Rock fans can go to a
concert and, while they're there, order a CD made during the show.
That kind of fast-turnaround service isn't common yet in the classical
world, but the Borromeo String Quartet is leading the way in offering
listeners CDs and DVDs recorded in concert.
It's a completely do-it-yourself
job masterminded by the group's first violinist, Nicholas Kitchen.
Since October 2003, the Living Archive project has preserved and distributed
recordings of most of the Borromeo Quartet's concerts. You can go
to the ensemble's website—www.borromeoquartet.org—and
order a CD of a Mozart/Janácek/Beethoven recital given in Burlington,
Vermont, and compare that to the same program given the following
night in Montpelier. You can find a couple of cycles of the Brahms
quartets, recent works by György Ligeti or Jennifer Higdon embedded
in mixed programs, and much more.
Kitchen says the project
developed from his determination not to let the quartet's work disappear
once the notes faded from the concert hall, and a need to interact
more with the audience. The next stage of development for Living Archive,
says Kitchen, will be the incorporation of this raw material from
live concerts into educational DVDs, as well as a kind of encyclopedia,
organized by repertoire, of the ensemble's favorite versions of each
movement of each piece.
Right now, the group sells
anywhere from zero to 25 copies of each concert, including CDs, DVDs,
and VHS/CD combos. "We've seen some people who have ordered one
immediately following a concert that they attended, then many of these
same people have gone on to order quite a few more concerts that they
did not attend," says Kitchen.
The bad news is that Kitchen
himself is the sole techie.
"Other members of
the group, in addition to helping me with what is possible in the
setup, handle different aspects of Living Archive," he says.
"Will [Fedkenheuer, second violin] handles the website, Mai [Motobuchi,
viola] handles the order forms at concerts, and Yeesun [Kim, cello]
handles the sending out [of the recordings]. Joseph Correia is acting
as a kind of manager for Living Archive and handles the databases
of orders and calls to make preconcert arrangements for Living Archive.
"Everyone in the
group tries to help."
Want to try it yourself?
Here's Kitchen's description of the Borromeo chain of production:
"The sound is picked
up by Schoeps stereo microphones in ORTF configuration [centered in
front of the group, one mic pointing a bit to the left, the other
angled to the right]. These are excellent mics ($2,500) and the fact
that they are fixed in a nice stereo configuration means that even
if I have an extremely pressed setup, I will not get a strange result.
These mics I put onto a very thin aluminum stand that goes up to about
11 feet. Then a thin five-pin XLR high-performance microphone cable
runs backstage, where a Y-cord splits the signal into left and right.
Then this goes into a Digidesign Mbox [a MIDI compatible micro-music
studio], which provides phantom power to the mics and converts the
analog input to digital output. The output is then sent through the
USB port of a Mac G4 PowerBook laptop, where the signal is recorded
in ProTools LE (which comes with the Mbox in a package for around
$450). Files are divided and assembled into CDs using the Jam and
Toast CD-burning programs ($150).
"The video image
comes off a Sony DRV-TRV 900 ($2,500), which puts the digital image
onto mini-DV [digital video] tapes. These are transferred through
Firewire [a peripheral connection that speeds up the movement of large
multimedia images] into the program Final Cut Pro ($800). Into Final
Cut Pro, I bring in a large audio file that was converted from 44.1
Hz to 48 Hz in ProTools. I synchronize the audio with the video and
then divide the large file into separate movies of each movement,
adding small fades to smooth the viewing. I then export these movies
as QuickTime Pro files, which DVD Studio Pro ($400) will recognize
and work with. I then make TIFF menus for the DVD in Photoshop, one
for location, one for the movements. All these elements are brought
into DVD Studio Pro and a DVD is created.
"The menus allow
you to navigate to any movement, but the DVD is designed so that if
you do nothing, it will simply play over and over again. Building
a DVD takes five or six hours as the computer rebuilds the file into
the particular format used for DVD. Then burning each DVD takes about
one and a half hours, because I have learned the hard way that if
you burn it at anything but real time, you will not have a reliable
disc.
"Once the CDs and
DVDs are done, I make labels for them using Discus Pro (it comes with
Jam and Toast) and I use printable CDs and DVDs and print the label
right on the disc with an Epson 900 (CD printers are quite cheap now—$150
perhaps?). I then hand these to Yeesun, who sends them out to fill
the orders. In addition, we send a copy to the presenter and any guest
performers, along with their percentage; each person involved gets
10 percent of the profits from sales of the discs.
"The amount of information
to archive on DVD for each concert—about 25 gigabytes—means
that I use six external hard drives to hold it until I have a chance
to transfer it permanently to DVD. Each drive holds between 200 and
250 gigabytes of information.
"So, I would say
from one point of view, anyone can do this. From another point of
view, you really have to have a pretty strong commitment to the idea,
and I certainly had to invest a huge effort in getting over the learning
curves of the software. I couldn't be happier that I did it, but I
would hate to look at an actual calculation of how much I have slept
in the last eight months."
Kitchen says that because
quartet members do all the work, Living Archive does turn a marginal
profit. "But the motivation for Living Archive," he stresses,
"is really about creating a resource for understanding string
quartets, as pieces of music and as performing ensembles."
