Living Genres in Late Modernity: American Music of the Long 1970s 9780520388796

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Living Genres in Late Modernity

The publisher and the University of California Press Foundation gratefully acknowledge the generous support of the Roth Family Foundation Imprint in Music, established by a major gift from Sukey and Gil Garcetti and Michael P. Roth.

Living Genres in Late Modernity American Music of the Long 1970s

Charles Kronengold

University of Califor nia Pr ess

University of California Press Oakland, California © 2022 by Charles Kronengold Library of Congress Cataloging-­in-­Publication Data Names: Kronengold, Charles (Charles Stewart), author. Title: Living genres in late modernity : American music of the long 1970s / Charles Kronengold. Description: Oakland, California : University of California Press, [2022] | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: lccn 2022005490 (print) | lccn 2022005491 (ebook) | isbn 9780520388765 (cloth) | isbn 9780520388772 (paperback) | isbn 9780520388796 (epub) Subjects: LCSH: Popular music—United States—1971–1980—History and criticism. | Popular music—United States—1961–1970—History and criticism. | Popular music—Social aspects—United States—History— 20th century. | Popular music genres. | BISAC: MUSIC / History & Criticism | MUSIC / Philosophy & Social Aspects Classification: lcc ml3477 .k66 2022 (print) | lcc ml3477 (ebook) | ddc 781.640973—dc23/eng/20220304 LC record available at https://​lccn​.loc​.gov​/2022005490 LC ebook record available at https://​lccn​.loc​.gov​/2022005491 Manufactured in the United States of America 31 30 29 28 27 26 25 24 23 22 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Con t en ts

List of Musical Examples  vii Note on Musical Examples  ix Introduction: Listening for Genres  1 1  •  Unengaging Histories: The Pop Song’s “More” and Melancholy Democracy, 1968–69  43 2  •  Space Issues: The Seventies-­Soul Complex  89 3  •  Exchange Theories: Disco, New Wave, and Album-­Oriented Rock  138 4  •  Senses: Nocturnes among the Smaller Genres  171 5  •  Forces: The Late-­Modern Concerto  200 Afterword  249 Acknowledgments  257 Notes  259 Index  325

M usic a l E x a m pl es

Ex 1.1. The piano’s right hand signifies pop at the beginning of Esthero’s 2005 “Everyday Is a Holiday (With You).”  44 Ex 2.1. Anthony Jackson’s famously funky bass line, which opens the O’Jays’ “For the Love of Money.”  131 Ex 4.1. Elliott Carter’s 1978 Glock Birthday Fanfare presents fragments from “Happy Birthday.”  177 Ex 4.2. “Happy Birthday,” transposed to correspond to the opening of Glock Birthday Fanfare.  177 Ex 4.3. The opening of John Cage’s Nocturne for Violin and Piano raises the question: What kind of piece is this?  181 Ex 4.4. The opening of Copland’s Midsummer Nocturne; the title reflects—or helps produce—the late-­modern nocturne’s characteristics.  189 Ex 4.5. The opening of Ulysses Kay’s First Nocturne for piano.  190 Ex 4.6. The nocturne’s conventions saturate the score and paratexts of George Crumb’s Music for a Summer Evening (Makrokosmos III).  193 Ex 4.7. Four minutes into Earl Kim’s Earthlight the soprano speaks this line as her spotlight dims and the piano’s chord decays.  197 Ex 4.8. In the final section of Earthlight the texture reduces to a little canon on B , D, and E between soprano-­plus-­violin and piano.  198 Ex 5.1. Morton Feldman’s 1975 Piano and Orchestra, mm. 1–5.  213

b

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Ex 5.2. At the end of Morton Feldman’s Flute and Orchestra (1978), the soloist, an English horn, and a solo cello combine to slowly present a complete chromatic scale.  224 Ex 5.3. The opening measures of Olly Wilson’s Akwan for piano (doubling electric piano), amplified strings, and orchestra (1972).  232

viii  •   M us ic a l E x a m pl e s

Not e on M usic a l E x a m pl es

In addition to the brief score examples that appear in this book, some score examples are available on the University of California Press book page, https://www.ucpress.edu/books. These examples are called out in the text using the icon G. The website also has links to playlists. These playlists include most of the main audio examples discussed in the text; these too are called out, using the icon . When the text focuses on a moment in the middle of an audio example, the callout includes a time-­point. In the spirit of this book, there are additional playlists of “bonus tracks” for each chapter; these contain representative works mentioned in the text or notes. These are not called out in the text and need not be listened to in any particular order; their aim is to deepen your engagement with the genres, people, and works discussed in the chapters.

ix

Introduction LISTENING FOR GENRES

What could make you care if a bass drum goes THOOM instead of just thump? What’s the difference whether a concerto ends loudly or quietly? What does it matter if a piece is called “Nocturne,” “Notturno,” or “Nocturnal Sounds?” The musical genres discussed in this book gave sense to such minor distinctions. Little instances of this-­versus-­that proliferated across American popular music of the 1970s, shaping classic soul albums, million-­selling disco songs, and odd pop records. In Western art music, too, subtle differences had outsized effects, which we can grasp in short birthday pieces and expansive genres like the concerto. Popular or unpopular, these genres relied on small details to connect people, works, practices, institutions, resources, and ideas. Those connections were often fragmentary, unstable, and contingent; but they held, if only for a moment, and gave these genres ways to face the world. The chapters that follow ask how these sorts of connections happened and what they tell us. This means accounting for a lot of music, some of which you may know about and some you may not have heard of. It means trying to rehear the American 1970s through the workings of its musical genres. And it means wondering what musical genres are, and what they do. Genres are good at making you care. They make things matter. They create new kinds of differences, new roles for difference. Musical genres can do all this in a variety of ways. This book listens hard to a half-­dozen genres and asks how: how have they changed musical experience, and what have they added to the fabric of the world? It works comparatively, across these and other genres, to show what 70s music can teach us about the relations among people, genres, and works. It moves between popular and classical genres, bigger and smaller genres, and recognized and unrecognized genres in order to 1

demonstrate how musical genres of the 70s differ from one another—and what they share. The book springs from a conviction that the cultural productions of the American 1970s present an extraordinary richness deriving from how they played with genres and from the details their genres make a place for. The American 70s created pressures and possibilities its musical genres reflected. Seventies soul gave people new ways to imagine social space and to engage with issues of the day. Disco changed how people made songs. Nocturnes of the 1970s gave new-­music listeners reasons to think about moods and the senses. Concertos of the 70s leveraged the convention of soloist-­vs.-­ orchestra to encourage people to listen harder. And so on. Listeners may have glimpsed this richness at the time, but genre theory, then and since, has not. We haven’t tried to say what this richness does, aesthetically and culturally. This is partly because we haven’t listened to what American musics of the 70s tell us: that musical genres are complex, messy, and dynamic. Individually and collectively they add up to heterogeneous constellations of phenomena. Genres are collections of works; sets of practices; comings together of people; repositories of ideas, images, and conventions; ways of interacting with spaces, technologies, and institutions; and much else. Putting this another way, musical genres illuminate not just works, but people, technologies, spaces, and everything else that makes up a cultural landscape; they can serve as a bridge between individual aesthetic objects and larger social structures. But they need to be experienced in all their multiplicity. Experiencing the genres this book considers will mean emphasizing five characteristics of musical genres in general—five basic aspects that define musical genres and shape our encounters with them: 1. Genres are part of the material world. A genre fundamentally depends on what is actually available to be experienced in the works, events and practices that connect with it. Genres can’t be experienced apart from their material existence: immaterial notions like “genre rules,” irony, and minor-­mode harmony need material features (like recording studios, hairstyles, and synthesizer sounds) to hang on to.1 In musical genres especially this encourages attention to the materiality of sound, the materiality of body/brain processes, and the materiality of spatial relations. 2. Genres can’t be experienced outside of time. Genres are ineradicably temporal. It’s not just that genres like Philadelphia soul have historical origins and unfold in historical time, and not just that their sonic effects are necessarily time-­based: they structure time in many ways, from their slower rhythms of emergence, growth, and decline, through 2  •   I n t roduc t ion

the temporalities of composition, rehearsal, production, performance, and ordinary getting around, to the multitemporality of musical works (form, phrase, meter, and so on), and the micro-­rhythms of aesthetic experience.2 3. Genres are irreducibly multidimensional. Genres interact with works, practices, institutions, spaces, economies, technologies, conventions, forms, images, and ideas; they impinge upon emotions, social relations, modes of comportment, a range of stakeholders, and events of many sorts.3 3. Each genre is a metagenre. Every genre establishes specific roles for other genres, for all its dimensions, for the works that engage with it, and for the concept of genre itself. Each genre proposes a system of genres and ways of inhabiting this system. 5. Genres are subject to contingency. A genre happens but might not have happened; it creates effects that might or might not be a­ pprehended by a given person in a particular time and place; and it contends and aligns with other forces in ungovernable ways.

All five of these characteristics favor multiplicity over generalizations, and immanent features over abstractions. As such they cut against long-­standing assumptions about genres: that genres mostly classify works, that they can be fully explained through historical accounts, that they’re best understood as social practices, that they enforce rules and contracts, and that they can be mapped in two-­dimensional space.4 More importantly these basic characteristics remind us that genres are entangled with forms of life that go beyond the making and experiencing of art. So why begin a book about musical genres of the 1970s with questions about the small and unimportant? (A great deal of this music has had broad aesthetic and social impact; a good bit partakes of the monumental.) There are three main reasons. First, the musical genres of the 70s flooded American cultural space with trivial details and fine distinctions. It’s worth making room for all this stuff alongside what would seem to really matter: the things people care about aren’t always what’s important.5 Second, details make it harder for us to abstract, generalize and simplify—which is legitimately helpful when we’re dealing with practices and repertoires that have been understood in reductive ways.6 And third: we will see that minor details helped animate 1970s culture, and that works of the 70s often advertise themselves as bearers of minute particulars. We’ll find that when these genres grew large, when they explored big issues, when they pushed music out into other realms of the social, they did so in and through little details. L i s t e n i ng for G e n r e s   •   3

Hearing a Genre through a Fine Distinction Take Parliament’s “The Freeze (Sizzaleenmean).” This nine-­minute album cut, the first song on side two of the million-­selling LP Gloryhallastoopid or Pin the Tale on the Funky, nurses a small distinction while calling attention to its very obsession with minutiae. It’s 1979, near the height of disco’s popularity, but “The Freeze” delivers a funk groove that would seem more at home much earlier in the decade. “CAN we get you hot?,” the female backing vocalists sing crisply in unison, starting on the downbeat. They wait about four beats, with the bass-­line-­driven groove underneath and bandleader George Clinton’s spoken voice interjecting “Got me hot,” before they continue: “Can we MAKE your temperatures rise?” The backing singers repeat this alternation for most of the song in continual call-­and-­ response with Clinton. [track 0.1] So if you were inclined to hear the first question as merely rhetorical—the presentation of a dance-­music cliché with a little sexual suggestiveness rolled in—do you want to rethink your ­response when you hear the second question’s more “precise” language? Is the joke that you’re now encouraged to take the question seriously where before you just heard it as an exhortation? Or that the precision fails to clarify the nature and source of the heat? What’s the difference? About three minutes in, this double back-­and-­forth becomes truly funny. As the female singers keep switching between their two questions, Clinton uses his role in the call-­and-­response to draw attention to an even finer distinction: CLINTON:  OK girls: “can we get you hot, may we make your” BACKING SINGERS:  Can we get you hot? C:  Say “may you” [sic] next time around BS:  May we make your temperatures rise? C:  Just the girls: “can we get you hot, may we make your.” Here we go, girls BS:  Can we get you hot? C:  Talk to me: “may we” BS:  May we make your temperatures rise? C:  One more time: “may we make your temperatures rise” BS:  Can we get you hot? C: “May we”

4  •   I n t roduc t ion

BS:  May we make your temperatures rise? C:  Talk to me, talk to me, y’all

The song has shifted. First it emphasized an inexplicable oscillation between a polysemic colloquial expression and a restatement in more neutrally descriptive terms. Now it’s enforcing a strangely decorous insistence on proper language use—but only half the time, and as the product of a gendered and class-­inflected give and take. The funky groove could be heard as the bedding for these exchanges, or as the record’s raison d’être. What kind of song is this? What has it invested in and what is it trading on? “The Freeze (Sizzaleenmean)” is a late-­seventies funk record. But it sticks closely to James Brown’s groove-­oriented output of 1965 through 1974—so much so that it can be heard as an homage. “The Freeze” shows many key aspects of Brown’s funk style. It’s a long, bass-­line-­driven song featuring call-­and-­response; a lot of the material undergoes frequent repetition. The rhythm guitarist, bassist, and drummer perform a groove that places weight on the downbeats and injects syncopation everywhere else.7 They do so with a funky feel that may reflect the contributions of Brown alumni like Bootsy Collins and his brother Catfish.8 “The Freeze” takes the form of Brown’s extended funk songs. It has a four-­measure introduction that comes back twice; about 80 percent of its length is devoted to the basic two-­measure groove; and it has a contrastive bridge. The sound of the recording is rather dry and thin by comparison with contemporary radio and dancefloor fare; the drums, especially, seem more like early-­seventies funk than late-­seventies disco. Maceo Parker, Brown’s best-­ known saxophonist, weaves ad-­ libs around the vocal call-­and-­response. Even the song’s title gestures toward Brown. This sort of definite-­article-­plus-­noun title conventionally names a dance type; Brown employed this convention often, while Parliament (and related groups like Funkadelic, Bootsy’s Rubber Band et al.) did so nowhere else. The puzzling parenthetical too recalls a titling gambit Brown used increasingly across the 70s. And the interchange between Clinton and the “girls” reflects both the quirky and the objectionable in the gender and class politics of Brown’s on-­and offstage dealings with his employees.9 If funk were nothing more than groovemaking in the James Brown manner we could stop here. But that was never true—certainly not of Brown’s varied output, which included many funky pop originals and funked-­up pop covers along with funk-­inflected soul ballads, bluesy instrumentals,

L i s t e n i ng for G e n r e s   •   5

R&B songs, and Tin Pan Alley chestnuts. Within songs, too, funk usually projected a mix of genres. And seventies funk made use of genres and genre conventions in highly characteristic ways: genres present not only typical features (which we call conventions), but typical ways of handling these features (which we can call metaconventions). In “The Freeze” it’s the playful work of homage, plus the song’s persistent humor, that signals the presence of this “meta” dimension.10 Along with the funny “Can we . . . May we” exchange, the song’s recurring contrastive bridge helps make this dimension audible. The bridge presents changes of meter, texture, and melodic/harmonic style, leading us down a darker path featuring Parker’s edgily chromatic avant-­jazz improvisation; its basic ^ riff could work in a hard-­rock context, an affinity that connects obliquely with the rock-­oriented lead guitar running (quietly) through the verses. This bridge thereby fulfills a genre convention, but with a mix of elements you wouldn’t hear on Brown’s records. The relevant metaconvention, which operates even across Brown’s oeuvre, is this: funk songs draw on the genre’s established practices in a manner that makes an issue of how, and that seeks to expand these practices.11 So even though the call-­and-­ response and this exaggeratedly contrastive bridge broaden the song’s range of effects—in quite different directions—these features keep the song close to the center of the funk tradition. It’s characteristic of 70s funk that a fine distinction like “Can we . . . May we” animates a song by both pushing out and focusing in. This exchange pushes out by giving us reason to wonder just how strange funk’s conventional call-­and-­response schemes can become: What can these exchanges talk about? How far can they stray from simply giving affirmation, making exclamations, encouraging dance moves, providing punctuation, or introducing musical ideas? What can a lead singer ask for? How odd can his language, affect, and persona get? What sorts of roles can he and the female backing singers adopt? The “Can we . . . May we” exchange also focuses in. It animates “The Freeze” by deepening the song’s investment in its groove-­ driven funkiness, as if its homing in on something vanishingly small reflects a giving up of what matters, of the world, or even of sense, in the face of the groove: it’s the song telling us that all we should care about is a beat pattern, a bass line, a bunch of other instrumentalists entraining to a groove, and a handful of vocalists getting us to feel that groove. This fine distinction also reflects investment in funk as a genre. Heard as a deep dive into funk’s conventions and how they operate, the “Can we . . . May we” distinction tells us that the musicians grasped and cared about the 6  •   I n t roduc t ion

genre’s commitments. And at a level that exceeds the musicians’ control and intentions, this minor detail reveals the genre’s major tensions: structured song vs. infinitely extendable groove, danceability vs. other functions, focus vs. stylistic heterogeneity, precision vs. casualness, seriousness vs. humor, a record’s fixity vs. the unpredictability of live improvisation, singularity vs. convention, individuality vs. collectivity, immediacy vs. historicity, having something to say vs. wanting to lose oneself in a groove. These tensions can remind us that many factors impinge on a record like “The Freeze”—institutionally and culturally as well as musically. Making a groove, conceiving a song, producing a record, and marketing an LP are different processes with different histories, temporalities, and stakeholders; all of these processes leave an impress on the finished product. Direct and indirect record-­industry pressure is a big part of what impinges. The record industry was experiencing a boom in the second half of the 1970s, much of it driven by Black music, especially disco. Black artists had reason to eye the sales of their LPs, seven-­inch singles, and increasingly twelve-­inch singles in the pop, soul, and dance-­music markets. Widely publicized chart data, accurate or not, made stakeholders more aware of how Black music was performing commercially.12 Major and independent record labels alike benefited from pumping out product; mining genres like funk and disco sometimes made better sense than putting massive promotion behind a few superstars.13 P-­Funk’s success created pressures of its own. Along with the group’s status as a premiere touring outfit, Parliament and Funkadelic had had eight gold records between them since 1975; Funkadelic had a number-­one soul hit and a quick-­selling LP on the charts at the time Gloryhallastoopid was released. As Amy Nathan Wright has detailed, there was a brand to manage, with a distinct sound and iconography—a mythology, even—along with a Motown-­like expanding roster of headliners, mostly drawn from the ranks of P-­Funk sidemen and backing singers.14 So some of what impinged on a song like “The Freeze” was specific to the P-­Funk model, which relied on big scores to finance and justify the spinoffs, which worked in turn to keep musicians happy enough to create the big scores and do the tours. What impinges musically and culturally has a lot to do with P-­Funk’s production process. In the late 70s this meant many people working quickly, one after another adding elements over basic tracks, in a structure George Clinton called “assembly line.”15 Each person had something distinctive to provide, from the guitarist who first put chord-­progressions on a four-­track tape to visual artists like Pedro Bell and Overton Hall who worked on the L i s t e n i ng for G e n r e s   •   7

album covers.16 Surprising ideas and investments emerged from this process. Songs became permeable to the genres these musicians knew—jazz, rock, pop, classical, disco, soul, gospel, as well as funk—to the histories of these genres, and to the specifics of the group’s own history, which had been marked by explicit engagement with genre-­boundary policing (as in a song like Funkadelic’s 1978 “Who Says a Funk Band Can’t Play Rock”).17 Clinton and other lyricists could quickly grab hold of phrases from TV ads, old songs, the Bible and spirituals, sportscasting, the dictionary, and DJ patter; they could draw material from chemistry, pop psychology, politics, Clinton’s stuffed animals, and much else.18 What songs were “about” was partly determined by how these sources interacted. When we say that music, culture, and institutions impinge on a record like “The Freeze” we’re acknowledging the uncertainties that attend record production when many actors play a role and things come together quickly.19 The efficiency and openness that allows people to speedily produce commercially successful records means there’s a degree of uncontrol—things happen to a record as it’s being made. It’s not as if a single artist, producer, label boss, corporation, sales chart, production practice, or musical genre can dictate how a song turns out. Each of this record’s actors creates forces that contend and align with other forces in unexpected ways. The distorted guitar doesn’t seem fully at home with the basic groove, for example, but it paves the way for the rock-­oriented riff that powers the song’s bridge. And when people work fast, as P-­Funk and most other soul, funk, and disco musicians did, they don’t normally ask “why?” once a record clicks. Nor do audiences need them to. A basic point here is that the genre both creates pressure and provides ways to relieve that pressure. Funk’s past haunts “The Freeze”: James Brown, the “Godfather,” looms over this record’s sounds and practices. But, as the “Can we . . . May we” exchange shows, Brown’s foundational strategies (like improvised call-­and-­response) suggest ways to get past him. Funk’s present too pushes in on this song. The late-­70s disco market held powerful attractions. Funk groups like Earth, Wind and Fire, Kool & the Gang, and many others tapped into that market by producing long, danceable songs featuring catchy melodies over driving bass lines locked in with heavy drum sounds. P-­Funk did this too with late-­70s mega-­hits like “Flash Light,” “One Nation Under a Groove,” and “(Not Just) Knee Deep.” The sound, forms, and lyrics of funk had changed by 1979, partly because dance music had become more reliably lucrative. But funk also provided scripts for resisting disco’s pressure: songs like “The Freeze” leveraged funk’s investments in rock and jazz in a 8  •   I n t roduc t ion

manner that nudged them away from the dance floor. It’s not hard to find danceable disco songs with meter changes, dissonant saxophone playing, or distorted guitar, but “The Freeze” puts all these elements into the framework of a “listener’s song” rather than a dance song—which opens up space for the funny “Can we . . . May we” exchange.20 More broadly, funk’s groove-­oriented approach provides a mechanism for things to pop into musicians’ heads, and solid grooves make it easy to add new elements; but these elements can create tensions that need dealing with, and funk’s practices show how to deal. So, we could say, funk creates space for details like “Can we . . . May we.” This little detail becomes possible thanks to funk’s convention of call-­and-­ response over a groove, its improvisatory practices, and its “freewheeling, uninhibited, trying to get you, entertaining kind of attitude.”21 The genre’s persistent jokiness, and the depth of its engagement with its past, allow this detail to count as a detail—as something that can jut out and gain attention as part of a whole. And the fact that the “Can we . . . May we” exchange appears on a million-­selling LP both amplifies it and justifies its presence. We can say further that this detail helps animate the song. Whether a particular listener notices it or not, whether it’s meant to work as one of the song’s hooks, whether its humor is its raison d’être or something mostly for the musicians themselves, this fine distinction is a locus of effort and energy. It gives the song liveliness, vividness, and interest: the P-­Funk people care about this detail, and they show us how to care. We can also say that this detail teaches us about funk as a genre, in three main ways. First, it reminds us that the scope of what we can attend to in a funk song is deep and broad—deep in the sense that we can listen into foundational practices like groove-­making and call-­and-­response and extract something new from them, and broad in that this scope encompasses elements like humor, gendered labor, and engagement with funk’s past. Second, the “Can we . . . May we” distinction makes exaggeratedly clear that funk records are products of negotiation. Again, this distinction introduces tensions that enter a field of forces already riven by other tensions. Putting it another way, the this-­versus-­thatness of “Can we . . . May we” triggers a process that unfolds in relation to many other musical and social processes that together produce the song. This funny negotiation helps the song achieve and justify its nine-­minute length, and it projects the song into realms of sociality in which the difference between “can” and “may” might matter. And third, this detail teaches us that funk embraces contingency. We can’t predict how this fine distinction will influence any particular experience of L i s t e n i ng for G e n r e s   •   9

the song. We can’t determine what its point is, or if it has a point (or, indeed, whether the point is its pointlessness). Even if George Clinton had explained, in 1979, exactly what this distinction was about, we couldn’t have predicted how that would have shaped the song’s reception. What we do have is a genre-­specific sense that groovemaking is a fundament, the funk group’s energy and “attitude” too are fundaments, and almost anything else can bubble up to the surface. The unknowns surrounding the aims and ­effects of this minor distinction—why it bubbled up and whether listeners will care about it—are a sign of how funk works. A funk song asks its listeners to abide with not knowing what will emerge from its musical textures, whether it’ll be danceable, how silly or serious it’ll become.22 Funk builds in this acceptance of contingency. Artists rely on it for space to move, and as something to react against; this reliance is what we would expect from musicians like P-­Funk, who literally tell us “Think!” at one moment and “Ain’t nothin’ but a party” at the next.23

Genres (and Genre Theories) in the 1970s One song’s assertion of a fine distinction has told us about a particular genre, reminding us we can learn about genres through individual songs and their details. If close reading is a tool in this investigation, it’s a kind of close reading that registers but doesn’t seek to overcome slippages of meaning or indeterminacies of function. It doesn’t assume that everyone, or no one, grasped a meaning at the time, but asks instead what difference it would have made to grasp it or not. It’s a mode of reading that can ­accept refusals of meaningfulness, or the possibility of pointlessness—that can acknowledge the things we’ll never explain (or don’t need to). It seeks to preserve an initial sense of “what the fuck is that about?” even while pushing for an answer. And this is a mode of close reading that doesn’t wait around for masterpieces or archetypal examples. As such its readings happen in full awareness of the many other songs and little details that too could be read closely. Parliament’s “The Freeze (Sizzaleenmean)” needs to be heard as one of several thousand late-­70s funk songs; we gain insights from one song only if we know how it relates to many others. For that reason this book’s archive includes thousands of pop songs, soul songs, and disco songs, fourteen hundred concertos, and hundreds of nocturnes. Listening to the works that participate in a genre can be a good way to study 10  •   I n t roduc t ion

that genre. Patterns emerge. We’ll often find that what’s most interesting about a particular case is what it shares with other examples of its genre, and not what makes it singular. In context of all the songs it’s entangled with, a record like “The Freeze” can also teach us something about 1970s genres more broadly. Some of what “The Freeze” does, many other funk songs do; and many genres of the 70s do the kinds of things that funk does. While these traits are not exclusive to musical genres of the 1970s, they are key to the behavior of genres and works in the 70s. “The Freeze” demonstrates some basic things about how musical works of the 70s interact with genres. These traits group into three categories: (1) the ways that multiple genres impinge on 1970s musical works; (2) the ways these works embrace genres and genre conventions; and (3) the fact that works interact with genres in a self-­reflexive manner. 1. “The Freeze” shows how genres like funk, jazz, rock, and disco become part of a song’s substance. They course through the song and invigorate specific elements. These genres are thus experienced contingently in ebbs and flows. (The rock guitar appears only in the verses, and it’s quiet enough that you can miss it; the bridge’s riff might or might not be heard as rock-­ oriented.) So the question isn’t “is this a funk song or a rock song?” or even “is this a funk song and a rock song?” but “how did this song connect with the sounds, practices, and institutions of funk and rock (and other genres)?” “The Freeze” is typical in that it’s impinged on by a handful of genres that operate sometimes in concert and sometimes in conflict. It’s also typical in how it brings out the tensions that define its home genre—tensions that help open it up to other genres. 2. It shows too how 70s songs engage with genres and genre conventions. Like many musical works of the 1970s, “The Freeze” uses genre conventions as material—sometimes sheepishly, reluctantly, lazily, or condescendingly, but without trying to bully us into looking past this use toward something ostensibly deeper. Similarly this song generates complexity and interest by turning a conventional scheme like call-­and-­response into a trope; humor is part of how this happens. In short, “The Freeze” is a song that doesn’t attempt to avoid conventions or to transcend genre; instead, it retains an experimental, skeptical attitude toward the genres it connects with, while also preserving the value of ease, repetition, shorthand, playfulness, casualness, not-­caring, overconfidence, and trust in listeners. Studying music of the 1970s shows that 70s musicians didn’t like to be excluded from particular genres, they didn’t like to be limited to a single genre, and they didn’t always L i s t e n i ng for G e n r e s   •   11

want their works to be judged principally as members of a genre; this especially affected artists of color, as shown in Maureen Mahon’s book on Black women in rock.24 Seventies musicians often took issue with particular genre conventions and practices, and they sometimes set themselves up in opposition to specific aspects of a genre’s history. But they didn’t usually evidence a desire to operate in a space “between genres” or beyond the field of genres;25 and if they did, their works, their audiences, and the networks of people, objects, and institutions that sustained them quickly pulled the genres back in. (Even a mega-­artist couldn’t fully determine whether a drummer would produce a dancefloor-­worthy beat, nor whether a piece of electronic gear would signal disco three months hence, nor whether a record label would market a song as pop. No one could fully control the cultural associations of a saxophone or a particular chord progression.) Like most 70s musical works, “The Freeze” uses genres to connect with audiences, institutions, and other songs. By drawing on genres, a work submits to the economic and aesthetic judgments of those genres’ markets—perhaps unhappily, but without conveying the sense that it’s inappropriate to have to. This included the Western art music genres discussed in this book. These connections with the commercial sphere are part of a genre’s sociability as well as the principal means by which its objects circulate. 3. “The Freeze” demonstrates a broad 70s trend toward self-­reflexiveness in a work’s interactions with genres. Self-­reflexiveness here is the capacity to perform analytical work on a genre’s conventions and practices by means of those conventions and practices.26 Self-­reflexiveness is basic to funk, as Tony Bolden has argued, and this is precisely what “The Freeze” accomplishes with its canny use of call-­and-­response over a groove.27 Many works this book discusses are like “The Freeze” in that they might be called self-­theorizing objects. Self-­theorizing musical works have mechanisms for telling us what they’re doing and how; they have stories about the genres they interact with; and they provide generalizable insights into the process of making cultural objects.28 Taken together, the works that participate in a genre constitute a self-­theorizing archive, which means that there are patterns to the self-­ reflexiveness demonstrated by these works. As Samuel Floyd suggests, “genres Signify on other genres,”29 and in any given genre, this reflexive gaze will focus on specific practices and conventions and leave others uninterrogated. These patterns add up to a conception of how genres work, what’s important to them, and what they’re good for. It’s partly for this reason that an individual genre can help us theorize the field of genres. 12  •   I n t roduc t ion

These are simple points. It’s not hard to imagine how a work could interact with several genres in dynamic, time-­bound ways. It’s not hard to understand why musicians would engage in a give-­and-­take with a genre’s conventions and practices, or embrace one strand of a genre’s history while keeping another at arm’s length—or how a work could participate in a genre even if its makers don’t want it to. Nor is it difficult to grasp how works that participate in a genre could employ mechanisms for reflecting on that genre. These characteristics add up to a kind of complexity that works derive from their interactions with genres, a complexity that shapes thousands of popular songs and classical pieces of the 1970s. But this complexity was underplayed in genre theory at the time, and hasn’t been given its due. This is partly because genre theory, then and now, has had trouble simultaneously grasping complexity and multiplicity. Grasping them separately hasn’t been seen as a problem. Genre theory can acknowledge complexity in the form of rare “masterworks that . . . far surpass the conventions of their genre,” as Hans Robert Jauss did in his groundbreaking 1972 essay “Theory of Genres and Medieval Literature”—even as his point was that these “unexpected” masterworks constitute a rupture in the genre’s history.30 There’s no theoretical difficulty when a particular genre like the novel is said to be complex, as opposed to the “little behavioral genres” of ordinary speech.31 Indeed, Fredric Jameson claims that the very maturity of the nineteenth-­ century novel and its successor, “the unclassifiable ‘Livre’ or ‘text,’ ” signals “the end of genre.”32 For Jameson genres survive only in the “half-­life of the subliterary genres of mass culture.”33 Because these “subliterary genres” do not bear discussing, this approach yields a genre theory without genres: for the few works that matter, genres exist only as “raw material.”34 The novel’s complexity and its proliferation thus operate on entirely distinct registers. Nor do theoretical difficulties arise if a popular genre “evolves” to the point of producing complex “self-­reflexive or formally self-­conscious” works; this evolution was fundamental to Thomas Schatz’s Hollywood Genres (1981), where it provides a reason to not look at genres in their less “evolved” states.35 Similarly, genre theory can handle masses of texts—but only on the assumption that no individual text needs unpacking. “Distant reading” suffices.36 This hands-­off approach became the basic tack when genre theorists were confronted by the multiplicity of 1970s popular music. Talking in 1979 about “contemporary pop music of whatever type,” Jameson actually denied that there was “anything to be gained by reconstituting a ‘corpus’ of texts after the fashion of, say, the medievalists who work with pre-­capitalist L i s t e n i ng for G e n r e s   •   13

generic and repetitive structures;” it’s as if the capitalist framework, and perhaps the multiplicity itself, makes works and genres less amenable to (and worthy of ) analysis.37 But why? Even if we concede that a multiplicity of songs means many non-­masterworks to potentially contend with, even if these songs circulate in the commercial sphere and “we live a [sic] constant exposure to them,” why does this entail “a structural absence . . . of . . . ‘­primary texts’ ” to study?38 Jameson is saying, in effect, that (1) the greater the number of popular songs we’ve heard, the less we can learn from any new song, and (2) the greater the number of texts interacting with a genre, the less interesting each interaction. If we follow the logic of all these approaches we reach a troubling conclusion: the artistically significant works can’t teach us about genre precisely because they’re artistically significant, and the artistically insignificant works can’t teach us about genre because they’re insignificant. The significant works are by definition exceptional: they constitute a too-­small minority of texts, and they derive their significance from the “modernist revolutions” that “successfully repudiated the older” genres, as Jameson put it.39 Artistically insignificant works (whether they’re pop songs or members of “subliterary” genres) are too numerous, and they’re churned out in ways that limit their individuality; furthermore, our “constant exposure” to their multiplicity means we can’t find anything new in them. So, it follows, the significant works are too few to generalize from, and the masses of insignificant works zombify the genres they participate in. This taste-­rather than fact-­driven logic governed the approach to contemporary fiction and music in the genre theories of the 70s, and it straitened the study of genres in film. The problem stems from a widely shared sense that the universe of texts consists of good exceptions fighting it out with bad everything else. This is the idea that there’s not just a sharp border between literature and the “subliterary,” but also a great preponderance of the subliterary, which makes it hard for the literary to emerge. The same situation is understood to hold in film, with rare examples of high-­quality cinema (whether auteurist, independent, or otherwise “art”) barely surviving in the face of run-­of-­the-­mill commercial movies. Similarly, everyone has heard the genre-­dismissing line about there being only “two kinds of music, good and bad,” whether it’s attributed to Handel, Rossini, Bizet, Ellington, Basie, Ray Charles, or Jimi Hendrix. But when asserted in the 1960s and after this line tends to convey a sense that the good is rare: if a musical work seems at home in a genre, which most works do, it’s probably less than good.40 14  •   I n t roduc t ion

We find this “good exceptions” approach in Jameson and Schatz, and in the late-­60s/early-­70s genre theorizing of Carl Dahlhaus.41 Jameson pictures twentieth-­century cultural space as an overdetermined commercial sphere (consisting of “genre films,” “subliterary” or “formula” print genres, and popular music) that transforms the “older generic specifications . . . into a brand-­ name system against which any authentic artistic expression must necessarily struggle.”42 Jameson’s unabashedly modernist language—“authentic artistic expression” battling the “subliterary” in a proxy war against capitalism— connects with Dahlhaus’s approach to genres in Western art music.43 Just as Jameson explicitly equates “contemporary ‘high culture’ ” with modernism and draws a line below, Dahlhaus isolates a particular strain of contemporary late modernism, treats it as fully representative of postwar Western art music, and places it above “trivial music.”44 For Dahlhaus too, genres no longer have any just claim on aesthetic activity. “Since the late eighteenth century all genres have rapidly lost substance,” and individual works “submit only under duress to being allocated to any genre;” this historical development comes from “a tendency to favor the exceptional”—a consequence of the composer “having to maintain [a] position in the market place without the backing of a patron.”45 This explanatory scheme rendered most contemporary cultural production inaudible. While Jameson refused to recognize the masses of “ ‘primary texts’ ” around him, Dahlhaus failed to acknowledge that hundreds of symphonies, concertos, string quartets, and sonatas had been written since World War II (many by modernist composers), and that these genres weren’t slowing down; nor did he allow space for the emergence of new genres.46 Dahlhaus’s and Jameson’s approaches demonstrate how scholars theorized contemporary musical genres in the 1970s—partly because their efforts add up to just a handful of sporadic attempts. Indeed, genre theory of the 70s mostly left music untouched.47 Jameson wrote about music only in passing, and never devoted a whole article to questions of genre. Dahlhaus, too, published but a few pieces on genre, and did not specialize in the music of his day.48 In film studies, where questions of genre had gained more attention in the 60s and 70s, the idea of the “good exception” proved very resilient. When Schatz placed “genre films” against what he called the “non-­genre film,” for example, he too was isolating a small number of works and saying they deserved greater scrutiny.49 Even Leo Braudy’s serious attempt to defend the study of “genre films” was compromised by a frame that places these films, which embrace “conventionality,” against the rare “film ‘classic,’ ” which doesn’t.50 L i s t e n i ng for G e n r e s   •   15

So genre theory of the 60s and 70s inherited and perpetuated a rare-­ exceptions-­plus-­the-­rest ontology. This ontology ended up devaluing “the rest,” the practice of aesthetic evaluation, and even the exceptions themselves. Scholars who succumbed to this picture of cultural space reacted in a variety of ways, none of which involved engaging with a multiplicity of contemporary works. The approach represented by Jameson, Dahlhaus, and Jacques Derrida was genre theory trying to put itself out of business; for Dahlhaus, “the history of genre disintegrates when the mediocre degenerates to the level of aesthetic vacuity,” and if you “speak only of important, exceptional works,” you find that “the history of exceptions is no longer the history of a genre.”51 This approach says that genre theory no longer has genres to study or works it can tell us anything about. The other major theoretical strains, too, showed no urgency about works of the here and now. Film theorists like Schatz and Braudy started with existing canons (“Classic film,” the old Hollywood studio system) and received ideas about each genre’s origins and themes.52 They sought to move genre theory toward industry studies, reception theory, or visual iconography.53 But having delimited their modest-­sized canons, they didn’t fully investigate them; there was no careful working through of institutions, audiences, or visual devices, nor any attempt to engage with “all films [in a genre], regardless of perceived quality.”54 And when literary theory of the 70s actually embraced genres, it did so in a self-­deprecating way, apologizing to the left for its reinvestment in supposedly stodgy matters of norms, classificatory schemes, and literary systematics, and to the right for its willingness to consort with vernacular cultures.55 All these approaches gave scholars reasons to not investigate. What did they miss? Above all, these scholars failed to grasp the nature and extent of what was happening artistically in the 1960s and 1970s. In music especially this meant the work that was being produced and disseminated; the practices that enabled this proliferation; the networks that connected these works, institutions, and stakeholders; and, simply, the intensity of the effort and care that went into this aesthetic activity. One can understand why a 70s medievalist might not have seen how lucky it was for genre theory that there had been over one thousand genre-­mixing funk songs by the time Parliament released “The Freeze,” or that new pieces for soloist and ensemble were appearing on average about once per week, or that there were zero disco songs before 1972 and thousands upon thousands by the beginning of 1979. But particular kinds of works and sets of practices 16  •   I n t roduc t ion

were so prominent in the 60s and 70s that anyone thinking about questions of genre might have been stirred by them. Even a scholar of literature, film, or Classic-­Romantic music could have noticed how the LP was reconfiguring the ways genres operated, for example. Genres like rock, soul, opera, and electronic music changed once they embraced the long-­playing album’s concretion of sounds, images, and text, its capacity to embody a genre’s variety and internal tensions, and its possibilities for bridging genres.56 Albums changed the ways a genre faced the world, became legible, and revealed the identities and concerns of its stake­holders. So too might a key group of musical practices have roused theorists of genre to ask what was happening. New sounds were everywhere in the 60s and 70s. Musical practices that broadened the possibilities of instrumental and vocal sound were swirling through genres: think Jimi Hendrix’s use of feedback, chamber music’s incorporation of percussion, synthesizers in jazz. One could easily hear extended techniques, expanded ranges, new instruments and kinds of voices, and increasing numbers of non-­Western, folk, electronic, electroacoustic, and formerly underutilized instruments. These sounds and practices created new possibilities for concertos, string quartets, and symphonies, funk, pop, rock, salsa, and jazz songs. They opened these genres up to other musics, and raised questions about the relations of genres to idioms, techniques, and technologies. These musical practices reanimated older genres—thus helping them stay alive—and enabled the proliferation of new genres. But none of this activity spurred anyone doing genre theory at the time. Neither did genre theorists acknowledge the highly visible changes in musical networks of the 1960s and 70s. The growth of music journalism might have encouraged scholars to move past entrenched distinctions between “high,” “low,” and “middlebrow” musical genres. Images of the recording studio, and stories about the hundreds of hours musicians were spending there, could have made scholars ask what all that time, effort, and technology was doing for musical genres. The boom in attempts to “record communal musical events,” which Braudy notes was cinema’s “major musical trend of the late 1960s,” gave genres an audiovisual intensity that might have compelled a rethinking of the visual dimension of musical genres, and of the multi­sensory economies of musical experience.57 And a broader sense of what people could musically care about—hairstyles, drum sounds, advanced degrees, the thickness of vinyl LPs—might have inspired a correspondingly broader sense of how many dimensions musical genres possessed.58 L i s t e n i ng for G e n r e s   •   17

In short the people who were (not really) writing about musical genres in the 1970s missed everything that might have slowed down their investigations: everything that gave the lie to the “decline of genres” thesis, everything that showed commonalities between “high” and “low” genres, everything contesting the idea that genres straiten aesthetic activity, everything that complicated typical accounts of genres’ emergence, growth, and decay. Starting with a group of popular-­music articles by Franco Fabbri, and Stephen Neale’s 1980 booklet on genre in film, things changed a bit.59 Not only were there more historically-­and institutionally-­focused studies of popular genres; there were rigorous, multidisciplinary returns to key questions. Fabbri f­ocused on norms, for example, and Neale asked how ideology was articulated through cinematic resources like narrative.60 But the idea of looking closely at a multiplicity of texts (or events) across multiple genres didn’t emerge in this wave of 80s and 90s genre theory.61 The turn toward norms, ideology, institutions, and practices couldn’t save genre theory from its blind spots. Even now one struggles to find scholars acknowledging what music of the 1970s makes clear: that genres are riven by internal tensions; that there’s a dynamic play of genres in any individual work; and (partly because of these tensions and this play) that musical works present broken surfaces and embody multiple systems of value. And it remains too easy to find people talking about works as being “in” genres, making two-­ dimensional maps of the field of genre, uncritically accepting artists’ dismissals and disavowals of the genres they engage with, and spending time asking whether a practice, or group of texts, is or isn’t a genre. We need to let more people, more kinds of objects, and especially more works influence what we say about musical genres. Because genre theory has not listened closely and comparatively to big corpora, it has been able to survive on generalizations. We’ve missed not just works, but the details of those works: we’ve been unable to grasp the ways that individual genres create details and seek to make them count for something. Because there has been too little attention to the play of genres in individual works, we haven’t learned to listen for how genres function and affect us moment by moment. And because we haven’t looked hard enough at the dynamic ways that works embody and project genre identities alongside other forms of identity—identities that derive from time, place, nationality, ethnicity, class, gender, sexuality, and ability—we’ve missed something important about how identities function and interact. So not hearing the 1970s prevents us from understanding how musical genres work—how they connect with songs and with one another, how they 18  •   I n t roduc t ion

operate across a range of practices, institutions, and networks, and how they make a place for particulars. Not understanding how musical genres work means we’re missing something: we’re missing something ethically about the ways we care and the ways we relate to each other, and we’re missing something ontologically about what there is to care about and orient ourselves around. This music still needs what Foucault called “curiosity,” which “evokes ‘care.’ ”62 It needs us to move slowly through many examples, and a multitude of details, across many dimensions of genre. This book thus adopts a deliberate pace that fits the dense thicket of 1970s cultural production. In doing so it finds material to study in little details, fine distinctions, emergent conventions, odd interfacings with musical technologies, gradual shifts in sonic characteristics, and subtle ways of playing with genres; this is where the action is. The chapters that follow put a multiplicity of recordings and scores under the magnifying glass in order to find a new way back to questions of identity and sociality.

What Genres Are, How They Work, What They Do If genres are more than collections of texts and conventions, more than ­social formations and sets of practices, more than institutions and modes of discourse, what are they exactly? If Alastair Fowler is right, and the idea that genres classify objects is a “venerable error,” what do genres actually do?63 How do genres operate, and how do they work upon us? For purposes of this book the answers lie in the five basic features mentioned up front: that genres possess 1. many dimensions; 2. a materiality that defines their nature and extent and shapes their immaterial aspects; 3. an ineradicable temporality that functions at many scales; 4. a reflexivity and relationality that make them work as “metagenres”; and 5. a high degree of contingency in their origins, makeup, and effects. It’s worth saying a bit more about a few of these features, but not before providing some account of how genres hit us as genres. This account can center on the notion of genericity. Genericity names the property of bearing the stamp of a genre. It’s about experiencing something L i s t e n i ng for G e n r e s   •   19

in light of a genre. (That something can be the width of a tie, a series of repeated notes, or waiting on line to get into a club.) More strongly, it’s part of “learning to love new particulars”: as Max Cavitch says, “Through a textual object’s genericity, we learn to recognize and value its difference from what we have been taught to desire.”64 These questions of recognition and valuation have ethical as well as aesthetic implications; this helps determine the stakes of genericity, especially when we consider devaluation, and failures of recognition. When we think about genericity we’re asking which aspects of an analytical object come forward thanks to the effects of a particular genre. Or, more broadly, we’re asking: which aspects, features, moments, objects, utterances, activities, or physical characteristics of, in, or associated with this text, event, setting, or practice are readable, become visible, “fit,” give pleasure, provoke thinking, or spur talking as an effect of, or in light of this genre’s presence, meanings, functions, or institutions?

Genres, these questions tell us, can shift perceptions of many sorts of entity, sometimes profoundly. Indeed, genres can actually create aspects, moments, features, objects, and roles, like a record’s capacity for “easy mixing” in a DJ set, the “break” in dance music and its visible trace in a record’s grooves, the “twelve-­inch version” of a danceable song, and the “disco consultant.”65 Genericity is a key concept for this book even though the word seldom appears in the core chapters. This is because, by focusing attention on how a genre can “light up” specific aspects, features and moments, the notion of genericity provides reasons and ways to attend to the dynamic play of genres in particular works. That is, any work will be impinged on—partly illuminated— by several genres, and it’s worth investigating the details of how, when, and for whom. Genericity can inform studies of large corpora as well: attending to what a genre lights up across many works that share a time, place, or medium can reveal patterns. By showing these regularities (like the wide use of disco’s “four-­on-­the-­floor” bass-­drum patterns, discussed in chapter 3) we can connect works that are “in” a genre with those that merely borrow from it. Genericity reminds us too that many of a work’s attributes need to be experienced and recognized as such, which means they may be subjective or appraisive (like

20  •   I n t roduc t ion

the nighttime impressions conveyed by the postwar nocturnes considered in chapter 4); this is but one way that genericity underscores contingency. Thinking about genericity, asking how many sort of things can bear the stamp of a genre, brings us back to the multidimensionality of genres. Taken together, the genericity of a reverb patch, a typeface, and the physical distance between instrumentalists on stage can suggest that genres don’t so much classify works as constellate features.66 The heterogeneity of these features is itself crucial to how genres operate and how they’re received. In methodological terms, the multidimensionality of genres favors an emphasis on genericity’s moment-­by-­moment are-­you-­getting-­this-­or-­not over atemporal notions like “genre rules” and the “generic contract.”67 The concept of genericity makes it worthwhile to spell out what there is to be gotten—to actually list the dimensions of genre. What follows is a brief spelling-­out. Given this book’s emphases it makes sense to view the dimensions of genre from the perspective of texts—principally records, performances, and (in Western art music) scores, bearing in mind paratexts like titles, liner notes, and onstage monologues, and the larger “epitextual” field (the discourses of press releases, reviews, interviews, DJ and show-­host patter, etc.).68 This perspective reflects the book’s aims but remains wide enough to suggest what a practice-­, institutions-­, or audience-­based investigation of a genre might look like. My list of the dimensions of genre has been preceded by Jennifer Lena’s ambitious attempt to delineate the shared attributes of sixty-­four mostly American musical genres. Boiling these sixty-­four down to four ideal types of genre (“avant-­ garde,” “scene-­based,” “industry-­based,” and “traditionalist”), Lena creates a template of attributes across twelve dimensions.69 Here I list a larger group— nineteen dimensions, most of which are themselves multidimensional—in order to show the range of what we can listen and look for when we investigate what musical genres do. The language I use has been shaped by questions that have arisen in the course of studying postwar musical genres, but it’s designed to be applicable to other musics and to genres in other media. The concept of a genre includes: •

Practices, activities, behaviors: What are people doing—or what do they think they’re doing—when they participate in this genre? How does the genre show on their bodies and faces? What are the meanings of these activities and behaviors, and how are they talked about? How is information about this genre taught and learned? How does this genre define, regard, and reward (material and immaterial) labor?

L i s t e n i ng for G e n r e s   •   21

•

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Functions and effects: What are these texts for? What do they do? What roles do they play? What effects (real and putative) do they have on the body/ brain? What sorts of affects and emotions are they associated with, and how are these affects/emotions created, depicted, registered, and channeled? Audiences, people, participants, stakeholders: Who are this genre’s people? How do these texts (and their paratexts) picture them? How does this genre figure the relations among (its) people, including author-­to-­ author, author-­to-­audience, friendship, etc.? Who produces and otherwise facilitates these texts? Who is being addressed by them (and how do they represent the people they don’t address)? Who has a stake in this genre? Contexts: Where do these texts circulate, where do these activities happen—­in which places, institutions, and discursive networks? What are the real and virtual spaces in which they’re experienced, and how does this affect the works’ size, forms, and functions?70 Modes of dissemination and consumption: How do these texts circulate? How are they exchanged? How available are they (where, to whom)? What are the trade routes? Does the genre have a name? Does it function as a pigeon-­hole?71 Does it have a market presence? How does money enter the picture? Origins: What stories are told about where this genre comes from? Are these stories accurate? Does this genre emerge from a particular time and place, or group of people? How do its origins reflect and influence its ­relation to other genres? History and tradition: Across what time spans and in what socially ­sanctioned ways are these texts produced, disseminated, consumed, and known? How does this genre change over time? Temporalities: In what ways does this genre structure, picture, and embody the flow and experience of time (at longer, medium, and shorter time-­scales)?72 Size: How big or small are these texts? Form: How are these texts organized? Sections? Beginnings, middles, ends? What’s the role of form in this genre and how is it talked about? Medium: Are these texts all in the same medium? If so, how does the medium shape them? If not, what’s the nature of the intermediality? Objects, resources, technologies: What sorts of equipment, technologies, and other stuff play a role in the creation and dissemination of works in this genre? Who has access and who doesn’t? Materials, features, conventions: What are these texts made of? What do they tend to include or exclude? Which features help identify a text as being in this genre? Which analytical parameters does this genre encourage us to trace? What are this genre’s “metaconventions?” 22  •   I n t roduc t ion

•

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•

Principles: What seem to be the regulative principles, norms, or “rules” governing how people make, interpret, use, or respond to these texts? Which notions of correct/incorrect and good/bad do you find in this genre? How are these principles and notions made known? Are they explicit or not? How stable are they? Who gets to judge? What are the legal and extra-­ legal modes of governance in this genre? Values: What do these texts picture as important (or unimportant), beautiful (ugly, sublime), etcetera? What are the value-­words used around this genre? What do they seem to want you to care about? Are there notable incommensurabilities or tensions between any of this genre’s values? Themes, subject matter, ideas: What are the basic ideas this genre seems to embody? What do these texts tend to talk about? Does the genre seem to possess, endorse, underwrite, or imply a particular world-­view? How does it treat what lies outside its materials, principles, values, and ideas? What is this genre’s ontology, or sense of what there is? What “particular kind of world” does this genre “project?”73 Names, titles, paratexts: How are texts named in this genre? What does it mean to call something a member of this genre? In what ways are its paratexts important and not? Stylistic features: Does this genre-­name also signal a style? Are this genre’s stylistic fingerprints visible in images, clothes and hairstyles, typography? Does this genre present stylistically distinctive modes of comportment or kinds of language-­use? Metageneric relations: How does this genre relate to other genres? How does it picture the role and the field of genre? What supergenres does it belong to?74 How does it generate and shape understandings of its subgenres and any countergenres?75

Calling these sets of attributes “dimensions” may obscure how much they’re entangled. Language-­use in a genre will affect its work-­titles and other verbal paratexts, for example; resource-­intensive genres limit the number and kinds of people who produce it, as Audre Lorde noted in 1980;76 a genre’s conventions will be influenced by how its texts circulate; the spaces in which a genre is experienced may affect its sense of form.77 These dimensions depend on one another for definition and weighting: a genre that recognizes a “god­ father” like James Brown or a point of origin like New Orleans will narrate its history accordingly; a genre whose norms are verbalized explicitly may be more likely to establish agonistic metageneric relations, as in first-­generation British punk;78 the twentieth-­century nocturne, which maintained strong intermedial relations with the visual arts, never developed a robust visual dimension of its own. So investigating one dimension requires consideration of L i s t e n i ng for G e n r e s   •   23

the others. Studying the dimensions of a genre also requires attention to how these dimensions manifest in a temporal flow—to how we apprehend them as they assert themselves in particular texts, events, or practices. Every genre possesses all these dimensions. But they’re entangled differently in each genre, hierarchized differently, and disposed differently in both temporal and spatial terms. Think about a dimension like form. The postwar concerto has simple formal principles that govern its overall mode of proceeding (like solo-­orchestra-­solo-­orchestra-­etc., which entangles form with a textural scheme and a basic concept), while disco’s principle of the “break” governs a specific thing that happens somewhere in the middles of songs (thus entangling form with dancefloor function and bodily comportment). Postwar nocturnes and 70s funk songs don’t exhibit formal principles one can delineate so clearly—but they all do have forms. In the short pop records chapter 1 discusses, the sense of form reflects the fact that songs may be heard in passing, or only in part, by listeners whose engagement may be shallow, fleeting, or narrow-­focused (connecting form with the absence of a clear function or mode of dissemination). Or take meanings: a genre’s cultural meanings can lie in the textures of works that participate in it, in the discourse around it, in its makers’ heads, in the spaces between works and listeners, in the social institutions that support it, in the listener’s gut. A given genre will be regarded in ways that reflect where this dimension is located. This book treats multidimensionality itself as a basic fact about what genres are and how they work. Multidimensionality provides a frame for understanding concepts like intermediality, formal variety, social function, cultural memory, relevance, and diachronic change from the perspectives of individual genres. Thinking multidimensionally can reveal how genres differ from one another, in four main ways. First, thorough examination of a genre’s dimensions, and how they’re entangled, hierarchized, and disposed, can serve to provide a map of that genre’s insides, alternative to the two-­dimensional mappings of multiple genres one often sees in studies of genre:79 in place of schemes that render genres commensurable by flattening them out, multidimensional pictures heighten a genre’s distinctiveness. Second, comparing several genres multidimensionally shows that each genre can provoke its own modes of analysis and, more broadly, its own ways of being apprehended. Third, a multidimensional framework can help us understand how genres manage to stay alive even when they’re remediated, or just alluded to, or when they operate without being invoked by name (as the postwar concerto often does). And fourth, a multidimensional account 24  •   I n t roduc t ion

of a genre gives the clearest image of how it establishes relations with other genres: the ways a genre constellates, concretizes, and temporalizes its features and aspects is what makes genres into metagenres. Among the dimensions listed above, the idea of “metageneric relations” stands most in need of further explanation. Calling genres “metagenres” means partly that a genre’s identity is relational: as chapter 1 shows, for example, late-­60s pop was defined against rock, soul, classical music, and other genres. But the notion of a metagenre also signals that there’s no genre-­neutral field on which these relations can unfold. That is, each genre proposes its own dynamic system of genres. It places itself within this system, not necessarily at the center, and seeks to determine the inhabitants. ( Just as a genre requires observance and non-­observance of conventions, so too does it need to establish an inside and an outside, and a sense of borders and margins.) Further, calling genres “metagenres” acknowledges that each genre affects the discourse around it: each genre gives substance and shading to the aesthetic concepts we use, like expression, personality, catchiness, memorability, complexity, and experimentation, and it creates a role for the concept of genre itself.80 Each genre influences the nature and function of these concepts—and hierarchizes them—in accordance with both the needs of its stakeholders and the tendencies of its materials. A genre also shapes the role and limits of an individual work, person, event, institution, or practice in redrawing this map as it goes along. And while a genre pictures cultural space according to its own needs, it must do so in contestation with forces from within and without. In sum, genres constellate heterogeneous features; they “concretize and vitalize” concepts;81 and by doing so they instantiate a set of relations among genres and in the wider world. This book’s title is meant to raise questions about what musical genres are in the late-­modern American moment its chapters focus on. What is a “living genre,” and what’s it opposed to? This is not just, or mostly, a matter of live performance; it does not require anything like Philip Auslander’s “liveness,” nor does it need to be “absorbed into the fabric of everyday life,” as it does in Kay Kaufman Shelemay’s important concept of a “lived musical genre.”82 But in the moment it’s experienced, it “symbolizes vitality, a sense of aliveness,” as Mellonee V. Burnim says of performance in Black culture.83 And taken as an unstable constellation, a living genre is “superresponsive to its environment,” as Wai-­chee Dimock says of the epic (citing Aristotle’s ­Poetics).84 Its “vitalization of ideals” happens through its details, telling us that genres can encourage a “focus on what is small and alive, rather than grand L i s t e n i ng for G e n r e s   •   25

and abstract.”85 Indeed, a living genre’s conventions and practices are what Wittgenstein called “forms of life” (which Angus Fletcher helpfully glosses as “includ[ing] the sense of staying alive and of being lively”).86 Genres can also give us reasons to take seriously Walter Benjamin’s dictum that “the idea of life and afterlife in artworks should be regarded with an entirely unmetaphorical objectivity.”87 This dictum should be heard in light of Audre Lorde’s reminder, in a 1977 essay on poetry for a magazine of women’s culture, that “our feelings were not meant to survive.”88 Put bluntly, a genre can live though its people do not, and (as Max Cavitch says, following Henry Louis Gates) studying genres can begin the process of “recuperating . . . lost human constituencies.”89 In musical terms the idea of “living genres” can become a way to register the vitality of the music and material culture the seventies were awash in. This means hearing life in the LPs, the branding, the old and new gear, the commissions, the grants, and the course syllabuses, even the mechanisms of classification. Listing out these modes of liveliness begins to suggest that the idea of “living genres” opposes itself not to putatively dead genres, nor to Jameson’s “half-­life” of “subliterary” genres,90 but to the very idea that genres are lifeless containers, deadening reductions of complex social practices, or post-­mortem accountings of spontaneous creative activity. Late-­modern artistic genres must often live dangerously, however. William Connolly characterizes late modernity—which includes the 70s and can be said to extend into our present moment—as a set of interlocking pressures on the subject: There is, first, an intensification of the experience of owing one’s life and destiny to world-­historical, national, and local-­bureaucratic forces. There is, second, a decline in the confidence many constituencies have in the probable future to which they find themselves contributing in daily life. There is, third, an even more ominous set of future possibilities that weigh upon life in the present. Each of these developments is distinct enough, in its newness, its intensification, or the extent to which it is inscribed in lived experience, to be treated as a defining dimension of contemporary life.91

Postwar artistic genres reflect these pressures. The people, works, and institutions that connect with these genres are subject to contingencies that affect not only their participation in these genres, but their very existence; it follows that a genre’s being “living,” “alive,” or “lively” depends on factors well beyond its stakeholders’ control. In the 1970s especially genres bear a double burden. Number one, genres in general could be seen as old-­hat or 26  •   I n t roduc t ion

merely quaint; the discourse around them made it easy to think that they weren’t what was interesting or important about the works, people, and practices that interacted with them. And number two, the specific genres that circulated in the 70s could be seen as inadequate to their historical moment, whether they were traditional genres like the nocturne and the concerto, trendy genres like disco and Philadelphia soul, or underacknowledged genres like pop and occasional pieces. What these diverse groups of works and practices share is that they arrive just after what we call “the sixties” and are haunted by a sense of belatedness or loss, even when they embrace narratives of progress and abundance.92 A late-­modern genre’s life can be precarious, whether or not it’s in decline.

Following the Play of Genres . . . These conditions enjoin us to listen hard to—and for—late-­modern musical genres. This can require a kind of slowed-­down critical focus: how do genres make themselves available, and light up specific elements, in the moment-­to-­moment unfolding of a musical work? I suggested above that the “genericity” idea calls on us to attend to the play of genres in particular works. By registering what there is to be heard, trying to actually hear it, and asking what it means if a listener grasps a particular element or doesn’t, we’re acknowledging that this play of genres will exceed what contemporary listeners verbalized; our accounts will bear an uncertain relation to what these audiences heard. This obliges us to tread carefully. We listeners have a hand in producing the play of genres as we experience a work, but we do so in relation to what that work gives us; the activity should feel like following rather than leading. Listening for liveliness and following the play of genres returns us to ­music’s multitemporality. The real-­time experience of music is multitemporal. We attend variously to different sorts of rhythms at different times, spurred not only by the materiality of the musical sounds we hear but by other sounds, by memories and other thoughts, and by the multisensory effects of other stimuli. The material sound-­stream itself presents multiple temporal strata: beyond the multitemporalities of form, musical syntax, and micro-­rhythmic effects, we can hear juttings-­out of slower temporalities, from the rhythms of studio time, rehearsal, and composition, to longue-­durée transformations of conventions, musical technologies, production practices, aesthetic categories, L i s t e n i ng for G e n r e s   •   27

the histories of instrument-­playing bodies, and much else. Of course the stubborn materiality of sound also imposes its own temporalities on the experience of a work (through a crash cymbal’s slow decay, the use of reverb, the force behind the first attack of a brass fanfare, the ways an analog synthesizer slowly drifts out of tune, and so on). If we’re tracking the play of genres in a musical work, then, we’re paying attention on multiple temporal levels, to many different kinds of flow. In one sense we’re treating genre as a trackable parameter, like harmony, capable of smaller-­and larger-­scale effects, functioning in relation to other parameters, and subject to differences in how people grasp and interpret it. But we’re also thinking about genre as one of the many cultural forces that can impinge on a musical work—in this regard like history, political economy, technology, community, ethnicity, gender, or the disciplined body. Indeed, tracking the play of genres can suggest a way to temporalize these other forces by asking whether, when, and how they come forward in the experience of a particular work. Putting this another way: a genre identity, like all identities, is experienced in ebbs and flows, and in relation to other sorts of identity. The rest of this introduction will sketch the play of genres in a very short funk song, and in a postwar lyric poem by Elizabeth Bishop and its 1976 musical setting by Elliott Carter. Bishop’s “View of the Capitol from the Library of Congress” will provide an opportunity to see how the play of genres can work in relation to an anxious movement among the senses, language-­games, and poetic figures; Carter’s Bicentennial remediation of this poem, too, puts its flow of genres into a swirl of other contending forces. But first we will turn back to late-­70s funk. Together these examples will give a sense of what it means to cultivate an ear for musical genres of the 1970s. Parliament’s “The Freeze (Sizzaleenmean)” showed how a particular detail could provide clues to funk’s modus operandi. But it also demonstrated how multiple genres can flow through a 70s funk song and light up specific elements. These genres—and the elements themselves—are experienced contingently, depending on who’s listening when, where, and how. Taking the whole of another late-­70s funk song will give a clearer sense of how the play of genres can work in a multitemporal flow. “Brazilian Rhyme (Interlude)” appears in two entirely different incarnations on Earth, Wind and Fire’s triple-­platinum LP All ’N All (1977). The first and longer of the two times out at about a minute and twenty seconds, closing side one. The first “Brazilian Rhyme (Interlude)” rewards attention to the moment-­ to-­moment play of genres. An interlude, like a prelude, conventionally does 28  •   I n t roduc t ion

only one thing or presents a single idea; if its function is simply to establish a soundworld, set a mood, or maintain continuity, it can do so with a minimum of material. But “Brazilian Rhyme (Interlude) [I]” goes out of its way to present a mix of genres. Vocal and instrumental parts enter one at a time, encouraging you to focus on individual elements. The song fades in on a Fender Rhodes electric piano and finger snaps. [track 0.2] Falsetto voices enter, in unison, with a “Brazilian” melody (sung in vocables), soon supported by trumpets and trombones. The horns swell, engulfing the Rhodes, and we hear a new percussion part played (perhaps with a castañet technique) on what sounds like stones. The drum set enters, then electric bass. New, highly contrapuntal vocal material appears. We hear the start of an electric guitar solo as the song fades out. The staggered entrances work to showcase the skills of the musicians. Some of the parts foreground the performer: Philip Bailey’s falsetto, Verdine White’s muscular electric bass, the funky drummer (Fred White or Maurice White). Others parts might get you to pay attention to the engineer (George Massenburg), like the finger snaps and the “stones,” while the horns encourage you to notice arranger Tom Washington—the voicings and the mixture of muted trumpets plus open trombones signal jazz but also possess individuality. Washington’s horn arrangement shows how the song works as a whole. “Brazilian Rhyme (Interlude) [I]” is set up so that particular instrumental and vocal parts connote specific genres. This approach raises the question of whether and how this song hangs together, given its multiple sources and range of addressees. You have the Brazilian vocal material and the funky bass and drums. The horns suggest jazz, the guitar solo signals fusion, the Rhodes and handsomely-­produced finger snaps are typical for mid-­to late-­seventies soul, and the part played on “stones” may sound vaguely Latin American. The contrapuntal vocal material has a more complex genealogy. It goes back to jazz vocal groups like Lambert, Hendricks and Ross (at least), and may even recall classical/jazz pastiches by artists like the Swingle Singers, but the precise and varied articulation, and the nature of the melodic material itself, gives it a high-­sixties character; it connects with late-­sixties bossa-­ nova-­influenced pop-­soul and pop, particularly given the group’s extensive collaboration with arranger Charles Stepney, who had helped define late-­ 60s pop-­soul vocal arranging through his work with the Dells and Rotary Connection.93 The clarity and specificity of these genre references differ, as does the likelihood of their being understood. Many listeners would have heard the Rhodes L i s t e n i ng for G e n r e s   •   29

part as soulful and the horns as jazz-­like without specific songs or artists having been referenced; and soul gains additional weight as the 1970s-­Black-­ music genre that mostly strongly shaped reception and marketing, including the considerable promotional efforts of Columbia Records. By contrast, the initial vocal material not only “sounds Brazilian” but alludes to Milton Nascimento: Nascimento received writing credit, and the melody in falsetto recalls his approach. (The second “Brazilian Rhyme (Interlude),” on side two, reproduces instrumentally the opening of a Nascimento composition and performance that begins Wayne Shorter’s 1975 LP Native Dancer, also on Columbia Records.)94 These generic allusions to música popular brasileira (MPB) are clear and specific but not as accessible to EWF’s non-­Brazilian listeners. Some elements can attract attention for failing to disclose their identity: the stones function partly as something that makes you say “what was that,” thereby contrasting with elements that are more easily identifiable. It’s also typical that each genre allusion emerges through a different mix of parameters: jazz through harmony and texture, funk through rhythm and timbre, fusion through timbre and melody, música popular brasileira through melody, rhythm, and harmony. Thinking along slightly different lines, the interlude’s Brazilian quality derives mostly from the song-­as-­written, its funkiness comes principally out of the song-­as-­performed, and its character as late-­70s soul reflects the song as arranged, produced, and marketed. The effects of genres are ineradicably temporal, but they aren’t limited to this sort of variable real-­time flow. Following the play of genres means listening for other modes of temporality. For one thing this song squeezes half a dozen genres into a mere eighty seconds. There’s a kind of virtuosity in this display, but also a sense of temporal compression.95 This song stands out for presenting what seems like too much material for its length and ostensible purpose (especially once we acknowledge that this rich LP hardly needs fully wrought interludes between songs); the song’s individual elements seem to rush toward its boundaries. Even within the song’s conceit of wheeling things in and out, the contrapuntal vocal material is more generous than it has to be. The slight excessiveness of Verdine White’s ad-­libbing on the bass line helps make things funky. George Massenburg’s work provides further examples. As engineer, Massenburg shapes the sounds of instruments and voices individually through deft miking and equalization so that every element is differentiated. In a song like “Brazilian Rhyme (Interlude) [I],” the differentiation helps you hear the variety of elements the song contains, and complicates the meaning of individual elements—the finger snaps work partly as vehicles for 30  •   I n t roduc t ion

reverb, for example, so they can’t be heard simply as natural or spontaneous. But Massenburg exceeds this function to create a sound recognizable as his alone; as a departure from an engineer’s usual roles, this personal stamp is yet another force resisting the song’s temporal compression.96 This sense of compression—and the effort and energy it derives from— pushes the song’s play of genres out into the whole LP. That is, this compression engages another set of time-­strands: recollection and anticipation, grasping the LP as a whole, hearing how “Brazilian Rhyme (Interlude) [I]” differs from other songs on (and beyond) the LP. In particular the compression shows funk’s tendency to include more than a song can safely contain.97 All the genres this song includes could have been explored more fully, and each of them does in fact receive fuller treatment at some other point on All ’N All. This interlude’s play of genres thereby reminds us that funk exceeds the bounds of any individual song. There are many funk songs with a broad generic mix, but none that exhibits the breadth a typical funk album incorporates. Indeed, while all of EWF’s albums present a range of styles, this range includes songs that don’t themselves exemplify the funk song: taken individually they can be heard as soul, top-­40, and so on, but as part of an album they reveal funk’s attempt to include everything. The interludes on All ’N All play a role in this breadth. They help make the album’s mixture of songs more heterogeneous—more varied in function, length, form, genre, and in what they ask of listeners. Because of its stated function and the compressed way it’s put together, “Brazilian Rhyme (Interlude) [I]” can be heard both as presenting too much material too quickly and as smooth background music. These hearings depend on the listener’s perspective, the setting, and the mode of diffusion (headphones, a bass-­heavy sound-­system, an average stereo, a portable cassette-­player, etc.). At the same time, these interludes function as links: they help create a larger-­scale form and argue for the album as a unit. These interludes also teach us about how funk comports itself. The kinds of effort and energy “Brazilian Rhyme (Interlude) [I]” embodies can demonstrate how this genre faces the world. Playing funk isn’t meant to sound easy. If funk is a test for musicians, it always says “show your work.”98 The effort and energy partly serve an aesthetic of rawness: talking about All ’N All in the liner notes for a 1999 remastering, Maurice White said “I wanted it to sound raw, at least the way we define it [laughs].”99 Rawness makes the energy and effort audible. This song’s rawness derives not only from the aggressive bass and drums but equally from how the song’s unison-­voices-­plus-­finger-­snaps L i s t e n i ng for G e n r e s   •   31

scheme creates the image of a street-­corner setting (a setting that works as a trope in both Brazilian and North American music). But throughout All ’N All the “raw” sound requires the group’s frank use of sophisticated production techniques; this is part of why White laughs.100 Rawness and sophistication complicate one another: the sophisticated production values mean that the “raw” or “street-­corner” quality can’t be taken too literally, while the assertion of rawness means these sophisticated techniques aren’t adequate on their own. This tension can itself become a source of energy. Funk’s mode of comportment shapes its play of genres. Seventies funk musicians were always multiply competent: many had backgrounds in jazz, classical, gospel or the blues, and all of them could perform soul. But funk seemed to make them want to go beyond what they know.101 Groups like Earth, Wind and Fire performed songs in other genres like insiders, with no trace of an accent, but they often took an additional step. They worked to make themselves competent in other genres’ material to the point where they could not only play it straight but play it funky.102 Because they did things the hard way, 70s funk artists truly learned the languages of the genres they borrowed from. Funk’s incorporation of other genres normally goes along the grain of stylistic or formal similarities. For example, música popular brasileira shares with funk, soul, jazz, disco, and gospel (Maurice White’s first musical language) an Afrocentric way of placing chromatic harmony under diatonic or pentatonic melodies; “Brazilian Rhyme (Interlude) [I]” manifests this connection. We can hear this openness to other genres as both a reaching out and a letting in. The flipside of this openness is also important: it means there’s often no clear way to separate out funk’s s­ takeholders—­or its institutions (like record labels) and musical materials—from those of a neighboring genre like soul. The manner in which “Brazilian Rhyme (Interlude) [I]” plays with genres may come the closest of any of its features to defining 70s funk. As noted in connection with Parliament’s “The Freeze,” this is a metaconventional feature: we’re thinking not only about what sorts of music the song incorporates but how it incorporates them. Most 70s genres underwrite generic mixtures; the essential point, though, is that each genre differentiates itself at this meta-­ level. We can begin to discern these differences by simple structural analysis of individual songs like this one. How many genres does this song’s mixture incorporate? How much of the song is given over to genres other than funk? Do the borrowed genres occupy certain sections or strata of the song and not others? How do these genres relate to funk and to each other? 32  •   I n t roduc t ion

So the play of genres here tells us about the song, and about the All ’N All LP. It also tells us about funk as a genre, about the other genres this song connects with, about the relations among these genres, and about their similarities and differences. As such, it teaches us about the broader field of long-­1970s popular music. Again, the play of genres involves multiple time-­strands. MPB governs the song’s concept, which has a different temporality than the way soul shapes the overall production practices, which is different from how the funky elements jut out from time to time, and from the surprise-­effect of the late-­appearing jazz-­fusion guitar solo; all this is different again from the unevenly felt and mostly held-­off pressure from disco’s emphasis on danceability, bigger drum sounds, and denser cymbal patterns. Different too is pop’s temporal logic of the hook that can stick in your memory and blot out other parts of a song; so is the temporality of pop-­soul’s uneasy balance between that temporal logic and the force of soulful singing. We can even hear the effects of slower music-­historical flows: the increasingly unsustainable conflict between big-­drum-­sound exploration and rhythm-­section arranging; more investment and changing aesthetics in Brazilian record production, mastering, pressing, and diffusion;103 and the fifteen-­year embrace between Black music and pop in Los Angeles recording studios.104 This interlude’s play of genres, which is grounded in the specific poetics of funk’s genre mixing, leads us to a central point. A song can have multiple centers or foundations. Consider “Brazilian Rhyme (Interlude) [I]” from the perspective of funk’s values: the weight of the bass and drums—the way they can suffice to carry the song—make funk the song’s foundation. If MPB is your standpoint, however, you might place the voices at the center, you’ll grasp the song’s status as a Nascimento pastiche, and you might be nudged by Earth, Wind and Fire’s imposingly refined sonics. The prevailing values of late-­seventies soul—smooth but soulful voices, a tight rhythm section (softened with horns, keyboard pads or strings), good rhythm arrangements, sophisticated production values, a balanced mixture of elements—will be heard as central from that genre’s perspective. This multiplicity of centers is one of funk’s essential characteristics, as I’ve suggested; but it informs us about all these genres. A second basic point is that this listening exercise reveals things we can’t learn without following the play of genres. We sense above all the push-­and-­ pull of funk’s multiple time-­senses, which are shaped by compression and expansiveness, spontaneous juttings out and long-­practiced discipline. But this mode of listening can sharpen our ears for the multitemporal flows of L i s t e n i ng for G e n r e s   •   33

every genre this song connects with—including those it doesn’t participate in, like disco, whose market presence and production aesthetics haunt late-­70s music. What remains to be said is something equally basic: a song’s play of genres happens within a larger field of forces. Songs interact with genres at the same time as they engage with other cultural forces, other sets of practices, and other modes of identity. Turning away from popular music to vocal chamber music and musically-­informed lyric poetry, we can follow the play of genres

. . . into a World of Genres and Other Forces One can see why Elizabeth Bishop’s 1951 “View of the Capitol from the Library of Congress” drew Elliott Carter’s attention. Not only does the poem foreground a developed instance of diegetic music; the scene of audition takes place in a public, notably “American” setting that connects with the Bicentennial occasion of the commission Carter had received. “View of the Capitol” makes an issue of its female subject’s status as the poem’s voice (in a way that resonates with Carter’s interest in questions of voice, vocality, and the singing subject). And it presents a dynamic play of genres and rhetorical modes that Carter—a famously sensitive reader of poems—would have been fully capable of grasping.105 This play begins with the poem’s title, which signals the genre of the topographical poem. The topographical poem describes a place, natural or manmade, either from a fixed point or in the process of moving around or through it. Poems in this genre run from intimacy to grandeur, from meditation to propaganda, partly depending on the nature of the place described. This poem’s first stanza acknowledges a kind of responsibility to the topographical poem, but immediately swerves: Moving from left to left, the light is heavy on the Dome, and coarse. One small lunette turns it aside and blankly stares off to the side like a big white old wall-­eyed horse.

Describing the light rather than the Capitol itself, this first stanza directs its gaze out of the picture. It verges into a cascade of whiteness-­words—“white” and “wall-­eyed,” but also “lunette” and “blankly”—only to arrive at an impasse: where does the poem go after producing a horse?106 This stanza makes a problem of the topographical poem in two quite different ways. First, its 34  •   I n t roduc t ion

exaggeratedly precise descriptive impulse squelches the speaker’s response to the view, which is normally a key element of topographical poems.107 It’s as if in late modernity the materiality of the light becomes a necessary element in the work of description: the topographical poem’s principal job becomes impossible, and this endless task leaves no room for the poet’s reflection on the scene. Second, the magic-­trick horse, which fulfills the stanza’s rhyme-­ scheme but deflates its tone, shifts “View of the Capitol” away from the topographical poem and toward the register of experimental modernist lyric (playing in more elemental ways with language and form, perception and description).108 The beginning of the second stanza reflects the opening generic frame: the unidentified speaker’s gaze takes in another aspect of the view. But it gives the rest of the poem over to a mostly aural phenomenon, going from seeing to hearing, and from stasis to movement: On the east steps the Air Force Band in uniforms of Air Force blue is playing hard and loud, but—queer — The music doesn’t quite come through. It comes in snatches, dim then keen, then mute, and yet there is no breeze. The giant trees stand in between. I think the trees must intervene, catching the music in their leaves like gold-­dust, till each big leaf sags. Unceasingly the little flags feed their limp stripes into the air, and the band’s efforts vanish there.

(10)

(15)

Great shades, edge over, give the music room. The gathered brasses want to go boom—boom.

