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Big Voice in a Small Room

Big Voice in a Small Room

Stephanie Blythe is an A-List opera singer with a big voice who’s used to performing in big rooms. Blythe, who was Musical America’s Vocalist of the Year for 2009, performs often at the 3800-seat Metropolitan Opera House, including the role of Fricka in the Met’s new Ring cycle where she must be heard above the din of an enormous Wagnerian orchestra. So imagine the mezzo-soprano’s surprise when she was led into the 1500-square-foot, 57-seat Pearson Theater in Berkeley, California, to give a fundraising recital of popular songs inspired by the artistry of the great American songstress Kate Smith. But moments after stepping into the small hall, Blythe’s skepticism turned to amazement. For this is not like any other 57-seat concert hall on earth.

The Pearson Theater is located at Meyer Sound Laboratories, Inc. John Meyer is a pro audio pioneer who, 35 years ago with his wife Helen, started a company to provide state-of-the-art gear for sound reinforcement and recording. Long-term clients included The Grateful Dead and Luciano Pavarotti. As time went by, Meyer discovered that the spaces that musicians were asked to perform and record in could, perversely, affect the music-making itself. “After 50 years of recording, we’ve learned that musicians actually interact with their spaces,” Meyer told me in a wide-ranging phone conversation. “It’s not a source and reverberation event—it’s one event talked about in two different ways.” Meyer set out to design a sophisticated electronic system that could adjust the aural environment of a performance space. The result was the Constellation Acoustic System.

Constellation is a custom-designed installation of a large number of miniature microphones and self-powered loudspeakers connected with advanced digital processing software. It should be emphasized that this is not sound reinforcement. There is no pickup of direct sound; Constellation deals only with reverberation and early reflections. A powerful computer is processing 20,000 echoes per second to, in Meyer’s words, “make them go where they’re supposed to go.” It’s complex all right. For example, the Constellation implementation at Zellerbach Hall at the University of California involves 44 microphones and 105 (!) speakers of various sizes. The result is far more acoustic flexibility than can ever be achieved with physical modifications to a hall—curtains, shells, moveable walls, chambers, etc.—and at much lower expense. A multipurpose venue could use one setting in the morning for an orchestra rehearsal, another in the afternoon for a solo piano recital, and a third in the evening for a klezmer band concert. Dozens of rooms, big and small, have been equipped with the Constellation technology all over the world, from California to Austria, China, and Saudi Arabia. Audiences can experience a performance optimally, musicians can better hear each other and the room they are playing into, and there’s the potential to make superior recordings.

Big Voice in a Small Room

After the benefit concert in the Pearson Theater—immediately after, in fact, over dinner—Stephanie Blythe enthusiastically volunteered to participate in any “experiments with recording” that Meyer wanted to conduct in the hall. Blythe and her gifted accompanist, Craig Terry, had the perfect material with which to test the room’s possibilities. The singer and pianist had been presenting their program of songs from the repertoire of Kate Smith (1907-1986) to enthralled audiences for several years. The concert was twice heard at Lincoln Center’s American Songbook series, once in April of 2011 and again two years later. (The PBS TV special that derived from the latter performance can be viewed in its one-hour entirety at video.pbs.org/video/2364993302.) Blythe, in addition to channeling the earlier vocalist’s musical style and sound—the New York Times critic reviewing one of the Lincoln Center performances called her “an even better Kate Smith than Kate Smith”—is articulate, funny, and sexy as she introduces selections including “The White Cliffs of Dover,” “Look for the Silver Lining,” “Wrap Your Troubles In Dreams,” “We’ll Meet Again” and, of course, “God Bless America.”

Stephanie Blythe has long been dissatisfied with the way she has sounded on recordings. Two factors are responsible, the singer explained. “As an opera singer,” she told me, “I’ve spent my whole life learning how to project my voice into a space. The up-close sound, for my particular voice, doesn’t capture the whole sound. Sometimes it sounds like it’s all treble and no bass. In the Pearson Theater, I realized that the entire space was like a microphone, that you could ‘play’ the room. Because there was no closeup miking for me or my pianist, all the ‘mixing,’ all the choices were ours. It wasn’t something that was created post-recording, in the editing room.” John Meyer feels that more distant microphone placement is preferable for basic acoustical reasons as well. “What happens in the near-field does not happen in the far-field, and vise-versa. The things that happen close to an instrument are completely different than what happens 15 or 20 feet away. You can see that with speakers, too. You can take a 15-inch speaker and put broadband sound into it. If you measure it very close, you see all these cancellations, but if you move away, they disappear.”

