Jonny Greenwood writes about his year off and losing faith in recordings

Jonny Greenwood has written a column for The Guardian's music blog about his year off from Radiohead. He has spent it writing for small string groups, first in a residency with the Australian Chamber Orchestra and lately with the London Contemporary Orchestra. It's intended for concerts instead of recordings, which is a new way of thinking about music for me.¹ He was raised on recordings, he writes, and taught to trust them as stand-ins for the real thing. Years of hearing classical music played live have cost him that belief.

He owns up to an embarrassing hi-fi phase in the 1990s. On a visit to a hi-fi shop with him, Nigel Godrich put a question to the owner. Why would you need to listen to OK Computer on a CD player that costs more than the tape machine which we recorded it on?¹ The owner told Godrich he must think digital is just ones and zeros.

The high point of the Australian trip was hearing the ACO rehearse Shostakovich's string quartets. What he loves in live music is that it is played once, in a room, and shared by everyone there. Unlike recordings, it isn't identical to the previous performance or the next one. It can go slightly (or badly) wrong at any time.¹

He still enjoys studios, and electronic music, which he says thrives on the airlessness of its recordings. He doesn't trust microphones or speakers with acoustic classical music, and says they make Ligeti or Penderecki sound harsh. Yet nine in ten judgments of classical music, he reckons, are made from recordings.

He has played one show with the LCO, at the Wapping Project in London, and plays with them again tomorrow in the wind tunnels at Farnborough in Hampshire. Neither space was built for concerts, and nobody will know how the tunnels sound until they start. In August he joins the LCO for There Will Be Blood with its score played live at the Roundhouse, and the ACO piece, “Water”, has its premiere in Dublin in October.

His advice is to go and hear classical music played live, above all the kind that needs no PA, and to think of speakers as barriers rather than amplifiers. If you haven't heard it live, you haven't really heard it¹