In genre terms, “View of the Capitol” proceeds from the topographical poem to a more modernist quasi-­or mock-­Stevensian meditation on whiteness. (Wallace Stevens’s “The Auroras of Autumn,” which describes a beach with a deserted white cabin and a man who “turns blankly on the sand,” had recently appeared in print.)109 The second stanza shifts the generic register again, now toward something like a Romantic lyric of “visionary hearing.”110 L i s t e n i ng for G e n r e s   •   35

Bishop’s imaginative reconstruction of this sonic phenomenon moves the poem into overt trope (lines 13-­15), which gives “View of the Capitol” a hint of allegory, a hint that’s finally taken up, in mock-­Homeric apostrophe, with the pun on “Great shades” (meaning “shade trees” but suggesting spirits of the dead), and in the personification of the band in the onomatopoeia of the final line. The genre of political satire acquires a special importance here through its refusal to appear—it hovers above the surface of the poem without touching down until the final two lines. And because “View of the Capitol” was written during Bishop’s yearlong tenure as Poetry Consultant to the Library of Congress, and the poem first appeared in a July 4th issue of the New Yorker, it becomes readable as an occasional poem; this brings certain elements to the fore. The poem’s movement among genres is complicated and enhanced by an equally rapid movement among the senses of sight, hearing, and touch, and among language-­games. The movement among the senses is suggested first in the description of light as “heavy” and “coarse,” and shows clearly in a phrase like “dim then keen, / then mute”: sight then touch, then hearing.111 As noted with respect to the first stanza, the movement among language-­games and poetic figures sometimes stabilizes but often subverts the genres the poem engages with. In the second stanza, for example, the unstable generic situation becomes an issue through the poet’s wry use of what could be called the language-­game of poetic repetition: “the Air Force Band / in uniforms of Air Force blue.” These two lines read first like a trope on what Wittgenstein calls “the language-­game of giving information,” a language-­game that plays a role in the topographical poem: these lines pile up more and more detail, even as it’s unclear how or whether this detail is supposed to function as information.112 But the excessiveness of the repetition also sounds literary.113 The language-­game of poetic repetition might be defined as the superfluous repetition of a phrase—redundant at one level—that nevertheless adds something by way of emphasis, musicality, or a sense of difference. Here, however, the repetition, with its strangely hollow ring, creates a deadening effect. It makes the poem feel stuck, impeding the turn toward sound. Other words and phrases too freeze or redirect the poem: “intervene” (whose contemporary geopolitical meaning dissonates against the imaginative generosity that marks the rest of the sentence it appears in, perhaps hinting at satire); the notion that “each big leaf sags” under the weight of the sonic “gold-­dust” (which has been read as reflecting a lesbian subject-­position); “gathered brasses” (which suggests the military’s top brass); “boom—boom,” 36  •   I n t roduc t ion

the truncated final line; and especially the set-­off “queer,” which performs and literally means a turn aside.114 These words and phrases become part of and obstacles to the multitemporal flow of genres—in a poem that plays on tensions between movement and stasis. This poem, then, uses “genre as a field of potential identities.”115 The poet performs the genres she approaches, one after another, changing them to suit her purposes of the moment; at the same time, these genres perform their work upon her, encouraging certain modes of talking and thinking, and discouraging others. But the key thing is how other modes of identity interact with the poem’s play of genres. Beginning with the poem’s title, genre identities help structure the ebbs and flows of many sorts of identity. That is, genre identities shape the presentation of features that mark this poem as “Cold War,” “modernist,” “traditional,” and “American,” and that position its speaker as a woman, an outsider, queer or lesbian, cooped up, anxious, a (“public”) poet, and as recording an unfolding experience. And it works the other way too: these identities inflect the poem’s handling of the genres it draws on. The poem entangles all these identities with time and the work of the senses. Carter’s setting picks up on a lot of this. Its most notable aspect, unsurprisingly, may be how Carter handles the half-­heard band music. The penultimate song in A Mirror on Which to Dwell, a six-­song cycle on Bishop’s poetry for soprano and nine instrumentalists, Carter’s “View of the Capitol” is A Mirror’s most insistently “public” song, and the only one that signals the cycle’s Bicentennial occasion.116 Returning to the poem’s second stanza will help us grasp how Carter’s setting uses a play of genres to connect with that occasion, with the poem’s speaker, emotional tenor, and physical context, and with a musical experience that both poet and composer find (in Carter’s words) “absurd and monstrous.”117 In doing so we can begin to think about genres as forces that impinge on a musical work in concert and contestation with other forces. Bishop’s registering of this sonic phenomenon—which she rehearsed in a diary entry—would have struck Carter as similar to the descriptions and depictions of band music in flux one finds in composers like Mahler and especially Ives.118 And indeed Carter’s rendering of the band music makes at least one interviewer hear the song “almost as a tribute to Ives.”119 Hearing Ives becomes an alternative to hearing genres. In Carter’s musical context, the explicit musical representation of band music would need some kind of aesthetic justification. It would be much easier to imagine a staged meeting with a singular figure like Ives (whom Carter knew and had ambivalent L i s t e n i ng for G e n r e s   •   37

aesthetic reactions to) than to picture an “abstract” late-­modern composer engaging with genres; as we have noted, following Eric Drott’s critique of Dahlhaus, hearing genres in late-­modern Western art music goes against the critical grain.120 But genres certainly mattered for Carter, and as Anne Shreffler’s studies of his sketches reveals, Carter sought to create a play of genres in “View of the Capitol.”121 The “Air Force band” enters the musical texture of Carter’s setting just before the soprano begins to present the second stanza. [track 0.3 [0:54– 1:33], G web ex. 1] Shreffler notes that Carter considered bringing in hints of the band music right at the song’s opening but decided against it;122 so the coincidence between the band music and the specific lines of poetry that provoke it helps us hear this generic allusion more clearly. Hearing this allusion is an issue because there are real questions of definition: what represents the band? Does anything depict the obstruction? What conveys the speaker’s response? Instruments associated with band music enter the song’s texture for the first time here: piccolo, E clarinet, snare drum, and bass drum, along with the contrabass playing pizzicato. But the most assertively marchlike rhythm is played by the viola, which is “metrically uncoordinated” with the rest of the instruments but pretty well synced up to the vocal part (with respect to tempo and pitch).123 The pitches of the viola and the voice are severely restricted. Carter’s setting of this stanza has them focus on a diatonic collection of just four pitches (in ascending order D , E , B , C), eventually swapping the B for a new highpoint of D (m. 29, on the word “queer”). This makes the collection chromatic but preserves the scheme of major seconds at top and bottom, a large interval in between, and a strongly projected major seventh. Carter’s orchestrational gambit for this stanza creates two main effects. First, it makes the band music inseparable from the idea that it’s being heard mediately and intermittently; Carter ensures that you can hear band music at this moment, but he does so in a way that raises questions of what exactly you’re hearing as band music, and whether you’re hearing band music or a hearing of band music (and perhaps whether you’re hearing Bishop’s band music, or Carter’s, or even Ives’s). Second, by using the pitch-­limited, march-­ rhythm-­pastiching viola as a mediator between voice and “band,” Carter’s setting maps the speaker’s restriction of movement onto what she’s hearing in the band music; this makes the scene’s “absurd and monstrous” affect more available to listeners. As you hear the mediated band music you’re also hearing Carter’s interaction with the genre of vocal chamber music. This is the cycle’s home

b

½

b b b

38  •   I n t roduc t ion

b

genre—it’s how the piece is cataloged, programmed, marketed, and framed by its paratexts. A Mirror on Which to Dwell follows a rich vein that begins with Schoenberg’s Pierrot Lunaire: song cycles for solo voice and mixed, ad-­ hoc chamber ensembles that vary the instrumentation from song to song. But Carter exercised himself about writing for voice. When he accepted the commission for A Mirror he hadn’t composed any vocal music for nearly thirty years. In the early 70s he was saying that “vocal music in general has to be rethought completely and . . . I don’t have the time or the patience to do that singlehandedly.”124 Carter’s approach to setting texts and writing for voice and instruments suggests nothing like a complete rethinking, however, as he readily acknowledged.125 A Mirror continually reaffirms the priority of the voice, not by restricting the activity of the instruments, but (in the manner of Bach’s cantatas) by making the voice prove itself through intense contrapuntal engagement. And Carter adheres to many aspects of earlier vocal music: conventional functions of melisma and registral high-­points; traditional modes of vocal sound-­production; a close relation of phrase-­length to comfortable breathing; and, above all, respect for a poem’s versification. Still, the cycle reflects a self-­conscious attempt to negotiate with a genre that foregrounded specific practical and aesthetic problems. For Carter, these problems included hearing the words of a sung poem, finding singers who could handle the challenges of intonation and rhythm that instrumentalists are accustomed to (and institutions that support those singers), dealing with the slower speed of presentation that sung words demand, projecting meanings the poem leaves unsaid, and conveying a reading that stems from the composer’s “taking great care” with the poem.126 Shreffler’s study of the sketches brings out two additional genres that might otherwise remain inaudible. Carter’s notes refer to an “under-­current of funeral-­march;” this funeral-­march idea appears throughout the song as a slow pulse that governs a multilayered rhythmic structure.127 Carter also tagged some band-­music sketches with the label “banda,” alluding to the “coarse” onstage band in Verdi’s operas. As Shreffler points out, the “banda” suggests musicians who stand at a physical remove from the orchestra and possess a “lower level of playing technique.”128 We could add that the “banda” normally represents a generic intrusion into the staged multi­media vocal genre of opera, which makes it quite different from military-­band music and vocal chamber music. The funeral march gives Carter’s setting a more complex sense of occasion, partly because like the band music it can only be heard mediately, intermittently, and contingently. The song thereby establishes a L i s t e n i ng for G e n r e s   •   39

relation between the poem’s lyric moment, the July 4th (or Bicentennial) celebration, and some occasion for mourning, but it doesn’t define that relation. The banda can be heard to intensify this complex sense of occasion by signaling the fact and occasion of performance itself: banda musicians are costumed, made up, and put onstage to perform as a performing band—in a darkly comic way, this is playing as play-­acting. The funeral march’s function as a rhythmic stratum also highlights a basic feature of Carter’s polyrhythmic textures: they can accommodate multiple genres simultaneously.129 Listening for genres can make us more receptive to the forces that co­ create a song like Carter’s “View of the Capitol.” In keeping with the themes of Bishop’s poem, these forces include the energies and experiences of poet, composer, performers, and everyone else who helps bring (a hearing of ) this song into being; musical, literary, social, and political histories; time, wind, and weather; the calendar, money, and labor; gender and other cultural identities; and body/brain capacities, including those of the human voice. In other words: genres inflect the idioms of vocal and instrumental writing, the uses of conventions and other musical materials, the nature and role of aesthetic categories like tradition, influence and originality, and other forms of long-­duration temporality. But they do more than this. Genres are forces that make these interiorities and exteriorities part of the experience of a work. Carter’s setting of the second stanza can demonstrate these effects. Think how the song’s genres can create different imaginings of its multisensory surround, for example. The military band is buffeted by the weather, and by a sense that they’re intermittently heard—and that no one’s really paying attention. The members of the “banda” have to play characters under the hot stage-­lights, moving around with their instruments. Participants in a funeral march proceed slowly, with the earth underfoot, some carrying a coffin. And performers of vocal chamber music are reading score, counting, trying to make eye contact with one another, seeking balance, adjusting to the poem’s sonic and semantic nuances as the singer responds to them. These are all different modes of comportment, reflecting different sorts of physical and cultural impingements. They’re all contingent and time-­dependent, but they remind us that genres can offer pictures of the world that are multidimensional, sticky, and vivid. So when we hear a moment like “but—queer—,” with the bass-­drum hit dying away, the snare drum sneaking in, the viola doubling the soprano’s notes while continuing to push onward with its steady rhythm, and the “band” instruments percolating, we’re hearing the song’s genres contending 40  •   I n t roduc t ion

and aligning with other forces to momentarily concretize a relation between a work and the world around it. This field of forces connects the music’s broken surface with the speaker’s fraught, underdefined, and provisional subject position. The fiction of a speaker thinking in real time, briefly halting the work of description, can thus become a way to animate the song’s key relations: between poet and speaker; speaker and singing subject; poet and composer; poet and recollected event; poet, setting, and audience; and composer, performers, and listeners. It matters greatly that our sense of these relations can be affected by enigmatic sketches a scholar uncovers after the fact. It matters that the field of forces animating these relations can include elements Carter was thinking about but didn’t intend to put into the work, elements he wanted to make audible but couldn’t, and elements he wouldn’t have been able to control even if he had wanted to. We benefit from imagining hearings in which the funeral march and the banda drop out, hearings in which Ives takes over, hearings in which the violist channels march music for strings and projects a different chamber-­music genre into the song’s texture. Living Genres in Late Modernity focuses on what is actually available to be experienced at the moment when a work first reaches a public. But it tries to do justice to this broader sense of what can go into a work and what can be gotten from it. A genre adds to the works it connects with. And unlike the discourses of history, technique, originality, and influence—which are invoked far more often in connection with late-­modern works—the discourse of genre builds in the question of how a work is experienced. Genres give us more to experience, and they give us ways to value that “more.” Chapter 1 makes a theme of the pop song’s “more,” focusing on strategies of relentless accumulation and display in an intensified sort of pop from 1968 and 1969. This chapter begins a sequence of three chronologically-­arranged chapters that ask how Black popular-­music genres connected with the rest of American popular music, and with the wider world, in the long 1970s. Chapters 2 and 3 listen for these connections in soul and disco, respectively. This book’s final two chapters return to the uncertain terrain of late-­modern Western art music. Chapter 4 focuses on the still-­living nocturne as a fragile and fallible “minor” genre. In chapter 5 an essential point is that—despite those uncertainties—nothing can stop the (even older) concerto. Chapters 4 and 5 shift not only to Western art music, but to genres with centuries-­long time spans. This means asking what made the long 1970s a unique moment L i s t e n i ng for G e n r e s   •   41

for these genres. These chapters don’t move away from popular music entirely, however: by paying attention to musical conventions, moods, surface effects, money, trends, fashions, and fads, to LPs as objects of material culture, and to journalism, advertising, and record sales, they treat these “classical” genres as popular music. Taken together, then, this book’s chapters show both contrasts between and entanglements of “art” and “popular” genres, big and small genres, older and newer genres, lucrative and less-­commercial genres, recognized and unacknowledged genres, and socially “thick” and socially “thin” genres. But the book ends darkly. As the Afterword suggests, looking back on the book’s core chapters, art’s best promise may be the possibility of endless doubt. Genres are necessary to aesthetic activity but insufficient, and they’re always in competition with other forces; we may have to accept the idea that genres are exactly the sum of their details and occasions. What genres are good at, finally, is asking us whom we recognize as human others, and how we should respond; asking us what we need to know, or need to have experienced, in order to acknowledge each other. They help us grasp the nature of the collective in collective aesthetic experience. Genres interpose themselves as pure institution, pure structure. Lacking the warmth of communities, the dignity of rituals, the thickness of social formations, the imposing presence of authorship, they just allow themselves to serve as the third term mediating a work and a listener, or two works, or a group of listeners, enjoining us to hold onto the experience of those relations. First, though, genres ask us to listen for them.

42  •   I n t roduc t ion

On e

Unengaging Histories THE POP SONG’S “MORE” AND MELANCHOLY DEMOCRACY, 1968–69

Pop songs are supposed to be everywhere. But do you know them when you see them? And will they come when you call them? They’re far more elusive than you think. Indeed, rock critics often define pop songs by what they’re missing. In one typical instance, a year-­end wrap-­up by The New York Times’ Jon Pareles, 2005 was “a year for unheroic, unambitious pop with little more to say than ‘play me on the radio.’ ”1 The year’s top albums are “not too demanding.” “They don’t set out to surprise.” Twice he characterizes some of them as “circumscribed” (though he does not quite say by what). Pareles doesn’t claim to be capturing the truth about pop music: he’s just giving his assessment of the ten top-­selling albums of a particular year. But Simon Frith adopts a similar approach in his “Pop Music” chapter for the Cambridge Companion to Pop and Rock. Early on he announces his strategy, albeit in a passive construction that suggests its pervasiveness: “pop is defined as much by what it isn’t as by what it is.” “It is what’s left when all the other forms of popular music are stripped away.” What Pareles says about 2005 in particular Frith states about pop in general: “Pop is not driven by any significant ambition except profit and commercial reward.” He goes on to assert that pop “does not have a specific or subcultural, communal market/­culture, . . . come from any particular place or mark off any particular taste.” It’s “the music we listen to without meaning to.” Pop is “produced . . . as a matter of enterprise not art,” and “[it] is not an art but a craft. It is not about realizing individual visions or making us see the world in new ways.”2 In a bibliographical note he adds “pop seems to be that music that isn’t much studied.”3 People like Frith surely grasp that other genres have borrowed from pop.4 Pop must therefore have some borrowable stuff; this stuff helps define it as a 43

genre. But critics trying to describe the pop song positively—in terms of what it has—talk exclusively about themes, marketing strategies, sentiments, and basically everything except musical conventions. There’s nothing in Frith’s paper to account for the way pop is signaled or referenced by something like this, which comes from the same early-to-mid 2000s moment as Frith’s and Pareles’s pieces:  = 

 Piano



       

   3   

       

    3

    

     3

    

    3

Ex. 1.1.  The piano’s right hand signifies pop at the beginning of Esthero’s 2005 “Everyday Is a Holiday (With You).”

An acoustic piano presenting closed-­position triads in straight quarter notes, at a moderate tempo, can itself suggest pop. The pop flavor only intensifies when we take into account the chord progression’s harmonic rhythm, which begins with the maximally comfortable one chord per measure before stalling out in bar 4. This soundworld derives from operetta, music hall and musicals by way of the Brill Building and the Beatles. Countless late-­60s and 70s songs confirm the pop associations of this quarter-­note topos; almost all of them frame this sound as coming from out of the past, from a simpler time.5 This song is by Esthero, a Toronto-­based singer and songwriter who gained a following with her 1998 album Breath from Another, a trip-­hop-­ inflected collection that also demonstrated pop and soul acumen. “Everyday Is a Holiday (With You)” appeared on Esthero’s 2005 Wikked Lil’ Grrrls, but its pop qualities have partly to do with its sounding much earlier. This collaboration with Beatle-­child Sean Lennon was originally produced for the soundtrack to Down with Love (2003), a lightweight film that takes place in the early 1960s. In this film and more broadly these seven seconds of music signal the historical specificity of the early to mid-­60s, in some views the last “golden age” of the pop song; but these very sounds also denote “pure” pop as a timeless style. Their capacity to quickly signal a style thus makes them like a power chord signifying rock. We don’t really need to know the CD or film from which the song is drawn. This four-­measure introduction, as a musical object, is concretely pop.6 It doesn’t matter what happens next. Even 44  •   C h a p t e r on e

cut off from what it introduces, this specimen gives the sense that it would grow back as a pop song. “This is a pop song,” it tells us; therefore the pop song is this. Contra Frith and many others, songs like “Everyday Is a Holiday (With You)” show that pop does and possesses everything a genre demands. Not only does it have sounds, verbal tropes, and paratextual features that can signal it. Pop has a story about its functions, history and audiences, its relations with other genres, its forms and dimensions, its materials and their economy, its modes of production and dissemination.7 It has ways of showing us which aspects matter, and how and why they do. So, we might say, the pop song isn’t missing anything: it’s just that the critical discourse allows it to hide its inner workings. If we take songs whole, as brute objects of consumer culture, we won’t want to snap off the back panel and look at the circuitry. Similarly, it’s difficult to hear the claim that pop is “not an art but a craft” as a call to investigate the handiwork, let alone the craftspeople. The same is true if we suggest the successful pop song is an entirely contingent occurrence; or we believe that pop songs are overdetermined at the front end by the industry that pumps them out; or we place so much weight on the reception side that we’re just like “chacun à son goût”; or we try to figure out the nature of the “perfect pop song” and decide it’s mysterious. And the claim that a pop song has no depth hardly constitutes an invitation to consider surfaces. All these discourses give us excuses to not pay attention to the details of individual songs, to the macro-­and micro-­histories of making, marketing, and consuming pop records. If we do look closely, though, we see nothing’s missing. Everything’s there inside. Or it’s lying on the surface. But the pop song does embody a deeper lack. Yes, pop has a story about its functions, but in truth it’s a pretty short story. Indeed the pop song’s function is hard to define, not only by comparison with strongly functional genres like dance music, but also as compared to genres like rock, soul, gospel, and punk, whose practices build in a reason for existing. Pop raises the specifically modern question of how an artwork’s function can be different from, more deeply, its raison d’être. If the pop song’s function is simply to be popular, to be catchy, it does seem to lack something. The political theorist Wendy Brown asks, “What if democracy is in fact missing what other regimes possess in principles such as excellence, raison d’état, imperial right, or property? Must democracy then be supplied a principle or purpose from outside? Must it be attached to a principle or principles other than itself ?”8 Similar worries shadow the pop record in the post–rock & roll era: U n e ng ag i ng h i s t or i e s: P op   •   45

questions about whether democracy has an essence or a telos rhyme with doubts about whether the pop song has a conceptual center or a reason for being. What can we learn from this strange affinity between the pop record and democratic culture? As this chapter’s title implies, this association provides a way to analyze two conflicting attributes both pop and liberal democracy possess: a quality of too-­muchness, and a sense of belatedness, absence, or loss.9 Critics have failed to account for the simple fact that the genre of pop music persists—with and without strong industry support; sometimes selling, sometimes not—and nobody can say what it’s for. Doubts about democracy’s raison d’état have long been part of democratic theory, however. One political theorist actually puts democratic culture into relation with a modern artistic genre for the sense of “uncertainty” they share. Bonnie Honig suggests that “democracy ha[s] a genre,” and that this genre is gothic romance.10 The gothic mode appeals to Honig because the doubt it creates in the reader—is the woman’s dark lover a hero or a villain?—“presses us to attend to the people’s perpetual uncertainty about the law and their relation to it: is it really part of us or an alien thing, an expression of our intimate will or a violent imposition?” Like Honig’s the pairing I propose emphasizes the fact of uncertainty.11 (These uncertainties hit both pop songs and democratic culture especially hard in 1968–69.) Because it lacks a strong reason for being that many genres build in, pop must draw raisons d’être from elsewhere.12 For these it needs not just the sounds but the activities, functions, and conceptions associated with other musical practices. A pop song’s borrowings thus involve but go beyond the use of other genres’ conventions and techniques: pop’s underdetermined functionality means it is waiting to be assigned the roles ascribed to whatever genres it draws on—to be danceable, to serve as a youth anthem, to flatter a home stereo, to establish a definite mood, to tantalize listeners with something exotic, to present a songwriter’s vision or a singer’s interpretation, and so on. These borrowings of both materials and principles have several entailments: (1) In the era of recorded music pop takes on, and becomes associated with, functions not native to it. Any time a pop song serves one of these functions, it exceeds its genre’s designs.13 (2) What a pop song incorporates can both strengthen and undermine it: its borrowings may well embody values inimical to pop’s own.14 (3) Pop records often compensate for what they borrow by showing what they have to trade: in the late 60s especially they engage in lavish display of pop’s most recognizable conventions. 46  •   C h a p t e r on e

The Late-­6 0s Pop Song’s More The late-­60s pop song’s “more,” no matter how elusive, comes about through the borrowed materials that fill its textures and the extra-­generic roles it ends up playing; in its heapings up of its own materials; and in the way this accumulation shows against the backdrop of too many other popular songs trying to outdo each other. Precisely because of what it lacks, pop needs this “more” in order to survive—commercially and aesthetically. My late-­60s examples will demonstrate the exuberance and desperation this situation provoked. This chapter delineates a kind of late-­60s pop song. It covers a finite body of work—conservatively about 1,100 songs recorded in 1968–69, plus about 150 precursors from 1967—much of which has remained obscure.15 But this group of songs is large, influential, and interesting enough to demand study. I adopt the rubric of a lack dialectically engaged with a “more” in order to move past current frameworks for understanding pop as a genre. The critical tradition we inherit has no way to address a large number of records produced at the height of “the sixties,” involving many important figures of that era and the decade that followed it—a repertoire that has had enormous stylistic and cultural reach. Nor can it deal with the contradictions in the typical ways we’ve defined the genre. Consider pop music’s two ideals of simplicity and polish, for instance. They actually conflict: one creates a picture of leaving out what isn’t important, while the other requires adding stuff you shouldn’t notice. Similarly, the common notion that pop songs establish a balance between familiarity and novelty gets tipsy once we acknowledge that this isn’t a zero-­sum game: familiarity and novelty (like simplicity and polish) are in fact tied to specific musical features and techniques, any of which can appear in a given song. In the heightened pop style that crystallized in 1968 and had a significant presence for two and a half years, “balance” went out the window and the heaping-­up of both familiar and novel features became an organizational strategy. Why, at the height of the rock era, and on the heels of a successful back-­to-­basics trend in soul, would these records have confronted audiences with brass fanfares, dissonant string arrangements, James Brown beats, harpsichords, glockenspiels, oboes, synthesizers, fuzz guitars, Latin percussion, nursery-­rhyme choruses, sitars, pseudo-­sitars, references to sitars, pastiches of Bach and Gregorian chant, unexpectedly lyrical melodies, antique pump organs, weird echo effects, anything through a phase U n e ng ag i ng h i s t or i e s: P op   •   47

shifter, and whatever else an up-­to-­date studio could hit people with? This approach failed commercially more often than it succeeded, but it seems to have convinced many artists, songwriters, arrangers, producers, and industry personnel that it was a direction to follow. Listening now to songs in this style, you can be struck by both the sense of a uniform pressure to include everything and the variety of these songs’ responses to this pressure. A track like Rotary Connection’s “Paper Castle,” arranged and produced by Charles Stepney and released as a single in ’68, begins with a crisp, lightly dissonant brass fanfare against timpani rolls, joined after one iteration by a baritone sax playing repeated sixteenth-­notes and Phil Upchurch’s drippingly distorted electric guitar. This sonic assault needs the riveting clang of a stepwise descent in orchestral chimes to bring the six-­measure introduction to a close. When a vocal group dominated by White-­sounding men then enters, twice singing “We’re living in a paper castle / The wind is gonna blow it down,” with the intensity you may figure it deserves, you know it’s the main hook. This is the chorus. (Those recognizing the group, or Stepney’s sound, may wonder why his favorite singer, the great Minnie Riperton, is barely in evidence.) It may thus take you a moment to notice you’re being hailed by exaggerated representations of the “wind,” courtesy of swirling high-­register tape-­effects. As these sounds build (along with the voices) into a dissonant mass, however, pushing aside the syncopated horn-­section stabs and taking space away from the heavy drums, requiring the chorus to stretch into an unusual eleven bars, you may have a hard time noticing anything else. Once things have kind of gotten back to normal, with the beginning of the first verse [0:32], Stepney decides the time is right for a blistering post-­bop string arrangement in angular, fast-­moving unison lines [0:37]. All the while Upchurch acts as a free agent, playing whatever he wants within the song’s prevailing Mixolydian mode [track 1.1]. Equally various but with a completely different mix of elements is Peppermint Rainbow’s “Pink Lemonade,” another non-­charting single from 1968, which presents a serious-­business minor-­mode treatment of its Summer-­love theme. Oboes and other winds begin in counterpoint with churning low strings. The introduction’s repeated drive toward a half-­cadence is punctuated both times by a delicate crotale on the fifth scale-­degree—fate ringing the doorbell, no doubt. Bland doubled voices, singing softly but placed high in the mix, introduce the chorus while the flutes and oboes continue in counterpoint. There’s enough intensified visual and phenomenological detail in the lyrics to lend the song a slightly psychedelic flavor but not enough 48  •   C h a p t e r on e

to serve as a hook, let alone to give the record a raison d’être. This record is truly nothing other than pop [track 1.2]. The Cowsills’ “Make the Music Flow,” whose lyrics advocate balance and temperance, nevertheless operates fully in the excessive mode. The pubescent voices of this family group enter immediately, beginning with the puzzling imperative “Tune me a sitar neither high nor low.” The presence of the sitar in the lyrics, rather than the lower-­hanging “guitar,” already moves the song along the grain of the heightened style. The Coral “electric sitar” does finally assert itself, in the song’s bridge [0:57; the bridge starts at 0:52], but it’s nearly buried under a pseudo-­baroque harpsichord obbligato.16 And this is only after the arrangement has presented banjo, string tremolos, oboes and other winds, brass blasts, bongos, and power chords on electric guitar, all against increasingly contrapuntal vocal arrangements, not to mention heavy drum fills that periodically throw off the phrase-­structure [track 1.3]. Material that doesn’t suggest the intensified style, too, gets taken for a ride. The Delfonics’ slow reading of “Scarborough Fair,” with its over-­the-­ top arrangement by Philadelphia-­soul auteur Thom Bell, retains only the first verse—the part of the song people remember—and instead devotes a full third of its short length to a one-­measure vamp on a rich tonic-­minor ninth chord. One might not have expected Simon and Garfunkel’s celeste-­ and-­harpsichord-­enhanced but otherwise restrained 1966 performance of this song to provoke heightened-­pop treatments, but the Delfonics record is only among the five wackiest of about a dozen that appeared in 1968–69 [track 1.4].17 The Free Design concludes their 1968 album You Could Be Born Again with the genuinely moving “An Elegy.” Without vibrato, at the bottom of her range, Sandy Dedrick sings a slow-$ ballad about this family group’s cousin Dwight, killed in Vietnam. But “An Elegy” nevertheless includes a double-­time bridge in 58 time, featuring contrapuntal string and horn arrangements, with oboe and xylophone popping in and out [track 1.5]. Even the Carpenters’ first album, Offering (1969), includes “time-­signature changes, extended solos, and things that we don’t do now,” as Richard Carpenter explained in 1975.18 If we go through the songs on Offering we could expand Carpenter’s list to include dissonant vocal ­arrangements, “anti-­establishment” lyrics, creepy spoken-­word poetry, ­parade pastiches, odd meters, tempo-­changes between sections, harpsichord parts, funky drum-­patterns, aggressive brass and string ­arrangements (sometimes contending with contrapuntal vocal arrangements), orchestrated crescendi, long-­held final chords sustaining every note in the diatonic scale, U n e ng ag i ng h i s t or i e s: P op   •   49

surprising changes of mode or key, turgid harmonies, abrupt changes of emotional tone, and odd retro or “historical” touches. But it’s equally important that there’s nothing that makes you want to call these songs rock, jazz, or soul, and nothing that prevents Carpenter from demonstrating his gifts as a pop songwriter—again, nothing that makes the songs anything other than pop.19 What happens when we’re confronted by a style that gives us too much to keep track of, that keeps these small musical objects coming in and out unpredictably? What does it mean when every record has too many elements squeezed into short song lengths, creating bulges but not persuading pop’s artists, producers, and institutions to expand the pop song’s form?20 We’ll listen for the aesthetic and cultural implications of this approach, but we should first register its impact on pop’s musical economy. The presence of all this material on records suggests something important about the history of the musical object: not only that pop records had indeed started to become collections of many small musical objects, but that the small musical object, articulated in multiple dimensions (frequency, duration, quality, intensity), grew capable of defining pop as a genre. That is, elements like fanfares, built-­up harmonies sung in vocables, harpsichord figures, and the musical objects that supplanted them became just as fundamental to pop as the vocal melody, the lyrics, and the (whole) song or performance. These late-­60s records show how both the novel touches and the (musical and verbal) clichés became a way of establishing the “thing-­like” character of all musical gestures and conventions: as pop records began to accumulate more material than they could safely contain, all smaller musical objects started to resemble objets trouvés. Changing production practices of this moment worked toward clearer differentiation of elements in the mix and thus supported a more heterogeneous collection of materials. This sense of particles constituting the musical discourse, and of objects on the soundstage, can make a recorded song feel like an assemblage.21 We lack a picture of the pop song that can make sense of this heightened style. What is pop if it has to encompass parts of the early Jackson 5 and the Delfonics, the Cowsills, the Fifth Dimension, the wonderfully crazy Stepney arrangements for Rotary Connection and the Dells, the children’s music of nonexistent TV-­spinoff bands like the Hardy Boys and the Banana Splits, sensitive unpopular pop by the Free Design and Inner Dialogue, producer-­ driven pseudo-­psychedelia like Peppermint Rainbow and the Astral Plane, hammy bubblegum by Tricycle and Salt Water Taffy, soundtracks for 50  •   C h a p t e r on e

nebulous surfing films like Follow Me, studio musicians doing instrumental albums as Electric Indian and Area Code 615, the “contemporary” edge of the easy-­listening continuum ( John Andrews Tartaglia, Pat Williams), low-­ modernist outfits like Montage, the Millennium and Neon Philharmonic, juiced-­up bossa-­pop by Carnival, and cool-­with-­the-­kids pop-­g ospel by ­Andraé Crouch? What these and other diverse examples share is that they all try too hard and include too much. They say, in effect, that if pop songs are supposed to sound simple and polished, familiar yet novel, we’re going to present as many simple, polished, familiar, and novel items as we can possibly pack into this thing; what’s more we’ll have them interact with elements that show our ideas of complexity and rawness; and we’ll swirl them around on the song’s constantly changing soundstage. What happens when you see a pop song sweat? These songs suggest that pop music, as a genre, is unable to bear the realization of its ideals. (In this too it may resemble democracy.) What follows will first contest our inherited picture of the pop song and then consider the case of these amped-­up pop records of the late 60s, looking finally at a handful of features many of these songs share, before returning to the question of what the odd ordinary pop song can teach us about melancholy democracy.

Pop and the History of Not Rock & Roll It’s worth remembering how often twentieth-­century American popular music gets reduced to the “history of rock & roll.” Students of popular music become used to a critical framework wherein more than a decade of jazz, gospel, and rhythm & blues becomes the “prehistory” of rock & roll; it hardly surprises us when some critic says in a keynote address that “rap is rock.”22 Recent discussions of popular music have questioned rock’s preeminence within this critical framework while retaining the structure itself: rock preserves its status as exceptional, as transcending genre, even though other genres begin to share the discursive space. The notion of rock and pop as foils, in particular, continues to do damage. From within a rock & roll paradigm, the polarization of rock and pop can make sense, as indeed any genre’s picture of a neighboring genre can. But how did we get from there to the idea that the categories of rock and pop basically cover everything?23 In this charged landscape, moreover, every critical term acquires a “rock” or “pop” valence. So we wind up with a bunch of old dichotomies: originality U n e ng ag i ng h i s t or i e s: P op   •   51

vs. familiarity, art vs. craft, directness vs. artifice, particularity vs. universality, etc. Again, the recent critical discourse allows for either side of a dichotomy to be praised at the other’s expense, but it resists seeing each genre, let alone particular songs, as embodying both sides in various ways and degrees. To put it another way, when you adopt the rock/pop divide as a fundament, you risk dulling your ears to more subtle, more compelling kinds of contrast among genres and within songs. Rock provides just one perspective, just one set of values. We don’t need to say that rock is dead, but we should acknowledge that “rock” as a genre-­neutral value word is pretty sick. ­Moving past the rock/pop divide and away from the rock-­centric view of twentieth-­century popular music can give a healthier perspective, for these five reasons: 1. The defining qualities of pop apply more broadly than rock culture normally acknowledges. Any “popular” record, in any genre, raises questions about people: about who’s going to buy the thing, of course, but also more broadly about a “we” who would share the experience of this song, and (because we’re not talking about folk culture) a “they” who make and disseminate it, usually from a cultural center. It deals with issues of memorability or recognizability, and of expression or sentiment. And it creates an economic relation of familiarity and novelty. Scholarship tends to downplay the aesthetic significance of “mere” novelty.24 This is partly because gimmicks and cheap effects don’t seem to require commentary, but equally because one longs to hear a song’s particularity as “ejaculated from a deeper cause,” in Emerson’s phrase. But novel effects constitute the principal means of exchange between genres, and play a crucial role in determining the course of a genre’s history. Specific practices of pop play a broader role as well. The concept of musical “hooks” applies quite generally, for example, even as the nature and function of hooks varies from genre to genre—pop’s use of hooks in fact depends upon that variation as providing new material. Pop music has no originary moment the way rock & roll does, nor does it hide its reliance upon conventions. As such it reveals better than rock a crucial ambiguity: a genre embodies on the one hand an authoritative set of practices, features, conventions, and ideals, and on the other hand an accidental history of changing styles (as the Esthero example showed).25 Just as the things we say about pop apply more broadly to popular music as a whole, so too do the contents of popular songs include pop elements: pop’s values and practices participate somehow and to some extent in every popular record. (We could call this point 1A.) Every one of these records, in any genre you like, employs some of pop music’s conventions whether 52  •   C h a p t e r on e

its producers acknowledge it or not. Since pop elements swim in and out of any actual song, pop always constitutes an aspect of a popular song’s identity. 2. Rock is part of pop. We’d do better calling it a subgenre rather than a countergenre.26 Rock’s musical practices don’t sufficiently establish the kind of relation with pop that a countergenre would require, and the qualities normally adduced to distinguish rock listening from pop listening are inseparable from a connoisseurship that isn’t genre-­specific. 3. The “rock vs. pop” dichotomy can’t do justice to the soul tradition. Once the music called soul emerges in the mid to late 1950s, there’s no institutional or musical justification for retaining the dualistic picture wherein rock and pop together cover the field: soul has had as strong a stylistic/market presence as the other two, and can’t be assimilated to either one. 4. In the 1950s and after, popular music relies increasingly on musical elements that aren’t written down; this development has become associated with rock, but its effects were much broader. The simple fact that mainstream American popular music took shape in written form meant that it had to contend with questions of what could be notated and what couldn’t. Sheet music projects a set of musical values that help to define the mainstream in the Tin Pan Alley era. Chief among these values is the sense that the voice performs whatever is particular to the song while the accompaniment can be reduced to its chord changes (and perhaps a rhythmic figure) without any significant loss of information. While the sheet doesn’t attempt to proscribe the particulars of a singer’s performance, it makes clear that the vocal melody is where the action is. But once records start to outsell sheet music, we find an increasing emphasis on grooves, we hear arrangements becoming more and more assertive across a range of styles, and we see the emergence of record production as a creative realm alongside songwriting, performance, and arrangement. The rhythm section and percussion instruments play a greatly enhanced role—and not merely a rhythmic role, but textural, melodic/­harmonic, formal, and generic. The values of Tin Pan Alley songwriting do not go away, and they often operate in a fruitful sort of tension with these new, often African American emphases. Indeed, even pop recordings of Tin Pan Alley songs reflect this increasing interest in percussion, new sounds, and attention-­seeking studio techniques. And as we’ve already seen with the Esthero record, the reduced piano accompaniments of typical Tin Pan Alley sheet music actually show up on records (including rock records) for their capacity to signify this older style. The hook remains important as the principal means for making a song memorable, for distinguishing it U n e ng ag i ng h i s t or i e s: P op   •   53

from others of its kind. But the status of recordings as the principal form of consumption demands a broader conception of hooks. No longer does the hook need to be a vocal melody matched to the song’s principal lyric; it can be a quirk in the singer’s performance style, a surprising choice of instrument, an unusual sound, or a production trick that runs through the song. The main point is that popular music of the 50s and after—pop as much as soul and rock—depends on sonic elements that aren’t written down, even as it continues to draw on sounds, techniques, strategies, and concepts (like the hook) that descend from Tin Pan Alley. 5. The pop song acquires a special ontological status in the era of recorded music.27 This shift begins against the backdrop of institutional changes—­ increasingly collectible sheet music, expanding copyright law, orchestral potpourris of popular melodies—and accelerates with the notion of “jazzing up” songs and with the new vocal practices associated with electrical microphones. But popular recordings of the 1930s and after enact a transformation of the pop song from something performed or documented to something incorporated or included. The framing devices that mediate pop songs in pop and other genres become a way of registering the song’s temporal, generic, or affective distance. A song’s relation to its audiences, to other songs, and to the history of its genre can thus be figured within the record itself, by means of arrangement, performance, and production, and need not be merely paratextual. The pop song’s new ontological status (point 5) and the popular record’s increasing emphasis on elements beyond what sheet music notates (point 4) condition the development and commercial acceptance of rock & roll and, a bit later, soul. Simply put, these emergent genres succeed in the context— and partly because of—people buying interesting-­sounding records. Peter Doyle’s Echo and Reverb and Albin Zak’s I Don’t Sound Like Nobody show the importance of sonic materiality to the popular records that precede rock & roll. Keith Negus has argued convincingly against the notion of the rock & roll “revolution.”28 But scholarship has not acknowledged how securely established were the features of what Motti Regev has called the “rock aesthetic” before the emergence of rock & roll. Regev’s “rock aesthetic” includes features like “sophisticated studio craftsmanship,” “use of electric and electronic sound textures,” and “certain techniques of vocal delivery, mostly those signifying immediacy of expression and spontaneity.”29 Attaching these features to rock makes it harder to understand the popular record as a specific mass-­mediated aesthetic form.30 54  •   C h a p t e r on e

The Pop Record of the 1950s and After We can better grasp the heightened pop of the late 60s if we bracket rock & roll and see how a pre-­rock pop record embodies the aesthetic practices that define popular music of the following decades. Caterina Valente’s 1954 version of “The Breeze and I” became a top-­ten pop song at the moment just before the emergence of rock & roll. This record shows that everything was already in place before rock & roll appeared on the scene. Adapted from ­Ernesto Lecuona’s light-­classical piece “Andaluza,” “The Breeze and I” is a Tin Pan Alley song that had gained popularity through 1940 versions by Jimmy Dorsey and Xavier Cugat.31 Like Valente’s record, the 1940 versions depend on the medium of recordings, as their instrumentation, arrangement, and balance between voice and instruments make clear. But these voices, instruments, and production values all operate in service of the written song.32 By contrast the Valente record takes the song as an occasion for pursuing multiple objectives. Some of these goals do indeed derive from features of the original song, and some concern Valente’s voice, but others have nothing inherently to do with either the song or traditional ways of pitching a pop singer. Like Cugat’s and Dorsey’s, Valente’s version trades on the song’s origins as an adaptation of Lecuona’s piece. Even in this respect, however, the Valente record exceeds the earlier versions. Its Iberian features are significant and various, pushing melody, harmony, arrangement, and production past what the notated song’s materials authorize. Valente’s voice is treated flexibly—not only in terms of its range, timbral variety, and amount of reverb, but also through its multiple functions, like the way it serves as orchestrational color in the record’s “instrumental” chorus.33 Furthermore the song is given a cha-­cha backdrop that connects the record with the 50s mambo trend, a trend in which the Cuban composer/pianist Lecuona’s compositions were already playing a significant role.34 The shifting arrangement includes much Latin percussion, allowing it to bring out both the Cuban and the Iberian aspects [track 1.6]. But it’s the record’s unusually long opening section that makes it representative of the new pop record of the 50s and after: a minute-­long stretch of music bearing little relation to the Lecuona/Stillman “Breeze and I” serves as both a frame for the original song and an opportunity for fulfilling other commitments. It begins with a brass fanfare whose Phrygian mode provides an Iberian flavor. Tom-­tom and bongo rolls underneath, and cymbal strikes above, assert percussion’s importance in the texture. Syncopations enliven U n e ng ag i ng h i s t or i e s: P op   •   55

the broad L meter; a shift to straight eighth-­notes in groups of three followed by a measure full of eighth-­note triplets creates a composed-­out accelerando. This intensification continues across parameters, ending in a dissonant whole-­tone blast that occupies a full measure. The beat and meter become uncertain as the tempo slows abruptly; classical guitar enters with a characteristic tremolo while flutes play looping scalar figures. Valente’s voice arrives, with plenty of reverb, presenting vocables in a flamenco style (a notably non-­rock form of Regev’s “spontaneous . . . delivery”). Flutes and violins continue to swirl. High strings decorate whole-­tone harmonies. Her voice gains presence: there’s less reverb; close miking allows us to hear her breathing. Egged on by the inevitable castañets, the winds, brass, low strings, and percussion speed up, threatening to spin out of control before giving way to high strings, which descend three octaves via fast scalar passagework, gradually losing distinction in the reverb-­soaked environment until they crash, sending out a fifth-­scale-­degree shockwave. The whole thing lasts long enough to make you wonder whether and how an actual song will emerge. When the original song finally appears, its late arrival draws attention to Al Stillman’s English lyrics in a way that the 1940 versions did not. These same lyrics are business-­as-­usual in the earlier versions: they simply add narrative and emotional specificity, along the grain of the English-­language title, to a melody the record has already presented instrumentally. When you’ve had to wait a full thirty-­four bars for the main melody to show up, however, you may find yourself allowing these lyrics to do more extensive cultural work. Thus, parallel to this newly composed introduction, we could say, but off its radar, the lyrics demonstrate both emotionality and self-­reflexiveness: The breeze and I are saying with a sigh That you no longer care The breeze and I are whispering goodbye To dreams we used to share Ours was a love song that seemed constant as the moon Ending in a strange, mournful tune And all about me, they know you have departed without me And we wonder why, the breeze and I The breeze and I

We see that before this record’s introduction remediated the Tin Pan Alley song, Stillman’s words performed a similar operation on Lecuona’s music. The original melody serves as the vehicle for a tag-­line that gets repeated a 56  •   C h a p t e r on e

generous four times; the music’s directionality is asked to hold together a less-­than-­coherent romance narrative;35 and music/sound becomes an overt topic. Meanwhile the Andalusian theme is left behind. These lyrics remind us there’s often indirect discourse and self-­reflexiveness in Tin Pan Alley songs and their descendants: the singer telling us what she’s saying and how, reporting on her emotions, singing about singing, using musical metaphors, and whipping out the main hook-­line at every possible checkpoint. This level of mediation conditions the emotionality that the text’s subject-­matter and vocabulary convey. Again, the 1940 versions may not read this way. But the Valente record’s long introduction has the novel effect of putting a frame around the sentiment, all the more because like the earlier versions the whole record still manages to clock in under three and a half minutes. It becomes hard to hear the song’s emotionality as direct expression; this can make us question the role of sentiment in the song and the means for presenting it. Sentiment may indeed be an essential component of the pop song, but this record makes it compete with other sources of authority.36 What is this record’s core? The Tin Pan Alley song? The original piano piece (or just its melody), the romantic lyrics, the recognizable singer’s impressive performance, the song’s protagonist, the fancy arrangement, the flamenco, the Latin beat, the very emotionality of music, the musicality of music? We can’t choose.37 Does this record have a raison d’être? The Valente song provides a useful prelude to the heightened style of the late 60s partly because it can be heard as working hard; and as is often the case with pop records, we don’t quite know what all the huffing and puffing is about. Such records may embody values that (within pop) seem timeless—values governing melody, expression, and sentiment—but they frame these elements as having to accommodate themselves to the pressures of fashion, technological change, and all the modes of identity-­making you can put on a record. “The Breeze and I” is neither retro Tin Pan Alley nor futuristic hi-­fi spectacular. Its chart success tells us it wasn’t ahead of its time. There are no famous innovators on board: arranger Werner Müller isn’t Gil Evans or Les Paul; he may not even be Xavier Cugat. We can’t construct a modernist narrative out of the historical and musical materials this record provides. Given the gender positioning of the typical 50s pop chanteuse, Valente’s image as a self-­possessed cosmopolitan subject—manifested in her mobility within the song’s structure, arrangement, and emotional dynamics—may be the record’s most forward-­looking aspect. Like late-­60s soul singers performing pop songs in elaborate arrangements, she’s cruising through the song: playing U n e ng ag i ng h i s t or i e s: P op   •   57

multiple roles, acting as her own memory of the song’s origins, presenting the song’s emotions without becoming identified with them. But by placing Valente in a gilded cage on the cover of The Hi-­Fi Nightingale, the album this song appeared on, Decca Records signaled that it wasn’t out to give her too much autonomy.38 So how does this record capture what becomes the “pop/rock aesthetic?” What does it actually contain? How might we define the aesthetic practice governing this record? The record has a “main” hook—the presentation of the title phrase, especially when driven home at the end of the song’s form. But this hook coexists with other hooks: the concerted opening, the specifically Iberian longing the flamenco conveys, the castañets and Latin percussion, the shimmering orchestration, the exaggerated reverb effects, the danceable beat that suggests glamorous urban nightclubs, Valente’s “exotic” accent,39 her range (in both senses) especially when she sings the untexted passages, the bridge’s catchy melody, the cute self-­referentiality of phrases like “Ours was a love song” and “strange, mournful tune.” These hooks vary according to their sources, the parameters they emphasize, their position in the song’s form, and the cultural knowledge they depend on; some inhere in the original sheet music, while others are specific to this record. Thus certain of these hooks may work only under particular conditions of diffusion, and only with specific segments of its audience; in each actual hearing of the record some of these potential hooks will come forward while others will fail to draw attention. The multiplicity and multidimensionality of this record’s hooks reflect its musical economy more broadly. This record has a contemporary beat whose (possible) status as a hook reminds us that it has been actively chosen by the arranger: it can’t be read off from either the written-­out song’s rhythmic vocabulary or the rhythmic styles adopted by earlier recordings of this song (although it may have been influenced by both, positively or negatively, obliquely or directly). Nor do the record’s genre, lyrics, or tempo overdetermine its approach to rhythm. And it’s not just rhythm that’s underdetermined: none of this record’s varied sources of authority can dictate the record’s approach to arrangement and production either. We do best to say that there are many factors impinging on the record, but none that gain the upper hand. To be sure, certain features of the lyrics are mapped onto the arrangement and production, thus underscoring the lyrics, but on a moment-­ by-­moment basis that doesn’t add up to a coherent reading of the song. Similarly the song’s Iberian theme exerts some pull on the arrangement and 58  •   C h a p t e r on e

production, as does its Cuban origin; but they do so separately and inconsistently. One can hear too that the record provides an occasion for textural variety and display in a way that reveals the pressure of the “hi-­fi” trend, but again this pressure shows only so often. As such, the record’s “personality” or “voice” is constructed through the interaction of song (especially lyrics and melody), singer, arrangement, and production, with the aid of paratextual features that range from the singer’s romance-­language name and the inclusion of the song’s Spanish title in parentheses, to the album title, cover image, and liner notes. The singer herself moves among different approaches, timbres, and registers as the record unfolds. Her performance is shaped by miking, mixing, and other kinds of signal-­processing; these production values change over the course of the record in accordance with the roles her voice plays. She’s present on the record “too little,” given the record’s long instrumental stretches, but also “too much” (since her voice extends beyond simply delivering the song’s lyrics and even moves into the “instrumental” sections themselves). Her “personality” is thus bound up with these textual and paratextual features, some of which can be apprehended only contingently. Therefore (as I suggested above) there’s no certainty about what constitutes the record’s conceptual center, what it’s mostly trading on: we don’t know before the fact if there’s an emotional core, and if so what its nature and degree of importance relative to other factors might be. So there may be no emotional core but there’s a lot of emotionality on this record’s surface. The record’s many sources of emotionality include its very distance from the written song’s lyrics, idioms, sentiment, and ethos, as well as from its Cuban and Iberian sources. This sense of distance depends of course on particular performance, arrangement, and production techniques. Reverb, for example, helps establish temporal, spatial, and emotional distance.40 Arrangement touches can reframe and defamiliarize the Latin beat, creating cultural space between the listener and the record’s ostensible dance-­music style, as when material introduced by percussion and muted trumpets shifts to pizzicato strings in the second half of verse one. It’s crucial to this pop aesthetic that records like “The Breeze and I” present both a complex space and a manifold temporality. This record certainly reveals its historical moment, all the more because it reaches back fifteen years for its Tin Pan Alley source. But its “advanced” arrangement and up-­ to-­date studio techniques allow it to point backward as well as forward, sometimes at the same time: in the closing section, as the record goes into U n e ng ag i ng h i s t or i e s: P op   •   59

a retrospective mode (Valente repeating the title phrase while the arrangement softens), cowbells are used in a way that’s both Machito and Mahler.41 Thanks to these sophisticated musical means, many features of this record assert a particular temporal position or direction. This temporal play begins with the lyrics’ asserting the nowness of the “breeze .  .  . saying” such and such, along with the narrative’s turn to the past; but it extends to the feeling of nostalgia built into the Iberian idiom, and to the trendy sonic effects. Musical techniques of repetition and variation further enrich this record’s capacity to signal both the then and the now. This record needs a deep savor of the past and a vivid feeling of immediacy. It needs the sense that songs and singers are important, and the sense that all the other stuff can matter just as much. In more general terms ­Valente’s record creates a tense standoff between part and whole, specificity and generality, memory and real presence. It doesn’t mind you noticing that these tensions don’t resolve. And it doesn’t mind you knowing that this is how records come together. Just as the lyrics are partly about lyrics, to some extent this record becomes a song about songs, music about music. All this mediation and self-­reflexiveness is, inescapably, on the record (creating myriad possibilities for hearings of—and failures to hear—its accumulation of details). The original song, then, already mediated and self-­reflexive, is part of the record but not its only reason for existing; the frames around the original song are as important to this record as is the song itself. The record thus raises questions about what and whom it’s for, about its speaker(s), addressee(s), and scene of address—questions it can’t answer.42 Like the pop records that follow it, Valente’s “Breeze and I” has too much material(ity) and not enough raison d’être. The aesthetic practice governing this pop record is marked by an openness to whatever’s around, which leads to a heaping up of stuff in which no individual element is uniquely essential—not the song, nor the singer, nor any of the arrangement and production touches that give it its sonic concreteness. This is the pop record of the 50s and after.

The Rudiments of the Heightened-­P op Style I’ve devoted time to Caterina Valente’s “The Breeze and I” because it can show, better than the rock & roll that emerges soon after, how the popular record engages its musical context. The intensity of this engagement becomes palpable in the late-­60s records this chapter is centrally concerned 60  •   C h a p t e r on e

with. We’ll move in three jumps from mid-­50s pop to the stylistic core of late-­60s heightened pop: for reasons that will become clear, it makes sense to pass through the pop-­oriented soul of the late 1960s, and the so-­called “bubblegum” style (with a nod toward “easy listening”), before arriving at the music of 1968–69 that can only be called “pop” even as it draws on everything under the sun. It’s a short step from Valente’s record to the innumerable late-­60s soul versions of older pop songs. Take the Dells’ “Off Shore,” recorded at the end of the 60s and released as the final song on the album Like It Is, Like It Was in February 1970; like most of the Dells’ late-­60s records it was arranged by Charles Stepney (whom we’ve already encountered as the auteur behind Rotary Connection). The song, written and first recorded by harmonica player Leo Diamond in 1953, has the style and AABA structure of a Tin Pan Alley ballad.43 Diamond became known for “exotic” records in the vein of Valente’s “Breeze and I,” many including overdubbed harmonica.44 While the song’s origins are pop, it had gained a place in the soul tradition by the time the Dells approached it. Thus the Dells record has to converse not only with the original song, which already builds in a melodic/harmonic relation to jazz, but with a set of R&B and jazz tropings on this late Tin Pan Alley composition. The 1957 recording by the Cardinals, an R&B vocal group on Atlantic Records, is the obvious reference point for the Dells’ version.45 The Dells’ recording of “Off Shore” bears many similarities with Valente’s version of “The Breeze and I,” almost as if rock & roll hadn’t appeared in the meantime. Like Valente’s “Breeze and I” the Dells’ “Off Shore” begins with an elaborately orchestrated introduction, using newly composed material, in a way that puts a frame around the original song [track 1.7]. Flutes and deftly orchestrated brass step forward against a full string section, along with cymbal-­washes, wind-­chimes, lapping waves, and some ardent sea-­fowl. Here too whole-­tone harmonies fulfill a conventional function: as they might in Debussy they work to represent the gentle rocking of a ship on the water, resolving to a diatonic collection before returning to a whole-­tone collection that functions as a “soft” quasi-­dominant chord.46 In both cases the carefully constructed vagueness of the introduction gives the sense that we must cross some border-­region to reach the original song, which is thus shown to lie at some temporal or emotional distance. Both records use the voice in varied ways: they showcase the presentation of the original melody, allowing a lead singer to perform a conventional function, but they ask the voice to play other roles as well. In both there’s a mix of features that derive from the U n e ng ag i ng h i s t or i e s: P op   •   61

original song and features that don’t; much of their material, beyond their introductions, exceeds what the original song authorizes. Elements drawn from different genres and styles bear a variety of aesthetic implications. Alongside these records’ responsibilities to the written-­out Tin Pan Alley song are a set of pressures and possibilities that derive from earlier recordings and the genres these recordings come from. But their sonic materiality means these records can also convey the song’s potential immediacy, its capacity to be brought into the present. These records refuse to be heard in only one way. They possess no single center; if the Dells’ “Off Shore” has a raison d’être, it is as a soul record, and not as pop. And this is one thing that distinguishes the Dells record from heightened pop of Valente’s era. It’s soul music. In aesthetic and marketing terms it has an origin and a target that allow it to engage listeners beyond pop. The singing makes this point in the most obvious way. It can stand on its own, and not merely through the powerful vocal performance of Marvin Junior, who enters after the intro: “Off Shore” has two lead singers and uses all five members of the Dells to perform a varied vocal arrangement. Indeed this record makes the bold move of interpolating an even earlier Tin Pan Alley song, “When the Swallows Come Back to Capistrano,” as its first bridge.47 Johnny Carter sings leads on this bridge, and his sweet timbre and more restrained phrasing suggest the R&B vocal groups of the 50s—which is what the Dells had begun as. This bridge thus comes from farther back in the past, even as it too connects with the soul tradition. Soulful vocal performances are self-­justifying within the tradition the Dells participate in, all the more when singers treat songs flexibly. Junior does leap out: the creativity of his ad-­libbing, and his relentless insistence on his own sonic presence and particularity, go further than what a pop singer would do. But it’s equally important that we hear this soulful multivocality within the tight confines of a record that can also function as pop. The weight of the rhythm section is equally important. A surprisingly active electric bass creates an additional “voice” one can follow through the record.48 Stylistically and technologically dependent on recent developments, this approach to the bass was up-­to-­date for soul as well as rare in non-­soul-­ derived pop. The drums too can gain attention they wouldn’t have received on a straight-­ahead pop record before 1967—through their big sound and funky feel, their punchy underscoring of the horn arrangement, the syncopated bass drum, and especially the increasingly intense fills. I underscored the multidimensionality of the Valente record, but in the Dells record the 62  •   C h a p t e r on e

dimensionality is exponentially increased, partly because the rhythm-­section members become real actors. Like the singers, the instrumentalists can come off as actual people with specific musical/cultural histories. This lively human presence registers partly through its distance from the moment and style of the original song(s). Such a hearing is always highly contingent, but it was unavailable to Valente’s mid-­50s audiences. The Dells’ record’s specifically soulful multivocality and multidimensionality show how pop-­soul helped create the rudiments of late-­60s heightened pop. Greater sonic clarity gave the rhythm section a stronger presence as a unit but also made each of its instruments more individuated. Pop-­soul producers took advantage of this increased clarity to insert a grooving, attention-­seeking rhythm section into a variegated pop soundworld of multiple voices and full studio orchestra. We could call this the first and fundamental addition that triggered the heaped-­up approach. More subtly the give-­and-­take between soul and pop itself contributed to the heightened pop style. In soul the rhythm section, like the voices, can stand on its own. But—to give one example of this give-­and-­take—this record’s responsibilities to pop make the rhythm players perform unusual roles: the watery intro to “Off Shore” reveals a rhythm section reshaping itself to fulfill a specific depictive purpose.49 What makes this record up-­to-­date soul, in fact, has to do with its tensions between pop and soul: between ad-­libbing singers and relatively fixed songs; between big drum sounds and the more “balanced,” “orchestral” sound that governed easy-­listening pop; between the conventional roles of the bass in pop and the sound and playing-­technique that emerge on electric bass in mid-­60s soul and funk; and especially between soul’s vocalcentricity and a new sense that, as Stepney put it, voices had to be “played like instruments into the whole musical picture.”50 Musically, then, the convergence between the soul rhythm section and increased sonic differentiation broke pop open: pop’s already heterogenous elements acquired the character of discrete audio objects with individual agency. We hear this in obvious ways when horn, string, and vocal arrangements mimic the hookiness and dynamism of funky rhythm-­section patterns. Stepney mastered this. He understood too that a grooving rhythm section could provide a ground on which ever more surprising musical objects could come and go.51 Pop records thus exhibited greater sonic intensity, definition, and variety. These aesthetic goals were in place even before Valente’s era, but their specifically African American accent in the late 60s made this a qualitative shift and not merely a matter of degree, for two U n e ng ag i ng h i s t or i e s: P op   •   63

reasons. Black-­music approaches conveyed effort, balanced by a non-­rock ideal of precision, all the more when they were attempted by pop musicians who couldn’t quite achieve the soulful grooves or vocal performances they sought. And this aesthetic of effort/precision put pressure on each musical element to stand out. Deracinated these musical objects may have been, when they appeared on pop records, but their highly defined sonic presence could give the sense that they were working as well as worked. Many of Stepney’s late-­60s pop-­oriented records exaggerated and underscored this quest for vividness: prepared-­piano introductions that pastiched John Cage’s Sonatas and Interludes, an electronic Rock-­Si-­Chord presenting eighteenth-­century figures in Rotary Connection’s satirical version of “Soul Man,” Phil Upchurch’s unprecedentedly dissonant post-­rock guitar solo on the Dells’ reading of “Whiter Shade of Pale,” and so on.52 Vocal arrangements for records like “Whiter Shade of Pale” and the Dells’ “Medley: Can Sing a Rainbow and Love Is Blue” redraw their lyrics’ economy to emphasize colors and other “secondary” features, often at the expense of their themes. It is in and through this pressured vividness that late-­60s pop shows the effects of its historical moment. In ’69, as opposed to ’54, the sonic materiality of any musical element can imply a specific cultural formation that listeners align with or against. The sounds interpellate particular constituencies and exclude others. (Do you like the strings or do you find them sappy? Is distorted guitar appropriate for a pop record? Do the swayings back and forth of objects in the stereo field charm you or create a headache? Are you the one being addressed by this serious, adult-­sounding singer, or are you overhearing something intended for grownups?) Rock plays a role in this shift: its emphasis on amplified sound implied particular modes of diffusion and scenes of address, where the pop song had always pictured itself as readable in any medium or setting. Heavy amplification not only became a cultural signifier: it was imposing enough to make you take a stand.53 Under rock’s influence the boundaries between musical and cultural forces started to blur. Unlike pop’s sonic materiality, rock’s viscerality of sound was intertwined with its reasons for being; and the Dells records’ grounding in soul gives them ways to answer questions about raison d’être that pop records lacked. But rock, soul, and pop were all at the mercy of forces asking more and more of popular music: they show the pressure for ambition, bigness, and physical impact that emerged alongside traditional demands for catchiness, personality, and sentiment. Importance became more important. In 1969 there was 64  •   C h a p t e r on e

always something pressing itself forward, something needing addressing: there was a repository of social energy that records could—had to—tap into. Even the most politically unengaged pop producers seem to have heard this cultural/aesthetic demand.54 But without a raison d’être, “importance” was a matter of topoi, techniques, and schemes.55 If pop’s main response to these demands took the “apolitical” form of greater heterogeneity and clearer differentiation of musical elements, rock too saw its visceral effects undermined by their very reproducibility. When the power of amplification lessened through overuse, and rock circulated more widely (in domesticated forms or beyond its original cultural contexts), there emerged a “left melancholy” about rock’s promise and possibilities.56 Any late-­60s song or artistic practice could be brought up on charges of insignificance: “why do that when all this is happening around us?” Even the so-­called “bubblegum” style revealed these pressures. While soul shows how musical genres were part of what impinged on pop in the late 60s, bubblegum demonstrates the effects of these pressures. The bubblegum style lay at the center of several convergences. For the writer of a 1968 Time article, it was simply “the latest confection created for the subteen market, which accounts for about one out of every four single records sold.”57 But as this article acknowledges, these subteens were “the displaced persons of the rock revolution”: rock’s themes of “war, alienation, racism and narcotics” failed to address the “concerns, or rather unconcerns” of these preteen listeners. This was in fact the first instance of a pop style that aimed younger than rock: rock & roll and the rock that followed it had meant youth music, while things we place on the pop side of rock had until then targeted older listeners (especially easy listening).58 In the first decade of rock & roll, pop was for grownups; by the early 70s, pop listeners were typed as younger than rock’s. 1968–69 is the moment when this relation was uncertain: bubblegum’s conflation of nursery-­rhyme melodies and rock-­oriented child-­man vocals could itself tell listeners that the categories of youth and age were in flux. What the Time article does not say explicitly is how rock’s intensity and sense of importance could not simply be ignored by the pop that appeared alongside it in the marketplace. Bubblegum makes plain that rock pressured pop in new ways. Occasionally this happened through sounds, like distorted electric guitars, that derived from rock and might have prevented a record from counting as pop a few years earlier.59 But more often this pressure for bigness and intensity provoked responses that drew on principles of heaping-­up and techniques of sonic differentiation. Thus in bubblegum U n e ng ag i ng h i s t or i e s: P op   •   65

the “fuzz guitar” asserted itself against fanfares, orchestral chimes, shouted group-­cheers, built-­up vocal harmonies, and other signifiers of importance.60 These records often created intensity in ways traditional for “kids’ music”: through lyrics that repeated simple phrases (“Finders keepers losers ­weepers,” “Yumberry Park,” “Tweedly dee tweedly dum,” “Tra la la”) or depicted its listeners’ “unconcerns” in exaggerated phenomenological detail (“Yummy yummy yummy I’ve got love in my tummy,” “Smell the sunlight as it warms you”).61 Bubblegum also sought intensity through soulful means like active bass playing and funky drumming: this demonstrates the breadth of soul’s impact on late-­60s pop, even on pop styles that hardly registered as “soulful.” These soulful elements, like the fancy horn and vocal arrangements, needed professional musicians, and thus contrasted with the “untrained” sound of the lead singers and the collectively chanted vocal hooks. Similarly, bubblegum’s sense of “nowness” and urgency happened through both novel sonic means and extreme realizations of old-­fashioned annunciatory topics (as when the Hardy Boys’ “Here Come the Hardys” begins “Hello hey hi how are you now / You know we’ve got so much to do now”).62 And this present-­ and future-­oriented stance coexisted with backward-­looking conceptions of lyrics, melodies, and song-­structures. So stylistically bubblegum lay at the crossroads of pop and rock, child and adolescent, Black and White, professional and amateur, new and old, ordinary and heightened, “engaged” and “unengaged,” simple and complex—all unstable categories in 1968–69. As such it can teach us two things about the heightened pop it overlapped with. (1) Even when pop’s traditional virtues of simplicity and artlessness made commercial and aesthetic sense, these late-­ 60s records refused to wall themselves off from the musical and cultural swirl around them, and instead embraced an aesthetic of too-­muchness. (2) This concerted heaping-­up of unreconcilable musical objects, with the heavy rhythm section a basic element, served as a response to new listening practices; perhaps it revealed the emergence of a new sort of listener. Samuel R. Delany registered these changes at the time. When a kind of “musical sophistication” driven by repeated hearings of records “filters down to . . . the level that buys . . . two million 45 rpm copies of this month’s number one hit tune,” he suggested, it means that the most illiterate gum-­chewing teenybopper quite seriously feels she has not even heard a song until it has come out of her ten-­transistor job at least half a dozen times. No matter how little actual depth of comprehension she can bring to a song, that this sort of musical attention is a matter of course with the broadest level of the musical audience is, in cultural terms, amazing.”63 66  •   C h a p t e r on e

For Delany, production practices wherein “multiple hearings become built into the medium” rendered a leisurely “ ‘vamp until ready’ ” approach “totally superfluous”: these short songs could be packed with material from beginning to end. But “on the other hand” these production and listening practices also worked to the benefit of pattern repetition, “rhythmic or melodic, simply because it is formally pleasing”—a technique that often emphasized the rhythm section. One should add that these developments assumed this unflatteringly depicted girl was listening past a song’s main melody. If Delany was right, the strategy of wheeling things in and out of a record’s texture becomes easier to explain: rather than forcing producers to strip things down, bubblegum’s young addressees were another argument for the heaped-­up style. Moreover the kid-­friendly repetition of “simple” vocal hooks served as an excuse to include specifically Black, groove-­oriented kinds of pattern-­ repetition.64 Similarly the rhetorical stance of a child’s openness to experience gave a reason to incorporate novel production techniques and adopt an aesthetic strategy of inclusiveness. In this way the most up-­to-­date funky drum-­patterns could undergird a little-­kid chorus chanting “finders keepers losers weepers,” and (as we saw early on) a bubblegum-­linked family group like the Cowsills could assert their youth while fronting a notably heterogeneous mix of musical and cultural elements.65 Bubblegum shows in the clearest possible way how pop absorbed and redirected the multiplicity of musical, social, historical, and market forces impinging on it. As it always had, pop embraced these forces as material for use. What had changed since Caterina Valente’s era was the speed, volume, variety, and intensity of the barrage. More than before, pop’s tensions pulled it in different directions. Where was pop supposed to go—toward its “sheet-­ music” roots or toward sonic materiality? Toward a race-­neutral “popular” style or toward “Black music?” Toward rock or away from it? Toward kids or grownups? And so on.66 For bubblegum, as for much late-­60s pop, these competing forces provoked “both/and” rather than “either/or” responses. “Bubblegum soul” by the Jackson 5, the Five Stairsteps, and others doubled down on this “both/and” approach by drawing extensively on rock and psyche­delic styles while also making soulful singing a fundament.67 Whether or not the basic institutional frame of the “subteen market” counts as a raison d’être for bubblegum and bubblegum soul, it can’t capture everything the music contains. We could surely ask: were little kids truly the target of the fancy bass-­playing and contrapuntal vocal arrangement on the Hardy Boys’ hit “Love and Let Love,” or of the meter-­changes in the U n e ng ag i ng h i s t or i e s: P op   •   67

Jackson 5’s “ABC” and “I Want You Back?” But one might legitimately reply “yes, why not?” or “no, but the market demanded that level of sophistication,” or “hey, it works on a less-­than-­conscious level,” or “whatever; that’s just musicians fooling around.” There’s seldom a paper-­trail, and it’s hard to go back and adjudicate among these possibilities. Bubblegum clarifies a relation between the heaped-­up style and the multiplicity—and instability—of pop’s addressees: a record’s every musical element could assert a complex genealogy and a particular mode of address. From a production perspective a bubblegum record was trying to hit many moving targets, but this messy process had the unexpected effect of bringing new addressees into being. A similar narrative governs “easy listening,” another main pop subgenre. Intended for adults whose tastes were formed before rock & roll’s emergence, this marketing category might seem to target a stable, if aging, audience. Here too, however, we can observe many musical and other-­than-­musical practices impinging on records, encouraging heterogeneous un-­“easy” sound­worlds, and targeting a range of listeners. The success of pop arranger Paul Mauriat’s version of “Love Is Blue (L’amour est bleu)” too provoked a 1968 Time report on pop’s state of the art. Noting the surprising sales of an “all-­instrumental number” that lacks the “juggernaut beat, the vocalisthenic performance and the strain of novelty” that have been “considered necessary the past few years,” the author is at a loss to define its appeal: all he can say is its “unusual staying power at the top of the charts” may derive from its being “practically gimmick-­free” [track 1.8].68 But Mauriat’s record does have two showy features beyond what the Time author calls the song’s “plaintive, folklike melody.” A liner note for Blooming Hits, the album whence it comes, touts one of them: “The French pianist, conductor and orchestrator Paul Mauriat,” it begins, “has been described in the press in recent times as the virtuoso of the ‘in’ sound, who in some of his ‘happy, upbeat arrangements’ favours the ‘in’ instrument, the harpsichord.”69 I’ve underscored the late-­60s popularity of this instrument: its old/new hookiness had earned it the status of a “gimmick” by 1968, and its presence on Mauriat’s record was apparently enough to trigger similar harpsichord-­ scoring on at least eight subsequent versions of this song in 1968 alone.70 Another catchy feature is the little two-­chord vamp the record begins with. Normally we wouldn’t think anything of such an opening (Delany’s critique of the “ ‘vamp until ready’ ” gambit notwithstanding). But the two chords in question have a particular cultural resonance. The oscillation between a tonic minor chord and a major IV chord had already become a 68  •   C h a p t e r on e

principal signifier of funky jazz—Eddie Harris’s “Listen Here” might be the contemporary locus classicus—and it had been diffused through soul, funk, boogaloo, and rock. But this harmonic oscillation also fits the Dorian mode, allowing it to signal nineteenth-­century “folk music.”71 This was among the deepest musical puns of late-­60s pop, precisely because it collapsed the distance between “Black” and “White” music. And like the harpsichord this harmonic oscillation was complexly old and new. Both features could be heard (and not heard) in many ways. So the Time author didn’t know how much he didn’t know. Even this record, which derives little energy from its rhythm section, presents an unstable mix of elements: hints of Black music, the folklike tone, and classical; assertions of both sonic materiality and melody’s primacy or “universality.” Much late-­60s easy listening pushed this instability further.72 Indeed, every late-­60s pop style and subgenre—pop rock, psychedelic pop, pop folk, pop jazz, pop soul, pop gospel, bossa pop, and so on—shows tendencies toward openness and too-­muchness on the production side, along with the multiplicity and instability of its addressees. The 1,100 records that fully embody the heightened aesthetic put themselves forward as ungraspable assemblages. At the same time they still sought validation as pop: they were ever-­ready to project Tin Pan Alley values, and they never comported themselves as purely rock, folk, or straight-­ahead soul. In this way, these records presumed the existence of listening subjects who were, at best, just beginning to emerge—who on one hand would attend to a record many times, listening deeply into its textures, but on the other still accepted pop’s basic premises of catchy melodies and instant readability. On the production side, however, the songwriters, arrangers, producers, and studio musicians seemed absolutely self-­confident. With no financial security, no fan base, no working band, and sometimes no actual material, many impresarios of the heightened style took to the recording studios or record companies with a secure sense that they had hits under their fingers.73 Often they guessed wrong. The post-­Brill-­Building songwriter Roger ­Nichols occupied this gap between production and reception. While he broke through at the start of the 70s with hits like the Carpenters’ “We’ve Only Just Begun,” in 1968–69 he was still waiting for his first big score. People were recording his compositions like crazy at the end of the 60s, however. Songs like “The Drifter” and “Love So Fine” appeared ten times each by the end of 1970, never charting as singles; five other songs were done about a half-­dozen times each, also without much commercial success.74 U n e ng ag i ng h i s t or i e s: P op   •   69

The artists who performed Nichols’s songs were mostly underpromoted new groups taking the heaped-­up approach or working in the developing soft-­rock style; some were pop singers (Black and White) participating in a decayed Tin Pan Alley economy. So we can’t make much of these nearly eighty records’ failure to chart. But what emerges is how closely these records hugged Nichols’s own heightened treatments of the songs, as heard on a 1968 album, a few earlier singles, and some extant demos. The songs themselves are designed in accordance with Tin Pan Alley practices such that they would be fully capable of preserving their identity across a variety of tempos, arrangements, and styles. But over and over, covers of Nichols’s songs adopted highly particularized—and one would imagine superfluous—features of his original arrangements.75 This reflects a stubborn sense that Nichols could not have been wrong in thinking his songs required the specific arrangements he commissioned for them: his every concoction of neo–Tin Pan Alley songwriting and heaped-­up arranging just had to be a hit. By the time Nichols began to succeed commercially, his songs, and the musical context around them, had swung away from the heightened style. Similar miscalculations shaped these pop auteurs’ interactions with record companies. The enormously talented Free Design signed with Enoch Light’s Project 3, an easy-­listening label with a “hi-­fi” emphasis, for the promise of artistic autonomy; but their records were barely promoted and badly distributed. Inner Dialogue, the essence of the psychedelic pop style, wound up on the L.A.-­based Ranwood label—in the late 60s Ranwood was about as psyche­delic as old shoes, a moribund outfit of Lawrence Welk reissues, Magic Organ albums, and other producer-­driven easy-­listening projects. Dealings with the major labels too often went sour. Millennium got a Beatles-­like production budget from Columbia Records on the strength of mastermind Curt Boettcher’s success producing the Association and Jan and Dean, but Boettcher had no name recognition or natural fan-­base, and (Boettcher felt) the music was too elaborately produced to perform live; Columbia had no obvious way to market the record. Commercially it tanked. Even the successes can make you wonder. The bubblegum-­inflected “Yellow Balloon” was written by Gary Zekley, who also had been working with Jan and Dean. The duo liked the song. But when Zekley heard the arrangement they were intending to record (an arrangement he was sure would flop), and was unable to change its direction, he decided to shop the song around. Having convinced Ken Handler of Canterbury Records that the 70  •   C h a p t e r on e

song was a potential hit, Zekley arranged and produced a heightened version with high-­end L.A. studio singers and instrumentalists.76 “Yellow Balloon” reached number 25 on Billboard’s pop chart—but how many more units might it have sold had it not appeared on Canterbury, an obscure property of Mattel Toys run by a man known as the “real Ken” (on whom Barbie’s counterpart was based)? Would “Mrs. Bluebird,” Boettcher’s lavishly produced minor hit for Eternity’s Children, have done better on a label other than Tower, a Capitol subsidiary designed as a tax shelter? Why would the recipe of Jim Webb’s songs, versatile Black singers, fine L.A. session-­players, and juiced-­up arrangements, on a well-­positioned label, generate real sales for the 5th Dimension but not for Thelma Houston? This is where pop’s lack confronted the heightened style. A pop hit had always been a contingent occurrence, but this proliferation of makers, listeners, and musical objects created unprecedented causal clutter. It’s true the production of pop records ran very smoothly in the late 60s. Deep talent-­pools and well-­oiled studios put lush, refined, precise, groove-­driven backgrounds within easy reach of arrangers and producers; for the first time, low-­budget pop LPs could achieve an “expensive” and up-­to-­date sound.77 But the heightened style itself wasn’t the result of an industry strategy, even as it relied on this economic model. Far from an industry-­driven machine, this pop strain survived on the efforts of an eclectic group of stake­holders: cartoon-­characters fronting actual bands, real-­life soul artists seeking (sometimes) to cross over into pop, arrangers taking liberties, jazzers (like Margo Guryan) discovering Pet Sounds, arty music-­students, downtown rhapsodes, shady producers looking to hustle some kids, singing-­groups on a perpetual post-­collegiate tour, aging pop stars, pre-­pubescent children of showbiz-­ touched parents, gulled A&R men, and, especially, conscientious studio musicians and engineers. None of these had a reliable audience.78 The flip-­side of pop’s “universality”—meaning its capaciousness as well as its r­ eadability— is that it “does not have a specific . . . market/culture.”79 While many of the profitable and unprofitable examples of the heaped-­up style could be called underground, they seldom had any way of tying the audience to the artist: in the absence of physical proximity an artist’s listeners were mostly an accident of distribution. The audience was just whoever happened to lie in the path of the soundwaves.80 Just as we have few contemporary interviews with the makers of the heightened style, and almost no information about the lay reception of this music beyond skeletal chart data, we can find very little journalism about U n e ng ag i ng h i s t or i e s: P op   •   71

these records as they were appearing on the market. Occasionally we get glimpses of how this style bothered rock critics. We’re not surprised to read this assessment of a 1967 precursor: Like the cover, the over-­a ll effect is busy, hip and cluttered. .  .  . An obsession with production, coupled with a surprising shoddiness in composition, permeates the entire album . . . an album of special effects, dazzling but ultimately fraudulent.”

Oh wait actually we are surprised—he was talking about Sgt. Pepper’s.81 So we can imagine how he might have responded to a bunch of no-­name Dutch crazies like the Buffoons. Heightened pop put everything up for grabs: more sounds than before, more meanings, more diverse pictures of artists and audiences. Journalism, radio, and television were unable to directly shape the production and reception of this style, and they’ve left few clues for historical inquiry. We must come to terms with a not fully knowable practice wherein atomized productive forces yielded heaped-­up records for imprecisely targeted audiences. What we do have in relative abundance are records and the relations among them. Our best data are the too many small musical objects that fill these records’ textures. This chapter’s final sections will use these data to suggest how heightened pop created the new forms of address I’ve begun to delineate: communication as a swirl of senders and receivers in which no one stays put.