 

The other practice that results in a superior recording, Blythe contends, is the use of single takes, with as little editing as feasible. “A third of this recording is one take; it’s not manipulated at all.” On the subject of combining multiple run-throughs at the editing stage, Meyer adds: “You can tell when they’re spliced no matter how well you do it. Because you’re taking two different events. The rooms change every ten minutes; humidity and temperature are never completely static. When we take a measurement of a room, store it in the computer, wait ten minutes, and store it again, it’s a different room. Not very much different, but enough to change how we hear reverb.”

In the ideally tuned environment of the Pearson Theater, Meyer’s engineers (John Pellowe and Miles Rogers) placed a pair of Neumann microphones in an M-S configuration about ten feet from Blythe, where the mezzo’s voice fully “develops.” There was also no near-field miking of the piano. “I don’t know how to mike a piano closeup,” declares Meyer. “I’ve sure tried and I’ve worked a long time on it. You’re sticking mikes inside and all over the place and it doesn’t sound like a piano does when you’re ten, twenty feet away.” Any tendency to compress dynamics was scrupulously resisted, as well. “It’s very tempting when you have someone with a 20dB dynamic range to compress the loud notes just a little bit. Just a dB or two. But we’d take the risk that Stephanie would hear it.”

The CD recorded in Berkeley for the Innova label, As Long As There Are Songs, includes no stage banter but, in addition to a generous helping of the Kate Smith material, holds other classics from The Great American Songbook, spanning the years 1919 to 1965. Among the 14 selections are standards by Irving Berlin (“Always” and “How Deep Is the Ocean?”), Ira Gershwin/Harold Arlen (“The Man That Got Away”), and Sammy Cahn/Saul Chaplin (“Please Be Kind”). Blythe definitely doesn’t perform the songs like an opera singer lamely attempting a crossover album. First of all, she uses her voice in a completely different manner than she would for Handel, Wagner, or Stravinsky, employing her “chest voice” pretty much 100% of the time, as opposed to the “head voice” the vocalist uses for her operatic and lieder repertoire. What is the same as Blythe’s classical work is the exceptional control she manifests over her tonal resources, intonation, phrasing, line, and her sensitivity to the words. As just one example, listen to the exquisite shaping of “When You Wish Upon a Star,” where the musical interaction between Blythe and Terry is as apparent as it would be if you could see the artists. It’s telling to listen to the CD after watching the PBS video: The same sense of occasion and risk-taking one gets from the performance in front of an audience comes through on the recording from Berkeley, thanks to the push for single takes, the far-field recording, and the clarifying acoustic of the Constellation venue. Blythe observes: “There’s this wonderful spontaneity in music-making. A live performance can’t be repeated—you can’t do it the same way twice. It’s something that is very, very special, a one-off thing. That’s why studio recordings are tough for me. There’s too much manipulation that goes on. I barely listened to the playbacks on this disc, I was so happy with what I heard.”

Blythe continues. “The recording industry is not the best for classical music today. It just isn’t what it was. I think it’s because we’re trained to listen in a different way. The recordings I listened to when I was a student are from the 60s and 70s and have a sense of immediacy and honesty that made me want to be a singer. There’s something about hearing a voice in all its glory that makes the experience wonderful. You realize that this is a real person. And when a real person can make sound like that, it’s awe-inspiring.”

Stephanie Blythe’s CD concludes with “This Is All I Ask,” a 1965 composition by Gordon Jenkins written for Frank Sinatra’s September of My Years album, a reflection on the theme of aging. It’s the song that provided the title for Blythe’s remarkable program, as rendered by John Meyer’s recording team in the Pearson Theater. That number ends with this couplet: “And let the music play as long as there’s a song to sing/Then I will stay younger than Spring.” Nice thought, that.

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