How Music Works (16 page)

and shovers, as the early recording studios had, Stokowski conscripted stu-

dio technicians to move the mics around during the recordings of orchestras.

Anticipating a counter-melody from the French horns, for example, he’d sig-

nal a mic to be wheeled into position in time for their “solo.” He realized—as film-sound recorders and mixers do—that we hear with all our senses in a

live situation, and to just stick a mic up and expect it to capture what we

have experienced, well, that wasn’t going to happen. Recreating the subjective

“experience” meant one had to do more than that.

In a live situation, the ear can psychoacoustically zoom in on a sound or

isolate a section of players and pick out a phrase or melody—the way we can

pick out a conversation at a noisy dinner table if we can see the person talking. Stokowski recognized this phenomenon and made adjustments to help

bridge that perceptual gap. All of his innovations aimed to get the
experience
on disc, and possibly even surpass it by, for example, exaggerating dynamics and shifting perspectives.

Sometimes he went the other way: rather than exaggerating, he would

attempt to mask some aspect of the original. At one point he proposed that a big problem inherent in opera performances could now be solved. He pointed

out that “the lady who plays the part live may sing like a nightingale but she looks like an elephant.” Stokowski suggested that svelte actresses learn to lip-synch to pre-recorded vocals so that the opera visuals could finally match the composer’s intention. I saw this done once for a filmed version of Wagner’s

Parsifal
directed by Hans-Jürgen Syberberg. He had great actresses and actors playing the parts, lip-synching to great singers. I thought it worked, but this approach never caught on.

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FROZEN ARCHITECTURE

Recordings freeze music and allow it to be studied. Young jazz players used

to listen to Louis Armstrong’s recorded solos over and over until they

figured out what he was doing. Later, amateur guitarists would use recordings to break down Hendrix and Clapton solos in the same way. Tenor saxophonist

Bud Freeman found that listening to other players in clubs was too distract-

ing—he preferred records. With a recording you could stop time by stopping

the record, or you could make time repeat by playing part of a song over and over again. The ineffable was coming under human control.

But learning from records has its limitations. Ignacio Varchausky from

the Buenos Aires tango orchestra El Arranque says in the documentary

Si Sos Brujo
that he and others tried learning from records how the older orchestras did what they did, but it was difficult, almost impossible. Eventually, El Arranque had to find the surviving players from those ensembles

and ask them how it was done. The older players had to physically show

the younger players how to replicate the effects they got, and which notes

and beats should be emphasized. So, to some extent, music is still an oral

(and physical) tradition, handed down from one person to another. Records

may do a lot to preserve music and disseminate it, but they can’t do what

direct transmission does. In that same documentary, Wynton Marsalis says

that the learning, the baton passing, happens on the bandstand—one has to

play with others, to learn by watching and imitating. For Varchausky, when

those older players are gone, the traditions (and techniques) will be lost if their knowledge is not passed on directly. History and culture can’t really be preserved by technology alone.8

Recordings uproot music from their place of origin. They allow far-flung

artists and foreign genres to be heard in other parts of the world, and these artists sometimes find a wider audience than they ever imagined they could

have. John Lomax and his son Alan traveled thousands of miles to record

the music of the American South. Initially they used a large and bulky disc

recorder. This would be like having a mastering lab in the back of your station wagon, but it was as portable as one could get at the time, if you could call something the size of a small refrigerator portable.

In one instance, John and Alan went to a Texas plantation to record the

black “residents” who would, they hoped, sing for them. The fact that those

DAV I D BY R N E | 89

men could be “commanded” to sing might have been the primary reason to

go there, but their experience did prove to be enlightening in a way that they hadn’t expected. They were looking for someone who could sing the song

“Stagolee.” It seems slightly suspicious to me that these guys already knew

what they wanted—how do you find the unexpected if you know what you

want? Milner tells the story like this:

A murmur went through the crowd and soon became a unanimous chorus. “Send

Blue!” “Blue knows more about Stagolee than ol’ Stag himself!” “Blue, white man ain’t gonna hurt you! What you scared of? That horn too little for you to fall into it—too little for you to sing at with your big mouth!” The man named Blue stood up. He certainly deserves the name, Alan thought as Blue walked toward him. The man’s skin was so dark it looked blue-back. “Can you sing ‘Stagolee’?”

Alan asked. “Yessuh,” Blue replied. “I knows ol’ ‘Stagolee,’ and I’ll sing it for you.”

He paused. “If you allow me to sing another song first.” “Well,” Alan stammered,

“we would like to hear it first, because we don’t have very many unused cyl-

inders…” “No, sir,” Blue said, picking up and adjusting the recording horn. “I won’t sing my song but once. You’ve gotta catch it the first time I sing it.” Alan relented, and switched on the machine. Blue began to sing:
Poor farmer, poor
farmer, poor farmer
/
They get all the farmer makes / His clothes is full of patches,
his hat is full of holes / Stoopin’ down, pickin’ cotton, from off the cotton bolls…

As he sang, he looked at the plantation manager. The crowd’s nervous laughter grew to a roar as Blue continued:
Poor farmer, poor farmer, poor farmer / They get
all the farmer makes, / At the commissary, his money in their bags / His poor little
wife and children, sit at home in rags.
When he was done, Blue received a standing ovation. But he wasn’t finished yet. He motioned to Alan to keep the machine running, looked straight at the horn, and delivered a spoken coda. “Now, Mr.