Grasping Pop’s Small Musical Objects Sifting through these 1,100 songs and the 2,500 to 3,500 surrounding them confirms that late-­60s pop took everything in. It shows too that these records drew on a relatively limited number of models to shape the presentation of this multiplicity. As we would expect, the prominent voices of mid-­60s pop had a strong impact: the middle-­period Beatles, the Beach Boys of Pet Sounds, Burt Bacharach and his Brill Building colleagues, Motown. Even when heightened pop’s stylistic heterogeneity exceeds what these precursors attempted, this impact can still be felt at the meta-­level, in two main ways: Beatles-­like uses of past and present Anglo-­American popular styles; and the incorporation of new technologies and “foreign” musical elements as discrete textural strata or in specific song-­sections (like introductions). The 72  •   C h a p t e r on e

middle-­period Beatles broadened their stylistic repertoire by pushing out along the grain of a song’s melody, harmony, and lyrics: the words and music would point Eastward, inward, backward, or “Blackward” and the instrumentation, arrangement, and production values would follow in a manner that yielded an internally coherent record. The second main way of creating variety—through stratified textures, or contrasts between sections—often worked against coherence. But both strategies relied on increased sonic differentiation. They also depended on clearly articulated song-­sections, and on techniques for bringing elements in and out, both of which were a strength of Bacharach’s and Motown’s arrangements. The musical materials themselves and these strategies for incorporating them circulated together in late-­60s pop. This basic point—that when genres engage in exchanges of these sorts they trade not only musical objects but methods of exchange—will figure prominently in later chapters. But it’s important to emphasize that in late-­60s heightened pop the objects themselves accumulate and stick. These musical objects became the most stable features of a soundscape in which people and institutions were unable to take solid form. I’ve noted many of the objects that define the heaped-­up style: tropes of simplicity and directness (like nursery-­rhyme melodies);82 figures that demand attention (fanfares, “new sounds”);83 signifiers of complexity and derivatives of modernism (angular, dissonant melodies, odd or changing meters);84 archaizing touches like pump organs and baroque pastiches.85 Especially important are the elements that function mostly as “extra”: large backing-­groups singing vocables, melodic fragments that come and go, additional layers of percussion, instruments that signal other genres. I’ll say a bit more about several of these features—the quarter-­note accompaniment figure and the brass fanfare as complementary opening gambits, the funky drum-­patterns associated with James Brown, the lyrics of these heightened songs, and (by way of conclusion) the ubiquitous harpsichord. Together these features can provide a sketch of pop’s commons at a moment when cultural affiliations and disaffiliations were changing in musical and other-­ than-­musical ways. This chapter began with an example of bare even-­quarter-­note triadic accompaniment at moderate speed. In its typical form this accompaniment pattern appears on the acoustic piano as the main or only element at a song’s beginning. I cited it as a clear way of signaling pop, which tells us it can serve as a means for measuring distance from soul and rock. This pattern appears in hundreds of songs of the 60s and 70s, but its presence on U n e ng ag i ng h i s t or i e s: P op   •   73

heaped-­up records of 1968–69 might surprise us: why would this gesture of renunciation make sense for songs that want to include everything? The degree of contrast this move allows is partly the point, as I’ve already suggested: strong contrast can itself help establish a heightened aesthetic, and a pop song’s “more” can stand out against an opening that conveys lessness. And of course this pattern’s bareness is both real and troped: it does as little as necessary to provide a song’s harmonic and rhythmic underpinning, but it also carries strong associations with the prewar styles of operetta, music hall, and Tin Pan Alley. From this it derives not only an old-­fashioned quality but an expository—sometimes assertively rhetorical—character. It establishes a stripped-­down texture, to be sure, but any sense of intimacy it creates is of a notably public sort. We can hear this accompaniment figure at or near the beginning of 43 of the 1,100 heaped-­up songs; there are another 27 records whose openings signal this figure while modifying it; 38 or so place this pattern in a different instrument or formal position. How does it function in the heightened style? Here again the 1967 Beatles provide the grammar. Of the Beatles songs that use this pattern “A Day in the Life” may have been exerting the strongest pull in 1968–69; the song’s bridge employs this topic in a way that confirms its associations with prewar pop, especially by contrast with the remainder of the song.86 Their “Penny Lane” provides another locus classicus. A group like the Family Tree operates in a music-­hall idiom throughout their archaizing concept-­album Miss Butters, so we’d expect to hear the quarter-­note topic on acoustic piano early and often. Indeed it’s the first sound we hear on the album following eight seconds of a lightly processed chord for strings; the abrupt textural switch to the piano surely recalls the beginning of Paul McCartney’s bridge for “A Day in the Life,” a connection confirmed by the quick entrance of the lead voice singing the novelistic-­ordinary line “Early one morning she was born.”87 As the doubling of birth and dawn confirms, the quarter-­note accompaniment figure tends to point backward: to the historical past, to childhood, to an originary moment. The Free Design employs this pattern solely in “Don’t Cry Baby,” the first song on their children’s album Sing for Very Important People—it appears nowhere else on their four earlier LPs. This quarter-­note figure comes and goes on the Association’s “The Bus Song,” interacting with other retro touches, including a barbershop-­quartet pastiche; the song ends with the line “Time has passed them by.” Sometimes this pattern’s relation to its prewar sources becomes more complicated, however. The complication begins when a presentation departs 74  •   C h a p t e r on e

from what I called the typical form (an acoustic piano playing nothing but even quarter-­notes in $ time right at the start of a song). Many instances signal this conventional accompaniment figure while diverging from its norms. Often this figure has an unexpected timbre or formal position. Putting it at the beginning of the bridge jerks us into an earlier time, as in “A Day in the Life.” Even if its appearance in a song’s first verse is merely delayed by a long introduction, the jarring effect of a re-­beginning or change of gears raises questions about how, whence or why we’ve traveled to the music hall.88 Hearing this pattern on harpsichord or another attention-­getting keyboard (like what Inner Dialogue calls a “Dulcitron”) can make it serve as a hook.89 Groups that sought to assert a “modern” pop identity while also presenting a guitar-­based sound often used this figure on electric guitar; this included the Beatles, the Association, the Zombies, and many others.90 Thus the pattern’s very familiarity allowed it to accommodate novelty and variety. Similarly its troped simplicity helped songs foreground what counted as complexity and excess, and its rhythmic regularity made it a foil for changing meters and asymmetrical phrase-­structures.91 Putting things another way, once the quarter-­note pattern reaches beyond its origins as a prewar accompaniment scheme, and begins functioning as a figure for its earlier moment or a trope on the musical practices it emerges from, it becomes merely one kind of object among many circulating in a record’s texture, competing for discursive space. It shapes a record’s meanings only momentarily and incompletely. Late-­60s intensified pop renders this pattern’s presence contingent and unnecessary. But the more superfluous it is, the clearer its meaning, function, and origin; all the bendings and stretchings don’t reduce this clarity. Placing it in contrastive schemes or bringing it in and out confirms, even strengthens, its cultural associations. In the late-­ 60s heightened style, just as in “A Day in the Life,” the pattern holds onto its meanings tightly enough to address listeners in its traditional manner— whenever and however it actually appears. Signaling old-­fashioned pop on a record that embodies the heightened style works as a way of reasserting traditional approaches, of showing their adequacy. This pattern can both collapse and acknowledge the distance between the present and the past. The even-­quarter-­note accompaniment and other common opening moves thus raise questions about modes and scenes of address. Just who is being interpellated by this pattern, or by an unmetered piano arpeggio, a brass fanfare, an acoustic-­g uitar strum, a swooping synthesizer, a bossa-­nova beat, an a cappella vocal arrangement, or a minor chord scored for full string U n e ng ag i ng h i s t or i e s: P op   •   75

section? And how? What happens when the quarter-­note triads start filling up time and filling in the harmony? By convention, this pattern is addressed to the singer (or whoever presents the main melody) and not the audience. It draws our attention toward a yet-­to-­appear figure in the soundscape. It invokes thick and entrenched musical and social practices, conjuring up the traditionally strong triangular relation of singer, accompanist, and listener. In a radically inclusive style that doesn’t predetermine who will present a melody, what sort of melody this will be, what role it will play in the song, this pattern can telegraph formal and affective structures in an otherwise unpredictable swirl of elements. The broader point is that such small musical objects became more stable than subjects and addressees in heightened pop’s unstable scenes of address. Brass fanfares make this point in a more obvious way. Who is the fanfare really for? Hint: not you. Its basic function is to signal the imminent arrival of someone or something important. What it announces at the beginning of a pop record, though, is rather ordinary. It delivers information we already have: that a pop song is forthcoming. Thus, we could say, its function is clear but unnecessary; its cultural associations are well understood but inapt for an introduction to a two-­and-­a-­half-­minute piece of “disposable” pop. Indeed the distance between the ordinary pop song and the fanfare’s bigness tends to make the fanfare work as a hook. The extreme cases only reinforce its basic meaning and function. Van Dyke Parks’s “Number Nine” begins with a brass arrangement whose grandness points toward nothing so much as the potted fanfares of 20th-­Century Fox and other film studios. We may take the bluegrass material that follows as a deflation of this intro, but we soon realize the title has been warning us that the song is an adap­ tation of the “Ode to Joy” from Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony. Whether we decide this opening gambit ultimately “fits” the song or not, we have no reason to doubt the fanfare’s capacity to do its job. At the stylistic center of bubblegum, the Hardy Boys’ “That’s That” begins with a two-­measure brass fanfare that introduces the first verse. This is unproblematic. But the verse lasts only four measures, after which there’s another fanfare, also four measures long. Like the opening fanfare it’s presented over a tonic pedal-­ point, enhancing its introductory character. The short verse itself adopts the fanfare’s manner, with the brass section playing straight through under a full vocal arrangement. Rather than dilute the fanfare’s effect, this scheme allows it to permeate the song, making the whole thing annunciatory. Stepney’s envelope-­pushing fanfares—in 74, for shofar, or in the Phrygian mode over a 76  •   C h a p t e r on e

funky drumbeat—show his creativity, facility, and competitiveness, but they too don’t compromise the fanfare’s basic function.92 Like the quarter-­note accompaniment pattern, the fanfare hung around in heightened pop partly for what it enabled musically but more because it staged a scene of address. (In this sense Stepney’s intensified fanfares can be heard to say “Hey, listen—we’re serious this time.”) The fanfare’s scene of address implies a big space and requires a collective, perhaps a crowd. But new listening practices, technologies, and stylistic approaches meant that fanfares were heard also by individuals as individuals in a broader variety of settings. This gave the fanfare additional dimensionality and grain, especially when placed against contrasting material. It could remind listeners how odd it is to confront the public with a brass blast before launching into an intimate communication with a lover. Thus, as the venerable fanfare was made to connect with a wider soundscape of genres, styles, audiences, and modes of diffusion, it changed both its and the pop song’s typical scenes of address. These developments reinforced the fanfare’s solidity but destabilized the pop song’s traditional discursive strategies. A brass-­fanfare opening gives you not only the fanfare but the cut to whatever follows. This abrupt shift—from “us” to “me,” from that sort of musical object to this sort—starts the listener on a bumpy path. Fanfares problematize how subjects and addressees move through a song. In the late-­ 60s heightened style, all the common openings obtained a sonic concreteness that helped assert their cultural specificity. These opening gambits shared a hard-­won capacity to signal styles and genres; they provided images of their soundscape, and for listeners who recognized them they bore a trace of their genealogy. A record’s first moment had the freedom and responsibility to present hooks, establish a scene of address, give a (true or false) picture of how it was made, and convey a sense of its addressees. Pop’s ideal of instant readability remained, but it applied to discrete musical objects and not only songs as wholes. This object-­oriented aesthetic encouraged listeners to chart a course through an entire song, or to stay fixed on one of its odd features, rather than simply drift toward iterations of its principal hook. But on many of these records the fanfare simply initiated a barrage of small musical objects: this aspect of the pop song’s “more” may have been too much too soon for audiences trying to navigate an extremely variable soundscape. Funky drumbeats too became part of the commons in late-­60s pop. The tremendous pop-­chart success of James Brown’s groove-­driven funk songs, beginning with “Papa’s Got a Brand New Bag” in the Summer of 1965, made U n e ng ag i ng h i s t or i e s: P op   •   77

these beat patterns fungible as well as capable of attracting musicians’ attention. Unlike the fanfare’s highly conventionalized early entrance and quick exit, a drum pattern typically occupies long stretches of a record. And unlike the quarter-­note accompaniment figure, funky drumbeats come from the present, and from a non-­pop tradition that allows them to carry a song. As such these drum patterns could provide a through line for pop records along with energy and a sense of immediacy. This itself wasn’t innovative. By the late 60s it was long customary for pop records to present new or borrowed beat patterns; and the production practices that enabled the heaped-­up style had roots in an older percussion-­forward aesthetic.93 We’ve already seen how late-­60s pop placed additional weight on the rhythm section. The eclecticism of the heightened style, too, helped broaden and deepen this trend.94 What remains to be said is that the source of a funky drumbeat’s vividness lay not only in its danceability and sonic concreteness, nor even in its African American cultural specificity, but also (simply) in its assertion of humanly produced energy. The human agency behind drum patterns truly needed asserting, however. Human agency was not a given in a melody-­and-­harmony tradition that normally left drumming uncredited. A crossover soul album like Sly and the Family Stone’s 1968 Dance to the Music stands out for calling attention to the effort and inventiveness behind funky drumbeats: in a liner note signed by Sly himself we read that drummer Gregg Errico “plays the best licks, the fastest and the funkiest,” and “is probably workin’ on a new lick this very moment.” The idea of drum patterns as “licks” (a term normally applied to melodies) reflects their strong profile in late-­60s funk; but equally important is the idea of a specific, named, working, thinking person behind these patterns. I should make clear that Errico is White, all his bandmates are mentioned in this note, and this band had rock associations as well as pop aspirations and a grounding in soul. Even so, this characterization of Errico provides a striking instance of personhood projected through Black percussive sound in music that counted as pop in 1968–69. When we hear funky drum patterns across a range of late-­60s heightened pop records—at least eighty–five songs, stretching from James Brown’s pop covers and pop-­oriented originals through crossover boogaloo and horn-­ heavy pop-­rock to studio-­driven country, clumsy psychedelia, and low-­flying bubblegum—we’re hearing people playing those patterns.95 The discourse around pop music was only beginning to establish ways of acknowledging these people. Nevertheless the intensity of the sounds and the clarity of 78  •   C h a p t e r on e

their genealogy made this human agency available to those who knew to listen for it. Such knowledge was intimately connected with a grasp of Black cultural practices: if you understood how to attend to a grooving rhythm section you were in a better position to hear the claims a drummer was making on you. We don’t know, in any particular hearing of a record, whether a drummer’s work managed to cut through. And if it did cut through, we can’t say whether it operated in service of the song as such, the record as a whole, soul music, Black culture, the drummer as a person, the pattern itself, or nothing in particular. But heightened pop’s occasional funky drumming demonstrates something important: that the direct embedding of personhood within a discrete, extra-­generic musical object could establish a mode of communication specific to this time and aesthetic approach. These drumbeats reveal, again, that musical objects could jut out in heightened pop because they were vividly realized, culturally rich, and capable of showing effort and personhood. Perhaps this funky drumming suggests that the object-­oriented musical approach succeeded best when its objects actually communicated the human activity that lay behind them. If so, the heightened style’s too-­muchness was really a too-­manyness—its swirls of objects really an ungraspable multitude of people. The lyrics to these songs can help make sense of this multiplicity. Even in this heaped-­up style, which often presents singers only fleetingly, sung words (and vocality itself ) retain their capacity to project a sense of personhood. Unlike funky drumbeats lyrics can tell you “I’m feeling this” or “I’m thinking about that.” What these songs’ lyrics say, however, hews closely to themes well established by the 1920s. They seldom engage with anything that was new or pressing in 1968–69; their aesthetic comportment seems out of step with what is thought to matter in late-­60s popular music. And whatever their themes, these lyrics come off as naive, druggy, blindly cheerful, or childishly sulky—like looking at the world “Thru Spray Colored Glasses,” as the theme song of the 1969 surfing film Follow Me put it. But they comport well with the objects of the heaped-­up style by foregrounding discrete words, images, and sensations. This enables them to assert human experience in efficient and palpable ways. While these lyrics are indeed mostly cliché, they place special weight on heightened phenomenological reportage.96 Their colors, feelings, and images of nature sometimes suggest “enhanced” perception, sometimes ordinary experience, but they tend to convey a sense of wonder.97 In their unstable musical contexts these lyrics can gain momentary attention by zooming in on a moment, feeling, object, name, word, or phrase. U n e ng ag i ng h i s t or i e s: P op   •   79

As noted above, the Dells’ versions of “Can See a Rainbow / Love Is Blue” and “Whiter Shade of Pale” emphasize the lyrics’ isolated color words over their ostensible themes. In Carol Stromme’s “Warm,” backing vocalists speak the word “warm” on every other downbeat as Stromme quietly sings about “feelings I can’t name.” Inner Dialogue’s “Little Bits of Paper” lends phenomenological heft to the title phrase by delivering it repeatedly in an otherwise non-­sequitur-­filled and instrumentally busy song; the same is true of about forty marginally coherent records that focus on rain, sunshine, wind, or flowers. Peppermint Rainbow’s “Pink Lemonade,” also mentioned above, shows how a vivid image can staple together a record that lacks centripetal force. The song’s recurring title phrase contends with: hard-­to-­ follow lyrics narrating an unremarkable story; a lead voice whose authority is immediately contested and gradually siphoned off by backing singers and an intensified instrumental arrangement; and a main melody continually heard against active counterpoint. What lyrics we do notice, beyond the title phrase, mostly expand on the image of beverage in glass. So the “pink lemon­ ade” conceit not only stands out, it also provides an organizing principle for the record’s prismatic multiplicity. The quick-­draw response would be to call this “psychedelic.” But pink lemonade is not psychedelic. Adding grenadine syrup or messing with Minute Maid doesn’t put you on the path to mind expansion.98 No, this conceit demonstrates two simpler, bigger points: that lyrics dominated by a single image create space for the music; and that this singular focus can project human experience vividly in the absence of a compelling story, a charismatic singer, a coherent soundscape, or anything else that might serve as a raison d’être. There’s an obvious way these lyrics help foreground the music. The strong contrast between the emphasized words and the rest of the lyrics makes the unemphasized portions less likely to gain attention. This gives more space to the instruments and the nonlinguistic aspects of the voices. Such an approach can strike us as simply unambitious, but culturally it reflects a belief in music’s capacity to get beyond language. This connects with the second basic point. The ideology that produces this belief in music’s universality and immediacy comes from the same place as a notion of personhood prior to culture, politics, and history. The vivid pictures of human experience we get from these records rely on and propagate such a notion. These lyrics ask us to accept their micro-­phenomenology as a realm of common experience. They ask us to care about phenomena simply because they can be concretely described—whether or not they’re real, whether or not they matter. This 80  •   C h a p t e r on e

approach disengages from current events and cultural specificity in favor of a reduction to the basics of human experience. Lyrics show how address works in the heaped-­up style: this style elevates the momentary possibility of human communication over the content expressed. Three characteristics of this style’s approach to lyrics reinforce each other and confirm the broader object-­oriented aesthetic: (1) images, narratives, and personas come and go quickly, and are never revealed in their entirety; (2) the feelings and experiences described could be almost anyone’s, but (3) their concreteness and vividness make them pop out. At best, this approach reveals what we (could) share; at worst it leaves politics and history behind. But it asks nothing more or less than that the listener recognize an other momentarily before her. As an alternative to political statement and personal narrative, this mode of address provided a way to respond to the too-­muchness and too-­manyness of the 1960s—even if it mostly missed its targets. The four sorts of musical object I’ve discussed show how the heightened style embodies personhood without guarantees. If we can’t hear a lead singer as the fully drawn performer of a coherent lyric, if many listeners failed to recognize a funky drummer’s connection to Black culture, how do we acknowledge the anonymous figure presenting a conventional piano accompaniment, or the people who play fanfares? Not only do heightened pop’s people usually fail to secure recognition from listeners, they don’t necessarily gain mass and meaning through such recognition. To say pop lacks a raison d’être is to suggest that its people may not matter.

Melancholy Democracy and the Pop Song’s People Who are the pop song’s people? It has been a central point of this chapter that when it comes to the intensified-­pop style of the late 1960s we really don’t know. We can praise the creativity of producer/arrangers like Charles Stepney, and note the impact of a drummer like Hal Blaine, who played on hundreds of L.A. sessions in the late 60s and often contracted his fellow musicians.99 We can register the fact that key artists like James Brown and the Jackson 5 participated in this heightened style, along with figures better known for their work in genres like jazz, classical, rock, bossa nova, and gospel. We can see that record labels big and small, at the center of the pop-­music world and at its peripheries, sought to cash in on this style U n e ng ag i ng h i s t or i e s: P op   •   81

(or hide profits there). But we can say almost nothing about the audience. We’re dealing here with an impoverished form of what Georgina Born calls “musically imagined community”: a “microsocial sphere of co-­present musical performance and corporeal experience” that “favor[s] the ongoing formation, in microcosm, of collective identities.”100 This musically imagined community is impoverished in two main ways. (1) The co-­presence and corporeality this imagined community embodies are accidental, contingent, and momentary; they are not guaranteed by the practices of making and hearing these pop songs. And (2) the identities emergent in the soundscape around heightened pop of 1968–69 have little grip, specificity, or thickness. This brings us back to a fundamental question: who was listening to this music, and how? ­Critics couldn’t say and mostly didn’t try. Pop’s traditional status as music for “everyone” begs the question. And the idea that pop is for kids (as opposed to grownups), for oldsters (as opposed to youth), for the mainstream (as opposed to the margins), and, as Frith suggests, not for any “specific or subcultural, communal market/culture” doesn’t bring us any closer to an answer.101 The corporate cultures that financed and curated the production, pressing, and distribution of these records developed only the sketchiest image of this style’s audience.102 Consider the audience question from the standpoint of the ubiquitous harpsichord. This instrument appeared on hundreds of records between 1967 and 1970.103 Its frequency in popular music maps onto the emergence and decline of the heightened-­pop style. Alongside its cousins the Baldwin Electric Harpsichord, the electronic RMI Rock-­Si-­Chord, and the Clavinet (an electric clavichord), the harpsichord stands as the perfect emblem of late-­60s intensified pop. Who are the harpsichord’s people? Who wanted to play this antique instrument, who wanted to hear it, and why? Who’s responsible for its prominence? Here we can begin to grasp the oddness and the stakes of heightened pop’s engagement with its cultural surround. A complex set of factors puts a harpsichord on a late-­60s pop record. An early-­music movement of the 1930s and 1940s gets the harpsichord’s sound in the ears of musicians and listeners. The “LP-­mediated ‘Baroque revival’ ” that follows, which Robert Fink justly notes encouraged home listeners to blanket themselves with concerti grossi as “wallpaper music,” relied on the development of a “modern” harpsichord with a metal frame like the piano’s.104 This modern instrument didn’t sound quite like its eighteenth-­century precursors, but it worked well for new music, whether pop or classical: its solidity made it amenable to both heavy studio use and non-­traditional playing techniques; 82  •   C h a p t e r on e

and its increased range, easy octave-­doubling, and touch-­of-­a-­button timbral variety made it competitive with the other keyboard instruments vying for musicians’ attention. The modern harpsichord started making an impact in pop around 1951, with Rosemary Clooney’s “Come On-­a My House.” Mid-­ 60s songs by artists like the Beach Boys and the Righteous Brothers showed that this modern harpsichord could power a Top-­10 hit—or at least do its thing on one.105 Film scores and television shows played a role. Then the floodgates opened. But does this mean that any record-­buying listener actually wanted to pay for the sound of a harpsichord on a pop record? There’s no evidence the harpsichord ever sold a pop record or stopped one from moving. Even when an easy-­listening album like the Anita Kerr Singers’ 1966 Slightly Baroque uses the harpsichord on almost every song, and its liner note advertises the instrument’s presence, we don’t know whether its (modest) sales had anything to do with the instrument. In general the micro-­historical detail around late-­60s harpsichord use provides interesting insights into label bosses, arrangers, and session musicians, but little sense of how their records were being heard by laypeople. I noted above that Paul Mauriat’s million-­ selling “Love Is Blue” quickly provoked at least eight recordings of this song that mimicked Mauriat’s distinctive harpsichord scoring; but were the ­arrangers of these versions making correct commercial decisions? Or take the case of producer Bob Thiele. Trying in his way to nudge the jazz record label Impulse into the pop market—via free-­jazz saxophonist Albert Ayler, as if that made any sense—Thiele cut product-­placement deals with Baldwin and RMI for access to their electric and electronic harpsichords.106 In 1968 RMI took out ads in magazines like Jazz and Pop, sometimes featuring endorsements from Impulse artists; record reviews in Jazz and Pop and elsewhere noted the presence of Rock-­Si-­Chords and electric harpsichords on Impulse albums. But what’s selling what here? And who actually cared? Asking this of the harpsichord isn’t the same as asking who wants to hear a voice or an electric guitar. The harpsichord represented a new sound in the 60s, and was usually marketed that way when it was mentioned at all. Yes, it was antique, and as culturally loaded as anything, but many pop listeners would not have been familiar with it. For them it might’ve mattered that this instrument sounded unusual, could cut through a mix, wasn’t a piano. For listeners who “got the reference,” the harpsichord’s eighteenth-­century resonances might have felt puzzling, alienating, or unlovably quaint, as much as inclusive. And if you found yourself comforted rather than weirded out by U n e ng ag i ng h i s t or i e s: P op   •   83

the harpsichord’s presence, that was probably a sign that (as Fink reminds us) the harpsichord’s midcentury cultural meanings had as much to do with bourgeois lifestyle-­maintenance and leisure-­time as with fine art and European history; these were cultural meanings that didn’t jibe with the sonic intensities of the heaped-­up style this instrument came to emblematize. The briefly ubiquitous harpsichord can teach us about pop’s commons in the late 60s and after. Uncertainties around this instrument’s constituencies, meanings and effects might have made us wonder about pop’s makers and listeners. Compare the harpsichord to the piano, the electric guitar, the drum set, the synthesizer, the string section, the brasses. The harpsichord’s place in late twentieth-­century culture is underdetermined, its authority is limited, its sphere of influence is narrow. We don’t know whom the harpsichord gives voice to or whom it’s there for. Its presence on a pop record raises questions that are traditionally and insistently political: who are we? Where do “we” come from? How and where do we gather, what do we convene around? What do we know, what do we share? In its imperfect way, the harpsichord gives us pictures of how we lived, thought, and comported ourselves at the end of the 1960s. Its sonic materiality, cultural density, and distance from the center of popular music helped it register the shifting relations among p­ eople, sounds, technologies, institutions, and ideas. Grasping/not-­grasping the harpsi­chord in late-­60s pop became part of how people experienced music. And what the harpsichord asks of you, everything else in the musical texture wants from you too. The harpsichord’s sonic materiality is there to be noticed, even if it wasn’t acknowledged, even if its players mostly went uncredited. Its fussy particularity says a piano wouldn’t have been good enough, and nothing happening around us could justify taking shortcuts. When odd, unnecessary, and hard-­to-­assimilate elements like the harpsichord populate a song’s texture, every element can become more difficult to grasp. Every element has its own feel, history, meanings, stakeholders—more than we know, more than we can hear. At the far end of what can count as a pop song, these late-­60s records give us too much too quickly, a barrage of fragments rushing past us. But we may realize, dimly, that we’re being hailed. This dim sense is why I invoke the notion of melancholy democracy. I alluded early on to Wendy Brown’s picture of “left melancholy,” following Walter Benjamin: “a condition produced by attachment to a notion of progress in which opportunities missed or political formations lost are experienced as permanent and unrecoverable.”107 Brown’s formulation fits late-­60s rock culture very well, especially as described at the time by a twentysomething author 84  •   C h a p t e r on e

like Nik Cohn. For Cohn, 1968–69 is a moment of loss and decline: “In the 50s, the whole point about rock was its honesty . . . and now it’s become just as fake as Doris Day ever was.” The widening gap between artist and audience means that groups like the Beatles “don’t belong to their own time and place any more.” This groups’ many followers have “felt themselves obliged to get into Art,” and it’s teenagers “who’ve lost out.”108 But pop had no originary moment to look back on, no stinging sense of a vanished cultural formation or a lost opportunity. Compared to rock culture’s self-­certainty, pop is altogether less assured—about itself, its cultural place, and its relation to history. As such, pop’s melancholy is a gentler cultural formation telling us that maybe we’ve missed something, or that there’s something we haven’t caught up with. Telling us that what we share might not be important; that what we share doesn’t necessarily add up to collective experience. Or that the only thing we share is our separateness. The harpsichord reminds us: in the frothy textures of late-­60s heightened pop, the past, present, and future coexist in a swirl. These records include too many elements to keep track of. These elements are all on the point of disappearing. Their relations are under­ determined by history and by the many hands who had a part in making the song. As a listener you’re always participating in a melancholy scene of address: there’s always something you’re failing to really hear, something flying from grasp just when you catch hold of it. Heightened pop wants to include everything and address everyone. If it thereby counts as a “democratic” genre, its democracy is a melancholy democracy—a democracy unable to bear the realization of its ideals. In the same way, a pop song that seeks to include everything pop can encompass might stop being a pop song. Can this music speak if its every element wants a voice? That’s the key question. Whether we acknowledge it or not, these records give us the ethical task of trying to hear their many voices. Think again about what the harpsichord player and the other studio musicians are asking of us. At the most basic level: they want to be heard. They want us to care about what they’re doing. It’s easy to care when a pop singer caresses a long note—because we sense that she cares. Certain kinds of musical behavior encourage this mutuality of care: they encode what we recognize as expressiveness, intensity, or effort. As time passes, pop assimilates new sorts of musical behavior; there’s more we can care about. (Much of this happens between the 1954 of Caterina Valente’s “The Breeze and I” and the heightened pop of 1968–69.) At any moment in pop music’s history there will be a lag—you’ll be experiencing musical behaviors you don’t (yet) understand. In 1968–69 there was a huge U n e ng ag i ng h i s t or i e s: P op   •   85

backlog that behaviors like harpsichord-­chording were part of. So you might think, yeah, the lead guitarist cares (the distorted timbre and string bends tell me so), but I’m not so sure about the harpsichord player, and hey, who’s making that bell sound? What does this tell us about hearing pop in the heaped-­up style? That singing and guitar-­playing mattered to listeners and the other stuff just didn’t? I don’t think that’s the lesson, despite the many commercial failures this style produced. What seems more plausible is that this musical style destabilized address and reception to the point that the whole business of communication became uncertain. Musical elements popping in and out of the texture, studio musicians asserting themselves, lead singers too thrown into the incomprehensible swirl: this created a new scene of address. It’s hard to listen when you don’t know who all you’re listening to. In effect you’re being hailed, asked to care, by many strangers. This is quite different from the sonic image of Ellington and His Orchestra in a glamorous nightclub, Ella and Louis in your living room, or John, Paul, George, and Ringo as your friends—all the more if you’re hearing musical labor and you don’t know who’s doing it or what for, or you can’t picture how it’s done. Even grasping the presence of the studio musicians might require specific sorts of cultural knowledge—like knowing it’s not the drummer playing the tambourine, it’s a different percussion player; or knowing there’s someone twirling a knob on a synthesizer to make that funny swooping sound. Again: trying to hear this music’s many stakeholders constitutes an ethical task. This is a strange sort of ethical work—straining to hear a backing musician on a record, or imagining Samuel Delany’s hypothetical ten-­year-­old girl listening to one of these songs in 1968—but it goes to the heart of why the intensified pop of the late 1960s mattered then and matters now. Looking ahead to later chapters, we can make three final points: that this music’s too-­muchness and too-­manyness are essential characteristics of post–rock & roll pop; that popular music of the 1970s made good on what this late-­ 60s pop could only dream of; and that late-­60s heightened pop truly fit its cultural moment precisely because it presented an inassimilable multiplicity. This chapter has delineated a musical style that took pop songs to the limit. It thus provides an exaggerated picture of pop as a genre. But the multiplicity of objects and stakeholders that characterizes this style is broadly definitive of pop after 1950. We noted how Valente’s 1954 “The Breeze and I” brought pop’s tensions to the surface: between song and record, singer and song, melody and texture, familiar and novel elements, European and New World 86  •   C h a p t e r on e

musical traditions. In the heightened style of 1968–69 these tensions broke the pop song open. Pop of the 70s and after sometimes hides the fissures but can’t repair them. In the era of recorded sound pop becomes, and remains, a genre of fractured constructions made by many hands for an uncertain group of stakeholders who receive these constructions in ways that can be hard to fathom. More than other popular-­music genres, pop is unthinkable without the sense that a song can define itself—and succeed or fail—through an unpredictable mix of elements: beat, sound, lyrics, voice, melody, bass line, marketing, fashion, context, occasion. Pop is unthinkable without heavy pressure from other genres and the world beyond. Unthinkable without questions about its raisons d’être. Unthinkable without the sense that its aesthetic and commercial strategies rest on unstable foundations, and that it will have to incorporate whatever comes along—in aesthetic, technological, historical, and cultural terms—even if this may lead to its undoing. But this desperate scene shows what pop is good at. A pop song reflects compromise, division, incompleteness, multiplicity, speed, change, and contingency. The makers of 1970s pop and soul drew on pop’s strengths. Too-­ muchness and too-­manyness became valuable for the paths they opened up. Musicians were listening hard. The late-­60s swirl was focused and redirected in support of voices who had never gotten to sing lead. (Literally and figuratively.) Mitchell Morris’s The Persistence of Sentiment shows how, in 1970s pop, soft soul, and crossover country, artists and audiences from the cultural margins were able to renegotiate the terms under which they were heard and acknowledged.109 Chapter 2 will describe how these and other “space issues” played out in the stereo fields and the wider soundscapes of 70s soul. In Philadelphia soul, early-­70s Motown, the black-­action-­film soundtracks, and early disco, techniques for heaping things up, making them jut forth, and wheeling them in and out were put in service of new ideas and ambitions, new subjects and kinds of subjectivity, and new collectivities. Even in 1968–69, however, the heightened-­pop style did useful cultural work. Its inassimilable multiplicity gave it the capacity to connect with “the sixties” in ways that other genres, especially rock, could not. For the most part it wasn’t the lyrics that made this connection. We’ve noted that these songs typically didn’t engage with history or with issues of the day; politics needed addressing but these records had nothing to say. For Simon Frith that didn’t disqualify these songs from speaking to their moment: “Songs that took it for granted that they didn’t matter registered much more precisely . . . the essential mood of the sixties, the sense of change and possibility.”110 Indeed. U n e ng ag i ng h i s t or i e s: P op   •   87

But we could add that “unengaged” late-­60s pop provided an expanded sense of what mattering was, and a broader picture of who to. The late-­60s pop song functioned as a common space in a way that contemporary rock could not. Rock’s reliance on loudness meant it depended on particular occasions, places, and modes of diffusion; and it had a culture you were expected to be a part of. A pop song could happen anywhere. Listeners could enter and leave; they weren’t asked to commit themselves. Listening on the radio sufficed. You could buy the single without feeling the album pressuring you to hear more of this music and learn about those who produced it. Nothing made you want to experience this music live. There was no need for a group, a life story, a fan base, or any of the other trappings that undergirded aesthetic identity in rock. And pop’s listening practices meant that a song could survive if some or other element failed to come off, or if you only heard the first half, or even if there was only a single feature that caught your attention. For a moment, in that common space, you become one of the pop song’s people. What you hear, what you know, what you remember helps you acknowledge some of the song’s many stakeholders. You’re experiencing a convergence of minor histories, some more engaging than others: sheet music giving way to recordings, fanfares coming back with a vengeance, the revival of harpsichord building, James Brown’s crossover success, corporate-­funded loss-­leader record labels becoming laboratories for ambitious producers, the histories of the catchy melody and of the child as consumer. You realize there’s more than you can hear. But the song’s multiplicity gives you a panoramic view of what people can engage with—even if none of a record’s stake­holders can fully dictate the terms of these engagements. This experience reminds you that we don’t always know how or whether to engage, what engagement looks like, or what will happen if we do engage. Late-­60s pop can unfix and pluralize the notion of engagement. Even the obscurest of these songs has something to tell us: we can learn from how much their makers tried to put in, and from how much their too few listeners failed to take out. So these records, many of which reached hardly anyone, “said” nothing, had no reason for being, nevertheless register an emergent picture of the human in post-­1960s America. Heightened pop’s people are dispersed, incomplete, always waxing or waning; characterized by multiple affiliations and disaffiliations; wanting and able to demand acknowledgment but only capable of registering in culturally mediated forms. Could it be that this was the only late-­60s genre “fully equal to the moment?”111 88  •   C h a p t e r on e

T wo

Space Issues The Seventies-­s oul Complex

The amped-­u p late-­6 0s pop songs discussed in chapter 1 raised questions about how a musical genre fits its cultural moment. How do a genre’s sounds, images, institutions, and practices respond to the events, issues, and affects that shape the ways people understand their time? Early-­70s soul voiced and participated in what was happening around it. But it inherited a long history of Black (and other) musics, and it operated in the shadow of what we call “the 60s.” The inheritance reached back to what Rochelle Larkin’s 1970 book Soul Music! calls “the agonizing wails that rose from the stifling holds of the slave ships;” and it encompassed the major themes and defining features of earlier African American musical genres, the contributions of these genres’ stakeholders, and all the musical conventions, cultural trends, and recent technological developments that were animating Black music at the end of the 1960s.1 This inheritance included civil-­rights-­era understandings of how political, familial, and personal space could relate and intersect. It included record labels, performance venues, and recording studios; it reflected Black music’s interactions with radio, film, television, fashion, advertising, fiction, poetry, journalism, and music education.2 And early-­70s soul also inherited many of the specific musical features that helped create the intensified pop considered in chapter 1: the stabbing harpsichords, the brass fanfares, the “electric sitars,” the intermittent breakbeats, the characteristic mixtures of pop-­friendly vocal hooks, assertive rhythm sections, and concerted orchestrations, the lyrics that zoomed in on a word, feeling, or moment. Working in the shadow of the 60s meant dealing with disillusionment. The 60s were in Fredric Jameson’s words “a moment in which the enlargement of capitalism on a global scale .  .  . produced an immense freeing 89

or unbinding of social energies, a prodigious release of untheorized new forces.”3 But the “world economic crisis” at the end of the 60s made it hard to sustain this “sense of freedom and possibility—which is for the course of the 60s a momentarily objective reality, as well as (from the hindsight of the 80s) a historical illusion.”4 The expansion and contraction of possibility Jameson describes happened simultaneously across the whole of the late 60s and the 70s. This reminds us of what chapter 1 noted: that a feeling of too-­lateness had already emerged in 1968, even as new sites for agency and community continued to proliferate.5 Early-­70s Black music, film, and literature reflected these contradictory tendencies. We can see this push-­and-­pull in the wintry landscapes of the film Shaft, shot on location in New York City in early 1971: Shaft presents new and old modes of comportment and social organization (white-­collar African American women, Black militants, mafiosi), and it conveys both optimistic and pessimistic affects in each of its three main neighborhoods (Times Square, Harlem, the West Village). And we can hear the push-­and-­pull in the way Isaac Hayes’s soundtrack for Shaft employs its soul rhythm section and studio orchestra, especially as its up-­to-­date Black sounds both create the leading edge of early-­70s soul and fulfill a range of old-­fashioned film-­scoring responsibilities. Shaft embodies the tensions of the early-­70s moment. The “sense of freedom and possibility” was neither guaranteed nor foreclosed; it still structured the aspirations of many people who hadn’t achieved full recognition as subjects. But danger, darkness, and failure too pervaded the texture of early-­70s life, a mood that African American artists often acknowledged, and sometimes deliberately worked through. The intensity of these contrasts can itself make the early 70s feel like it’s a foil for the 60s. Chapter 1 asked whether any musical genre was “fully equal to the moment” of 1968–69.6 It suggested that a particular strain of intensified pop came closest: the too-­muchness of these frantically eclectic pop records was uniquely capable of conveying a sense of too-­manyness—a sense that there were so many people addressing so broad a range of audiences, with so much pressing upon everyone, that all the mechanisms of communication had become unstable. Early-­70s soul likewise met its cultural moment with a ­variety of musical techniques and aesthetic strategies: some new, some straight out of the late 60s, some older. In early-­70s soul, too, the variety itself was an essential characteristic. This variety, which could govern individual songs as readily as whole LPs, added up to a set of ways that soul could connect with its time: by pointing toward both the future and the past, by engaging 90  •   C h a p t e r T wo

with other genres (and thus with other demographics), by emphasizing both individuality and collectivity, and by creating representations of both public and private space. Every genre raises basic questions about its people: who’s doing this? Who for? As chapter 1 showed, late-­60s pop posed these questions incessantly but couldn’t provide answers. This chapter will argue that 70s soul answers these questions in the music, whether it’s band members literally introducing themselves on the record, Marvin Gaye’s “What’s Going On” placing a community of listeners within the song’s texture, or a canny producer like Thom Bell saying to himself, “ ‘You know what, there are a lot of people . . . who think about the old days a lot. I’m going to try and come up with an idea to make them feel like 1959, 1960.’ ”7 The central claim of this chapter is that 70s soul responds to its audiences and its time by representing the spaces people interact in and move through. If late-­60s pop registered the swirl of sounds, feelings, and people around it, early-­70s soul created spaces listeners could imagine inhabiting.

Soul at the Start of the 70s Calling early-­70s soul a “complex” says two things. Point number one, soul music was the most trafficked node in a network of overlapping genres. This network included subgenres like funk, precursors like the blues, spinoffs like disco, parts of other genres (e.g., jazz and pop), and hybrids like Latin soul and the Black-­action-­film soundtracks. And point two, soul had come to serve as an umbrella-­term, signifying an essence of Black music, and sometimes denoting the totality of this network.8 The second point has to do with shifts in marketing, journalism, reception, and language-­use that took place across the 60s. In 1969 “Soul” became the name for Billboard Magazine’s Black-­music sales chart, replacing Rhythm & Blues; this change was visible in Black-­music advertising as well. As Portia Maultsby and David ­Brackett have both noted, the Billboard name-­change was the culmination of a process wherein soul became “the de facto term for Black popular music.”9 The long 1970s showed soul’s tightening grip on the record industry: sales increased; independent soul labels made deals with major labels for PR and distribution; major labels like Warner Brothers finally began to develop soul artists and repertoire; soul labels like Motown, Stax, and T.K. established sublabels focused on deliberately-­soulful flavors of gospel, jazz, disco, and S pac e I s s u e s: Sou l   •   91

other neighboring genres; and soul-­artist-­run sublabels emerged with regularity from both independents and majors.10 As to the first point: soul became the main node in a complex of genres partly because it most consistently embodied a set of aesthetic principles its neighboring genres shared. These principles include an “indisputably black” voice (or instrument) telling a story, expressing something that’s “about life, not just music” and making itself a party to “the black[’s] . . . unceasing struggle for survival of his [sic] self;”11 an assertive, grooving rhythm section that can power a song, and sustain interest, entirely on its own; a respect for the ideals of a musician’s cultivated personal “sound” and particular “feel;” and an emphasis on precision in performance and clarity or sharpness in the production values.12 These principles shaped the music called “soul” as it emerged out of rhythm & blues, gospel, and soulful jazz in the mid-­1950s (with artists like Ray Charles and Sam Cooke). They continued to define soul through the 60s and 70s, and they became fundamental to Black-­music genres like funk, Motown, Southern soul, Philadelphia soul, and disco.13 These aesthetic principles could also be said to underwrite soul’s overlaps with 70s pop, jazz, rock, salsa, and reggae, all of which were represented on Billboard’s soul chart. One thing soul and its complex of genres get from these basic principles is a sense of cultural depth and breadth. When a song fulfills (all or most of ) these principles, it not only counts as soulful. It gains a charge that excites a host of cultural forces around it. (As the introduction showed with respect to late-­70s funk, a grooving rhythm section especially can both serve as a song’s reason for existing, and provide the spur and the means for incorporating other elements—within the song’s texture and in broader cultural terms.) Through repetition, expansion, and wide diffusion, the fundamental features of soul music receive the power to take whatever’s around them and make it soulful. Elements like a spoken monologue, an oboe line, a sweeping hand-­gesture, or a set of nearly-­matching outfits work differently when placed against a bass-­line-­driven groove; that difference is the soul tradition remapping cultural space. Similarly, melismatic breathy singing and a gospel touch on the keyboard can put certain listeners in a templar space or in the grip of the past. Crisply played horns on the offbeats can invoke particular kinds of tuition and labor, and specific modes of social organization, especially when a song’s lyrics confirm the connection. If we talk about the variety of elements in early-­70s soul, then, we mean the harpsichords; the inventive string arrangements; the hard-­rock guitar 92  •   C h a p t e r T wo

riffs; the concerted uses of reverb and phase shifting; the Latin percussion; the long introductions and unexpected shifts in texture; and the singers delivering (and ad-­libbing on) lyrics about racism, poverty, the environment, hard-­to-­define feelings, and every flavor of love, sex, and romance. But we also mean the other-­than-­sonic features these musical elements cluster with. And we mean soul music’s capacity to trigger intense experiences of Black culture. So when soul-­book authors like Phyl Garland and Rochelle Larkin seek to describe soul at the moment when it becomes the basic Black-­music term (and its sounds are everywhere, and are better recognized as such), they make wide-­ranging connections. Larkin invokes Du Bois’s The Souls of Black Folk on “the color line;” Amiri Baraka’s appreciation for 60s R&B; soul singers’ clothes and hair; audience responses; and consumer dollars spent on concert tickets.14 Garland points to James Baldwin on the multi­ sensory power of musical experience; soul’s reliance on studio musicians becoming producers; and the impoverished or “semideprived but respectable” backgrounds of many soul artists.15 These books register developments that would continue: soul’s wider diffusion in films and on television; its increasing presence in and as visual culture; and how its artists and listeners assert the cultural specificity of cities and neighborhoods. Garland talks about space and movement in charged ways, beginning with the soundscape outside her apartment on Chicago’s South Side. She suggests that “soul is all about” how the “black world .  .  . causes one to remain a little more alive, though it is just as likely to drive one to the outermost limits of escape from that which is unbearable.”16 All these elements become part of how an “indisputably black” genre is woven into African American culture.17 Every genre possesses many dimensions (as this book’s introduction argued). But soul’s heterogeneous variety of elements makes commentators like Garland want to convey a sense of pressure, of high stakes, of cross-­dimensional connections that need acknowledging. Indeed Garland grounds her characterizations of soul in depictions of cultural density: for her, soul is the whole past and present of African America. How does this variety and cultural density shape the way early-­70s soul responds to its moment? As with chapter 1’s pop, soul’s heady variety of elements establishes new possibilities—new ways the genre can reach out into additional demographics and social spheres. And soul’s cultural density creates an additional set of responsibilities, especially given its increasing market share. The high proportion of “music with a message” that Larkin finds on Record World’s soul chart for January 24, 1970, part of what she calls S pac e I s s u e s: Sou l   •   93

a “trend towards more meaningful songs,” are one site where these responsibilities are taken up. Songs she lists, like Sly and the Family Stone’s “Thank you (Falettinme Be Mice Elf Agin),” Nina Simone’s “To Be Young, Gifted and Black,” and the Whatnauts’ “Message from a Black Man,” show how soul can make interventions.18 These songs are important not only because they add to the discourse on issues of the day, and not just because they show the seriousness of artists (and the commercial benefits of demonstrating that seriousness). They’re important also because, in their variety, they reveal soul’s stakeholders to one another. Soul’s message songs give audience-­ members ways of recognizing what they hold in common with other listeners who may or may not be targeted by a particular aspect of a given record (including but not limited to the “message” itself ): listeners, that is, who may or may not buy LPs or posters, talk about an artist’s changing style, read an interview, memorize a song’s lyrics, sing its melody on the street, pick out its chords on a piano, or connect its message with a bible verse. But the message songs form only one discrete part of soul’s response to its moment. Equally important are soul songs that focus on a groove and last more than five minutes. Ray Charles’s 1959 “What’d I Say (Parts 1 and 2)” became an early crossover soul hit in this vein, cementing a practice of dividing the two halves of a groove-­oriented song between the A-­and B-­sides of a seven-­inch single, and offering the continuous whole on LP. James Brown made this kind of two-­part song essential to the emerging funk genre in the mid-­60s.19 In the late 60s and early 70s, long groove-­driven songs really took off in soul and its neighboring genres. Many of these were only released on LP. These long songs were bound up with making, marketing, and listening to LPs, with increasing emphasis on rhythm-­section playing and vocal ad-­libbing, with the cultural practice of dancing to records, and with the exploration of form, repetition, and textural variety. Like the “message songs” these long, groove-­oriented records can make stakeholders wonder whom and what a record is for. We can ask who was hearing the LP version and who was just exposed to the seven-­inch, whether anyone was playing the long version on the radio, using it on dancefloors, or taking it to represent a kind of place or event. Both length and groove-­ drivenness convey ideas about artistic expression, African American musical and social temporalities, and what people (can) care about. Long, groove-­oriented songs were early-­70s soul’s specifically musical response to late-­60s questions about how songs can acknowledge too-­muchness and too-­manyness: where chapter 1’s late-­60s pop songs squeezed everything 94  •   C h a p t e r T wo

in and heaped it all up, these songs provided space above the groove, and mechanisms that allowed additional elements to enter the mix. And they provided time, through repetition and open-­ended forms. Sometimes these long records were also message songs. When they were, they intensified the experience of the message, as Robert Fink has shown in connection with the Temptations’ “Papa Was a Rolling Stone” and other Motown songs produced by Norman Whitfield.20 But whether they had “messages” or not, these long records reoriented time and form in soul, changing the apprehension and meanings of shorter songs too. And indeed, short, pop-­oriented soul records constituted a third major song-­type in the early 70s. These hundreds of songs sometimes had messages, and sometimes focused on grooves, but they stayed close to pop’s norms by respecting the short lengths and clear sectional divisions of most radio-­friendly fare. The commercial success of these songs kept them coming throughout the long 1970s, but they also served as sites of aesthetic transformation. James Brown and other soul and funk artists had already changed the pop record by showing that short, groove-­oriented, melody-­minimizing records could top the pop charts; this continued into the 70s. Mid-­60s Motown soul showed that White pop had no monopoly on universality and mass appeal. But trends in late-­60s pop-­soul specifically drove many of the commercial and aesthetic shifts that happened around 1970–71, especially in what became known as soft soul and Philadelphia soul. Groups like the Dells, whom chapter 1 discussed in connection with their producer/arranger Charles Stepney, and the Delfonics (arranged and produced by the Philadelphia-­based Thom Bell) proved a song could combine soulful singing, a grooving rhythm section, pop-­songwriting values, and concerted use of strings, woodwinds, and brasses—sometimes in truly “strange” ways—and succeed as both pop and soul.21 The Dells’ 1968 anti-­war song “Does Anybody Know I’m Here” (with its running string melodies, funky drumming, jazzy saxophone, and contrasting smooth and gritty singers) exemplifies how these songs’ short lengths, rich orchestrations, and overall pop-­friendliness didn’t stop them from plumbing the depths of the soul tradition any more than it prevented them from delivering up-­to-­date messages. Pop-­soul records were soul records, even if a strain of rock criticism claimed otherwise.22 Turning this formulation around: the variety and cultural density that defines soul of the long 1970s was fully compatible with the pop song’s conventions. In sum: the late-­60s moment, when soul became the umbrella-­term for Black music, bequeathed both an urgency and a means to respond. The S pac e I s s u e s: Sou l   •   95

urgency to both feel something and do something functioned as a kind of cultural density that contended (and sometimes joined forces) with commercial imperatives and increasing media saturation. The means for responding relied on soul’s position as the busiest node in an expanding complex of genres and subgenres. The key song-­types that stepped forward in the late 60s—the “message songs,” the long groove-­driven songs, and the orchestrated pop-­friendly shorter songs—can count as responses to these conditions. The message songs say what soul must do; the long groove-­driven songs demonstrate what only soul can do; and the pop-­friendly short songs show soul finding genre-­specific ways to do what all pop-­oriented songs do. The sections that follow will ask how early-­70s soul makes spaces for people to interact in and move through. Each of these three song-­types is thinkable in terms of social space. Message songs pose questions about soul’s cultural reach, and thus about how it “fits” in its contexts; the long songs create groove-­saturated spaces, thereby temporalizing social space; and the pop-­oriented songs target listeners “anywhere in the world,” raising questions about exactly who and where its hearers are.23 This chapter considers all three of these song-­types. It moves toward a focus on long, groove-­oriented songs in Philadelphia soul (like the O’Jays’ “For the Love of Money”). Before that, it zooms in on two key 1971 examples that find special ways of depicting social space and externalizing Black interiority: the “Theme from Shaft” (and the film’s opening credit-­sequence), and the title track of Marvin Gaye’s What’s Going On. But first we should ask what kinds of space we’re talking about. How does a song, or a genre, create a sense of space and movement? How do we conceptualize social space in early-­70s soul?

Making (Social) Space in Early-­70s Soul Think again about some basic questions. Who is a musical genre for? Where does it happen? Yes, it can be for the people who live where its makers come from, and for the people who buy the albums. It happens in the studios where it’s recorded and the clubs where it’s performed. But a genre also answers these questions by conveying ideas about the people and spaces it engages with. It can point to places and the people who inhabit those places: Larkin’s Soul Music! exudes over “groups making it who haven’t even left the ghetto, but carry it with them, with pride. Like the Watts 103rd Street Rhythm Band, the Voices of East Harlem, the 125th Street Candy Store.”24 96  •   C h a p t e r T wo

A genre’s sounds can color a space and change the way people behave in it. And genres, like people, are shaped by the places they move through and the communities they encounter. So when we talk about Philadelphia soul, Motown, or the Memphis sound, we invoke both real and ideal places—both Sigma Sound studio, at 212 North 12th Street in Philadelphia, and “the City of Brotherly Love.” We can describe a host of spatial practices (commuting to Sigma from New York, creating sound isolation in Studio B, occupying the dancefloor in particular ways), several dozen strategies for creating a sense of place in lyrics, and many sorts of sonic space (the balcony of London’s Hammersmith Odeon; tricky reverb effects moving across the stereo field; a college student’s headphones blasting the O’Jays; Linda Creed’s apartment as she listens “over and over” to a tape of a new Thom Bell melody, trying to put lyrics to it).25 Musical genres have many ways to answer the question of where they happen, and the answers usually involve people in motion. As Georgina Born puts it, this question encompasses the “relations between music and sound, time and space, subjectivity and sociality” as they are inflected by “technological mediation.”26 All this can remind us of the variety of social spaces that interact with genres. “Social space” is shorthand for a relational complex of real and virtual spaces. It encompasses the civil and domestic spheres, geo­ political spaces (like the Americas, the North Atlantic, the African Diaspora, the Global South, the world), types of space (“home,” a bank, the suburbs), soundscapes and mediascapes, the cultural geography of actual places (including redlining, gentrification, and zoning laws), and the socialities of mental space. The social spaces of soul music thus include Stax Records’ “freak studio,” with its sloping floor; Memphis as “only a few minutes away” from Mississippi and Arkansas; the hypothetical bank suddenly transformed into “another place. A place where Black People live” by James Brown’s “Money Won’t Change You,” in Amiri Baraka’s famous image; and Esther Phillips singing about “a junkie walking through the twilight” in Gil Scott-­Heron’s “Home Is Where the Hatred Is.”27 Breaking this down further: a genre like Philadelphia soul is shaped by geography, spatial practices, and the ways people talk about places; and it can musically point to spaces or index them on records. Philadelphia soul’s history unfolded in a particular way partly because Thom Bell sought to preserve the anonymity he thought he needed to be able to take the bus to work.28 A young bassist, Anthony Jackson, famously presented what became the main bass line of “For the Love of Money” at a studio date led by producers Kenneth S pac e I s s u e s: Sou l   •   97

Gamble and Leon Huff; but things might have gone differently if Jackson hadn’t had to schlep down from New York—if, say, he’d been participating in daily recording and songwriting sessions with the Philadelphia crew, or he’d been better established in New York and had outlets there.29 Moving from stage to studio created complex interactions between commerce and ­aesthetics. Gamble, Huff, and Bell were unsatisfied with the backing-­vocal tracks laid down by male groups like the Stylistics, Blue Magic, and Harold Melvin and the Blue Notes, so they began employing more-­in-­tune and smoother-­sounding ringers (including some women);30 but the groups’ actual backing singers were accomplished live performers with distinctive onstage comportment. This created a set of potential disjunctions: sight vs. sound, studio sound vs. live sound, credited group-­members vs. mostly uncredited and underpaid studio-­singers, detail-­oriented vs. more wholistic listening. These disjunctions meant that Philadelphia soul possessed multiple regimes of loyalty, fidelity, and accuracy—­partly spatial regimes that functioned differently depending on who was listening where, and how. The ways people talk about particular social spaces too can shape a musical genre. We see this in the discourses around Detroit as the “Motor City,” or the early-­70s discotheque. Once a place starts to mean something sonically, its name can serve as a stylistic marker, as with Wilson Pickett’s 1970 studio LP In Philadelphia. Pickett’s album, produced by Gamble and Huff, with arrangements by Bell and Bobby Martin (another key figure), recorded at Sigma with the A-­list rhythm section, name-­checked the city purely to signal a sound; the LP’s title isn’t pointing to a live performance, or some fact about Pickett’s biography, or anything in the lyrics.31 But when social spaces like Philadelphia or “the disco” can denote or otherwise signify a genre, other features of the place come into play. These features can then attach to the genre (which happened in the case of Motown Records’ “assembly-­line” approach).32 Philadelphia soul also shaped and was shaped by the spaces depicted in its lyrics and on its album covers. In a heightened instance of this, the O’Jays 1973 LP Ship Ahoy has a cover painting showing the group-­members on a slave vessel; its long title-­track’s lyrics describe the Middle Passage. Adding cinematic sound effects to a crisply produced minor-­mode dirge, the “Ship Ahoy” song places this history here in the present: a raspy guitar picks up the sounds of a whip, vocal ad-­libs cut against the ironic title phrase.33 The LP provides the darkest possible answer to the question of where the genre comes from and whom it is for. This extreme case illustrates another main trend: songs that index a place by incorporating 98  •   C h a p t e r T wo

source recordings, whether it’s the ocean and the hold of a ship, recording-­ studio chatter, a house party, or the cheers of a large audience. This broad, vivid, and flexible conception of social space colored the discourse on Philadelphia soul, as a 1974 New York Times profile of Gamble, Huff, and Bell makes clear. Theatre and film critic Clayton Riley opens his piece with a Philadelphia-­centered picture of the Great Migration; the rest of the profile maintains this attention to racialized space in and surrounding Philly. Spatial thinking permeates the whole piece. It’s rich with details of Philadelphia’s cultural geography, from Bell’s characterization of Phila­ delphia as a city that “has always been a good place for . . . formal training” in “arranging and composition,” and Gamble’s memories of Huff and him in the early days “working in the same building . . . grinding out songs on different floors,” to Riley’s multisensory accounts of places and movement: the blue-­carpeted interior of Bell’s new studio, and the “sound patterns” of a car-­ride (“conversational fragments, dashboard music, Philly street noise”).34 The article attends as well to the spatialities of making, distributing, and marketing Philadelphia-­specific music that “can be sold proudly, anywhere in the world”: “We intend to be here, my man. Out here in it all,” Huff says, using a Black vernacular expression that means really experiencing conditions on the ground.35 Riley provides knowing descriptions of the records, again in spatial terms, and draws trenchant comments out of Gamble, Huff, and Bell. They all talk about listening into the textures of multilayered songs. Gamble says “We work to give our audiences a number of things to hear. Strings, horns, multiple percussion lines and strong vocal textures. It’s all there, if you want to listen.” Riley notes “polyrhythms, and some superb reed and brass instrumentation placing tension across the several meters present,” and describes how “an extended vocal break in the O’Jays’ ‘Put Your Hands Together’ provides the space for a Blood rich move into church, deep crying and responsive calls, all suspended high above the song’s regular pace.” Riley talks too about how Philadelphia soul records connect with movement: the polyrhythmic “For the Love of Money” is “strictly the max . . . among black disco dancers.” In all these examples and throughout Riley’s article, sounds are framed in racialized as well as spatialized terms. Gamble and Huff position themselves as African American men whose comportment in public and private space will be judged from a white perspective, even as it offers something Huff claims “Black kids need to know.”36 This cultural positioning extends to the ways Philadelphia soul records engage with the intimate spaces of love, S pac e I s s u e s: Sou l   •   99

sex, and romance: though the white press may criticize them for it, “we’re contemporary men who create music that speaks without shame about love, because we’re not afraid of the subject.”37 The records themselves can demonstrate how this conception of social space maps onto early-­70s soul. The discussion so far adds up to five key points. (1) There are many different kinds of social space, and (2) no clear divide between real and virtual spaces, or between spaces apprehended mostly aesthetically and those apprehended mostly pragmatically. (3) All of soul’s spaces are social spaces, even the stereo field as diffused through headphones, even artists’ interiorities as revealed in interviews. (4) Soul’s spaces are racialized spaces, and they’re inflected by other cultural identities, including gender. But (5) these spaces emerge contingently from a mix of elements; they’re not overdetermined by the cultural identities they engage with. These key points remind us: soul records present manifold, dynamic spaces that can’t be reduced to a static image of a club or a concert hall or a singer/songwriter’s mind. The Stylistics’ 1971 crossover hit “Stop, Look, Listen (to Your Heart)” shows how a soul record can produce social space [track 2.1]. Written by Thom Bell and Linda Creed, it’s an instance of the short, pop-­friendly 70s soul records that observe pop’s conventions with respect to lyrics as well as form. And it’s one of those Philadelphia soul songs that can present a contrapuntal weave of oboe, plucked and bowed violins, glockenspiel, quivering cellos, electric “sitar,” and fast-­moving electric bass—all within the first eight bars—and still somehow come off as sparse and restrained. The title phrase shows Creed’s debt to Motown songwriting, especially to Smokey Robinson’s lyrics.38 It heightens the immediacy of the present moment, with its Motown-­like imperatives, and it draws attention to emotional surfaces and depths in the manner of a Robinson song like “Tracks of My Tears.”39 But Creed’s lyrics make more of space, in two ways: they put the song’s metafiction in spatial terms, and they revive and explicitly spatialize the dead metaphor of “falling in love.” The first line (“You’re alone all the time”) establishes the metafiction of an addressee whose feelings and behavior are being questioned, analyzed, and intervened in. The song continues this, using ordinary or cliché phrases that maintain the spatial emphasis (“you can’t hide / All the things you really feel,” “open up, let it in,” “sharing love you keep within”): we get here/there, moving/blocked, and inside/outside. Similarly, the first verse begins to enliven the falling-­in-­love metaphor with the phrase “fall in love, out again” [0:29], and fully animates it in the second 100  •   C h a p t e r T wo

pre-­chorus: “So jump on in / Head over heels, and fall right in” [1:39]. The image of love as oceanic is another cliché, of course, but the weight here is on the jumping rather than where you land—except that the word love is set with oceanic vastness, delivered three times across a three-­measure phrase that occupies nearly half the chorus (following two statements of the title phrase) [1:05–1:14, 2:04–2:14]. How does the music connect with the spatialities of Creed’s lyrics? It matters that Creed wrote the lyrics in response to Bell’s melody, that Bell created the arrangement in his head as he composed the melody, and that the arrangement was conceived with the players, backing singers, engineer, and studio in mind (not to mention Russell Thompkins’s ringing falsetto lead).40 The production of space on this record doesn’t happen without the connections among all these elements; nor is it possible without the spatial practices and features of cultural geography that integrate these people and places into the song-­making process. Hearing space means apprehending the spatial imagery in the lyrics, the gaps in the vocal melody that allow “exotic” instruments like French horn and harpsichord to come forward [2:14–2:26], the engineers presiding over close-­miking and reverb, and the ambient sound of the celebrated Sigma studio. To hear space across these elements of the record is to grasp a central feature of 70s soul: the musical elements are conceptually braided, not just collaboratively produced, which entails that professional roles and geographical features are also part of the weave. That is, (1) on the record, each of these elements—vocal melody, bass line, lyrics, form, arrangement, production, and so on—gains sense only by means of the others. And (2) the people and places are necessary elements too; they too are part of the record. (In this sense the musical surface is like a basket-­ woven sphere: any point or strand can draw attention, whether a drummer’s touch, a biographical detail, or a reverb patch, but it remains inextricably connected with the others.) Thanks to a discursive field that included records, album covers, journalism, radio, television, and live performance, the spatialities of a 70s soul song include the musicians’ career trajectories, and physical quirks of the recording studio, along with far-­fetched instrumentation, and lyrics about moving around. In “Stop, Look, Listen (to Your Heart),” Creed’s lyrics as performed help make space. First, the lyrics and vocal melody leave room for Bell’s highly differentiated arrangement. There are many prominent rests within vocal phrases, and there are two purely instrumental sections (the five-­measure introduction and a four-­bar bridge [2:14]); these breaks can call attention S pac e I s s u e s: Sou l   •   101

to instrumental features whether or not a listener is paying attention to the words. And second, the syntax creates openings that call out for a response. The lyrics begin with four questions, all in the second person, provoked by the speaker’s observations. The next sections contain framing devices and ambiguous syntactical features that create uncertainty about the addressee(s) and the scene of address. The title phrase, for example, becomes indirect discourse because it’s enjambed with the line that precedes it (“It’s never too late, too late to / Stop, look . . . ”). And the enjambed lines that conclude the chorus, culminating in the oceanic setting of “love” (“Listen to your heart, hear what it’s saying / Love love love”) create ambiguity as to whether “love” is grammatically an object (i.e., “hear what it’s saying: it’s saying ‘love’ ”) or it’s in the vocative case (“hear what it’s saying, my love”). The text-­music relation in “Love love love” can emblematize the socialities of musical space here. This space is a mix of syntax, themes, harmony and arrangement, physical places, and political economy. We don’t know what was on the demo-­tape Bell provided, but Creed may have come up with these words in response to the surprising features of this melodic phrase: its slow one-­note-­per-­measure speed (which makes it sound less like melody than a sequence of three rich chords), unusual three-­measure length, and shift to the parallel major (a compressed instance of the harmonic “transport” Mitchell Morris hears in “You Make Me Feel Brand New,” another Bell-­Creed song for the Stylistics).41 Creed’s word-­choice then created an opportunity for the built-­up backing-­vocal harmonies Bell favored; but Bell must’ve felt this exceeded the Stylistics’ abilities. On the record Thompkins performs the top voice but the vocal arrangement uses extra male and female studio singers, including Creed. This text-­setting and vocal arrangement puts a halo around “love,” makes it an object of contemplation. The phrase hangs outside of time, syntax, and narrative context.42 Furthermore, this phrase replaces the homosocial vocal-­group space with something mixed-­gender—in actual fact, even if many listeners may not notice. Either way, the “Love love love” phrase complicates the speaker-­addressee relation and highlights the specifically Black masculinity of the falsetto lead voice.43 Other moments and sonic features of this song can bring out the racialized and gendered character of musical space. Many elements open themselves up to questions about whether and how they reflect gender and ethnicity: Russell Thompkins’s falsetto, especially when he ad-­libs in the out-­chorus; the sharply played guitars, bass, and drums; the French horns presenting a punchy melody in the bridge; the string tremolos in verse 2 [1:14]. Does the 102  •   C h a p t e r T wo

electric sitar read as “Indian,” the oboe melodies and harpsichord chords as “white?”44 How is the “marching band” glockenspiel gendered? Listeners’ responses to these elements will vary; they may not correctly grasp who’s making a sound, or what kind of presence this sound has already established in African American music. But by precisely individuating these elements as they come and go on the soundstage, records like this help establish a mode of listening. In a manner that’s specific to Philadelphia soul, but along the grain of 70s soul more broadly, this record’s arrangement and production allow listeners to apprehend each of these elements as humanly and s­ ocially produced. Everything about 70s soul tells you you’re not just hearing sounds, you’re hearing multiply-­identified, collaboratively-­working, sound-­ producing people who inhabit the same world you do. These questions of gendered and racialized sounds emerge from a discourse that says Philadelphia soul is made by Black men who “create music that speaks without shame about love.” Where does that leave the European American Linda Creed? The spaces of 70s soul can also be understood as networks of people in motion. This is reflected in the ways that Creed’s ethnic and gender identities are constructed and performed. Her ethnic identity is a kind of marked whiteness: Bell says “She’s a French Jew. Most people didn’t know she was white.” Creed’s gender is similarly marked. She was “the only girl writer that has ever been down here with us,” but “she wanted to be treated like, regular,” so she insisted on being called by her last name, “just like they call me Bell.”45 In a 1975 interview Creed describes herself becoming a songwriter in the spaces of African American culture, and doing her creative work while circulating within the domestic sphere. Attending the “predominantly black” Germantown High School in Northwest Philadelphia, and drawn to R&B, she had to “listen through the static” to Black stations that were hard to reach where she lived; when her tastes “branched off,” she “started getting into jazz and going to the jazz festivals.” Her seriousness about R&B led her to become “very black-­oriented, because to know something you have to experience everything.”46 Writing songs with Bell in her mid-­twenties, she realized she could work better at home, while her (non-­musician) husband was out: “I generally sit with a song about two or three days, playing it over and over, listening to it while I’m making the bed, or cleaning up.”47 Creed’s performances of gender and ethnicity drew attention in journalism and among her peers. But her negotiations with identity mapped onto her songwriting in ways that appear to be mostly negative. She describes her S pac e I s s u e s: Sou l   •   103

output as “pretty basic lyrics, really basic emotions that would be very easy for anyone to identify with.” The Stylistics’ “You Make Me Feel Brand New,” “the biggest song we’ve had,” is “different from what people think of in the context of an R ’n’ B tune. I don’t think that we write R ’n’ B.”48 She chafed against writing the first-­person lyrics for the Spinners’ “Ghetto Child,” a message song that had crossover success: “the only song I didn’t write from my experience .  .  . which is probably why I’ve always hated it.”49 It bears saying that Creed helps envoice 70s Black masculinity—the vast majority of her lyrics were written to be performed by African American men—and that her work and too-­short life became part of a Black musical genre.50 But there’s another point to be made about ethnicity, Philadelphia soul, and social space. Creed’s example shows how Philadelphia soul produces whiteness as a marked, unstable, and decentered category. This means more space for Black culture. And one place Black culture goes is into the traditionally white spaces of pop. In other words, Creed’s marked whiteness helps Philadelphia soul make pop Black. The final sections of this chapter will return to Philadelphia for a look at the long groove-­driven songs (which are sometimes message songs too).51 But the pop-­friendly songs of Creed and Bell show how Philadelphia soul first changed social space: by spreading out into the center. Making space in 70s soul becomes more charged in message songs that emphasize place and movement, especially in rare cases when lyrics and bi­ ography converge. Esther Phillips’s version of Gil Scott-­Heron’s “Home Is Where the Hatred Is” became a surprise soul-­chart hit in 1972 (and served as the opening track on her 1971 LP From a Whisper to a Scream) [track 2.2].52 Recorded in New York and released on Kudu, a soulful offshoot of the commercially oriented jazz label CTI, Phillips’s record stands out for four main reasons. First, Phillips was an amazing vocalist—she gained fame singing R&B as a teenager in 1950—who turns in a riveting performance. There’s a rhythmic freedom, timbral variety, wit, and overall sense of confidence one associates with the mature work of figures like Dinah Washington and Aretha Franklin. Second, the song uses space and movement in both lyrics and music to address a social problem as it plays out across the civil, domestic, and personal spheres. Third, the record embodies a “multivocality” that reflects the contributions of many people who had a hand in it. And fourth, the song’s anti-­drug lyrics connect with the heroin addiction that had dominated Phillips’s young adulthood in the 1950s and 60s.53 Scott-­Heron’s song puts social space in the foreground: “A junkie walking through the twilight,” its lyrics begin, “I’m on my way home. / I left three 104  •   C h a p t e r T wo

days ago, but no one seems to know I’m gone.” Without needing to specify the setting or define a relation to others, the speaker conveys the sense of moving through a physical city toward home as a physical place; the time-­ markers (evening, the “on my way” travel-­time, “three days”) add grip to the sense of space and motion. The song continues with the only statement of its title phrase: “Home is where the hatred is / Home is filled with pain and it / Might not be such a bad idea if I never, never went home again.” Here “home” serves also as an idea and institution, which supports the echoes of clichés like “home is where the heart is” and “you can’t go home again.” A sense of interior space emerges in the subject’s thinking “it / Might not be such a bad idea if . . . .” Later, when this A-­section returns, the speaker’s interiority becomes more spatialized, and conflated with domestic space: Home is where I live inside my white powder dreams Home was once an empty vacuum that’s filled now with my silent screams Home is where the needle marks Try to heal my broken heart

Similarly this second A-­section intensifies the play of “filled” and “empty” interior space; and it zooms in further, to the “needle marks” that work as the exterior trace of the trauma. Between the two A-­sections the B-­section switches to the second person: “Stand as far away from me as you can and ask me why / Hang on to your rosary beads / Close your eyes to watch me die.” These lines could be targeting a bystander’s response out on the street, or addressing an intimate relation—“Hang on to your rosary beads” lays a charge of shallow piety that could stick in public as easily as in private. ­Either way this other, who “keep[s] saying ‘kick it quit it,’ ” is challenged with the song’s most tortured spatial image: “but did you ever try / To turn your sick soul inside out / So that the world . . . Can watch you die?” Musically too the song works to build in a sense of space and movement. Its modal-­ jazz-­flavored mostly-­slow-­moving harmony gives a lot of time to the tonic minor chord it starts with, and to II and vii; this tonic-­versus-­flat-­side harmonic scheme gives the feel of two distinct planes, which Phillips’s version takes greater advantage of. In general, Phillips’s record makes more of the song’s spatialities. First, it moves among genres and styles just as concertedly as Scott-­Heron’s song moves among harmonic planes, modes of address, and interior and exterior spaces. Second, Phillips’s vocal performance has greater dimensionality. She’s more rhythmically active and varied than Scott-­Heron, and (especially

b

b

S pac e I s s u e s: Sou l   •   105

given how it’s miked and produced) her vocal sound has greater definition and presence: listen for how she leaves breathy trails at the ends of phrases. It helps too that unlike the original version this record repeats the B-­section after the second A, creating another opportunity for variation and contrast. This change also means there are four vocal sections, versus three in Scott-­ Heron’s version; both records are about three and a half-­minutes, but his includes instrumental solos instead. But third—the main thing—Phillips’s record is truly multivocal. Many actors leave traces, as elements come in and out of the texture, creating the play of genres and other forces that works alongside the spatialities of the lyrics. At the center of the soundstage are Phillip’s voice and a small rhythm section (just two guitars, bass, drums, and a discreet shaker). But the contributors also include producer (and CTI label boss) Creed Taylor, two arrangers, a legendary engineer (Rudy Van Gelder), the horn-­section members, a dozen string players, and Scott-­Heron as composer and lyricist. Some horn players stand out individually: Ray Charles’s famous alto soloist Hank Crawford can be heard on top of the saxophone section, and the less well-­known tenor player Frank Vicari solos briefly [1:29–37] and ad-­libs over the fade-­out. The horns were scored by Pee Wee Ellis, who also did the rhythm arranging. Ellis was James Brown’s main arranger and musical director during Brown’s late-­ 60s creative peak, and this record’s percussive horn parts and funky groove make that connection clear. Don Sebesky arranged the strings, as he did on dozens of Taylor’s productions, providing low-­modernist bite (particularly in the second A-­section [e.g., 1:45–1:48]) along with some sweetening. The top-­notch rhythm section stands out too: drummer Bernard Purdie’s rim-­ shot-­focused funk beat, Cornell Dupree’s “Shaft”-­style rhythm guitar in the B-­sections [0:50, 2:17], and especially Gordon Edwards’s assertive bass line. Van Gelder deserves credit not just for the clarity of sound that made him a crucial figure in jazz history, but also for forward touches like the extra reverb on the strings, which provides a more dimensional and dynamic sense of space. These individual contributions are differentiated enough to point in a variety of directions—stylistically and in the stereo field, as when Ellis’s antiphonal horn-­arrangement scheme is brought out by panning the trumpets left and the alto and tenor saxes right. So this record embodies a play of forces that includes Scott-­Heron’s words and music, Phillips’s struggles against addiction, her recognizable sound, her clear diction (which brings the lyrics forward), and a lot of the early-­70s-­soul complex. Many soul and soul-­adjacent jazz genres impinge 106  •   C h a p t e r T wo

on this record. Funk elements butt up against jazz-­inflected soul and soft-­ soul touches (like flat-­side harmony enhanced by strings). The great New York–based musicians who perform on this record connect it with high-­ charting soul, mainstream jazz, jazz funk, and the emergent practice of African American creative writers like Scott-­Heron making their “poems into songs”; Purdie had provided the drums on Scott-­Heron’s record, for example, as well as being extremely busy in all those genres.54 Another new style, emerging to suit the needs of the Black-­action-­film soundtracks, maps onto Dupree’s wah-­wah guitar; but at certain moments his playing points back toward the blues. (As Mark Anthony Neal has noted, this LP “unabashedly embraced the blues idiom at a moment when the form was losing both visibility and credibility among black audiences.”)55 This record’s interweavings with jazz are extensive. Given the soul-­jazz label it appeared on, its big-­band horn scoring and jazz-­modern strings, and the contrast between Vicari’s post-­bebop tenor-­sax obbligato and the jazz-­blues guitar, one could forget that this is also a pop-­jazz record, especially in material-­ culture terms: short, released as a single, highly arranged, voice-­heavy, with no instrumental choruses. Scott-­Heron’s original version is another important element in this record’s field of forces, partly because its sales and notice were steadily increasing while Phillips’s version was charting.56 Contemporary journalism like Garland’s October 1972 profile of Phillips, which discusses “Home Is Where the Hatred Is” as the audience’s key to an addiction “that has nearly torn her asunder,” too becomes part of what shapes the record’s reception.57 This record’s power lies ultimately in how Phillips makes space for the song’s story, and hers, in and through its play of forces, with and among an all-­male supporting cast. When Phillips performs Scott-­Heron’s song, the gendering and racializing of space come forward. Most of the record’s raced features are also gendered: singing over a one-­chord funk groove, or above jazz-­flavored strings, or against an angular tenor-­sax obbligato, or alongside an already-­Shaft-­associated wah-­wah guitar part. This is doubly true for the lyrics, which inflect African American visibility, mobility, and vulnerability in quite different ways depending on the singer’s performance of gender. When Phillips sings about “try[ing] to heal my broken heart,” tells her interlocutor to “Stand as far away from me as you can,” expresses fear, shame, anger, and regret, or tropes on a cliché, she does so as a Black woman searching for her place among others (to paraphrase Aretha Franklin).58 In a telling misprision Garland hears “turn your sick soul inside out” as “turn your S pac e I s s u e s: Sou l   •   107

sex all inside out,” as if to ask: what would it take for an African American woman to gain some space, to simply be seen and heard?59

Seeing/Hearing Space, Identity, and Motion Black male visibility and audibility were changing cultural space in the early 70s, however. A film like Gordon Parks’s 1971 Shaft was part of this, thanks to its wah-­wah-­g uitar-­driven theme song as well as its multicontextual eponymous protagonist. It’s simple: seeing people move through space while you’re hearing Black music increases the vividness and concreteness of the people, the places, and the music.60 Shaft’s breakout popularity, as film and as soundtrack album, meant that sounds of early-­70s soul and images of Black masculinity lent each other new meanings. The “Theme from Shaft” shows how the Black action films provoke the emergence of a new kind of song, with a new sort of musical economy; and the Theme’s role in Shaft’s credit sequence shows how these songs help define a new type of character and a new cinematic economy. These films clear a great deal of space for the soundtrack, and what they receive in return is a sense of depth—­ consciousness, even a conscience—that the image and dialogue don’t always provide.61 The music, for its part, must tie itself to the film’s visual track, but this explicit function frees it to explore the implications of its materials outside the traditional pop song’s political and musical economy. Moreover, the African American characters of these films provide the music with visible support in its attempt to create new styles and sensibilities. Isaac Hayes, Shaft’s composer, was key to these developments, partly because he was already an influential figure in late-­60s/early-­70s popular music; as the “blaxploitation” cycle continued, Hayes began to act in some of the films he provided the soundtracks for.62 Hayes’s co-­arranger Johnny Allen played a significant role as well. After Hayes directed (and played keyboards in) the rhythm section, and developed the grooves and vocal melodies, Allen drew on a compendium of melodic fragments and background figures he had developed over the years—an actual book, apparently, with parts ready for in-­studio use—and quickly blocked things out for winds, horns, and strings in changing combinations over the rhythm tracks.63 What Black-­action-­film soundtracks provided for musicians, beginning with Hayes and Allen, was an opportunity to investigate new grooves, moods, production techniques, harmonic materials, and layerings of melodic ideas without constant pressure 108  •   C h a p t e r T wo

to create vocal hooks or to stick to conventional song forms.64 And indeed, in part because of these soundtracks, the conventional song and the idea of the hook changed greatly in the 70s. Equally important, the early-­70s-­ soul complex provides only one set of resources for the composers of these soundtracks: cues often make use of earlier musical codes, and present the kind of music a scene might have called forth in an older film—like a snaking chromatic line to convey suspense in a film noir—but filtered through a soul sensibility. One can hear many styles in the jazz and Western classical traditions, often reconceived to emphasize the rhythm section. In Shaft and the other Black action films, the soul rhythm section stands at the center of the soundtracks’ remappings of cultural space. The constant-­ sixteenth-­note wah-­wah-­g uitar part in the “Theme from Shaft” has become a notorious instance of this; by April 1972 Hayes was having to answer questions about a “sound that has been imitated in a number of cheap Black film scores.”65 Guitarist Charles Pitts’s use of the wah-­wah pedal has a complex genealogy. In the 60s the wah-­wah pedal provided a way to add nuance to melodic lines on the guitar, specifically to enhance their vocal, expressive qualities. With Jimi Hendrix and other guitarists the wah becomes more than a means for enhancing an otherwise traditional melodic phrase, and begins itself to provide access to a new range of otherworldly sounds. These sounds don’t obliterate the guitar, but they often stretch it into unrecognizable shapes. This use of the wah-­wah pedal remains rooted in the intensely vocal cry of the blues, however, even at its most distant from guitar technique as these musicians inherited it. The “Theme from Shaft” draws on an alternate strand of guitar technique, one associated with James Brown’s funk grooves. Brown’s guitarist, Jimmy Nolen, following earlier R&B and jazz traditions, took the percussive component of guitar picking and made it into an essential feature. In Nolen’s hands the electric guitar became a complex rhythmic voice that added harmonic support without ever renouncing its right to make a melodic intervention. When guitarists like Pitts add the wah-­wah pedal, this percussive component can become more important than the pitch itself. In the “Theme from Shaft” the guitar functions simply as that which enables the pedal: the manipulation of the pedal is almost solely responsible for whatever profile the guitar part has, since it stands on one pitch and locks into a single rhythmic value. Hayes and Allen make the arrangement respond to this shift in roles. As Mitchell Morris points out, the Theme’s instrumental introduction takes up more than half its length, and unfolds quite slowly.66 In the absence of S pac e I s s u e s: Sou l   •   109

strong melodic hooks or a full-­blown groove, the guitar part moves into the foreground. We’re encouraged to focus on the nuances of the guitar because, for a while, there’s not much besides what Hayes called the “driving and relentless” rhythm of “the guitar and drums.”67 Later, when other instruments enter, the guitar holds things together, providing the glue for a bunch of Allen’s melodic fragments that float in and out without attempting to constitute a traditional backing arrangement. Because the “Theme from Shaft” takes so much time to become anything like a pop song—again, the voice doesn’t appear until more than halfway in—we can invest in the details for themselves, and not simply as cushions for the voice. The “Theme from Shaft” teaches us to care about what has been passed over as without value. In Emersonian terms, “that which was negligently trodden under foot”—the wah-­wah pedal, of course—becomes “sublimed and poetized.”68 In the film’s credit sequence, the work performed by the theme song parallels the work of the visual track. (1) The theme provides an introduction to the film in general and to the main character in specific. Its own internal structure, particularly its long introduction, can teach us about the nature and role of introductions as such. (2) It creates a musical economy as it unfolds by investing in some unlikely elements while reevaluating older holdings. This economy is different from that of traditional pop and soul songs. (3) The theme establishes the generic frame for the whole score. It begins with the hi-­hat and guitar, rather than orchestral instruments, and goes on to give the unmistakable feel of a soul rhythm section: this is groove-­driven music. It also presents both diachronic and synchronic means of generic transformation. The wah-­wah pedal is introduced as a new sound and argued for through its enhanced role in the arrangement. The song’s simple chord-­structure creates a novel harmonic feel with familiar means.69 This chord-­structure pressures other musical parameters: form, melody, arrangement. The possibilities of synchronic transformation, too, are grounded in the soul tradition. The song provides just enough of a groove to keep the listener involved, and thereby leaves space for extra-­generic materials to ease into the mix. While the theme song doesn’t include any material really foreign to late-­60s/early-­70s soul, it reveals Hayes’s and Allen’s modus operandi: movement from genre to genre is lateral, exploiting the common ground between genres and relying on the continuity provided by the rhythm section and the classic Stax Records production style. The soundtrack as a whole encompasses a variety of genres, but it pictures the broad generic mixture as inherent to the soul complex, part of its tendencies, affinities, and history. 110  •   C h a p t e r T wo

(4) The Theme defines a style built on contrasting elements and an appreciation for details. The credit sequence’s visual track achieves comparable ends by means of space and movement. It (1) introduces the character, developing new modes of introduction in the process, (2) establishes the film’s cinematic economy, (3) defines the generic frame and the means for generic transformation, and (4) shows the role of details and contrasts in the film’s visual style. Walking is key to this, partly as an assertively ordinary mode of transportation, partly as a way of conveying ground-­level experience. A moving shot sweeps down towards Times Square, preparing us for Shaft’s grand entrance; unexpectedly he emerges from the subway as the Theme kicks in. What the rest of the credit sequence depicts is mostly Shaft walking. At several points in this sequence Shaft displays well-­developed jaywalking skills; his first utterance is a curse directed at a driver who has refused to stop for him. That Shaft is shown taking the subway and getting around on foot already marks him as different—not only from figures like James Bond, who seldom need to hit pavement, but also from more hardboiled characters whose walking takes place mostly offscreen.70 Shaft’s identity is partly revealed through the ways he walks and encounters people in a variety of neighborhoods. Shaft’s walking demonstrates how the film creates social and generic space. Think of it as functionally equivalent to the constant wah-­wah guitar part in the theme song: his walk makes connections among a diverse group of images, and asserts the value of motion, transition, and local detail as complements to conventional set-­pieces and fixed narrative sites.71 Shaft is depicted as continuously in motion; clues about genres and generic transformation are provided by where he walks. Shaft walks out of the subway, against traffic (getting into a bit of a fight with a driver), through steam from a manhole, among striking employees of the New York Times. Shaft’s taking the subway works with and against his fashionable clothes to define the film as a specifically urban thriller—a viewer can expect that Shaft will more closely resemble Bullitt, say, than a Bond movie. As an example of complex, real-­time negotiation with his environment, Shaft’s jaywalking (and the action-­film-­appropriate physical confrontation it provokes) confirms his status as an active subject rather than a racialized object; unlike many “ethnic” characters, he is in the city and not merely of it. The image of a solitary figure walking through steam is part of the generic repertoire of film noir. And when Shaft walks past the picket line, the viewer may be reminded of documentary and news footage of the civil rights movement, S pac e I s s u e s: Sou l   •   111

particularly because this scene is shot in a documentary style, with an active shoulder-­mounted or hand-­held camera. His movement among these sites helps take the viewer from genre to genre, here and in the rest of the film: all four of these genres (urban thriller, action/adventure film, film noir, and documentary) play significant roles in Shaft, and each projects a strong sense of space and movement, as well as a clear role for visual details. As Shaft’s credit sequence shows, the Black action films establish a productive relation with early-­70s soul. The music and films support one another in cultivating a play of genres, an appreciation of details and contrasts, and a grammar for depicting space and movement. The indexicality of putting people, places, and generic markers on screen accomplishes in an obvious way what 70s soul records normally do without benefit of the moving image. The recorded instances of this intensified depictive mode encompass the painterly spatialities of Esther Phillips’s “Home Is Where the Hatred Is” and the more overtly cinematic effects of the O’Jays’ “Ship Ahoy.” The bold play of genres in texts like Phillips’s record and Shaft’s credit sequence demonstrates another key point: borrowings from genres like mainstream jazz or film noir create responsibilities that texts fulfill even when they aren’t compelled to by film producers, label bosses, gatekeepers, or audiences. That is, genres bear an unenforceable authority that can nevertheless command respect, even when it’s not backed up by power.72 Finally, a record like Marvin Gaye’s “What’s Going On” shows that vividly presenting the sounds of people in complex spaces can become a means for asking fundamental political questions: who are we, and how should we live?

