Music producer, Tim Smithies describes his work producing CDs
The first meeting of the new 2023/24 season kicked off with a fascinating talk by Tim Smithies on the problems and challenges producing music recordings for sale. Tim is a leading light of the Metronome label where he has been for 30 years. When we listen to a CD, we are not aware of the effort and time taken to assemble the artists, technical staff and instruments needed to make it all happen. An added problem for small and niche producers is that they are unlikely to have the resources needed to record the standard repertoire with big orchestras and a big name conductor and soloist.
In common with many small firms, survival often depends of locating a gap in the market too small for the heavyweight firms to consider. Metronome started with focusing on early music and the first example was music from the Plantagenet era and a piece composed by John Dunstable and played by the Orlando Consort. Another early recording was Love Affair with the Lute and a piece by John Dowland, Flow my Tears. Tim said the aim of his label was to “focus on the clarity” and this certainly shone through in this and other examples he played.
As time went on, the label got “drawn into other people’s interests” as Tim put it and that means expanding the repertoire to include other artists and genre. This is the classic dilemma for small firms: do you stay focused on your strategy or do you respond to market opportunities as they come along? As Tim explained, trying to do the former can be difficult especially in the world of artists. Opportunities arose and it was sensible to respond to them.
Things can develop from a very small start he said. He instanced the harpsichordist Carole Cerasi whom he heard at a concert playing music by Elizabeth Jacquet de la Guerre. This led to a series of recordings by her on the label.
Closer to home, Metronome has produced music sung by the choir of Salisbury Cathedral in a recording called An English Choristers Songbook.
One of the problems a small producer has – as one might expect – is poaching of artists by larger firms. But it was not all one way he said and there were examples of what he termed ‘rebound’ that is, artists who wanted to do their own thing and found the restrictions of the big labels did not allow them to do that. Christopher Hogwood was an example who wanted to record music on the clavichord, an instrument widely used by Bach for example. The problem is that it does not have that great a volume so is suitable only for intimate settings. We heard a recording of a familiar Bach piece normally heard on a piano, which sounded quite different on a clavichord. The music appears on a Metronome recording called The Secret Bach.
One of the difficulties with recordings of this nature on period instruments is that they have to be made where it is situated since they cannot be moved to a recording studio. This has its own issues of finding a room with the right acoustics. As anyone who has organised an event in such settings will know, as soon as you are poised to start, drilling will start somewhere, as if by magic, making progress impossible. As we heard at a previous Society meeting, instruments need constant tuning during the recordings.
Talking of older instruments, we even heard a piece on the theorba, a double necked lute with an extra set of bass strings.
This was a fascinating evening and a great start to the new season. Not only did we hear some interesting and for some of us, unfamiliar music, but we learned of the story behind it and gained a glimpse of the life of a small, but perfectly formed, record producer.
Peter Curbishley
Next meeting on 9 October 2023. Printed copies are available in the Library, the Tourism Information Centre and Oxfam (upstairs).
Salisbury Recorded Music Society 