President,” he said, “you just don’t know how bad they’re treating us folks down here. I’m singing to you, and I’m talking to you, so I hope you will come down here and do something for us poor folks down here in Texas.” As the crowd

cheered, Alan adjusted the machine to play back the recording. People shushed each other as Blue’s scratchy voice emerged from the horn. “That thing sure

talks sense!” someone yelled.9

Blue understood the power of recording, that it could travel to places he

could not, and be heard by people he would never meet—like the President.

90 | HOW MUSIC WORKS

The disenfranchised and invisible could be heard with this new machine.

Alan Lomax liked the idea that the recorder could be a means by which these

invisible people could be given a voice.

The Lomaxes endeavored to facilitate the spread of this music, though

whether they really were helping in the way they thought they were might

seem debatable now. Daddy Lomax in particular had disturbing ideas about

how best to “help” his subjects. Huddie Ledbetter, better known as Lead-

belly, was a singer and guitar player the Lomaxes met in a Southern prison.

Leadbelly’s talent was recognized by many who heard recordings of him,

however John Lomax in particular had a thing about what he considered

to be “authentic.” Leadbelly was an all-around artist who loved to play pop

songs, as well as rawer, more folky material. Lomax forbade him to play the

pop stuff when he took him up to New York to perform for the sophisticated

big-city folks. He wanted to present a “raw Negro,” an authentic primitive,

straight from prison, for New Yorkers to gawk at—and appreciate as well.

He even had Leadbelly dress in overalls when he performed, as if he had

no other clothes to wear. (Huddie actually preferred suits.) While Lomax

wanted to make sure to show how good a player Leadbelly was, he didn’t

want him to sound too good, too slick. On the Lomax recordings this rough-

ness was a stamp of authenticity. So although these recordings did allow

this “hidden” music from Mississippi, Louisiana, and elsewhere to be heard,

there was no possibility of objectivity when it was removed from its context.

Show business (yes, this “scientific” folklore collecting might be viewed as a fairly peculiar and prescribed form of show business) took over, and simulated authenticity became a common tool of presenters—and sometimes of

artists, too—it’s shades of Buffalo Bill and Geronimo and later Bob Dylan,

taking on the persona of an innocent yet perceptive country boy. In later

years, Alan Lomax in particular was dismayed as the recording world came

to be dominated by a few large companies. He saw people being robbed of

their voices, and the musical landscape flattened. He was right. Inevitably, recorded music was a branch of proto-globalization—a process that could

uncover hidden gems while at the same time flattening them out.

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HOW LONG IS A SONG?

Katz asserts that the limited running time of 78s (and later of 45s)

changed writing styles. Recording discs were limited to fewer than four

minutes (more like 3½ minutes for 45s) a side, which prodded songwriters

to shorten their compositions. A three- to four-minute song seems a natu-

ral length to me—it often seems almost inevitable. I can hardly conceive

a time when it might have been otherwise. But maybe, as some suggest,

we have all internalized this arbitrary aspect of recorded music and now

find the exceptions strange and unusual. I remind myself that even folk and

blues songs, some of them centuries old, don’t stretch on endlessly and

most don’t have too many verses—that’s how I justify the omnipresent 3½

minute song to myself. Then I realize that some ballads were much, much

longer. Epic verse, whether European, Asian, or African, was often delivered in a kind of chant, and a single piece could go on for hours. While shorter

forms, like Shakespeare’s sonnets, might be closer to what we now view as

songs, 3½ minutes is not a universal song length.

Perhaps this is a case where the technology and the circumstances of

its wide acceptance conveniently happened to fit a pre-existing form like

a glove, and that would explain why the technology became so popular.

Everyone instinctively knew exactly what to do with it and how to make

it part of their lives. Katz says that Adorno didn’t like this time-limiting aspect of recording technology; the grumpy Adorno called it
atomized listening
. Adorno suggests that our musical attention spans became shorter as a response to the limited length of recordings. A kind of ADD form of listening was ushered in, and we have come to expect everything musical to be

broken down—atomized—into three- to four-minute chunks. Even longer

pieces now had to advance in bite-sized steps, Adorno claims, because a

piece that develops slowly risked losing our interest.

I can’t disagree with that assessment, but I also sense a counter-ten-

dency afoot, an acceptance of musical works that are exactly the opposite:

long and textured, rather than melodic; enveloping and atmospheric as

opposed to episodic and hierarchical. I’ll get to those new developments in

a later chapter.

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IMPROVISATION BECOMES COMPOSITION

Recording technology had a huge influence on both jazz and classical play-

ers. While performing, jazzers would stretch out a tune or theme as long

as they or their audience felt like, or, more practically, as long as the dancers were encouraging them. Soloing for thirty-two choruses was not unheard of

(basically, jamming on a song thirty-two times in a row), but that would be

way too long on a record, so they edited themselves. The recorded versions

of their compositions became more concise, and what was previously largely

improvised music began to become more “composed.” The “tightened” ver-

sions of their solos were soon what they played more often. Sections that

used to sound different every time now always sounded pretty much the

same. I’d argue that for some jazz musicians this was not a bad thing—forced brevity became a restriction that encouraged rigor, focus, creative editing, and structuring. In recording, the dynamic differences between loud and soft sections also needed to be minimized. Such restrictions had the side effect of

once again splitting musical creation in two; what worked best for a live performance and what worked best for recordings was not always the same thing.

Music was getting smoothed out, not always for the worse, I’d say, and

there would be periodic reactions against this tendency. It’s no wonder that many came to believe that roughness and inaccuracy were positive values;

they came to represent authenticity and a resistance to the commercial

steamroller of smoothness.

Though classical pieces still tended to be longer than what recordings could accommodate at the time, even those composers began to adjust to the new

technology: they would write transitions that corresponded to the moment