What’s Going On Where, with Whom Gaye’s 1971 “What’s Going On” has special ways of putting people in the mix. Through its play of voices, variety of layered textures, and shifting modes of address, this song depicts space, interiority, and collectivity in the textures of a message song. A major departure for Motown Records, “What’s Going On” quickly became influential for its message and its role in an artist-­directed, album-­oriented project. But it and the What’s Going On LP also gained notice for their innovative sonic practices. These practices connect the LP with the contemporary “soft soul” of Thom Bell and Charles Stepney, and they define one kind of pressure Gaye’s LP exerted on the soul coming out of Chicago, Los Angeles, New York, and Philadelphia.73 112  •   C h a p t e r T wo

Attending just to the title track here, we can focus on three basic questions. Whom do we hear in the song’s textures, how do they get there, and what effects do they create? “What’s Going On” opens the LP. It famously starts with the sounds of a house party [track 2.3]. Listeners who had heard the already-­popular pre-­LP seven-­inch version wouldn’t have expected the song to begin by fading in on a group of men offering greetings: “Hey, what’s happening?,” “Brother, what’s up?,” “Right on,” “What’s your name?” The partygoers can be heard on the original single version, but not as prominently, and not until the middle of the song. Using small-­audience or party sounds on records had been mostly a means for creating an atmosphere, giving a sense of place. Presenting the party people right at the beginning of a record does two things: it creates expectations about the sort of music that’ll follow, and it makes these sounds function as a hook. Hearing the grown-­up men at the beginning of “What’s Going On,” you might expect something funky in the early-­60s sense—raw, emotional, bluesy, rhythmically propulsive but not downbeat-­heavy and ultra-­syncopated. Think “Mercy, Mercy, Mercy” by the Cannonball Adderley Quintet, which achieved great chart-­success in 1967 through a “live” recording that included sounds of in-­studio audience-­ members responding to features like Adderley’s preacherly monologue on “adversity,” the song’s first minor-­mode cadence, and Joe Zawinul’s sparse electric-­piano solo.74 The Impressions’ “We’re a Winner” (#1 on the R&B chart in 1968) leaves no doubt that its party-­people opening is meant to work as a hook: it makes the record stand out, and draws listeners into the space and the network of people indexed by these sounds. Like “What’s Going On,” “We’re a Winner” thematizes collectivity, which means the party people shape how the opening functions as a hook in the moment, and how it affects the rest of the song: since the Impressions’ partygoers include women and men (and maybe kids), the song establishes a scene of address different from that of “What’s Going On.”75 And because “We’re a Winner” quickly interrupts the partygoers with two brass blasts (before going into its danceable major-­mode groove), it tells us that the relation between the opening and the song proper is artificial, structured to produce specific effects.76 In “What’s Going On,” the song and the house-­party opening belong to quite different musical realms. As Mitchell Morris puts it, the music is “unusually luxurious for a house party, and . . . could not exist outside the studio.”77 Compared to the opening of “We’re a Winner” the disjunctive S pac e I s s u e s: Sou l   •   113

effect is both weaker and stronger. It’s weaker in that “What’s Going On” has the music ease in gently, foregrounding a low-­key alto saxophone line rather than socking listeners with blaring brass. But what comes in over the speaking voices is far from the world of the party. This music is groove-­ driven, to be sure, but it can’t be heard as contained within a “house,” a club, or any other common physical space. And once it arrives it flows continually through the whole of the song. This flow, too, marks a departure from Motown. It’s manifestly different from taut constructions like the Jackson 5’s “ABC” and “The Love You Save,” #1 soul and pop hits from 1970 that represented Motown’s state of the art; they and earlier Motown songs articulate the breaks between musical sections with admirable clarity. “What’s Going On” smooths over these distinctions. Instead it brings textural layers in and out—strings, voices, many sorts of percussion—and gives each stratum a high degree of dimensionality and distinctness (which too isn’t typical for earlier Motown).78 Again, this textural flexibility and level of sonic detail speak against the idea that we’re hearing an audience listening to a song as it’s being performed in a club or other confined space. The high degree of sonic detail actually holds for the party sounds too. This is different from the openings of “We’re a Winner” and (to take another famous example) the Temptations’ 1969 “I Can’t Get Next to You.” Listening carefully to the opening of “What’s Going On”—just those 7.5 seconds before the rhythm section enters—one hears no party sounds other than those of the voices. There’s no foley sounds of opening beers or slapping five, no ambient sounds of a crowded room. This almost suggests the party represents the pure space of conversation. But there are three stray bongo hits, about 1.3 seconds in, and a pre-­echo of the alto sax. More importantly the voices also perform rhythmic interjections and vocal percussion, especially right at the beginning. And they’ve been miked, equalized, and produced in the same manner as Gaye’s singing voice: they’re treated like Motown royalty. This treatment makes what they’re saying more intelligible, but it also increases the aesthetic density of the sounds they make. So the house-­party vignette not only functions as a hook (through its sonic isolation, prominent formal position, and distance from what follows it), its variety and level of detail give it affective and thematic weight. Two points emerge. First, it’s hard to reconcile the party people and the rest of the song. Second, both sonic spaces, that of the house-­party and that of the actual song, are complex other-­than-­real spaces. This means the very opening of the song poses questions about who its people are. If the party 114  •   C h a p t e r T wo

people don’t simply fit the musical space, where do they belong? Who are they? Do they already form a community for this music, or does the song reinvent them as such? How do the partygoers relate to the people who perform the song? The experience of listening to “What’s Going On” can mean getting confused about whom we’re hearing, about who’s making the song for whom—especially because the party people fade in and out over the course of the song, and they sing background vocals at times (along with a multiply overdubbed Marvin Gaye, which adds to the potential confusion). The partygoers might also be identified with the finger snaps that enter the texture later on (another element that hadn’t appeared on the original seven-­ inch version). Touches like this create continuity across the divide between the opening and the rest of the song, and (further) blur the line between the song’s listeners and makers. Another way the LP appears to work through its first song’s disjunctive opening is that some of the men’s greetings become song titles: “What’s Happening Brother,” “Right On.” We can say, then, that having hit the listener with the house-­party scheme and followed it up with music that doesn’t match it, the song and LP make themselves responsible for this discrepancy. The title track works to harmonize the disjunctions between the spoken opening and instrumental intro, between its sounds and its people, and between its playing, singing, and speaking roles. Simply put, “What’s Going On” gives listeners ways and reasons to listen for people in its textures. We can thus hear the opening of “What’s Going On” as telling a story about the genre: that the address to or creation of an audience must be built into the soul record itself, properly a part of it. The question of who its ­people are can interest us on several levels. Two of the party people are Gaye’s friends Lem Barney and Mel Farr, then members of the Detroit Lions. They appear alongside three professional singer/songwriters and Gaye himself; all six men serve as partygoers and contribute to a loose-­unison vocal countermelody that enters with the lead voice. At the same time as Gaye is sharing the mic with non-­musicians, and blending his recognizable vocal sound with that of the backing singers, he treats even his own voice as multiple through overdubbing, and questions its preeminence in the texture through arrangement and production. As we’ve noted, such flexible use of the voice becomes crucial to 70s soft soul. But the key point here is how—on the first LP Gaye had artistic control over, as he’s trying to both project his interiority and deliver a “message”—he elects to employ a heterogeneous mix of voices.79 Gaye’s vocal overdubbing isn’t seamless. It’s heterophonic, which is S pac e I s s u e s: Sou l   •   115

a key Afro-­diasporic practice, but more specifically it embodies contrasting performance styles. Beginning with the second verse [0:45] there are two lead voices, both his, one singing fairly straight and one more ad-­lib. The effect is somewhat like having the first and last verses sung simultaneously, except that the lyrics don’t change; it creates a contrast between exposition or declamation and commentary or improvisation. So is there a single, real, present-­in-­the-­space Marvin Gaye at the center of this song’s texture? Or facets, multiples, phases, a variety of roles? Who is Marvin Gaye in this song, and how do you listen to and for him? And are the partygoers and others who populate this song any simpler to grasp? The question of how the people wind up in this song’s textures also needs attention. Putting his Pro Football friends into the song is of a piece with Gaye’s finding contributors in what Ben Edmonds calls “the neglected corners of the Motown closet;” this in turn connects to Gaye’s practice of assembling songs by adding small touches provided by uniquely positioned specialists.80 Another part of the “how” involves multitrack-­studio techniques: the song relies on overdubbing (to enrich melodic lines, build up harmonies, and create heterophonic and polyphonic textures), layering textural strands, bringing these strands in and out, and processing them in discrete ways. A third way people enter the texture of “What’s Going On” is by accident. The dual lead vocal is one example. Gaye had recorded two quite different complete takes and wasn’t sure which to use or whether to use parts of one and parts of the other. These two vocal parts were on separate tracks, of course, and Gaye asked the recording engineer to play back the multitrack tape so he could switch between the two vocal tracks for comparison. But the engineer accidentally put it over the speakers in mono, which made both vocal tracks come through at the same time. Gaye liked what he heard and decided to keep it that way on the record.81 Similarly, while you can’t tell from simply hearing it, the alto saxophone line that follows the party opening was a happy accident—something the saxophonist played to warm up without realizing anyone was paying attention. Gaye hadn’t decided on the right introduction for the song, but when he heard Eli Fontaine casually improvise that line before the session had begun, he knew he’d gotten something he could use. No version of this story tells us why Gaye fixed upon this saxophone line. It doesn’t sound concertedly “improvised”—or “composed”—nor exactly like a traditional obbligato lead-­in to the vocal entrance, nor like a “call” (in the manner of John Coltrane’s opening phrase

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on the 1965 LP A Love Supreme), nor quite like a warm-­up.82 And that may be its point, along with Fontaine’s sound and feel. These two accidents tell us something about the people in this record’s textures: how they’re constructed and what effects they create. The dual lead vocals play a role in both creating Gaye’s complex musical self and establishing a parallel between the construction of self and the making of community. This parallel becomes more apparent as additional Gayes enter the mix, sometimes scatting over the rhythm section, sometimes in call-­and-­response with the other vocalists, sometimes in one accord with them.83 The dual-­voiced lead also highlights the production process: before deciding that the two tracks were viable together, Gaye had to step back and estrange himself from the moment-­to-­moment emotional intensities he’d poured into them. Even without knowing the proximate cause, a listener can wonder about the singular/plural effect, and perhaps about how and why the record’s other contributors have been layered into the texture.84 Fontaine’s saxophone melody too can teach us about the process. Knowing the story of its accidental birth encourages us to think about the poetics of the recording studio: rehearsing, warming up, getting underway, noting how the individual players sound in the space on that day. The institutional structure of making songs is present in this song’s texture, just as the creation of community and self are. And for listeners who haven’t learned how it came to appear on the record, the accidental melody can still show the value of the casual and offhand; this makes it a complement to the album’s big themes and to its intensely personal ones. From Gaye’s perspective the saxophone line is a case of finding what will suffice, and of recognizing and relying on others. Learning about these accidents helps us connect the details we hear with the people who’ve put them on the record—and with the record’s message. Other sites of activity in this record’s textures also help make these connections. A key example is Gaye’s investment in the title “What’s Going On.” He isolates a stock phrase that’s normally asked without the desire for an answer—a phrase one of the partygoers might say—and tries to give it urgency. Repetition and reframings of the title phrase intensify it. The phrase first appears not as a question but as an object at the end of a sentence in the imperative mood (“Talk to me so you can see / What’s going on”); in a manner reminiscent of Curtis Mayfield’s lyrics, the title phrase is arrived at through a thoughtful sort of syntactical indirection.85 These framings and

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re-­framings continue (“Tell me what’s going on,” “I’ll tell you . . . ”). But as the backing singers repeat it four times, eight times, it becomes a genuine question. Asking “what’s going on” seriously is the song’s message. This message is the time and effort it takes to create that seriousness. The message can only exist as a set of musical and verbal processes. It also needs the song’s complexities of voice and address, which the imperatives and this question contribute to. The lyrics are mostly in the second person, but the addressee shifts from phrase to phrase. These shifts follow a scheme, moving around the family (“mother,” “brother,” “father” in the lead voice, plus “sister” in the backing vocals). But threaded into this scheme are preacherly fillers and frames that address the listener: “You know,” “You see.”86 These connect with deictics like “bring some lovin’ here today,” which enact the listener’s presence in the space of the song. The message is bound up, too, with the complexities of the singing subject, and with the record’s multivocality more generally, which includes elements like Fontaine’s alto sax, James Jamerson’s electric bass, and David Van De Pitte’s string arrangement. This song’s message, and Gaye’s interiority, need collective participation, which the song’s Black-­church and civil-­rights-­movement affinities underwrite. Even the smallest details connect the song’s people, who include listeners, with its message. Think of the finger snaps on the backbeat, which first appear when Gaye sings “Picket lines.” They’re thematically loaded, since they enter just as the lyrics signal participatory politics, but they’re also naturalized as “audience participation” by the presence of the house-­party sounds. Plus the finger snaps remind you, if you need reminding, that this music really is participatory: it’s a groove-­driven record that makes hearers want to move. At the same time, the snapping comes as an inspired, late-­stage orchestrational touch that recalls Gaye’s background as a drummer, and that demonstrates this record’s layered, dynamic approach to texture (especially because the high strings enter simultaneously, for the first time, with a long-­ breathed melody that emblematizes the record’s non-­picket-­line-­appropriate lushness). The finger snaps perfectly encapsulate how the song creates and depicts experience. This little detail connects with everything that makes this record a big statement in its day and after: its process-­based message, the impress of its many sounding bodies, its capacity to convey the experience of the recording studio, its layered, changing, groove-­driven textures, its expansive sense of time and space, its shifting modes of address, and indeed the importance of its details. 118  •   C h a p t e r T wo

Approaching Politics in Philadelphia Soul Philadelphia soul demonstrates that Gaye’s approach was portable. Long, groove-­driven songs in particular became showcases for the musical features that made “What’s Going On” stand out; sometimes these were message songs but often they weren’t. These records were important to the whole 70s-­soul complex. They helped make soul more album-­oriented, and tied that orientation to notions of maturity, seriousness, and ambition; this approach raised the profiles of many producers behind it, generating controversy along the way.87 At the same time these long songs highlighted what studio musicians, backing singers, arrangers, and engineers—the people working “behind” the famous artists and producers—could accomplish on records. Much of what they accomplished in these songs reinforced and extended Afro-­diasporic practices (as the groove-­oriented approach implies). And in an increasingly LP-­focused market, these songs served the practical function of generating material quickly.88 The long, groove-­driven song is a simple concept. The question of where these songs come from is more complicated. Soul of the late 60s and early 70s took up many older models for making long songs, and it established new ones. Some old ways of constructing long groove-­oriented songs derived from forms associated with earlier genres. The expandability of the basic jazz song-­form (head-­solos-­head) became a direct model through the hard-­driving grooves and vamps of soul jazz like Art Blakey’s “Moanin’ ” (1958) and Lee Morgan’s “The Sidewinder” (1963). Songs with long opening vamps also get picked up on, as do those that move into long vamps after cycling through a more compact song-­structure (as in the Afro-­Cuban son-­montuno form) and those that consist only of a repeated vamp or montuno.89 Gospel too provided models for long songs, especially songs with testimony, multiple soloists, or long call-­and-­response sections; as Mellonee V. Burnim has written, “The entire Afro-­American religious music tradition is based on the creative manipulation of expandable units of time.”90 These formal schemes went into secular songs of the 60s and 70s, especially as gospel interacted with contemporary trends in rhythm-­section-­focused songs.91 Other long-­song models came from earlier soul, especially ballads—songs with monologues and extensive vocal ad-­libbing that gave space to the rhythm section. Some soul songs waxed long because of their narrative element or actual time-­filling function in a film score. Others picked up on a strain of 60s modal jazz that made length part of its point (along with static S pac e I s s u e s: Sou l   •   119

harmony or drones); when these jazz songs were built on grooves, vamps, or short bass lines (like Pharoah Sanders’s 1969 “The Creator Has a Master Plan”), they connected with soul.92 The newer models had a lot to do with James Brown’s 60s funk records, and with technologies and practices of the recording studio. As the 70s unfolded, new formal approaches emerged to meet the market for long dancefloor-­focused songs. A main new formal principle lay in orienting songs around one-­or two-­chord bass lines; another involved creating structure by bringing elements in and out of layered textures. Sometimes length was driven by studio experimentation: exploring an unusual instrument (or a special way of miking and equalizing a common one), showcasing a specific effect, or giving time for a novel set of production values. Often these newer models coexist in a song, as when a groove is bound up with novel sounds.93 Long, groove-­driven songs were crucial to the whole 70s-­soul complex. But in Philadelphia soul particularly they became part of the genre’s nature and branding. This is partly because Philly soul was emerging just as these long songs were becoming a major factor: Sigma Sound studio opened in 1968, and over the next four years Philadelphia soul was boosted by new independent labels (especially Philadelphia International Records, which negotiated a distribution deal with Columbia Records), new facilities, an artist-­run publishing company, big LP sales, and peer and critical recognition. Philadelphia soul had singers adept at stretching out over a groove, great rhythm-­section players, a longtime engineer in Joe Tarsia, who’d finally gotten things working the way he wanted, and (as we noted) producers and arrangers committed to “giv[ing] our audiences a number of different things to hear. Strings, horns, multiple percussion lines and strong vocal textures.”94 Long songs facilitated and highlighted all this. These long groove-­oriented songs could show what was possible, musically and lyrically, partly because they were varied in tempo and subject-­matter; they could give a sense where the music-­makers were coming from, figuratively and literally; they suggested how listeners could move their bodies; and these songs supported expanded notions of musical Blackness, drawing on faraway and nearby styles, and channeling both futuristic and nostalgic impulses. The newer long-­song models, especially, encouraged 70s listeners to experience space and movement sonically. And the long songs gave listeners ways to profit from Philadelphia soul’s internal tensions. These tensions are worth spelling out, because they both shaped and were shaped by the long songs. 120  •   C h a p t e r T wo

Even in its own time Philadelphia soul of the 70s was defined by fundamental tensions. (1) The genre was known as much for its liberal use of strings, horns, reeds, and vibraphone as for its incisive rhythm sections. (2) Its not infrequent “message songs” were far outnumbered by its songs on romantic themes. And (3) Philadelphia soul’s antagonistic relation with rock journalism bore little resemblance to the way it was covered in the Black-­music press. This critical dissensus made clear that the genre’s sounds and themes were actually producing tensions; it’s one way we know these tensions were grasped as such. These defining tensions shape “soft soul” more broadly, which also includes the work of Chicago-­based arrangers like Charles Stepney, New York producer/arrangers like Van McCoy and Bert De Couteaux, and figures on the Los Angeles scene (Barry White, for example, and many artists, arrangers, and producers in the fold of the then recently relocated Motown Records).95 Going deeper: these three sets of tensions can be grasped as three main features, each of which emphasizes a different dimension. Feature one, which concerns musical techniques and aesthetics, is the centrality of contrasty textural schemes. Strings, horns, and woodwinds are essential to the “softness” of soft soul, but they come and go within songs, and always function in relation to the assertive rhythm section; voices too (Stepney said) “need to be played like instruments into the whole musical picture.”96 This dynamic approach to texture encouraged formal experimentation. Feature two has to do with soft soul’s thematics: the relationality and varied treatment of its themes become essential to its makeup. Love songs form the plurality of soft soul records, but they’re emotionally and thematically varied. And they carry the sense, reflected in interviews and criticism, that they need to be argued for—because they’re old-­fashioned, romantic, not message songs. The message songs too required justification, whether they dealt with politics, society, history, or the family: label bosses, journalists, and lay listeners confronted these songs with questions about the extent to which their artists, their sounds, and this genre were fit to make statements. All these themes influence music and lyrics, but without overdetermining them: each theme maps onto many song types and lengths, tempi, and degrees of danceability, and many sorts of language use. Bell suggested that every time they take up an old theme, “it has to be . . . of a different color, a different shape.”97 Feature three is about address and reception. It’s a way of channeling the critical dissensus into a specifically Black mode of listening. Philadelphia soul’s fraught relation with the rock press affects how its makers conceive of the sounds they create. As Huff put it in the New York Times profile, S pac e I s s u e s: Sou l   •   121

“We’ve been criticized . . . for using strings to establish romantic moods in our music. None of us apologizes.” But this antagonism with white critics becomes the foil for a relation of trust with Black listeners: “The press is composed of many people who cannot really hear black music,” Huff says, but “almost any black person you stop on the street can explain Gamble and Huff music with more information than these rock critics.” As we’ve seen, Gamble describes this relation of trust as active, requiring effort from both makers and listeners: “We work to give our audiences a number of different things to hear. . . . It’s all there, if you want to listen.”98 All three of these features help enable long groove-­driven songs, especially in Philadelphia soul. One of the first and oddest was the Stylistics’ 1971 “People Make the World Go Round,” a Bell/Creed message song with a distinctive marimba-­and conga-­rub-­flavored groove that it projects through frequent changes of meter. This six-­and-­a-­half-­minute song relies on textural contrasts; it reflects the genre’s demand for thematic variety; and it shows trust in Black listeners. Like “Stop, Look, Listen (to Your Heart),” from the same LP, it foregrounds Russell Thompkins’s falsetto, but it has less than three minutes’ worth of Thompkins’s singing (from 0:23–2:13 and 2:37–3:34), hardly any ad-­libbing despite its length, and no backing vocals. Nor do its lyrics, taken alone, transmit a clear message: the title phrase pins nothing down, and the rest of the lyrics gesture toward class and collective action but provide little detail or point-­of-­view. So the music carries weight. “People Make the World Go Round” features catchy melodies in both verse and chorus; a memorable, carefully etched descending phrase sets the title. But this record also trades on its basic groove, on how this groove is handled, and on the song’s textural contrasts [track 2.4]. The strikingly arranged one-­measure groove, which enters over whooshes and wind chimes [0:12], dominates the intro and verses, dovetails with the final word of the title phrase at the ends of the choruses, and plays a key role in the long vamp that occupies the song’s second half. This groove stands on a single chord, which fits its funk-­associated tempo of eighty-­four beats per minute: the rhythm section, especially drummer Earl Young, plays it in a funky manner. But it abuts contrasting material that’s sometimes in a different meter and often produces unusual phrase-­lengths. These contrasting measures contain stop-­time and rhythmic-­unison effects that create a break or “cut.”99 The song gives its second half over to a two-­ bar vamp that alternates between $ and % measures [3:01]; the $ measures derive from the main groove, and the % measures are a compressed, more 122  •   C h a p t e r T wo

syncopated version of the ^ bar that sets the title phrase. This mostly instrumental vamp section is the song’s most notable formal feature. It demonstrates an emerging trend in Philadelphia soul toward songs that leave their verse-­chorus structures behind for short, often chorus-­derived vamps. This is one of the common newer models for creating long songs in 70s soul.100 But here this formal scheme works differently, because the two-­measure vamp juxtaposes a groove-­oriented, verse-­derived $ bar with a more structured, chorus-­derived % bar. In textural terms: the vamp contains these internal contrasts; it encourages textural changes above and within it; and the sixty-­ four-­measure section it fills itself creates a broad textural contrast with the rest of the song. The song’s textural contrasts are unpredictable. It’s not just a matter of Bell’s typically dynamic instrumentation (e.g., the comings and goings of trumpets, strings, and flute here). Nor is it just that once the voice fades out, listeners may expect it to come back. It’s also that the long two-­measure-­vamp section facilitates subtler changes in the rhythm playing, and dovetailings of other ele­ments: this creates both a smooth flow and an unpredictability of structure. As Thompkins’s voice is finally disappearing in a reverb haze, around 3:35, the strings reenter, momentarily demanding attention before providing a cushion for guitarist Norman Harris’s new stepwise melody [3:47]. Harris then repeats this melody, phrasing it a bit differently, and moves into a sparse solo that leaves space for the rest of the rhythm players to become more active; in particular the second guitarist (Roland Chambers or Bobby Eli) starts to open up his sound and fill in more space [starting 4:35], cross-­fading with Harris’s slow return to rhythm-­guitar mode. A flute enters, for the first time, to play a restrained solo [5:03], but as this is happening the rhythm section continues to step forward: Vince Montana’s marimba presses on alone with the main melody, and starting 5:28 Larry Washington presents a more assertive conga pattern. Meanwhile the high strings come back to float the tonic at irregular time-­intervals [4:24–33, 5:10–18, 5:35–42, 6:08–fade]. Despite this record’s emphasis on texture and groove, it was definitely intended as a message song. Bell said in 1973 that “People Make the World Go Round” had been a deliberate first attempt: “I said ‘now we want something in today’s thing, Creed. . . . We’ve never written timely songs, songs that fit underground movements, or on-­top-­of-­ground movements.’ ” “And at that particular time,” Bell continued, “that was when all the strikes were going on. That’s when people were demonstrating, boycotting, laying in, fall-­ins, sleep-­ ins, walk-­ins, talk-­ins, you name it—the ‘-­ins’ was in.” This attempt needed S pac e I s s u e s: Sou l   •   123

Bell to “fiddle around, fiddle around [with the music] for nine months .  .  . before she even heard it.”101 For Bell, “People Make the World Go Round” became a record showing a “more creative aspect . . . that was completely different from anything else” they had produced. Bell suggested this enabled it to reach multiple audiences: “It was classified as jazz, as rock, as pop, and as r&b; everything.”102 He makes clear that this record partakes of the tensions in Philadelphia soul’s variety and relationality of themes. It was spurred by a kind of song and a kind of theme—not by the desire to deliver a particular message. This approach may betray the message-­song ideal. But it yielded a song that provided new ways to experience a message. This was Bell’s first attempt at a long, groove-­oriented record as well his first message song. The oddness of this record’s groove and form lends an experimental flavor to both its groove-­ drivenness and its message-­delivery. This song thus connects with the tensions in Philly soul’s reception. Its long, half-­instrumental form and truly unusual groove place trust in Black listeners. And its success was defined in ways that elided the role of critics: Stylistics’ member Airron Love suggested that the decision to release a shortened seven-­inch version of the song (which reached #6 on Billboard’s soul chart and #25 on its pop chart) was “simply due to radio stations pulling the track off the album,” adding that its release may also have been provoked by the quick proliferation of cover versions.103 Add up this record’s unusual groove, long duration, rhythm-­section emphasis, clear sonics, unpredictable textural contrasts, and oblique message: together they facilitate a range of new experiences for those who “want to listen.” Part of the experience is dealing with the song’s title phrase. This phrase takes the form of a maxim, but doesn’t itself constitute a message. It plays an outsized role in the song, however, because (1) it gets repeated a lot, (2) the melody it’s associated with persists instrumentally through the long vamp section, which keeps the words in your head, and (3) there aren’t many other lyrics (and no new words appear after 1:44). The phrase appears at the end of the chorus, which begins by way of a “But”: But that’s what makes the world go round The up and down, the carousel Changing people they’ll go round Go underground young man People make the world go round

Bell said he came up with the title phrase and, unusually for him, the beginning of the first verse (“Trash men didn’t get my trash today / Oh, why 124  •   C h a p t e r T wo

because they want more pay”).104 The two verses go on to cite transit-­fare hikes, pollution, Wall Street, and the late-­60s culture wars. Their level of detail contrasts with the generality of the chorus; this contrast is typical. More unusual is how the “But” signals an effort to bring this detail into alignment with the title phrase: Creed is reverse-­engineering a relation Bell left underdeveloped. She does so by fleshing out the experiential and material features of the title phrase, such as they are. She matches the verses’ affective charge by creating a sense of time and motion—“up and down” and around—and by shifting suddenly to the imperative mood. The line “Go underground young man,” with its puzzling echo of “Go West young man” and uncertain connection to Bell’s talk of “songs that fit underground movements,” brings an addressee into being. This “young man” could plausibly serve as the target for the title phrase, which might make him the speaker of the verses. But a main part of experiencing these lyrics is how the chorus creates a convergence of physical space, social space, and the idea of people “going through changes.”105 The question of voice and address gets swept up in this convergence. So the chorus’s lyrics, taken alone, are simply saying “as much as we all complain, this is just how the world is;” the title phrase becomes cousin to adages like “the more things change the more they stay the same,” “what goes around comes around,” and “it takes all kinds.” But this song’s message is equally a product of its musical features. The lyrics suggest a play of voice and address, and maybe a dialogic relation between verses and chorus; but these possibilities are straitened by the absence of backing singers, and by Thompkins’s even-­keel vocal performance. More importantly the long vamp section, the odd groove, and the extensive repetition of the two melodies associated with the title phrase place the emphasis on experience and process. This six-­and-­a-­half-­minute record is a working-­through of its title phrase. And once this verbal/musical phrase gets performed many times, in multiple ways, as part of this record’s highly wrought musical textures, its meaning changes. At first it serves to answer the question raised by the verses—What do these stories add up to? People make the WORLD go round: these ups and downs make the world turn. But under repetition, with “People” setting the high note, the phrase ends up simply saying PEOPLE make the world go round. The message becomes something like faith in people, in who we are and what we do. As with Gaye’s “What’s Going On,” this song’s message is music-­and repetition-­dependent, process-­ based, and reliant on collective participation. Here, though, the message is delivered without fully drawn lyrics, obviously-­participatory backing vocals S pac e I s s u e s: Sou l   •   125

and finger snaps, or an improvising singer projecting his interiority. What we get instead, especially in the song’s second half, is the rhythm section playing the syncopated %+$ vamp, presenting a melody associated with the title phrase, and making these elements into a groove listeners experience, collectively, as such. Getting this song’s message means abiding with its strange groove. And vice versa. Talking about his collaborations with Creed, Bell said “everything we do is experiments.”106 The Stylistics’ “People Make the World Go Round” is a successful experiment in which the long form, the groove, and the message all possess an experimental character. Each of these three elements is singular. But it’s precisely as a singular long, groove-­driven message song that this record fits a pattern. Scanning the corpus of Philadelphia soul studio releases during the breakthrough years of 1970–1975, one finds just over 135 message songs. Most are longer than 4:45—longer, that is, than what a seven-­inch single can normally accommodate. Of the 73 long message songs, 59 count as groove-­driven: these records use arrangement gambits, production techniques, and formal strategies to foreground their often singular grooves.107 Put these 59 in the mix with the other 96 long, groove-­driven Philadelphia soul songs, bearing in mind that the 207 long Philadelphia soul songs released between 1970 and 1975 stand out against more than 1,000 shorter songs.108 There are two main takeaways. First, over this six-­year period, message songs are greatly overrepresented among the long songs: message songs account for 35 percent of the long songs, versus less than 7 percent of the short songs. Second, Philadelphia soul creates a clear connection between delivering messages and focusing on grooves. These associations between long forms, messages, and groove-­drivenness help Philadelphia soul develop new ways of experiencing ideas through song. Records combining these three features proliferate across the whole 70s-­soul complex, especially in funk, Southern soul, gospel, Motown (in Detroit and L.A.), Chicago-­and New York-­based soul and soft soul, and disco. This Afrocentric approach means the “message song” changes. The groove-­driven emphasis on process brings music-­with-­a-­message intensity to songs whose lyrics could be called nostalgic, sentimental, hortatory, or affirmative, songs on spiritual themes, and songs about Blackness or gender identity, as well as songs about politics, war, the environment, poverty, and racism. In Philadelphia soul, soft soul more broadly, and the disco that comes out of it, instrumentation, arrangement, and production play crucial roles; as we’ve noted, techniques for bringing elements in and out of layered 126  •   C h a p t e r T wo

musical textures are essential to the experiences these records create. The Philadelphia soul examples in particular favor a formal strategy we heard in “People Make the World Go Round”: their second halves often abandon pop song-­structure for a continuous one-­or two-­measure vamp.109 These fifty-­three records, twenty-­eight of which are message songs, provide new ways of inhabiting social space. They become the basis for Philly soul’s way of approaching politics. Their politics happens in the experience of the song’s gradual unfolding. A few more examples will give a further sense of how. But we should pause over Linda Creed’s role in “People Make the World Go Round.” Like “Stop, Look, Listen (to Your Heart),” “People” raises questions about what it means for a woman to stand near the center of a song that embodies male homosociality; there it was the men’s vocal group, here it’s the all-­male rhythm section. And, simply put, women were rarely found on either side of the mic in long Philadelphia soul songs until 1975—not coincidentally the year that the “disco diva” emerges as a figure in popular culture.110 Successful Philadelphia soul songwriters like Creed and Vinnie Barrett seldom had a hand in long songs.111 Nor were female singers given many chances to stretch out over long, groove-­driven Philly soul songs until 1975.112 Perhaps this is not surprising. The preconditions certainly favored men. The images of seriousness, ambition, and interiority that helped drive the market for long groove-­driven songs were most strongly associated with veteran male solo artists like Marvin Gaye and Curtis Mayfield; it makes sense that Billy Paul, a former jazz singer with a grown-­up comportment, would release more message songs, and more long songs, than any other Philadelphia soul artist. On the production side, Philadelphia soul’s new producers, arrangers, and songwriters were emerging from the ranks of male studio musicians.113 Recall Bell’s line that Creed was “the only girl writer that has ever been down here with us” for songwriting and recording sessions.114 The shorter track-­lengths of Philly soul songs cowritten by women confirm that long groove-­oriented records were bound up with the homosocial practice of building songs in the studio.115 Add to this Gamble’s explicitly masculinist and patriarchal vision of the “message . . . in the music,” which had a pronounced effect on who did what in Philadelphia soul, and it’s clear why the long, groove-­driven songs were initially a male province.116 The rare exceptions show two main things: that the absence of women singers was a matter of gatekeeping, not capacity; and that the demand for what people began calling “disco” records forced the gates open. The earliest exception may be Ruth McFadden’s “Ghetto Woman” (1972), a long, S pac e I s s u e s: Sou l   •   127

danceable Gamble and Huff song that Gamble Records spread over two sides of a seven-­inch single (in the venerable dance-­music fashion). An unmetered minor-­mode opening leads to a tart your-­rich-­husband-­doesn’t-­make-­you-­ better-­than-­me monologue over a one-­measure bass-­line-­driven groove, signaling that “Ghetto Woman” is a place-­, gender-­and class-­conscious message song; the second half abandons the song’s occasional turns to blues harmony and sticks to the basic one-­chord groove, adding hand-­claps, male vocalists chanting the title phrase, and plenty of McFadden’s spry ad-­libbing. Recorded at Sigma with the first-­call rhythm section, “Ghetto Woman” could have provided a template. But it was an underpromoted one-­off, performed by a singer who had recorded her best-­known song in 1955.117 Barbara Mason’s ten-­minute “World War Three,” another groove-­driven message song with mostly static harmony, at least found a place on a successful LP, her 1973 Lady Love.118 One of few early-­70s Philadelphia soul artists who wrote their own material, and (aside from Jackie Moore) the only woman in that number, Mason followed up with a full album of groove-­oriented message songs, Transition (1974), which included one long track. While Transition failed commercially, it and “World War Three” confirm the tight fit between groove-­driven message songs and artistic ambition.119 That sense of ambition and seriousness also permeates the Three Degrees’ “If and When,” a seven-­ minute set-­piece on the group’s million-­selling self-­titled 1973 LP. “If and When” is a groove-­oriented ballad that highlights all three group-­members along with the rhythm section, and includes brass fanfares, timpani, strings, and notable production effects; it leaves its verse-­chorus structure behind for a concertedly arranged two-­chord vamp supporting vocal harmonies and ad-­libs. This song, too, demonstrated that women singers and long, groove-­driven songs could make a potent formula. Philadelphia soul’s other top female group, First Choice, demonstrated the second main entailment of these rare exceptions: the six long danceable songs on their first two LPs (1973–1974) helped define the emergent disco genre.120 But even so—this adds up to a dozen exceptions among 110 songs prior to 1975. This gender imbalance matters. Philadelphia soul develops new ways to convey experience, but the imbalance cuts that experience in half. Audiences who stepped into the spaces created by these long, orchestrated, groove-­driven songs should have had gotten to hear more women inhabiting those spaces. The female singers and songwriters were certainly ready, and the materials, institutions, and history of the genre had the capacity to support them. Starting in 1975–76, Philly-­associated disco records show 128  •   C h a p t e r T wo

what had been missing. After all, a singer performs her gender differently over a spotlighted groove. The particularities of that groove influence the performance; doing this for six minutes is different from doing it for three, and doing it in the studio is different from doing it in concert. And of course people compose and deliver message songs in gender-­specific ways. So if we acknowledge the power of process-­driven strategies for conveying messages, creating musical space, and approaching politics (which Philadelphia soul developed out of the late-­60s pop soul and early-­70s soul we’ve considered thus far), we must also acknowledge that the exclusion of women’s experience constitutes a failure. As we zoom in on Philadelphia soul’s approach to politics, we should continue to ask who enters this genre’s spaces, and on what terms: who is this genre for? The O’Jays’ “For the Love of Money” (1973), a gold record for Gamble and Huff, emerges from the sphere of Philadelphia soul’s all-­male rhythm sections. Bassist Anthony Jackson receives co-­songwriting credit; the story is that he introduced the bass line in Gamble and Huff ’s office, and the producers jumped on it.121 Jackson’s sounds, thoughts, spatial practices, and interactions with the other musicians left an impress on what became a long, groove-­driven message song. But of course other factors impinge on the making of this record, and even on the bass part itself. Think how this record happens. Jackson figured out a bass line in New York; he had spent years jamming with his guitarist friend Reggie Lucas, using a pick to double Lucas’s Jimmy Nolen-­type guitar parts an octave down.122 He traveled to Philadelphia for a Sigma session presided over by Gamble and Huff. Likely toward the end of the day, when the producers had run out of material and there was a little time left, Jackson presented the bass line. (Imagine if he had already found use for it in New York.)123 Soon after, the other musicians built a groove around it; Huff facilitated. (As this bass-­line took shape in Jackson’s mind, ears, and hands, it’s doubtful that he was imagining the unusual drum-­ pattern that accompanies it on the record.) No paper-­trail tells us exactly when and how the rest of the composition happened. Gamble and Huff composed the contrasting bridge, and developed the concepts and lyrics; at some point the New Testament verse that gives the record its title entered the picture and got worked into the song. The musicians recorded the basic tracks, a process that may have overlapped with the songwriting process. The O’Jays came in for the whole LP’s worth of vocal sessions, including leads and backgrounds, knowing that five of its eight tracks were message songs. Then came the “sweetening” sessions with the winds and brasses. This S pac e I s s u e s: Sou l   •   129

was followed by engineer Joe Tarsia’s postproduction work creating special ­effects. So if we assert that this song’s message can only be experienced as part of a process, we really mean multiple processes: like “What’s Going On” and “People Make the World Go Round,” this record reflects many practices, many contingent factors, and the work of many (mostly male) hands. Jackson’s bass line appears right at the beginning. It’s clearly a melodic hook, because of the strength of the line itself and the fact that the bass stands alone (ex. 2.1) [track 2.5]. This bass line works like many funky bass parts: there’s a contrast between its odd-­numbered measures, which are resolutely on the beat (accenting beats 1, 2, and 3), and its more syncopated even-­numbered measures.124 It’s also important that this is not a standard electric-­bass sound: Jackson famously plays with a pick, giving a sharper attack. Indeed the guitar-­like muted and choked sixteenth notes are an additional dimension of this melodic hook (and help provide a groove in the absence of other instruments). Furthermore, the bass is phase-­shifted, giving it unexpected nuance and sheen. There’s also a striking reverberation effect. Since the bass enters alone, the only thing that gives it a sense of place is the suggestion of the physical space it inhabits; a generous amount of reverb provides this sense. But without warning the reverb is turned off. The bass has the rug pulled out from under it. Our precarious sense of place is shown to have been nothing more than the result of a technological trick. Reverb doesn’t normally call attention to itself this way. And the total absence of reverb, that completely dry sound, is itself unusual: it creates an uncanny sense of proximity. Like Gaye’s use of the house-­party scheme, this effect takes something commonly used to create a backdrop, and problematizes it. The melodic aspect of the bass line gains attention, but the strangeness and energy of the sound, and the problematizing of musical space seem to call for the song’s expansive introduction. This introduction presents another notable studio trick: Tarsia employed tape-­manipulation techniques to create backwards, fade-­in, and pre-­echo effects on the O’Jays’ already echoey phrase “Money money money money . . . money” (which itself echoes the bass line’s first two sixteenth notes). The intro feels long for its one-­minute length, mostly because of its textural changes: at 0:43 it withdraws the voices, in a kind of mini-­break, and then introduces a trumpet playing a composed line derived from a fragment of the bass line, soon joined in harmony by a saxophone. Like “What’s Going On,” then, “For the Love of Money” complicates its representations of acoustical space, and contains a multiplicity of voices, some of which exist on the threshold between presence and 130  •   C h a p t e r T wo

 

   

       

 

               



w/pick and phaser

 

       





               



Ex. 2.1.  Anthony Jackson’s famously funky bass line, which opens the O’Jays’ “For the Love of Money.”

absence. This song follows the spatial practices of “What’s Going On” by using studio-­based sonic techniques to say something about social space. It too frames sonic details in a way that tells us they matter. In both cases the introduction can suggest that the song desires not simply to deliver a message, but also to perform the social function of asking how we come to talk about these things, what it’s like when we do talk about them, how much of a change from our routine ways of thinking such talk requires. The rhythm arrangement helps us recognize this departure from routine with the bold move of putting the snare drum on beats 1 and 3 rather than the usual 2 and 4. The two-­measure beat-­pattern starts with iiiqon the downbeat of the first bar, which is “answered” by stark hits on beats 1 and 3 in the second bar. (The bass drum introduces this pattern in the intro, and the snare drum surprises us by mostly doubling it rather than providing a contrast.) The playing and production values of the drums and percussion, along with the funky bass line, can make people want to dance—recall R ­ iley’s claim that this song was “strictly the max . . . among black disco d­ ancers.” But the odd drum-­pattern means people may need to find new ways to do so; it bears saying that “black disco dancers” were themselves a novel cultural category in 1973–74, especially in the pages of the New York Times.125 ­Dancers will feel the absence of a strong articulation on beats 2 and 4, perhaps sensing drummer Earl Young’s tension and seriousness, along with the release that comes with the introduction of a traditional drum groove in the song’s bluesy bridge [3:00]. So we’ve got an intro that raises questions about how to approach the body of the (message) song, and a whole song that’s threaded through with a drum-­pattern that creates a new, strange kind of experience. “For the Love of Money” uses its biblical text in a manner that, too, relies on reframings and syntactical inversions. This is another way the song creates effects of defamiliarization. Its lyrics adopt a New Testament phrase as S pac e I s s u e s: Sou l   •   131

it appears in the King James Version: “For the love of money is the root of all evil: which while some coveted after, they have erred from the faith, and pierced themselves through with many sorrows” (1 Timothy 6:10). In the Bible verse “for” means “thus”—that is: “Thus, we see, the love of money is the root of all evil.”126 But the song’s lyrics give this phrase the sense of to do x on account of y: “For the love of money”—that is, because they want money—“people will lie.” This allows for a soul-­music-­friendly call-­and-­ response syntax: the backing vocalists sing the title phrase, and the lead singer responds “people will do x.”127 But it divorces the phrase from its scriptural context. Similarly, the song includes more of verse 10 (“I know that money is the root of all evil”), but it also quotes the title of a huge Depression-­era message song (Bing Crosby’s “Brother, Can You Spare a Dime”), and incorporates the phrase “almighty dollar,” a conscience-­testing epithet that had been circulating since the 1840s. This makes the biblical references part of an overall allusive texture, and calls attention to the way these allusions are framed (“I know that,” and so on). These allusions get caught up in a swirl of speakers and addressees that also includes the ad-­libbing singers, who act both blind (“I really need it”) and enlightened (“Don’t let money rule you”), and engage in dialogue (“How many days have I heard you say . . . ?”). A basic point is that this record both encourages participation and pre­sents itself as odd. Its urgent lyrics, urgently delivered, can add up to a powerful statement and pull listeners in different directions. So too can the song’s musicianly details. This begins with the processed bass part, continues with the Young’s handling of the surprising beat-­pattern, and extends to unexpected solo spots for soprano saxophone [3:19], electric piano [5:15], and trumpet [5:25]. The record’s many vocal and instrumental parts work sometimes in concert, sometimes in contrast, but all are beholden to the funky bass line and the strange beat-­pattern. A listener/dancer’s progress through the song is conditioned by this push-­and-­pull—a mix of stickiness, intensity, oddness, and unpredictability. The disorientation-­reorientation effect created by the spatial play at the beginning, the challenging drum-­pattern, and a form that gives you three unbroken minutes of that two-­measure groove at the end thickens the relation between the song’s lyrics, its groove, and its people. This song becomes political partly because the religious and kitchen-­table dimensions of its message embody soul’s connections with civil-­rights-­movement and class politics, but also because these thick relations energize the politics of whom the song is for—“black disco dancers,” top-­40 audiences who sent this record to #9 on the Billboard pop chart, LP 132  •   C h a p t e r T wo

buyers who made the album go platinum, jazz listeners targeted by the instrumental solos. “For the Love of Money” is seven minutes of “how should we live.” It shows how long, groove-­driven message songs with heightened sonics and changing textures can create and occupy political space, and give listeners ways to inhabit that space. One thing these songs show is that we don’t always inhabit it; we have to approach it. “For the Love of Money” puts us in the grip of its move into political space by heightening its internal tensions and effortful remakings of familiar materials. Later Philadelphia soul songs approach political space more smoothly and affirmatively, while still foregrounding contrasts and humanly produced energy. A key example is Harold Melvin and the Blue Notes’ 1975 “Wake Up Everybody,” which is poised between an already-­historically-­ laden Philadelphia soul and the now-­fully-­arrived disco genre. This Gamble and Huff message song stages an approach to political space through its formal scheme and play of genres. It’s one of the fifty-­three long, groove-­ driven Philly soul records that devotes its second half to a short vamp. Its verse-­chorus structure uses a strong contrast between major and minor; its final three and a half minutes leave this behind for a one-­measure groove that’s unambiguously major. But “Wake Up Everybody” begins with an unmetered pentatonic wash, suggesting a kind of modal jazz that used drones and free rhythm for their cultural associations, sonic properties, and temporal possibilities [track 2.6]. Think Coltrane’s 1965 A Love Supreme, which created a templar space that from its initial release was understood to have political implications.128 Philadelphia soul was well-­integrated with this strain of experimental, spiritual jazz.129 This song’s associations with post-­Coltrane modal jazz are strengthened by tambourine waves and the entrance of a pentatonic bass line (on electric piano) as metered time is established—shades of Alice Coltrane’s “Journey in Satchidananda” (1971). When lead singer Teddy Pendergrass’s voice appears [0:36], its proximity, along with the intimacy of the arrangement and production, compresses the templar space created by the introduction; finger snaps on the backbeats, in place of the drum-­set, help produce this intimate effect. This two-­minute stretch of the song holds true to the aesthetic values of precisely rendered Philly soul, even as these values dissonate with the prophetic mode invoked by both the lyrics and the instrumental opening. But the space expands again with the long end-­vamp that balances and fulfills the intro. Here Pendergrass performs nonstop ad-­libs (sometimes overdubbed, sometimes in call-­and-­response S pac e I s s u e s: Sou l   •   133

with Melvin) over a strong one-­bar bass line. At points he brings back lyrics from the verses [e.g., 4:01–19], but with a new melody and an ad-­lib feel befitting the new musical context; later the ad-­libs call out “dope pushers,” false preachers, lying politicians, businessmen, and others. In genre terms, “Wake Up Everybody” creates a play of modal jazz, Philadelphia soul, and the gospel-­soul fusion that connected secular artists like Curtis Mayfield with gospel musicians like the Staple Singers.130 The gospel-­ soul flavor mostly governs the vamp section. The vamp’s bass line leaps from the tonic to the fifth degree in its first half and makes a stepwise descent in its second, outlining a progression from I to IV; this line isn’t truly gospel-­ derived, but along with the plagal harmony it can signal gospel soul like the Staples’ “I’ll Take You There” (a 1972 hit in the prophetic mode). As a #12 pop hit anchoring a million-­selling LP, “Wake Up Everybody” also participates in pop as a genre; considered as such, its length and form recall the Beatles’ similarly structured “Hey Jude,” whose “mantra”-­driven second half establishes the sense of a participatory public space even in the absence of an explicitly political text.131 The play of genres in “Wake Up Everybody” does three things. (1) Its real-­time flow carries listeners from a templar space through the space of Philly-­soul intimacy to a political space that incorporates and transforms the others. (2) It sorts through and interprets the political music of the 60s, represented by gospel-­soul fusion, the modal jazz of Coltrane and his followers, and the universalizing (but often Black-­music-­ derived) pop of the Beatles. And (3) it provides a script for disco. “Wake Up Everybody” is part of a bigger story about how Philadelphia soul works, how it approaches politics—and how its stylistic signature starts to dissolve. The long, groove-­driven songs keep their messages in motion; these songs keep telling us they’re all about experience and process. In political terms this means they’re constructed to emphasize the approach to, work behind, and possibility of politics; a mid-­70s song like “Wake Up Everybody” suggests that Philadelphia soul enters political space when no one expects it to and nothing else will. Philly soul can thereby reveal the difficulty of inheriting the 60s musically. Gamble and Huff knew they were late to the 60s.132 They knew you couldn’t say “Wake Up Everybody” in ’75 the same way you said “People Get Ready” in ’65. They knew the prophetic mode of the Coltranes and Pharoah Sanders couldn’t send records to the top of the soul charts.133 They knew the Beatles’ anthems could no longer serve as the reference-­point for politically engaged music. And they knew that the popular image of 60s soul as a resolute communal voice in movement 134  •   C h a p t e r T wo

politics masked deep uncertainties.134 But these genres, like all genres, bear what I’ve called an unenforceable authority. By keeping them in play, along with Broadway, pop, Western art music, and mainstream jazz, Philadelphia soul songs give meaning to the growing distance from the 60s, and even from the early 70s of “What’s Going On” and Shaft. This is to say that Philly soul’s ways of looking back, which some have heard as reflective of musical or indeed political conservatism, possess a criticality and an experiential grip.135 By slowly moving through genres of the recent and more distant past, the long songs provide a reckoning. And what they show, in their focus on process, movement, and approach, is a social space that’s ineradicably messy. The mixed messages and multiple processes of a song like “Wake Up Every­body” allow it to make an example of itself. On the plus side, this record puts prophetic politics on the dancefloor through an ad hoc combination of genres; perhaps this broadens the ways music can approach politics. But at the same time, the song’s exemplary status can work against it: some fans heard the song’s message as false to the reality of the group’s feuds and Pendergrass’s imminent departure.136 One can also debate whether the song is political at all. Further, its paternalistic vision can highlight the paucity of feminist thought, female voices, and women’s experience in early-­to-­mid-­70s Philadelphia soul records. And its ad hoc play of genres points ahead to the moment around 1976 when Philly soul began losing its generic signature.

Moving to Disco Philly soul was a principal source for disco. Its people, sounds, song structures—­and particular songs—went straight into the genre-­defining disco records of the mid-­to-­late 70s.137 “Wake Up Everybody” lies on the cusp of these developments. But all its pluses and minuses bear upon disco, including its production of a messy social space (which, chapter 3 suggests, counts as a net positive). Tim Lawrence has shown that people asked whether and how a disco song could embody a message; they wondered about the politics of the social spaces that emerged around disco records.138 Disco extended Philadelphia soul’s ad hoc generic mixtures, and kept its musical conventions in play, but this actually hastened the dissolution of the Philly sound. A main reason was that Philadelphia’s busiest session players (who were also arrangers and songwriters) decamped for Salsoul, a new Manhattan-­based disco label, which meant that their sounds became S pac e I s s u e s: Sou l   •   135

definitive of disco; it meant too that the records coming out of Philly soul institutions, created by a now-­unstable roster of musicians, grew more varied and thus stylistically diffuse. Vocal distinctiveness cut both ways too. Pendergrass’s ad-­libs, overdubbed and overlapping with Melvin’s, projected both Black male interiority and Black male collectivity, in the manner of Gaye’s “What’s Going On,” but they also supercharged Pendergrass’s singular v­ ocality, helping to make him a megastar. “Wake Up Everybody” thus points back to early-­70s constructions of the Black self in groove-­oriented message songs, but it also looks forward to always-­groove-­driven disco. And in disco the ad-­lib showcase boosted women singers as much as men. Three male-­to-­female disco remakes of Philly soul songs can show how this worked, beginning with Melvin’s “Don’t Leave Me This Way,” from the Wake up Everybody LP. Sounding somewhat like the title track in its harmonic contrasts, overall structure, and focus on Pendergrass’s ad-­libs, this record stood as a lower-­profile album cut. But a faithful version released by Motown Records a year later became veteran singer Thelma Houston’s first big hit, and a disco classic.139 A non-­charting song from Pendergrass’s platinum-­selling first solo LP (1977) worked similarly. “The More I Get, the More I Want” was a danceable Philly-­flavored record that quickly provoked a full-­on disco remake by Lorraine Johnson, whose previous releases included a 1971 gospel album. Recorded in Muscle Shoals, Alabama, for the New York disco label Prelude, Johnson’s version was a raw-­edged, hands-­on-­ the-­mixing-­board workout. The 6:43 “Special 12 Inch Disco Version” brings vocal and instrumental tracks in and out unpredictably, with the seams showing, reverb leaking, and Johnson’s arresting performance exposed alongside flute, strings, bass, and frisky drumming; it showed where dance music was going. And a later example, “This Time Baby,” appeared first in a characteristic Thom Bell production for the O’Jays—again an unheralded album cut on a platinum LP—and the following year as a much longer record by Jackie Moore, who’d had a presence in early-­70s Philly soul. Moore’s version, a #1 dance hit in 1979, recorded in Philadelphia but using the rhythm section from the L.A.-­based group Atlantic Starr, turned the song into a bass-­line-­ and ad-­lib-­driven disco masterpiece with striking breaks and builds.140 In each case a mature singer created a disco anthem from a song about sex. These weren’t message songs, but their labor-­intensive gender reversals—a woman singing “come on down and do what you’ve got to do,” “every time I get it I just want more,” or “using you was so easy / Boy I used you a thousand times”—made them statements precisely as performances of gender. 136  •   C h a p t e r T wo

Long, ad-­lib-­heavy disco songs became a major mechanism for introducing, defining, and (re-­)branding women artists. And in turn these artists gave those records—and the genre—the energy, urgency, and purpose that had become essential to 70s soul. Chapter 3 listens for what goes into disco records, what comes out, and how. It focuses on the circulation of musical conventions: how they move through cultural space, and especially through the records’ layered textures. Disco’s distinctiveness lies partly in how it interacts with other genres. Philadelphia soul was part of that musical economy, even as its early-­to-­mid-­70s moment started to recede. But it was just one trading partner in disco’s expanding system of exchange. Soul and disco had to keep moving.

S pac e I s s u e s: Sou l   •   137

Thr ee

Exchange Theories DISCO, NEW WAVE, AND ALBUM-­ORIENTED ROCK

Disco had a purpose: making you move on the dance floor. But it also sold millions of records, revived careers, provoked debates about the effects of music, became part of gay culture, got cross-­marketed with congas, made songs go through people’s heads, pushed the record industry to introduce the twelve-­inch single, gave rock artists the chance to write pop songs, threatened friendships, turned session musicians into auteurs, served as a platform for foreign singers trying to enter the North American market, and changed the way songs were constructed.1 So beyond fulfilling its primary function as dance music, what else did disco have to give? The answer lies partly in its multiple modes of address—its commitment to the dance floor, participation in the soul tradition, and success on the pop charts. Pursuit of these distinct ambitions meant that disco’s materials and conventions circulated widely, making them available to other genres. Indeed its conventions appeared in many contemporary genres that didn’t have dancing on the agenda. But disco’s legacy has also to do with the way it made its materials available and put them into a system of exchange. The exchanges this chapter considers happened around the time of the record industry’s commercial peak, and sudden crash, at the end of 1979. The music-­historical context is important as well. Talking about disco demands an acknowledgment of its immediate precursors in African American music, including genres discussed in previous chapters, like funk, soul, Philadelphia soul, and the Black-­action-­film soundtrack. We’ve seen that when you study these genres you can’t entirely abandon the notion of a genre as a set of constitutive features; but it’s equally true that these and other genres of the 70s can often be better defined with reference to their internal variety and proliferation of subgenres, their modes of revision and transformation, 138

and their movement toward other genres. They constantly remind us, too, that genres are in works as much as works are in genres. This chapter looks at three late-­70s genres—disco, new wave, and album-­oriented rock—that overlap in varying degrees with respect to their historical moment, modes of dissemination, institutional frames (like record labels), musical materials, personnel, and audiences. Songs in each of these genres contain musical hooks and sometimes succeed on the pop charts. They also borrow from the same genres and from one another. This chapter will be particularly concerned with these sorts of cross-­ borrowing. Marcel Mauss makes the crucial point that when different cultures engage in trade, they trade not only goods, but methods and concepts of exchange.2 To quickly give a representative example: when a new-­wave song borrows disco’s conventions like four-­on-­the-­floor and processed percussion sounds, it often acquires at the same time disco’s tendency toward stratified textures that allow other types of material to ease into the mix. A new-­wave song may thus incorporate material from some third genre— material, that is, deriving neither from disco nor new wave. Every party to an exchange operates within a set of understandings about what can and can’t, will or won’t be traded, and why. This greatly interested Mauss. Thinking about exchange as a metaphor for genre mixing, however, I’ll want to emphasize that each such exchange shows something about these concepts of exchange; I’m seeking to bring out the latent theory revealed in acts and channels of exchange. The analysis will pay close attention to specific musical conventions, for the following reasons: (1) Conventions are sedimented with history. (2) They also possess a materiality on records that can’t be written off: four-­on-­the-­ floor is simply there regardless of authorial intent or audience response. (3) Expressive conventions remind us that when a musician communicates something, she does so in a language only partly her own. (4) It’s worth making a space for talking about metaconventions—conventions governing the use of other conventions—like irony in new wave, the idea of rock as an art form, and the rock group as composed of freely consenting autonomous individuals. Much of this chapter will focus on the metaconvention of stratification in disco and its migration to new wave. In different ways these metaconventions condition the nature and function of conventions like the guitar solo, the bass line, futuristic synthesizer sounds, the voice as conveying personality, and so on. While the “meta” makes clear they’re second-­ order, like all conventions metaconventions are subject to contingency: they E xc h a ng e T h eor i e s: Di sco   •   139

have no greater purchase on stability, naturalness, significance, or intrinsic rightness than first-­order conventions do. For all these reasons musical conventions serve a critical role in historicizing and collectivizing experience. Noting how conventions of several genres coexist within individual songs helps us to see that artworks present broken surfaces and embody multiple systems of value.

Defining Disco, New Wave, and Album-­Oriented Rock As we attempt to characterize disco, new wave, and album-­oriented rock, differences begin to appear. We normally define disco by its function as dance music. New wave pictured itself as that which was different from contemporary mainstream rock and pop. It is therefore a politicized identity because its meaning requires that something be defined as its other. And album-­oriented rock was at first a radio format.3 These initial modes of definition encourage quite different ways of thinking. We can see, for example, that AOR requires a bit more explanation. Album-­Oriented Rock radio arose as an alternative to AM pop radio, providing a home for many musical practices that the AM stations wouldn’t accommodate. The emergent AOR stations would play songs that were considered too long, too heavy, too instrumentally oriented, too improvisational, too eclectic, too dark for pop radio. Some jazz-­rock, funky rock, and Latin rock would appear, but the bulk of the playlist in the early days of the AOR format was devoted to hard rock, progressive rock, southern rock, and rock singer/songwriters. To speak of AOR as a musical genre is to recognize that groups began making records with an eye to this format. (A similar story can be told about disco’s origins.) While AOR radio never stopped playing “Stairway to Heaven,” “Won’t Get Fooled Again,” and long patches of Dark Side of the Moon, a new set of bands began to dominate the format in the late 70s: Boston, the Electric Light Orchestra, Foreigner, Heart, Kansas, Styx, et al. Other groups who had been successful for longer began to produce music in this vein, like the Steve Miller Band, Queen, Pink Floyd, Jefferson Starship, and Sweet; one could certainly add Led Zeppelin’s In Through the Out Door (1979) to this list. For purposes of definition, it seems reasonable to focus on groups whose music doesn’t fit as comfortably into any earlier rock subgenre. Although most of the AOR groups I’ve listed had a Led Zeppelin thing going on, progressive rock provided the conceptual point 140  •   C h a p t e r T h r e e

of origin. Foreigner even toted around a King Crimson veteran for several years. But AOR differs from progressive rock in crucial ways. AOR relaxes the demand for virtuosity; it is more US than UK; it incorporates progressive rock’s musical values as but one of several strands, thereby compromising progressive rock’s single-­mindedness; it has a more “realistic” view of the market. Most important—and this is the genre’s central irony—album-­oriented rock groups achieved great success on the pop singles charts—a form of success that progressive rock seldom sought. For all these reasons AOR can be thought of as progressive rock’s little brother. AOR stepped out of its older brother’s shadow in the early 80s, refused to wear its prog-­rock hand-­me-­ downs, and lived its adulthood as bland 80s pop. This was a quite ambiguous coming of age, but it clarified AOR’s adolescent quality: AOR couldn’t have lasted forever; its immaturity is part of its charm; and there’s a kind of idealism about its musical values that complicates its status as “corporate rock” in the critical literature. Moving past the initial definition of new wave complicates things as well. Just as AOR is both a younger sibling and a countergenre to progressive rock, so does new wave bear a complex relation to punk. If AOR forged a compromise with progressive rock’s ascetic view of popular culture, new wave was a secularization of punk’s ideals. New wave came out of the punk movement, but it was associated with a later historical moment; it sounded decidedly mixed, impure, diluted by comparison with punk; it didn’t reject the aesthetic, as Ellen Willis pointed out back in ’78;4 and it didn’t adopt the attitude of renunciation that punk sought to maintain. At the same time, punk serves as an ideal for new-­wave artists and audiences—something perhaps impossible to achieve once you try consciously to realize it in musical terms, but nevertheless worth seeking. New wave’s impurity derives largely from its constitution as an amalgam of styles. If the new-­wave umbrella starts off as nothing but a marketing category, it quickly becomes much more: one gets from critics and artists the image of new wave as unified not only by its attitude toward the mainstream, but also by similarities in many areas—hairstyles, fashion choices, musical influences, cultural references, onstage behavior, critical vocabulary.5 The idea of punk as underwriting new wave is widely shared, for example, as the overlapping term post-­punk shows. Nevertheless one can still be struck by the breadth of what counted as new wave in the late 70s and early 80s, and by the way it included parts of other genres—the experimental wing of power pop, some of dance music’s electronic side, the songlike output of several “downtown” avant-­gardes—which E xc h a ng e T h eor i e s: Di sco   •   141

often came into conflict over musical practices and cultural values. So in addition to providing an ideal and a foundation, punk becomes (merely) a part of new wave’s consortium of subgenres. From a punk perspective, though, new wave betrays punk by incorporating it as just another style. New wave and AOR provide greater challenges to genre theory than do punk and progressive rock precisely because their songs are often compromised or mixed, because they’re responding to competing values and practices.6 Mark Spicer’s work on genre-­mixing from a new-­wave perspective has made this clear.7 The effect of such competing pressures also helps define the Black genres of the 70s mentioned above. Disco songs, too, gain much of their theoretical interest and power on the dance floor from the ways they bring to the surface a tension between pop song-­structures and African American musical practices that lies at the heart of twentieth-­century American popular music.

Disco’s Workings Consider a well-­known disco song that embodies this tension: Inner Life’s 1981 version of “Ain’t No Mountain High Enough” with Jocelyn Brown on vocals, produced and arranged by Patrick Adams and Greg Carmichael, and remixed by Larry Levan. This song will bring out some of the genre’s particularity before the chapter moves to disco’s convention of putting the bass drum on every quarter note—so-­called four-­on-­the-­floor—across a number of songs. The discussion will then segue into new wave through that genre’s borrowings of this convention. I focus on a cover version not only because the approach to and frequency of covers varies across these three genres, but also because the disco cover clearly demonstrates the manner in which most disco songs tend to handle pop conventions. Original disco songs often frame their verses and choruses—the sections that allow you to hear them as pop songs, or that you might comfortably render as sheet music—as if they were cover versions of some earlier record.8 Disco employs a broad range of devices for telegraphing beginnings and ends of sections. From soul and funk, it takes the break and the stop-­time turnaround, from Afro-­Cuban music you hear the pregón (or musical “call”), and from Western art music it borrows fanfares, orchestrated pedal points, prolonged dominants, excessive repetition of full cadences, and timpani tattoos. Breaks in disco songs continue funk’s tradition of giving the percussion 142  •   C h a p t e r T h r e e

a chance to step forward while other instruments take a pause, but they become longer and more structured (partly since they often include a “build” that gradually restores the elements that have dropped out); and by 1977 they are more-­or-­less-­expected events in the middles of songs. Because disco shifts the musical economy away from the chorus and verse toward sections like the introduction and the extended break, songs like Candi Staton’s “When You Wake Up Tomorrow” and Dan Hartman’s “Vertigo/Relight My Fire” can thereby present themselves as perfectly sufficient long before their verse-­chorus structure becomes apparent. More subtly these framing devices enable disco to treat the pop song’s conventions as requiring preparation and justification on the dance floor, as occupying a distant part of the soundscape, and as embodying values of the past. The original version of “Ain’t No Mountain High Enough,” performed by Marvin Gaye and Tammi Terrell in early 1967, can remind us what the 60s Motown song does. Within twenty-­three seconds, or twelve measures—well before the chorus first appears—the song delivers memorable lyrics, plus melodic hooks in both voices and instruments, plus vocalists interpreting and ad-­libbing, plus a compelling bass line, plus a catchy rhythm arrangement, plus varied orchestration, not to mention the instantly recognizable vocal timbres of Gaye and Terrell. One should add that the song compresses this material into a frequency range narrow enough to push it through the speaker of a portable radio. “Ain’t No Mountain High Enough” seems to fill the conventional pop song-­structure with the maximum amount of material, and to do so in a way that shows respect for the contemporary two-­to three-­minute pop song. With so many hooks in different domains and innumerable little details, the song calls for an endless rhapsody on its composition, performance, and arrangement. Here a discussion of just one of its details will serve to set up Inner Life’s version. Certain conventions are so well entrenched that when songs depart from them it’s worth pausing over. Putting the snare drum on beats two and four is one such convention. If you don’t hear this pattern in a song whose genre makes you expect it, you should ask what this departure does: Does it make the song more danceable? Less danceable?9 Does it signal another genre?10 Does it draw attention to a particular musical domain, like timbre? Does it start to destabilize the genre’s other conventions?11 Does it create a hook? And are you sure the musicians violate this convention on purpose?12 Instead of the expected snare on two and four, “Ain’t No Mountain High Enough” presents a sixteenth-­note motive that begins on beat two, and articulates E xc h a ng e T h eor i e s: Di sco   •   143

beat three, but leaves beat four empty. It’s played on the snare drum’s rim, which suits the motive better than the drumhead would—performing it on the drumhead would make it sound too obviously like a marching-­band figure—­and which sounds quieter and more restrained. The sense of restraint is enhanced by the “empty” beat four. It would seem from what follows that this rim-­shot motive is intended to work in two ways. First, we are meant to hear it precisely as what Western music theory calls a motive—that is, as something constituting an idea, possessing a profile, capable of generating material: not yet a hook, perhaps, but nevertheless standing out against its background. As such it gives listeners the sense that every element is pulling its own weight, that nothing in the song is merely conventional. Second, this motive holds back the level of energy so that the chorus (which introduces the snare on two and four) still seems grand, as it ought to, despite the density of the introduction and first verse. The rim-­shot motive may be unusual and compelling, but in the song’s context it’s almost an afterthought; it’s just one of many details that shape the song and make it stand out from others of its kind.13 Inner Life’s version starts with this rim-­shot motive in the foreground [track 3.1]. Adams transforms it in ways that are useful to describe, but we should first acknowledge the simple fact that he selects this feature for emphasis—that he even finds it in the texture of the original version. The use of the rim-­shot motive in the introduction to this version can teach us a lot about disco as a genre: how songs create form, how the genre’s prime responsibility as dance music is fulfilled, something about how hearing and memory work. It also demonstrates disco’s flexible handling of voices and instruments. Disco’s stratified arrangements authorize textures in which any voice, instrument, or other sound can come to the fore and recede. An element can serve almost any function—the genre doesn’t predetermine its role. As in funk, an element’s genre associations and timbral qualities help determine its function. But disco operates more freely, playing with and against these associations and qualities to create new configurations that change over the course of a song. This approach not only encourages variety, it also facilitates the creation of larger structures that work against a song’s sectional divisions. Consider Adams’s appropriation of the rim-­shot motive. Again, it’s interesting that Adams zeroed in on this detail even though it lay buried in the texture of the original song. His appropriation also makes us wonder how recognizable the rim-­shot motive is intended to be and what recognition would do for a listener. (How, we might ask, does recognition of this 144  •   C h a p t e r T h r e e

motive resemble and differ from recognition of the song’s chorus?) The use of hidden details has served at least one clear function, historically, in the remakes of successful records. It is a way of communicating musician-­to-­ musician, a form of homage but also an assertion of one’s competence to redo the original song.14 Adams’s appropriation of the rim-­shot motive goes beyond communication with the original song, however, because he makes his transformed version of the motive do actual work. This itself tells us something about the sorts of hearing disco cultivates. The idea of listening deeply into a song’s texture is basic to disco. We normally associate this kind of listening with DJs and other remix specialists, but it is just as critical to performance, arrangement, and production. In any phase of the production process, someone can add or emphasize a detail and assign it an important function. Many of the best remixes foreground a detail that might have gone unnoticed in the original mix and use it to create a hook or to provide continuity across textural changes. An engineer like Jimmy Simpson knew how to sculpt a bass drum’s timbre so the whole arrangement acquired a special liveliness.15 You can also hear Jocelyn Brown reshaping phonemes, changing her placement, and using glottal stops in response to an instrument’s timbral features.16 Disco dancers respond to such features as well: hearing connects with moving in disco. The fine details that appear on disco records can often be imagined as provoking specific bodily responses. You might put a dip in your hip when you hear movement across the stereo field, doublings of a percussion part, changes in a reverb patch, swells, and so on.17 But what is most distinctive to disco in this regard is the way that certain musical details can be heard as capable of animating the whole structure. Disco’s people develop an ear for the kind of detail that can generate this power.18 The transformed rim-­shot motive works as such a detail, but its realization takes a collaborative effort. Adams rediscovers and reorchestrates the motive and places it in a stratified arrangement. He uses the motive in certain sections of the song and not others, and he seems to make a point of excluding it from the verse, which is precisely where it had appeared in the original version. Larry Levan’s remix may be responsible for the motive’s prominence at the beginning of the song, however, and for the roles it plays later on.19 What Adams does initially is quite clever. He reorchestrates the motive by removing it from the snare drum and reassigning it to synthesizer and electric guitar.20 The use of the synthesizer obscures the motive’s marching band or military associations. Switching the rhythmic motive over to the synthesizer also detaches it completely from the snare drum’s function of articulating E xc h a ng e T h eor i e s: Di sco   •   145

beat two, freeing this motive to perform different functions and combine with other elements.21 The song takes advantage of this freedom by building an unusual arrangement around the motive. First, the arrangement compels us to notice this motive by keeping things sparse: all you hear for the first forty seconds is the synthesizer playing the motive, the guitar, and the congas, plus sparse, quiet high-­hat and tambourine parts.22 Jocelyn Brown’s voice then enters, ad-­libbing on the original song (none of whose material we’ve heard, unless you count the rhythmic motive). The texture doesn’t begin to fill up until about one minute and twenty seconds in. We may sense we’re noticing the synthesizer part perhaps more than we should: it probably ought to be buried in the texture.23 The guitar part shows respect for the synthesizer, however. The guitar mostly doubles the synthesizer’s fixed motive an octave lower but also plays between iterations of it, thereby creating a kind of call-­ and-­response scheme with the synthesizer.24 The guitar’s responses fall into a four-­measure pattern, so they sound more variable than the one-­measure synth motive, perhaps somewhat improvisatory. The guitarist also creates a bit of additional nuance by changing his articulation as he repeats this part. Something’s therefore odd about the guitar part: it establishes itself as an independent entity by means of its responses to the motive, but it nevertheless doubles the rigid synthesizer motive three out of every four times; even its responses give the sense that it’s taking its cue from the synth.25 But why does the song want to trade on the synth part? A disco song’s investment in individual elements can lead to stratified textures and to forms that work against conventional sectional divisions.26 These textural and formal principles depend on each other: disco creates form by means of changing textures (bringing strata in and out), while its expansive forms facilitate the varied presentation of notably heterogeneous strata. One should emphasize that stratified textures work dialectically in groove-­oriented music like disco: stratification’s principle of independent, heterogeneous strands relies on, and must contend with, an already existing groove—someone at the mixing board intervenes after the groove has been constructed. It’s premised on the solidity of a groove whose individual parts are there to be separated out. Indeed the stratification principle might not have emerged were it not for musical practices in which grooves could stand on their own, and the consequent openness about what was necessary and sufficient for a song. (This has interesting implications for a genre like new wave, in which groove-­making isn’t second nature. Disco’s use of stratification is also quite different from 146  •   C h a p t e r T h r e e

AOR’s, which derives conceptually from the autonomy of each band member: rock’s stratified textures are normally more static than disco’s, and their strata aren’t expected to interlock as tightly as in groove-­oriented genres.) The nature and impact of disco’s stratified textures will require further attention, particularly with reference to the mixing board’s role. But it’s important also to note the kinds of individual part that encourage this textural strategy. In a funk song, a single detail might be heard to animate the whole, but it would do so in a manner reminiscent of the central “bell pattern” in West African drumming: not just as a point of reference for the other parts, but as the heartbeat. It would be at the center of a network that incorporates all of the texture’s elements. Disco works more flexibly, investing in details that don’t seem to demand it, that remain aloof from other elements, and that come and go; a sense of arbitrariness can hang over the selection of a detail for emphasis in a disco song.27 Here the synthetic timbre and static quality of the synthesizer’s one-­note part make it stand out from everything else. It sounds mechanical, automatic, and therefore, (1) like it has its own power source, independent of whatever momentum the guitar, congas, and voice establish; (2) like it requires no human effort; (3) like it can go on forever. This detail provides its own kind of energy, its own sense of time, its own affective quality. For all these reasons the synthesizer part forces a stratified texture to emerge. The stratified texture both preserves and transforms the original song’s rim-­shot motive, creating an unusual arrangement in the process. Although it’s unusual, this arrangement is characteristic of disco in two related ways. It makes a place for variation, which helps to establish a contrast between a changing figure and a relatively static ground; and it uses what one might almost call the “humanity” of the electric guitar part to form a bridge between the synthesizer and the improvising voice (which soon enters this sparse texture), thereby creating a contrast between the human and the mechanical. These two related thematic categories—figure↔ground, human↔mechanical—give meaning to many of disco’s musical practices. Subtle details of performance, arrangement, and production can become available to an audience when they are understood in light of such thematic paradigms. The effect of an element’s coming forward and receding, or of a vocal part’s comporting itself first rigidly and then flexibly, comes about thanks to a number of musical (and sometimes verbal) effects. Disco works with these sorts of contrast without rendering them as binary oppositions— these thematic categories are continua. All parameters are variable in disco: the mixing board is disco’s master trope. E xc h a ng e T h eor i e s: Di sco   •   147

In disco’s prehistory the figure↔ground contrast emerges as an opposition between a voice up front and a percussion backdrop. Percussion serves as ground because its parts form a tightly interlocking structure that exists apart from the song’s melodic-­harmonic material, and because these parts usually emphasize constancy and repetition (although they can incorporate improvisation and variation). The voice is our focus—a human figure in the landscape, perhaps solitary, perhaps surrounded by a chorus of subsidiary figures.28 In mature disco this image retains some of its authority, even as voices can serve many functions and percussion can occupy the foreground. A disco song can make use of these cultural associations by presenting the figure↔ground theme as a clear contrast; but the very same song can subvert these associations by bringing things in and out unpredictably or by making an element serve a surprising function. Either way this thematic category of figure↔ground helps to make meaning. Such thematic play gives a sense of what kinds of information disco songs convey and of how they convey it. We can see, too, that disco’s performers, arrangers, producers, and DJs must work hard to convey these subtleties to its audiences—who may demonstrate their grasp of such subtleties exclusively on the dance floor. Indeed the figure↔ground contrast has contributed to the image of disco as repetitive, when critics focus on the static aspect of the ground and neglect how it changes and what occurs on top of it, and to the genre’s reputation for histrionics, when listeners hear the solitary vocalist ad-­libbing without acknowledging her role in a complex economy. Disco makes both sides of the contrast important, however, and disco songs construct landscapes too varied to be reduced to a fixed opposition between figure and ground.29 The thematic category of human↔mechanical plays an equally important role on the dance floor while being subject to the same kinds of misunderstanding. Some critics reduce this contrast to voice versus synthesizer and associate it exclusively with Eurodisco; it occurs in every disco subgenre, however. More importantly the contrast can emerge in any domain or combination of domains, and any element of a song’s texture can be called upon to represent either side of the contrast. Synthesizers are often used to convey a mechanical quality, but they might equally be programmed, played, and processed in such a way as to create the human touch: Inner Life’s version of “Ain’t No Mountain High Enough” assigns the original rim-­shot motive to the synthesizer partly to give it a mechanical feel, but the song also features a long synthesizer solo that sounds both futuristic and conventionally expressive. Robotic voices can repeat a catchphrase ad infinitum. It’s typical 148  •   C h a p t e r T h r e e

as well that rhythm-­g uitar parts and bass lines are constructed to embody both human and mechanical feels by switching from a highly syncopated figure, say, to something resolutely on the beat.30 This thematic category, too, can be rendered not only as an opposition but as a continuum: disco songs often contain a range of feels from absolute freedom to perfect rigidity.31 Again, these thematic categories, and others, like the tension between African American and European-­derived musical practices, are realized variably—­they are not subject to one-­to-­one mappings that hold good for an entire song: just as the presentation of individual details and conventions will change across the length of a song, so too do changes happen at the meta-­level of what these conventions and details mean. Our understanding of the synth motive’s functions benefits from having these thematic configurations in mind. Some of the song’s particularity derives from the way that the synth part seems to be pushed too far into the foreground; some has to do with the way that the guitar, the voice, and other elements try to converse with the synth despite (or because of ) its mechanical quality. If we define the notion of the groove minimally as a short, repeated unit, played by the rhythm section, that provokes a beat-­ acknowledging comportment, we can ask what sort of groove emerges around the synth part. The groove is often characterized as a perfectly interlocking mechanism, like clockwork, or a “walking ‘arm in arm.’ ”32 But good grooves—grooves that succeed on the dance floor, grooves that musicians imitate or sample—seem to have an element that creates friction, that resists the flow.33 Funk songs can make the juttings out quite obvious so that the groove’s stability is really threatened, but in disco the friction is more often generated by an element that doesn’t quite fit. The synthesizer motive is a typical example: it has a rhythmic feel that makes it different from the other elements; its timbre doesn’t blend in; and of course it seems to be stuck on a single idea. It’s equally typical that the synth motive isn’t hung out to dry: not only do the performers try to converse with the synthesizer, but the song’s arrangement and production work to expand the motive’s possibilities. Adams withdraws the motive once the texture has filled out and doesn’t bring it back until the song’s break (starting at 5:17). When it returns, Adams has it jump from left to right in the stereo field every eighth note, which changes its rhythmic profile, helps to create a sense of space, and may serve as a hook.34 The motive appears here against a long-­note melody in the French horn, a clavinet playing the chord progression, and a reduced percussion arrangement consisting only of a tambourine and a high-­hat that E xc h a ng e T h eor i e s: Di sco   •   149

mostly doubles the motive. The melody and chord progression recontextualize the motive, making it function as a rhythmic response (where before it functioned as a call against the guitar’s response), and emphasizing its role as a tonic pedal.35 These touches show that the motive is working and being worked; it changes the groove and the groove changes around it. The motive influences the form in several ways. Its appearance, disappearance, and reappearance become major structural markers: these moments do just as much to determine the form as do occurrences of the verse and the chorus (which we hear only twice each and not at all in the last two-­thirds of the song). It’s worth noting that about 65 percent of this version repeats a four-­measure progression that derives very obliquely, if at all, from the original song—this is the material that first enters at around 1:21. In such a formal economy, the changing synth motive gives the listener an additional thread to follow. This structure exists in a productive tension with other determinants of the form; this is so particularly because the original song’s verse and chorus arrive late and leave early, creating uncertainty about what will happen next. The use of the motive also affects the song’s danceability. Dancers experiencing the opening should feel that the sparse texture is sufficient for now: we are given cues that the texture will grow and change, and we therefore listen both in the moment and beyond it.36 Disco rewards attention to time in a way that AOR and new wave may not. Its breaks and builds, changing textures, and repeating four-­bar grooves generate forms that acquire meaning on the dance floor: these forms ebb and flow in relation to a dancer’s particular ear, physicality, comportment, and endurance. Such developments happen in real time, or one could say in lived time. But this sense of time interacts with other temporalities in disco: narrative time, the time of conventional song-­forms, the time of memory, clock time, the time it takes for a generic signal or cultural reference to do its work, the temporalities of desire, and so on. Like its stratified textures (and partly by means of them), a disco song’s temporalities are layered and variable: seemingly incompatible senses of time can be presented simultaneously, and an individual stratum may speed up, slow down, or change valence. Inner Life’s “Ain’t No Mountain High Enough” reflects this complex temporality. Part of what 60s Motown signifies in disco is the capacity to tell stories, to persuade, to convey emotion through conventional pop song-­ structures. Jocelyn Brown really preaches. Her ad-­libbing in the introduction makes you sense the narrative flow: the lyrics talk of constancy (“I’ll be here waiting”), but her discourse unfolds in time and there’s no going back. The 150  •   C h a p t e r T h r e e

original “Ain’t No Mountain High Enough” contains a bit of narration, but more than telling a story it presents characters trading vows, making something happen. (A vow seeks to stop the flow of time, but as a performative utterance it effects a change of state.) So the song’s lyrics make you witness a drama as it unfolds. In Inner Life’s version, you might sense this drama as unfolding brokenly or in the past, because the lyrics seldom appear in their original guises—they’re more often sung to improvised melodies—and they share time with longer instrumental passages. A disco song’s treatment of conventional forms affects one’s experience of its multitemporality, whether these conventions are underscored or subverted. Disco musicians learn from Motown’s precise articulation of the distinctions among verse, chorus, and bridge (as everybody should—nowhere are these conventions better realized). In Inner Life’s “Ain’t No Mountain High Enough,” as in many Motown-­influenced disco songs, the movement between sections is handled with respect: a verse, chorus, bridge, or break always begins with a textural change that makes it easier to hear and that underscores its basic nature. Disco also responds in interesting ways to Motown’s strategy of packing as much information as possible into the pop song’s confines. One thing disco gets from Philly Soul is the belief that Motown’s density of material demanded longer lengths and a more varied flow of information than Motown’s pop song-­forms allowed. It’s amusing that by the time the first chorus arrives in the Inner Life version (at 2:05), the original song would be just about over. But the Inner Life version isn’t simply longer: the sparse introduction, and particularly the emphasis on the rim-­shot motive, makes it seem like Patrick Adams has time-­stretched the original song, separating out its strands as if for analysis. As mentioned, the recognizable “Ain’t No Mountain High Enough” appears late, or only once it’s been prepared for. It also occupies a rather small proportion of the Inner Life song: 10.5–11.5 percent of the twelve-­inch version’s ten and a half minutes (not counting the use of the original lyrics with new melodies); we hear the verse and chorus from 1:43 to 2:57, and that’s about it.37 The original song might thus be heard as out of the past, or as far away, or as a fragment requiring reconstruction,38 or as at the center, or as a distant memory. In all of these hearings the Inner Life version traverses a distance in some dimension to arrive at the point at which the original song can be recognized. The introduction forms the first part of a structure wherein what follows can be heard as either closer or farther away, as happening earlier or later, as remembered more precisely or less so. This movement E xc h a ng e T h eor i e s: Di sco   •   151

through time, space, and memory can work against the stock notion of disco’s “timelessness.”39 The idea of disco’s timelessness is a hodge-­podge of formal, rhythmic, timbral, textural, and spatial effects, isolated verbal tropes, and unpredictable aspects of where it’s being spun, on what kind of system, by whom, and with what other songs as its context—not to mention where the listener is, how the listener is, and who the listener is. That this timelessness is constructed rather than “naturally occurring” hardly invalidates it as an affect, but it should encourage us to pay more attention to the ways that such timelessness interacts with disco’s other temporal effects: the “timely,”40 the moment that occurs too early or too late,41 tropes of time accelerating,42 slowing down or stopping abruptly, the sense of clock time’s inadequacy (or adequacy),43 and, here, the machine time of the synth motive. The interaction of these temporalities helps create a sense of form in disco.

