The word atonement is unusual in being a term with English origins that has entered the standard vocabulary of Christian theology. Broken into its component parts - at-one-ment - it naturally suggests a state of affairs in which two parties are united or reconciled, but in both its theological and nontheological uses, it more usually refers to the act or process by which this has come about. Just as we speak of atoning for our mistakes and wrongdoings, the traditional Christian belief in the Atonement refers primarily to the spiritual significance of the life and work of Jesus Christ. It is a central affirmation of Christianity that Christ atoned for the sins of the world and thus reconciled a fallen humanity to God. Though this affirmation is not expressly included in any of the three principal creeds - Apostles', Athanasian, and Nicene - few Christians, if any, would dispute it. Intellectual problems and theological disagreements only arise when we attempt to expand on this simple affirmation. Just what was our condition before Christ's work of reconciliation? Was it estrangement in the way members of a family become estranged when the natural affection and sympathy they ought to have for each have dried up, or been hurtfully transferred to nonfamily members?

Answers to four connected questions about revelations and miracles carry the gravest implications for both Christian and non-Christian revelatory claims. Stripped of nuances to be added later, the questions are: (1) Can belief in a revelatory claim be appropriate if no adequate case backs the content of the belief? (2) Can a case for a revelatory claim succeed without first establishing the existence of God? (3) Can a case for a revelatory claim succeed if it does not include appeal to a confirming miracle? (4) Are Christian revelatory claims vulnerable to Humean-type arguments against the credibility of miracles? We, of course, cannot fully engage the questions in this brief chapter. We can, however, at least clarify the questions and the interconnections among them. We can also gain a sense of the value of and need for exploring more fully the content of Christian revelation from a philosophical standpoint. However, before we take up these four questions directly, we must discuss some terms. We aim here not only to provide some context for our later discussion, but also to draw off some of the vapors clinging to the issues.

What are religious rites in general, and Christian rites in particular? A definition of religious rites needs to cover a wide range of acts that I simply list at the outset in order to record the breadth of practices that need to be covered. Religious rites include prayers involving praise (worship or adoration), petition and confession, vows, commissions such as ordination, rites of passage such as baptism, confirmation, marriage ceremonies, funeral rites and burials, communion or the Eucharist (also called mass, the Lord's supper), feasts, fasts, alms giving, vigils, lamentations, blessings, thanksgiving, grace before meals, and contemplative or meditative prayer. By way of a general definition of religious rites, I suggest the following: religious rites are repeatable symbolic action involving the sacred. There may be times when it is not obvious whether one is participating in a religious rite. For example, one may pray to God without engaging in a rite, but once that prayer forms a pattern that can be repeated and employs symbolic action such as bowing the head, folding hands, and so on, one is at least in the early stages of engaging in a rite. While some religious acts may not be clear cases of ritual, I take it that the current definition would cover all or most of the formal acts of prayer, praise, and so on, carried out in mosques, temples, ashrams, cathedrals, churches, and Christian communities today.

To understand what we hear from recordings we must first understand them as sources of evidence. Although initially the usefulness of recording was unclear, in the twentieth century the industry became profitable through focusing on entertainment. Providing consumers were entertained they were content not to enquire too closely into the distortions and illusions that recording created, especially as sound quality improved and relative prices decreased. Thus throughout the past 110 years records have been widely if naively accepted as surrogate accounts of live performance. Nevertheless, reading through the medium reveals the extent to which recording transmutes music-making. Even when production and record seem at one, as in much rock music from the 1960s when albums were created over long periods in the studio, records contain secrets that challenge preconceptions. Outlining the most significant is one purpose of this chapter. First, though, we need to know how to find recordings, and how to date and place them: then we shall be in a better position to ask about the sounds they encode.

Discographies and information trails

There are many discographies and other useful materials available via the internet, but it is often impossible to estimate how accurate the information is for there is less obvious editorial control or review than in printed publications. Nevertheless, a comprehensive online discography for a single performer, Eugene Ormandy for example, is often reliable, and when an institution like the London Symphony Orchestra puts up discographical information one has good reason to trust it. Digging into the frustratingly awkward catalogues of the great sound archives, such as those at the British Library, Library of Congress and Bibliothèque nationale, can often yield useful information, but each is riddled with quirks and uncertainties.

Increasingly, listening to ‘historic’ performances on record presents exciting challenges to those making new recordings in the studio. Among their many purposes, recordings enable us to plot lineages of musical accomplishment and also to observe where musicians in the last century or so have sought to break away from established traditions. Histories of interpretation can now be traced compellingly through a judicious synthesis of biography and the source-evidence on record. Wrongly imagined histories can be righted. And yet the recent surge of musicological interest in recordings and the resulting scholarly output has barely registered on the radar of performers (as distinct from those who study performance), as a catalyst either to pursue models of enquiry into past interpretative values or to measure what these achievements count for in their own creative lives. The study of recordings by academics is rarely motivated by how it can inspire performers. Therefore the study of recordings by performers needs to be built on its own practical and cultural foundations where a close intertextual relationship can be established between the recording studios of yesterday and today.

