Recording Classical Music

CHAPTER 15 Studio Techniques

Re-Creating the Aural Sense of Historic Spaces

Musicians who wish to take a historically informed approach to performing music composed between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries often find themselves without access to a suitable room for tracking, and in the absence of acoustically appropriate historic spaces, large churches have become favored venues for recording early music, even though they are far too reverberant for much of the repertoire, particularly solo songs accompanied by quiet instruments, such as the lute, guitar, or harpsichord.¹ Modern studio technology, however, can be employed to simulate the aural sense of the modest chambers in which the music probably would have been performed originally, ...