Four-­on-­t he-­F loor and the Uses of Conventions The discussion of Inner Life’s “Ain’t No Mountain High Enough” has focused on one unusual feature in order to provide a picture of disco’s practices. We’ve considered conventions, some specific to disco and some derived from pop and other genres, but we haven’t dealt with one that occupies more than three-­fourths of the song: once the full drum set kicks in, we hear a brisk four-­on-­the-­floor, the bass drum on every quarter note. While it doesn’t appear in every disco song, four-­on-­the-­floor remains disco’s most recognizable convention. As such it can provide a useful way to examine how this genre treats its conventions. It goes without saying that different genres possess different conventions, but we should add that the uses and understandings of conventions vary across genres as well. How do disco, AOR, and new wave differ in their incorporation of conventions? At the risk of oversimplification one could put it this way: new wave treats conventions as a necessary evil, or attempts to ironize them, or uses them without acknowledging their status as conventions. Since both new wave and AOR inherit rock’s nervousness about conventions—part of the 60s distrust of rhetoric as such—their employment of conventions can be marked by similar sorts of defensiveness and denial. Thus, in AOR, pop’s conventions are condescended to for pop effects.44 Rock’s conventions, on the other hand, are treated in AOR as though they aren’t (merely) 152  •   C h a p t e r T h r e e

conventional: they’re accepted as the way things really are—a guitar solo or a vocalist emphasizing a high note doesn’t so much serve a function as embody real expression. Similarly, when an AOR song incorporates the conventions of progressive rock or classical music, it does so with the sense that these conventions don’t simply point to a higher cultural form: again, an AOR listener has to accept that these conventions actually embody what is elevated about these cultural forms, that they enable a song to reach these heights. Disco’s artists and audiences expect that a song’s contents will be partly conventional, and one senses no particular embarrassment over conventions. More neutrally than in AOR and new wave, a convention is simply an element of a disco song—no more, no less. Conventions have a place in disco, just as a song’s more unusual elements do. But disco requires that a song present the right convention in the right way at the right time; and among many ambitious producers a song must newly instantiate or revise a convention each time it’s employed.45 Nor can we assume that conventions do their work in the background—like voices and instruments in disco, conventions don’t have predetermined roles. A correctly realized four-­on-­ the-­floor can constitute a disco song’s raison d’être, for example. Think for a moment about the instrumental solo, a convention heard in all three genres. In AOR, as in the rock genres it comes out of, the solo is the guitar solo: yes, Mr. Wakeman, keyboardists may solo, too, but they have to make a case for themselves in a way that guitarists do not. The instrumental verse is the guitarist’s time—and not just within a particular song: it’s more like a time of day, in that an AOR guitar solo occupies a conceptual place that connects it with all other rock guitar solos.46 The AOR guitar solo is equal in expressive weight to the vocal verses—and it’s no coincidence that many AOR guitar solos became sing-­alongs (Boston’s, especially), while lyrics were often ignored (e.g., Boston’s and Heart’s).47 In new wave as well the instrumental solo is a guitar solo until proven otherwise. This is to be expected from guitar-­based rock genres, and new wave and AOR certainly start off that way. But the new-­wave group may present this convention sheepishly because the genre partly constitutes an attempt to reduce rock’s grandiosity. Although new wave doesn’t go as far as punk’s arrogance about expression—the idea that punk’s very intensity (or what it codes as intensity) guarantees its expressive force—many new wavers remain suspicious of any convention whose observance threatens a song’s distance from mainstream rock. New wave’s guitar solos can lack inspiration and even competence according to the standards of 70s rock, but new wave’s listeners understand E xc h a ng e T h eor i e s: Di sco   •   153

that these deficiencies don’t prevent a guitar solo from fulfilling its functions: the guitar solo may serve as an allusion to earlier genres like rockabilly or surf, or as an ironic deflation of rock’s conventions.48 At the same time, though, the rhetorical strategies of allusiveness and irony themselves become expected and therefore function as metaconventions without being acknowledged as such. This exemplifies the way a convention can function in new wave without musicians, critics, and audiences recognizing its conventional status.49 In disco, not only is the choice of instrument open, it may be just as important as the material this instrument plays; as in new wave, the solo is not necessarily tied to an idea of expression or the practice of improvisation.50 (By contrast, while many AOR guitar solos are hardly improvised, the image of a guitar solo’s spontaneity retains its importance.) Disco refuses to assume the instrumental solo’s distinctiveness: the solo exists within a cluster of arrangement touches that include the improvisatory melody played by a whole string section, the contrapuntal passage for several solo instruments, the repeated vamp or melodic fragment that undergoes timbral or spatial changes, and so on. Four-­on-­the-­floor, in its many guises, can illustrate disco’s use of conventions. When you listen closely, you find that four-­on-­the-­floor has a different feel, a different rhetoricity, and serves different functions depending on the tempo; the instrument’s timbral features; its miking, equalization, and stereo placement; the drummer’s touch; the textural and rhythmic contexts; and the ways this pattern is modified and departed from over the course of a song. The bass drum is quite well produced in “Ain’t No Mountain High Enough,” and all it does is present four-­on-­the-­floor. It’s somewhat interesting that the song compels the bass drum to interact with the timpani (since they too are low-­register drums that play a repeated pattern in the song). But the only thing really worth saying about the use of four-­on-­the-­floor in this song is that we don’t find ourselves talking about it; we should acknowledge that this pattern can go unnoticed. Four-­on-­the-­floor functions sometimes as an individual stratum; we could even call it the very root of stratification, because it splits up the drum set (and thus the rhythm section) and asserts the possibility that any element can present itself as independent. In this guise it can be so monotonous that it quickly falls below the threshold of our attention, as it does when it serves as an element that can’t be separated out from other parts of larger rhythmic and textural structures. Disco songs employ this convention in many ways, however. Let us look briefly at how four-­on-­the-­floor works in several other songs from the disco canon. 154  •   C h a p t e r T h r e e

Loleatta Holloway’s “Hit and Run” (1976; remixed for twelve-­inch by Walter Gibbons in January of 1977) defines itself as disco partly by presenting four-­on-­the-­floor for most of its eleven-­minute length. Because the song’s main two-­measure riff attacks the on-­beats for the first six beats in succession, four-­on-­the-­floor here seems to power this riff and thereby the whole arrangement. Like much of the output on the Salsoul family of labels, “Hit and Run” shares personnel and stylistic features (including four-­on-­the-­ floor) with danceable Philadelphia soul of ’72–’76; this song announces itself as disco—as opposed to the well-­established genre of Philly soul—largely through its willingness to actually trade on this bass-­drum pattern.51 The title, lyrics, and relaxed tempo of Cream de Coco’s “Disco Strut” (an early twelve-­inch single, recorded in 1976) naturalize the song’s use of this rhythmic pattern by connecting it to the idea of the “disco strut.” This naturalization of four-­on-­the-­floor occurs more concretely in the tastefully titled “Le Spank,” a big soul-­chart hit by Le Pampelmousse with the Jones Girls on vocals. “Le Spank” turns four-­on-­the-­floor into a viable rhythmic motive by including lyrics about “the way you clap your hands” and “stomp your feet” and then following these references with clapping or stomping (as appropriate) on every quarter note for two full measures; once you’re compelled to pay attention to this rhythmic pattern and you start to respond with your own clapping and stomping—as appropriate—you’ve given this pattern a profile, made it meaningful. This basic rhetorical sequence—asserting a conventional feature rather baldly and then calling attention to it in another textural stratum—is a fundamental way of creating meaning in disco: a feature becomes available to dancers via textural change and starts to matter when hearing and moving sync up to concretize it. But at the same time four-­on-­the-­floor can seem alienatingly mechanical or automatic, especially to non-­disco sensibilities. Sometimes it does indeed function as the clock or regulator to which the texture’s inhuman elements cohere and against which the song’s more conventionally expressive elements must compete. This approach is common in hard-­core Eurodisco; particularly good examples can be found in “Wishbone” and “Hills of Katmandu” by Italo producer Celso Valli’s studio outfit, Tantra.52 The regulative function of four-­on-­the-­floor works in other ways. It can provide stability, “compensating” for irregularity in other rhythmic domains: odd meters and changing meters (Patrick Adams, Roy Ayers, Change, Vince Montana)—one wonders whether Adams bragged about employing six-­ on-­the-­floor—irregular phrase-­lengths (Adams, Change, Edwin Birdsong), E xc h a ng e T h eor i e s: Di sco   •   155

and varied harmonic rhythm (Adams, Leroy Burgess). Four-­on-­the-­floor can also sound all-­too-­human, however, especially when a less than perfect drummer struggles to produce this pattern at a quick tempo (faster than 130 beats per minute, say) for the entire length of a long song, as in El Coco’s “Cocomotion.” Sometimes four-­on-­the-­floor provides disco’s producers and engineers with a challenge. A song like “Keep on Dancing” by Gary’s Gang, which came into being at least partly in order to test producer Eric Matthew’s new studio, presents the four-­on-­the-­floor pattern, innocently enough, as but the first of many strata to enter the song’s texture. But in the percussion-­rich soundscape—Gary (Turnier) was a drummer—the quality of percussion sounds becomes important, and we start to hear the bass-­drum pattern partly as an assertion of the song’s high production values. The pattern’s rhetoricity is therefore something like “even four-­on-­the-­floor can justify your attention; if this element can withstand scrutiny, any element can.” The song’s other elements are thus forced to work harder. Dan Hartman’s “Vertigo/ Relight My Fire” provides a more extreme example of this timbral economy. We know from interviews that “Vertigo/Relight My Fire” was built up from a commanding bass-­drum sound that itself derived from the bass drum in another disco song—Ashford and Simpson’s “Found a Cure,” engineered by Jimmy Simpson.53 The bass drum in “Found a Cure” was taken as a challenge by Hartman and John Luongo, who mixed the song. The bass-­drum sound they created in response then worked as a major determinant of their song’s arrangement and production, according to Luongo: the bass drum became “so big and tough” that they had to make things “bigger and bigger” in order to compete with it.54 The bass drum here makes four-­on-­the-­floor function as a hook, precisely because it stands out against other realizations of this convention.55 The range of these examples shows again how the refusal to predetermine an element’s function can keep disco interesting—and we needn’t say “despite the use of conventional materials.” Conventions aren’t merely convenient in disco. (This includes metaconventions, which are equally subject to obsolescence or upheaval, and equally capable of existing above or below the radar.) They’re the basic proteins everything’s built up from, responsible for the foreground as well as the background, the poetry as much as the prose. Nothing about disco seeks to disguise this. What matters is the way individual songs pick them up, examine them from different angles, reshape them or present them as objets trouvés, and place them in odd constellations. 156  •   C h a p t e r T h r e e

Disco can render conventions cold and inassimilable, or it can make them appear as if they’ve arisen in response to some real need.

Disco’s Conventions in New Wave Disco’s flexible use of conventions justified a look at four-­on-­the-­floor across several songs. While one might take the same approach to new wave and post-­punk, one would notice similarities more clearly than differences. It’s not that new wave doesn’t present four-­on-­the-­floor. You can hear this pattern in a broad range of new-­wave and post-­punk songs: Blondie’s “Atomic,” the Buzzcocks’ “Fiction Romance” and “Autonomy,” the Clash’s “Lost in the Supermarket,” Delta 5’s “Mind Your Own Business,” OMD’s “Messages,” the Police’s “De Do Do Do, De Da Da Da” and “Driven to Tears” (though not in its ponderous, sloppy chorus), the Pop Group’s “We Are All Prostitutes” and “Feed the Hungry,” the Pretenders’ “Private Life,” Souxsie and the Banshees’ “Hong Kong Gardens,” Stiff Little Fingers’ “Tin Soldiers,” U2’s “I Will Follow” and “A Day without You,” X’s “Nausea” and “The Unheard Music,” James White and the Blacks’ “Contort Yourself,” Wire’s “I Am the Fly,” basically everything on Pylon’s Gyrate, and the occasional song by Adam Ant, the Associates, the B-­52s, Dramarama, Ian Dury, Gang of Four, Gruppo Sportivo, Joy Division, Public Image Ltd., Simple Minds, Talking Heads,56 and XTC, among many others. One doesn’t find the same variety among presentations of this pattern in new wave, however. This is partly because four-­on-­the-­floor is disco’s convention and not new wave’s, but also because disco’s musical practices make a place for exploring four-­on-­the-­floor: new wave comes mostly from rock, ultimately, and its rock sources do not develop disco’s formal openness and use of the break, its stratified textures in which any element can leap into the foreground, or its focus on percussion instruments (and how their timbres are shaped through the recording process). Disco’s and new wave’s varying uses of four-­on-­the-­floor reflect more fundamental differences. Because conventions like four-­on-­the-­floor are accepted without a fuss in disco, musicians can focus on how a convention is being used—hence the friendly competition and multiplicity of functions described above. Even when the borrowed conventions derive from other genres, disco songs tend to invest them with a sense of particularity. New wave’s musicians, on the other hand, have to think more about whether a convention is employed than of how. It’s important to repeat that E xc h a ng e T h eor i e s: Di sco   •   157

new wave’s aura of unconventionality does not translate into a sparing use of conventions. Four-­on-­the-­floor is just one example of an often-­used convention that derives from a non-­rock genre. Shared conventions like drum fills and guitar solos appear as frequently as they do in other, more mainstream rock genres. But four-­on-­the-­floor can be attacked without vigor, the drum fills can sound obligatory,57 and when we hear the guitar solo it may seem like nobody wants to play it and no one needs to hear it. The realization of conventions in new wave retains a quality of generality that contrasts with the sense of particularity one hears in disco.58 Many conventions, especially those that come from beyond rock, operate in new wave like they’re controlled by on/off switches: a song either includes four-­on-­the-­floor or it doesn’t. I have already suggested that rock’s conventions are considered a necessary evil in new wave, or they are ironized; the basic sense is that conventions lie outside what matters about a new wave song unless they are troped upon. As in many rock subgenres, if conventions aren’t somehow subverted, they are below the level of reflection or considered unimportant. Since new wave prizes individuality and unconventionality, we should expect that it handles rock’s and pop’s conventions at arm’s length. But as I’ve said in relation to guitar solos, new wave artists seem not always to understand that this approach can reinscribe conventionality at the meta-­level— that there emerge conventionally ironic or parodic stances that every new wave artist is expected to take. This condition occurs frequently in putatively alternative or experimental genres: a hypersensitivity to the conventions of other genres along with a blindness to the ways that its own practices begin to congeal into conventions. If you want to determine how conventions function, you may have to listen carefully to elements about which artists and audiences keep silent. So why would a new-­wave song incorporate four-­on-­the-­floor? There are three reasons unrelated to disco that we ought to note quickly. First, at tempi faster than 140 beats per minute, four-­on-­the-­floor can start to recall surf and hot-­rod music more than disco, at least in guitar-­based songs59—surf and hot-­rod occasionally present four-­on-­the-­floor. (This approach is by no means exclusive of disco, however: in a kind of musical pun, new-­wave songs like Blondie’s “Atomic” can use four-­on-­the-­floor as a way to combine the conventions of disco with those of early-­60s rock instrumentals.) Second, four-­on-­the-­floor sometimes appears in new wave because it’s easy for an untrained drummer to play. It provides a simple solution for amateur drummers who have problems with the independence of their hands and feet.60 158  •   C h a p t e r T h r e e

When weak drummers play four-­on-­the-­floor, the presentation seldom rises to the level of a “disco strut;” but many new-­wave songs that include four-­ on-­the-­floor for its ease of execution also incorporate some of disco’s other conventions. And third, four-­on-­the-­floor can work affectively, providing a dirge-­like feel at slower tempi, as in the X examples mentioned above, or a military topos, as in the Stiff Little Fingers song.61 It is disco’s popularity and frequent use of four-­on-­the-­floor that determine the meanings of this convention in new wave, however; the prominence of this convention in disco can trump new-­wave musicians’ intentions. Whatever roles four-­on-­the-­floor can play within disco, outside of disco it functions as what Alastair Fowler calls a generic signal:62 it’s a feature so immediately indicative of disco, and so often heard at beginnings of disco songs, that when it appears in other genres—especially during disco’s golden age—it works as a generic allusion to disco.63 More significantly it provides a point of entry for other conventions and practices associated with disco. Blondie’s “Atomic” and the Clash’s “Lost in the Supermarket” demonstrate how this sort of borrowing can work. Both songs confirm the connection between disco and four-­on-­the-­floor by presenting a break that emphasizes percussion.64 The bass players in both songs get a bit frisky, taking advantage of the thinned-­out, groove-­oriented texture of the break. While the bassists’ improvisatory approach and somewhat gooey feel aren’t quite appropriate for disco, they show that the musicians are responding to disco’s convention of putting the bass line in the foreground. The bass’s independence from the rest of the arrangement, along with the relative autonomy of four-­on-­the-­ floor, also re-­create disco’s stratified textures; stratification itself becomes important in new wave, as we will see. Four-­on-­the-­floor signals disco and provides a means of exchange between disco and new wave. New wave’s borrowings from disco can illustrate the point made initially, following Mauss, that when genres engage in trade, they share not only materials but methods of exchange. A new-­wave song  that borrows four-­on-­the-­floor thereby acquires disco’s tendency toward stratified textures. By separating instruments that the typical rock rhythm section binds together, stratification allows a new-­wave song to incorporate material from other genres. “Not Great Men,” a Gang of Four song released in 1979 (at disco’s commercial height), demonstrates how new wave adopts this practice. The song clearly belongs to new wave. Many features tell us as much—the lyrics, the insouciant vocal melody (which mostly just oscillates between pitches a major second apart), the singers’ rough timbres, and E xc h a ng e T h eor i e s: Di sco   •   159

the trebly guitar sounds—even if we don’t know the group and haven’t seen the cover art. Although it establishes itself as new wave, “Not Great Men” borrows extensively from disco.65 In addition to four-­on-­the-­floor (which disappears after the song’s introduction), you hear enhanced drum sounds, processed hand-­claps, a bass line that emphasizes the tonic and the lowered seventh degree,66 creative mixing, and stratified textures. The hand-­claps, like four-­on-­the-­floor, function as a generic signal—when they enter during the song’s break (1:42), the disco associations become unmistakable. The use of stratified textures in “Not Great Men,” provoked by four-­on-­ the-­floor, seems to justify the hand-­claps and other features that derive from disco. (Disco originates, extends, or raises the expressive value of many means for enriching the percussion soundscape in recorded music: the enhanced snare drum; the big bass drum—and more generally the differentiation of percussion instruments from one another through mic placement, equalization, reverberation, gain, and stereo placement; the use of percussion instruments beyond those of the standard drum set; the mixture of acoustic and electronic percussion instruments.) Stratification and creative mixing also ­affect the song’s treatment of new wave’s conventional materials: the ways that the guitar tracks are punched in and out owes more to disco’s remixing than to rock’s image of the guitarist. Most interesting, though, is the way that stratified textures encourage the use of material from other genres. A melodica appears during the song’s introduction. The way it enters, coasting in over the drums, makes sense as part of a stratified texture. But the melodica itself has nothing to do with disco. Nor can it appear in new wave without justification. It’s associated with dub reggae, which feeds into new wave, but its appearance in a new-­wave song would normally demand several other features that work in concert with dub reggae; as Mimi Haddon notes, these features wouldn’t need to include a “rocksteady-­style bass line and . . . offbeat ‘skank’ in the rhythm guitar,” but they would likely involve the heightened use of “echo and delay.”67 Here, the melodica is used in a manner more consistent with disco’s intermittent keyboard pads, in a texture that’s not notably echoey. Because it floats a major tonic chord into the prevailing minor-­mode context, however, the melodica resists incorporation: it stands as an intruder from another genre. Stratified textures opened things up for new-­wave bands, as the me­ lodica’s surprising entrance and quick disappearance in “Not Great Men” begin to show. Disco’s stratified textures may have appeared so frequently in new wave because they authorized arrangements in which any voice, 160  •   C h a p t e r T h r e e

instrument, or other sound could come to the fore and recede. In disco, as we’ve noted, this approach operated as a means for variety within songs; it also facilitated the development of larger structures that could work against a song’s sectional divisions. In new wave (both danceable and not), the layered approach provided solutions to both practical and aesthetic problems. On the practical side, stratification eased the accommodation of band members with different skill levels and musical backgrounds, one of whom might be a drum machine—hey, if you were a musician in the 80s, some of your best friends were drum machines.68 The punk heritage allowed that anyone could be in a band, but in new wave anyone meant anyone—even machines, even highly competent musicians.69 X’s “Nausea” contains not only four-­on-­the-­floor (as mentioned above), but also a blanket of producer Ray Manzarek’s Hammond organ. It is not just the Hammond’s timbre and genre associations that make the organ part stand out as an independent stratum: it’s former Door Manzarek’s routine rock competence, a kind of ability that seems quite out of place. (Manzarek’s decision to join the band in the studio reminds one in retrospect of the way that Ry Cooder stripes his average guitar playing across seemingly every song on The Buena Vista Social Club—one gets the identical sense of an older rock musician forgetting his producer’s scruples because he couldn’t resist an urge to sit in with the locals.) Many new-­wave bands show this sort of spike in competence—up, if the band incorporates a musician with another genre’s pedigree, or down, when it includes a nonmusical friend or relative.70 But the band members’ ability to blend together musically was not thought to determine the group’s overall skill level, particularly with regard to the New York groups. New wave’s diversity often manifested itself in this way: every instrumental and vocal part might reflect the stylistic biases of whoever (or whatever) performed it; in a stratified texture, each of these parts might remain distinct. The genre mixing in new wave derived, more literally than in disco, from the tastes and backgrounds of individual band members. This direct mapping of a musician’s “thing” onto one of a song’s stylistic elements in a stratified texture became the central principle animating the early-­80s projects of New York producers like David Byrne and Bill Laswell.71 These sessions would bring together musicians from diverse backgrounds and place them in a minimally determined framework; layered textures would often result whether the finished product emphasized the live jam session or studio artifice. Another practical result of the stratification principle had to do precisely with new wave’s relation to the recording studio. Once new wave started to E xc h a ng e T h eor i e s: Di sco   •   161

incorporate layered textures, a song’s individual elements would no longer “naturally” cohere, either in live performance or in the studio. New wave’s musicians didn’t normally develop the sixth sense for creating coherent rhythm arrangements that was expected in genres like soul and disco. The threat of a song’s becoming a potpourri made the techniques and strategies of multitrack recording a more urgent necessity; a superordinate science was required to shape the individual elements into some kind of whole. The layered approach provided a reason to use the studio (and, significantly, a reason capable of deflecting comparisons with rock’s concept albums). Stratified textures taught new wavers what disco’s and AOR’s musicians already knew: that the studio could function as an instrument, as a way to make ideas—and hooks—go further. It could also provide a respite from the rock & roll lifestyle, from the demands of gigging, and from the visual dimension of live performance.72 In aesthetic terms stratified textures broke new wave’s punk frame. The layered approach and its realization in the studio represented a shift in new wave’s economy, moving it away from live performance and from the conception of the record as a document of live performance. This shift complicated the idea of the recording process as either transparent or corrupt; it also displaced the notion of an unmediated connection between artists and audiences. The realization of layered textures in the studio compromised punk’s ideal of spontaneity insofar as this realization took time and required new skills. New wave could no longer be unselfconsciously do-­it-­yourself; a band would either gain the necessary skills or employ someone who had them. In either case, the skills a band started out with didn’t suffice—­another departure from the punk aesthetic. Stratification also pushed instrumentalists and vocalists to contribute something distinctive to a song’s texture. This individuation promoted a sense of equality among a song’s instrumental parts and in so doing implied that the voice’s preeminence couldn’t be assumed. As mentioned, the use of disco’s layered textures enabled instrumental sounds and techniques associated with disco to appear with regularity in new wave: independent bass lines emphasizing the lowered seventh scale-­degree,73 sharper rhythm guitar playing, a more varied percussion palette. These techniques embody different musical values. We begin to hear the groove as self-­sufficient, and the hook as designed to stand out against this (more or less continuous) groove; this is true particularly for timbral hooks, which grow more and more common. Textural change becomes a formal determinant and any element can 162  •   C h a p t e r T h r e e

come to the fore. A greater emphasis on these values enhances new wave’s potential for moving away from guitar-­based approaches (even if this potential is not always fulfilled). Stratification also facilitates the exploration of dissonant harmonies; especially in “no wave,” dissonance itself becomes coded as personality, bound up with a subject’s departure from convention.74 When arbitrariness becomes an important cultural value in later new wave, stratification can assist in its realization. Our discussion of four-­on-­the-­floor has led us to think about stratification as a general principle in new wave. It’s not only that new-­wave songs routinely approach disco without presenting four-­on-­the-­floor: disco’s practices of stratification help keep new wave flexible, give it ways to grow, and thereby extend its life as a genre. Many new-­wave artists made moves into disco-­influenced dance music around 1978–1982—not coincidentally when disco was at its height and just after. This included the Au Pairs, Cabaret Voltaire, Joe Jackson, Japan, Martha and the Muffins, Yello—even the Buzzcocks in a song like “Are Everything”—and almost all of the groups cited above as employing four-­on-­ the-­floor.75 In an interesting development, the spinoffs, solo work, and side projects of many new-­wave and punk groups’ members made the disco/dance turn in the early 80s: musicians from the B-­52s, the Buzzcocks, the Clash, Gang of Four, Joy Division, the Lounge Lizards, the Pop Group, Public Image Ltd. (and thus the Sex Pistols), the Specials, Suicide, Talking Heads, U2, XTC, and others. The sheer volume of these lists, and the stylistic breadth they reveal, should tell us that something was going on. New wave’s borrowings from disco follow three basic tendencies. There are serious attempts at dance music, usually with a strong electronic component; disco can also be signaled for affective reasons, whether the aim is irony, camp, or parody or reflects genuine sentiment; and disco often becomes the frame when the instrumentalists in a new-­wave group, having acquired some facility, want to play harder, better, or funkier (or want to relax, experiment, mess around in an idiom that’s comfortably distant from their home genre). These three strands overlap but should be understood as separate; in particular the goal of making dance music can be pursued without a musicianly interest in groove-­oriented or funky playing, as the later history of electronic dance music makes clear. The Gang of Four can reveal the whole drift of these borrowings from disco, which, I want to say, all depend on the practices of stratification. Songs like “I Love a Man in Uniform,” “Call Me Up,” and “Is It Love” are designed to function as dance music, and they incorporate elements of disco E xc h a ng e T h eor i e s: Di sco   •   163

that help them do so. The percussion soundscapes are layered and highly differentiated: particular sounds jump out of the texture—sometimes because of changing reverb and equalization patches—provoking moment-­ to-­moment responses from dancers; instruments come and go, creating breaks and builds that contribute to the songs’ forms.76 As their function and materials suggest, these songs use stratified textures in disco’s manner. More surprisingly the uses of disco as irony/sentiment and as an outlet for effort/relaxation also rely on stratification. As a matter of historical fact, by the end of 1979 new wave’s irony requirement was as often fulfilled by implying and subverting danceable grooves as by lampooning rock’s conventions. Gang of Four often played with the functionality-­nonfunctionality of grooves, as in “Paralysed.” The ironic dimension of the band’s approach to disco has a lot to do with their lyrics, of course—it’s common across popular music genres to parodize in the lyrics but be dead serious in the music and performance, so it shouldn’t surprise us when a song like “At Home He’s a Tourist” contains sarcastic references to “the disco floor” while at the same time seeking to work as dance music. But expanding on disco’s employment of the anomalous element in a stratified texture, new-­wave songs commonly produced ironic effects by forcing an undanceable element to stand alone or by allowing it to sabotage the groove. Stratification also aids in Gang of Four’s presentation of sentiment: the impact of singer Jon King’s earnestly torchy style (beginning with Solid Gold, the group’s second album) depends on the swirl of things coming in and out around him and on the sense of indifference to the singer these stratified textures can convey. That his singing could itself be subject to the mixing board’s rough justice adds to its vulnerability. The stratification regime thus makes space for the emotional weight of King’s singing but also adds a critical dimension, as it does with the sugary backing vocals of “I Love a Man in Uniform” and “Is It Love” (which might otherwise sound too broad and old-­timey). Disco was also a more reasonable vehicle for King’s attempts at soulful expression than soul, funk, reggae, or a pastiched Motown style—all of which the band likely preferred to disco—because disco’s stratified textures could more easily deal with a not-­conventionally-­soulful singer. The Gang of Four provide a perfect example of a post-­punk group working to groove harder, to build a groove that stands on its own. This ties into stratification as well, because stratified textures render all instruments more individuated and (potentially) equally capable of providing power: like it does in disco the possibility of foregrounding individual strands raises the stakes for each player and 164  •   C h a p t e r T h r e e

singer—rewarding precision, revealing mistakes, etc. And as I’ve suggested, new wave’s recording practices become more high-­tech, contributing to the separation of elements in the mix. Stratification can therefore accommodate differences in competence, interest, and energy among band members moving beyond their home genre. But disco’s practice of stratification operates as well in less danceable Gang of Four songs.77 This was true across new wave, especially among groups whose output is mostly danceable or electronically oriented. We’ve noted how the aesthetic import of stratification lies in the way it reshapes the form and nature of the song and allows any element to come to the fore or perform a surprising function. But here we see another crucial lineament of disco’s stratified textures: that they spread to other genres, where they became the structural means for musical approaches that had nothing to do with dance and sometimes little connection with traditional soul, pop, and rock songwriting. Freed from disco’s triple commitment to dance music, soul, and pop, detached from a tradition that placed the grooving rhythm section at its conceptual center, stratification provided a script for the development of electronically informed songs emphasizing attitude, mood, or ambiance (playing an important role in the music we call “ambient”); of music that sought to mix new styles and technologies with older ones; and of a hook-­making practice based on found objects (a practice predating but including the use of digital sampling). Early on, following the record industry crash of late 1979, disco’s capacity to make songs out of seemingly nothing, to hold new and old in suspension, and to find hooks where none seemed to be helped new-­wave artists enhance their commercial possibilities, especially in Great Britain. Aesthetically this led in many directions, producing genres, and modes of generic mixture, at an unprecedented rate.

Effects of Exchange between Genres So without disco, new wave might not have perpetuated itself beyond its initial cultural moment. We should put ourselves in the grip of this ­doubly contingent sequence of historical occurrences: the emergence of the metaconvention of stratification (as an accidental product of aesthetic, technological, and institutional factors) in a Black dance-­music genre, and its subsequent effect on an oppositional rock genre (as a “means or method of exchange” acquired accidentally in the circulation of musical materials). E xc h a ng e T h eor i e s: Di sco   •   165

New wave needed something, because when an oppositional genre’s sounds and techniques start to appear in the mainstream, its oppositional force— and thus its identity—is greatly compromised. Stratification allowed new wave to not only keep itself going, but to affect other genres, including disco and its offspring. Because new wave’s stratified textures derived from disco, they could easily gain traction on the dance floor. New wave thereby seeded disco’s stratified textures with its own materials. This made a place in dance music for new wave’s metaconventions of arbitrariness, dissonance, attitude, marginality, and so forth. The effect of this exchange on electronic dance music can’t be overstated: putting it simply, stratification remains EDM’s fundament, with new wave’s approach to stratification working more virally and disco’s more systemically. New wave uses the modes of exchange created by stratified textures to send messages back to disco. A final example will demonstrate how AOR overhears these messages. After a quick look at how new wave asserts itself in the best-­known AOR song with four-­on-­the-­floor, Queen’s “Another One Bites the Dust,”78 we can conclude with a brief comparison of stratification’s effects on disco, AOR, and new wave. “Another One Bites the Dust” has obvious connections to disco. Beyond four-­on-­the-­floor and other aspects of the drumbeat, one might point to the prominent vocal ad-­libs, Brian May’s rhythm-­g uitar playing and doubling of the funky bass line, and especially the tell-­tale hand-­claps (as in Gang of Four’s “Not Great Men”). The song presents an idiomatic break (1:40–2:30) that’s enhanced by Freddie Mercury’s vocal ad-­libs, some abstract guitar sounds alongside cheesy Oberheim-­synthesizer chord-­swells, and some white-­ noise helicopter effects. The bass line is the song’s most disco-­oriented feature. Bassist John Deacon, who wrote this song and several of Queen’s other pop hits, reportedly hung around in the studio during the recording session for Chic’s “Good Times” and received permission to steal the song’s bass line, which, one can hear, he kind of did.79 The synthesizer part also derives from disco: it’s more or less the same kind of part you hear in Candi Staton’s “When You Wake Up Tomorrow,” which delivers synth swoops in the break—perhaps only to assure you that it’s giving you all there is to give—but employs synthesizers nowhere else.80 Queen had made a special point of avoiding synths on their earlier albums—“No synthesizers!” scream the credits—and it remains odd that they would have fallen off the wagon so they could go “shiieeewww” a few times on a handful of songs. Although Queen didn’t descend from progressive rock, which almost always employed 166  •   C h a p t e r T h r e e

synthesizers as melodic keyboard instruments with funny timbres, they used acoustic piano in conventional ways—to provide harmonic and rhythmic support and to create particular genre associations;81 the Wurlitzer electric piano in “You’re My Best Friend” is equally conventional for 70s pop and rock. The synthesizer part’s focus on timbre would therefore have stood out from Queen’s other uses of keyboards. More importantly this synth part doesn’t connect with typical rock subjectivity the way the band’s other keyboard use does. It’s clearly a response to and product of disco’s stratified textures. New wave fits into this song’s equation as well. We can hear new wave in the lyrics and the nervous, edgy vocal performance—in the song’s aggressiveness generally—and in the sense of arbitrariness about the sound effects and the synth parts.82 The synths are surely compatible with disco, as I’ve said, but the song’s eclecticism and foregrounding of “attitude” reflect new wave more than disco. And unlike disco this song contains rough edges that listeners would have associated with new wave in 1980. Like the Cars and the Police, Queen creates new wave’s relative austerity through a song’s short length, thin but layered textures, sparse guitar parts, and absence of chordal keyboard parts; “Another One Bites the Dust” is separable from mainstream pop of the day because of this brittle sound-­world and the lack of a big, lush chorus. One could also note Mercury’s and Deacon’s short hair on the album cover—again, related to disco (through its associations with gay culture), but also capable of signaling new wave as opposed to mainstream rock. The basic point here is that AOR’s disco comes through new wave. It’s hard to make a causal link, but one notes that no AOR artist draws on disco until after new wave had begun to threaten “classic rock” assumptions with a picture of the “modern.”83 At bottom this is an AOR group doing pop: disco functions as pop in “Another One Bites the Dust,” like it does in the album and single versions of Kiss’s “I Was Made for Loving You.”84 But Queen takes up new wave’s indeterminacy of function—which is not the same as nonfunctionality or as (art) rock’s rejection of functionality—along with its attitude. This indeterminacy provides a loophole for an AOR song that worked on the dance floor and succeeded mightily on the pop charts. Maybe this lessened any guilty feelings about doing disco for money. The presumption, derived from progressive rock, that AOR songs are (specifically) not for dancing conditions the role that borrowings from disco can play in AOR; new wave’s metaconventions provided a script for approaching E xc h a ng e T h eor i e s: Di sco   •   167

disco, however, a script that couldn’t have been found elsewhere in the rock tradition. “Another One Bites the Dust” remains AOR, since it’s still a rock band playing disco. The integrity of the foursome is preserved. The song manages to hold off the expected rock guitar solo but not the use of distorted power chords. May’s performance of a role foreign to AOR, like doubling the funky bass line an octave up, gives off a feeling of “do I really have to play this over and over?” The slightly overdriven sound is unidiomatic for the soul tradition and carries a note of protest against the guitar’s reduced function. In general May’s parts are a bit out of the pocket, which one can hear either as rock diffidence or as aimed at loosening the overall feel. May’s playing on this song demonstrates a common rock metaconvention: features deriving from AOR become in an AOR band’s attempt at disco not merely conventional but a reassertion of rock identity or a way of resisting disco’s conventions. Thus we can hear this song as revealing the limited effect of disco’s stratified textures on AOR: the identity of the individual band member and the integrity of the group trump the possibility of stratification taking over. Its pop function overdetermines its form—the bass line is shaped and departed from in such a way as to allow the song to conform to a verse-­chorus structure—but this song’s aesthetic point lies in expressing a rock band’s personality. The role of disco’s stratified textures in AOR is limited by the stratification principles it inherits from the rock tradition: every man [sic] for himself, assisted by overdubbing (and, in the background, the possibility of solo projects that takes weight off any particular song’s individual strata). Together the pressures of pop and rock on “Another One Bites the Dust” mean there’s no chance of disco’s stratification reshaping the song, let alone the genre of AOR. So we hear a kind of stratification in this song, but one quite different from that of disco and new wave. On one hand each band member’s contribution is distinct enough sonically to give a sense of four different modes of comportment: Deacon as a songwriter invested in the material, as a funk fan wanting to write a good bass line, as a bass player relishing a bass-­line-­driven song and wanting to carry the groove; Mercury as someone who cares about the genre, spent time in discos, and grasps a connection between disco’s valuation of vocal ad-­libs and his own theatricality; May as out of sync with the song’s genre and stylistic features, a little flustered, not knowing what to think; and drummer Roger Taylor as, you know, drumming. On the other hand the song (as pop) and the personality of the rock group win out over the goal of genre pastiche85—an undisco assertion of whole over part, product over process. 168  •   C h a p t e r T h r e e

Stratification and Disco’s Fragile Musical Economy Stratification tells us something important about disco: that the genre was able to perpetuate itself as system, syntax, or script and not only as sentiment, experience, or social formation. As we’ve seen, it’s specifically a circulatory system, a mode or method of exchange. It conditions and shapes content, but it does so as process rather than material (though it quickly generates hooks and conventions, like the punched-­in guitar chord that fades in and out as it races across the stereo field in “Another One Bites the Dust,” or the drum fill that leaves a trail of exaggerated reverb in its wake). It concerns obvious surface features—features often more strongly present than lyrics, for example—but (and this is what makes it compelling for theories of exchange) it moves into new wave from disco without either genre fully embracing it as something to trade on. From listeners’ perspectives, stratification itself was never a “hook.” AOR groups like Queen take up disco’s stratified textures in service of effects, aims, and principles already known to them, already part of their home genre. By contrast new-­wave artists allow stratification to push their music into unknown territory, using its openness as a means for interacting with changing technologies and institutional contexts. But what impact do stratified textures end up having on disco itself ? The disco songs mentioned here, like Candi Staton’s “When You Wake Up Tomorrow,” Chic’s “Good Times,” Dan Hartman’s “Vertigo/Relight My Fire,” and Inner Life’s “Ain’t No Mountain High Enough,” embody a fragile moment of equilibrium in disco’s timbral economy. Disco’s practice of stratification and emphasis on percussion and timbral differentiation unleashed forces that couldn’t be controlled. Following these records, the heightened differentiation of elements in a stratified texture and the ever-­increasing importance of drum sounds became mostly a matter of novelty (and in the case of drum sounds heft), leading to the ascendence of enhanced drums and drum machines, first as futuristic hooks (superposed on older styles of drum production), then as genre-­or period-­defining, and finally as hegemonic. (This brief history of drum sounds can supplement the typical story of disco’s fall by considering factors internal to the genre’s changing musical economy.) These changes had several results: (1) a decreasing interest in the rhythm section’s feel and in rhythm arrangement; (2) the simplification of melodic hooks and melodic materials generally as they were forced to E xc h a ng e T h eor i e s: Di sco   •   169

compete with the drum sounds; (3) a tightening of the borders between disco and other genres, particularly those of the past; (4) a decline in the values of subtlety, invention, and musicianship as they became harder to foreground. This meant that (5) the conflict between the human and the mechanical became literalized, then merely procedural; and (6) disco’s nostalgia was forced out of the musical texture and into the critical discourse.86 So stratification’s telos is the complete unraveling of the groove—the end of the rhythm section. The groove is qualitatively and affectively different when built up again in electronic dance music. This chapter has told a discocentric story about key transformations of new wave and dance music, but it’s a narrative of disappearance, a story without an ending. Perhaps it’s a boring story, too, because it concerns a principle that musicians may not have cared about and audiences weren’t necessarily aware of: stratification’s career can’t be cast as a tale of individual artistic innovation, vital subcultural expression, events that define a time and place, or even a profound technological shift. Stratification has only to do with musical economy, with the disposition and circulation of elements in a texture. But as a mode of exchange at a critical historical moment, it suggested new ways of hearing and song-­making, a newly dialectical relation between whole and part. Unlike the scripts provided by contemporary genres, disco’s practice of stratification accommodated everything but promised nothing. Is this stratification’s theory of exchange—that when it comes down to it we’ll take endless possibility over guarantees of meaning, heterogeneity over coherence, continual change over a sense of progression?

170  •   C h a p t e r T h r e e

Fou r

Senses NOCTURNES AMONG THE SMALLER GENRES

Turning back to Western art music for this book’s final two chapters, it’s worth recalling two points from the introduction. First, following Eric Drott, we noted a tension between the claim that Western art music genres had been losing force, and the plain fact that people kept writing in them.1 Second—a more basic point—is that genres add something to the works they connect with. Nocturnes demonstrate these points. So do concertos (the focus of chapter 5), but nocturnes do so in a way that reflects the fallibility, doubt, and contingency that color the interactions between works and genres in Western art music of the long 1970s: as the nocturne’s twentieth-­century history unfolds, its characteristic delicacy and gentleness become carefulness, hesitancy, and uncertainty, and its central musical conventions start to seem anachronistic or unrealizable. As such, nocturnes also encourage a return to the question of how genres fit their moment, which emerged in chapters 1 and 2. Throughout this chapter we’ll be remembering, too, that nocturnes are quiet and “smaller” in sociological as well as musical terms: they speak to many, many fewer people than do the songs discussed in chapters 1–3. If the essence of the nocturne lies in musical and social conventions of the mid-­nineteenth century, what can this genre say to the postwar moment? If, that is, nocturnes are bound up with nineteenth-­century piano technique and aesthetics, bel canto lyricism, modest-­sized forms with a fully drawn theme heard at the beginning and end, textures with sustained bass-­notes and rippling arpeggios in the left hand accompanying gracefully ornamented melodies in the right, structural emphasis on tonic and subdominant harmonies, and historically specific notions of feminine feeling and appreciation for details, how can they speak through the musical and social conventions of the 171

long 1970s? What happened to this 150-­year-­old genre during this particular decade and a half ? About 250 nocturnes and related night-­pieces from the 1920s through the mid-­1980s suggest a three-­part answer. One, twentieth-­ century nocturnes absorbed every available musical convention for depicting night, so they didn’t require tonal harmony, the piano, melodic themes, or nineteenth-­century vocality. But, two, this absorption, and the works’ departures from the nocturne’s foundational conventions, broadened the genre, so these works had to communicate their genericity by other means. Paratexts were key to this, especially titles. But this communication also depended on how a piece employed the conventions it did include—it depended, we could say, on the nocturne’s metaconventions. These metaconventions were broadening too, however, which meant that a piece might have to convince listeners it was using its materials in a “nocturnal” manner, whether tentatively, delicately, curiously, hazily, or spookily. This leads to part three of the answer: long-­70s nocturnes could speak to their moment precisely because they made new-­music’s stakeholders engage with mood and with surface effects. Their composers accomplished this sometimes self-­consciously and sometimes naïvely, sometimes fluently and sometimes fumblingly, in old and new ways, through musical and other-­than-­musical means. The creation of mood and the success of surface effects are necessarily social and inextricably linked to sensory experience—two reasons why they get downplayed in a tradition that values the ideal of the autonomous work. Furthermore, moods and surface effects are subject to a range of contingent factors. So in their dependence on mood and effect, long-­70s nocturnes can show how the ephemeral, the superficial, and the contingent can matter. These pieces demonstrate how genres can keep themselves going, just barely, by finding whatever suffices. One thing nocturnes drew upon, we’ll see, was Western art music’s connections to the senses, frayed and mediated though these connections were. Nocturnes were less hardy than concertos, and less frequently composed in the 1960s, 70s, and 80s; chapter 5, by contrast, will survey a field of about 1,400 works. But the very tenuousness of nocturnes and other long-­70s night-­pieces gives us special ways and reasons to listen for genres. The nocturne has also provoked important genre-­focused scholarship. In several papers and part of a book on Chopin, Jeffrey Kallberg has narrated the history of the nineteenth-­century nocturne in a way that can inform the study of musical genres in the twentieth century; in particular he deepens our understanding of the social dimensions of Western art music genres, and 172  •   C h a p t e r Fou r

he adds grip to the relation between genres and musical details.2 And Susan Stewart presents a substantial intermedial account of the nocturne; her discussion focuses on multisensory experience in literature, visual art, and music across a wider time-­span.3 This scholarship helps us refine the decline-­ of-­genres thesis put forward by Carl Dahlhaus: the nocturne emerges and thrives at the moment when (Dahlhaus says) the ideal of the singular work was taking over and musical genres no longer had substance.4 As Kallberg notes, Dahlhaus makes a too-­strong connection between the late-­modern proliferation of ad hoc titles and the weakening of traditional genres. Kallberg correctly says this “overlook[s] the possibility that titles might be clues to genre in rather the same way that titles have served literary works in the last two centuries.”5 But the postwar nocturne makes Dahlhaus’s claim look . . . pretty good. In general we shouldn’t buy his argument that if a piece doesn’t have a genre title, it doesn’t participate in that genre—concertos demonstrate why—but the late-­modern nocturne proves Dahlhaus partly right. A postwar work can’t assert itself as a nocturne in the absence of a night-­invoking title, text, or paratext. Equally important, the reverse is true: if a postwar piece is called a nocturne, it operates as such. Long-­70s reviews of concerts, recordings, and scores don’t reveal any pushback. Nobody says “the composer is wrong to label this piece a nocturne.” So these pieces need their nighttime titles; but the titles actually accomplish something. This shows that Kallberg is right too. His emphasis on “communicative and persuasive properties” reminds us that musical genres are sites of provisional agreement and consent between makers and audiences; titles serve as contracts, Kallberg would say.6 And in the long 1970s people seemed to agree on what a night-­piece was and did. But these nocturnes and other night-­pieces also communicated doubt, fallibility, and contingency. That too was a point of agreement. A brief history can show how this unfolded; drawing on Kallberg and Stewart, and extending the history into the 1970s, we can quickly get to the heart of the matter. In the eighteenth century, a title like Nocturne, Notturno or Nachtmusik simply designates a piece meant to be played at night. Only with 19th-­century composers like John Field and especially Chopin does the musical nocturne begin to acquire any depictive capacity. The next step, which Stewart emphasizes, is how the depictive impulse gives way to a focus on nighttime experience. Such a shift comes later to music, and happens in relation to musical conventions associated with the nineteenth-­century piano. This sometimes uneasy relation affects a later development, which is S e ns e s: No c t u r n e s   •   173

beyond Stewart’s scope: postwar nocturnes can actively question the genre’s capacity to represent the night and nighttime experience. This specifically late-­modern development coexists with an equally characteristic tendency toward pieces that look back on the nocturne’s history. Indeed it’s characteristic that long-­70s pieces can highlight (or suppress) any part of this trajectory. They can do so in part because nocturnes have always been modern in their conveyance of expression and meaning: nocturnes have always been a way of mediating expression, especially vocal expression (a point demonstrated by Kallberg), and they’ve always been poised between meaning and occasion, and between theme and setting. There’s a second thread to this history. It concerns what the nocturne absorbs. Night music proliferates in the twentieth century. This includes but goes well beyond piano nocturnes, chamber notturnos, and works beholden to Debussy’s orchestral Nocturnes. Even the Oxford English Dictionary can tell you that a twentieth-­century meaning of “night music”—“Music which evokes the sounds made by birds, insects, etc., at night”—is “associated chiefly with the music of Béla Bartók.” To this we would add songs and song-­cycles on nocturnal themes; dramatic scoring for nighttime scenes in film, opera, and theatre; Tin Pan Alley, light classical, and jazz nocturnes; a host of ad hoc nocturnal chamber and orchestral works; and a figurative sense of “night music” connected with the sounds of nature (again the OED’s definition invokes insect sounds). All of this helps create the metageneric context for postwar nocturnes. A complementary part of this context is the nocturne’s connections with other small genres that foreground setting, address, and occasion: serenades, barcarolles, romanzas, lullabies, and (we will soon hear) short birthday pieces, among other genres. From the broader night-­music context a postwar nocturne gets new materials to use, but it runs the risk of getting lost in that broader mass. And from the occasion-­driven-­smaller-­ genre context a nocturne acquires a dependence on scenes of address that its medium, style, and stakeholders may be unable to provide. So we’ve got two principal historical strands. Both strands reveal a gradual increase in the resources nocturnes can draw on, but also a diminishing sense of the genre’s distinctiveness, essence, efficacy, and reason for being. The nocturne’s (older and newer) conventions can provide access to gentleness, delicacy, vulnerability, and restraint; nocturnes can succeed at creating mood at a moment when the possibility and value of doing so is questioned in Western art music. Small-­scale nocturnes by Cage, Copland, Ulysses Kay, and George Crumb will demonstrate this, each in its own way conveying a 174  •   C h a p t e r Fou r

modest performing/listening subject separable from the composer’s authorial presence. But these examples, and borderline cases by Pauline Oliveros and Earl Kim, will show too how doubt, fallibility, and contingency surround the postwar nocturne, and how they can become part of a work’s substance. Doubt and fallibility shadow these pieces in two ways: as a characteristic of the performing subject’s hesitant comportment, and as a question about the piece’s capacity—at this late stage, with these old or borrowed c­ onventions— to bring the nocturne into the present and make it matter. Postwar nocturnes thus create a sense of contingency. Yes, nightfall happens often, but there doesn’t need to be a musical genre that reflects this, and there surely don’t need to be nocturnes. Night and night-­pieces don’t have to fit snugly. There are no guarantees that a long-­70s nocturne has to exist, that it will work, that it’ll mean anything. The examples by Cage, Crumb, Oliveros, and Kim will show how a late-­modern night-­piece can work to create its occasion and environment; but this work occurs in full awareness of the possibility that pieces like this may not fit their setting or their moment. In order to better feel this sense of contingency it’s worth turning first to a genre that embodies contingency through and through—a kind of occasional piece that owes its very existence to the aestheticization of a notably unimportant occasion.

Occasion and Contingency Questions about how a nocturne fits its moment come in part from the genre’s complex sense of occasion, which is at once diurnal, contingent, arbitrary, overdetermined, and uncanny. By contrast, occasional pieces take those questions off the table. They exist precisely to create such a fit. But when a piece’s occasion is the opposite of world-­historical—when, let’s say, it’s a round-­numbered birthday of a new-­music personage—the piece can acknowledge or even dramatize the contingencies of its materials and its moment. A look at two of Elliott Carter’s many birthday pieces can help us cultivate a sense of contingency that extends to the musical techniques, the composing subject, and the genre itself. The occasional piece is truly a hidden genre despite the huge number that have been composed, performed, recorded, and published. No one has written its history or even acknowledged its role as a site of twentieth-­century musical activity. The occasional piece has remained hidden partly because it S e ns e s: No c t u r n e s   •   175

draws attention to what the modernist ideal of the autonomous work tries to conceal: “extramusical” sources of meaning and value (especially pedestrian sources), and external pressures on the work of composing. In a tradition that has sought to imagine a composition as emerging from nothing more or less than a musical idea, following only the tendencies of its own materials, needing no cultural context, having no function, the occasional piece is a scandal. But it can remind us of something important about genres as such—that they underscore the fact and role of occasion. (Again: genres help us ask “why here, why now?”) The birthday pieces add another element to our picture of modernist Western art music: the dedicatee becomes a special sort of witness to the activities of composer, performers, and listeners, and gives us access to an instance of musical friendship. Carter’s 1978 Glock Birthday Fanfare, for three trumpets and a percussionist playing vibraphone and orchestral chimes, was written for William Glock, a modern-­music champion who served as the BBC’s Controller of Music from 1959 to 1973. This low-­profile two-­minute work was published in 1998, but may be the only mature Carter piece to not be recorded and commercially released. It premiered on the radio, at the beginning and end of a program that otherwise contained clips of interviews with composers (like Carter) reminiscing about Glock. This means that the piece is denied its visual dimension and physical presence; perhaps it was never meant to be “performed.” Furthermore, its function as a theme song for a one-­off classical-­music radio show gentles or deflates its “fanfare” character. The details of this piece suggest that Carter was happy to play along. The instrumentation goes along the grain of the fanfare, of course, but also shows that Carter was not above making a dumb pun on the dedicatee’s name. Carter also quotes fragments from “Happy Birthday”—another way of letting external factors shape the piece. Carter would have known Stravinsky’s 1955 Greeting Prelude, another short birthday tribute (in this case to the conductor Pierre Monteux) that uses “Happy Birthday” as source material. Both the Prelude and the Fanfare reflect their composers’ preoccupations in matters of technique; in Stravinsky’s case this meant serial procedures. But Carter’s piece works differently. Calling the piece a fanfare puts it in the sphere of useful music, and invites listeners to hear it broadly. This deflects attention from the work’s contrapuntal intricacies and flow of ideas, and from the ways this piece asks to be taken as finely-­wrought chamber music. All of this makes the “Happy Birthday” quotations project more strongly. And these quotations reveal tensions between the piece’s concept and its 176  •   C h a p t e r Fou r

Brisk, ca. 72

                 5  5

5  9               5

*

5

1

Trumpets 2 In C

                  3

3                 3

3

Vibraphone (Chimes)



 

* Passages enclosed in brackets (   ) should be brought out.

          3  

   9       

 

  

  3

       

Ex. 4.1.  Starting in its opening measure, Elliott Carter’s 1978 Glock Birthday Fanfare pre­ sents fragments from “Happy Birthday” (4.1a, trumpets 1, 2, and 3). Later (ex. 4.1b) it distributes “Happy Birthday” across the three trumpets, placing the C an octave too low.

B

    

 







   

Trumpets 1, 2, 3, mm. 8-9







  

Trumpet 3, m. 1

Trumpet 3, m. 1

Trumpet 1, m. 1

Trumpet 2, m. 1 5













Trumpet 2, m. 11 Trumpet 1, m. 11

 









 

Trumpet 1, mm. 11-12 Trumpet 1, mm. 14-15

Ex. 4.2.  “Happy Birthday,” transposed to correspond to the opening of Glock Birthday Fanfare. As the brackets show, Carter’s fanfare draws on almost all of “Happy Birthday”— but not the octave leap that spans mm. 4–5.

composer’s aesthetics. Comparing his score to the “Happy Birthday” intertext (ex. 4.1a, 4.1b, 4.2), one notes that Carter draws on all of that song’s distinctive melodic gestures—except for the boldest: the octave leap that begins its penultimate phrase. Carter never embraced twelve-­tone procedures, but he certainly imbibed the modernist proscription against melodic leaps of an octave: atonal and twelve-­tone orthodoxy held that melodic octaves S e ns e s: No c t u r n e s   •   177

added nothing, stuck out uncomfortably, tore at the musical fabric. Octave leaps were an anachronism. So Carter excludes the leap. Thus it’s instead his modernist propriety that juts out from the piece: his taste becomes the anachronistic element that dissonates against the work’s concept. The work’s occasion and the composer’s subjectivity make competing demands on the work. A sense of contingency can emerge from this confrontation. One of Carter’s later birthday pieces seems to stage a confrontation between contingency and necessity. Esprit Rude / Esprit Doux, for flute and clarinet, contains a remarkable moment that can be read in (at least) two ways. The first interpretation begins by hearing one element as contingent or as representing contingency, and another as embodying necessity. The second interpretation questions this neat division, and in particular the idea that any element might really be free of contingency. The work was written as an homage to Pierre Boulez, the letters of whose name become a four-­ note motto heard at the beginning (and end) [track 4.1, G web ex. 2]. The piece establishes the “motivicity” of this motto quite clearly: it’s presented in a transparent texture the piece soon abandons; it’s given a rhythmic profile and registral contour that helps create the sense of a phrase; and it’s immediately repeated in varied form. The second presentation confirms the motto’s importance partly by having the two instruments each swap one note, giving the sense that the motto is conceptually prior to what the instruments articulate—the sense that a precomposed pitch sequence has been orchestrated for these two instruments. This re-­presentation divides into two halves: the flute delivers what works rhetorically as a kind of transformed echo, but then the clarinet sharply articulates the motto’s registral extremes. This leap serves as a hinge between the expository character of the opening measures and something more developmental (m. 5). Then, for the first time, the two instruments articulate the downbeat simultaneously—or articulate simultaneously period (m. 6).7 The material here differs strikingly from what we’ve heard so far, and especially from the opening three and a half measures, across a number of parameters. It’s registrally compressed, softer than what immediately precedes it, and relatively rhythmically undifferentiated at the level of the individual note; furthermore, it focuses on a single interval, the minor second, and on pitch collections built out of that interval. The clarinet, taken alone, displays this focus most obviously. It fills up pitch space, minor second by minor second, adding up to many presentations of the chromatic tetrachord. This effect of a blur of minor seconds is strongly confirmed in performance: the accented notes in both 178  •   C h a p t e r Fou r

instruments project very clearly in this texture, especially given the dynamic indications, and they, too, fill up pitch space chromatically and emphasize pitch collections like the chromatic tetrachord (e.g., starting at the upbeat to m. 7.) With these considerations in mind we can hear mm. 6–7 and the clarinet in mm. 8–9 as a kind of composed out noise or residuum or buzzing, and in any event as not really material. This blurry writing can serve as a ground for that which works as a figure (mm. 8–9);8 but it’s neither expository nor developmental—it’s undifferentiated stuff. Given the context the piece provides, this moment can function as the sound of contingency. We have established an opposition between essential material—the realizations of the motto—and pure contingency (mm. 6–7). Just under a minute in, there’s a varied restatement of the opening that incorporates the intervallic language of mm. 6–7, especially the clarinet’s favorite set class, the chromatic tetrachord (last beat of m. 31) [track 4.1 [0:55–1:07], G web ex. 3]. This dramatic moment delivers two interlocking presentations of the chromatic tetrachord as material derived from the opening. Hearing this moment in such a manner gives us a way of understanding its rhetorical force; more importantly for present purposes, we can hear it as redeeming the noise of mm. 6–7 for musical use. Adorno remarks that “from time immemorial, art has sought to rescue the particular [das Besondere zu erretten]”; this moment can be understood as staging such a rescue.9 That which was heard as pure contingency is brought into the work’s proper sphere. The prelinguistic buzzing, emblematized by the inarticulate chromatic tetrachord, ends up providing the grammar for a restatement of the piece’s principal material. You could call it a dialectical synthesis of the piece’s material and this material’s other. This hearing works fairly well in the ear, and it gives proper respect to what seems in the piece’s context like an important moment. So what’s wrong with it? It relies on taking one element as contingent and another as essential. And what’s so essential about the motto—the fact that the piece says it’s essential? Is that enough? This first hearing should give way to an acknowledgment that the motto and its realization are equally the product of contingency. What could be more contingent than a motto derived from the letters of a person’s name? It conjoins two discourses that have nothing to do with each other. And an appeal to the tradition of constructing such mottoes doesn’t help in a late-­ modernist context: Is Carter’s use of this scheme just an unreflective continuation of this tradition? Does it refer to BACH?10 Is it a way of registering the distance between earlier forms of homage and the work’s late-­modern S e ns e s: No c t u r n e s   •   179

cultural moment? Note also that the content of this motto cannot simply be read off from Boulez’s name: why not use the “re” from his first name? And Carter could have gotten cute and taken his E from Pierre and made the “ez” into an E . It’s worth mentioning too that the four pitches he settles on constitute one of the two “all-­interval” tetrachords (0,1,3,7); this tetrachord is a diatonic collection, but it was a fundamental building block of Carter’s post-­tonal practice. This means the motto is not simply “the given;” it comes out of Carter’s aesthetic practices. The opening motive is therefore constitutively impure. This motive served as “the essential” in a dialectical pair with mm. 6–7 as “the contingent;” but both of these moments emerge from a play of competing tendencies, many of which lie beyond control or beneath reflection. For example, the capacity of mm. 6–7 to represent contingency is itself contingent upon our hearing chromatic pitch-­space as providing the smallest possible intervals. Such a hearing is merely conventional, however, even a bit old-­fashioned, and relies on our forgetting about the microtonal intervals and non-­pitched sounds flutes and clarinets can produce—or on our placing them off limits. If the identity of the opening motive is heard as contingent—not as “the given,” or as naturally musical—we begin to hear the stuff of mm. 6–7 more generously. These measures may sound blurry and indeterminate, but in a sense they’re rational and exceedingly determinate: more clearly than anything else in the piece, they establish a clear link between the smallest detail and the logic of development. The chromatic tetrachord becomes material to generate from. (This can make us more receptive to the notion that it’s concretely derived from the clarinet’s compound minor-­ninth leaps in m. 4, the first of which is part of the motto.) We no longer take the motive as determinate and mm. 6–7 as indeterminate: we accept the contingency of both identities, and of the other kinds of material this piece presents. So a second interpretation of the “dialectical synthesis” moment (starting upbeat to m. 32) would begin by contesting the foundations on which the first hearing stands. The sense of the motive as determinate and mm. 6–7 as indeterminate is founded on an illusory belief that the motto constitutes a pure, single source from which the piece emerges. If both identities are contingent, their very status as objects capable of being repeated and varied is subject to contestation. The three moments we’re focusing on can thus be heard as bound together dialectically, or as three different (but somehow related) things, or as one constellation of intervallic material taken three different ways, or as not so closely connected that they ought to be

b

180  •   C h a p t e r Fou r

taken together at all. Birthday pieces like Esprit Rude / Esprit Doux tell us it’s not a given, but a remarkable fact that an element can acquire the capacity to represent something or to connect with other aspects of a piece. In a world of contingency, the whole business of representing and connecting is puzzling. Which returns us to the late-modern nocturne.

Hearing Nocturnes What does it mean to hear the nocturne in a postwar piece? What sorts of representation and connection do such hearings require? What can the postwar nocturne add to a piece, and how? A late-40s piece by John Cage will help us get at the late-modern nocturne’s particular mode of comportment— its particular ways of making connections, following lines, and hearing what’s around it. The piece participates in the minor violin-and-piano subgenre of the already-minor nocturne. This subgenre did not lack for distinguished contributors. Following late-nineteenth-century arrangements of Field and Chopin for this medium, there were violin-and-piano nocturnes by Sarasate, Lili Boulanger, Crawford, Vaughan-Williams, and Copland. But a more important precedent for Cage was Webern’s more neutrally titled Vier Stücke, Opus 7 (1910). Cage’s nocturne begins like this:

Ex. 4.3. What kind of piece is this? Note there’s no orthographical distinction between the title and the instrumentation. S e ns e s: No c t u r n e s

•

181

What happens in measure 1? A single gesture? Two discrete attacks and their resonances? An accompanimental introduction and first solo entry? A slow two-­note melody spread across two different instruments and registers? Maybe we can hear it as a question and answer. Or perhaps it’s better heard as an antecedent calling out for a consequent. What are we taking in, listening for, acknowledging, when we make this sort of determination? The medium of violin plus piano starts working on us immediately: this first measure confirms what tradition leads us to expect: that the cultural dynamics of melodic voice and chordal accompaniment have been activated by this choice of instrumentation. But this dynamic is already complicated by the way the piano’s first attack contains two different sorts of articulation, neither of which works terrifically well as traditional melody or accompaniment. And when the piano leaps up to surround the violin’s first pitch with an even denser chord, it’s possible the piano has shifted roles, though we can’t be sure from what to what. The chords themselves are dissonant but diatonic, percussive but articulated quietly. We’re not encouraged to hear them as “going anywhere,” all the more because the second chord contains the first, at least in pitch-­class terms, and the bottom of the second chord “merely” doubles the still-­sounding G3. If anything these chords help tonicize G: maybe there is a specifically tonal sense in which we want the A to move back down to the G, which wouldn’t give the piece a way to proceed. So the question arises: how (if at all) does this opening measure encourage a continuation, and of what (possible) sorts? Do the two whole-­notes have enough to hold themselves together as a melody across instruments and registers? What is a linear major ninth exactly? A big leap, obviously: the piano’s second chord might suggest it signals a change of register. A major ninth is also reassuringly diatonic, however, especially in this harmonic surround; it’s a displaced major-­second step that can convey both the qualities of the ordinary rising whole-­step and the sense of a big and surprising shift. This particular major ninth stands out because it corresponds to the violin’s open strings: we could almost imagine the piano’s G making the violin resonate and then the violin returning the favor (now that the piano’s sustain pedal is pressed down). This gives meaning to the violin’s A, which in live performance we’ll just have heard the instruments tune to. It’s as little as the instrument can do, and thus like starting from nothing, but it also has an essential violinness. Against this reminder of the violin’s open strings, the mute creates—and signifies—quietness and softness; it also argues for 182  •   C h a p t e r Fou r

timbral specificity in a musical situation that doesn’t (yet) give us a traditional melodic motive. But again: none of this timbral specificity or grounding in the physicality of instruments can suggest a path forward. OK; so what if we try to grasp this measure as the opening of a nocturne? First of all, that gives us a way to hear the quietness—as evocative or atmospheric, as signifying the genre’s sense of modesty and the intimate settings in which piano nocturnes are traditionally heard. Calling the piece a nocturne tends to imply that it’ll be a “small-­form” piece. The nocturne designation might make us wonder whether the piece will present the genre’s traditional sorts of piano writing, or its convention of shifting harmonies over a sustained bass. We might be encouraged to ask where this piece falls in the conceptual history of the nocturne: will it simply attempt to depict the night? Does it seek also to register a subject’s nighttime experience? Does it try to reflect the work of earlier night-­pieces? Does it assume that novel depictive means are necessary? Or does it question altogether the capacity of music to represent the night? We may expect this late-­sounding piece to embody a restrained or even tentative comportment, moving forward with deliberateness or even hesitation. If we remind ourselves that this measure begins a postwar piece, more precisely a piece from 1947, what then? This opening measure surely doesn’t demonstrate an avant-­garde approach to pitch, rhythm, timbre, or anything else. But it marks itself as “after Webern” in timbral/textural terms, and in an athematicism that the piece as a whole bears out. As such we’re entitled to hear its use of tonality as consciously decided upon.11 Indeed, any use of diatonic collections, melody-­and-­accompaniment textures, even the very idea of a melodic line—all these can be heard as deliberately chosen. (And of course we would want to say the same thing about the nocturne’s convention of the piano arpeggio in measure 2.) So for a specifically late-­modern piece of this sort—that doesn’t appear to flatter itself with a sense of its ­novelty, that refuses both twelve-­tone procedures and classic atonal strategies, that hardly positions itself as neoclassical—for a piece like this: how does it go on? Late-­modern music is haunted by three senses of this question. We might paraphrase the first sense as “How should the composer continue this piece?”12 Imagine you’ve written this opening measure: what does it want from you? Where do you find the next pitch, how do you decide what happens when? Modernist composers asked such questions with rising insistence between the late forties and the early seventies, and there was no court of appeals. The second sense registers the demand for originality and S e ns e s: No c t u r n e s   •   183

the burden of the past: “How do we go on when everything has already been done?” Who needs to hear another nocturne? How could I possibly write for the piano any longer? In its third sense this question contemplates the impossibility of art as such. Think now about the fact that this piece is by John Cage, who soon after 1947 certainly did contemplate the impossibility of music as such. Knowing this is Cage’s piece, we might accept its uncertain forward motion as a way of “letting sounds be just sounds,” to paraphrase a line he starting using in the 50s; this piece might suggest ways of proceeding that lead away from traditional understandings of the late-­modern piece. But where exactly was Cage in 1947? Cage was seen at this time as a prepared-­piano and percussion composer; this was after his first pieces for radios and turntables, in the middle of writing the large cycle of Sonatas and Interludes for prepared piano, but before the chance operations and 4’33”. His romantic partnership with Merce Cunningham was not yet generally known. He had been more or less outed, however, in an essay that praised his prepared piano music, in masculinist sexual and political terms Cage generally abhorred, as a kind of “muted violence.”13 Among the things Cage did want to talk about was the music of Satie and Webern; the Nocturne was premiered on a program that also included Webern’s Opus 7 and Satie’s Things Seen to the Right and Left (Without Glasses); Webern’s piece is clearly audible in the Cage, as at least one contemporary reviewer remarked.14 So, putting it crudely: a nocturne drawing on Webern’s pointillist “silences” and Satie’s sobriety becomes a way of avoiding interpellation as a noisy, proletarian, gay composer. Cage here consciously chooses the not-­prepared piano, and the traditionally “feminine,” “domestic” genre of the nocturne, as a tactful (and tactical) withdrawal from a persona that could no longer say what he wanted to say.15 This narrative moves along the grain of Jonathan Katz’s classic essay on Cage’s “queer silence,” but Nocturne makes things more complicated.16 Why is Cage’s Nocturne complicated, what is it asking of us? Without wanting to enforce a particular hearing of this notably open-­ended piece, I think it’s worth trying to listen for a long, interrupted line in the middle register, traced from the violin’s first pitch [G web exx. 4, 5, track 4.2]. This line works in a particularly Schoenbergian way. Cage got a lot from his classes with Schoenberg. But here as elsewhere Cage seems to be drawing on Schoenbergian techniques that Schoenberg didn’t talk about: creating long-­range stepwise registral lines is one of the little techniques that helped create Schoenbergian continuity and coherence in post-­tonal contexts. You 184  •   C h a p t e r Fou r

can follow the A4 as it frees itself of the G, moves up to B, first contending with B before receiving all sorts of confirmation and support. (It eventually comes to stand for the dominant of e minor, but it retains its greater weight relative to the assertion of e minor’s tonic.) Then B, and thus this long-­range registral line itself, disappears from the scene (at m. 17), though nothing displaces it (maybe it’s still resonating in mm. 18–21, where it’s sometimes present, though not emphasized). It returns in two compromised ways: in the “wrong” octave (mm. 28–34); and more saliently in a full embrace with C5 (starting upbeat to m. 36). C5 becomes the final note in this long, broken line, never quite becoming detached from the B—except perhaps if the violinist “tightens” the C high enough to give the sense of a new or different interval between it and the B. This pitch-­structure isn’t what the piece is about; it doesn’t have a goal; it can’t unify the piece; it doesn’t add anything to or elucidate the harmonic structure, nor does it work as a composing-­out of the piece’s foreground motives. The best it can do is to hold itself together, or more precisely to perform its holding-­together of itself. This long broken line has deep roots in Cage’s aesthetic; as I’ve suggested, it represents one way Cage connects with and supplements the Schoenbergian practices he had learned firsthand. But for Schoenberg, Cage’s line would be too nondirectional, too dependent on contingent factors of performance and reception, too unmotivated. Its need for someone wanting to follow it becomes key. This broken line becomes part of the fabric of the world only as such. But this line is grounded in immanent features Cage put there, capacities these traditional instruments possess, the cultural meanings of melody, the nocturne’s temporalities, and indeed the fact that postwar nocturnes often present a heterogeneous group of culturally resonant fragments. It’s worth noting too that this broken line, which spans the beginning and end of the piece, connects with seemingly minor elements of the performers’ comportment: asking the violinist to “tighten” (m. 12) and “relax” (m. 48) her pitch creates microtones the piano isn’t capable of. This tiny detail becomes intimately engaged with the long broken line. There was no agreed-­ upon way to notate these microtones in 1947, but the language of tightening and relaxing reminds us of the basic physics of stringed instruments: it conceptually bridges violin and piano, as if to show the connectedness of these instruments in this (traditional) medium. And in this slowed-­down, sparse musical context this tighten/relax language becomes a way to restore the oddness and intimacy of touching a vibrating string.

b

S e ns e s: No c t u r n e s   •   185

Since Cage’s Nocturne presents the nocturne’s conventions in ebbs and flows, its many other heterogeneous features also come to the fore and recede. Intensely physical features like the tightening/loosening of pitch call out to us in special ways—especially if we’re haunted by a sense that the piece may not mean anything, or that we’re not sure whether or how to care about it, that its possible focus on “atmosphere” (paraphrasing Cage) may cut against hearings that seek to piece out its details, that the piece may fail in some of its attempts to hold itself together, that it’s too heterogeneous or too samey, or that our hearing is fallible. Nocturne can be analyzed in traditional terms, but its openness foreshadows post-­piece trends of the 60s and after. In its beginning and “coda” (starting upbeat to m. 36) it seems to lack what could make it count as a piece, even by comparison with Webern’s Opus 7. In some ways, this piece has very little. Nocturne holds off any sense of the urban nightscape; there’s no noirishness, no reminder of Cage’s urban situation, no pressure from a reality outside the nocturne’s charmed space. There’s nothing like the contemporary urban nightworld of films, nightclubs, popular songs, and the capitalist pressures of labor, the impending workday. If it’s a residuum of echoes, it collects nothing but Western-­art-­music objects. As I suggested, this may be a feature of Cage’s restraint or quietism. Possibly it’s a way of honoring the nocturne, of letting it speak in its own voices. But Nocturne’s openness or lack raises questions about how the piece holds itself together. The piece’s broken lines constitute a crucial way that the broad question of “how to go on” can become part of a work’s texture. It matters, therefore, that Cage’s night-­piece expends aesthetic energy holding off what’s culturally around it. We might wonder how a greater openness to Black musical practices might have affected the note bendings in measures 12 and 48, or the extensions of dominant harmony throughout. Or think about the piano voicings: like Thelonious Monk’s in 1947 they’re sometimes anchored by dissonant clusters; sometimes they allow the whole gamut to resonate all at once; sometimes they change color through an abrupt shift of register or dynamics, or a weird octave doubling; sometimes they live on surprising contrasts between chordal and linear elements. And more broadly, bebop ballad-­playing might’ve provided a model for shared alertness, responsiveness, thoughtfulness, and hesitation that could have changed the nocturne’s modus operandi. So (as ever), our hearings of a piece in its contemporary context reflect compositional paths not taken, aesthetic connections not drawn. This includes the late-­modern nocturne’s unacknowledged relations with pop culture like Tin Pan Alley song and light-­jazz nocturnes. 186  •   C h a p t e r Fou r

These failures to create links become part of music history, as much as the connections actually established. And the surface-­level affective qualities of these untraced lines can become audible. Listen to the variety of stuff on Nocturne’s surface: Can these heterogeneous materials suggest the presence of a wider world? Do they say anything about what might connect us listeners as we’re hearing this piece? Cage’s own statements of the forties suggest not. His critical—often self-­critical—views on communicating through music, on searching for new ­materials, on exercises of taste reveal a deep skepticism about connection and attachment as such. He understood the problem of others, of our separateness (or of what it means that what we share is our separateness). Sometimes he expresses this in a form that acknowledges the crisis of meaning I’ve just sketched: the “state of music,” he says in the late 40s, is “extraordinarily disparate, almost to the point of a separation between each composer and every other one, and a large gap between each of these and society.” In order to compensate for this separation, however, Cage’s writings at this time often express a wish for attunement—with nature, with “contemporary spiritual needs,” with “that final tranquility, which today we so desperately need.” He sometimes calls it “integration.”17 This is a common philosophical move: once you forgo the project of mastery or control, the ideal of attunement is the only replacement that seems good enough to provide a transcendental guarantee. One understands the temptation, and one sees how it might fit with Cage’s attacks on communication and intention. Cage’s two-­sentence program note for Nocturne can be read as an expression of the wish for attunement: An attempt is made to dissolve the difference between string and piano sounds though the convention of melody and accompaniment is maintained. The character of the piece is atmospheric and depends for its performance on a constant rubato and the sustaining of resonances.18

But its references to “the convention of melody and accompaniment” and “constant rubato and the sustaining of resonances” signal the traditional nocturne. And more importantly its pointed evasions of agency actually give space to ordinary, fallible human comportment. Perhaps performers and even listeners can “attempt . . . to dissolve the difference between string and piano sounds;” perhaps this is not just something Cage has accomplished compositionally. Maybe the roles of “melody and accompaniment” don’t simply map onto violin and piano respectively. When he writes “sustaining S e ns e s: No c t u r n e s   •   187

of resonances” perhaps he’s not just describing the sounds—maybe he’s suggesting something the performers should try to do. In short, Nocturne’s heterogeneity exceeds Cage’s ontology. And the nocturne’s world is bigger than Cage’s; the genre makes this piece permeable to a broader range of experiences than the path toward “that final tranquility.” This allows us to follow Nocturne’s lines, stumble over its obstacles, and become affected by its disjunctions. Its status as a postwar nocturne means that the composer is giving something up (which Carter’s birthday pieces didn’t quite do); in Nocturne this triggers the release of the genre’s gently restless energies. In Aaron Copland’s Midsummer Nocturne this sense of giving something up aids the emergence of a childlike performing subject, a bit awkward but open to experience. This two-­minute piano piece was composed in 1947 but not rediscovered—nor given its title—until the late 70s. Like Schumann’s Kinderszenen it can be heard as for children and as about childhood; its expressive indication, “Slowly, poetically (and somewhat thoughtful),” functions likewise. Early on, three brilliantly faux-­naive touches work in conjunction with the title to create a sense of the late-­modern nocturne’s uncertain comportment (ex. 4.4) [track 4.3]. The piece begins off-­kilter, notated as syncopated but working in the ear as on the beat; its second melodic phrase begins a step up, as if it’s creating a sequence, destined to wind up somewhere else, but after two notes it just sinks back into a repetition of the first phrase (upbeat to mm. 3–4); and when the bass becomes melodically active, near the end of the first period (mm. 7–8), its descending scale dissonates repeatedly against the still-­moving top voice. In the following period a touch of ornamentation suffices to signal the nocturne’s presence in the texture (mm. 17–18). But what the nocturne genre adds to this piece is a tentative persona trying to follow a line. Ulysses Kay’s 1973 First Nocturne for piano can exemplify how the work of trying to make or follow a line becomes key to the late-­modern nocturne. It’s one of the first pieces in which Kay engaged with serial procedures; it’s an essay or exercise in that sense. The nocturne’s modesty and slowness fit this attempt. The opening measures bear this out (ex. 4.5). The piece begins with two (dovetailed) row statements in a deliberate, transparent presentation, softened by the use of the pedal; afterward there’s a cantabile melody. More subtly, Kay’s series and the way he handles it comport well with characteristics of the twentieth-­century nocturne. In particular Kay takes advantage of the row’s whole-­tone content and diatonic segments, and he partitions the series in ways that bring octatonic collections to the fore: one can hear juxtapositions of whole-­tone and octatonic materials that recall 188  •   C h a p t e r Fou r

Slowly, poetically (and somewhat thoughtful)

            

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Ex. 4.4.  Midsummer Nocturne got its title in 1978, three decades after Aaron Copland composed it. But this title still reflects—or helps produce—the late-­modern nocturne’s ­characteristics.

Debussy’s nocturnal vocabulary. The piece also embraces the nocturne’s long-­breathed lyrical melody and coloristic uses of harmony, which the twelve-­tone procedures don’t themselves underwrite. The nocturne’s permeability to experience shapes these conventions in relation to this work’s time and place, and its composer’s subject position. Yes, Kay was an East Coast academic composer who would be expected to understand serial procedures S e ns e s: No c t u r n e s   •   189

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Ex. 4.5.  The opening of Ulysses Kay’s First Nocturne for piano works at once as an experiment in twelve-­tone composition and as a nocturne of the long-­1970s.

and traditional piano genres. But (on an uneven playing-­field chapter 5 will return to) new-­music audiences also expected that works by Black composers of Kay’s generation would naturally demonstrate a “jazz influence” [G web ex. 6]. Hearing the nocturne in this piece means hearing jazz, for better or worse, whether or not the composer was hearing it too. When we follow lines in the nocturne (thinking also here about how a composer “goes on” in a serial piece), and experience the nocturne’s surface effects, we don’t always know when we’re approaching depths or shallows.