If the post-war recording studio is deemed partly responsible for a perceived erosion of the ‘commitment at risk’ of the performer's ‘enactment of chosen meanings and values’ (as George Steiner ennobled the interpreter), the solution I offer below provides a chance for atonement: performers properly equipped with a broad and discriminating musical vocabulary from the past (as observers and possible re-activators of specific rhetorics, means of characterisation, hierarchies of elocution and nuance, etc.) can re-invent the ‘studio’ as a critical workshop for evaluating the ideals of previous generations and stimulating a practical re-appraisal of modern musical interpretative values. For history to impact creatively in this way, performers must conquer fears of past ‘greats’ as a yoke that stifles individuality and then wrestle with those elements which, however remotely, already inspire them.

I was involved with the Human League for the period from 1978, when we formed the band from various precursors, until that version of the band split in late 1980; and that whole time was fundamentally about a new form of recording technique. What we were doing evolved from previous approaches, of course, but it was the limitations of what was available to us then, compared to today's technology, that was the key point – and actually made for a more spicy creative environment. It was about physical limitations as well as the limitations of recording and musical instrument technology. We were in the Devonshire quarter of Sheffield, where there were Little Mesters's shops that had fallen into disrepair, which you could pick up for rehearsal purposes for almost nothing – like five pounds a week. They were basically ruins, and it kind of appealed to us because all that was needed was a lick of paint, and then you'd got a studio. Things were so basic for us when we started out that we didn't have a mixing desk, we didn't have equalisation, we didn't even have stereo at that point: we were just bouncing material from track to track on a Revox. But those limitations led us to all kinds of interesting creative solutions – things that we wouldn't otherwise have stumbled upon.

It goes without saying that there have been huge changes in studio technology over the last forty years – but what's interesting is how at every stage in this evolution there has been a need to improvise with whatever the current technology provides. Pink Floyd's music has always made use of all kinds of what might be called ‘environmental sounds’, and EMI had their own enormous library of sound effects on tape as well as the commercially available vinyl discs of sound effects. But often the quality simply wasn't good enough to take them off a vinyl record, and sometimes the specific sounds required weren't available, so we'd have to find our own ways to make or find the sounds. Examples would be the sound of footsteps for the 1973 album Dark Side of the Moon, recorded in the Abbey Road echo chamber; or the clock sounds, for which Alan Parsons, the engineer on that album, went out to a clock shop – in Islington I seem to remember – and recorded a lot of chiming and ticking and so on. Those were relatively straightforward, but when Roger Waters and I were doing the track ‘Money’, we ended up assembling a bunch of coins and drilling holes in them so that they could be dangled on strings in order to achieve the right sort of coin-jingling sound.

As a concert musician you gradually learn to focus on that little slice of time, typically from 7.30 to 9.30 pm, when you must be at your best. Over the years you learn how to build up towards that point, rehearsing during the day (but not wearing yourself out), eating wisely, resting at the right point, all with the aim of being at your most alert and energetic during the performance. You know you have only one chance to give your best.

Making a recording therefore comes as a shock, because in my experience it involves playing your chosen repertoire at high intensity for hours on end. Nothing in rehearsal quite prepares you for this, because in rehearsal you instinctively pace yourself, and in recording you cannot. If, like me, you work in small chamber groups or on your own, you suddenly find yourself facing unprecedented challenges. A recording session typically starts at 10 am (after an hour of warming up) and runs through until the evening, or until everyone feels too tired to go on. My groups have always wanted to record whole movements at a time, so that their shape on disc has integrity. Only when we've got the whole movement safely recorded do we go back and ‘patch’ mistakes. When we appear in person to play a concert somewhere, we want to be able to match up to, or do better than, our recordings. However, playing movements over and over at full stretch is something we never did before we first encountered a recording session, and something we never do at any other time.

I first heard it late one night in a bed and breakfast on the outskirts of Glasgow. It was October 1993 and I was on my way to the Scottish Highlands and breaking my journey overnight in a large Victorian terraced house with old, loose-fitting, sash windows. A strong northeasterly wind battered the gable end. My room was on the second floor and around 2am the blast percolated through the window frame, at first a low tone then rising in pitch and intensity as the wind strength varied. I was drawn out of sleep and lay there in the dark inside an unfamiliar room. The window rattled gently, but the sounds from it twisted and turned all around in the darkness. Warm, secure and drowsy, the details of these wildly varying sounds stirred something in my imagination as I slowly drifted back off into sleep.

