The Metal Ear

May 5, 2025

On a June day in 1965, violinists John Dalley and Arnold Steinhardt (me), violist Michael Tree, and cellist David Soyer, the members of the recently formed Guarneri String Quartet, walked into Webster Hall at 125 East Eleventh Street on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. We were there to make our very first recordings, two Mozart String Quartets, K589 and 590. Unlike the typical, antiseptic recording studio, I was surprised to find myself in an ample ballroom out of another era. In fact, my mother recalled attending union dances there in the 1920s. Its hardwood floor had been left clear, with chairs lining the perimeter, presumably for dance couples spent from their exertions in the foxtrots, polkas, rumbas, and tangos that had been Webster Hall’s principal industry over the last half century. Now it was leased by RCA records, which installed a soundproof recording booth and listening room along one wall.

Webster Hall’s acoustics were superb, with just enough resonance to put a bloom on the sound, but not so much as to make it muddy or indistinct. While we began warming up, our producer Max Wilcox fussed with the microphone positions. Then he stood in front of us as if to gather in the sound of our playing like a human recording machine. Shuttling back and forth between live musicians and the sound-booth machines, Max kept moving the microphones and adjusting their height in search of that elusive match with the sound in his inner ear. Finally, Max deemed us ready for a trial recording. John, Michael, David, and I dutifully churned out three minutes of Mozart and then we marched expectantly to an alcove alongside the ballroom to hear playbacks.

What we heard was disheartening. The balances were off (I can still hear Michael grousing, “Not nearly enough viola.”) the tempos were not altogether convincing, and was that what we— and I—actually sounded like? It was the same feeling of discomfort and mild shock I had experienced recently in the men’s section of a department store while trying on a new jacket. Standing in front of a three-way mirror, I had caught a glimpse of my profile as others presumably saw me. Was my nose really shaped like that, did my chin do that funny thing? And in this case, was my vibrato really so unrelenting? As if on a prearranged signal, we began to complain to Max all at once: a whole catalogue of grievances about everything from balance to the quality of our individual and collective sounds.

Max was unruffled by this assault from an unhappy four-headed monster. He seemed almost to expect it. The microphone, a metal ear, can be a useful tool for musicians as a kind of reality check, but it does not hear the way human ears do. When the complaints ceased, Max emerged from the recording booth and began repositioning our dance partners, moving microphones a fraction of an inch one way and another. With a continuous, repeated triangulation of playing, listening, playing, and readjustment, we began to approach a recorded sound that was realistic. But it was never exactly right.

In the coming years, Max and the recording producers who followed him continually brought in new microphones. One was brighter, another more mellow. Some favored the violins, while others would bring out the deeper resonance of the viola and cello. The producers also tried different recording strategies. One approach was to assign individual microphones to each of us, so that lapses in the balance of voices could be adjusted in the studio, months or years after the fact. 

The microphone inevitably divides musicians into two groups: those who feel uncomfortable before its metal ear, and those, fewer in number, who embrace its cool presence, even revel in it. The pianist Glenn Gould went to the extreme of entirely forsaking the concert stage for the recording studio. He complained about the concert experience, “the none-take-two-ness of it all.” 

“But Glenn, playing before the microphones eliminates a whole series of transactions between performer and audience. Gone is the welcoming applause as you enter the stage, the familiar signs of the concert hall that drift across the footlights, the rustle of programs, the infuriating latecomer as he rushes to his seat, and finally the magical heartfelt communication extended as a loving gift by the performer to his listener.

 Glenn?” 

Long after that first Mozart session, our quartet was recording in London for the BBC. The session dragged on. We were tired and seemed to have difficulty making a definitive take of the Smetana Quartet’s last movement that ended the program. Then our friend, the cellist Jacqueline du Pré, entered the studio. We were to have dinner with her after the session. “I’m early. Do you mind if I listen?” she asked, draping herself over one of the few chairs in the studio. Of course we didn’t mind. The very British voice of Eleanor Warren, our record producer, came over the intercom. “Guarneri String Quartet, Smetana’s ‘From My Life,’ last movement. take fourteen.” The quartet came to life, reinvigorated by an addition to the inert microphones poised above us—a listener with ears, a heart, and a deep musical sensibility. The music flowed from us to the studio’s solitary listener. With the three quiet pizzicato notes, the three heartbeats that end the work, Jackie embraced and congratulated us all. At the last moment, a recording had turned into a performance, far better than any “take.”

This was the challenge for our young and inexperienced quartet in 1965 as we heard Max announce over the intercom, “Guarneri String Quartet, Mozart Quartet K589, take one.” As we played the quartet, it was uncertain to what extent we would love the microphone, but then came take two, take three, and take four, the number that inevitably reminded me of recording sessions with one of our future record producers, Peter Dellheim. When the spadework had been done and we still had enough stamina and concentration for a take four and possibly takes five and six before we gave out completely, Peter would announce over the intercom at this juncture, “Take four, gentlemen. It is now time to gird your loins.”

When our Mozart record was finally released, I was for the most part pleased. We sounded surprisingly good, and we had even managed to retain some of the energy one expects in the concert hall. There was our name in large letters on the record jacket, with a suitable accompanying photograph. On the other side were liner notes and then, almost as an afterthought, producer Max Wilcox and engineer Richard Gardner’s names in unobtrusive small letters at the bottom. Max had used our best takes while eliminating our slips, the sounds of airplanes approaching La Guardia, and noise produced by the New York City Sanitation Department. I wondered why Max Wilcox’s name wasn’t featured prominently on the front cover and ours writ small below the liner notes. 

After having made dozens of records over the years for three different companies—from Haydn to Henze, from the somewhat obscure Arriaga to Schubert’s celebrated “Death and the Maiden,” from ten works with pianist Arthur Rubinstein to two complete Beethoven Cycles— Sony has just released forty-nine CDs of our complete RCA recordings in a boxed set. 

But what if, say, our Beethoven Cycle has the good fortune to be bought? It will arrive in its new home and be played once, twice, or even a dozen times before joining its pals, the music lover’s other records, in semi-retirement. If the concert performance is a spark in time, then the recording is only a brief flame. 

But what’s wrong with a little flame now and then?