Sensing Nocturnes It has been a central claim of this chapter that nocturnes are fundamentally concerned with sensory experience. Whose? Who are the subjects and 190  •   C h a p t e r Fou r

addressees of the late-­modern nocturne? In what ways does it matter that these obscure pieces connected with very few sensing bodies? Examples by George Crumb, Pauline Oliveros, and Earl Kim will show how late-­ modern nocturnes made these fundamental doubts and questions part of their substance. These night-­pieces can invoke their subjects and addressees by creating an environment that sensing bodies can inhabit. It’s important to underscore the smallness, lateness, and lack that define these long-­70s night-­pieces. By contrast, the nineteenth-­century musical nocturne had a much fuller conception of its subjects and addressees, and a much bigger audience. Jeffrey Kallberg demonstrates quickly and convincingly how the 1830s–40s nocturne was fully intertwined with contemporary notions of feminine feeling and comportment; he goes on to cite evidence that many women were playing pianos just as the nocturne was becoming popular.19 Long-­70s nocturnes didn’t benefit from this kind of cultural embeddedness. Their makings of sensory experience had to draw on whatever they could find, especially in the past, and they could only happen one hearing at a time. Crumb’s night-­pieces reveal this predicament, and their composer’s resourcefulness. Crumb had a bit of a market presence in the 60s and 70s. His recordings for Nonesuch sold pretty well, and his scores received many reviews in journals. He was mostly celebrated as a purveyor of new and exotic sounds, but his many night-­pieces pulled him back into the nocturne’s history. A piece like Four Nocturnes (Night Music II) for violin and piano (1964) received praise for its exploration of new “sonorous possibilities” in a “carefully notated” and “musically integrated manner,” but its aesthetic is fully grounded in the nocturne’s conventions: “this music requires delicacy, poise and atmosphere!”20 Even when subjected to a withering critique for its putative lack of substance, Crumb’s 1974 Music for a Summer Evening (Makrokosmos III) is characterized as a novel concatenation of old-­fashioned night-­music effects.21 A positive evaluation of Music for a Summer Evening places the work’s new sonorities in the tradition of Debussy, Bartók, Webern, Cowell, and Cage, mostly understood as night-­music composers.22 This mix of new and old converges on night music as a communicative medium, Crumb as basically nocturnal, and a performing subject whose “delicacy” and “poise” were in service of “atmosphere.” Crumb’s music becomes a nocturne environment with the performing body at the center. The specifics of Crumb’s pieces, and even the differences among them, can become less important; the notion that Crumb was composing the same piece over and S e ns e s: No c t u r n e s   •   191

over became so common that he had to joke about it in an onstage conversation, as recorded in the New York Times (“I have written . . . at least two or three”).23 The focal point became the performers’ here-­and-­now production of night-­music sounds. This is not to say these pieces’ details didn’t matter. It’s a question of how. The beginning of “Nocturnal Sounds,” the first movement of Music for a Summer Evening, is a typical case, experienced both on the page and through the original 1975 Nonesuch LP (ex. 4.6) [track 4.4]. On one hand Crumb grants every detail the greatest possible specificity. Notational precision (which the reviews invariably mention) asserts itself as an aesthetic value. Almost every gesture has an expressive indication. The pianos are amplified, adding sharpness; and the original recording has a more present and proximate sound than contemporary concert performances would have provided. On the other hand Crumb also loads things up with an extraordinarily generalized nocturne-­sense. The details rely on slam-­dunk nighttime tropes (whole-­tone collections, acousmetric effects, sounds of birds and bugs). Crumb blankets the entirety with richly nocturnal paratexts: the title, subtitle, epigraph, and even an evocative tempo indication (“Magical, suspenseful [e = 50]”). The form too is driven by broad ebbs and flows of texture and dynamics, forming a “natural environment” for the play of the carefully-­rendered musical objects in the foreground. The work’s performers become figures in this nighttime landscape, thanks in part to a musical discourse that often slows down for the production of timbre-­focused gestures; there’s a sense that these new sounds need special handling. But here too there’s a play of specificity and generality. This recording (like most premiere recordings of Crumb’s music) contains many small rhythmic inaccuracies. These derive partly from the nocturne’s tradition of using precise rhythmic notation to create effects of flexibility, but also from the fact that Crumb asks performers to make sounds whose success is contingent upon factors like the location of a particular piano’s cross-­ bars, the thickness of the paper that gets placed on the piano strings, and the quality of the percussionist’s contrabass bow. What can end up mattering most is the attitude of patience and gentleness that audience members share with the performers. When you see a nocturne-­friendly expressive indication (“delicatiss.”) you might feel churlish complaining about a slightly-­ too-­late grace note; when you listen to the recording you might care more whether a gesture seems carefully placed than whether it sounds novel or especially gripping. This music requires and encourages trust among a not 192  •   C h a p t e r Fou r

Ex. 4.6.  The nocturne’s conventions saturate the score and paratexts of George Crumb’s Music for a Summer Evening (Makrokosmos III).

insignificant group of stakeholders: Crumb; his performers and listeners; the many hands involved in this work’s production and dissemination; and those who teach, speak, and write about new music. Trust is a key ethical value for a genre whose late-­modern exemplars can never give back as much as they borrow. Fallibility and trust are complementary values. Against a backdrop of trust, the fallibility of Crumb’s performers brings them closer to us, and embeds us more deeply in the nocturne’s environment. The nighttime Sonic Meditation V (“Native”), by Pauline Oliveros, makes a similar point in a different medium. This text-­score, originally published in 1971, runs as follows: “Take a walk at night. Walk so silently that the bottoms of your feet become ears.”24 For a piece that lacks a nocturnal title—and tries not to produce sound—this is a perfect example of how the late-­modern nocturne can place its fallible subjects along a path of their own making. This takes us past Cage presenting lines for us to follow, and beyond Crumb’s in-­the-­moment intensities. “Native” places its subject in a nighttime (natural?) environment, connecting with poetic depictions of solitary nocturnal experience (as richly described in Susan Stewart’s essay on the nocturne).25 Almost all the Sonic Meditations this text-­score appeared with require sound making, and still more need a group of participants. This one stands out as well for its downward orientation, which gets its subject moving slowly along the ground, like a nocturnal animal, and for its goal of listening through the skin, which highlights multisensory experience (especially in the nighttime context of attenuated vision). Like Cage’s and Crumb’s nocturnes, “Native” has flaws and gaps. Silence doesn’t normally admit of degrees, so it sounds funny to say “walk so silently that . . . .” We might wonder about the faux-­naive voice that says “bottoms” rather than “soles.” Moreover, should we assume this is happening in the country? Why not imagine yourself walking down Broadway in your socks? Most problematic is the piece’s title: “native” can mean many things, but if you hear it as participating in racist tropes of Native Americans walking quietly in the forest, or being at home in nature or the premodern past, you may well find yourself at an impasse.26 And how, finally, are we meant to understand this meditation’s (impossible) bodily transformation? All these gaps and flaws push toward radical self-­transformation, perhaps befitting a meditation more than a nocturne: at some level, this piece wants its performers to become impossibly quiet, impossibly sensitive, impossibly

194  •   C h a p t e r Fou r

solitary, remade as something other-­than-­human. But in the nocturne’s spirit “Native” can ask its addressees to create a new kind of multisensory relation to the nighttime environment: to move more slowly, quietly, and lightly than anything in the nightscape; to imagine what the feet-­ears would be hearing; and to be able to hold off the question of what happens when morning comes. Earl Kim’s Earthlight (1973) uses more conventionally “musical” materials to create an environment of endlessly falling night. Subtitled “a Romanza, for high Soprano, Violin con sordini, Piano and Lights,” it sets a cento of mostly nocturnal fragments from Samuel Beckett’s novels and dramatic texts. It appeared on a 1977 LP. Earthlight’s instrumentation works like a pun on Webern’s Vier Stücke, Opus 7, and his slightly later vocal chamber music, bridging two sides of a composer Kim was beholden to. Perhaps the choice of instruments gestures toward the violin-­and-­piano nocturne, if not toward Cage’s and Crumb’s pieces themselves. Earthlight’s “Romanza” designation may also point toward an oddly dramatic (if obscure) nineteenth-­century nocturnal romance, Le songe de Tartini by Auguste-­Mathieu Panseron, which adds a virtuosic violin part to the traditional piano and voice.27 Virtuosity surely characterizes Earthlight, from the soprano’s wide range (B3–A6), to the rhythmic difficulties, and challenging passagework. The texts are chosen and ordered in a way that sometimes hints at a trajectory from evening to the middle of the night. The lights contribute to the darkness. Unlike the constant blue light illuminating the players in Crumb’s partly nocturnal Vox Balaenae (1971), the lights here fade up and down on the individual performers as their sounds enter and leave the texture; they also create “pools of light [that] can actually be seen, appearing and disappearing as patterns on the floor” [track 4.5, G web ex. 7]. Earthlight’s few scholarly commentators have underscored the ordinariness and conventionality of its musical materials. For Elaine Barkin its emphasis on “pre-­scrutinized, dissected, and refashioned workbench ‘musical devices’ ” as the basis for virtuosic display, in which the soprano is “ ‘played’ as an instrument,” becomes “rather like Beckett’s frequent focus on the disposable stuff of the world, the rubbish of language and of humankind;” Daniel Albright suggests the piece “illustrates the failure of musical devices to constitute genuine expression.”28 But hearing/seeing the nocturne in Earthlight’s texture speaks against the idea that its musical materials are “disposable” or inexpressive. The music draws heavily on the nocturne’s conventions

S e ns e s: No c t u r n e s   •   195

(the mutes, fermatas, sustained resonances, as well as pitch and rhythmic features); and it participates in the late-­modern nocturne’s metaconventions as we’ve delineated them [track 4.5 [5:59], G web ex. 8]. Broken into discrete sections in the manner of Debussy (Kim’s other great musical ancestor), the form is shaped by gaps and discontinuities that help establish the late-­modern nocturne’s hesitant comportment. And the texts don’t dominate the piece’s texture: there are many instrumental passages, and four long stretches sung on “ah.” Even the piece’s virtuosity itself connects with the nocturne tradition, not only through Crumb and many earlier composers, but also because the virtuosity is mediated by the muted sounds and the halting form. The point is that the musical materials already have a lot of the nocturne in them. With the texts boosting the signal, and the lights shutting out the rest of the world, Earthlight’s “ordinary” musical sounds can constitute a self-­enclosed nocturne environment that encompasses the audience along with the players. In this sense, the lights can be understood to restore or add the nocturne’s visual dimension: the lights impoverish the visual field by dialing up the darkness, but enrich it by adding an element of visual play, explicit audiovisuality. The text-­fragments too, in Kim’s setting, get as much from the nocturne as they give. Earthlight softens what’s harder in Beckett. “It’s darkening. The earth is darkening,” the soprano says about four minutes in (ex. 4.7) [track 4.5 [4:06]]. These lines are from the English version of Cascando, an early-­ 60s radio play. Kim uses a translation Beckett later revised. As Enoch Brater notes, the canonical version has “it’s darkening . . . earth darkening.”29 Brater mentions the differences of speed and articulation but not the effect of removing the article and the verb: the definite article and the straightforward constative sentence suggest an ordinary, diurnal character and perhaps signal the commonness of “the earth,” or the ground, as an environment. Without the article, “earth” is either the planet, part of an odd nonce-­formulation, or an effect of the panting speaker’s breathlessness, and in any case quite defamiliarized. This is just one way that Earthlight’s persona is gentler than Beckett’s, and cradled by the nocturne-­as-­environment. The final section sets a passage from Waiting for Godot that suspends the night indefinitely (ex. 4.8). The soprano sings “At me too someone is looking, of me too someone is saying, He is sleeping, he knows nothing, let him sleep on.” Kim places a rest between “sleep” and “on” [track 4.5 [14:32]]. Perhaps this is how the nocturne ends, by creating its own charmed space, in endless night. 196  •   C h a p t e r Fou r

Ex 4.7.  Four minutes into Earl Kim’s Earthlight the soprano speaks this line as her spotlight dims and the piano’s chord decays.

Ex 4.8.  In the final section of Earthlight the texture reduces to a little canon on B♭, D, and E between soprano-­plus-­violin and piano. At the end the slowly dimming lights extend the quiet moment.

It has taken two extreme cases to show what the nocturne did to survive into the long 1970s. The career of this once-­popular genre needed text-­scores like “Native” and hybrids like Earthlight. It held itself together with whatever scraps of music, text, effect, history, and sensory experience it could muster; and only barely; for very few people; in ways that could easily go unrecognized. The concerto had no such trouble, as we’ll see.

S e ns e s: No c t u r n e s   •   199

Five

Forces THE LATE-­MODERN CONCERTO

This final chapter takes up a genre that has never been anything but live. Throughout the twentieth century new concertos continued to appear while old ones maintained the genre’s place on concert programs and recordings. Questions about the concerto’s value didn’t slow it down; if anything, they inoculated it against decay. In what follows I have recourse to the idea of the concerto as a force partly to register the ways this genre snowballed through twentieth-­century cultural space. The unstoppable concerto contrasts with the precarious life of the nocturne described in chapter 4. We saw that the late-­modern nocturne projects a sense of fallibility. It constructs a performing subject who has to move slowly and tentatively. The nocturne’s capacity for representing the night, too, starts to seem fallible. These pieces can attempt to trade on night-­music tropes, or to insist (in a way that’s uncharacteristic of generic change in postwar Western art music) on the adequacy of the genre’s traditional features. But in truth they’ve relied on nighttime titles or texts with nocturnal imagery. They need these extramusical means to assert their identity as nocturnes. And because there has been greater agreement on what these titles convey than on what can aptly be labeled as such, it becomes hard to say, for many pieces, what makes them nocturnes other than the text or title telling us so: these night pieces share no characteristic length, medium, formal principles, stylistic features, or instrumental idioms. We saw too, however, that the postwar nocturne’s aesthetic distinctiveness depends on this very lack—on the nocturne’s status as a minor genre with no guaranteed slot on concert programs, on its refusal to update its cultural values, on the ways its listeners must meet it halfway. As such, it’s important to acknowledge the costs of the concerto’s forcefulness: after all 200

this is a genre that, for someone like Donald Tovey, had already devolved in the nineteenth century to works “that express little else” than the “splendid spectacular effect of a full orchestra as a background for a display of instrumental technique.”1 Nocturnes can make concertos look vulgar. If the nocturne inhabits a moment of fading twilight, the concerto happens under the full glare of stage lights. The nocturne is intimate, the concerto is grand; the nocturne is quiet, the concerto is loud; the nocturne is “delicate, tender, ethereal”;2 the concerto is coarse. While the nocturne can go slow, the concerto always needs to build a head of steam. The nocturne concerns itself with feelings, the concerto focuses on surface effects. Indeed, while the concerto would seem to make everything visible, the nocturne accepts the condition of “diminished vision,” the “absence of clarity and distinctness of phenomena,” and the contingencies of perception.3 As such the nocturne shows things in vague outlines; the concerto presents clearly delineated shapes. Where the nocturne marks the convergence of femininity and vocality the concerto has embodied aggressive masculinities and a picture of musical instruments as products of technical rationality.4 The nocturne’s vocality enforces a respect for the rhythms of breathing, and its “modest” instrumental writing accommodates itself to the capacities of the ordinary human body; by contrast the concerto has relied on schematic forms that can oscillate mechanically between soloist and orchestra, and on a body that’s pushed to the limit. Nocturnes have been available to amateurs, concertos are the province of professional virtuosos. Thus nocturnes can normally happen in any small room, while concertos usually need a great hall. And while the nocturne has been slow to absorb new musical styles (or we could say it has stood content in its conventions), the concerto has never met a style it didn’t like. The nocturne became intermedial, as we’ve seen, while the concerto has remained a purely musical genre. But the postwar concerted piece was quick to explore the politics of its opposition between soloist(s) and orchestra, while the nocturne mostly refused the political turn: the nocturne has largely succeeded in maintaining the image of a charmed space “where boundaries are fluid and open, where no harm is given or taken.”5

The Concerto’s Persistence This book has insisted throughout that each genre encourages thinking along specific lines. If I’ve allowed this brief comparison of concertos Forc e s: Conc e rt os   •   201

and nocturnes to lapse into a series of rough oppositions it’s because the concerto imposes a sort of thinking by way of contrast. The force of this contrastive mode shows at many levels. Two examples, from Elliott Carter and John Cage, can suggest how this operates. When Carter began working on his 1965 piano concerto, one of the first things he put on paper was a simple table with the header “Relationships of Piano to orchestra” and a firm hand-­drawn line down the middle. Carter simply wrote pairs of contrasting terms, beginning with “Piano states—orchestra distorts”: “soft restrained delicate | violent loud,” “Brilliant | dull,” “expressive | mechanical,” and so on, twice extending the neat but unruled line as he added more pairs.6 Carter’s table can strike us with its heterogeneous mix of elements. It ranges from specific musical features (“quiet | crescendo < ff ”) to extramusical ideas (“fanciful | routine”), and includes some items that lie as it were in between: common modern musical descriptors like “ ‘organic’ | symmetrical” and “disorderly | systematic.” While a few of Carter’s pairs have a definite grounding in conventional features of the genre, most seem notably ad hoc. This willingness to fashion the soloist-­orchestra relation from scratch leads commentators like David Schiff to suggest that Carter is “throwing the concerto tradition away and beginning anew,” that he treats the genre with “a quixotic disregard for its conventions.”7 But the evidence of this table suggests otherwise, especially when we look at notes Carter apparently inserted later using a different pencil. Between the header and the beginning of his pairs he squeezes in “(‘human’ not ‘heroic’ piano[)].” In space remaining at the bottom of the page he adds what appears to be his final pair: “how to have ‘grand piano’ moments? | orch, throws ‘cold water’ on ideals?”8 These notes and questions sit comfortably within the romantic and post-­romantic conception of the concerto: they all have precedents in canonical nineteenth-­century works, and they show that Carter “draws on the old idea of the concerto as a contest or allegorical embodiment of individual and collective.”9 In other words the contrastive framework itself possesses a strongly traditional bias. It would appear that this framework has also had an influence at the meta level: just as a work can stage a conflict between soloist and orchestra it can embody a contrast between traditional and non-­traditional approaches to the genre.10 Thus Schiff can hear “each of Carter’s concertos [as] a subversive anti-­concerto in its own way,” while still acknowledging their connections with the genre’s traditional features and implications.11 This table is one example—among many this chapter will point to—of the concerto’s capacity to impinge on 202  •   C h a p t e r F i v e

pieces even when the presence of its conventions is contested or denied. Carter’s table proves useful for another reason. A quick glance shows that Carter twice has soloist and orchestra trade terms: “slow | fast” is immediately followed by “fast | slow;” “comic | serious” precedes “serious | comic.” This table, then, does not merely establish a static conceptual framework: it constitutes a first sketch of the piece’s form, that is, of its temporal unfolding and its organizational principles. Carter is telling himself not only that some musical behaviors will be shared between piano and orchestra, but that his concerto will proceed partly according to the principle of first she does it, then they do it, and so on. This back-­and-­forth musical flow, which the table models, belongs to the concerto’s traditional syntax. Take Carter’s table as one illustration of how the concerto persists, even for a composer supposedly in the business of making “subversive anti-­ concertos.” The same could be said for John Cage’s more plausibly subversive Concert for Piano and Orchestra (1958), a partly indeterminate work that rejects not just the concerto, but (at least for Adorno, who greatly admired the piece) “every notion of coherent musical meaning.”12 Cage’s notes inform audiences that the piece “is without a master score,” consisting instead of fourteen independent parts (called Solo for Piano, Solo for Violin 1, and so on); the performance is coordinated by a conductor who, working from a separate part, merely “represents a chronometer of variable speed.”13 As Cage makes clear, not only are “specific directives and specific freedoms given to each player including the conductor,”14 but the piece’s instrumentation, duration and form are left open: “The pianist is free to play any elements [of the Solo for Piano] of his choice, wholly or in part and in any sequence. The orchestral accompaniment may involve any number of players on more or fewer instruments, and a given performance may be extended or shorter in length.”15 The case for Cage’s Concert as a piano concerto isn’t helped, one assumes, by the work’s provocative title: it deflects the genre of the concerto and places emphasis on the event at which these performers come together (perhaps over any piece as the reason for this coming together). This title might also signal a desired state: the piano and orchestra working together, “in concert,” rather than interacting in the customary agonistic ways.16 So how does the Concert relate to the concerto? What might tempt us to restore the final “o” and hear the piece as a “Concerto” for piano and orchestra? For one thing the inequality of the two entities is hard to deny: the piano stands out, from the title’s delineation of piano “and Orchestra,” to pianist David Tudor’s rhapsodic first gestures on the original recording Forc e s: Conc e rt os   •   203

[0:29-­1:01], to the thunderous (if partly sarcastic) applause for Tudor at the end [track 5.1]. The piano’s singularity is more than confirmed by the “stupefying complexity” of the Concert’s Solo for Piano, which famously includes eighty–four distinct notational schemes in its sixty–three pages.17 While the other instrumental parts challenge the players with unusual notation, extended techniques, and odd doublings (like bassoon plus baritone saxophone), their ten-­to fifteen-­page lengths and “relative simplicity” contrast with the piano part’s “extravagance.”18 Cage’s own language, too, pushes in the direction of the concerto. Recall his liner note: “The pianist is free to play any elements of his choice . . . The orchestral accompaniment may involve any number of players.” There’s a contrast not only between the “free” soloist and the not particularly empowered “accompaniment,” but also between the underdetermined “players” and the masculine pronoun “his” (which is both masculinist, along the grain of the concerto’s gendered identities, and a nod to Tudor). The choice of the piano as solo instrument and of Tudor as soloist move the piece still closer to the concerto: the piano’s status as the concerto instrument par excellence connects with Tudor’s role as Cage’s most dedicated performer.19 Tudor’s playing on the first recording differs from the orchestral musicians’ in its greater subtlety of touch and control of dynamics, its avoidance of melodic clichés, quotations, and stylistic pastiche, and more broadly in its proximity to Cage’s musical approach of the 1950s.20 This is unsurprising. Tudor knew Cage’s piano music of the fifties more intimately than did the composer himself; and beyond his extensive preparation and sense of responsibility to the piece, he worked harder during the performance and reacted more cannily to his fellow musicians’ playing. But these differences only become available to listeners against the backdrop of the orchestral accompaniment. They’re inseparable from basic questions about what occurs texturally from moment to moment: is Tudor playing or not? If so how audible is his playing? How much activity is happening in the register(s) he’s playing in? Does he seem to be leading, or accompanying, or first among equals? When and how are his gestures responded to by the other musicians? Everything coalesces around “him against the rest;” no other player can be tracked through the Concert this way. The piece raises the concerto’s questions and provides the concerto’s answers. Even the laughter provoked by the accompanying musicians, quite audible at many points on the premiere’s live recording, can reflect a hearing of the Concert as a traditional contest between a “sensitive, imaginative soloist” and an “aggressive orchestra.”21 204  •   C h a p t e r F i v e

While the solo-­versus-­orchestra relation may not have been composed out by Cage as it was in Carter’s piano concerto, the contrast between Tudor’s ardency and the crude behavior of the orchestra would have emerged all the more plainly for those who witnessed the pianist intently focused on his task, both at the keyboard and “crawling around among the pedals of his pianoforte in order to knock at the sounding board from below . . . [which was] not loud enough to be funny.”22 It’s unclear whether Adorno ever heard the recording of the first performance, though he might well have understood the laughter and other audience noise as registering the work’s capacity to “emit an extraordinary shock.”23 The Concert was probably slightly crazier than he imagined.24 Even as a sonic text this piece presents an extreme case: the relation between solo and orchestra doesn’t follow the traditional “this-­that-­this-­that” syntax; there’s no structural repetition, nothing like a ritornello; no overt “sharing” of material; no cadenza, not even any unaccompanied playing; little traditional virtuosity, and none of the familiar passagework. In its first performances the piece seemed to completely reject the concerto’s convention that the soloist’s every gesture carries weight. Moreover the conventions it did observe or put in play had to fight against strong currents: the convergence between the autonomous-­work tradition and the performance of experimental pieces; the status of the 25-­Year Retrospective Concert, especially among its many art-­scene attendees, as a proto-­“happening.” Obviously the relations between composer, performers, and audience broke down in the first performances. But again—these breakdowns were structured by the concerto’s traditional opposition between soloist and orchestra, including its ressentiment. And it’s not only that the Concert’s departures from some genre conventions occurred alongside the observance of others. It is also, to repeat, that the departures raise the concerto’s questions, including questions the composer was apparently seeking to ask: why should the soloist automatically command attention? Why can’t any player’s careful placement of a gesture change the piece’s course? Might we not hear this ensemble as simply fourteen individuals working in concert? Whatever stops the Concert from becoming a traditional concerto doesn’t prevent it from being shot through with the concerto’s conventions and aesthetic ideas. The concerto may not help the Concert achieve anything like coherence. It may frustrate Cage’s intention that the piece “hold together extreme disparities,” or reduce this ideal state to a simple opposition between piano and orchestra. The concerto’s uneven effect on the Concert Forc e s: Conc e rt os   •   205

brings out the genre’s unresolved tensions, too; this can change the genre, undermining its coherence, making it start to seem strange. But for better or worse this genre is thoroughly interwoven with the Concert’s other elements. Everything that contributes to the Concert’s complex of meanings has been impinged upon by the concerto: the relations among the work’s musical materials, the historicity of its musical gestures, the human interactions it sustains and represents, its embeddedness in its settings. The concerto becomes part of the Concert’s substance, surely as much as the pitches and rhythms, gestures and formal landmarks a given performance happens to contain. At the far edge of what can count as a piece, the concerto is still working and being worked. In short the concerto survives because it can operate above and below the radar, along the grain of a composer’s intentions and despite them. It persists partly because its basic mechanisms of structural repetition, textural contrast and spatial play have remained legible across innumerable styles, compositional approaches, and instrumental combinations, and partly because its central metaphors of competition and conversation continue to attract listeners. The continuing appeal of traditional instrumental virtuosity, and the impact of new and other sorts of instrumental virtuosity, mean there have always been performers who want to engage with recent concerted works and listeners willing to hear them. The concerto reassures audiences with a familiar picture of the star performer, while drawing on other musical and nonmusical ways of singling out an aesthetic subject: the jazz improviser, the (post-­)romantic hero (or anti-­hero), the rhapsode, the lonely guy.25 Composers, too, benefit from the concerto’s basic textural schemes. Given the built-­in emphasis on the soloist, the solo part can become a “through line” that allows the composer to draft the piece in short score relatively quickly from beginning to end.26 Similarly the clarity of “this-­that-­this-­that” and “here-­there-­here-­there” can provide ready solutions to formal problems that have challenged composers in post-­tonal contexts.27 Composers know too that as a practical matter concerted works are normally considered to demand less rehearsal time than their symphonic or chamber-­orchestra equivalents: relatively simplified orchestral writing has made concerted pieces more effective than other orchestral works (thus confirming the prestige of their orchestral medium).28 Furthermore the concerto’s basic schemes ask for very little. The genre has a low entry-­fee: really all you need to do is throw an extra music-­stand onstage near the conductor and ask somebody to do something nearby. Or 206  •   C h a p t e r F i v e

you can call a piece “concerto for orchestra” and watch while people wait for subgroups and solo instruments to leap out. And among traditional and post-­traditional genres, concerted pieces have a special purchase on the compositional concerns of the twentieth century, including timbre and texture but also dynamics and spatialization, the exploitation of new and underutilized instruments, an emphasis on juxtaposition rather than development, on oscillation instead of progression, on contrast rather than counterpoint (and, we could add, on contrast as an aesthetic principle in its own right rather than a way of delineating other aesthetic principles). The employment of chamber-­music techniques and aesthetics in orchestral writing has found a ready place in concerted pieces as well. Equally important is how many of the concerto’s putative twentieth-­century innovations—in form, instrumental combinations, use of narrative elements, titling, etc.— have eighteenth-­and nineteenth-­century precursors. As twentieth-­century examples too take hold in the repertoire, they not only provide material (in the widest sense). They show the many ways that it can still be done: that you can write a concerto for percussion and orchestra, or for a soloist and just a half-­dozen accompanying instruments; or that you can create a sense of form through textural means, or that you can pursue an interest in music theatre, electronic sound-­sources, or partially indeterminate notation. Thus there are many discontinuous histories that composers, performers, and listeners can tap into.29 Thinking about why the concerto persists compels us to ask first of all how it does, but there’s never been a full accounting of this. I began asking this question by surveying the breadth of approaches adopted in about 1,300 concerted works completed between 1960 and 1989, from ultra-­traditional to highly experimental.30 The breadth itself does stand out. There truly are many new solo instruments and solo groups placed against an astonishing variety of things that can count as an orchestra. Lengths, forms, and styles actually do vary in unprecedented ways; generic mixtures broaden as well. But across this variety I started to notice some surprising regularities, especially as I narrowed the field to works with an American connection.31 One is the undisguised use of “ordinary” musical stuff like repeated notes, open strings, and long-­held chords. Another is the pressures and possibilities of sonic materiality, particularly through ideas about sound that derive from beyond Western art music—from Black musical practices, from amplification, from techniques of the recording studio, and so on. To demonstrate the sorts of give-­and-­take with the concerto we find in this repertoire I’ll Forc e s: Conc e rt os   •   207

discuss handlings of conventions like scales, solo entries, unaccompanied solo writing, structural repetition, and—at some length—repeated notes. This chapter will spend a bit more time with certain works, especially Ornette Coleman’s Skies of America and (mentioned frequently along the way) Morton Feldman’s pieces for soloist(s) and orchestra. My final claim about these two composers’ pieces is that their not-­fully-­embraced status as concertos enables them to target a new sort of aesthetic subject. Feldman’s ideal listener, who’s willing to slow down and work to hear a mostly quiet piece as a concerto, will provide a final, hopeful picture of what the late-­modern concerto can do. But many postwar concerted works help the concerto survive by making us wonder why the genre persists and what it’s good for; this is the broadest answer to the question of how.32

Conventions and Metaconventions Like chapters 1 (on the late-­60s pop record), 2 (on soul), and 3 (on disco, new wave, and album-­oriented rock) this chapter assesses the roles of particular conventions across many works. But pop and disco have always been judged (or pre-­judged) on the basis of their conventions. In a modernist art-­ music context this approach may require a quick methodological aside: after all, why worry about conventions like scales, say as opposed to more focused sorts of intertextuality, or materials unique to a given piece, or innovative techniques? First, conventions have been the missing term in analyses of postwar Western art music. They’re seldom acknowledged and never treated systematically.33 Empirical study shows, however, that conventions hang on, gain new meanings, and indeed emerge in late-­modern contexts. Just like the genres they interact with, they create networks of pieces, people, and institutions. Second: each time a convention is enacted, it obtains a concreteness that both works against its abstractness or generality, and makes it inescapably part of a piece’s texture (regardless of the composer’s intentions). Conventions are thus key to the foregroundings of sonic materiality this chapter will discuss.34 Finally, as in chapter 3 it will be helpful to think about metaconventions: conventions governing the use of other conventions. These include the idea of the concerto’s “conversation,” as well as the basic sense that everything the soloist does is a priori important. The cadenza too is a traditional metaconvention. Another example is the metaconvention

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that the soloist’s first entrance constitutes a major structural or dramatic moment: it shapes the use and apprehension of whatever is presented in that ­entrance—of whatever conventions are observed or unobserved.35 In different ways these metaconventions condition the nature and function of conventions like scalar figures, unaccompanied solo writing, and the exploitation of an instrument’s registral extremes. Chapter 3 made the point that metaconventions, like all conventions, change as they circulate through cultural space. The concerto can remind us that conventions sometimes become metaconventions as the practices they’re bound up with start to fray. This happens with arpeggios and passagework, for example. The conventions of “broken chords” and “fast running notes” for the soloist acquire a metaconvention’s capacity to articulate a piece’s relations to first-­order conventions like the chord, the melodic gesture, and the display of idiomatic solo writing. A late-­modern concerted work that problematizes these fundamental conventions—and there are many that do—can use (the presence or absence of ) arpeggios and passagework to tell us where it stands. Or consider a final V-­I cadence. It’s purely conventional in eighteenth-­and nineteenth-­century pieces. In a postwar concerted work, however, tonality can be chosen or rejected, functional or nonfunctional; tonality might be the piece’s vernacular or a quaint archaism. As such, a final full cadence can cast a shadow back over the piece and make us think about how chords have been functioning, what it has meant to (not) emphasize a particular pitch-­class, what role materials of the past have been playing, how this piece’s form has handled signals of closure. Metaconventions are part of ordinary musical discourse; they don’t automatically make a piece self-­reflexive. It’s true they’re necessary to self-­ reflexiveness and, therefore, to any sort of modernism, counter-­modernism, anti-­modernism, or postmodernism. But it’s the ordinariness of the concerto’s metaconventions that deserves further attention: even the extreme case of Cage’s Concert for Piano and Orchestra reveals that these metaconventions allow us to talk about shared practices while keeping us grounded in the stubborn particulars of a given score or performance. I’m reintroducing the distinction between conventions and metaconventions here partly to show how much day-­to-­day work metaconventions do, but also to note how this distinction softens under the weight of the concerto’s wide load: as concerted pieces continue to accumulate and branch off, conventions can take on a “meta” quality and metaconventions can harden into conventions.36

Forc e s: Conc e rt os   •   209

Ordinary Materials: Repeated Notes One such first-­order convention is repeated notes in the solo part. This is a surprising convention in its own right, emerging where you don’t expect conventions to take hold, appearing in concerted pieces of the 60s and after that seem to share little else. It’s a convention in two senses: it is heard all the time, and it doesn’t need inventing.37 It’s there, already and seemingly always. Playing the same note over and over is as ordinary as you get. Think how odd it is for a concerto soloist to do this—repeated notes don’t normally constitute a melody; they can’t show off the instrument’s range or its virtuosic possibilities or even its idiomatic gestures. They’d be more appropriate for the second bassoon than the soloist. So how and why do they occur in the solo parts of many late-­modern concerted works? What happens when they do? A famous instance comes in a piece we’ve already encountered, Carter’s piano concerto. No commentator fails to mention the heightened moment when the soloist reiterates the F above middle C, over and over, as the piece moves toward closure.38 But because these repeated notes serve a clear role in a process of intensification, their use here doesn’t raise the questions that other instances do: it plays as a sort of neutralization or reduction, the final emptying out before a big finish.39 Similarly these repeated notes emerge from and lapse back into a simple emphasis on the F, rather than an exclusive focus on F—the piano plays many other pitch-­classes in this passage. Other examples go further. And the repeated Fs become a rhythmic line, sometimes even projecting multiple rhythmic strata; we might thus hear this rhythmic activity as compensating for, or more precisely foregrounded by means of, the reduction in pitch activity.40 There’s little sense that the piece has had to give up anything by indulging in these repeated notes. Carter tries a similar gambit in his next solo concerto, the oboe concerto of 1987.41 This example better shows the element of renunciation that has marked this convention and helped make it useful. At a moment in the piece when the concerto’s sense of dialogue has been well established, Carter restricts the oboe’s statements to isolated reiterations of a single note, B below middle C [G web ex. 9, track 5.2].42 Unlike the Piano Concerto’s repeated Fs, the oboe is actually reduced to a single pitch. And not merely this: the oboe is limited to presentations of individual long notes with gaps in between, all at the same dynamic and with the same articulation. These reiterations are too spread out to be heard as a line, so they can’t work as a rhythmic motive or even as a participant in rhythmic play; the oboe’s attacks

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are evenly spaced, coming about every 4.7 seconds, though this regularity may be hard to notice against the orchestra’s sharply articulated cross-­ rhythms.43 Thus, in a way that wasn’t true of the piano delivering its repeated Fs, the oboe is “inflexible.” It’s telling too that Carter chooses B 3, the oboe’s lowest note. (One observes it’s preceded by the A6 that’s normally considered the instrument’s highest note.) The oboe’s low B is employed quite sparingly to this point.44 Not only does it therefore mark a limit-­point, this repetition of the oboe’s lowest note is a rare foregrounding of the honking timbre this instrument’s bottom register can produce: it’s a brusque, coarse sound, though there’s no mistaking its source.45 This series of gestures is opposite to refinement as well as invention. This example moves us closer to an understanding of this late-­modern convention. Like scales, triads, and arpeggios in tonal music, repeated notes become a kind of raw material capable of asserting both rawness and materiality. Repeated notes can be heard as at once unshaped—below the level of what counts as musical invention—and unmediated—pure matter. Carter’s use of this convention does something highly characteristic. It combines the repeated notes with features that support both these hearings. The even durations help this stream of notes convey a sense of reduction to the simplest possible instrumental writing. (In many concerted pieces the soloist’s repeated notes are presented in even durations, creating a range of effects we’ll quickly note in what follows.) And by heightening the activity in a third parameter, the timbrally aggressive B makes the repeated notes work as an assertion of sonic materiality. This too is common, and indeed these represent the two main strands in the use of this convention. Each is a kind of restriction. But in an emphasis on sonic materiality the goal of restricting pitch-­activity is to foreground something else; while in the case of a reduction to “basics” the point is the restriction itself. In this way repeated notes or chords can connect with signifiers of simplicity or of Western art music’s prehistory: beyond even durations this would include diatonic collections, homorhythm, and short melodic or rhythmic patterns.46 They can also be classed among conventions that signal sonic materiality, like open strings, drones, non-­cadential trills, registral extremes, timbral play (at the expense of melody), noise effects, and so on. The forms of concerted pieces have benefited from the strong contrasts these conventions can create. Restricting the “this” helps it stand out against the “that.” Even so, the rhetoricity of the oboe’s repeated B-­flats in the Carter clearly partakes of traditional soloistic power. We have no trouble hearing this as

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self-­insistence, all the more because the repeated notes work as “other” to the piece’s material and they only occur once. By contrast Feldman’s 1975 Piano and Orchestra begins by raising questions about whether the piano will really assume the soloist’s mantle (ex. 5.1). It starts with the soloist q­ uietly articulating a D 5 on each of the first six quarter-­notes, rubbing against a sustained C5 in the English horn; the piano then skips a beat (though this beat is articulated by a pizzicato chord in the strings), then another, then becomes more rhythmically flexible in its presentations of this D before returning to even quarter-­note attacks for the final three quarters of measure 4 [track 5.3]. There had been plenty of non-­virtuosic solo entrances in piano concertos, but the single, quiet repeated note, in even durations, right at the beginning of a piece, almost dares the listener to deny the performer’s status as soloist.47 Equally important, Piano and Orchestra quickly accommodates itself to these straitened circumstances. The piece’s level of melodic/rhythmic activity actually drops following this longish opening phrase. For seventy-­five seconds (and then again for another two minutes or so after that), the piano avoids playing anything resembling a melodic phrase; furthermore, the piece as a whole presents zero consecutive attacks at a distance of a quarter-­note or less between m. 4 and mm. 74–75, a four-­minute span. Where Carter’s repeated notes required a pulling back, here the piano’s repeated notes come closer to the high end of the piece’s melodic/rhythmic activity. This subtle contrastive effect surely conditions a hearing of Piano and Orchestra as an anti-­concerto: if you expect the level of activity to rise following a spare opening phrase, and instead you hear it fall, you might imagine that the piece has set itself up in opposition to the genre’s basic principles. But this effect can also constitute a dialing-­down of the relations between solo and orchestra in a way that preserves the genre’s principles. Even in this piece the soloist’s opening statement matters more than anything the orchestra responds with; the rest of the solo part too defers to it. Thus the repeated notes must count as essential material. According to such a hearing repeated notes are neither a sign of restriction nor an indication that something’s missing—they become, quite simply, adequate to the task of providing the piece with its script. If they embody a quality of reduction, it’s a reduction to essentials, an ascesis. In a way that can help confirm the concerto’s identity in late modernity, the repeated notes here are assertive enough to stand out against what follows them, but nevertheless opposite to empty display, passagework, melodic cliché, chuggings through

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extremely quiet, without the feeling of a beat,  

Flutes

English Horn

Trumpets in C

Piano

Percussion 1

Percussion 2



 

     







  











 

 









 



 



 

triangle









timp.









   

con sordino

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Violin 2

   

con sordino







 

con sordino div.

Violas

Violoncellos

       

con sordino

div.

Double Basses

   

  





  

    

      

    

div. pizz.

    

div. pizz.



    

Ex. 5.1.  Morton Feldman’s 1975 Piano and Orchestra, mm. 1–5. The soloist enters right away, presenting notably non-­virtuosic repeated notes.

E. Hn.

Perc. 2

   

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C Tpt.

   



 

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Fl.

 

  

     

Ex. 5.1.  continued



unis. arco



 

poco

  

unis. 2 soli



a twelve-­tone series, noodling, and other forms of “pointless activity.”48 Repeated notes are no longer other to a work’s “essence.” The Carter oboe and Feldman piano examples share something important. The solo instrument’s timbral particularity, and its mere presence in its harmonic, textural and physical context, work as a genre-­appropriate claim that whatever the soloist does can suffice. So again: this convention is shaped by the genre’s (competing) metaconventions, specifically that the soloist’s behaviors must be measured against a demand for virtuosity, that (however) anything the soloist does carries weight, and that sonic materiality can count as musical material, in the broadest sense of musically usable stuff. (We’ll see that sonic materiality can subsume, exceed, and conflict with traditional emphases on the soloist and the composer.) The low B ’s irreducible oboe-­ness says the soloist simply has to perform the instrument’s timbral specificity in order to fulfill the role of concerto soloist—all the more because its lowest note sounds uncompromised.49 Similarly, Feldman’s opening suggests, the piano need only project its non-­orchestral sound into the texture for its status as soloist to be fully established.50 All this would seem to support a high-­modernist belief in an ever-­ expanding aesthetic horizon. A specifically long-­70s gaze grasps this convention differently, however. Against the backdrop of a tradition that never went this far, there’s a kind of freedom from melodic/rhythmic artifice we should take care to register: the freedom to not worry about the distinctiveness of what the composer puts forth, or what the soloist plays. It’s as if the pieces say “there’s no such thing as ‘new material’ anymore, so why try? Let’s admit the obvious.” Repeated notes allow these pieces to open themselves up, make themselves vulnerable. The genre remains alive, and changes, as a result of this openness. But at a cost. We might hear Carter’s one-­time use as hinting darkly that musical material lies in danger of running out. (So then what? Where would this leave a concerto soloist?) Feldman’s more thoroughgoing employment of this convention, here and in his other concerted works, might suggest it’s too late to play the game of musical motives and musical ideas.51 But when the late-­modern concerto’s forces energized this dialectic of expansiveness and doubt, the expansion won out: it is, finally, the diverse and frequent use of this convention that makes it worth studying as part of the concerto’s history. Repeated notes for the soloist help delineate beginnings, middles, and ends, as Feldman’s pieces show.52 Besides this, repeated notes appear in cadenzas, for example, where they can help support or contest

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traditional demands for virtuosity.53 And beyond these specifically formal functions, they play a host of other structural roles. They can mark the beginning or the goal of a process. They have also served to articulate a work’s conceptual origin rather than its temporal beginning, like a sonic fundament (in Morton Subotnick’s Parallel Lines) or an axis of pitch-­symmetry (in Earle Brown’s Centering for violin and ensemble). Carter’s oboe concerto showed how repeated notes attach to registral extremes; they’re often used to underscore “boundary tones,” that is, highest and lowest notes, and first and last notes. Similarly their pitch-­stasis can highlight stasis in other parameters: even durations (as we’ve seen), drones and other kinds of static harmony, unchanging dynamics and articulation, a frozen timbral identity. Especially when matched with even durations, repeated notes provide a notably “neutral” way of filling up time, which the concerto has certainly allowed.54 Rhetorically this convention has been flexible too.55 In their common ­association with even durations, repeated notes have worked in service of “mechanical” topoi.56 While they can signal “indifference,” as in Lutosławski’s cello concerto, or ask a listener to make do with little, as in Feldman’s pieces, they can also convey an expressive intensity, heightened focus, or plain obsessiveness.57 Sometimes the expressive quality becomes tender, as if the player is caressing the note;58 in more sober instances the repeated note functions as a reciting tone.59 Thea Musgrave’s horn concerto demonstrates three other ways this convention has operated in concerted pieces: to produce fanfares, echoes, and spatialization effects.60 Along traditional lines and in ways specific to the era of recorded music—as Musgrave’s piece reminds us—this convention has allowed the soloist’s sound to stand out (at the expense of traditional virtuosic display). But the low profile and traditionally accompanimental function of repeated notes have also provided a means for the soloist to blend into the orchestra.61 Occasionally this convention lets us glimpse the pleasures of repetition, as in Feldman’s Violin and Orchestra, though it must be said that no concerted piece I’ve found truly gives its soloist over to such pleasures.62 As something “minimal” this convention has lent access to stylistic features of minimalism, however.63 And this convention has served as a fulcrum between the traditional concerto and musical practices beyond Western art music: the final movement of Donald Erb’s trombone concerto has the soloist play repeated notes in the style of a didgeridoo; and Alberto Ginastera’s first cello concerto uses motor-­rhythmic repeated notes to provoke an intervention from the percussion section, shifting the musical 216  •   C h a p t e r F i v e

discourse in an Afro-­Cuban direction.64 These examples should make clear that the varied uses of this convention have different genealogies, trajectories, and musical features they combine with, as well as diverse functions and rhetoricities. It bears saying that this convention did its work in a way that’s very apparent on the surfaces of these pieces, but without any program note, review, or scholarly article acknowledging its pervasiveness.65 Thus, beyond its presence in the history of a busy genre, this “hidden” convention can teach us something about late-­modern artistic practices. It’s not only that singular moments in these pieces relied on shared means. Nor is it just that repeated notes, like all the conventions and metaconventions I discuss here, were found in the toolboxes of traditional composers and experimentalists, Pulitzer winners and the relatively unrewarded, Americans and everybody else. Conventions, this tells us, don’t require verbalization. Some conventions are never “expected;” some can’t be “subverted.” We learn too that we haven’t properly understood the nature and role of ordinary musical stuff in late-­modern works; nor why concertos, like the nocturnes we encountered in chapter 4, make a place for it. This convention’s very repetitiveness has been the stuff of variety. In its boringness it has provided, undisguised, some of a dramatic genre’s dramatic moments. Its ordinariness has made it the most distinctive feature of certain concerted works.66 How, then, does this convention affect the concerto and the discursive field around it? Simply put, these repeated notes press on the genre’s sore spots. We’ve already observed how they uncover a contradiction in the way the concerto both accepts whatever the soloist plays and demands virtuosity. Similarly this convention makes us wonder about abundance and scarcity of musical means in late modernity. Other tensions too produce ripples. Because these repeated notes come from everywhere and nowhere they pose questions about the genre’s history and porousness, and about the way concerted pieces relate to each other. They create uncertainty about whether they constitute a “traditional” or “innovative” feature of the late-­modern concerto, reminding us finally that this convention (like other emergent conventions) is really neither. As such, the undeniable “thereness” of repeated notes confronts the contingency of musical effects. These tensions map onto the heightened aesthetic/political economy of virtuosity, the common practices of consuming concertos, and the slower processes of composition and rehearsal. Does this convention of repeated notes mean it’s OK to not bring the house down? What if, after a quiet ending emphasizing the soloist’s repeated notes, it turns out there was a dry eye Forc e s: Conc e rt os   •   217

in the house—should the composer get blamed for leaving too much on the bargaining table? Or is it the performer’s fault for not sealing the deal? What does it mean for a composer to just write out that note over and over again? (How) does a virtuoso practice playing twelve D-­flats in a row? We can imagine a late-­modernist composer daring herself to do this. Once in a while the speed and articulation of the repeated notes provide a challenge for a virtuoso performer.67 Sometimes there truly is a demanding performance technique the repeated notes require, as when a soloist must learn circular breathing to perform the didgeridoo material in Erb’s trombone concerto.68 As audience-­members we can experience moments when “simple” materials get us to listen harder. But more often than not these repeated notes create musical and social situations we don’t know how to describe.

Ordinary Materials: Open Strings, Registral Extremes, and Scales All the same: unremarkable stuff like repeated notes cannot be dismissed or ignored. We can see in retrospect that ordinary materials reminded the concerto it was still living. Perhaps partly because they weren’t talked about, they became a way for concertos to engage with both the history of the genre and the materiality of sound. The convention of repeated notes for the soloist changed the terms of both sorts of engagement. I should separate and clarify these two strands. I will do so through briefer discussions of three kinds of ordinary material that work more aggressively to assert sonic materiality or stir up historical sediment. With greater ease than repeated notes, open strings and registral extremes shove sonic materiality into the foreground, because first, they’re even more “elemental”—they’re bound up with the physicality of instruments and of making sound, in a way that’s ontologically prior to any piece—and second, they’ve had a marked tendency to stand out when assigned to a soloist in concerted works. Scales, on the other hand, carry a stronger sense of history than repeated notes. These materials helped keep the concerto alive by forcing it to look back, either across the length of its history or onto the body/brain/world network in which it’s em­bedded, and forward through the higher (or subtler) degrees—or new sorts—of contrast they enabled. We’ve already encountered open strings for the soloist: European composers as different as Britten and Ligeti combined them with repeated notes, 218  •   C h a p t e r F i v e

and so did strange American bedfellows like Harbison and Erb. This device provided the opening move for a high-­profile commissioned work by Pulitzer winner Jacob Druckman. His 1978 viola concerto, written for the New York Philharmonic and its principal violist, Sol Greitzer, begins with the unaccompanied soloist presenting a unison repeated G3: a left-­hand-­pizzicato open G rings out while jeté (or “thrown bow”) technique is used to create skittering repetitions of the stopped G3. Both these techniques are relatively quiet. This gesture’s deliberately crabbed sound makes it a bit of a special case. But its strong pitch, rhythmic and timbral identity allows it to serve as a referential sonority throughout the work, especially once heard against similar gestures using the open D string (0:35) and later the open A (2:06); before long the orchestra picks it up (0:46) [track 5.4, G web ex. 10].69 Such a no-­drama opening, in the traditional setting of this work’s premiere, could spell trouble for a concerted work with solo viola. A popular viola joke asks how you get a violist to play spiccato, a similar bouncing sort of bowing technique: you just write a whole-­note and put “solo” above it. All viola concertos have to deal with what Tovey called the instrument’s “notorious inferiority complex.”70 But Druckman puts this viola joke into the opening of his piece; the left-­hand pizzicato too is like a symptom of nerves. Whether he intended the cute humor or not, Druckman provides a way to understand the effect of open strings in a solo part: they assert the instrument’s physical properties over the capacity of musical material to exploit them, and (according to the terms of the joke) they emphasize the sound over the player, gravity over mastery. Open strings jut out, and what does the jutting is common property rather than singular. They teach a lesson about the foundations pieces cleave to when there’s no fully-­drawn common practice. In an aesthetic context that radically underdetermines what musical material is and where it comes from, open strings want to tell us: musical material is what comes from basic properties that musical instruments share.71 Why is this a radical notion? The viola’s first sound is precisely the kind of gesture that late-­modern pieces use quasi-­motivically.72 But the traditional concerto would have trouble recognizing it as a gesture: again, it’s too raw, too plain, too shapeless. Many naked presentations of open strings in concertos do not rise to the level of gestures as traditionally understood, perhaps going as far back as the solo entry in Berg’s violin concerto.73 So why did concertos put ever more weight on them? Like repeated notes, open strings can provide motivicity through non-­traditional means. But an open string’s status as “unshaped” has an Forc e s: Conc e rt os   •   219

additional dimension. Even the physically awkward and not-­very-­loud opening move of Druckman’s concerto can confirm what opening strings are: they’re the freest, purest, most resonant, in some ways most characteristic sound you can make on a stringed instrument. They’re also the loudest and easiest to play—this remains true of the viola’s opening gesture relative to the techniques being employed. Moreover they’re pinned to certain pitches and intervals we’re familiar with.74 They’re already “there” on the instrument, prior to any articulation. Postwar concerted pieces hit them harder than earlier concertos do, doubtless partly because open strings can make it easier to play difficult intervals, wide leaps, and passagework that doesn’t lie easily in the hand, and partly because composers and performers object less strenuously to their “unrefined” qualities.75 Open strings, then, produce heightened effects that don’t derive from the piece itself, the genre’s traditional practices, or any specific canonical pieces.76 Their sources of authority are sound, physical objects, historicized human bodies, and the acoustical environment; the cultural memories they trigger are hardly genre-­specific. At this point in a set of complex and contingent historical processes, open strings remind us, these are the sounds, musical instruments, and instrument-­playing bodies we’ve wound up with.77 Open strings become the best approximation of “the way things are.” Registral extremes too have been able to provide a ground and delineate musical/­cultural space. Low notes, like the viola’s open C string and the oboe’s B 3, possess a weight that derives as much from their status as a (sometimes literal) fundament as from their timbral distinctiveness; this is especially true of pedal-­ tones on brass instruments.78 Moreover the very extremity of high notes and low notes has been the source of strongly contrastive effects in a genre that requires contrast: from note to note or phrase to phrase, many pieces have juxtaposed high notes with low notes, or extremes with non-­extremes.79 A final point about registral extremes concerns their relation to the concerto’s twentieth-­century history. The upward creep of instrumental ranges is an old story; tracing it from Beethoven through the 1980s reveals a process of expansion that can seem like steady progress, but it also shows signs of the difficulty, effort, boldness, risk, and failure associated with high notes.80 In the twentieth century this story must be interwoven with a central narrative of African American music. When the composer T. J. Anderson was asked in a 1973 interview whether the “black experience” had changed “classical music as conventionally understood,” he immediately mentioned the blues but added “Also, the way instruments are used—the expansion of range of

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instruments—has changed. For instance, jazz musicians, being limited in training, refused to accept certain concepts of what an instrument could do. So notes got higher and higher.”81 High notes in concertos tell the history of the genre’s future—a future that included the concerto’s “conversation” with Black music and concepts of sonic materiality. Playing scales lies closer to the center of the traditional concerto. Scales have never left the soloist’s arsenal. Although—or because—they’re part of every musician’s training, they have formed a necessary part of virtuosic practice: scales make difficulty and energy (or commanding ease) palpable for the audience, even when they aren’t hard to play. It helps too that no concerted work, regardless how far removed from tonal harmony and traditional idioms, has done without some form of stepwise motion. But as an old convention at a late-­modern moment a soloist’s presentation of a scale can still surprise us. Six quick examples will suggest the range of effects scales could create. Whether easy or hard, diatonic or non-­diatonic, emphasized or en passant, these odd examples of scales jut out from their contexts. These examples thus connect with our other instances of singular effects produced by ordinary means. We’ll also find that they get us back to the question of sonic materiality, especially as it interacts with Black-­music practices. Earl Kim’s violin concerto is a virtuoso piece that deploys scales in service of that virtuosity. It introduces the scales in a surprising manner (m. 113), through an abrupt change of section thirty-­seven seconds into the excerpt [track 5.5 [5:44–6:51], G web ex. 11.].82 The piece was written for Itzhak Perlman, the most ubiquitous violinist of the 1970s (at least according to Morton Feldman), but not often a performer of contemporary works.83 As we might expect, it engages a traditional virtuoso economy, musical and otherwise.84 These diatonic scales are framed both by what’s musically around them (more pointillistic, disjunct, chromatic material) and by the earlier virtuosic concertos they connect with.85 I’ll add that this scale-­driven passage is not only diatonic (both melody and accompaniment), but white-­ note: this makes it easier to play but also has a poetics of simplicity and “purity.” Moreover it emphasizes even durations, which is a very common association. Let this example stand in for a host of pieces that employ scales in surprising ways and contexts but score them in a manner that’s compatible with virtuosic passagework.86 Virtuosic in its own way is 1968’s Communications #11, an album-­length piece by the Jazz Composer’s Orchestra with Cecil Taylor. Composer and session leader Michael Mantler describes the piece in a liner note as Forc e s: Conc e rt os   •   221

“From the association with one man. The orchestration of his piano.” This approach, and the work’s title, point in directions well-­established by the piano concerto; one sees why a contemporary reviewer said, “It seems that the orchestra is not the power, but perhaps the volume. The piano not the piano but the orchestra.”87 But in a setting where Taylor cannot feed material to the ensemble in his accustomed manner—the work’s structure doesn’t allow it, and most of the Orchestra probably couldn’t hear him in the studio—his improvised solo part has to establish “communications” on its own terms.88 Taylor “thrashes, swirls, and dances, snarls and ice-­skates his percussive ideas with overpowering strength,” as Ron Welburn put it at the time: “It is this energy that distinguishes Cecil Taylor’s music from any European classicism. The piano becomes the orchestra it can be, and on this record Taylor engulfs the arrangement of Viennese-­born Mike Mantler.”89 Often, as Welburn says, “the machine-­g un effect of his articulation contains two or three musical ideas operating simultaneously.”90 About eight minutes into part 1 of this two-­part work, however, Taylor surrenders himself to one simple idea [track 5.6 [8:05–8:55]]. The musical context is an already-­ established harmonic stasis—the orchestra staying almost completely within a prevailing E Dorian collection—along with rising intensity and high textural density (starting about 7:28). At 7:49 Taylor plays a final chromatic lick and throws himself into E dorian. When the reeds and brasses build and sustain a chord (starting 8:05), Taylor begins to respond with E dorian scale-­segments, usually presented in parallel seconds, sometimes missing the fourth degree, A (8:12–8:29). He doesn’t exactly turn into Bill Evans circa 1959, but he accepts this notably neutral way of moving around within a diatonic mode.91 The piece could follow the lead of its modal harmony and stay here forever, but instead it turns on a dime: the reeds play two four-­note chromatic phrases in close harmony; Taylor inserts little repeated melodic cells that follow the pitch and contour of the reeds’ line (8:31–8:39). The reeds play a final sustained chord as the brasses return (8:40). Taylor pounds clusters into a texture that threatens to become too sweet (8:48). The surprise-­effect of the scales is confirmed by the contrast with what comes next: following the shift at 8:31 the piece acquires greater melodic specificity, a faster harmonic rhythm, and a stronger sense of dialogue between piano and orchestra. Taylor’s performance of the E dorian brings out the differences between playing a scale and playing in a scale: free-­jazz extensions of the modal style underwrite the latter but don’t normally include the former. As a pulling-­back (like we’ve seen with repeated notes) or

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a staged refusal to improvise a new melody or a more varied texture, this moment places weight on the totality of the sound. Scales can suffice. They’re normative. But they’re “improvised” here as a singular, idiosyncratic gesture within fully accepted constraints—including the form’s demand to suddenly change gears. The normativity of scales can help them create closure. This works even when the scales are non-­diatonic, as two examples will show. Feldman’s Flute and Orchestra ends with a sparse passage that unfolds a complete chromatic scale (ex. 5.2). As the flute continues to occupy its high tessitura, a solo cello begins a chromatic descent from A5 (notated as G double-­sharp); the chromatic descent moves to the English horn, then the flute (still in its high tessitura), and finally the cello again. The piece ends with the flute’s repetition of its last four-­note chromatic descent [track 5.7 [31:27–32:38]]. In a closing section newly composed for a 1978 revision, Alberto Ginastera’s first cello concerto begins on its low open C and gradually rises in an arpeggio that turns into a kind of scale—like moving along the upper partials of a fantastic harmonic series as it enters a microtonal world [track 5.8 [3rd movement, 9:30–10:20]].92 Ginastera’s epilogue behaves fairly traditionally: despite the unfamiliar sound of the cello’s microtones, the “archetypical gesture” of a slow stepwise ascent against a chordal cushion makes clear the piece is coming to an end. (It doesn’t hurt that Ginastera has the cello continue playing its high C6 for an additional seventy seconds, unaccompanied save for some orchestral thunder-­and-­lightning that quickly blows over.) In Feldman’s quiet ending, the chromatic descent derives from, exceeds, and ultimately neutralizes the consistent one-­to-­four-­note cells that have dominated this piece.93 Here the scale is disguised a bit by octave displacement, switchings between instruments, a notated wobble on the penultimate note, and the overlap between its first three pitches and the soloist’s completion of her previous idea. Besides this, the abrupt slowdown in the presentation of scale-­steps after the third note (following m. 882), and the rhythmic unpredictability thereafter, may compromise the scale’s normativity. But this oddly literal unfolding of the chromatic aggregate still functions as a spelling-­out of “everything there is” in pitch-­class terms.94 The flute’s final four notes return to its penultimate phrase, now rhythmically regularized, and gesture toward the work’s opening: as if the only way the piece can end is to absorb the motivicity of the flute’s first phrase into the raw material whence it comes—it’s like you wake up and realize this whole thing was just four notes in the chromatic scale. Forc e s: Conc e rt os   •   223

         

 

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Ex. 5.2.  At the end of Morton Feldman’s Flute and Orchestra (1978), the soloist, an English horn, and a solo cello combine to slowly present a complete chromatic scale.

Scales for the soloist often seem both simple and odd, especially when they’re not given the virtuoso treatment. Two non-­diatonic examples have just demonstrated this, but they can’t strike us the way diatonic scales do. We might assume that diatonic scales would be more likely to appear in tonal or modal harmonic contexts; this is somewhat borne out by the virtuosic neo-­tonal violin concertos of Penderecki, Rochberg, and others,95 and by David Baker’s concertos for soloist(s) and jazz band. But as something separable from virtuosic display, diatonic scales are less frequent than we would suppose. Even Erickson’s Garden for violin and orchestra, a piece organized in large modal blocks, avoids scales, with one notable exception—a tutti passage without the soloist (mm. 78–90).96 And when diatonic scales 224  •   C h a p t e r F i v e

do appear in postwar concerted pieces it’s usually a surprise: scales ­appear mostly where they can raise questions. Their commonness can create doubt as well as reassurance. Bill Evans’s performance of Claus Ogerman’s 1974 Symbiosis for piano and orchestra can show how diatonic scales can surprise us even without techniques of modernist defamiliarization. The scale rises out of an inner voice (starting 0:17) to become the focal point in this unaccompanied opening to the work’s second (and final) movement [track 5.9, G web ex. 12]. This passage is completely written out, as the orchestra’s verbatim repetition quickly tells us (1:07–2:06). We’re authorized to hear the piano’s ascending scale as ad-­libbed, however, because (1) it “merely” fills space between statements of the more strongly profiled three-­note motive that begins this movement, and (2) the performer is a famous improviser. E ­ vans’s unmistakable touch and phrasing, too, make this composed passage seem improvised. Indeed the slowish tempo, absence of a strong pulse, and reduction of the piano texture to just the one line can almost make it seem like Evans is discovering or inventing the D-­major scale. The piece quickly becomes more chromatic (0:52–57), so we can understand this section as ripe for harmonic/melodic complication.97 But whether we hear Evans’s presentation of the scale as doubtful or assured—as willed naiveté or canny ascesis—it registers a distance from the practices of both jazz and the concerto. This play of familiarity/oddness and assurance/doubt is key to the ways that scales can dramatize the work of starting out. Because this movement’s opening section keeps reappearing in different guises,98 and is finally restated at the end (starting 5:29 of part B), it can also point backwards: here as elsewhere the structural repetition of deliberately rudimentary material like diatonic scales can stage a return to origins.99 The importance of Evans’s touch tells us: these sorts of staged return can assert sonic materiality as it’s bound up with the prehistory of, or alternatives to, Western art music. Such non-­virtuosic presentations of scales can also become a site for projecting a distinctive musical personality: they can make the “impersonal” diatonic scale a concrete universal, as if to say “you don’t know what a C-­major scale is until you’ve heard it in all these possible ways.”100 A final example comes from the emotional core of a forty-­minute work we’ll return to, Ornette Coleman’s Skies of America: diatonic scales as they had never been heard, far beyond what normally counts as “out of tune” [track 5.10 [2:38–3:43]]. The sense that the orchestra and the alto-­saxophone are governed by different regimes—even though composer Forc e s: Conc e rt os   •   225

and improvising soloist are one and the same here—­extends past their differing conceptions of pitch and timbre to the soloist’s rhythmic v­ ariety and sense of freedom from the pulse, his varied phrase-­lengths, and (at higher and lower structural levels) his unpredictable comings in and out. From the scale-­fragments starting at 2:42 to the last descent beginning 3:35, this moment renders ordinary materials as radically singular, in a piece that also recasts the solo/orchestra relation. Coleman’s playing here can make us ask ourselves what scales are. To review: they’re ordinary. They’re never assumed to rise to the level of a musical motive. Sometimes they’re understood as other to what counts as melodic inspiration or cleverness. The Coleman, Feldman, Ginastera, and Kim examples already brought out two accidental qualities of scales that the concept of scale doesn’t include: non-­equal tempered instruments play scales differently than equal tempered instruments. It’s also harder to play in some registers and keys than in others, even for an equal-­tempered instrument. Most importantly scales are deep for at least these four reasons: (1) Scales are one of the things instrumentalists practice from their earliest student days. The player’s physical relation to the instrument changes along with his own body in ways that shift between creating technique and preserving it. Like the slowly repeated notes at the opening of Feldman’s Piano and Orchestra, they’re associated with the multiple senses of “starting out”: with the poetics of beginning on an instrument, or approaching one for the first time in a particular setting.101 They’re typed as the first thing musicians play to warm up. (2) Scales aren’t really raw material—they’re sedimented with a lot of history, since, not only does everyone practice them, composers and improvisers actually use them in pieces.102 (3) At the same time they really are the easiest, “simplest,” most “neutral” way of traversing musical space or delineating a pitch collection: they fill pitch-­ space the way even-­duration repeated notes fill time. As such they’re a nexus of memorability and predictability. They give you a picture of what there is, whether they’re diatonic or non-­diatonic.103 (4) For all these reasons musicians have strong personal and cultural associations with playing scales. All this can help explain why scales have found a ready place in a genre that hasn’t always demanded original material.104 But it doesn’t suggest why scales can strike us as odd when they appear in a late-­modern concerto. Part of the oddness derives from the high degree of contrast they can create with what’s around them. Part comes from the way their normativity can be framed: after all, what happens when you “return” to scales after a gap has opened up between composing and the pedagogy that playing scales (still) 226  •   C h a p t e r F i v e

represents?105 The real question, though, is how a scale’s commonness interacts with the sonic materiality of any actual presentation.

Sonic Materiality This question is key to the impact of sonic materiality on the late-­modern concerto. The concerto saturates itself with ordinary materials. But it always places them here in relation to there; it makes us grasp them as this against that; and it renders them as fully dependent on some person—this person— playing them now in exactly this way. Personality embraces impersonality and abstraction demands concreteness: this is what produces the particulars of a genre that seeks to leave nothing out. When concertos engage with history through conventions like scales, or with physical reality through the sounds of open strings, they confront us with the “when, where and how” of sonic materiality. I’ve been squeezing a lot under the heading of sonic materiality: all the emphases on traditional and nontraditional instrumental timbres or on texture as a leading parameter; every way of drawing attention to the physical work of making sound or to the spatial dimension and the diffusion of sound; all forms of amplified, recorded, or electronic sound, and most heightened uses of percussion; any attempt to draw on musical practices that foreground sonic properties neglected by Western art music. It’s useful to remember there was a Western art music genre that could accommodate all these ways of asserting sound’s material existence. This conceptual breadth should not weaken the concept to the point that it loses its historicity, however. Especially important, across the range of postwar concertos, are ties between the expanding role of sonic materiality and the effects of Black-­music practices. Jazz-­influenced concertos and concerto-­influenced jazz works had had an impact before the war, of course, and many Third-­Stream pieces of the 50s and after took concerted form. But by the late 60s these fusions sometimes obscured more common sorts of connection between the concerto and what Olly Wilson called “traditional, Afro-­American conceptual approaches to instrumental performance.”106 Two trends both revealed and concealed this relation. Like never before, composers advertised their connections with jazz; and their concerted pieces increasingly drew on techniques that had emerged from jazz or Black popular music. At one level it’s remarkable that so many Western-­art-­music composers acknowledged their debt to Forc e s: Conc e rt os   •   227

jazz; this list includes perhaps unexpected names like Carter, Druckman, William Bolcom, John Harbison, Joseph Schwantner and other European-­ American Pulitzer winners like Michael Colgrass, Donald Martino, and Ned Rorem.107 Often, however, the jazz connection was of a strictly personal sort—usually the product of a youthful interest the composer didn’t maintain—­and its role in the composer’s work was self-­described as limited in scope. In these contexts jazz was seldom talked about as a living tradition, as part of Black culture, as already an influence on modernist Western art music, or as capable of providing insight into formal and aesthetic questions. Typical of the qualified ways jazz received acknowledgment was Martino’s remark that “there’s actually quite a strong bebop feel to some parts of ” his Triple Concerto, for clarinet, bass clarinet, contrabass clarinet, and ensemble: “Of course,” he added, “these influences are much transformed, maintaining rhythm and gesture but not pitch and harmony.” From an East-­Coast “pitch and harmony” composer this is a nudge toward the margins.108 Conversely when composers emphasize so-­called “secondary” parameters like rhythm and timbre, or describe extended techniques that move them past traditional conceptions of “pitch and harmony,” the Black-­music connection tends to drop out. Thus Musgrave says the quarter-­tone writing in her horn concerto “was a result of [dedicatee] Barry Tuckwell listening to the recordings of Don Ellis, the American trumpet player”; this connects with a use of microtones that as Wilson says had “been part of traditional black practice,” even though Black music and Ellis’s jazz provenance go unmentioned (and Musgrave, Tuckwell, and Ellis are white).109 Sometimes musical techniques are characterized as new and sourceless, as when (again in Musgrave’s horn concerto) the trumpets move around the hall, released from the conductor’s control, which “allows for greater freedom in the superimposition of musical ideas” that are “contrasted both in substance and in tempo.” Or these techniques are traced to electronic music, on which Musgrave leverages her use of “distortion (prepared piano and harp, and muted brass flutter tongue clusters), echo[, and] feedback effects.” Compare this to the other items on Wilson’s list of techniques and principles that had traditional Black roots or derived from “the extraordinary virtuosity of the ‘bebop’ school”: “the ‘new virtuosity’ and ‘extended instrumental techniques,’ ” “a wide range of timbral nuances,” “multiphonics,” “multi-­ layering of musical textures,” “ideas like ‘indeterminacy’ and open-­ended formal conceptions,” and (from an earlier article) “the propensity for certain ‘buzzy-­like’ musical timbres.”110 Wilson represents a special case of a composer/scholar attempting to place 228  •   C h a p t e r F i v e

African American musical approaches in relation to musics they’ve interacted with, though other Black American composers made similar statements—­ Anderson (as we saw), David Baker, Anthony Braxton, George Russell, and many others who had produced concerted works.111 But these composers were in the awkward cultural position of having to spell out that they weren’t drawing solely on jazz, a fact simply assumed in the case of the white composers.112 With many more opportunities to speak and less professionally at stake in their relations with Black music, white composers were able to set the terms on which Black music’s role in the Western art tradition was assessed.113 As I’ve suggested, these assessments generally acknowledged the personal dimension but not the sounds or the sounds without the people. Neither approach was bullish on culture’s role in producing “personality” or on the bodily work of producing sound.114 Pointing to electronic music, for example, while plausible in sonic terms, tended not only to cover up Black musics’ contribution to the techniques and apprehension of electronic and amplified sound, but also to hide the place of people in actually making sounds. Now there’s no way, or reason, to argue that Black musical practices lay behind most assertions of sonic materiality in the postwar concerto. The point is rather that the actual instances of concealing or revealing this relation can teach us about sonic materiality and the concerto’s commons. What they teach, in brief, is this: personal memories of jazz stood as a repository of meaning and value, while sourceless conceptions of sonic materiality became a way to move past traditional and modern notions of the composer’s autonomy and control. Colgrass won the 1978 Pulitzer Prize for Déjà Vu, a concerto for percussion quartet and orchestra commissioned for the New York Philharmonic.115 This work is streaked with pastiches of pre-­and postwar jazz, always coming or going, shaped by Colgrass’s high-­class post-­avant-­garde orchestration. Colgrass makes the typical move of claiming that “All of the music . . . emanates from this classical line [the piece’s theme], even the jazz,” and his program notes say further that the title refers to his days as a freelance percussionist. But this must be balanced against the nearly constant presence of déjà entendu jazz in the texture of this piece (including what the score calls a “solo jazz bass” positioned near the percussion soloists), not to mention the paratextual references to Colgrass’s youthful jazz experience:116 the piece trades on its status as a jazz autobiography, albeit one that elevates the autobiography over the jazz and the symbolic value of jazz pastiche over any substantive engagement with jazz in the piece’s highly wrought percussion-­ and-­orchestra textures. As such, Déjà Vu constitutes a crude form of what Forc e s: Conc e rt os   •   229

George Lewis calls “telling your own story” in jazz improvisation: the projection of a “personal narrative,” enabled by “developing your own ‘sound.’ ”117 In Colgrass’s piece, jazz represents the past—déjà vu all over again—and Western art music equals the present.118 Anthony Braxton’s Composition 63 (1976), a large-­scale work whose premiere featured Braxton and Lewis as soloists, refuses such mappings. Positioning the piece as “combin[ing] elements (lessons) from the post-­Webern/Ayler continuum . . . to forge a new viewpoint,” Braxton found ways to unleash the productive energies of memory as it operates within jazz practice. In a key section that has the two soloists improvise successively over a series of long-­held chords in the ensemble, a “ballade-­like,” “singing,” “soft” melodic approach emerges (12:47–16:32). The “soloist is expected to take the composite tradition of linear postulation into account,” Braxton writes, defining this melodic/linear approach in language that anticipates Lewis’s: “ ‘Give us a story’ (about ‘something’).”119 These means of projecting personhood can make “sounds become signs for deeper levels of meaning beyond pitches and intervals,” according to Lewis. For many composers, jazz-­as-­personal-­narrative provided access to these “deeper levels” in an aesthetic context where reserves of meaning were often hard to tap. These injections of personal narrative into musical textures were at the very least a reminder that sonic materiality requires people. Such traces of human activity in musical sounds provided added value in a genre that still counted on “drama” and “conversation.” But the late-­modern concerto also became a site for the rejection of the sovereign individual as represented by the virtuoso performer or the autonomous-­work composer. This rejection manifests in the many gestures of renunciation we’ve encountered and sometimes in the sense of commonness that ordinary materials can convey. Musgrave’s attention to sonic materiality worked in service of the genre itself. “The idea of Concerto fascinates me,” her liner note states in a late-­ modern pledge of allegiance to a traditional genre, and her goal in the horn concerto and her “many” other concerted works was to make the genre’s possibilities for “dramatic exploration” available through shared means: the materiality of sound, as I’ve defined it, served as an alternative to both traditional virtuosity and composerly invention. Musgrave’s approach can be heard as promoting solidarity over individual identity. Again, however, it took an African-­American composer/scholar like Wilson to show how these alternatives to the autonomous individual might relate to Black musical practices. Wilson’s Akwan, a concerto for piano 230  •   C h a p t e r F i v e

(doubling on electric piano), amplified strings, and orchestra, uses the electric piano in a manner that reconfigures the solo/orchestra relation. The piece shows immediately that it’s a postwar, post-­tonal essay: a high degree of dissonance takes hold as the low winds and brass, pizzicato cellos and basses, and bass drum enter under a call on timbales (ex. 5.3) [track 5.11]. There’s rhythmic energy but little sense of a pulse (mm. 1–4). The register expands upward with the entrance of horns, trumpets, violins, and violas; the electric piano sneaks in “too early,” playing a barely audible dense, low-­ register chord in quick even durations (mm. 5–6). Right around the moment when the piece seems ready for a traditional big solo entry, it instead introduces a West-­African-­derived texture that starts with a fragmentedly funky bass line in the tuba, joined one at a time by three trombones playing interlocks of a short pattern (mm. 18–31; 0:54–1:37). Besides the tuba and trombones, the principal melodic interest is provided here by two flutes, which present snatches of atonal melody that project a rising chromatic line; the electric piano continues playing low-­register clusters in repeated sixteenth-­note sextuplets, gradually growing louder. This opening passage subsumes the soloist in a complex texture dominated by a melodic/rhythmic structure strongly reminiscent of the Ewe music Wilson was then studying in Ghana, where Akwan was written.120 The sonic materiality of the electric piano shows what Wilson called “the Relation between Afro-­American Music and West African Music”: the Fender Rhodes is played with a “percussive technique . . . resulting in an abundance of qualitative accents,” thereby contributing to a dense, stratified, heterogeneous texture.121 The Rhodes has a specifically African American accent, however. Wilson was surely aware of the negative reception electric instruments received from guardians of jazz’s purity: culturally these instruments were seen as working “hand in hand with aesthetic dilution and compromise of vision,” as Welburn put it, and sonically they were heard as “muddy” and “limited in sound and articulation possibilities.”122 The electric piano was indeed more at home in soul and funk than in straight-­ahead jazz, and it was fully capable of producing annoyingly distorted and spongy sounds, particularly in its low register. Wilson takes advantage of the instrument’s accidental timbral qualities, however, using them as a means to incorporate the soloist into the orchestral texture in ways the acoustic piano would never allow; and when the Rhodes does stand out, as it does about 1:45 in, its popular-­music associations help it work as a timbral “hook.”123 This timbral distinctiveness emphasizes the instrument in its soundscape over the player Forc e s: Conc e rt os   •   231

circa 72

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as soloist. Akwan contains some virtuosic solo writing, especially for the acoustic piano, and many passages in which the solo part gains attention in traditional ways. But it puts the soloist in service of something more inclusive than the concerto’s dialogue between solo and orchestra. The piece stages a principled giving-­up of personality. As Wilson put it in a contemporary position paper, he tried in pieces like Akwan “to approach music as it is approached in traditional African cultures,” as a force connecting people and the world, “obligatory and vital to existence,” rather than seek a “distillation of [personal] experience.”124 Ornette Coleman’s Skies of America places these differing conceptions of sonic materiality against each other. Coleman’s sound as improvising soloist leaps out. It interacts, however, with composed orchestral parts that reflect what Coleman called “the way I play.”125 These two strands jointly create a sense of his personality that’s both strong and manifold. At the same time, Coleman’s presentation of ordinary materials like scales dissolves his aesthetic subjectivity into something broader and deeper than personality: his playing and thinking through scales reminds us that what we call “­Ornette’s ‘sound’ ” relies on shared means.126 This dialectic of personality and impersonality unfolds in real time across a form that engages the concerto’s principles. Skies of America has a staggeringly complex production and reception history, but it remains best-­known as a forty-­one-­minute orchestral piece that occupies the entirety of a 1972 Columbia recording.127 The piece was apparently composed as a “concerto grosso for symphony orchestra and jazz combo.”128 Underfunded by Columbia’s classical division, which produced the work, and badly promoted by its jazz division, the Columbia Skies of America is a scaled-­down and modified version performed by the London Symphony Orchestra. First the British musicians union disallowed Coleman’s quartet from playing on the premiere and the record as originally planned: he was granted a work visa only as a composer and not as a jazz performer.129 The concert was canceled and only Coleman himself was able to perform alongside the LSO on the record, which he does on seven of the work’s twenty-­one sections. Insufficient rehearsal-­time prevented two substantial sections of the work from being recorded: a glance at the score shows they’re the densest and most difficult to perform.130 The playing overall is often terribly inaccurate, giving the sense that like Cage’s Concert for Piano and Orchestra the piece triggered a rebellion among some of the orchestra members. Finally Columbia banded the work into short, discrete tracks with Coleman’s evocative titles; this reflects the sectionalized character of 234  •   C h a p t e r F i v e

the piece, which Coleman’s liner note calls “a collection of compositions,” but at the expense of a symphonic sweep he also sought to create.131 A performance with Coleman’s quartet and the American Symphony Orchestra at Lincoln Center later that year restored what New York Times jazz critic Don Heckman too called the work’s “concerto grosso” dimension, but the Columbia recording remains the canonical version.132 To be sure, this is partly because of the commercial heft of a major record label and the (unadvertised) presence of Ornette, in his prime, as alto-­saxophone soloist.133 And for all the faults of the orchestra’s playing, this version bears the closest relation to Coleman’s written score, a work of considerable interest on its own terms. But the contingent features of the record’s sonic materiality also make the Columbia version worth studying in relation to the late-­modern concerto. The record had a classical-­music producer and two engineers who worked almost exclusively on popular music and British free jazz. Its sound reflects this hybridity. We get the sonic image of a concert hall appropriate to a traditional concerto or symphony, rather than the tighter studio sound sometimes heard on Third-­Stream and jazz-­orchestra recordings of the early 70s. The orchestral sound is a bit homogenized and string heavy, however, with more sheen than on a recording like that of Akwan.134 As such the orchestra seems immediately accompanimental whenever Ornette plays, especially because of the close-­miking that gives his sound a greater degree of particularity than anything else in the mix. The drum set and timpani also have a lot of presence, more than is usual on a classical-­music recording (even of percussion-­heavy modern pieces).135 What does this sum to? The recorded piece has been shaped by a battle with the musicians union over questions of performance versus composition, jazz versus classical, and the place of a musician’s “sound.” Its form and sonic materiality are partly determined by financial and personnel decisions made by a record company not fully committed to the project; its play of genres is affected by the choice not to credit Ornette as performer. The imposed absence of Coleman’s American sidemen means the recording includes no complementary soloist and no other musician with a sound the piece can trade on. There’s no rhythm section or anyone else buffering the familiar figure of Ornette the jazz improviser.136 The whole setup both makes Ornette’s playing jump out and encourages listeners to draw the orchestral instruments into his sphere: the drum set and timpani become his rhythm section, and the risky high trumpet parts can give the sense that the trumpeters are playing with him, like jazz musicians, rather than for him as Forc e s: Conc e rt os   •   235

orchestra members. But as Heckman noted “Coleman’s solo appearances are rare and brief.”137 Ornette doesn’t play until seventeen and a half minutes into the record, near the end of side one. So the written-­out piece has to carry the weight: this asserts the composer’s role but also suggests that the improvising performer is giving something up. Ornette’s “rare and brief ” interventions as soloist establish an exchange not only with the orchestral textures they inevitably stand out from, but with the concerto genre itself. Moments that participate in the concerto’s conventions and principles interact with moments that don’t. Even the sections Ornette “plays over”—we should pause over that common metaphor—vary in the ways and degrees they reflect the concerto, including its Third-­Stream tributary. The concerto doesn’t function here as a means for creating large-­ scale form, except insofar as side one ends with a brief cadenza and side two contains the bulk of Ornette’s playing. Neither does Coleman seem to have believed a concerted presentation of his compositional approach would somehow legitimate it. Coleman’s liner note suggests he was thinking more symphonically—from his refusal to name himself as soloist to his statement that the piece’s “movements . . . use the total collective blending of the transposed and non-­transposed instruments.” But as often happens in late-­modern contexts, the concerto impinges on the piece regardless of the composer’s wishes: the concerto’s contrastive principles become the way to accommodate Ornette’s sound. Sonic materiality can be characterized in this context and elsewhere as a kind of “untranslatableness,” to borrow a key term from Coleridge’s discussion of style.138 It matters, for example, that the drummer on the record isn’t Ed Blackwell, and that the record’s sound can’t be read off from the written score.139 Most importantly the orchestral translations of “the way I play” fall well short of “Ornette’s ‘sound,’ ” particularly as this sound actually manifests on the recording of Skies. We’re dealing here with a gap between soloist and orchestra that may be unprecedentedly wide. But there is no sort of contrast the concerto can’t handle. The solo/orchestra relation provides an entry point for the genre; once the concerto crashes through, a seemingly inassimilable solo part—radically singular in its sonic materiality—becomes either this or that in a contrastive scheme. The concerto leaves no remainder. What happens, though, when Ornette presents ordinary materials like scales? Scales lie beneath “the way I play”: deliberately played scale-­segments occasionally appear in Ornette’s solos of the late 60s and early 70s, but they don’t rise to the level of “his” familiar licks and patterns. And while the 236  •   C h a p t e r F i v e

sonic materiality of a gesture includes when, where and how it’s played, and who plays it, there’s also the question of just what is being played. Again, the familiarity of scales enhances the oddness of Ornette’s performance. The concerto is a powerful force, when it courses through a work; but can we imagine a point at which the materiality of a player’s sound becomes so obdurate that nothing gets past it? Can Ornette’s sound stop the concerto in its tracks? Consider again the passage from Skies introduced in the discussion of scales. The four-­and-­a-­half-­minute section whence it comes is entitled “Love Life.”140 This section begins as a very slow, lyrical chorale for the full orchestra; like most of the piece it has been striped with the ad hoc rhythm section of timpani and drum set [track 5.10]. In the context of Skies we don’t know whether, when, or how Ornette will come in. He has been playing over the last few sections, but this doesn’t erase the memory of the long stretch before his first appearance, nor the substantial gap between it and his second. And the fact that his previous statement culminated in a nearly two-­minute cadenza only raises questions about where we are in the piece and what Ornette’s next move will be. (The score never indicates what he’ll play, and it doesn’t always say when.) As this two-­minute section begins to repeat, Ornette enters. The musical situation might suggest a “ballade-­like,” “singing,” “soft” approach, to borrow Braxton’s terms, and Ornette kind of takes this suggestion. But his playing dissonates incredibly against the orchestra. What we’d initially call microtonal inflections turns into a whole phrase that lies consistently and precisely a quarter-­tone off (2:14–2:19). His intonation soon defogs, however, and his pitch-­choices seem to tie in with the notated orchestral part (2:35). At a key point in “Love Life,” what I’ve already called the emotional core of Skies as a whole, he projects two rising diatonic scale-­fragments into the suddenly sparse texture of just timpani and drum set (2:42–2:50; compare this to the parallel point in the first iteration, 0:32–0:39). After these two short phrases he drops out for a unexpectedly long span (2:50–3:07). Then he returns with the creative intonation and dissonant note-­choices, beginning with a descending diatonic scale-­segment, now head-­spinningly dissonant (3:08–3:11). He plays a lot of scalar material in what follows, with a pause from 3:28–3:34 that allows him to meet the orchestra at the top of a phrase (3:35) before presenting a long stepwise descent. The section ends just after Ornette’s final diatonic scale-­segment (4:21–4:25). Neither “the way I play” nor “Ornette’s ‘sound’ ” underwrites the presence of scales or authorizes the truly weird intonation. So both sources of Forc e s: Conc e rt os   •   237

personality are compromised. Moreover a soloist improvising slowly and thinkingly isn’t exactly native to the concerto, even without odd intonation and surprising choices of notes. We must account for the authority and assurance of his playing here. There had been a running critique of his intonation, but it had somewhat faded out by the mid–60s.141 Otherwise his performance on this section is typical for his playing in the early 70s: starting in 1965 listeners noticed him simplifying his playing, making his phrasing more symmetrical and sequential, his gestures more placed. It became  increasingly clear that Coleman was playing certain licks and patterns across the years, in many musical contexts, and writing them into his heads. By the late seventies he would say was not “improvising,” but “playing.”142 None of this would’ve prepared contemporary listeners for the funny intonation, but it gives a sense of the authority Ornette’s playing here nevertheless possesses. Whence does this authority derive? Coleman’s mere presence as an improvising soloist on a piece he composed is itself a form of authority, of course. If the piece is just “the way I play” then Ornette actually playing automatically belongs there: anything he plays is always already native to the piece’s vocabulary. But his authority has more to do with the features that differentiate his performance from the orchestral playing: only Ornette employs techniques associated with African American performance practices, like bent notes, changing vibrato, and microtonal inflections; his phrase-­structure shows more variety than the notated parts do, and he establishes an amazingly free rhythmic relation with the orchestra. The catchiness of his lines, played with his recognizable sound, often makes them detach from the orchestral mass. Especially when they approach his familiar licks, such lines convey a sense of conviction the orchestra doesn’t match. I’ve already noted how his sonic materiality depends on the particularities of this recording. That he’s close-­miked makes him stand out plainly but also affects his sound in subtle dynamic ways: we can hear little changes in volume and timbre as he shifts his position relative to the microphone, which gives him a dimensionality no other instrumentalist obtains. Notwithstanding the microtonal shifts, Ornette’s authority stems too in this section from the aggressively diatonic material he plays, beginning with his annunciatory first phrase (2:09) and peaking with his many diatonic scale-­segments. His authority comes as well from his slow pace and willingness to leave space between statements. The initial structure of call and response, with Ornette filling in what the notated music leaves as a gap, allows for the most notable effect: eventually Ornette makes it seem like he’s controlling 238  •   C h a p t e r F i v e

the orchestra in real time—like he’s stopped this big mass and turned it back around. This is the moment I was drawing particular attention to: his first two scale-­fragments, D-­E-­F -­G followed by D-­E-­F -­F (2:42–2:50). ­Ornette makes the orchestra sound like it produces a harmony and orchestration in response to what he has just played. This is actually how Coleman wanted his rhythm-­section musicians to function, especially once he started employing guitar players regularly in the mid-­70s (a “return” to chording instruments after a long hiatus). As guitarist James “Blood” Ulmer later explained, “I was orchestrating his improvised parts as he played them. Instead of setting up sounds for him to play, I would play where he went to. It’s different from following the patterns of chord changes. In Ornette’s music, the change comes after the phrase. It allows the soloist to make whatever phrase he really wants.”143 The big “change” follows Ornette’s key statement. Some of this moment’s authoritativeness derives from the way that both times Ornette asserts the top of his phrase as the tonic—somehow. This is the peculiar alchemy of Coleman’s “harmolodic” theory, notoriously hard to explain but described by Coleman’s musicians precisely as a kind of assertion or conviction.144 As his longtime sideman Don Cherry said, “If I play a C and have it in my mind as the tonic, that’s what it will become. If I want it to be a minor third or a major seventh that had a tendency to resolve upward, then the quality of the note will change.” Further: “In the harmolodic concept, you’re reaching to the point to make every note sound like a tonic.”145 This section of Skies can make it seem like Ornette has already achieved, reached, as a sort of permanent state, what Cherry says they’re “reaching to.” Ornette’s “bad intonation” becomes in this light a demonstration of his capacity to make any note “sound like a tonic,” even if his note lies a quarter-­tone away from where it’s expected. A sense of authority also derives from the concerto’s conventions and metaconventions: Ornette’s playing engages the metaconvention that everything the soloist plays carries weight, and that any statement either counts as virtuosic or deliberately rejects the norms of virtuosity. The metaconvention of the concerto’s “conversation” or “dialogue” helps us hear Ornette’s improvised reshaping of the solo/orchestra relation. But the concerto’s force contends with Skies of America’s other sources of authority, especially Coleman’s identity as the composer of a singular work, his unique position in jazz history (notwithstanding the packaging’s soft-­peddling of this), the weight of the specifically “symphonic” approach, and the scales as bound up with

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the common. Indeed “Love Life” alone creates an irreducibly dissonant constellation of Ornette’s assured playing, his surprising intonation, the commonness of the materials he presents, the self-­sufficient orchestral writing that gets demoted once Ornette enters, the specific qualities of the recording, and the late-­modern concerto’s conventions and practices. One way to honor the wonderful strangeness of this section is to acknowledge that it draws on, exceeds, and sublates both “personality”—whether the composer’s style or the improviser’s “sound”—and the concerto. Another way is to say what it does not do: it does not use jazz or the concerto or its ordinary materials as modes of reassurance. The out-­of-­tune alto saxophone itself makes that impossible. Sonic materiality here requires but cannot be reduced to “Ornette’s ‘sound.’ ” (Materiality could be defined as the part of reality that says nothing can be reduced to anything else.) If moments like Ornette’s deliberate, bare “D-­E-­F -­G, D-­E-­F -­F ” hit us with their emotionality, they do so not because a single affect manages to cut through, but because they register a swirl of meanings that nothing and no one can master. Ornette’s scale-­fragments here represent a kind of unincorporated commonness: a form of the common that (unlike the common of Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri) can’t be massed or abstracted.146 Its value or directionality can never be guaranteed, because the objects, forces, and conventions that produce it are heterogeneous, in tension with one another, and experienced contingently in ebbs and flows. “Love Life” is an extreme case in the concerto’s career, but what Ornette the improviser does here seems softer than resistance to the concerto or detachment from it. His place in the soundscape establishes a new sort of solo/orchestra relation. Ornette’s stance is a kind of being-­next-­to: a position that’s proximate enough to make us wonder about the nature of the relation, but not so close as to provide any answers. On many levels Skies of America reminds us that sonic materiality requires not just people but the spaces between people. These spaces are a crucial part of what we hold in common. Like the other scalar passages we’ve listened to, the scales in “Love Life” embody a commonness that creates doubt. Skies engages old questions about why the concerto persists. (What is the nature and value of virtuosity? Are the concerto’s traditional narratives still relevant?) But the Columbia record maps these questions onto the insistent sonic presence of a singular figure playing ordinary materials in a singular way. The pre-­and postwar doubts about the concerto’s capacities for meaning are met here by a proliferation of meanings. We see again that doubts about the concerto do not weaken it.

