Playing with the alter ego: control, vanity and selflessness in multi-tracking.

This paper was given at the Centre for the History and Analysis of Recorded Music (CHARM) conference Creative Production for Classical Music, King's College London on 5 June 2006, and published on the CHARM website (2007). The practice of multi-tracking or overdubbing is taken for granted in pop production and has been employed by artists as diverse as Jascha Heifetz, Glenn Gould and the Emerson Quartet in the classical field. Nevertheless, such production techniques remain relatively uncommon in the classical recording industry. This paper examines both the technique itself and the aesthetic implications thereof, with reference to case studies which include the recording by the Emerson Quartet of the Mendelssohn Octet and by the clarinettist Roger Heaton of Gavin Bryars' Three Elegies for nine clarinets. I suggest that the function of the recording changes along with the process itself: the recording becomes an artefact that is complete in itself and therefore loses many of its associations with (and aspirations to) live performance. The paper investigates the boundaries between public and private space which may be crossed in such recordings as well as issues of editorial and interpretational control.
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