How Music Works (17 page)

one was supposed to flip over the 78. Stravinsky’s “Serenade for Piano” had

four movements, which he wrote so that they would each fit onto one side of

a record. Decrescendos (a sort of fade out) were incorporated into the music that would occur at the end of one side, and then a crescendo would ramp up

on the flip side, so that there would be a smooth transition after you turned the record over. Some composers were criticized for writing graceless transitions, when actually they were merely guilty of not compromising their cre-

ativity to better fit the new medium. Ellington began to write “suites” whose sections cleverly accommodated the length of a three- or four-minute recording. This didn’t work for everyone. Jazz teacher and author of
Remembering
DAV I D BY R N E | 93

Bix
, Ralph Berton, describes how jazz cornetist and composer Bix Beiderbecke hated making records: “For a musician with a lot to say it was like telling Dos-toevsky to do the
Brothers Karamazov
as a short story.”10

THE NEW WORLD

Records were fairly cheap for much of the twentieth century—cheaper

than a concert ticket. And as they became more widely available, people

in small towns, farmers, and kids in school could now hear giant orchestras, the most famous singers of the day, or music from their distant homeland—

even if they’d never have the opportunity to hear any of those things live.

Not only could recordings bring distant musical cultures in touch with one

another, they also had the effect of disseminating the work and perfor-

mances of singers, orchestras, and performers
within
a culture. As I suspect has happened to all of us at some point, hearing a new and strange piece of

music for the first time often opens a door that you didn’t even know was

there. I remember as a tween hearing “Mr. Tambourine Man” by the Byrds

and, as would happen again and again over the years, it was as if a previously hidden part of the world had been suddenly revealed. This music not only

sounded different, it was
socially
different. It implied that there was a whole world of people out there who lived different lives and had different values than the people I knew in Arbutus, Maryland. The world was suddenly a

bigger, more mysterious, and more exciting place—all because I’d stumbled

onto some recording.

Music tells us things—social things, psychological things, physical things

about how we feel and perceive our bodies—in a way that other art forms

can’t. It’s sometimes in the words, but just as often the content comes from a combination of sounds, rhythms, and vocal textures that communicate, as has

been said by others, in ways that bypass the reasoning centers of the brain and go straight to our emotions. Music, and I’m not even talking about the lyrics here, tells us how other people view the world—people we have never met,

sometimes people who are no longer alive—and it tells it in a non-descriptive way. Music
embodies
the way those people think and feel: we enter into new worlds—their worlds—and though our perception of those worlds might not

be 100 percent accurate, encountering them can be completely transformative.

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This process of unexpected inspiration flows in multiple directions—out

from a musical source to a composer, and then sometimes back to that source

again. The European composer Darius Milhaud treasured his collection of “black jazz” recordings. No one would confuse the music Milhaud wrote with that of

the jazz players he was listening to, but I’m guessing that the music unlocked something in him that allowed a new direction to be realized in his own work.

I wouldn’t be surprised at all if Milhaud’s compositions found their way to the ears of later jazz composers, effectively making a complete loop. Early British rockers were all inspired by recordings of (mostly black) American musicians and singers. Many of those American singers would never have been able to

perform in Liverpool or Manchester (though a few did tour the UK), but their recordings went where they could not. To some extent, those British musicians did initially mimic their American idols; some of them tried to sing like black men from the South or from Chicago. If US radio and concerts hadn’t been as

segregated as they were (and still are, to a large extent), there would have been no space for these Brits to squeeze through. To their credit, they eventually abandoned the mimicry and found their own voices, and many paid tribute to

the musicians who influenced them, which brought them attention that they’d

never had before. Another loop of influence and inspiration occurred when African musicians imitated the imported Cuban recordings they heard—which were

themselves a mutation of African music. The African guitar-based rhumba that resulted was something new and wonderful, and most folks hearing it wouldn’t think it was a poor imitation of Cuban music at all. When I heard some of those African bands, I had no idea that Cuban music had been their inspiration. What they were doing sounded completely original to me, and I was naturally inspired, just as they had been. The process never stops. Contemporary European DJs

were blown away when they heard Detroit techno. This process of influence and inspiration wasn’t the result of corporate marketing or promotion, it was musicians themselves who usually stumbled upon what were often obscure record-

ings that opened their ears.

Recordings aren’t time sensitive. You can hear the music you want whether

it’s morning, noon, or the middle of the night. You can “get into” clubs virtually, “sit” in concert halls you can’t afford to visit, go to places that are too far away, or hear people sing about things you don’t understand, about lives that are alien, sad, or wonderful. Recorded music can be ripped free from its context, for better and worse. It becomes its own context.

DAV I D BY R N E | 95

The jazz soloing that had evolved in response to those dancers in juke

joints could now be heard rattling the teacups in distant living rooms and

parlors. It was as if, as the result of watching television, we eventually came to expect ordinary conversation to be as witty and snappy as sitcom ban-ter. As if that reality supplanted our lived reality. Had recordings done the same thing to music? Everyone knows sitcom dialogue isn’t how people

talk, don’t they? Don’t people know that recordings aren’t “real” either?