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We can add that doubt doesn’t represent a failure of the common—it may be the common’s greatest gift. This chapter’s final section will ask what it takes to accept this gift: what happens when we have to work to hear the common?

Common Practices We’ve gained a sense of the changing metaconventional surround that produces the concerto’s commons. Curiouser and curiouser things happened in postwar concertos, but they were easily absorbed into a genre that “is so adaptable,” as Musgrave wrote, “and can lend itself to such a variety of treatments,” because “there is no specifically defined concerto form, as such.”147 Persistence and variety reinforce each other. It also mattered that the canonical repertoire retained its place and that hundreds of newly composed tonal, three-­or four-­movement, traditionally scored concertos received performances between 1960 and the end of the 80s. People, institutions, spaces, works, musical features, modes of circulation, and verbal discourses all show the effects of the concerto’s principles. We see the resilience of these principles in many contexts. Samuel Adler’s 1982 orchestration textbook advises students in “the use of dialogue” and other ways of differentiating solo and orchestra, drawing on repertoire from Mozart to Bartok and ­Sibelius but describing these guidelines in a way that applies perfectly well to concerted pieces by Berio, Carter, Feldman, Takemitsu, and many others accused of writing anti-­concertos.148 In the concertos written for the New York Philharmonic, we find individual and corporate benefactors paying for concerted works in a high-­profile setting—recall that no twentieth-­century patron ever placed an order for a nocturne—choosing composers among the usual subjects (mostly white, male, East-­Coast or East-­Coast-­trained), but receiving pieces that vary greatly in style, form, length, titling, instrumentation, and handling of the solo part(s).149 The concerto’s prestige and legible principles also helped the genre reach beyond Western art music: what Musgrave called (paraphrasing Tovey) its “struggle or conflict in the sense of balancing unequal forces,” especially, made it viable in rock and film music as well as jazz and Third Stream.150 All the metaconventions we’ve encountered operated across stylistic, generational, and regional divides. The genre’s traditional mechanism of textural contrast appeared in varied guises. The concerto’s “tendency to progress by contradiction, unpredictably turning things inside out,” in Whittall’s words, Forc e s: Conc e rt os   •   241

was broadly visible.151 Sometimes this contrastive syntax behaves more gently than Whittall’s language suggests, as in Feldman’s and Takemitsu’s concerted pieces, but it continues to function.152 Even in rare cases when it fails to govern a piece, the demand for “progress by contradiction” operates in the background, pressuring the piece to change when it wants to hold fast.153 Someone like Feldman can surprise us with a clear, broad ritornello structure in String Quartet and Orchestra, a piece that at first strikes us as quiet and formally gentle. We noted as well that spatial play was granted an expanded role, particularly where it could foreground sonic materiality. We’ve had to acknowledge the metaconvention that anything the soloist does is important—often because a piece provokes us with solo writing that asserts its ordinariness, or confronts us with the soloist’s very quietness. There are certainly concertos that allow the soloist to fall below the radar for long stretches, but like Wilson’s Akwan such pieces usually both engage the metaconvention of the soloist’s importance head on, and contrast the below-­the-­radar passages with moments when the soloist truly stands out.154 A similar sort of flexibility governs the solo entry (as in Akwan), which helps it retain its grip. This play of commonality and difference also shaped the roles of traditional metaconventions like virtuosity and the cadenza. Because older sorts of virtuosity coexisted with alternative kinds, and with refusals of virtuosity, the concept itself remained legible and useful; often this coexistence could be heard within individual pieces. The cadenza too appeared in both familiar and novel forms. Extreme cases show how the traditional meanings survived. Frederic Rzewski’s A Long Time Man for piano and orchestra contains an “orchestral cadenza,” subtitled “Chain Gang,” in which the musicians play overlapping two-­note patterns accompanied by the “ ‘whump’ of axes, chains, pots and pans etc. sounded by 5 or six players.” This derives immediately from the prison work-­song “It Makes a Long Time Man Feel Bad,” on which the piece is a set of variations, but of course it makes a broader point about the politics of the solo/orchestra relation.155 At the same end of the cadenza continuum is the penultimate section of David Bedford’s Jack of Shadows for viola and ensemble, in which the violist bows the A and D strings continually while the tuba player steps in to bow the G and C strings; each of four flutists is assigned one string, on which they finger loosely notated glissandi.156 While this isn’t exactly a utopian social formation—it’s more like having your dog take the steering wheel while you operate the pedals—it shows the way these novel uses of traditional metaconventions tended to work. Positively and negatively these traditional means helped 242  •   C h a p t e r F i v e

create the late-­modern concerto’s commons, sometimes through such images of commonness. As new metaconventions emerge they drag singularity into commonality. Like all Western-­art-­music genres the concerto establishes a history of exceptions: striking moments in singular concertos by composers from Bach to Berg and beyond get replayed in postwar concerted works, creating a conversation that includes both borrowers and lenders. But the concerto’s capacity to incorporate everything into a this-­against-­that structure gives it special ways of making innovative features relevant to the genre’s history. After all, the solo/orchestra relation is one of the great meaning-­generators of twentieth-­century Western art music, along with texts (and voices), stagings (and narrative), dance (and movement)—and the only one that exists solely in the realm of “absolute music.” As such any treatment of this relation, no matter how far out, simply strengthens the genre’s network of meanings. We saw with Skies of America that it’s not only the soloist himself but the solo/orchestra relation, and specifically the gaps in this relation, that establish meaning. Commonness here depends upon the productive effects of doubt. This is true for many of the concerto’s conventions and metaconventions, especially emergent ones. The reader may have noticed an abundance of quiet endings among the works mentioned thus far. Some readers will know that the concerto canon after Mozart contains very few pieces with quiet endings. But from 1960 to 1989 there are at least 450 concerted pieces that end quietly. This phenomenon crosses nationalities, aesthetic approaches, composers’ ages and backgrounds, and everything else. We can’t not call the quiet close a conventional way to end a concerto over this thirty-­year span. Quiet endings stand out all the more against the convention of the “triumphant end,” which never goes out of fashion.157 The idea of the “anti-­concerto” might suggest an explanation for the quiet close, and indeed there are pieces whose quiet endings work to confirm a non-­conflictual relation between soloist and orchestra: this starts in the nineteenth century with pieces for solo instrument and orchestra based on vocal models, and continues through twentieth-­century concerted elegies, pastorales, nocturnes, and other small-­form concerted works that emphasize a sad or restrained mood.158 Joseph Kerman notes some interwar cases of proper concertos with quiet endings, which he says stage the work of mourning. These “concertos of lamentation” combine the soloist’s “keening voice” with the orchestra’s communal expression of grief “through its chorale or passacaglia”: “Mourning is universalized by being apportioned between the two concerto agents.”159 More often, however, the quiet close Forc e s: Conc e rt os   •   243

functions in a manner that the indispensable Tovey describes. Acknowledging the “brilliant and highly developed finale” of Franz Schmidt’s 1923 Concert-­Variations on a Theme of Beethoven for piano and orchestra, a work for the left hand written for Paul Wittgenstein, Tovey says “Tub-­thumping, however, is not in its profession”: the work ends quietly. “Much butter may have melted in its mouth,” he concludes, “but the end is peace, though the hearth-­rug be in pieces.”160 In the 60s and after this “much butter” ending becomes a formal convention: single-­movement pieces especially often contrast a frothy or heaped-­up middle with a delicate, sparse close, frequently balancing a quiet start. This formal arrangement seems “natural,” of course, and by no means genre-­ specific. But that raises questions about why this form didn’t govern earlier concerted works, and why it’s never talked about. Does its simplicity deprive it of explanatory value? Is it too common across genres and media? An unusual instance can illustrate how Tovey’s formal principle operates. Carson Kievman’s Concerto for Bassoon and Percussion Ensemble (Fire Alarm System) is scored for sixteen percussionists playing simple rhythmic patterns on the various bells that comprise a fire-­alarm system. Its subtractive form gradually deletes pairs of percussionists following intense moments in the active and difficult solo part. At the end of the piece, having reached a loud F 4 by way of a run that gradually rises, crescendos and accelerates—which puts out the final two bell-­ringers—the bassoonist sustains the F under a long diminuendo. Following this the score proscribes the soloist’s final gestures: “Out of breath. Slowly and methodically pack up the bassoon and leave.” Much butter indeed. Why does this formal principle become so common? Kerman’s “concertos of lamentation” provide too small a sample, and they may actually mislead. The examples he cites make clear that the piece as a whole responds to something worth mourning.161 Through paratextual features, appropriate musical conventions, quotations or allusions, this event is put into the piece. The event gives the piece meaning. But in the absence of a reason for lamentation, or for any other sort of emotional reaction or ritual response, the relation between the quiet ending and what it follows becomes less certain. If we’re hearing an aftermath, or a subsiding shock, then something must have happened: we’ve witnessed something that demands commemoration. This sense that the piece has accomplished or shown us something is not a given in musical idioms that can offer no guarantees of meaning. The Kievman bassoon concerto actually comports itself fairly traditionally in this regard,

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because it stages a narrative whose soloist’s actions are clearly readable. We might note a certain cleverness—instead of signaling there’s a fire needing extinguishing, the alarm bells themselves become the problem—but we’re not compelled to ask how meaning is made.162 If you took out the narrative and spatial elements, however, and chose more “musical” percussion instruments, audiences hearing the piece’s linear form and extended-­virtuoso bassoon part might wonder why the soloist had gotten so worked up. Again the productive tension between commonness and doubt helps create a convention’s meanings. The convention of the quiet close takes shape against the backdrop of the loud ending, in “triumph,” which a virtuoso performance is supposed to entail. But long-­held suspicions about the concerto’s virtuosity can make the triumphant ending seem hollow. We recognize the hard work but wonder what it’s for; the genre has never told us, and now it’s even less able to. Whether traditionally virtuosic writing precedes it or not, the quiet ending stands out as an alternative strategy for closure, albeit one whose sonic principle of slow decay can seem natural. It is, simply, a meaning-­ generating apparatus. Bruno Maderna’s 1970 Grande Aulodia for flute, oboe and orchestra has what Massimo Mila calls “a classic example of the ‘ending by evaporation’ that . . . became his particular signature.”163 Maderna’s phrase is worth trademarking. Not only does it show the struggle to find a means for closure that, precisely, works like a convention. It explicitly likens the ending of a piece to the passing off of substance—a conversion to vapor that may leave a trace. This is how a (modern) musical work is supposed to begin taking hold in memory while its actual sound decays. In a piece like Luciano Berio’s concerto for two pianos, which is beholden to Maderna’s concerted works early and late, the quiet ending serves an important structural function. It doesn’t so much slow things down or restore a sense of calm: it functions to create something that isn’t otherwise musically there.164 It’s an attempt to produce the residuum of its soloists/orchestra relation; or it’s a construction of the work’s aura. It makes us believe we’ve got something to hang onto or look back on. Many late-­modern concerted pieces achieve closure this way. A host of cases end with commonplace gestures, like the soloist’s rising arpeggio (or stepwise ascent) against a long-­held chord, her unaccompanied final assertion (or her refusal to make one), her slowly-­decaying high-­note, the softening echoes of a repeated note (or chord, or brief figure), or the distant thunder of a quiet tremolo. Often this means that the ending of a supposedly autonomous, singular piece can share more with the endings of other pieces than it Forc e s: Conc e rt os   •   245

shares with what it itself has just done over the past twenty minutes. This says nothing more or less than that there’s a common practice—­unsurprising if we were talking about what’s shared among perfect cadences at the ends of tonal concertos, but not what the critical tradition expects of works in the modernist line. The quiet close quickly becomes a pervasive late-­modern cliché: even Takemitsu and Feldman melt the butter. This encouraged alternatives— endings that are neither loud nor soft: the mezzo-­piano “let me please finish what I’m saying” (Carter’s piano concerto), the dignified solo instrument playing just loudly enough to be understood (Braxton’s Composition 63), the little machine completing its last cycles (Ligeti’s piano concerto), the “I’m still here” final swell (Shostakovich’s second cello concerto), and so on. Between ’60 and ’89 these novel strategies for closure coexisted with nearly five hundred quiet endings and over seven hundred loud endings. Together they strengthened the network of pieces, materials, people, instruments, spaces, and ideas that make up the concerto’s commons. The “much butter” ending provides opportunities to reflect on all these elements: with the “triumphant end” to its right and scattered ad hoc endings to its left, its slow, smooth passage over the threshold between the work and what lies beyond gives us a moment to think about what we remember, where we are, what the people around and in front of us have been doing. (This is another way of calling it an emergent metaconvention.) These quiet endings give us reasons and ways to listen harder. And further: they invite us to consider what it would mean if this quietness governed a whole piece. Feldman’s “instrument(s) and orchestra” pieces really are mostly quiet, mostly sparse, and mostly restrained. These pieces can’t be reduced to their slow, soft affect, but neither can they be imagined otherwise: the concerto’s conventions form a necessary part of these works, but so too does the fact we have to listen hard for these conventions. Like Coleman’s Skies of America, Feldman’s concerted pieces build in a level of doubt about their basic genre identity, and (more literally than Skies) about what we’re able to hear. “We” who are Feldman’s addressees emerge through contingent hearings of an unstable mix of musical materials; but the pieces seem to target listeners who will try to hear their details and structures.165 What happens when these listeners begin to inhabit the concerto’s common space? The concerto’s commons can be defined as the background and foreground presence of the people, objects, spaces, works, materials, conventions, practices, institutions, and “essentially many-­person reasons, intentions and actions” that make up the genre.166 Feldman’s addressees would arrive with a 246  •   C h a p t e r F i v e

readiness to be hailed by any of these elements but no fixed sense of which will stand out or indeed what role the concerto will play in a given musical experience. As chapter 4 showed in connection with the nocturne, a quiet piece makes itself vulnerable in a way that places trust in listeners.167 Slow, quiet pieces ask for special sorts of patience, care, and responsiveness—even when such pieces take the form of a concerto. The listeners Feldman calls for and the concerted pieces he asks them to attend to constitute rare occurrences in the concerto’s career. But this relation has broader implications for the workings of late-­modern concertos. Feldman’s concerted pieces allow us to tease out four last points: (1) This loud genre can speak with a quiet voice. When it does it obtains a capacity and authority to address the individual listener that its relentless this-­that and here-­there haven’t traditionally possessed. If we hear the concerto as “asking” to be heard, rather than forcing its way into the conversation, we’ve acknowledged a new way it can “say something” in and through a piece. (2) Like any of a piece’s many voices, however, the concerto’s voice can be drowned out. But (3) the concerto is always somewhere there in a work for soloist(s) and orchestra: it’s part of the work’s substance, it’s present in the space, it’s generating value in every sense. So (4) the concerto’s conventions and practices can be attended to or not. A listener who tries to hear the concerto in a quiet piece gains a genre-­specific sense of how to attend to or “hear into” a musical work. We can detach these points from the specific question of the quiet concerto, generalizing them to four parallel claims about late-­modern genres: (1) The idea that the concerto can itself “say something” reminds us that genres can diffuse thinking and agency, moving them outside the composer’s head and past the performer’s body. (2) Genres’ effects work contingently and can be covered up or canceled out by other forces (as well as enabled and amplified by them). Genres contend and align with other forces in dynamic ways within a piece’s unfolding and in its reception history. As such they embody change and contingency. But (3) despite the precariousness of their roles and meanings, genres can still lend depth, shading, perspective, and dimensionality; they provide material; they influence syntax and form; they shape our apprehension of performing bodies and acoustical spaces. Genres constitute distinct threads in a piece’s weave. They become part of a practice’s social imaginary. So genres add something to the fabric of the world. (4) As something demonstrably “there” in a late-­modern piece, but capable of being overlooked, a genre becomes radically dependent on contingent Forc e s: Conc e rt os   •   247

hearings: nothing says anyone will listen with care, or listen for the concerto. But by suggesting ways and reasons to listen carefully—whether these suggestions are taken up or not—a genre like the concerto provides a distinct picture of how to care about a musical work. Careful listening is a kind of care as well as a kind of listening. Genres give pieces the means to put themselves forward as objects of care. Whether they connect with their addressees or fail to, genres thus help us learn what we care about. Feldman’s gentleness enables and encourages the emergence of an active subject, reaching for something. His concerted pieces demonstrate how the doubt that shadows modern musical works, and the concerto in particular, can become the basis for a mode of care. But his rapprochement with the concerto, founded partly on the contingent success of his slowings down and movings in, represents a special case: usually the concerto’s forces can’t be contained. Alejo Carpentier’s brilliant Concierto Barroco has the nerve to ask a question we haven’t broached: What if the concerto doesn’t care about you? In the afterword, Carpentier’s 1974 novella will get us to see what it means for works and audiences to inhabit a world of genres and other impersonal forces.

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Afterword

Let’s ask the question chapter 5 left us with: what if genres don’t care about us? What if they’re just impersonal forces swirling through cultural space, wanting only to perpetuate themselves? Imagine the concerto with a leaf-­blower, whooshing everything into piles of two: soloists and everybody else, this sort of material and that sort of material, here and there. Not caring who benefits, who’s in the way, and who winds up in the wrong place. Where would that leave us? What would it mean that people care about the concerto (they like the virtuosity, they like the drama, they like the traditions) even though the concerto manifestly doesn’t care about them? Recall this book’s opening, which wondered how genres can get us interested in the little details they make a place for: what does it mean that genres encourage people to care about things that could go unnoticed, can’t be made useful, won’t last, or aren’t real? What are the ethics around this care—caring about what doesn’t matter, and maybe not caring about what does? Or caring only because a swirl of elements has suddenly put some puzzling feature up in your face. This book treats musical genres of the long 1970s as material forces working with and against other forces: time, gravity, human energies, money, technological changes, the discourses of race and gender. The musical works we’ve explored reflected this play of forces while also somehow getting people to care about the genres they connected with. Trying to piece out how and why this happened has helped us acknowledge the range of things that impinge on the making and reception of these works. It has reminded us that a musical work embodies multiple forms of structuration, multiple systems of value, and many potential sources of interest, ideas, and feeling; the swirl of genres and other forces can make almost anything a potential object of care. 249

Treating 70s genres as forces thereby gives us ways to also acknowledge uncertainty and doubt, and to grasp how this doubt has been productive. This doubt encompasses the sense that there is too much stuff and too many people to keep track of, which we registered especially with the intensified pop of chapter 1. It encompasses uncertainties about how works interact with genres and how genres fit their moment, which all the chapters have considered. It encompasses a sense of belatedness—of coming after the 60s, or after genres were thought to matter—and a sense of uncertain futurity. It encompasses questions about what these genres are good for. And this doubt energizes the self-­reflexiveness and capacity for self-­critique that mark these long-­70s genres. Together these forms of doubt help produce special modes of care; these genres can help us care differently, and as material forces they can teach us how care is contingent, distributed unevenly across a genre’s dimensions, and pressured by many temporalities. Like if you’re a 1978 disco connoisseur in Rio de Janeiro you don’t care about this snare-­drum sound until you’re in a crowded club with a good sound-­system, and you hear it isolated in the break; and you won’t care about it next year, when it has become commonplace; then in 1981 you’ll start wondering whether the snare-­drum-­ sound arms race is doing dance music any good. But this doubt has a darker side. Musical genres of the 70s produced waste, excess, missed opportunities, reductive modes of identification, and cruel forms of exclusion. They encouraged free-­riding, exploitation, and overproduction. Maybe the people who cared about them were simply caught in a neoliberal vicious cycle, pressured to care about more and more. One can imagine coming to doubt the whole business—meaning not this or that genre, but art itself. In fact it can be rational to doubt the whole business, as when, in her 1977 essay “Poetry Is Not a Luxury,” Audre Lorde plainly states as a Black woman that “within living structures defined by profit, by linear power, by institutional dehumanization, our feelings were not meant to survive.”1 We should acknowledge that darker side, and how it too is produced by the swirl of forces. This book’s introduction sought to show how we can follow the play of genres into a world of genres and other forces. Alejo Carpentier’s 1974 Concierto Barroco is the best way to embrace the swirl itself. In Carpentier’s quintessentially 70s novella, the concerto becomes an impersonal force that puts a profusion of details into an immersive multisensory flow that can make us care about anything and doubt everything. When the great Cuban novelist wrote Concierto Barroco, about seven years before he died, he was in 250  •   A f t e rwor d

the middle of an immensely productive period that yielded some of his best fiction along with many essays on literature and music. He’d lived for long stretches in Paris, Caracas, and Havana, working as a cultural journalist and editor, librettist, collaborator with the surrealists, theorist and promoter of Afro-­Cubanism, lecturer on music, radio director, and often a sort of cultural broker between Latin America and Western Europe. Now he was back in Paris, ensconced in his final post as cultural attaché to the Cuban Embassy. He was increasingly in demand as a lecturer and interviewee; a wider critical public had started to grasp his status at the center of the so-­called Boom in the Latin-­American novel, and as a fountainhead of the “real maravilloso” (“magic realism”) and the neo-­baroque. Concierto Barroco is regarded as a kind of summa of his style, and as a crystallization of his cultural theorizing and historical research. Carpentier’s novella follows an unnamed Mexican master, and Filomeno, his Black Cuban servant, on a voyage from Mexico and Cuba to Spain and Italy—and finally to twentieth-­century Paris. Their trip climaxes in Venice during Carnival season 1709, with a scene at the Ospedale della Pietà, where the two men join Vivaldi and his musical orphans, along with Handel and Scarlatti, in a concerto grosso that Filomeno calls (in English) a “jam session.”2 The novella starts with concertolike contrasts and spectacle as the rich master decides which of his silver objects to pack and which to leave behind: “Over here [aquí] what stays . . . and over there [acá] what goes” (2; 33–34). The “jam session” forms the busiest node of a network that begins in this opening paragraph. Concierto Barroco sets up a complex web of intertextual relations, historical description, local color, social critique, money, aesthetics, rhythmic and sonic effects, echoes and pre-­echoes. The concerto sweeps through this web, perhaps blindly, with its simple mechanisms of structural repetition, this vs. that, aquí and acá, its crude reliance on bigness and display, its love of star power, and its infinite capacity to be seduced by whatever can count as virtuosity. In Carpentier’s picture the concerto—its stakeholders, conventions, and history—constitutes something like a play of forces that course through cultural space, never entirely subject to control. Ultimately this seems to entail the ambiguation or even self-­subversion of the novella’s musics and musicians. In the central concerto-­grosso episode the force of the concerto sweeps through Vivaldi’s Ospedale, lighting up its concert hall, waking up the orphans and compelling them to assume their identities as players of this or that instrument, making the space resonate, elevating the novella’s main A f t e rwor d   •   251

characters to the status of soloists, reanimating the concerto grosso of Vivaldi and Handel, then disposing its people in the new order of the Afro-­ Cuban comparsa dance, and finally causing everyone to collapse, get up, reorganize in couples-­dancing, and disperse. The music of this episode has three parts: (1) the specifically eighteenth-­century concerto grosso, in which Vivaldi conducts from a podium but also performs as violin soloist along with Handel on the organ, Scarlatti on harpsichord, and—once he returns from the kitchen with copper kettles, rolling pins, silverware, etcetera— Filomeno, whose “plenitude of rhythmic patterns, syncopations, and cross accents” earns him a full 32-­bar episode for himself (35; 80, translation modified). (2) Filomeno, singing in call-­and-­response, leads everyone around the space in a comparsa, an Afro-­Cuban dance that was originally associated with burial societies but that became a Carnival parade dance. (3) Scarlatti plays some fashionable dances on the harpsichord, to which Filomeno eventually adds a rhythmic background on an improvised guiro. The description of this suggests Filomeno might be playing inside the harpsichord, in the manner of Henry Cowell’s 1925 piano work The Banshee, which would certainly fit Carpentier’s program. Scarlatti complains, in racist terms: “Diablo de negro . . . he makes me follow him. I’ll be playing cannibal music (39; 84, translation modified); he gets up and disappears with Margherita della arpa doppia into the labyrinth of cells. Besides Vivaldi’s and Handel’s concerti grossi, which continued to circulate in the 1970s, the other main musical source for this passage is the Cuban comparsa, especially as performed in competition during Carnival time in cities like Regla, where Filomeno is hired by the master. Comparsa dancers move as a line in a snake-­like pattern; there are multiple rhythmic and visual layers (at the level of the individual gestures and costume, and of the collective). People can seem to move in opposite directions while still contributing to a single line, an order that’s hard to see from within the crowd. The disorder at the edges can create the sense of a swirl. Afro-­Cuban musical values come to the fore. For the competitive comparsa teams that increased in popularity across the twentieth century, this dance can have the feel of a set-­piece, but even as such, the comparsa stages a loss of personal identity and the creation of new collective and other-­than-­human ones. Having the comparsa follow the concerto grosso puns on the son-­montuno form. This is an essential structure in Afro-­Cuban popular music, wherein a smoother, melodic, Iberian-­leaning, composed song—the son, canto, or verso—is followed by a montuno: a section based on a repeated groove, 252  •   A f t e rwor d

featuring improvisation by a vocal soloist in call-­and-­response with a small chorus, in a more West African–derived texture emphasizing percussion.3 So here the concerto grosso works as the son, with its melodic/harmonic focus and (mostly) European musical values, while the comparsa becomes the montuno. Given the breaks between these sections and the fact that they both have marked beginnings and ends, the son-­montuno plays out here at a greatly expanded scale. This works as an amplification of the son-­montuno’s sublation of European and African musical values. It’s also narrativized (in the sense both of being placed in several narrative strands and of emerging for narrative rather than specifically musical reasons); it’s explicitly racialized (including leaving the “Indiano” master with nothing to do but mix the drinks); and it’s made contingent on the small-­and large-­scale movements of people (the master and Filomeno from the New World; European visitors to Carnival, et al.). Roberto González Echevarría has called this montuno section the novella’s “whirlwindlike center.”4 It might even be called the conceptual hinge—it shows Afro-­Cuban culture reshaping old Europe, putting its people into new configurations, and creating new structures of feeling. But Carpentier goes out of his way to suggest that this concerto grosso (1) was a one-­time event (“aquella noche [that night]” it’s called, with emphasis: 52, 72; 104, 130), (2) whose value was hotly debated by its participants. (3) It works as but one highpoint of a line with many peaks. (4) It’s contiguous with other musical and sonic discourses in a sequence with wall-­to-­wall sound. And, crucially, (5) it was lost to history because it wasn’t notated or described by a traveler like Charles Burney or Charles de Brosses. So it happened, but so did much else; plus it might not have happened, and maybe nothing came of it. Indeed, the nature and the very discreteness of this “it” are themselves contested. Ultimately this exuberantly hybrid musical event is just one characteristic instance of the concerto’s capacity to shape the world of this novella. Throughout Concierto Barroco the concerto’s “conversation” and “competition,” and its simple mechanisms of structural repetition, this vs. that, and aquí and acá, are moralized—made to connect with questions of ethnicity, class, and culture. But they’re also rendered elemental: the characters and spaces are simply surrounded by, filled with sound; and musical experience is always rendered as multisensory and too much to take in. We can’t always grasp an order. The concerto directs things, conjuring up the minor characters and dispersing them. We don’t know what’s important or valuable. A f t e rwor d   •   253

Ordered dispositions like the line, with the comparsa as emblem, become especially important; but they’re only momentary. What, then, does Concierto Barroco offer us (and what does it refuse to give)? Again, the point is the swirl itself. What Carpentier finds in the concerto is an unstoppable contest of forces, indiscriminately productive and destructive. These forces ripple out from specific iterations of concerted music and sound into the novella’s texture as a whole, where they’re forced to contend with a host of other forces: history, language, money, emotions and drives, the weather, the seasons, disease, mortality, multisensory stimulation, the stream of thought, narration, and the energies generated by slower processes, like Venice sinking into the muck. Toward the end of his career and at a moment of intense neocolonialism and economic crisis, Carpentier produces a radical mode of political and aesthetic self-­critique by generating and abiding with a swirl of competing forces, in which basic principles don’t always hold, crucial events can fail to happen, people might well not matter, music could mean everything or nothing, and the only certainty is a kind of stubborn materiality. So the novella works to keep in play the possibility that its profusion of details doesn’t add up to anything. And in musical terms it works to suggest darkly that its climactic staging of a Black music emerging from the concerto’s swirl of forces could easily have failed to happen. This emergence was contingent upon Filomeno’s entrance on the scene (which itself, the novella makes clear, was contingent on weather, disease, emotions, rhetorical effects, and many other forces); and this moment needed a fictional character interacting with “real people.” The novella suggests it matters that we don’t actually have a historical figure, occasion, or aesthetic object (like Vivaldi’s lost Motezuma opera, which the novella draws on) to connect with this emergence. Carpentier also pushes back against these dark thoughts. He tries to convince us that the novella’s profusion of details reflects historical fact. He tells us it’s not counterfactual history. He suggests that by letting the unruly variety stand, we make other futures possible. And those futures don’t depend on a “real” Filomeno or any other singular figure—as Filomeno says he’s one of “the ‘me’s . . . who are going to be masses and masses of us” (68; 126, translation modified). As such, when the concerto impinges indiscriminately on street signs, revelers, hats, bits of scripture, bad smells, and when and how people pee—and Carpentier lovingly describes it all—its swirl of forces puts doubt and care in dialectical tension. This means we can and 254  •   A f t e rwor d

must abide with the swirl: we can’t have and don’t need coherence, closure, totality, greatness, stability, or clarity. All this is characteristic of the 1970s genres this book has engaged with. When we think about the profusion of details that gives life to 70s genres like disco and the concerto, we can become aware of how the generosity of the swirl provokes free-­riding and overproduction. Friedrich Gulda’s disco-­ pastiching 1980 Cello Concerto racks up debts to both those genres, for example. But while the piece does itself little credit, it doesn’t hurt disco or the concerto. It gives disco another outpost and the concerto another genre to absorb; it can place these genres’ less-­loved features in sharper relief. More importantly it puts these genres, many others, and a host of additional forces into a whirlwindlike accumulation that adds something to the fabric of the world—including things to care about or doubt. But equally characteristic are the doubt and care Carpentier’s concerto encourages around the absence or erasure of Black subjects. The lack of a “real” Filomeno can still sting. This is so all the more because the novella constantly seeks out Black and indigenous people in its historical materials, and constantly depicts racist language, ideas, and institutions. Like many of the genres and works we’ve explored, Concierto Barroco invites us to care about people it doesn’t give full voice to, and to ask who they are and whether they’ve been silenced. If we return to Lorde’s statement in “Poetry Is Not a Luxury” that “our feelings were not meant to survive,” we can grasp two complementary ways to turn Carpentier’s fiction around the point of real need. This is a familiarly 70s pairing of too-­lateness and possibility, here viewed from the position of an unjustly marginalized creative subject. Number one: as Lorde put it in a contemporary essay, the bottom line for women, especially Black women, is that “to survive in the mouth of this dragon we call america, we have had to learn this first and most vital lesson—that we were never meant to survive.”5 The forces that have long worked to silence and dehumanize Black women have taken a toll not just on the “feelings” that poetry springs from, but on life itself. But, number two, there’s a genre whose affordances can be mobilized as survival strategies: “Of all the art forms, poetry is the most economical,” Lorde put it in a 1980 address. “It is the one which is the most secret, which requires the least physical labor, the least material, and the one which can be done between shifts, in the hospital pantry, on the subway, and on scraps of surplus paper.”6 Doing this secret work, changing the feel of these time-­spans and places, and gathering the scraps are themselves part of what this genre is good for. A f t e rwor d   •   255

More broadly: genres of the 1970s tell us that if they live, if their people survive, it’s in and through the particulars of these objects, practices, spaces, and time-­spans. This includes the details of the many-­thousand poems, records, and musical scores, but also the scraps of blank paper and the quiet moments in the hospital pantry. Which is good, because the musical genres discussed in this book didn’t change the world. If they revolutionized anything, as perhaps disco did, it was in their musical textures, in the sorts of body/brain experiences their aesthetic practices made possible, and in the ways they were able to “gesture toward the beginnings of an alternative society.”7 The soul, funk, and pop that came after “the Sixties,” the disco that emerged in their wake, and the nocturnes and concertos that appeared after the radical experimentation of the 50s and 60s surely mattered: they stirred up sediment, lit up spaces, engaged with people who hadn’t been recognized as potential addressees, and produced new objects, relations, feelings, and ways to care. But these genres did this mostly through little details, and mostly because they wanted to perpetuate themselves. This meant their achievements were contingent, and subject to endless doubt. In other words these 1970s genres could matter while creating a sense that they didn’t. Or shouldn’t. Or that one couldn’t consider whether they mattered without asking for whom. Or that it was no longer clear what “mattering” was. Can we care about these genres now while doubting that they mattered then? We have no choice. Listening back on the 70s from our moment, we hear that what’s really there is just the profusion of details in a swirl of forces—no final accountings, no ultimate comings together, no solutions. That has to be enough. But didn’t these genres convene sustainable communities of listeners? Didn’t they create spaces people could inhabit? Can’t we look back on a world of living musical genres? No. They never could. It never was. But still—

256  •   A f t e rwor d

Ack now le dgm en ts

This book is a record (collage?) of innumerable conversations, comments, questions, and objections that have happened in person and in print. I am grateful to everyone who has engaged with this research in any of the forms it has taken. My thanks to Raina Polivka, Madison Wetzell, and the production team at UC Press for bringing this object into the world, and to Harvard Museums, the Romare Bearden Foundation, and the Artists Rights Society for allowing us to use Bearden’s uncanny Soul History on the jacket. This book has benefited enormously from several readers who went through the whole manuscript, all at once or as the chapters were getting written: Eric Drott, Suzanne Ryan (and the fantastic reviewers she commissioned), Will Straw, and my longtime mentors Richard Leppert, George Lipsitz, and Susan McClary. Jann Pasler has been an especially valued mentor, reader, and friend. Other friends and colleagues offered comments on particular chapters: Georgina Born, Georgia Cowart, Jonathan Flatley, Sumanth Gopinath, Norm Hirschy, Tim Lawrence, Eric Lyon, John Richardson, Mary Ann Smart, Ken Wissoker, and the late Stanley Aronowitz. Still others provided insights, references, and examples, rescued errant paragraphs, discussed the analyses, talked through the arguments, connected the dots, or warned me when I was wild in the strike zone: David Brackett, Ximena Briceno, Jim Buhler, Adrian Daub, Joanna Demers, Nina Eidsheim, Anne-­Lise François, Mike Gallope, Alvin Hill, David Hills, Héctor Hoyos, Mitchell Morris, Mark Nye, Ben Piekut, Denise Riley, Anna Schultz, Jason Stanyek, and the late Tony Newcomb. My Stanford Music Department colleagues too have been great interlocutors, especially Jonathan Berger, Karol Berger, Talya Berger, Chris Costanza, Brian Ferneyhough, Debra Fong, Tom Grey, Heather Hadlock, Herb Myers, Geoff Nuttall, Erik Ulman, and my new colleagues Patricia Alessandrini, Denise Gill, and Paul Phillips. Extra-­deep thanks go to Stephen Hinton, for thoughtful mentorship, and above all to Mark Applebaum and Jesse Rodin, who have been constant, welcome, and necessary presences in the making of this book. As seminar members and 257

teaching assistants my musicology doctoral students have given me more than I can repay: thank you Clare Bokulich, Joe Cadigan, Amanda Cannata, Victoria Chang, Kelly Christensen, Kwami Coleman, Ioanida Costache, Tysen Dauer, Gabriel Ellis, Kirstin Haag, Mike Kinney, Jonathan Leal, Daniela Levy, Elea McLaughlin, Emiliano Ricciardi, Kara Riopelle, Byron Sartain, Nate Sloan, Michi Theurer, Anna Wittstruck, and many others. I’ve relied on material and immaterial support from our chairs, Jarek Kapuscinski and Steve Sano, from Deans Lanier Anderson and Debra Satz, and from Stanford’s Humanities Center (especially Caroline Winterer and Andrea Davies), its Program in American Studies (especially Shelley Fishkin) and its Center for the Comparative Study of Race and Ethnicity (especially Jennifer Brody). And I owe many thanks to Cornell’s Society for the Humanities, especially Brett De Bary and Mary Ahl, for the time and space to begin this project. I’ve had occasion to present early (sometimes very early) versions of this material at Arizona State, Case Western Reserve, Cornell, the CUNY Graduate Center, Dartmouth, Harvard, McGill, Pitt, UC–Berkeley, UCSD, the University of Michigan, the University of Minnesota, USC, UT–Austin, the University of Washington–Seattle, the University of Wisconsin–Madison, and Wayne State; on these visits I’ve received trenchant comments from Paul Anderson, Jon Appleton, Jonathan Bernard, Lee Blasius, Lori Brooks, Mark Clague, Brian Hyer, Rick Mook, Carol Oja, Judith Peraino, Steve Pond, Alex Rehding, Annette Richards, Steve Shaviro, Anne Shreffler, David Yearsley, many people already mentioned, and countless others I wish I could’ve continued the conversations with. I’m grateful to many people for sharing their memories of music making and writing about music in the 1970s, especially George Lewis and Patrice Rushen, along with several others who have passed away: Marcus Belgrave, Ndugu Leon Chancler, John Hollander, Bern Nix, Bunny Sigler, and Ellen Willis. A version of chapter 3 appeared in Criticism 50:1 (2008); I thank the journal for permission to reprint. Finally I thank my family: Matthew Kronengold and Kirsten Williams (especially them), Ann Vernallis, Kayley Vernallis and Randal Parker, Carol and Dexter Hake, and Margaret Vernallis. Can you dedicate a book to four people? If so, this book is for my mother Penny Kronengold, who showed me how to look, for my late father Jack Kronengold, who taught me how to listen, and for Carol and Beatrice, who know why.

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Not es

Introduction 1. Thus David Brackett is usefully materializing an immaterial notion like “genres classify objects” when he asks, “What does it mean . . . to analyze the practice of categorization as an event?” in Categorizing Sound: Genre and Twentieth-­Century Popular Music (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2016), 330. The two most influential proponents of “genre rules” in music have been Franco Fabbri, especially “A Theory of Musical Genres: Two Applications,” in David Horn and Philip Tagg, eds. Popular Music Perspectives (London: IASPM, 1982), 52–81, and Simon Frith, “Genre Rules,” in his Performing Rites (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996), 75–95. 2.  I’m informed here by Georgina Born’s “Making Time: Temporality, History, and the Cultural Object,” New Literary History 46:3 (2015), 361–86. For a genre-­based consideration of the multitemporality of musical activity see Vijay Iyer, “Exploding the Narrative in Jazz Improvisation,” in Robert O’Meally, Brent Hayes Edwards, and Farah Jasmine Griffin, eds., Uptown Conversation: The New Jazz Studies (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004), 393–403. 3.  Jennifer Lena, too, emphasizes the multidimensionality of genres; her approach is discussed further below. See Banding Together: How Communities Create Genres in Popular Music (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2012), 8–10. 4.  Alistair Fowler’s Kinds of Literature: An Introduction to the Theory of Genres and Modes (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1982) offers critiques of classification (37) and maps (246–51). Sharply articulated arguments for the adequacy of historical and social accountings of genres can be found in, respectively, Rick Altman’s Film/Genre (London: BFI, 1999), and Carolyn Miller’s “Genre as Social Action,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 70 (1984), 151–67. On the “generic contract,” see Jeffrey Kallberg, Chopin at the Boundaries: Sex, History, and Musical Genre (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1996), 5–6; this notion connects with Fabbri’s and Frith’s concept of “genre rules,” cited above (note 1).

259

5.  On caring for what isn’t important see Avishai Margalit, The Ethics of Memory (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2002), 30–31. 6.  Alexandra Vasquez begins her book Listening in Detail with a moment in a 1951 radio broadcast by Ignacio Villa (“Bola de Nieve”) that “makes it impossible to put both his sound and the creative traditions he indexes here at the service of instant allegory, to signify sweeping historical truth, or as a point of departure for more legible discourses about race and nation.” For Vasquez “listening in detail” means calling attention to the ways a recorded detail “compresses complex receptive worlds, sentiments and performance trajectories.” Listening in Detail: Performances of Cuban Music (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2013), 4. 7.  Anne Danielsen emphasizes these characteristics in her definition of funk: see Presence and Pleasure: The Funk Grooves of James Brown and Parliament (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2006), especially 61–62. 8.  Both Collins brothers are credited on the album this song is part of, though it’s not clear whether they play on “The Freeze”; it sounds like Bootsy on bass. 9.  On-­and offstage were often hard to separate. As former Brown singer Marva Whitney reported, “I got fined, I think it was sixty-­five dollars, for having a wrinkle in the back of my dress! In the back! And that would come out of your check that week.” See Mike McGonigal, “James Brown’s Original Funky Divas: Interviews,” Yeti 1 (2000), 99–108; 105. 10.  The song’s jokiness begins with its punning parenthetical phrase, which connects Sizzlean, a bacon substitute that was much advertised in the late 70s, with the expression “lean and mean.” Humor was important in 70s funk. James Brown was deadly serious about the groove and “the show,” but often engaged in funny call-­and-­ response, joking lyrics and monologues, and general onstage jocularity. Funky/funny early-­70s novelty songs like the Jimmy Castor Bunch’s “Troglodyte (Cave Man),” Kool & the Gang’s “Jungle Boogie,” and the Ohio Players’ “Funky Worm” were million-­selling hits. 11. This metaconvention overlaps with Henry Louis Gates’s notion of signifyin(g), as musically elaborated by Samuel Floyd and Robert Walser, but it need not always become what Floyd calls a “reinterpretation.” See Floyd, The Power of Black Music: Interpreting Its History from Africa to the United States (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), especially 7–8, 95, and Walser, “Out of Notes: Signification, Interpretation, and the Problem of Miles Davis,” The Musical Quarterly 77:2 (1993), 343–65. 12.  Soul Train host Don Cornelius would sometimes cite chart and sales data when he introduced artists, for example. 13.  Parliament’s label, Casablanca, was an indie that did some of both; Funkadelic was then on Warner Brothers, a major label that was still making up for its late (1969–70) entry into the Black-­music market. 14.  Amy Nathan Wright, “A Philosophy of Funk: The Politics and Pleasure of a Parliafunkadelicment Thang!,” in Tony Bolden, ed., The Funk Era and Beyond: New Perspectives on Black Popular Culture (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008),

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33–50; on P-­Funk mythology see also Rickey Vincent, Funk: The Music, the People, and the Rhythm of the One (New York: St Martin’s Griffin, 1996), ch. 18. 15.  “George Clinton Interview,” Terminal Zone 1 (1988), np. 16.  On P-­Funk’s cover art see Amy Nathan Wright, “Exploring the Funkadelic Aesthetic: Intertextuality and Cosmic Philosophizing in Funkadelic’s Album Covers and Liner Notes,” American Studies 52:4 (2013), 141–69. 17.  P-­Funk asserted their presence in rock but sought to deny others a place in funk, especially artists they perceived as imitators, like George Duke and Rick James. 18. Clinton reported that the title for 1978’s Funkentelechy vs. the Placebo Syndrome came from encountering the word “entelechy” and looking it up in the dictionary; Bootsy Collins’s “Mug Push” (1980) took its name from one of Clinton’s “2 to 300” stuffed animals. See Robert O’Brian, “George Clinton: Lionized,” RockBill 4:3 (1985), 19–23; quoted phrases at 21–22. 19. This includes nonhuman actors in Bruno Latour’s sense. While I have elsewhere offered a critique of the Latourian actor, I fully accept the usefulness of looking beyond human agency for the forces that impinge on a record. See my “Harpsichords (and People) at the Limits of Mediation Theory,” Contemporary Music Review 37:5–6 (2018), 575–605. 20.  “Listener’s song” was producer Harvey Fuqua’s way of characterizing funk records like the Nite-­Liters 1970 “Con-­Funk-­Shun” that would make a musician “say, hey, oh, wow, groovy, but the average listener, I mean, they say oh, what, what are they doing? Oh that’s great, but we can’t dance” (Interview with Sue Cassidy Clark, March 12, 1971, transcribed in Sue Cassidy Clark Papers, Center for Black Music Research). 21. Quoting Fred Wesley, a trombonist/arranger for Parliament and James Brown in “Maceo Parker/Fred Wesley Interview,” Terminal Zone 1 (1988), np. 22. Silly and serious were not mutually exclusive categories: Clinton says “Bootsy’s songs are always along the vibe of silly-­serious” (O’Brian, “George Clinton: Lionized,” 22). On the roles and meanings of silliness in funk see Francesca T. Royster, Sounding Like a No-­No: Queer Sounds and Eccentric Acts in the Post-­Soul Era (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2013), 107–9. 23.  “Think! It ain’t illegal yet” was a chant that appeared on Funkadelic’s One Nation Under a Groove (1978) and served as a catch-­phrase in liner-­notes and live performance. Clinton’s phrase “Ain’t nothin’ but a party” was popularized on the title track of 1975’s Mothership Connection; Clinton later quotes this phrase with the explicit sense of its being a foil for deep lyrics (“George Clinton Interview”). 24. Mahon, Black Diamond Queens: African American Women and Rock and Roll (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2020). 25.  Fabian Holt delineates “a poetics of music in between genres” in Genre in Popular Music (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), 158–60. 26. This conception of self-­reflexiveness is compatible with but more fine-­ grained than John Frow’s “reflexive model [of a text’s relation to genres] in which texts are thought to use or perform the genres by which they are shaped.” See Genre,

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2nd ed. (New York: Routledge, 2015), 27; though it looks into the workings of texts themselves, it should not be associated with Thomas Schatz’s evolutionary model for “baroque” or “mannerist” self-­reflexiveness, discussed below. See Hollywood Genres: Formulas, Filmmakers, and the Studio System (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1981), 38. Again, this connects with signifying, as elaborated by Samuel Floyd, The Power of Black Music, 7–8, 95. 27.  Bolden, “Theorizing the Funk: An Introduction,” in Bolden, ed. The Funk Era and Beyond, 13–27. 28.  I’m extrapolating from the idea of practice-­immanent reflexiveness and theorization as discussed in film-­industry studies like John Caldwell’s Production Culture: Industrial Reflexivity and Critical Practice in Film and Television (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008), especially “Introduction: Industrial Reflexivity and Common Sense,” which describes the industry’s “self-­theorizing talk” (15–26). See also Jason Sperb, Flickers of Film: Nostalgia in the Time of Digital Cinema (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2016), especially “Introduction: Self-­Theorizing Nostalgia,” and Keith Negus, Music Genres and Corporate Cultures (London: Routledge, 1999), especially 24–30. 29. Floyd, The Power of Black Music, 95. 30.  Jauss, “Theory of Genres and Medieval Literature,” in his Toward an Aesthetic of Reception trans. Timothy Bahti (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1982), 94. 31.  Quoted phrase from V. N. Voloshinov, Marxism and the Philosophy of Language trans. Latislav Matejka and I. R. Titunik (New York: Seminar Press, 1973), 96. See also Mikhail Bakhtin “The Problem of Speech Genres,” in his Speech Genres and Other Late Essays ed. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist, trans. Vern McGee, 75. Frow’s Genre takes up Voloshinov’s notion, focusing on the riddle as a (not-­so-­ simple, it turns out) example of a “simple” genre (32–43). 32.  Jameson, “Reification and Utopia in Mass Culture,” Social Text 1 (1979), 130–48; quoted phrase at 136; see also Jameson, The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1981), 151. 33. Jameson, The Political Unconscious, 107. 34. Jameson, The Political Unconscious, 151. See also Jauss, “Theory of Genres and Medieval Literature,” 99–101. Things have gotten better: see Kevin Fellesz, Birds of Fire: Jazz, Rock, Funk, and the Creation of Fusion (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2009), 17, in which fusion is called “a ‘not-­quite-­genre’ ” that “points out the instability of all genre designations and highlights the fluidity of musical practices that genre names seek to freeze. . . .” [Fusion is] “a broken middle through which the correspondences between musical genre and identity were transformed.” In other words, fusion teaches us about the field of genre. Because fusion works differently than other genres do—partly thanks to the genres it “fuses”—it compels us to understand genres differently. 35. Schatz, Hollywood Genres, 264; films in this late “baroque” or “mannerist” phase are marked by “ambiguity, thematic complexity, irony, [and] formal self-­ consciousness” (41). 262  •   No t e s t o I n t roduc t ion

36.  To be clear: while I happily assent to Franco Moretti’s claim that “distant reading” is valuable because “it allows you to focus on units that are much smaller or much larger than the text: devices, schemes, tropes—or genres and systems,” I’m unconvinced by his arguments to the effect that distant reading signals the end of close reading let alone of any “direct textual reading.” Moretti, “Conjectures on World Literature,” New Left Review 1 (2000), 54–68 (quoted phrases at 57; emphasis in original). 37. Jameson, “Reification and Utopia in Mass Culture,” 137, 138. Moretti’s Wallersteinian framework, in which cultural production under capitalism produces cores and peripheries, does not itself constitute an argument that peripheral texts are less likely to exhibit complexity, but Moretti proceeds as if it did (“Conjectures on World Literature,” 55–56ff.). 38.  Jameson, “Reification and Utopia in Mass Culture,” 137, 138. His claim is that this “constant exposure” to “the various kinds of rock, blues, country western, or disco” means we can never capture anything like “the first bewildered audition of a complicated classical piece”: with a new pop song “what we listen to is ourselves, our own previous auditions” (138). 39.  Jameson, “Reification and Utopia in Mass Culture,” 136. Moretti says they’re the only texts we know how to read, even if we did have time to read more (“Conjectures on World Literature,” 57). 40.  J. H. Mueller’s 1951 “Musical Taste and How It Is Formed” provides rare pushback on this notion. Reprinted in John Shepherd and Kyle Devine, eds., The Routledge Reader on the Sociology of Music (New York: Routledge, 2015), 49–56; see 53. 41.  See especially Carl Dahlhaus, “New Music and the Problem of Musical Genre,” in Schoenberg and the New Music trans. Derrick Puffett and Alfred Clayton (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 32–44; see also Theodor Adorno, Aesthetic Theory trans. Robert Hullot-­Kentor (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 199–203. 42.  The Political Unconscious, 107; see also “formula genres” in (“Ideology, Narrative Analysis, and Popular Culture,” Theory and Society 4:4 (1977), 543–59; quoted phrase on 553). This conception enables Jameson to cast the critical debate as between a traditional Marxist embrace of mass culture (which, he acknowledges, does not involve investigating actual examples of mass culture) at the expense of “elitist” high culture, versus the Frankfurt School’s dismissal of mass culture in favor of the negative capacity of modernism; both sides of this debate rely on a hard-­and-­fast distinction between high culture and mass culture (see “Reification and Utopia in Mass Culture,” 130). Jameson’s own position in this debate is equally reliant on such a distinction: modernism, he says, should be studied “as part of a larger cultural unity in which mass culture stands as its inseparable dialectical counterpole” (The Political Unconscious, 288 n. 7). 43.  Both approaches have Frankfurt School roots, though Dahlhaus doesn’t acknowledge this legacy. 44. Jameson, The Political Unconscious, 288 n. 7; Dahlhaus, “New Music and the Problem of Musical Genre,” 38–44. No t e s t o I n t roduc t ion   •   263

45. Dahlhaus, Esthetics of Music trans. William Austin (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), 15; see also “New Music and the Problem of Musical Genre,” 43. 46.  This observation is made by Eric Drott, who also shows how Dahlhaus actually delineates an emergent genre without meaning to, “The End(s) of Genre,” Journal of Music Theory 57:1 (2013), 1–45; see 4–7. 47.  A funny not-­quite exception is Jacques Attali’s Noise: The Political Economy of Music, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985), which, as Drott notes elsewhere, advances a kind of “magical thinking” wherein changes in musical practices and genres “augur far-­reaching changes in social structure.” Eric Drott, Music and the Elusive Revolution: Cultural Politics and Political Culture in France, 1968–1981 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011), 87. For a brief earlier attempt see William Tallmadge, “Afro-­American Music,” Music Educators Journal 44:1 (1957), 37–39. 48.  The most substantial is “Zur Problematik der musikalischen Gattungen im 19. Jahrhundert,” in Wulf Arlt, Ernest Lichtenhahn und Hans Oesch, eds., Gattungen der Musik in Einzeldarstellungen: Gedenkschrift Leo Schrade (Bern: Francke, 1973), 840–95. 49. Schatz, Hollywood Genres, 10. In this way Schatz ended up reinscribing the director-­focused auteurism that genre studies was supposed to be a corrective to. 50.  Braudy, “Genre: The Conventions of Connection,” in his The World in a Frame: What We See in Films [1976] (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), 104–81; quoted phrases at 179, 104. 51.  Dahlhaus, “New Music and the Problem of Musical Genre,” 43. (Dahlhaus arrives at this conclusion without explaining how he gets there—like, what makes “the rest” vacuous?) Derrida’s single article, “The Law of Genre,” trans. Avital Ronell Glyph 7 (1980), 202–29, has been influential for its claim that works cannot “belong” to genres, but only “participate” in them; Frow rightly reads it as an instance of “post-­Romantic resistance to genre understood as a prescriptive taxonomy” (Genre, 28). 52.  Braudy concludes his long chapter on genre by addressing the post-­studio-­ system breakdown of popular versus serious; but he then asserts a distinction between “genre films” that “contain . . . critique of [social] values” and “serious film,” which “neglects . . . connection with the audience.” (The World in a Frame, 180–81). 53.  The uses of “iconography” in film studies were critiqued at the end of the 70s by Stephen Neale, Genre (Hertford: British Film Institute, 1980), 10–13. 54.  Quoted phrase from Alan Williams’s review-­essay on Schatz’s Hollywood Genres, “Is a Radical Genre Criticism Possible?,” Quarterly Review of Film Studies 9:2 (1984), 121–25; 124). 55.  For left-­facing apologies see Rosalie Colie, The Resources of Kind: Genre-­ Theory in the Renaissance (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1973), 1, Tzvetan Todorov, Genres in Discourse, trans. Catherine Porter (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 13, and Gérard Genette, The Architext: An Introduction [1979], trans. Jane Lewin (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), 80–85 passim. 264  •   No t e s t o I n t roduc t ion

Jauss’s “Theory of Genres and Medieval Literature” shows awareness of both flanks; see, e.g., 99–101, 107–8. 56.  David Grubbs emphasizes the negative consequences of this embrace, at least for experimental practices, but (as Grubbs acknowledges) from a 1970s-­record-­ buyer’s perspective LPs of this music were a key—sometimes the only—means of access (Records Ruin the Landscape: John Cage, the Sixties, and Sound Recording (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014). 57. Braudy, The World in a Frame, 170. 58.  On vinyl thickness: in 1969 RCA Records introduced the “Dynaflex” LP, which was thinner and more flexible than standard LPs. Because these used less vinyl they were cheaper to produce. RCA claimed their flexibility made these records less likely to warp and (somehow) less susceptible to pops and blisters, but many listeners found them noisier and lacking in bass. 59.  Fabbri, “A Theory of Musical Genres: Two Applications;” the Italian version is collected with other genre-­theory pieces from the 1980s in his Il suono in cui viviamo (Milan: Feltrinelli, 1996); Neale, Genre. 60. Neale, Genre: “Narrative is the primary instance and instrument of the regulatory processes that mark and define the ideological function of the cinematic institution as a whole” (20). Also important is Neale’s attempt to de-­hierarchize film genres, decoupling the high/popular binary from commercial/noncommercial (9). Another key text is Rick Altman’s “A Semantic/Syntactic Approach to Film Genre,” Cinema Journal 23:3 (1984), 6–18. 61.  For an important, more recent piece in which this does happen see Georgina Born and Christopher Haworth, “From Microsound to Vaporwave: Internet-­ Mediated Musics, Online Methods, and Genre,” Music & Letters 98:4 (2018), 601–47. 62. In an interview originally published anonymously, Foucault fleshed out this notion of curiosity as “a readiness to find what surrounds us strange and odd; a certain determination to throw off familiar ways of thought and to look at the same things in a different way; . . . a lack of respect for the traditional hierarchies of what is important and fundamental.” “The Masked Philosopher,” trans. Alan Sheridan, in The Essential Works of Foucault, 1954–1984, Volume One: Ethics, Subjectivity and Truth, ed. Paul Rabinow (New York: New Press, 1997), 321–28; quotation at 325. 63. Fowler, Kinds of Literature, 37. By contrast David Brackett says his book aims to “present . . . a history of the practice of categorizing” (Categorizing Sound, 331). They’re both right, of course. Fowler’s point is that genres do a bad job classifying; the most famous claim in his book is that a genre “is much less of a pigeonhole than a pigeon” (37). But for Brackett it matters more that we do in fact place objects in genres, in much the same way that we place people in categories; often these identities overlap, as with “Black music.” 64. Cavitch, American Elegy: The Poetry of Mourning from the Puritans to Whitman (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007), 23. Cavitch borrows the phrase “learning to love new particulars” from Louise Fradenburg on the work of mourning. No t e s t o I n t roduc t ion   •   265

65.  DJs would note whether a song began and ended in ways that facilitated smooth transitions to and from other songs. The textural changes that occur in a percussion-­driven song section manifest visually on a record’s surface. DJs and remix engineers like Jim Burgess and Ray Velasquez were sometimes credited as “disco consultants” on LPs and twelve-­inch singles. 66.  On genres as “mobile constellations” of features see Brackett, Categorizing Sound, 327–28. 67.  See again Simon Frith, “Genre Rules,” and (on the “generic contract”) Jeffrey Kallberg, Chopin at the Boundaries, 5–6. 68. See Gérard Genette, Paratexts: Thresholds of Interpretation, trans. Jane Lewin (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997). 69. Lena, Banding Together, 8–10. Lena is deliberately parsimonious here; her emphasis on “shared dimensions” creates a high bar for what counts as a genre; see 20–21. See also Holt, Genre in Popular Music, 19. For approaches more congenial to my tack see, on genres as “assemblages,” Georgina Born, “On Musical Mediation: Ontology, Technology and Creativity,” Twentieth-­Century Music 2:1 (2005), 7–36, and Brackett, Categorizing Sound, especially 10 and 327–29. 70.  On spaces see Steve Waksman, This Ain’t the Summer of Love: Conflict and Crossover in Heavy Metal and Punk (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009), 10–12. 71. Fowler, Kinds of Literature, 37. 72.  Born, “Making Time.” 73. Frow, Genre, 108; see also 19–20. It bears saying that such a “world” isn’t necessarily coherent, consistent, or fully drawn, and that a genre can “project” more than one. 74.  For example: recorded music, twentieth-­century music, art music, popular music, Black music, American music, experimental music; one notes the possibility of overlaps and contestations (in genres and individual texts), along with the instability of these identities themselves. 75.  These relations are key to Waksman, This Ain’t the Summer of Love. See also Fowler, Kinds of Literature, on subgenres (especially 112–14) and countergenres (174–79). 76.  Lorde notes the “enormous differences in the material demands between poetry and prose” and adds that “The actual requirements to produce the visual arts also helps determine, along class lines, whose art is whose” (“Age, Race, Class, and Sex: Women Redefining Difference,” in Sister Outsider (Berkeley: Crossing, 2007), 114–23; 116. 77.  The relation between space and other dimensions is noted by Lena, who provides useful examples (Banding Together, 11–12). 78.  Lena categorizes these sorts of metageneric relations as “boundary work” (Banding Together, 7, 9, 15). 79.  Fowler subjects this mapping impulse to a thorough critique (Kinds of Literature, 246–51). 80.  So, for example, some genres encourage talk about rules but others don’t. We lose these valuable distinctions if we adopt Simon Frith’s or Franco Fabbri’s 266  •   No t e s t o I n t roduc t ion

across-­the-­board use of “rule.” See Frith, “Genre Rules,” and Fabbri, “A Theory of Musical Genres: Two Applications.” (Fabbri at least taxonomizes in a way that brings out the differences among genres, and he uses the word normi, which might be better translated as “norms.”) If we were compelled to settle on one such term, we would do better with convention rather than rule since rules govern (from some indeterminate place outside) while conventions constitute part of the cultural object’s substance. (See Holt, Genre in Popular Music, especially 22–24.) Note the difference between “Is there a rule?” and “Is this a convention?” 81.  Paraphrasing Herbert Read’s claim that “the concretization and vitalization of ideals is one of the main tasks of the aesthetic activity in man [sic].” Anarchy and Order: Essays in Politics (London: Faber & Faber, 1954), 20. 82. Auslander, Liveness: Performance in a Mediated Culture (London: Routledge, 1999); Shelemay, Let Jasmine Rain Down: Song and Remembrance among Syrian Jews (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 171. 83.  Burnim, “The Black Gospel Tradition: A Complex of Ideology, Aesthetic, and Behavior,” in Irene V. Jackson, ed., More Than Dancing: Essays on Afro-­American Music and Musicians (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1985), 147–67; 159. 84. Dimock, Through Other Continents: American Literature across Deep Time (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006), 82; see also 85–86. 85. Read, Anarchy and Order, 20. Ian Hacking, describing J. L. Austin’s philosophical practice, Historical Ontology (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002), 67. 86. Fletcher, Colors of the Mind: Conjectures on Thinking in Literature (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991), 111. 87. Benjamin, “The Task of the Translator,” trans. Harry Zohn, in Selected Writings, 1913–1926, vol. 1, ed. Marcus Bullock and Michael Jennings (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996), 254 (trans. mod.). 88.  Lorde, “Poetry Is Not a Luxury,” in Sister Outsider, 36–39; 39. 89. Cavitch, American Elegy, 21. See Gates, Loose Canons: Notes on the Culture Wars (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), 38–39. 90. Jameson, The Political Unconscious, 107. 91. Connolly, Identity\Difference: Democratic Negotiations of Political Paradox (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1991), 20. See also 24–26, and Wendy Brown, States of Injury: Power and Freedom in Late Modernity (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995), 57–58, 68–69. 92.  This is a focus of chapter 1, which finds this sense of belatedness emerging already in late-­60s pop. 93.  Stepney, who worked with Earth, Wind and Fire from 1974 until his untimely death in 1976, is discussed in chapter 1. Maurice White had interacted with Stepney earlier at Chess Records, both as a session musician and as the drummer of the Ramsey Lewis trio. One place where these strands came together is Minnie Riperton’s bossa-­inflected Come to My Garden (1970), arranged and produced by Stepney with Lewis’s trio as rhythm section, and Riperton realizing Stepney’s elaborate vocal arrangements through overdubbing. No t e s t o I n t roduc t ion   •   267

94.  This song, “Ponta de Areia,” first appeared on Elis Regina’s Elis (1974), and then on Nascimento’s 1975 LP Minas. 95.  The song’s early fade at the beginning of the fusion-­style guitar solo is only the most obvious example. 96. Since the early 2000s, producers and prosumers have been able to buy Massenburg-­in-­a-­box: there are several signal processors that advertise themselves as duplicating Massenburg’s parametric eq patches. 97.  Other funk songs show the same tendency through formal expansion—as when a song goes on much longer than expected, or when a move into an outside genre takes over a song. 98.  James Brown’s “hardest working man” persona and his lineage as a bandleader/ control freak provide the originary instance of funk’s work ethic. 99.  Columbia CK 65738. 100.  The other reason is of course how refined EWF’s “rawness” sounds. 101.  One notes that musicians with jazz backgrounds who have made contributions to funk, like Herbie Hancock (in the liner notes to a 1975 compilation in the Blue Note Re-­Issue Series, BN-­LA399-­H2) and Fred Wesley (“Maceo Parker/ Fred Wesley Interview”) often report that they needed to learn how little they knew about funk before they could begin to understand how to play funky. 102.  James Brown’s many recordings of pop songs demonstrate this principle, as do some of Funkadelic’s rock songs. Kool & the Gang’s 1973 compilation Kool Jazz reached #14 on Billboard’s jazz LP chart. 103. For example, the hot production values of the EWF-­and Kool & the Gang–influenced group Banda Black Rio made MPB sounds (not just songs) available to North American production aesthetics, which (outside of individual players working in the United States) hadn’t often happened since the bossa-­nova craze of the early 60s. 104.  EWF had connections to the L.A. studio scene that from the late 60s to the early 80s had top session musicians and arrangers working between pop and Black genres—often at points of convergence. 105.  This is besides the poem’s intricate formal characteristics Anne Shreffler has called attention to in connection with Carter’s setting, taking cues from his sketches. See “ ‘Give the Music Room’: ‘View of the Capitol from the Library of Congress’ aus A Mirror on Which to Dwell,” trans. Felix Meyer, in Meyer, ed., Quellenstudien II: Zwölf Komponisten des 20 Jahrunderts (Wintherthur: Amadeus, 1993), 255–83. 106.  A lunette is a round skylight of the sort that’s built into in the Capitol’s domed ceiling, but the whiteness of its etymon, “little moon,” also comes through. Similarly, the familiarity of the phrase “blank stare” doesn’t block out the etymological sense of the word “blank,” especially in context of the wall-­eyed horse. 107.  Bishop’s title might seem typically generic, but it’s rare to title a topographical poem as tersely as “View of X from Y.” What Bishop has left out of the equation is a reference to her own poetic activity: more common are titles like Wordsworth’s “Composed upon Westminster Bridge, September 3, 1802.” The way Bishop’s title 268  •   No t e s t o I n t roduc t ion

excludes a more-­than-­literal “view” gives an early hint that there’s no place for the poet’s reflections. 108.  And third, this stanza engages the old, significant question of whether the speaker of a topographical poem is moving around or staying still; see Roger Gilbert, Walks in the World: Representation and Experience in Modern American Poetry (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1991), 6–10. 109. The poem appeared first in The Kenyon Review 10:1 (1948), 1–10, and then in Stevens’s volume The Auroras of Autumn (New York: Knopf, 1950). Harold Bloom discusses the image of the man “turning blankly” as the final link in a “transumptive chain” of “tropes of blankness” that also includes Milton, Coleridge, and Emerson—a chain that Bishop’s “View” could be said to extend. Bloom, The Breaking of the Vessels (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), 75–92 passim. 110. This phrase appears to originate with John Hollander, Images of Voice: Music and Sound in Romantic Poetry (Cambridge: Heffer, 1970), 24. 111.  Note that when we get to the sense of hearing at the end of this sequence, it’s with the word “mute”: we could say the faculty of hearing (best suited to apprehend the phenomenon confronting the poet) gets drawn on too late, and is greeted with silence. 112.  Wittgenstein actually says, overstating the case, “Do not forget that a poem, even though it is composed in the language of information, is not used in the language-­game of giving information.” Zettel, ed. G.  E.  M. Anscombe and G. H. von Wright, trans. Anscombe (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967), §160. Wittgenstein defines language-­game in Philosophical Investigations, trans. G. E. M. Anscombe (Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1958), §7. 113.  This is so partly because it’s not necessarily a repetition in performance: in the first instance we would want to say “Air Force Band,” emphasizing the activity of the group in question, while in the second case we would say “Air Force Blue,” say as opposed to navy blue. It’s worth noting that this repetition was the product of revision: the first published version of the poem has “uniforms of brilliant blue.” New Yorker 27 (July 4, 1951), 17. 114.  Steven Gould Axelrod discusses the Cold War meanings of the poem’s “intervene,” in “Elizabeth Bishop and Containment Policy,” American Literature 75:4 (2003), 853; Camille Roman explores the possibilities of hearing feminine-­and lesbian-­coded language around the gold-­dust and the leaves (Elizabeth Bishop’s World War II–Cold War View (New York: Palgrave, 2001), 128–29). Note too that bass-­drums would be expected to “go / boom—boom,” not “brasses.” To this list we could add “left . . . left.” 115.  Borrowing a phrase from Julie Ellison, who says generally about Margaret Fuller what one might say of “View of the Capitol”: “Stylistic heterogeneity takes on ethical qualities . . . while it becomes the means of vocalizing autonomous desire in a complex social frame.” Delicate Subjects: Romanticism, Gender and the Ethics of Understanding (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1990), 229. 116.  Carter chose and ordered the six poems to create three pairs of alternating “public” and “private” songs. No t e s t o I n t roduc t ion   •   269

117.  Elliott Carter: In Conversation with Enzo Restagno trans. Katherine Silberblatt Wolfthal (Brooklyn: Institute for Studies in American Music, 1991), 82. 118.  The diary entry is quoted in Brett Millier, Elizabeth Bishop: Life and the Memory of It (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), 223: “The band playing on the steps of the capitol—1st sounds unreal, a sort of imagined band, then in short bursts, real. There isn’t any wind, & looking out, one has the sensation that this effect is being caused by the great masses of the trees between the band & here.” In an interview Carter recalls a key passage from Natalie Bauer-­Lechner’s reminiscences of Mahler, in which Mahler hears a military band, a men’s choral society, and several barrel-­organs, all “coming from different directions,” and “enjoy[s] both the disconnectedness of the musical materials and also the fact that they were metrically uncoordinated”: “ ‘That is the true polyphony.’ ” See Allen Edwards, Flawed Words and Stubborn Sounds: A Conversation with Elliott Carter (New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 1971), 102n. 119.  Elliott Carter: In Conversation with Enzo Restagno, 81. 120.  Drott, “The End(s) of Genre.” Here as elsewhere I’m much indebted to this article’s attempt to actually hear and write against this critical grain; see especially 15–41. 121.  Shreffler, “ ‘Give the Music Room,’ ” 265, 269–70. 122.  Shreffler, “ ‘Give the Music Room,’ ” 270. 123.  Quoted phrase from Edwards, Flawed Words and Stubborn Sounds, 102n. 124. Edwards, Flawed Words and Stubborn Sounds, 106. 125.  Jonathan Bernard, “An Interview with Elliott Carter,” Perspectives of New Music 28:2 (1990), 180–214; see 187. 126.  Bernard, “An Interview with Elliott Carter,” 188; as a composer “you live with the text of a poem and you think a lot about it” (187). See also 184–85 on performance difficulty, and Edwards, Flawed Words and Stubborn Sounds, 106, on speed of presentation and questions of intelligibility. 127.  Shreffler, “ ‘Give the Music Room,’ ” 265. 128.  Shreffler, “ ‘Give the Music Room,’ ” 264, 269 (quoted phrase from Shreffler’s original English text; many thanks to Professor Shreffler for sharing this version). 129.  Here one could point to the funeral-­march tempo, the faster marching-­band tempo, and a sort of “static trees” tempo that first appears at the song’s opening. The multiple textural strands of Carter’s “View of the Capitol” are discussed in detail by Shreffler, “ ‘Give the Music Room,’ ” 265–81, and Brenda Ravenscroft, “Texture in Elliott Carter’s A Mirror on Which to Dwell” (Ph.D. diss., University of British Columbia, 1992), 198–225.

