... traces in the snow: on the meaning of recording albums ...

“Traces in the Snow: 

On the Meaning of Recording Albums”

    Today, for many musicians in the so-called “classical music” world, recording an album has become a kind of professional obligation, a sonic business card, a marketing tool, or, in the case of many performers who no longer compose or improvise, even an ontological alibi: as if recording were their way of engaging in poiesis, a substitute for actual creation. They call it “my latest work,” as if it were an original piece, an act of genesis rather than repetition. But while recording does have its legitimacy as a form of sonic inscription, it remains precisely that: a kind of writing (in the sense of incising grooves on a surface). But a secondary writing. And for that reason, at least for me, it feels urgent to rethink the place of the album in artistic life.

    I say this as someone who has recorded many albums. I have made them with the greatest care and with as much depth and devotion as I could offer. I do not regret a single one. But I have reached a moment in which I feel the need to stop. It is enough. I have left enough traces. And it is precisely from that awareness, of voluntary closure, of having reached the edge of a cycle, that this short essay is born.

    Why record? Why did I do it? And what meaning does it still hold?

    For me, a recording was never a commercial product, nor a way of proving anything, not even a means of immortalizing how I once played a particular piece. I do not believe in the immortality of interpretation, because true interpretation is always fleeting, ephemeral, a gesture that vanishes as it appears. Rather, the album has been for me a way to leave a trace. Like someone carving two names into the bark of a tree, or writing with a stick in the sand just before the tide comes in. Like the handprints on Paleolithic cave walls. Someone passed through here. Someone lived here. Once, something sounded. The album as trace. As testimony. As an act of memory.

    And that memory is not for the marketplace, nor for professional prestige. It is for the most intimate, emotional circle. For my children. So that one day, when I am no longer here, they might put on one of my recordings and hear my breath, my touch, the way I tried to caress a tone on the piano. So that in that listening, I might be present again. Not as a famous musician. Not as a pianist. But as a father, as a friend, as someone they knew. As a loving presence. As invocation. And perhaps, beyond them, for a few friends, for former students, for a handful of listeners who, amid the noise of the world, might hear one of those recordings as if it were a handwritten letter. A quiet confession. A shared secret.

    There is perhaps another reason as well: the desire to rescue, to preserve. To give voice to certain works, to certain composers who haven’t had the luck of being recorded a thousand times, who don’t belong to the hegemonic canon but still have something vital to say. In that sense, recording can be an act of poetic justice. Of repair. Of safeguarding, not in a dry or archival sense, but as an act of love toward what has been forgotten. To record is also to remember.

    But we must acknowledge its limits. The album is not an original work. It is not creation. It is not an act of primary poiesis. It is a trace, yes, but not a birth. Sometimes, when a performer no longer composes, no longer improvises, no longer seeks new paths, they take refuge in recording as a way to justify their presence in the artistic world. They believe that by recording, they are doing something “new.” But they are not. Recording a Beethoven sonata is not the same as writing one. Not even as discovering one. A record may be a beautiful document, but it cannot replace the fire of creation. It can be a sonic statue, yes, a monument, but it is not a flame.

    That is why so many albums, too many, are soulless products, mere showcases of technical prowess or impeccable sound design. They fix a form, they canonize a fleeting decision as if it were dogma, and then they are replicated endlessly, lifelessly. The interpreter who no longer improvises, who no longer composes, who has fully merged with the functional role of “pianist,” sees in the record their only path to expression. But in reality, they do not express themselves, they enclose themselves. They become bureaucrats of sound. Notaries of the past. And they pretend to be making art, when they are merely executing.

    So then, how to redeem the album? Perhaps it’s possible, if we give up its fetishization. If we understand it for what it is: a minor art, a subsidiary art, but still meaningful, if done with love. If we record not to impress, not to compete, not to immortalize ourselves, but to bear witness. To remember something. To leave a note in the margins of time. To say: this moved me. This hurt me. I played this for you…

    An album can be a monument, not of marble, but of breath. A fragile gesture, but a true one. It can even carry, silently, a musical ethos. Not one of technical mastery or sonic narcissism, but one of commitment to the soul of music. Because recording a work does not mean possessing it. It means accompanying it. Giving it a body for a moment. Letting it fly.

    That’s why, although I will always love recording as a language of its own, I feel I have said, through it, almost everything I needed to say. I will record very little from now on. I don’t believe in final statements, but I do recognize that, in my life, the album has become something completely secondary.

    A new time begins. A time to return to composition with a renewed sense of purpose. Even though I never stopped composing, I’ve composed since I was a child, because for me, composing is a way of breathing, during the years I recorded most intensively, that impulse quieted, as if put on hold.

    Now it flows again, naturally. Without the need for my music to be performed or published, because that’s irrelevant. I don’t compose as a strategy, nor as a profession, nor even as a vocation, but as a way of embodying music. Because the Word becomes flesh. And the flesh becomes Word. And writing, not as scientific notation nor as technical symbol, returns to what it never ceased to be: a neume, a breath, a sacred sign. And so begins again the time to create. To seek a more original voice, a voice being born. To trovar, to find. And perhaps, one day, someone will not listen to my recordings, but to the music that emerged from that silence. And say not “what a great interpreter,” but something simpler, truer: “there lived a man who loved music with all his being.”

    But perhaps what unsettles me most about the recording culture today is its tendency to erase the moment. To flatten time. Live music, with all its risks, is a dialogue with the present, fragile, unrepeatable, marked by breath and contingency. Recording, in contrast, often polishes away the accident, the hesitation, the small imperfection that might carry a deeper truth. It builds a version of music outside of time, idealized, fixed, weightless. And yet, music without time is not music. It is simulation.

    This desire for sonic perfection often distances us from the vulnerability that makes music human. The takes are stitched, edited, layered, until what remains is often pristine but voiceless. Not because emotion has been eliminated, but because it has been engineered. When I listen back to some recordings, even ones I cherish, I sometimes feel the loss of that risk, the moment when a phrase almost breaks, or bends, or surprises even the one who plays it. That is the space where music lives: not in the flawless, but in the flawed and fleeting.

    Perhaps this is why I return to the idea of the sketch, the trace, the footstep in fresh snow. Not to deny the beauty of detail, but to preserve the gesture, the motion of a thought before it hardens. A recording, at best, should preserve a breath, not a monument. It should be like a letter, not a treatise. If I record again, it will be to speak quietly to someone, not to assert anything. To say: I was here. This moved me. I hope it moves you too.