As a location sound-recordist with a particular interest in wildlife sounds and their associated habitats I had, prior to this event, always tried to avoid wind ‘noise’ on my recordings. I used large efficient windshields to screen my sensitive directional microphones from the effects of the elements and later, in post-production, filtered my tracks using a variety of equalisers to reduce the broad band frequencies associated with wind noise. All that has changed. I have now radically altered my recording techniques to try to incorporate almost all the sounds I hear in any chosen location, including those made by the elements, and now regard the sounds made by the wind as just that – sound, rather than noise.

My first practical engagement with historical performance occurred in the early 1980s. This was an intoxicating time for period recordings, thanks largely to the new medium of the compact disc. Christopher Hogwood's pioneering Mozart Symphonies for L'Oiseau Lyre was proving an important driver in propelling the entire movement towards classical repertory. In 1976 Neal Zaslaw had heralded Hogwood's project by taking as inspiration the celebrated orchestra at Mannheim, as it was recalled by Burney and Schubart. The rallying cry of ‘an army of generals equally fit to plan a battle as to fight it’ was a true promise of historical riches. Little of this heady ambition was reflected in Eric van Tassel's review of the complete set some eight years later, which observed tartly that ‘the … minimalist approach, which even in the last symphonies consists simply in getting all the details right, need not prevent our penetrating the surface of the music if we are willing to make some imaginative effort … a performance not merely under-interpreted but un-interpreted offers potentially an experience of unequalled authenticity’. The role of character and personality in ‘historical’ music-making was beginning to attract wider discussion that went far beyond the argument that any decision on tempo or dynamics must constitute interpretation. For example, Laurence Dreyfus pointed out that the ‘authentic’ musician acted willingly in the service of the composer, denying any form of glorifying self-expression, but attained this by following the text-book rules for ‘scientific method’, with a strictly empirical programme to verify historical practices.

To most ears, a recording of a song sounds like a reasonably accurate reproduction of the band or artist performing in front of them. Of course, most people nowadays know that many of the components of this finished product had to be played again and again until they sounded ‘right’ – and that what we hear all together on the recording probably wasn't all played at the same time. Nevertheless, a suspension of critical judgement is made and the song is perceived as a true representation of the artist's skills. But is there a magical ‘black box’ that can make anyone sound good? Since the nineties there have indeed been ‘boxes’ – in actuality, mostly software, but sometimes packaged up in a purpose-built box – that can adjust intonation and timing; but this wasn't always the case.

In the days before digital recording, when the hits I produced were made, the processes were more complicated. The method I used mostly was to ‘comp’ the vocal. This involved recording lots of takes of the vocal performance and keeping the better ones on separate tracks (we used multitrack machines usually with twenty-four tracks, but sometimes more), and then patiently sifting through each take line by line, sometimes word by word. The good ones were bounced onto another track, compiling one complete vocal track out of many. This could be an extremely tedious process at times, taking many hours to produce a three-minute vocal; but if done well, the result would be a near flawless performance that still sounded completely natural. And I have used this method even on very capable singers, because my view is that with a recording you want to hear the best version, the definitive version, one that will stand repeated listening. Even the finest singers in any genre will admit that it’s very rare for a performance to be perfect.

It is remarkable that we are still seeing the release on compact disc of newly discovered off-air recordings of live performances from the thirty or more years after the mid-1930s, which many assumed had not survived. It reminds us how important was the emergence at this time of direct-cut disc recording. Its development in the UK by Cecil Watts in 1928–32 is vividly recounted by Agnes Watts in her 1972 biography of her husband.

The use in Germany of disc pressings of broadcast material to disseminate programmes between German radio stations meant that such recordings (a few of which survive) were of remarkable fidelity from 1931. From 1935 they began using tape coated with iron oxide, with increasingly high quality as a result, though this Magnetophon sound recording and reproducing technology was not generally available outside Germany before the end of the Second World War, when it was disseminated by the celebrated British Intelligence Objectives Sub-Committee report in 1946. While as early as 1927 Reith had told the BBC Board that close touch was being kept with developments in the recording field, even in the 1930s recording was not a mainstream activity of British broadcasters. In the UK a succession of clumsy, crude recording systems came and went, but the mindset of broadcasters and musicians was not to preserve concerts. Even repeats of concerts on the BBC were achieved by booking the performers twice, and as late as the mid-1950s the major concert series on the Third Programme were always played on Friday evenings and again on Sunday afternoons, and were preserved only if the composers, artists or private individuals had them recorded off-air.