TECHNO UTOPIANISM PART 1

In 1927,
The Jazz Singer
, the film which Al Jolson sung in synch with the picture for some scenes, changed the idea of sound in movies. All the studios

wanted sound now. In 1926, AT&T created a new division, Electrical Research Products Inc. (ERPI), to soundify theaters, not just in North America, but

around the world.

An essay by Emily Thompson called “Wiring the World” tells the story of

this relatively short-lived organization. Thompson says that the technicians and engineers of ERPI saw their goal as more than just a technical accomplishment; they attached an ideological, cultural, and even moral aspect to

their mission. To prepare themselves, the ERPI team was first given “aural

training,” which meant some lessons in theater acoustics, sound reinforce-

ment, and learning how to keep the sound of streetcars and subways out of

the theaters. ERPI’s newsletter,
The Erpigram
, painted a vivid picture: “Each man has been equipped with a large fibre knapsack in which to carry his

equipment… the kit also contained a cap pistol to ‘hunt out reverberation,

and his echoes, and banish him from the theater.’”11

I prefer to imagine this aural training as something more esoteric, an

intensive course in listening, learning to hear, and practicing focusing one’s ears. I can picture a group of uniformed men, heads slightly forward, brows

furrowed, listening intently, communicating with each other through hand

signals in perfect silence. The skills they were developing were, in my version, almost mystical, in that they might have been training themselves to be able to hear things the rest of us would miss or to become aware of sounds that we would hear only subconsciously. Like some acoustic Sherlock Holmes, they

could survey a room with their ears and be able to tell you things about it, 96 | HOW MUSIC WORKS

even what was going on outside of it—things that ordinary mortals without

their special powers would miss. But, as with Holmes’s explanations, it would all seem obvious once it was revealed to us by the ERPI master. While the

listening training may have been important, in truth much of what they were

assigned to do was pretty prosaic: wiring and hanging drapes to muffle echoes and help with soundproofing.

Thompson writes about an ERPI team in Canton, Ohio, who heard a roar-

ing sound coming from somewhere near the screen, and of course they had

to track it down, find its source, and eliminate the offending noise. After

“considerable time spent tracking the noise through the circuit,” they looked behind the screen to find six caged lions belonging to the circus.

ERPI was more than a little evangelical. Much like our present-day

techno-utopians, they believed that there would be all kinds of profound

repercussions and knock-on effects (many of them completely unrelated to

sound) around the world as theaters were converted to sound. In the early

days of cinema, America was the primary source of films, so it was imag-

ined that along with movies, American values—democracy, capitalism, free

speech, and all the rest—would go along for the ride. Talkies would bring

“civilization” to the rest of the world! (“Civilization” being defined rather parochially, as it often is. One hears the same claims today being made for

Facebook and all the other new technologies—that they will “bring democ-

racy to the world.” Hell, they haven’t brought democracy to the USA!) Inter-

esting that “mere” film sound technology was presumed to carry so much

of this baggage.

The Erpigram
published a poem expressing their hopes and aspirations: The Chinaman rejects his jos

The Jap his hari kiri

Mahomet’s stocks are wearing thin

For ERPI is established in

The Lands of Rice and Curry!

Quite soon among the Eskimos

The fetish will be known

While mid-equator cannibals

Leave their cooking pots and Anabelles

To hear the white sheet groan!

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Where nations lack a common bond

And hate grows like a cancer

Who’ll banish ignorance and strife

And give the world new lease on life?

Why ERPI—is the answer!12

Thompson writes, “The [evangelical] language became military, and a

little sexual—the engineers were referred to as the American Expeditionary

Force…and as shock troops… also as American Experts… The headline as a

theater in Cairo was being equipped for sound was ‘Africa Falls Under ERPI’s Advance.’”13

This techno-crusade assumed that influence would essentially flow one

way, from the United States to all the other nations of the world, which would naturally become willing and happy consumers of superior American products. And that’s precisely what happened at first, because few countries had native film industries, and none of those had sound technology. In India they were treated to “Melody of Love” and in Fiji to “Abie’s Irish Rose”; folks in Shanghai got “Rio Rita” and “Hollywood Revue.” Only the very best in American culture.

This state of affairs didn’t last long. The French, unsurprisingly, took

offense at English blasting out of their cinemas, and they destroyed a the-

ater. Aspiring Indian filmmakers quickly learned how to use sound technol-

ogy, and began making their own movies. Before long, India was the largest

movie-producing country in the world. Movie studios equipped for sound

also opened in Germany and Brazil, where a factory producing lightweight

musicals churned out films for decades. As with most missionary initia-

tives, the final result was not exactly what had been intended. Instead of

global hegemony and standardization, sound in films allowed hundreds of

cultures to find their own cinematic voices. In fact, some argue that it was the homegrown Indian cinema that forced that country’s citizens to learn a

common language, which may have helped Indians find national identity as

much as the efforts of Gandhi did. And that common language eventually

enabled the unity that led to the ouster of the British Empire.

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BEYOND PERFORMANCE: TAPE RECORDING

Milner tells the curious history of the advent of recording tape—the