How Music Works (18 page)

next medium on which sound would be captured. The sequence of

events that led to the adoption of tape is so accidental and convoluted that its invention and adoption were far from inevitable.

Just before WWII, Jack Mullin, an engineer from California, tried record-

ing onto various mediums other than discs, but with limited fidelity or suc-

cess. When he was stationed overseas during the war, he sometimes heard

broadcasts of radio programs featuring German symphonies. Nothing unusual

about that: lots of radio stations had their own orchestras that played live in large studios or theaters, and those performances were primarily broadcast

live. The odd thing was, these “performances” were happening in the wee

hours of the morning, and Mullin heard them when he was working late. So

unless Hitler was commanding orchestras to perform in the middle of the

night, Mullin’s only conclusion was that the Germans somehow had devel-

oped machines that could record orchestras with such fidelity that on play-

back they sounded live.

Through a happy accident, Mullin ended up in Germany right after the

end of the war, and someone said that those radio transmissions had come

from a town near where they were stationed. Mullin went to look, and sure

enough, there were a couple of tape machines that had been modified in such

a way that their fidelity vastly improved on what any other existing technology could achieve. German technical innovations, like their rocket technology, were now free for the taking, so Mullin dismantled one of the machines and

had the parts sent to his mother’s house in Mill Valley.

When he got back to California, he reassembled the machine, and in the

process figured out what the Germans had done. Among other things, they

had added a “bias tone” to the recordings—a frequency you can’t hear but that somehow makes all the audible frequencies “stick” better. Mullin eventually

D

put these machines to work, and he discovered that in addition to being a

good recording medium, tape also opened up some unexpected possibilities.D

If a radio announcer flubbed a line, Mullin could edit out the mistake by

splicing the tape. You couldn’t do anything like that on disc! If a comedian didn’t get the same laughs he got on his run-through, then, assuming the

run through had been recorded, the laughter from that performance could be

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spliced into the “real” performance. The birth of the laugh track! Furthermore, laughs could be reused. “Canned” laughter could be added to any recorded

program if the live audience didn’t yuk it up sufficiently.

The use of editing and splicing meant that a “recording” no longer necessar-

ily represented a single performance, or at least it didn’t have to. The beginning of a song, for example, could be from one “take” and the end from a take done hours later. The broadcast version could even be the result of performances

that had been done in many different places spliced together. The elements of a

“performance” no longer had to be rooted in contiguous time or space.

After seeing a presentation by Mullin of his tape recording device, Alex-

ander Poniatoff formed a company, Ampex, to make more tape machines

based on Mullin’s design. The banks, however, wouldn’t give Ampex the loans

they needed in order to get things up and running—constructing the early

machines required considerable capital—so it looked bad for the future of

tape-recording.

Around this time, Bing Crosby, the singer who had mastered an innovative

use of microphones, was getting tired of having to do his very successful radio show live every day. Bing wanted to spend more time playing golf, but because his shows had to be done live, his time on the links was limited. Crosby realized that by using these new machines to record his shows, he could conceiv-

ably tape a couple of shows in one day and then play golf while the shows

were being broadcast. No one would know the shows weren’t live. He asked

ABC radio if they would agree to the plan, but when they saw Poniatoff’s “factory”—which was a complete shambles, with parts scattered all over—they

said no way. So Crosby wrote a personal check to Ampex that guaranteed the

machines would start getting built. They did, and after Crosby’s initial order, ABC soon ordered twenty more. The era of tape recording, and all the possibilities that went with it, was under way.

GLENN GOULD’S PROPHECY

Some years later, after the tricks and techniques that tape-recording made

possible began to be more widely used, the Canadian pianist Glenn Gould

wrote a manifesto,
The Prospects of Recording
, that expressed his perspective on recorded music and performance. Like Crosby, he was annoyed by the

100 | HOW MUSIC WORKS

restraints and limitations of having to perform live, and he eventually retired from the stage completely—though not to play golf. Gould’s manifesto was

both prescient and way off base.

For example, Gould predicted that live concerts would be more or less a

thing of the past by the end of the twentieth century. This didn’t happen,

but the fact that we often think of recordings as a more definitive version of a piece of music than a live performance indicates that Gould wasn’t necessarily completely wrong. To the great dismay of some classical listeners,

Gould embraced tape technology. He began to create “perfect” performances

by editing takes together, and as a result his dissatisfaction with live performance—his own especially—increased. He felt that there was an unfortu-

nate temptation for live performers to woo the audience, to pander to their

desires, and one presumes this expression of disdain meant that he believed

the music suffered as a result. I can see his point. I’ve been to performances, usually of pop music, where the desire of the performer to please the audience becomes such an integral part of the show, and eventually so annoying,

that I can’t hear the music anymore.

On the flip side, I’ve been to performances where the performer attempts

to go into a trance and ends up ignoring the audience completely, possi-

bly in order to give a deeper and more perfect rendition of a song or piece

of music. When that happens I feel I may as well go home and put on a

recording of the same music, which usually sounds better anyway. In that

sense I agree with Gould—if the goal of your performance is perfection,

then maybe that’s better achieved in the studio, with the help of tape edit-

ing and splicing.

