'the nightingale was just nicely there', although the best one was that, although the chap could hear it well enough, it sounded very faint and remote. Lovely, I thought - that nightingale is the one soloist who should sound as if he's miles behind the accompanists! But, the really heart-warming thing was discovering that this concert was Allan Booth's 'swan song', his last in his capacity as steward before he retired, and he'd been absolutely chuffed to hear 'his' nightingale as part of the performance. Serendipity moves in a mysterious way, don't you think?
