June 2025

Audiophiles: Can There Be Too Many Notes?
Not just listening, but truly hearing the music.
Article By Roger Skoff

  Do you remember the part in the movie Amadeus where Emperor Joseph II, his Kapellmeister, and other music advisory staff, including Salieri, have just heard a part of Mozart's latest work, are less than pleased with it, and the emperor declares that it "has too many notes"?

Mozart is shocked and amazed, and, to everyone's horror, openly disagrees with the emperor and his sycophants, saying, instead, that there are precisely as many notes as there needs to be.

That was about an opera, The Abduction From The Seraglio, but the same thing could be said of any piece of music – there are neither more nor fewer notes than there needs to be to communicate what the composer is trying to say.

I remember hearing a lecture many years ago about Beethoven, where the speaker was analyzing one of the great Beethoven symphonies, note by note, phrase by phrase, and showing that even that great and complex work was composed of just a few simple themes and leitmotifs, layered, interwoven, repeated, inverted, changed in key, and passed from one instrument or instrumental group to another, to make a single organic composition. And that, if even one of those things were to be removed, changed, or even given a different emphasis, the entire work would be changed.

That need for every note to be there to create or maintain the fullness and integrity of the composition applies not only to classical music but to every kind of music we listen to, even when the music is, itself, a construct of multiple "tracks" or recording sessions, and has no "original" overall performance at all.

If you stop to think about it, it becomes apparent that everything about a piece of music – from the notes it's composed of, to the way they are played, their relative dynamics, and the presence and/or timing of the silences between them – is a functioning part of a complex fabric of sound, tailored to affect our emotions by reacting with our senses, and that every one of them is essential. There is no part – even the most subtle – of a piece of music that doesn't matter.

Nothing about the music – not even in an impromptu performance – is there or remains there without the volition of its creator. It's like a fine meal, only made of sound, and anything at all that affects the sound is crucial.

Do you remember the old symbol for RCA Victor records? It was a dog (Nipper) sitting by a gramophone, raptly listening to (what we are told is) "His master's voice", and, for Nipper to recognize and accept it, the sound coming from the gramophone must have had at least some minimum level of similarity to the real thing, and the level necessary always being determined by each listener. (That explains how. in the old "Is it real or is it Memorex" test, live and recorded music could be played interchangeably behind a curtain and some listeners – even to the most primitive recordings – could still believe they heard no difference.)

Marshall McLuhan wrote, some years ago, that "the medium is the message." He was writing about television and claiming that the "message" conveyed by television watching is not only the intended content, but also the additional and hugely important fact that that message was being delivered through television, which became not only its carrier but its social and environmental context, and thus part of its meaning and an important element of its emotional and sociological impact.

With music and sound, it's the same, and possibly even more so: Obviously, music is sound, but unless we're at a live performance, the sound we hear and the music played will always be different to at least some degree – even if we were to listen with a theoretically perfect sound system in a theoretically perfect room. (If either of those things were possible) Just the fact that one acoustical environment was being reproduced (however "perfectly") within another one is sufficient to create an entirely new sonic experience.

And that, of course, brings up at least two questions: How different can music be from what the composer or performer intended and still be regarded as the same music? And what constitutes a significant difference?

As a purposely extreme example, think of this: Imagine your favorite piece of music played with all of the same notes played by all of the same instruments; keeping all of the standard temporal values (half note, quarter note, etc.), with all notes played in the same order, with all of the instruments playing all of their intended notes together as written, and with the only difference being that each note or note set (the combined sound made when two or more of the instruments are playing at the same time) is played separated by just ten seconds from the one before and the one following it. Would that still be the same piece of music? Would it be music at all? I doubt it, but that's only my opinion. Yours might be different.

There is one particular incident that illustrates both the importance of every note and the intervals between them. A bit of industry inside information here for you to enjoy, and as a cable manufacturer it is interesting that whenever a new batch of wire is in from our raw materials supplier, we would listen to it to determine its preferred direction of signal flow. (Yes, for whatever reason, all wire has a preferred direction of flow). To do so, we would take lengths of it and use them as speaker wires, not in hopes of the best possible sound (it takes fully formed cables to do that), but just to see which way (with signal running from the "A" end to the "B" end or from the "B" end to the "A" end) they sounded best. And there was always a difference.

All of the tests were conducted in the factory Sound Room, on our Reference System, and in this particular instance, the wire under test was not just the usual temporarily insulated bare wire, but a new product that we had developed specifically for use as speaker wire in in-wall custom installations. The test recording was the Leonard Bernstein performance of Mahler's Symphony Number 3 [Deutsche Grammophon 427328-2 (GH2)], and we had heard it literally hundreds of times, both in testing and just for enjoyment. So, imagine what happened when at one point, using the cheap in-wall wire, we found ourselves hearing something brand new, that we had never heard before.

Somehow, at one point (it's been at least a quarter of a century, and I simply can't remember at which specific instant) the music changed from what it always had been to what sounded like a military march! The effect was shocking and, after just a long moment of listening, I stopped the CD player, backed it up, and listened again. Sure enough, it was a march, where it never had been one before.

To check it out, I stopped the system, took out the in-wall wire, put back the top-of-the-line loudspeaker cables that the Reference System was usually wired with, and listened again: No march, just the continued flow of music as it had always been.

To put it mildly, I FREAKED! How could it possibly be that our cheapest cable – not even really a cable, just a better-than-usual quality 16-2 PVC insulated in-wall speaker wire – was outperforming and delivering more musical information than our very best, most expensive speaker cable?

To confirm what I was hearing, I called in some of my staff and we listened together several times, always with the same results: With the cheap stuff it was a march and with our very best it wasn't.

Finally, after much listening, we found out what was really happening. At the moment that the "march" appeared, one of the instruments went off sync with the rest of the orchestra and some of the other instruments followed. This was only part of the orchestra and, using the better cables, it was possible – if you listened carefully – to hear that that was what was happening. On the other cables, though, enough of the tiny detail of the signal information was lost that the apparent (though not the actual) tempo of the music seemed to have changed and – out of the combination of missed beats and blurring due to cable losses, the music seemed, until order was restored in the orchestra, to have acquired a whole new character.

Granted the example was unusual, but the point is still the same: Music is a delicate and intricate interweaving of notes and silences, all of which combine to make what we hear and, hopefully, enjoy.

Anything that changes how we hear that changes the musical experience, and that's one more reason for having a high-quality, accurate, and immersive sound system. It's not just listening on a table radio or its equivalent that can interfere with our musical enjoyment. Every note and every silence is necessary. Without them or with their balance changed or skewed, how can we truly...

Enjoy the music!

 

Roger Skoff