Gould wasn’t alone. He writes about fellow classical artist Robert Craft,

who
“seems to feel that his audience—sitting at home, close up to the speaker—is prepared to allow him to dissect his music and to present it to

them from a strongly biased conceptual viewpoint, which the private and

concentrated circumstances of their listening make feasible.”14 He seems to be implying that Craft, too, realized that many music fans now got their music

from the record player or the stereo console, and thus changed the way his

recordings were produced and the way the music on them was arranged, so

that a listener in a living room would have a more perfect experience.

There were and are dissenters to these new uses of tape. The shit really

hit the fan when someone was brought in to sing a high note on an opera

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recording that the principal singer missed or couldn’t reach. It was considered blasphemy, and this was way before Milli Vanilli got “busted” for not singing on “their own” records. I would agree that there’s deception at work when

the “singer” isn’t actually doing the singing and we aren’t informed of that fact, and it’s not part of the conceptual framework. When I’m on the road

performing, the band and crew are often outspokenly critical of other touring acts whose backing singers (or even lead singers) are on “tape,” or those who have hidden extra “bandmembers” in the basements of the venues. That said,

a playback show can have an integrity all its own. There are no hard and fast rules as far as I’m concerned.

Gould foresaw much of what we do today that was facilitated by tape-

recording as creation and as a way of composing. After he retired from the

stage, he branched out from making classical records and did some innovative radio programs for the CBC, one of which,
The Idea of North
, is partly a multilayered audio collage of voices and sounds that could only have been created using tape and its editing possibilities. It’s a wonderful piece. Milton Babbitt, the electronic-music composer, carried this idea to its logical conclusion:

I can’t believe that people really prefer to go to the concert hall under intellectually trying, socially trying, physically trying conditions, unable to repeat [replay]

something they have missed, when they can sit home under the most comfortable and stimulating circumstances and hear it as they want to hear it.15

INSTRUMENT TECHNOLOGY

AND ITS INFLUENCE ON MUSIC

Leo Theremin invented his eponymous electronic instrument in 1920.

1920! The theremin wasn’t widely heard until it was featured in a number

of movies, such as
Spellbound
in 1945 and
The Day The Earth Stood Still
in 1951, and eventually in the Beach Boys song “Good Vibrations.” The instrument is notoriously difficult to play, as the player doesn’t actually touch it (you control volume and pitch by proximity of a body part—usually your

hands), and maybe this was why the theremin didn’t catch on like he thought

it deserved to. Though Theremin was Russian, one could say that this instru-

ment, and some other electronic instruments and samplers that followed,

102 | HOW MUSIC WORKS

had no national or cultural provenance. They didn’t emerge out of an ongoing musical tradition, and they weren’t better suited to play music of one tradition over another. Organs, for example, emerged from liturgical music, and as with most Western instruments, they play Western scales and tuning easily,

and anything else with great difficulty. You press a key on these instruments and you’re automatically in the world of Western music—no variations of

pitch or bending of notes is possible. The theremin offered up less cultur-

ally-specific options. You could play pitches in between standard Western

pitches and you could bend notes and slide up and down. But the difficulty

in mastering the instrument kept a large number of musicians from utiliz-

ing those capabilities. The adoption of instruments with no cultural baggage would have to wait.

In the thirties, a number of inventors independently developed a way to

electrically amplify guitars. (Theoretically their process could be applied to any instrument with steel strings—a piano, for example—but these guys

were guitar players, and their tweaks, innovations, and prototypes could

be conveniently made in their home workshops.) Unamplified guitars and

some other instruments were getting drowned out in bands of the day.

Horns and pianos are much louder acoustically, and though placing a mic

in front of the guitar player works to remedy this, there was the risk of

feedback—the howling sound of the amplified guitar “feeding back” into its

microphone. Some early electric guitars were basically microphones shoved

into the sound hole of the guitar or clipped over the bridge, and they did

sound louder, but they didn’t solve the feedback problem. Transducer-type

pickups, which respond to physical vibrations, worked a little better. Rick-

enbacker made a guitar in 1931 out of solid aluminum (it must have been

incredibly heavy) that was nicknamed “the frying pan.”E

E

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In 1935, Rickenbacker made another one out of Bakelite—a kind of plastic

more often used for telephones and Kalashnikov rifles. The first commercial

recordings of these instruments were of Hawaiian music. Later, a new instru-

ment called the lap steel (essentially a guitar neck that you lay across your lap and play with a metal slide) was adopted by Western swing bands. Jazz

musicians and virtuosos like Charlie Christian picked up the electric guitar, and one could argue that without this technology Christian’s playing would

never have been heard. Blues musicians found that the increased volume of

the electric guitars worked great—they could now be heard in noisy clubs.

Guitar pickups were mostly magnetic at first. A pickup developed in 1940

sensed the vibration of each of the steel strings individually, and a small