ABSTRACT

Classical music departments of major labels have historically tended to use company employees as producers (though recently, typically of capitalism’s tendency to outsource risk, the freelance classical producer has become a routine professional figure). The permanent company employee doesn’t usually have the freelancer’s contractual driver of sales points, which encourages the producer to maximize the commercial potential of the recording at the expense of aesthetic or other considerations. In the end, though, the musical fundamentals are the same: the producer is the privileged listener, mediating the relationship between the score, the performing artists and the processes and technologies of recording.

(Less often the classical producer has also mediated the rather more difficult relationship between the living composer, the performers and the technologies.) The producer’s key task seemed to revolve around correcting mistakes, while prompting aesthetic decisions by the performers or engineers, and also prompting the sound engineer to produce a particular type of sound, aiming usually for what Colin Symes has called the ‘best seat in the house’ approach to sonic values – the attempt to make a recording which could be experienced in the living room as if the listener was in row 12 of the stalls seats at an actual concert.3