Chapter 1. Unengaging Histories 1.  “Pop Comfort over Ambition,” New York Times, January 6, 2006. E1. 2.  “Pop Music,” in Simon Frith, Will Straw, and John Street, eds., The Cambridge Companion to Pop and Rock (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 270  •   No t e s t o C h a p t e r 1

2001), 93–108; the quotations are at 95, 96, 104. Jennifer Lena argues that pop’s status as principally a “commercial category” means it “is best considered as a chart, a way of doing business, or a targeted demographic, and not as a genre”; see her Banding Together: How Communities Create Genres in Popular Music (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2012), 20–21. Here as in Frith’s and Pareles’s piece the use of the term pop resembles the typical ways the term mainstream is employed in popular music: what Jason Toynbee rightly critiques as a “dismissive” picture of “music which is standardized, popular and easy to listen to.” See Toynbee’s “Mainstreaming: From Hegemonic Center to Global Networks,” in David Hesmondhalgh and Keith Negus, eds. Popular Music Studies (London: Arnold, 2002), 149–63; quotation at 149. David Brackett’s “Musical Meaning” (in the same volume) helpfully notes, however, that the stylistic breadth and heterogeneous listenership of the “mainstream” supergenre hold for its constituent genres as well (65–83; see 68). 3.  Frith, “Pop Music,” 108. 4.  Though Frith’s emphasis on pop’s borrowing from other genres (“Pop Music,” 97) might have the effect of underplaying the reciprocity of these exchanges. 5.  Famous mid-­60s examples include the Beatles’ “A Day in the Life” and “Penny Lane,” and the Beach Boys’ “God Only Knows.” 6.  And, one should add, without directly alluding to a specific artist or song. 7.  Frith’s article has useful things to say about all of these save form and materials. 8.  Wendy Brown, Politics Out of History (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001), 124. 9.  This suggests the possibility of a late-­60s connection between the sense that “they don’t write songs like that anymore,” articulated at the time by a writer like Nik Cohn, in his Rock from the Beginning (New York: Pocket, 1970), and Benjamin’s notion of “left melancholy” as elaborated by Brown: “a condition produced by attachment to a notion of progress in which opportunities missed or political formations lost are experienced as permanent and unrecoverable” (Politics out of History, 168–72; quotation at 169). 10.  Bonnie Honig, Democracy and the Foreigner (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001), 107–22; quotation at 107. 11. Honig, Democracy and the Foreigner, 9. My approach differs from Honig’s in that the connections I pursue concern structural uncertainties as well as feelings of doubt. 12.  And to be clear, the “profit and commercial reward” that Frith says is “the only significant ambition pop is driven by” can’t count as a raison d’être unless one holds that every form of commercial culture (musical or other) is “driven by” this ambition (“Pop Music,” 96). 13.  Turned around to focus on the “foreign” elements pop draws upon to fulfill these functions, this resonates with Honig’s question of the foreigner in democratic culture (Democracy and the Foreigner, especially 4): “Why do . . . democracies rely on the agency of foreignness at their vulnerable moments of (re)founding, at what cost, and for what purpose?”. No t e s t o C h a p t e r 1   •   271

14.  See Brown on the Nietzschean idea that democracy ought to harbor values inimical to its project (Politics out of History, 135). 15.  These 1,100 plus 150 songs were culled from nearly four times as many candidates: all the songs on albums whence these 1,250 come, plus everything from 1968– 69 whose labels, personnel, and other paratextual features suggest the heightened style. So one had to check other songs by the same artists, arrangers, or producers, or on the same record labels, or recorded in the same studios; artists who’ve been associated with what’s become known after the fact as psychedelic or “sunshine” pop; all the classical-­leaning rock albums, pop-­leaning soul albums, easy-­listening-­ leaning jazz albums, and hi-­fi-­leaning easy-­listening albums, and so on. 16.  The Coral is not actually a sitar, but an electric guitar manufactured with sitar-­like sympathetic strings. 17.  The other four are by Sergio Mendes, The Buffoons, The Match, and Gershon Kingsley (on his Music to Moog By); one could add the krummhorn-­and-­ harpsichord-­dominated version by the Roundtable, featuring British early-­music stalwarts David Munro and Christopher Hogwood. 18.  http://​w ww​.grantguerrero​.com​/carpenters​/ticket​.html. 19.  This album was rereleased in 1970, unchanged, as Ticket to Ride, following the minor chart-­success of their version of the Beatles’ song. 20.  Even the Dells (whom I’ll return to), the most commercially successful of Charles Stepney’s 1960s groups, had to argue for the expanded length of a sure-­fire pop-­and soul-­chart hit like “Open Up My Heart,” according to a 1992 liner note (On Their Corner, Chess CH-­93333). Of course this ballad’s “extra” choruses, which first withdraw Marvin Junior’s lead vocal and allow the groove and the basic backing-­ vocal arrangement to speak for themselves [4:12–4:55] before bringing Junior back for expanded vocal ad-­libs [4:56–6:30], would’ve required little explanation within the soul tradition itself. 21. We’ll see what happens when this collage-­like—that is, non-­teleological, nonnarrative—mode of organization interacts with other genres’ traditional emphases, like soul’s aesthetic principle of “telling your own story,” and pop’s insistence on the song as a fundament. 22.  A fine book by Kevin Dettmar (who didn’t say this), Is Rock Dead? (New York: Routledge, 2005), concludes with the claim that rock will live on only by accepting rap as part of the rock tradition (155–57). This may be so from a rock perspective, but it makes less sense from the standpoint of hip hop’s own history and stakeholders. 23.  The idea seems to rely on the inclusions and exclusions produced by two mutually reinforcing discourses: writers like Frith say pop is everything that’s not rock or any of the other “focused music genres” (97), and Dettmar and random critics call “rock” everything that’s not pop. Thus all “focused” popular music genres are rock, and anything that’s not part of a focused musical genre counts as pop; together these add up to all popular music. Note the title, organization, and contents of the Cambridge Companion to Pop and Rock for an institutionalized form of this idea.

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24. But Albin Zak’s I Don’t Sound Like Nobody: Remaking Music in 1950s America (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2010), especially ch. 5, does not, one is happy to note. 25. This is the haunting question about conventions generally: does a given convention embody something intrinsically true, useful, beautiful, or right, or is it merely convenient? What happens when we come to doubt a convention? These questions return in chapters 4 and 5. 26.  That is to say: rock adds themes, musical features, and production practices to an existing repertoire of the pop song’s constitutive features (in the realms of external form, the nature of individual song-­sections, the relations of voices to instruments, the notion and importance of hooks). It doesn’t develop features that deliberately reverse their counterparts in pop. When rock adds features that make it incompatible with pop—sexually or politically explicit lyrics; distortion (and other instrumental or vocal timbral qualities that violate the norms of contemporary pop); extended jams (and other types of formal expansion)—it simply reveals it’s different from pop, not opposed to it. See Alistair Fowler, Kinds of Literature (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 1982) on countergenres, antigenres, and the broader phenomenon of “counterstatement” (174–79), and on the nature and formation of subgenres (111–14, 158–59). 27.  On changing ontologies of musical works, objects, and performances, as these concepts interact with recordings, see Mark Butler, Playing with Something That Runs: Technology, Performance, and Composition in DJ and Laptop Performance (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014), 27–40. 28. Doyle, Echo and Reverb: Fabricating Space in Popular Music, 1900–1960 (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2005); Zak, I Don’t Sound Like Nobody, ch. 5; Negus, Popular Music in Theory (Hanover, NH: Wesleyan University Press, 1997), 140–47. For another nuanced view of sonic materiality on pre-­rock popular records, see Rebecca Leydon, “The Soft-­Focus Sound: Reverb as Gendered Attribute in Mid-­Century Mood Music,” Perspectives of New Music 39:2 (2001), 96–107. 29. Motti Regev, “The ‘Pop-­Rockization’ of Popular Music,” in Hesmondhalgh and Negus, eds., Popular Music Studies, 251–64. Regev’s full definition of this aesthetic includes “extensive use of electric and electronic instruments, [“amplification,”] sophisticated studio techniques of sound manipulation, and certain techniques of [“ ‘untrained’ ”] vocal delivery, mostly those signifying immediacy of expression and spontaneity” (253). This formulation defines its features too narrowly, allowing much relevant music to fall into the cracks; it leaves out important features altogether (especially other performance practices associated with African American genres); it pegs these changes to rock, thereby foreshortening the history it seeks to illuminate. Plus it also kind of neglects the question of what they’re playing and singing—elements like chord progressions, melodic characteristics, and lyrics. Note too that “untrained” seems plausible if you’re talking about Bob Dylan—but Patti LaBelle?

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30.  Doyle connects echo and reverb on steel guitar to the production of ethnic difference in Hawaiian music, for example (Echo and Reverb, 132–34); but there’s more to say about how these sorts of signal-­processing interact with changing notions of instrumentation and musical arrangement to create new images of cultural space. Zak’s excellent discussion of echo and reverb in the early 50s (I Don’t Sound Like Nobody, 153–62) provides concrete examples that connect pop’s quest for novelty (in many forms) to the sonic innovations studio engineers started to pursue in the late 1940s. His examples usefully consider the creation of manifold, other-­than-­ real spaces. A full account of how these sonic effects relate to traditional and novel approaches to arrangement is beyond the scope of his discussion, however. 31. It was a number-­one hit for Dorsey (with Bob Eberle on vocals) in the summer of 1940; also reaching the pop charts in July 1940 were Cugat’s version (featuring Dinah Shore), and one by Charlie Barnet. The novelty organist Ethel Smith also performed this song in the early 40s as part of a Desi Arnaz short film. Lecuona published the Andalucia suite for piano, from which “Andaluza” is drawn, in 1928, alongside an arrangement as a song cycle with his own Spanish texts. “The Breeze and I,” with English lyrics by Al Stillman, appeared as a sheet in 1929. The song (under the English title and the name “Andalucia”) stayed in circulation in the period after Valente’s version, with late-­50s and early-­60s recordings by Gene Ammons, Art Blakey, Ahmad Jamal, Ramsey Lewis, Wes Montgomery, Carlos Montoya, Henry Mancini, Santo and Johnny, Ferrante and Teicher, Bing Crosby, the Fentones, the Tornados, the harmonica player Leo Diamond (whom we’ll briefly return to), and many others; most of these records have a percussion, hi-­fi, “exotic,” Iberian and/or Latin-­dance-­music emphasis. Interest in this song continues throughout the 60s and 70s. 32.  Neither version attempts to succeed on the dancefloor, and neither works to showcase its singer. Cugat’s record, like Dorsey’s (and Ethel Smith’s performance), fully embraces a bolero rhythm—perhaps because Ravel’s 1928 orchestral showpiece was then circulating in many recordings and performances, including Benny Goodman’s 1939 recording of Fletcher Henderson’s arrangement. 33.  The melody is presented first in high strings (decorated) then (relatively unornamented) by Valente, an octave higher than her texted presentation of the first chorus, so she’s thereby traversing two octaves and a fifth, from G3 to D5. 34.  Other movements from Lecuona’s Andalucia suite often were often adapted by Latin-­dance-­music orchestras, especially “Malaguena,” whose popularity leaves “Andalucia” in the dust; Valente’s contemporary recording of “Malaguena” was also quite popular. 35.  Like who are “they,” exactly? And did the “strange, mournful” ending of our “love song” mean that the love itself was doomed, or simply that this (metaphorical?) song had a nice-­sounding final phrase? I’m not even sure if the “Ours” refers to “our dream” or “our love song.” And is Stillman saying the song that represents our love’s ideal “seemed constant” but not necessarily the love itself? (Since when is the moon an image for constancy?) Are the first two lines a literal version of the third and fourth, except for the part about the wind sighing and saying stuff? 274  •   No t e s t o C h a p t e r 1

36.  Frith’s “Pop Music” wants to say that sentiment defines the tradition of popular song, but it’s uncertain (1) whether the forces sentiment is asked to compete with are part of this tradition or a subversion of it, and (2) whether this idea of sentiment includes or is other to irony; see especially 102–4. 37.  It’s unclear whether “Andaluza” first reached US listeners as a solo piano piece or as a song (with Spanish lyrics). Thus questions of raison d’être shadow recordings of “The Breeze and I”: are they vocal adaptations of a catchy instrumental melody, or an English translation of a Spanish-­language song? 38.  Even though the liner notes play up her cosmopolitan background. 39. As Billboard put it (April 2, 1955, 32). 40.  It does so without the aid of stereo, one notes; Doyle makes a polemical point about such possibilities in Echo and Reverb, 25–26. On distance as physical, temporal, and emotional, see Berthold Hoeckner, “Romantic Distance,” Journal of the American Musicological Society 50:1 (1997), especially 56–62. 41.  This is perhaps what one should expect from arranger Werner Müller, a Berlin native who trained in both classical conservatories and military bands, but who also arranged Latin-­flavored records all through the 50s and 60s, sometimes under the pseudonym Ricardo Santos. 42.  Here and elsewhere I’m greatly indebted to David Brackett’s critique of “abstractions such as ‘addressees’ and . . . ‘listeners,’ ” though my use of these notions may not fully answer that critique. See Categorizing Sound: Genre and Twentieth-­Century Popular Music (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2016), especially 14ff. 43.  Walter Everett notes the persistence of AABA (and AABABA) form after Tin Pan Alley: The Foundations of Rock: From “Blue Suede Shoes” to “Suite: Judy Blue Eyes” (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), 143–45. “Off Shore” also builds in several melodic/harmonic features that operate on the border between Tin Pan Alley and jazz. What Scott DeVeaux says about the Tin Pan Alley songs Thelonious Monk liked to play—that they themselves often contain melodic/harmonic features that provoked his harmonic transformations and interpolations—also operated in reverse: pop songwriters would seed their songs with features that might attract jazz musicians (DeVeaux, “ ‘Nice Work If You Can Get It’: Thelonious Monk and Popular Song” Black Music Research Journal 19:2 (1999), 169–86; see 176–77). 44.  Album-­titles like Exciting Sounds from Faraway Places and Exciting Sounds from the South Seas show where Diamond was coming from, as it were. Diamond recorded “Off Shore” again in 1962 as the title track of an album for Reprise Records—a label designed to provide alternatives to rock & roll. 45.  A reading by jazz/R&B alto saxophonist Earl Bostic would’ve been known to the group as well. Possibly also a 1959 version by a jazz small-­group under alto saxophonist Frank Strozier’s name, which like the Dells’ version includes a jazz-­ oriented bVIImaj7 chord-­substitution the original recording hints at in its introduction but shies away from in the song itself. 46.  Following this whole-­tone chord, which is built on F, there’s a momentary silence, after which the song proper begins—surprisingly—with a D-­major-­seventh chord. While explicable in pitch-­class terms—the A and C “lead to” the D—this

B

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nevertheless abrupt harmonic shift increases the sense of distance between the intro and the original song. 47.  This signals the Ink Spots’ 1940 record and Clyde McPhatter and the Dominoes’ 1952 version. 48.  The performer is likely Chess Records’ main session bassist of the mid to late 60s, Louis Satterfield, whose influence can be heard in his student Verdine White (of Earth, Wind and Fire; see the introduction). Like Motown’s James Jamerson, whom he likely followed in this, Satterfield drew on jazz bass technique but cultivated an approach with a sound and feel specific to the solid-­body electric basses of the 60s. 49.  This happens later with the Black-­action-­film soundtracks: see chapter 2. 50.  Edwin Black, “For the Record: Charles Stepney,” Downbeat, November 26, 1970, 12. 51.  In “Off Shore” this approach manifests partly as a greater degree of contrast, even in a non-­soul direction: note when the arrangement reduces to a single held note in the violins (2:11–2:13), and compare to the opening of The Dells’ “Does Anybody Know I’m Here.” 52.  Prepared-­piano examples include the Dells’ 1968 “Please Don’t Change Me Now” and “Wear It on Our Face.” The mix of elements in Rotary Connection’s “Paper Castle,” described above, provides another clear instance. Stepney’s heightened approach may be what got him fired once Chess was bought out by the GRT Corporation. And it has drawn fire from purists like Robert Pruter, who writes of the Dells’ Love Is Blue (1969) that “despite the album’s considerable success, it was a most distasteful effort. Every song on the album was given the most overblown and inflated arrangement to milk the most drama possible from each song.” See Chicago Soul (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1991), 112. But while Pruter is mostly right that this mostness was new to soul, there’s no evidence that most contemporary soul listeners objected. 53.  Stepney voted against the “ear pollution” of “groups averag[ing] over 100 decibels” (Black, “For the Record: Charles Stepney,” 32). 54.  Richard Carpenter and journalist Tom Nolan noted how these pressures affected the Carpenters’ first album, Offering. See http://​w ww​.richard​and​karen​ carpenter​.com​/recordings​_rev​.htm. 55.  The ever-­present fanfare might be the clearest such topos: as we’ll see below, it jumps out, interpellates everyone, and asserts the importance of whatever it’s attached to. 56.  See above, n. 9, on Benjamin’s notion of “left melancholy”; we’ll return to this. 57.  “Tunes for Teeny-­Weenies,” Time 92:3 (July 19, 1968), 63. 58.  On the emergence of this “pop vs. rock” relation, against the backdrop of the mostly underdiscussed “easy listening” genre, see Keir Keightley’s “Music for Middlebrows: Defining the Easy Listening Era, 1946–66,” American Music 26:3 (2008), 309–35, especially 327–29.

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59.  The clearest examples of distorted guitar in bubblegum can be found on We’re the Banana Splits (1968), and on songs that lean toward the psychedelic style, like the Bubble Gum Machine’s “I Wonder” and Tricycle’s “Poor Old Mr. Jensen.” 60.  This is why bubblegum’s use of distorted guitars differed from rock’s: a late-­ 60s rock record would suffuse the texture with distorted guitar, giving the sense that the song was unthinkable without it; bubblegum, like other contemporary pop, made clear that distorted guitars were additional, part of a song’s “orchestration.” 61.  “Finders Keepers,” Salt Water Taffy; “Yumberry Park,” Tricycle; “Fe-­Fi-­Fo-­ Fum,” 1910 Fruitgum Company; “Tra La La (One Banana Two Banana),” The Banana Splits; “Yummy Yummy Yummy,” Ohio Express; “The Senses of Our World,” The Bugaloos. These chanted-­nursery-­rhyme lyrics remind us that little kids’ pop remained a site where recorded music could embrace a participatory aesthetic. 62.  The repeated “now,” gratuitous semantically and as an end-­word, nevertheless gives a useful picture of bubblegum’s peculiar temporality. 63.  “ars longa est, . . . vita brevis,” Crawdaddy 1:17 (August 1968), 11–12. 64.  One need look no further than the 1969 Sesame Street song “Count to 20.” 65.  See above on the Cowsills’ “Make the Music Flow.” 66.  These considerations connect with questions we’re compelled to call political: how are group identities constituted and bestowed? How does a song move from presenting an “I” to articulating a “we” to addressing an “us” (and acknowledging a “them”)? 67.  To be clear, the Jackson 5 drew on bubblegum’s flat vocal style but contrasted it with more soulful, bluesy, or churchy approaches. Their records in the bubblegum (soul) vein include “I Want You Back” (1969), “The Love You Save,” “ABC,” “2-­4-­6-­8” and “Mama’s Pearl” (all 1970), and “Sugar Daddy” (1971). 68.  “Changing the Recipe,” Time 91:12 (March 22, 1968), 64. This article doesn’t mention the song’s origin as a Eurovision Song Contest entrant. 69.  Paul Mauriat and his Orchestra, Blooming Hits (Philips PDS 291, 1968). Philips was not a major player in the US pop market, and so may have attempting to cross-­market this record with the label’s extensive catalog of Western art music: the liner notes brag of Mauriat’s training “in the best classical tradition.” 70.  These include records by Ed Ames, Jeff Beck, Vivian Dandridge, Claudine Longet, Al Martino, Johnny Mathis, 101 Strings, and the song’s composer, André Popp. 71.  This common archaism can be heard in “traditional” songs like “Green­ sleeves” and newly composed pastiches like “Scarborough Fair.” Like many Euro­ vision contestants “Love Is Blue” leans toward an art-­music-­inflected folklike tone. Here the i-­I V oscillation is twice as fast as the typical one-­chord-­per-­measure harmonic rhythm: one wants to credit Mauriat with this double-­time modification, which creates a rhythmic feel that plays as “fast” in an arrangement that could otherwise seem slack. But it’s just as likely to derive not from anything “Black” but from art-­song accompaniment patterns designed to match the folklike Dorian mode.

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72. Especially when it had a musically “progressive” agenda, as with Enoch Light’s Spaced Out, Mystic Moods Orchestra’s Extensions, John Andrews Tartaglia’s The Tartaglian Theorem and Pat Williams’s Shades of Today. 73.  In an interview for a rerelease of the 1969 Golden Gates album Year One, for Audio Fidelity, coproducer Reid Whitelaw explained that he succeeded in pitching a “concept. The concept was a cross between the Buckinghams, the Spiral Staircase, with shades of Blood, Sweat and Tears. And I got them to put up the money before they heard anything. There were no demos or nothin’!” (liner notes to The Golden Gate, Year One, Cherry Red / Now Sounds CRNOW 12 [2009]). 74.  These include “Always You,” “Bitter Honey,” “Let’s Ride,” “Someday Man” (briefly a minor hit for the Monkees), and “To Put up with You.” 75.  Nichols’s recording of “To Put up with You” contains a subsidiary trumpet melody that also appears on versions by the American Breed, the Charade (though modified), Guy and David, the Sandpipers (a Spanish-­language version), the Sunshine Company, and Tony Gato; the Flying Circus’s version too uses the melody but places it in the flute. Similarly a demo version of “Always You” presents a trumpet line that later recordings by Linda Ball, the Sundowners, and the American Breed preserve; this line likely wouldn’t have appeared on a sheet or a voice-­and-­piano demo. Modernist string arrangements on Al Martino’s recording of “I Can See Only You” and Danny Sweet’s version of “Can I Go” hew closely to the strings on Nichols’s versions, even though they’re credited to different arrangers. Again: none of these originals or covers became hits. 76.  This single was rushed out so quickly that there wasn’t anything to put on its flip-­side. Canterbury simply made a B-­side of “Yellow Balloon,” the one song they had, played backwards, and entitled—you guessed it—“Noollab Wolley.” Yellow Balloon became the band name as well. 77.  By allocating little to A&R and promotion, record companies could produce LPs for $3,000 that sounded like albums costing five to ten times that amount. Key to this economy were top-­tier studio musicians like L.A.’s Wrecking Crew, who in 1968–69 played on three or four sessions per day (of the ten they were offered). 78.  For Nik Cohn, even the Beatles and the Beach Boys had left their audiences behind by 1969 (Rock from the Beginning, 129, 90–91). 79.  Quoting Frith again: “Pop Music,” 95. 80.  Any “organic” relation likely connected only DJs and record companies, and money may have been passing under the table (though some of these record companies didn’t even bother with payola). 81.  Richard Goldstein, “We Still Need the Beatles, But . . . ,” New York Times, June 18, 1967, 104. 82.  Also: scales and scale-­fragments, common harmonic progressions (often cadential, often repeated in rapid succession), and lyrics emphasizing childlike language. 83.  Plus bells and bell-­motives, orchestrated crescendos, and subsidiary melodies in the high register. 84. And irregular phrase structure, dissonant harmony, and non-­ imitative counterpoint. 278  •   No t e s t o C h a p t e r 1

85.  Or honky-­tonk piano, jug-­band pastiches, etcetera. 86.  Walter Everett notes the bridge’s echoes of Dorothy Fields’s 1930 “On the Sunny Side of the Street.” See The Beatles as Musicians: Revolver through the Anthology (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 117. 87.  Faintly echoing McCartney’s “Woke up, got out of bed.” 88.  This happens on the Astral Projection’s “(Astral Projection .  .  . Leave The Body) Overture / The Sunshine Seekers” and the Bubble Gum Machine’s “The Love of a Woman.” In a way that demonstrates what the quarter-­note pattern contended with, the latter song also includes heavy drum sounds (with many fills), fancy wind and brass arrangements, vocables for a largish complement of singers, a lead singer with rock-­oriented “personality,” an attention-­seeking electric organ, and a Beatles-­ rip-­off chorus (contrasting with an Iberian-­sounding lament-­bass chord progression in the verse); sleighbells provide sonic glue. 89.  Mentioned nowhere else I can find, the Dulcitron sounds as if a spongy clavinet has been put through a phase shifter. 90.  Guitars presenting this pattern became (and remain) a signifier of power pop. 91.  The quarter-­note pattern that pervades the Carpenters’ 1969 “Eve” highlights an isolated # measure at the end of the song’s first phrase and an “extra” measure in its bridge (1:12–1:15), both of which dissonate against the $ meter and regular four-­ measure phrases. 92.  Stepney’s arrangement for Minnie Riperton’s “Oh By the Way” begins with a brass-­and-­drums fanfare in Æ. (One might compare this to the recurring 78 fanfare in Thelma Houston’s “Everybody Gets to Go to the Moon,” composed and arranged by Jim Webb.) Rotary Connection’s album Aladdin opens with a shofar; Stepney’s funky Phrygian fanfare appears at the start of Rotary Connection’s “Christmas Child.” On the whole, these and other aggressively creative fanfares remind us of another basic thing fanfares do on pop records: they address other fanfares. 93.  These points are made clear by Valente’s “The Breeze and I.” 94.  At least 130 of these records use beats and/or percussion instruments associated with bossa nova or samba, for example, and many others borrow from Latin dance music. 95.  Note Brown’s cover of “Let It Be Me” and his original song “World (Parts 1 and 2).” Stepney’s pop-­oriented soul records often contain funky drumbeats, as on Marlena Shaw’s version of “California Soul;” these drum patterns are also common on the soulful side of heightened pop, which we can hear on Jim Webb projects like Thelma Houston’s Sunshower and many 5th Dimension records (often as an ­intensification effect about halfway through). Harvey Averne’s Viva Soul album demonstrates funk beats in pop-­oriented boogaloo. Horn-­heavy pop-­rock groups presenting funky drumbeats include the American Breed (e.g., “To Put up with You”) and the Bermuda Jam (“Easy to Say (But So Hard to Do)”). “Stone Fox Chase” by Area Code 615, an all-­instrumental side-­project of country studio musicians, has a funky beat and several drum-­breaks. The Critters’ “Because You Came to See Me Today” exemplifies the use of funky drum patterns on heightened pop records in the psychedelic style; psychedelic-­pop examples, often played by studio musicians, can No t e s t o C h a p t e r 1   •   279

be found on records by the Free Design, Inner Dialogue, Sagittarius, Spanky & Our Gang, the Clique, and the Buffoons (including the latter’s cover of “Scarborough Fair”). Bubblegum songs with funky drumbeats include Salt Water Taffy’s “Finders Keepers” and quite a few tracks by the Banana Splits and the Bubble Gum Machine. 96.  And not just in the bubblegum records exemplified above. 97.  Often in exaggerated ways, as when the Sunshine Company’s “I Can’t Help but Wonder” presents the title phrase as an overdubbed sung whisper that overlaps with the lead voice; this creates the effect of inner speech. 98.  And without trying to impose an overstrict standard of authenticity, one could add that if a group wants to present itself as “psychedelic” its members should probably look like they’ve at least tried pot . . . . 99.  Blaine was a key figure in the group of session musicians who have since become known as the “Wrecking Crew.” His studio log-­books from this period have been deposited in the archive of Cleveland’s Rock & Roll Hall of Fame. 100. Born, “On Musical Mediation: Ontology, Technology and Creativity,” Twentieth-­Century Music 2:1 (2005), 7–36; quoted phrases at 29. 101.  Frith, “Pop Music,” 95. 102.  Keith Negus’s Music Genres and Corporate Cultures (London: Routledge, 1999), especially ch. 2, shows great respect for the “uncertainties” that attend the development of a record label’s “corporate strategy” to “control and order” what happens with the production and reception of its music, but his eminently useful framework would have a hard time confronting the broader uncertainties of late-­ 60s heightened pop (quoted phrases at 31). 103.  Walter Everett notes this trend and lists some key examples and precursors in The Foundations of Rock, 75–77. 104.  Fink’s discussion of the baroque revival can be found in Repeating Ourselves: American Minimal Music as Cultural Practice (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005), ch. 4; quoted phrases at 172, 174. 105.  The Beach Boys’ 1964 “When I Grow Up (To Be a Man)” went to number 9, and the Righteous Brothers’ “You’ve Lost That Lovin’ Feelin,’ ” also recorded in ’64, topped the charts. 106.  See Ashley Kahn, The House That Trane Built: The Story of Impulse Records (New York: Norton, 2007), 143, on Thiele’s arrangement with Baldwin. 107. Brown, Politics Out of History, 169. See above, n. 9. 108. Cohn, Rock from the Beginning, 129. For a retrospective view see Simon Frith, “Rock and the Politics of Memory,” in Sohnya Sayres et al., eds., The Sixties, without Apology (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), 59–69, especially 61. 109. Morris, The Persistence of Sentiment: Display and Feeling in Popular Music of the 1970s (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2013); see especially 16 and 25–26. 110.  Frith, “Rock and the Politics of Memory,” 68. 111.  Borrowing Eric Lott’s phrase about bebop just after World War II (“Double V, Double-­Time: Bebop’s Politics of Style,” Callaloo 36 (1988), 597–605; quotation 280  •   No t e s t o C h a p t e r 1

at 603). Chapter 4 begins by asking what it means for a work or a genre to fit a moment—and to be shaped by what doesn’t matter as much as by what does.

Chapter 2. Space Issues 1.  Rochelle Larkin, Soul Music! The Sound! The Stars! The Story! (New York: Lancer, 1970), 6. See also Phyl Garland’s more substantial treatment of this theme in her The Sound of Soul (Chicago: Regnery, 1969), 42–47. Along with Arnold Shaw’s The World of Soul: Black America’s Contribution to the Pop Music Scene (New York: Cowles, 1970), Garland’s and Larkin’s were the first books to name and focus on soul as a complex of African American musical genres. Garland was an important journalist, mostly for Ebony, and later a journalism professor at Columbia; Larkin is best known as a prolific author of romance novels. For a thoughtful reading of Garland’s book, see Emily Lordi, “James Baldwin and the Sound of Soul,” CR: the New Centennial Review 16:2 (2016), 31–46. 2. Of these interactions the connections between soul music and literature have been the most studied: see especially Lordi, Black Resonance: Iconic Women Singers and African American Literature (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2013), ch. 5, and Shana Redmond, Anthem: Social Movements and the Sound of Solidarity in the African Diaspora (New York: New York University Press, 2014), ch. 5. On television and soul music see Gayle Wald, It’s Been Beautiful: Soul and Black Power Television (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015), ch. 3, Steven Pond, “ ‘Chameleon’ Meets ‘Soul Train’: Herbie, James, Michael, Damita Jo, and JazzFunk,” American Studies 52:4 (2013), 125–40, and Christopher Lehman, A Critical History of “Soul Train” on Television ( Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2008), ch. 3. On music education, from a key scholar writing in the early 70s, see Eileen Southern, “Music Research and the Black Aesthetic,” Black World 23:1 (November, 1973), 4–13. 3.  Jameson, “Periodizing the 60s,” in Sohnya Sayres et al., eds., The Sixties, without Apology (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), 178–209; quoted phrases at 208. These “new forces” include “the ethnic forces of black and ‘minority’ or third world movements everywhere, regionalisms, the development of new and militant bearers of ‘surplus consciousness’ in the student and women’s movements, as well as a host of struggles of other kinds.” He adds: “Such newly released forces do not only not seem to compute in the dichotomous class model of traditional Marxism, they also seem to offer a realm of freedom and voluntaristic possibility beyond the classical constraints of the economic infrastructure.” 4.  Jameson, “Periodizing the 60s,” 208. 5.  Eric Drott discusses this tension in a French context, focusing on the roles of musical genres in the events of May–June 1968 and their aftermath in Music and the Elusive Revolution: Cultural Politics and Political Culture in France, 1968–1981 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011); see especially 19–20, 61–69. 6.  The quoted phrase comes from Eric Lott’s “Double V, Double-Time: Bebop’s Politics of Style,” Callaloo 36 (1988), 597–605; 603. No t e s t o C h a p t e r 2  •   281

7.  Quotation from unpublished interview with Sue Cassidy Clark, June 3, 1973 (Sue Cassidy Clark Papers, Center for Black Music Research). Bell refers here to the Stylistics’ 1971 “Ebony Eyes,” a song he cowrote with Linda Creed, arranged, and produced. 8.  One sees this usage in Garland, The Sound of Soul, and Larkin, Soul Music!. 9.  Portia K. Maultsby, “Soul Music: Its Sociological and Political Influence in American Popular Culture,” Journal of Popular Culture 17:2 (1983), 51–60, especially 52, on the Billboard chart; David Brackett, Categorizing Sound: Genre and ­Twentieth-Century Popular Music (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2016), 267–71, quote at 271. See also Garland, The Sound of Soul, 2. 10.  On sales, see Garland, The Sound of Soul, 3. For more on this topic see Norman Kelley, ed., R&B, Rhythm and Business: The Political Economy of Black Music (New York: Akashic, 2002), especially David Sanjek, “Tell Me Something I Don’t Already Know: The Harvard Report Revisited,” 63–80. 11. The phrase “indisputably black” comes from Garland, The Sound of Soul, 2; “about life, not just music” is a quotation from producer Kenneth Gamble (in Clayton Riley, “The Philly Sound of Brotherly Love,” New York Times, March 31, 1974, D34); the phrase about “struggle” is from Garland, The Sound of Soul, 234 (italics in original). Emily Lordi’s The Meaning of Soul: Black Music and Resilience Since the 1960s (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2020) notes, brilliantly, that “In soul discourse, however, the payoff of struggle was soul itself, understood as unique resilience” (22); The Meaning of Soul appeared after this book was completed, and it deserves more than a footnote. 12.  See Garland, The Sound of Soul, 99, on B. B. King and “modern sound reproduction.” It’s worth noting that sonic values like “clarity,” “sharpness,” and “purity” are defined differently depending on context. 13.  These values were key to precursor genres like jazz and R&B; the first three of these values were also essential to gospel and the blues. On jazz see George Lewis, “Improvised Music after 1950: Afrological and Eurological Approaches,” Black Music Research Journal 22, Supplement (2002), 215–46. 14. Larkin, Soul Music!, 12, 175, 62–63, 155, 127. 15. Garland, The Sound of Soul, 26–27, 132–33, 32–37. On Garland’s treatment of Baldwin, and her concept of soul more broadly, see Lordi, “James Baldwin and The Sound of Soul,” 33–37. 16. Garland, The Sound of Soul, 231–34, quoted phrase on 233–34; see also 1–2. 17. Garland, The Sound of Soul, 2. 18. Larkin, Soul Music!, 177. On “To Be Young, Gifted and Black” see Redmond, Anthem, ch. 5. Writing in the 70s, Horace Clarence Boyer credits crossover gospel artists the Staples Singers and the Edwin Hawkins Singers for “the wide acceptance of that genre which is now called ‘message’ songs.” See “Contemporary Gospel Music,” The Black Perspective in Music 7:1 (1979), 5–58; quoted phrase at 10. 19.  Around this time it became common for record companies to prepare shorter mixes of potentially popular long songs (sometimes restructured, more often just fading out early) for seven-inch singles, jukeboxes, and radio play. A related strategy 282  •   No t e s t o C h a p t e r 2

was to place the vocal version of a song on the A-side of a single, and an instrumental version (usually the same mix minus the vocal track) on the B. 20. Fink, “Goal Directed Soul? Analyzing Rhythmic Teleology in African American Popular Music,” Journal of the American Musicological Society 64:1 (2011), 179–238. 21. Bell’s own word for his instrumentation (as quoted in Tony Cummings, “Philly Special: The Thom Bell Story,” Black Music, January 1974 [accessed on Rock’s Backpages]). 22.  Stepney complained about “Music critics . . . who are determined to save the artist from the evils of the arranger. Overproduction, they call it” (quoted in Edwin Black, “For the Record: Charles Stepney,” Down Beat, November 26, 1970, 12). Philadelphia producer Huff said “We’ve been criticized” for using strings (quoted in Riley, “The Philly Sound of Brotherly Love”). 23.  Quoted phrase from Huff, in Riley, “The Philly Sound of Brotherly Love.” 24. Larkin, Soul Music!, 73. 25.  The Hammersmith Odeon was the venue for the O’Jays’ million-selling Live in London (1974). The quotation from Creed is from “Linda Creed,” in Bruce Pollock, In Their Own Words (New York: Macmillan, 1975), 224–31; 226. 26. Georgina Born, “Introduction,” in Born, ed., Music, Sound and Space: Transformations of Public and Private Experience (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 1–70; quoted phrase at 69; see also 31–35. Born’s essay provides a magisterial overview of this field. See also Allan Moore, Patricia Schmidt, and Ruth Dockwray, “A Hermeneutics of Spatialization for Popular Song,” Twentieth-Century Music 6:1 (2011), 83–114. 27.  On gentrification and other factors in the shifting relations between disco and urban space in the late 70s and after see Tim Lawrence, “Big Business, Real Estate Determinism, and Dance Culture in New York, 1980–88,” Journal of Popular Music Studies 23:3 (2011), 288–306. On the production of mental space in recorded music see Eric Clarke, “Music, Space and Subjectivity,” in Born, ed., Music, Sound and Space, 90–110. On connections between spatial markers in lyrics and spatialization in recorded popular music, see Allan Moore, “Where Is Here? An Issue of Deictic Projection in Recorded Song,” Journal of the Royal Musical Association 135:1 (2010), 145–82. On Stax and Memphis see Garland, The Sound of Soul, quoting Stax executive Al Bell (132, 134). Baraka’s image comes from “The Changing Same (R&B and New Black Music),” in his [writing as LeRoi Jones] Black Music (New York: William Morrow, 1967), 180–211; quoted phrase at 186. 28.  Bell’s collaborator Creed says they “turned down several TV shows” because, he said, “ ‘How can I take the bus to work if people know who I am? . . . How can I go into Pantry Pride and go shopping?’ ” (Pollock, “Linda Creed,” 231). On relations between musicians and the urban environment see Sara Cohen, “Bubbles, Tracks, Borders and Lines: Mapping Music and Urban Landscape,” Journal of the Royal Musicological Association 137:1 (2012), 135–70. 29.  See John A. Jackson, A House on Fire: The Rise and Fall of Philadelphia Soul (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), 134. Similarly, the three members of the No t e s t o C h a p t e r 2  •   283

O’Jays lived far away, in Cleveland, so didn’t participate in the songwriting process, the recording of the rhythm tracks, or the orchestral “sweetening” that followed the sessions on which they recorded their vocal tracks; but on the other hand top-shelf string and wind players were always close by, thanks in part to the Philadelphia Orchestra and the Curtis Institute. 30. Jackson, A House on Fire, 157–60. The O’Jays are noted as an exception. 31.  Hear also the O’Jays’ 1969 In Philadelphia; and Dusty Springfield’s 1969 Dusty in Memphis, though c.f. Charles L. Hughes, Country Soul: Making Music and Making Race in the American South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2015), 69–70, and note chapter 2’s sensitive treatment of the racial politics of the “Memphis sound.” (Springfield’s 1970 LP A Brand New Me could justly have been called Dusty in Philadelphia, as it was a true Gamble, Huff, Bell, and Martin production, with the main rhythm section.) 32.  This was founder Berry Gordy’s term; see Andrew Flory, I Hear a Symphony: Motown and Crossover R&B (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2017), 41. 33.  This song’s connection with contemporary film is complicated by its apparent origin as an on-spec, unused contribution to the soundtrack of Shaft in Africa (see Jackson, A House on Fire, 133). 34.  Riley, “The Philly Sound of Brotherly Love.” 35.  See, e.g., Garland’s article on Chicago gangs, which quotes a teenager complaining that local social-welfare agencies are staffed by adults who “ain’t been out here in it like it is” (“The Gang Phenomenon: Big City Headache,” Ebony, August 1967, 96–103; quotation at 97). 36.  Riley, too, positions himself as an African American man. He interacts with his interviewees and the Times’ readership as such: he quotes Bell addressing him as “Brotherman,” he uses language like “Blood” for Black person, and more broadly models a Black writerly voice for a mixed audience. 37.  Riley, “The Philly Sound of Brotherly Love.” 38.  A debt Creed acknowledged: see Pollock, “Linda Creed,” 229. 39.  Gerald Early reports that Motown founder Berry Gordy would say “Always use the present tense” (“One Nation Under a Groove,” The New Republic, July 15, 1991, 30–41; quotation at 35). The imperative mood counts as a heightened form of this. 40.  Bell describes this process in his unpublished June 3, 1973, interview with Sue Cassidy Clark. 41.  Mitchell Morris, The Persistence of Sentiment: Display and Feeling in Popular Music of the 1970s (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2013), 74–78. 42.  All the more because this phrase gets left behind in the two outchoruses, as in “Tracks of My Tears,” mentioned above. 43.  On the problematics of falsetto signaling Black masculinity see Mark Anthony Neal, Songs in the Key of Black Life: A Rhythm and Blues Nation (New York: Routledge, 2003), 46–47, and Nina Eidsheim, The Race of Sound: Listening, Timbre and Vocality in African American Music (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2019), ch. 3. 284  •   No t e s t o C h a p t e r 2

44.  See Morris on sitar sounds in Philadelphia soul (The Persistence of Sentiment, 74–75). 45.  All quotations from unpublished June 3, 1973, interview with Sue Cassidy Clark. 46.  Pollock, “Linda Creed,” 228–29. 47.  Pollock, “Linda Creed,” 226. Beyond this gendered labor there’s the fact that, after her singing career didn’t pan out, Creed took a secretarial job with Gamble and Huff to continue to be “around music” (226). She also had to deal with rumors that she and Bell were having an affair ( Jackson, A House on Fire, 106). 48.  Pollock, “Linda Creed,” 229–30. 49.  Pollock, “Linda Creed,” 227; though she adds it “took me forever to do because I didn’t like the melody” (228). 50.  Creed died of cancer at thirty-six. 51.  We’ll see that Creed’s work forms an exception: for the most part the contributions of women songwriters (and to some extent singers) were shuffled to the margins of Philadelphia soul until 1975. 52.  The single went to #40 soul and #122 pop. Even this modest chart-success was surprising, partly because Kudu (then a new sublabel) and its parent CTI hadn’t done much business in seven-inch singles; the album reached #16 on Billboard’s soul LP chart. 53.  It’s hard to say how much points two through four contributed to this record’s success. In a thoughtful contemporary profile of Phillips, Garland asserts that many of Phillips’s early-70s fans were unaware of her early career and fight with addiction (“Esther Phillips Beats Drugs to Win New Fame,” Ebony, October 1972, 174–80). It’s also true that many hadn’t heard Scott-Heron’s original version, which Vince Aletti praises in a review while noting that the LP “may not be easy to find” (“Pieces of a Man,” Rolling Stone, July 20, 1972). 54.  Quoted phrase from Gil Scott-Heron, The Last Holiday: A Memoir (New York: Grove Press, 2012), 159. 55. Neal, What the Music Said: Black Popular Music and Black Public Culture (New York: Routledge, 1999), 76. 56.  Plus, according to Scott-Heron, Ellis (“who was then working with our label, Flying Dutchman”) introduced Phillips to the original record (The Last Holiday, 187). Both versions were released on New York jazz labels that were reaching for crossover success. On CTI see Charles D. Carson, “ ‘Bridging the Gap’: Creed Taylor, Grover Washington Jr., and the Crossover Roots of Smooth Jazz,” Black Music Research Journal 28:1 (2008), 1–15. 57.  Garland, “Esther Phillips Beats Drugs to Win New Fame,” 176. 58.  Franklin said that “Being Black . . . means searching for oneself and one’s place among others” (Alan Ebert, “Aretha,” Essence, December 1973, 38–39, 80–84, 87, 92; quoted phrase at 87). 59.  Garland, “Esther Phillips Beats Drugs to Win New Fame,” 176. 60.  This holds for Shaft’s white people too. For more on Blackness and whiteness in Shaft, see my “Identity, Value, and the Work of Genre: Black Action Films,” No t e s t o C h a p t e r 2  •   285

in Shelton Waldrep, ed., The 70s: The Age of Glitter (New York: Routledge, 2000), 79–123. 61.  Many viewers have noticed this aspect of Curtis Mayfield’s soundtrack for Super­fly (Gordon Parks Jr., 1972): see, for example, Nelson George in Blackface: Reflections on African-Americans and the Movies (New York: Harper Collins, 1994), 34; Ed Guerrero in Framing Blackness: The African American Image in Film (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1993), 96; and Nathan McCall in Makes Me Wanna Holler: A Young Black Man in America (New York: Random House, 1994), 101. But it’s misleading to suggest that this contrast—between glorification of the drug dealer’s life and critique of that life—exists only between the soundtrack and the film: it exists within both the soundtrack and the film. 62. Hayes won a Grammy for the “Theme from Shaft,” and his early-70s chart performance was truly impressive: three #1 soul LPs, then Shaft (which too reached #1, and went gold), then a few months later Black Moses (also #1), followed by Live at the Sahara Tahoe and Joy (#1, #2, both gold). Hayes made major contributions to many late-60s/early-70s popular-music trends just as they were hitting soul music: the self-produced LP, the double album, the double live album, the long-song-featuring album-length project, the artist-written soundtrack album, the artist-run boutique sublabel, the artist playing multiple roles (songwriter, instrumentalist, co-arranger, producer), and the artist working quickly in the studio to realize LPs. 63.  January 2012 conversation with John Fonville, who played flute on the sessions that produced the recordings used in the film. (The music was rerecorded for the soundtrack album.) 64.  It’s notable in this regard that Parks and editor Hugh Robertson actually recut several of Shaft’s scenes to better fit Hayes’s cues: see Jeff Smith, The Sounds of Commerce: Marketing Popular Film Music (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998), 147–48. 65.  Chester Higgins Sr., “Isaac Hayes Raps about His Music and His FUTURE,” Jet, May 4, 1972, 58–63; quotation at 61. 66. Morris, The Persistence of Sentiment, 49. 67.  Higgins, “Isaac Hayes Raps about His Music and His FUTURE,” 62. Hayes said he “wanted a musical score that would really tie into the character,” and “Shaft is a driving and relentless person.” 68.  Quotation from a central passage in Emerson’s address “The American Scholar.” 69.  Although the harmonic structure is simple and built out of ordinary materials, it’s not commonplace. The A-section of the song repeats a four-measure unit that alternates two measures of F major with two measures of E minor, while the B-section stays on G major. Without harmonic relations built on fourths and fifths (such as one has in blues and gospel harmony and their derivatives), the song seems to hover between E and G as tonics without really asserting the primacy of either. 70. Following Shaft, many crime and “problem” films devote screen-time to silent or solitary walks, especially films shot in New York City: Superfly, Black Caesar, 286  •   No t e s t o C h a p t e r 2

Serpico, Mean Streets, Death Wish, Saturday Night Fever, The Warriors, Ms. 45, The Brother from Another Planet, Do the Right Thing. Almost all these films have prominent scores emphasizing Black musical genres. 71.  This group of images can’t quite be naturalized as “things encountered on the way to work,” if only because Shaft traverses certain blocks more than once. This repetition may have been necessitated by the long duration of the theme song: the “Theme from Shaft” is almost a minute and a half longer than the average pop song of the time. If unanticipated, this longer length might have forced editor Hugh Robertson to scramble for sufficient footage. 72.  On unenforceable authority see my “Identity, Value, and the Work of Genre,” 104–8. On the distinction between authority and power see Hannah Arendt’s “What Is Authority”: “authority precludes the use of external means of coercion; where force is used, authority itself has failed.” (Between Past and Future, enlarged ed. (New York: Penguin, 1977), 91–141; quotation at 93). Following Arendt, William Connolly elaborates this distinction in The Terms of Political Discourse, 3rd ed. (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993), 107–16. 73.  See Morris, The Persistence of Sentiment, 68–70. 74.  The record and the LP it was drawn from were pitched as Live at “The Club” in Chicago but were actually recorded in L.A.’s Capitol Studios. 75.  James Brown’s “Say It Loud—I’m Black and I’m Proud” makes its mixed group of speaking voices an essential feature of its chorus. Donny Hathaway’s 1970 “The Ghetto,” whose late-arriving hangers out anticipate the party people in “What’s Going On,” includes a cranky baby Lalah Hathaway. 76.  A famous Motown example, the Temptations’ “I Can’t Get Next to You,” from the 1969 LP Psychedelic Shack, begins with clapping and the sounds of a party, soon interrupted by someone saying “Hol-hold it—listen,” leading to a bluesy piano intro. This opening is remediated in the album’s space-making title track (also a big hit), which starts with someone knocking, and taking a flamboyantly creaky door into (one presumes) a shack, as “I Can’t Get Next to You” begins to play. 77. Morris, The Persistence of Sentiment, 69. 78.  Music journalist Sue Cassidy Clark shares more than one joke with Philadelphia soul musicians like Thom Bell about the difficulty of hearing into the textures of 60s Motown songs. Talking to Bell about hearing the Spinners “through some of the Motown productions—I know your hearing is good,” she says. “No,” Bell replies, laughing, “Not quite that good” (unpublished interview, September 19, 1973, Sue Cassidy Papers, Center for Black Music Research). 79.  Ben Edmonds, What’s Going On: Marvin Gaye and the Last Days of the Motown Sound (Edinburgh: Mojo, 2001), 121–22, 174–75, 185–87. 80. Edmonds, What’s Going On, 156. Edmonds also registers the significance of Gaye crediting the musicians in the LP’s gatefold (155). Michael Eric Dyson notes the importance of Gaye’s many collaborators in light of a “whirlwind” ten-day schedule for the LP’s studio sessions, following the success of “What’s Going On” as a single release (Mercy Mercy Me: The Art, Loves, and Demons of Marvin Gaye (New York: Basic, 2004), 63–64). Alto saxophonist Eli Fontaine, who plays the song’s first No t e s t o C h a p t e r 2  •   287

melody, is one of three wind players Gaye and arranger David Van De Pitte assigned solos to, along with the honking R&B tenor saxophonist “Wild” Bill Moore, and (on “Right On,” playing in a sort of East Harlem salsa pastiche) the young, White classical flutist Dayna Hartwick. 81.  Both accidents are described in Edmonds, “A Revolution in Sound & Spirit: The Making of What’s Going On,” liner notes to What’s Going On (Deluxe Edition) (Motown 440 013 404-2, 2001). 82.  Maybe it kind of adumbrates the contour of Gaye’s first phrase (“Mother, mother”). 83.  The scatting shows too that Gaye’s multiplicity also facilitates communication between the present and the past, for better or worse: Motown boss Berry Gordy apparently complained about “that Dizzy Gillespie stuff in the middle, that scatting, it’s old” (as reported in Dyson, Mercy Mercy Me, 62). 84.  The dual-lead-voice texture became a recurring feature of Gaye’s style, an accident giving birth to a full-fledged practice. It’s also present in Al Green’s “Simply Beautiful” (1972) and Smokey Robinson’s “Baby Come Close” (1973). 85.  As when in the Impressions’ 1964 “Keep on Pushing” Mayfield sings “I’ve got my strength and it don’t make sense not to keep on pushing.” 86.  This Black-church mode connects with the address to the family: as Geneva Smitherman notes, sister, brother, and mother are “forms of address for black females and males, terms that emphasize solidarity and unity. Conceiving of the church as the human family in microcosm, church folk typically address each other in this fashion.” See Talkin and Testifyin: The Language of Black America (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1977), 57. But at some moments the addressee suddenly shifts, as when Gaye sings, “Picket lines and picket signs / Don’t punish me with brutality,” moving quickly from everyone to the police (presumably). So there are multiple modes of address in the song, including the questions, the asides, grammatically free-floating images like “Picket lines,” and statements of principle (“War is not the answer / For only love can conquer hate”). 87.  Norman Whitfield’s rise at Motown, for example, and its connection with long, groove-driven songs, provides a clear case of this controversy: Temptations’ member Otis Williams says the group chafed at the producer-driven approach that turned the group into the “Norman Whitfield Choral Singers”: “On some tracks our singing seemed to function as ornamentation for Norman’s instrumental excursions.” Otis Williams, with Patricia Romanowski Bashe, Temptations (New York: Putnam, 1988), 159. 88.  This was a factor in the making of Isaac Hayes’s seminal Stax LP Hot Buttered Soul (1969). 89.  For an introduction to son-montuno form see Robin Moore, Music in the Hispanic Caribbean (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), 91–102. 90.  Mellonee V. Burnim, “The Black Gospel Tradition: A Complex of Ideology, Aesthetic, and Behavior,” in Irene V. Jackson, ed., More Than Dancing: Essays on Afro-American Music and Musicians (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1985), 147–67, especially 162–65; quoted sentence at 162. See also Boyer, “Contemporary Gospel 288  •   No t e s t o C h a p t e r 2

Music,” especially 30–31; and Braxton D. Shelley, “Sounding Belief: ‘Tuning up’ and ‘the Gospel Imagination,’ ” in M. Jennifer Bloxam and Andrew Shenton, eds., Exploring Christian Song (Lanham, MD: Lexington, 2017), 173–94, especially 182–90. 91.  The gospel part of this equation included factors like the crossover success of Aretha Franklin’s Amazing Grace LP (1972); sublabels like Truth (a Stax imprint) that contracted top session musicians and arrangers; artists like the Staples Singers, who sometimes crossed over to secular song, and Rance Allen (who had a bit of a secular presence); and private-label LPs with the relevant musical characteristics. 92.  Miles Davis’s electric jazz records of 1969–72 were also key to this connection; see Eric Porter, “ ‘It’s about That Time’: The Response to Miles Davis’s Electric Turn,” in Gerald Early, ed., Miles Davis and American Culture (St. Louis: Missouri Historical Society Press, 2001), 130–47. 93.  For a song that draws on all these newer models hear Curtis Mayfield’s “Get Down,” the first song on his 1971 LP Roots. 94.  Gamble, quoted in Riley, “The Philly Sound of Brotherly Love;” this article also records Bell praising Tarsia’s expertise. 95.  Morris provides a fine capsule history of soft soul’s emergence (The Persistence of Sentiment, 70–73). 96.  Black, “For the Record: Charles Stepney.” 97.  Quotation from Dede Dabney, “Thom Bell—Spinning Hits with Style,” Record World, January 6, 1973, 8, 20; quotation at 8. In this interview Bell goes through much of the Stylistics LP saying how different the songs are from one another. 98.  Riley, “The Philly Sound of Brotherly Love;” Riley’s article also quotes Bell saying Philadelphia soul is “for folks who listen, as well as for those who dance.” 99.  The verses consist of a five-measure phrase, heard twice: two $ bars followed by a # bar then two more $ bars. The chorus goes $, $, ^ then $, $, $, ^; this adds up to the equivalent of eight $ measures but doesn’t feel that way. On the notion of the “cut” see James Snead, “Repetition as a Figure in Black Culture,” in Henry Louis Gates, ed., Black Literature and Literary Theory (New York: Routledge, 1984), 59–80, especially 64–67. 100.  We’ll return to this formal model below. 101.  June 3, 1973, interview with Sue Cassidy Clark. 102.  It was categorized as “everything,” Bell claimed, “except in two markets, religious and country-western” (Dabney, “Thom Bell—Spinning Hits with Style,” 8). 103.  Quoted in John Abbey, “The Stylistics,” Blues & Soul ( June 1972) [accessed on Rock’s Backpages]. Cover versions recorded by the end of 1973 included Michael Jackson’s, Lenny Williams’s, the Temprees’, a dozen jazz versions, and at least four reggae versions. 104.  June 3, 1973, interview with Sue Cassidy Clark. 105.  Smitherman defines “changes” as “unexpected emotional experiences.” Black Talk: Words and Phrases from the Amen Corner, revised ed. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2000), 89; on “going through changes” see also Talkin and Testifyin, 53. 106.  June 3, 1973, interview with Sue Cassidy Clark. No t e s t o C h a p t e r 2  •   289

107.  Letting the rhythm section stand alone for stretches is a main way to do this, along with reducing harmonic or melodic activity. This happens at all tempi, but takes a more concerted effort in slow songs. 108.  The numbers increase sharply from 1970 to 1975. During these years there were about eighty or so Philly soul LPs, hundreds of songs that appeared only on seven-inch singles, and a handful that came out exclusively on promotional-only twelve-inch singles. 109.  Sometimes these second halves become occasions for vocal ad-libbing, sometimes not. Close cousins are songs that move to a four-measure two-chord vamp; the most famous is William DeVaughn’s 1974 “Be Thankful for What You’ve Got.” 110.  On the March 1975 crowning of singer Gloria Gaynor as “Queen of the Discos,” see Tim Lawrence, “In Defense of Disco (Again)” New Formations 58 (2006), 128–46; 130n4; and also his Love Saves the Day: A History of American Dance Music Culture, 1970–1979 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003), 178. 111.  Barrett cowrote “Sideshow” and “Three Ring Circus” for Blue Magic (1974), the long ballad “Love Won’t Let Me Wait” for Major Harris (1975), and 1973’s “Just Don’t Want to Be Lonely” for Ronnie Dyson (also released a year later by Blue Magic as a seven-minute groove ballad), among other hits. 112.  Similar gender imbalances held in Detroit, Los Angeles, and Chicago, and across the South. New York’s Atlantic Records did a bit better, certainly with stars like Aretha Franklin and Roberta Flack, but also with less-well-known singers like Margie Joseph. In general the other exceptions were occasional songs by stars (Labelle), artists working with auteurist producers like Stepney (Minnie Riperton), singers with jazz connections (Esther Phillips, Freda Payne), and singers who wrote their own material (Zulema), along with early disco records (like Sunny Gale’s “I Wanna Know,” and Blood Hollins’s “How Have You Been” featuring Jean Lang). 113.  Especially Ron Baker, Norman Harris, Vince Montana, and Bobby Eli. 114.  June 3, 1973, interview with Sue Cassidy Clark. 115.  Things were different at L.A.-based Motown, where there were songwriters like Pam Sawyer, Valerie Simpson, Syreeta Wright, Terri McFaddin, Gloria Jones, Anita Porée, Kathy Wakefield, and Christine Yarian. 116.  See Nelson George, The Death of Rhythm & Blues (New York: Pantheon, 1988), 145, and Jackson, A House on Fire, 181–82. TSOP starts to sign more women solo singers after 1975. 117.  The Philadelphia-based McFadden had had a few local hits in the mid-50s and early 60s but nothing that charted nationally. In 1968 she returned to the studio after a several-year gap to provide a witty and commanding lead vocal on one of the first songs recorded at Sigma, “Rover Rover,” released under her name on Huff ’s barelythere Huff Puff label. “Ghetto Woman” was her next (and so far final) release. It too failed to make Billboard’s Hot Soul Singles, though it somehow hit #13 on Jet’s Soul Brothers Top 20 in the magazine’s final issue of 1972, its only week on that nontransparently constructed chart (Jet, December 28, 1972, 64). Its presence on this chart may have reflected strong regional airplay in a major soul-music city, or, doubtfully,

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some attempt to grease the wheels; the other nineteen records were also high-charting Billboard hits. 118.  The song’s opening monologue begins “I’d like to make some comments about our society.” Lady Love appeared on the eclectic Buddah label; it reached #29 on the soul-LP chart. 119.  A corroborating footnote to Mason’s auteurist positioning can be found in the self-titled debut LP by singer/songwriter Dianne Steinberg, produced by Thom Bell’s younger brother Tony. The daughter of pioneering African American radio DJ Martha Jean the Queen, Steinberg began her career in Detroit, and was signed to an L.A. label that was sold to Atlantic; Atlantic had strong ties to Philadelphia soul (though it was based in New York), and showed a willingness to release long songs by women artists. 120.  One of these, “Newsy Neighbors,” was a message song. 121.  Chris Jisi, “The O’Jays’ ‘For the Love of Money,’ ” Bass Player 16:9 (2005), 79–80. 122.  Jisi, “The O’Jays’ ‘For the Love of Money,’ ” 79. 123. As noted above in connection with Philadelphia soul’s spatial practices, things might have gone differently if Jackson had had enough going on in New York that he could’ve presented the bass line to a producer like Van McCoy, or if his songwriting practice hadn’t involved spending time with Lucas. 124. This description also fits the bass line of Kool & the Gang’s “Hollywood Swinging;” another gold record, it entered the charts in the same week as the O’Jays song. 125.  Riley, “The Philly Sound of Brotherly Love.” 126.  Verse 9 sets this up: “But they that will be rich fall into temptation and a snare, and into many foolish and hurtful lusts, which drown men in destruction and perdition.” 127.  Other soul songs make use of this construction, including the inversion, especially Ed Townsend’s “For Your Love” (1958): the title phrase appears both inverted and not, in a chiasmic structure (“For your love I would do anything / I would do anything for your love). There were several charting versions of this song, including Gwen McCrae’s, which entered the charts on September 29, 1973—about a week before the “For the Love of Money” recording session. 128.  I’m using the term “modal jazz” in Ingrid Monson’s “expanded sense,” meaning not just slower harmonic rhythm, and scale-based rather than chord-driven solos, but also an emphasis on drones, vamps, and “an expanded variety of rhythmic feels and melodic sources” that often draw on African and Caribbean musics. See Freedom Sounds: Civil Rights Call Out to Jazz and Africa (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), 298; see also 302–6 on the relation of modal jazz to religion and politics. 129.  Billy Paul was a fulcrum. Two members of the piano trio that had backed Paul in his mid-60s jazz phase stayed with him at Philadelphia International Records. His pianist Eddie Green was the constant in Catalyst, a Philly-based spiritual jazz group of which Paul’s bassist Tyrone Brown was also a main member. (Also recording

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with Catalyst were Anthony Jackson and other Philadelphia soul session players like Norman Harris.) Three of Catalyst’s four LPs were recorded at Sigma, along with other early-70s LPs in this style. This connection becomes audible in the modal-jazz openings of long Paul records like “Windmills of Your Mind” from 1970’s Ebony Woman, “East,” from 1971’s Going East, and “I’m Just a Prisoner,” from 360 Degrees (1972). 130.  “Let’s Do It Again,” a product of Mayfield’s collaboration with the Staples, made the charts at the same time as “Wake Up Everybody;” this fusion was a much broader phenomenon, however. 131.  “Hey Jude” is less radical formally than “Wake up Everybody,” since its vamp is four bars long rather than one, and its second half focuses on a new strongly profiled vocal melody (rather than a bass line). But this song’s launch into its second half, with the line “Then you’ll begin to make it better,” and repetitions of “better,” may, too, invoke the prophetic mode. Walter Everett notes that “Hey Jude” provoked a “rash of rock songs . . . with mantralike repeated sections.” See The Beatles as Musicians: Revolver to the Anthology (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999) 195. That “Hey Jude” borrowed from Black music was not lost on artists like Wilson Pickett, whose 1969 version “stamped it a soul song” (Larkin, Soul Music!, 132); the nine early-to-mid-70s versions by soul artists that follow Pickett’s seem to use his version as a reference-point. One wonders whether “Wake Up Everybody”’s line “The world won’t get no better / If we just let it be” is meant as an answer to the Beatles’ “Let It Be.” 132.  See Jackson on Gamble (A House on Fire, 83–84); and recall Bell’s remarks about Creed and him being slow to produce message songs ( June 3, 1973, interview with Sue Cassidy Clark). 133.  Or perhaps Billy Paul’s wonderful but commercially disappointing War of the Gods (1973) forced them to learn this the hard way. 134.  Jackson suggests that Gamble and Huff saw this more clearly, in the mid- to late 60s, from their position “on the fringes of the recording industry” (A House on Fire, 80). 135.  Jackson characterizes Gamble in particular as having “the heart and soul of a conservative black capitalist” (A House on Fire, 83). 136.  After a story about the group’s breakup (“Melvin and Blue Notes Hit Sour Note; Split up,” December 11, 1975, 74–75), Jet published two letters that make their point partly by quoting song titles: one reader wishes to “ask Harold how does he want people to believe in his songs like Wake Up Everybody if he doesn’t believe in them?” ( January 15, 1976, 4). 137. Lawrence, Love Saves the Day, 117–23. 138. See Lawrence, Love Saves the Day, 122, on messages “situated within the music;” Lawrence’s Epilogue reflects on the politics of disco’s spaces, a theme the book addresses throughout. See also Vince Aletti’s liner notes for Super Rare Disco (Robbins Entertainment 76869-75005-2, 1997) on early disco’s physical/cultural spaces. 139. The Melvin record found popularity in Britain once a single was rushreleased in the wake of Houston’s version. 292  •   No t e s t o C h a p t e r 2

140. Johnson’s and Moore’s records demonstrated another major trend: long dance records that gained their bold handlings of texture and structure from the disco DJs who remixed them prior to their release.

Chapter 3. Exchange Theories 1.  Disco’s place in gay culture has been well discussed in the critical literature. See Richard Dyer, “In Defense of Disco,” Gay Left 8 (1979): 20–23; Walter Hughes, “In the Empire of the Beat: Discipline and Disco,” in Andrew Ross and Tricia Rose, eds. Microphone Fiends: Youth Music and Youth Culture (New York: Routledge, 1994), 147–57; Nadine Hubbs, “ ‘I Will Survive’: Musical Mappings of Queer Social Space in a Disco Anthem,” Popular Music 26:2 (2007): 231–44; Douglas Crimp, “Diss-­Co (A Fragment): From ‘Before Pictures,’ a Memoir of 1970s New York,” Criticism 50:1 (2008), 1–18; and especially Tim Lawrence, Love Saves the Day: A History of American Dance Music Culture (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003), and Alice Echols, Hot Stuff: Disco and the Remaking of American Culture (New York: Norton, 2010). 2.  In cases where there was “considerable trade, from island to island, from port to port, across very great distances, since the very remote past” (un commerce considérable, d’ île en île, de port en port, à des distances très grandes, depuis des temps très reculés), this trade “had to convey not just things, but also modes of exchange” (a dû véhiculer non seulement les choses, mais aussi les façons de les échanger). See “Essai sur le don,” in Marcel Mauss, Sociologie et Anthropologie, 4th ed. (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1968), 155n3. For a sense of what Mauss may have been arguing against, see Bill Brown, A Sense of Things (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 88–89. 3.  On this and AOR’s racial positioning see David Brackett, Categorizing Sound: Genre and Twentieth-­Century Popular Music (Oakland: University of California Press, 2016), 297–99. 4.  Ellen Willis, Beginning to See the Light: Pieces of a Decade (New York: Knopf, 1981), 111–12. 5.  Tom Petty said that after the success of the crossover hit “Refugee” with new-­ wave audiences, “it would have been very easy to say, OK, we are new wave and let’s go get the skinny ties” (Musician, Player and Listener 34 (July 1981), 42–49, 52; quoted phrase at 52). 6.  To be clear: while punk shows these tensions socially, and to some extent from song to song, individual mid-­to late-­70s punk songs don’t normally present the internal heterogeneity we find in new wave and post-­punk songs. On the complex socialities of early punk, see Nick Crossley, Networks of Styles, Sound and Subversion: The Punk and Post-­Punk Worlds of Manchester, London, Liverpool and Sheffield (Manchester: University of Manchester Press, 2015). 7.  Spicer, “Reggatta de blanc”: Analyzing Style in the Music of the Police,” in Spicer and John Covach, eds., Sounding out Pop: Analytical Essays in Popular Music No t e s t o C h a p t e r 3   •   293

(Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2010), 124–53. On genre-­mixing in new wave ca. 1983–84 see Theo Cateforis, Are We Not New Wave?: Modern Pop at the Turn of the 1980s (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2010), 56–65. 8.  This is partly because disco’s versions of older hits establish a convention of placing long, groove-­oriented minor-­mode sections in front of the instantly recognizable older song. (Besides this version of “Ain’t No Mountain High Enough,” we can observe this convention in Scott Allan’s “I Think We’re Alone Now/Will You Love Me Tomorrow,” Deborah Washington’s “Standing in the Shadows of Love,” Soirée’s “You Keep Me Hanging On,” and Tempest Trio’s “You Keep Me Hanging On/Love Chains,” for example.) Tantra’s “Hills of Katmandu,” mentioned below in connection with the convention of four-­on-­the-­floor, holds off its pop-­oriented B-­section for more than five minutes; this long wait, plus the extreme change of mood from the rather stern A-­section to the Eurotrash of the B-­section, make the pop-­oriented material sound like it must be some old song. “If My Friends Could See Me Now,” by Linda Clifford, might be heard as a subtler example of the same scheme. A similar effect is achieved through both the songwriting and the performers’ vocal timbres in the promo twelve-­inch version of the Beach Boys’ 1979 “Here Comes the Night.” 9.  As mentioned in chapter 2, the O’Jays’ “For the Love of Money” puts the snare on beats one and three; it thereby makes the song less danceable, which makes sense thematically, given its lyrics. 10.  The opening section of Heatwave’s “Boogie Nights” signals (pop-­) jazz partly by keeping the snare off the beat. 11.  This is the case with Steely Dan’s “The Royal Scam,” which seems to follow “For the Love of Money” with respect to both its lyrics and its placement of the snare on beats one and three. 12.  British groups like Portion Control and the March Violets concoct drum machine programs that deviate from conventional patterns in ways that suggest free association, conditioned by the drum machine’s interface, rather than conscious departure from a norm. (This is different, I think, from the kinetically driven two-­ fingered approach that adds punch to old-­school hip-­hop drum programming.) 13.  A similar sixteenth-­note (rim-­shot) motive appears in Hugh Masekela’s 1968 “Grazing in the Grass,” but there it’s connected with the rhythm of the title phrase, and with contemporary boogaloo turnaround figures on cowbells and timbales; plus it’s more foregrounded. 14.  Eruption’s 1978 disco version of Ann Peebles’s “I Can’t Stand the Rain” (1973), which fared better than the original on the pop charts, provides an interesting example of such communication. A rising “raindrop” figure begins the original song and runs throughout it. According to the liner notes for a 1996 compilation of her chart hits (The Best of Ann Peebles: The Hi Records Years Hi 7243-­8-­52659-­2-­1, 1996), this figure was played on timbales, but it comes across as a weird sound effect created one knows not how: it’s distorted, doubled, and clearly works as a hook; but more strongly it dissonates against the rest of the song’s elements (through its distorted timbre as well as its pitch content). Because it’s both recognizable and decidedly odd, 294  •   No t e s t o C h a p t e r 3

this is the sort of feature a new version would have to address. Eruption’s version recasts it as a diatonic melody played (in equal temperament) on a synthesizer with a clean timbre. Its melodic emphasis, plus the fact that it disappears quickly (though it returns in the breaks), encourages us to make a connection between its rising contour and that of the bass line. The need for a timbral (and/or thematically related) hook at the song’s opening—a role that this recasting of the “raindrop” motive cannot fulfill—is answered in this version by a processed thunderstorm sound effect. 15.  Nick Ashford and Valerie Simpson thank Jimmy Simpson for his “great ears” (on the inner sleeve of Stay Free). The remix engineer John Luongo tells how Simpson’s bass drum sound influenced the bass drum sound—and through it the entire arrangement—of Dan Hartman’s “Vertigo/Relight My Fire,” discussed below (see Brian Chin’s liner notes to Columbia’s 1987 disco compilation Let’s Dance! The D.J.’s Collection of Dance Club Classics, Columbia C2 40517). Jimmy Simpson also coproduced and mixed Candi Staton’s “When You Wake Up Tomorrow,” mentioned above. 16.  We can hear her do so in “Ain’t No Mountain High Enough” at 1:10 (different vocal placement, and glottal stops, in response to the synthesizer’s timbre and envelope), in Nuyorican Soul’s “It’s Alright, I Feel it!” (a glottal stop in response to the piano’s phrasing), in her own “Somebody Else’s Guy” (changing phonemes), and in Inner Life’s “I’m Caught Up (In a One Night Love Affair)” (nasalization and vocal fry that relate to the sitar-­like buzz of a guitar part). 17.  At the same time, it’s important to hear disco as capable of accommodating nonfunctional details without abandoning its responsibility to the dance floor. See below, n. 27. 18.  But see below on the sense of arbitrariness or aloofness that can sometimes accompany the selection of a detail for emphasis. 19.  I say “may” because both of the versions released—LP and twelve-­inch—were remixed by Levan, and both begin the same way. (The beginning of the twelve-­inch version interpolates an extra phrase with just drums and synth bass, delaying the entrance of the guitar.) While greater attention has been paid to serial remixes, cases like this—in which there’s no “original” version released prior to the remixing—are equally interesting. Disco frequently makes remixing no more or less than a stage in the process, along with composition, performance, arrangement, and production. Remixing becomes just another source of the competing sensibilities that influence a song’s construction. (A song’s artist and producer were often escorted out of the studio while a DJ was doing the remix. The editors of Disconet DJ News 3:8 (1980) are compelled to say that the remix session for D.  C. La Rue’s “Cathedrals/1980” was “the first session in a long time where the artist and producer stopped in and didn’t have to be thrown out”; perhaps it mattered that the song was then already four years old.) 20.  The synthesizer has been programmed for a fairly quick attack and a somewhat buzzy timbre (probably a sawtooth wave filtered to emphasize the upper partials). The orchestrational decision to put the motive on a synthesizer with this timbre and envelope enhances the motive’s mechanical quality and gives it pitch No t e s t o C h a p t e r 3   •   295

content (which of course it didn’t have as a rim-­shot). Adams does the simplest thing with regard to the pitch content, which is to have the motive articulate the tonic. 21.  The terms of this freedom expand further when Adams reuses the motive— now on the downbeat—in Rainbow Brown’s “I’m the One.” 22.  The congas carry harmonic information as well (since they articulate the fifth and third scale-­degrees), reminding us that percussion’s function in disco is not only rhythmic, but harmonic/melodic, timbral, and generic, as the timpani also make clear. 23.  Beyond its ability to signal the original version, which can be put in doubt, the synthesizer part isn’t sufficiently catchy, memorable, or distinctive to serve as a hook; it’s static; it would not be called interesting—and it’s not quite mechanical enough to serve as that sort of hook. (Such mechanical hooks can be heard in Cameo’s “I Just Want to Be,” Lipps Inc.’s “Funkytown,” and—late, perhaps, but very obvious—Mass Production’s 1983 “Freak-­a-­zoid.”) 24.  This rhythmic motive is just as idiomatic on the guitar as it is on the synth: the guitar’s right-­hand muting is typical for rhythm guitar playing in soul, funk, and disco. 25.  Because this motive is silent on beat four, Adams can fill the space with other elements: the hand-­clap on beat four (beginning at 1:22) seems to provide another kind of response to the motive’s call—as if it gathers up the energy that the motive’s momentum creates. (You can hear this effect most clearly in the break, at 5:48 and following.) There is an important point to be made here about grooves in general, although I admit it won’t help to convince anyone who isn’t already in disco’s thrall. Typical patterns can be invested with a sense of specificity by making their elements seem to converse; for example, Chic’s drummer, Tony Thompson, plays his patterns in such a way that the snare drum and bass drum talk to each other. (This call-­and-­ response goes back to the interlocking parts in African textures.) By delaying the entrance of the purely conventional articulation of beat four in “Ain’t No Mountain High Enough,” and by setting up this articulation with a rhythmic motive that has a noticeably “empty” beat four, this instantiation of the convention appears as though it arises out of a particular situation. 26.  We see this investment strategy at work in the treatment of elements like the wah-­wah guitar and the high-­hat in proto-­d isco songs like Isaac Hayes’s “Theme from Shaft” (discussed in chapter 2) and his nine-­minute “Pursuit of the Pimp­mobile” from the Truck Turner soundtrack. (Do I still need to call the latter a neglected masterpiece, or is everyone on top of it by now?) But this strategy really begins to pay off on the dance floor, where temporality connects to physicality. 27.  You can get a sense of this arbitrariness from “First True Love Affair” by Jimmy Ross, remixed by Larry Levan, in which a synthesizer bass line that’s not in the pocket gets the royal treatment at the song’s opening, making the groove unsteady until the arrangement fills out and the electric bass enters. Skyy’s number-­one soul-­chart hit, “Call Me,” on the other hand, provides a good example of a disco song that works like funk in this regard: the one-­chord guitar part that begins the song animates the whole arrangement organically, as it were, and not as the result of 296  •   No t e s t o C h a p t e r 3

an arbitrary imposition. Both songs fared very well on the dance floor as well as placing on the soul charts. The first compensates for the unsteady synth bass (and a guitar part that’s also a touch shaky) by anchoring the rhythm arrangement with an electric bass part that works the on-­beats especially hard. “Call Me,” by contrast, features elements that jut out of the texture and prevent things from feeling too coherent, most obviously by means of the heavy drum fills that crash the guitar’s party near the beginning and a phone call toward the end—not just talking on the phone, one may recall, but actually placing the call on a touch-­tone phone, accompanied by a whole-­tone scale on the synthesizer. As I will say further below, grooves often benefit from a degree of internal tension or some kind of friction. 28.  The self-­conscious primitivism of an early disco song like the Chakachas’ “Jungle Fever” (1972) makes clear that this notion of “prehistory” does not point to any actual historical moment, but rather proposes an image of an idealized past. 29.  In disco’s prehistory, the ground means both “percussion” and “rhythm,” but these aspects are separable (as they are, later, in the mature disco song’s break). 30.  The guitar and bass parts in the chorus of Chic’s “Good Times” would be a well-­known example. Italian disco picked up on this arrangement technique (and on many of Chic’s favorite gambits) like mad, as in Jimmy Ross’s “First True Love Affair” (mentioned above, n. 27). 31.  Disco dancers embody this range by flexing and freezing in a variety of ways. These moves become part of the break-­dancer’s repertoire. 32.  Drummer Kenny Washington’s phrase, as quoted in Ingrid Monson’s fine discussion of the groove and “grooving.” See Saying Something (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 66–69; quotation at 66. 33.  I should make clear I mean something more disruptive or resistant or non-­ participatory than Charles Keil’s “participatory discrepancies.” See especially “The Theory of Participatory Discrepancies: A Progress Report,” Ethnomusicology 39:1 (1995), 1–19. 34.  The details: the motive’s rhythmic profile changes because you now hear it as accenting the eighth notes—it’s more internally differentiated. It helps create a sense of space by switching between extreme left and right (with the melody and chord progression in the center). Prominent stereo effects often serve as a hook; here we have an update of the old ping-­pong gambit. 35.  It’s almost as if the motive were part of a continuo accompanying a secco recitative; this would bring the clavinet’s harpsichord associations to the fore. 36.  The sparseness of the arrangement at the song’s opening creates a nice little groove despite having the synth motive way up in your face. When you hear the entrance of the timpani at 1:13, you may realize that nothing save the congas has been articulating the downbeat and nothing has been sounding in the lower register; these factors, too, would seem to work against the establishment of a danceable groove. With the genre’s responsibility to the dance floor in mind, we hear the opening texture as acceptable for dancing but also as temporary and incomplete. The song makes you dance harder to compensate for the absence of a strong downbeat and the lack of a heavy two and four, but communicates simultaneously that you No t e s t o C h a p t e r 3   •   297

need to preserve some energy. In the section that follows, the motive disappears, making this section as much a change of direction as a continuous build. The harmonic rhythm speeds up (and without the motive there’s no tonic pedal), the chord progression and the main melody in the violins descend like the original song’s verse, and the drum set enters, which gives the sense that you are closer to the original song; the absence of the voice and this section’s status as new, unfamiliar material tells you you aren’t there yet. 37.  It’s even less, actually, since Adams and Carmichael rewrite the end of the chorus and interpolate four measures worth of their introductory material as a turnaround between chorus and second verse—so shave off another ten to fifteen seconds. 38.  Even the parts of the song that do derive from the original have been revised extensively. Adams also changes the harmony underneath the song’s title phrase from minor to major, which ramps up the intensity. Similarly, the two-­bar phrase-­structure of the chorus gives way to more spacious four-­bar phrases in the long ad-­lib section that follows. The song provides a good example of the disco cover’s competitive approach, its attempt to exceed the original song. This song’s sheer length works similarly in this regard, providing a clue to another aspect of the approach here: the Inner Life version as realization of what the original could only hint at; the idea of the original version as a sketch or blueprint for what the Inner Life version actually brings to completion. (One hears this approach in the arrangement and performance of Tavares’s version of the Bee-­Gees’ “More Than a Woman.”) Here, of course, this is a misreading, but one that’s perhaps necessary to the project of redoing a song—that it should be conceived of as making, not remaking. In a 1973 interview for Ebony, Roberta Flack spoke of choosing “Killing Me Softly” as a song to cover because she felt that it could stand improvement, that Buffy Saint-­Marie’s original version wasn’t definitive, and that she would enjoy the process of working on it. 39.  The creation of a sense of distance in these sorts of ways predates disco, of course; it predates recorded music altogether but gains a special valence, first in 50s pop and then in disco—recall the opening of Heatwave’s “Boogie Nights,” for example. 40.  Loleatta Holloway’s entrance in “Vertigo/Relight My Fire” can be heard as “timely.” 41.  Like the break that comes too early (at 0:40) in Jackie Moore’s “This Time, Baby.” 42.  Hear the prechorus of Musique’s “In the Bush,” another Patrick Adams production. 43.  The chorus of Lipps Inc.’s “Funkytown” can be heard as suggesting the adequacy of clock time. 44.  Conventions of pop songs—like lyrics that address a beloved (Styx’s “Sing for the Day”), or simple, keyboard-­based harmonies (Foreigner’s “Cold as Ice”)— work in AOR to target pop audiences; pop’s conventions can be separated out from other aspects of AOR not only because they appear mostly in songs destined for 298  •   No t e s t o C h a p t e r 3

release as singles but also because the songs that include them always incorporate some compensatory progressive, “serious,” or musicianly touch—as if to say to their (album-­buying) fans “that pop stuff is for them—this is for you.” 45.  This requirement rests partly on the fact that disco had higher standards of musicianship than new wave and (most) AOR, standards inherited from the great session musicians of Philly Soul, many of whom became disco’s first performers, arrangers, and producers (as chapter 2 noted). 46.  Without trying to be funny I would say that playing a guitar solo in AOR resembles entering a ritual state—a plane of existence that is ever-­the-­same. 47.  Before undertaking this research I could sing from memory the guitar solos from Boston’s “More Than a Feeling” and Heart’s “Barracuda”—without believing they’re all that good—while being completely unable to conjure up more than scraps of the lyrics. 48.  Like the obligatory drum fill, the guitar solo can constitute in new wave an unhappy hippie remnant that returns us to an outmoded kind of expression; many new-­wave guitar solos appear only to fulfill a requirement of the (50s) rock ’n’ roll song’s form. Guitar solos in new wave often function mostly as generic signals— pointing ironically to a genre like hard rock (as often in the Dictators), or sentimentally to rockabilly (as in the Damned’s “Neat Neat Neat”) or surf (the Raybeats). In order to carry out this function, they need not seem inspired. 49.  The contributors to the Trouser Press Record Guide (especially Ira Robbins, its editor) seem to desire an ironic stance from every new-­wave musician. They continually refer to new wave as “modern music,” implying the inevitability of an epochal shift to new wave’s values (which would presumably allow new wave to supersede other rock genres). But what happens when everybody and everything is ironic? Would an object still count—would you still recognize it—as ironic? See Robbins, ed. The Trouser Press Guide to New Wave Records (New York: C. Scribner’s Sons, 1983) and The New Trouser Press Record Guide (New York: C. Scribner’s Sons, 1985). On irony in new wave see Cateforis, Are We Not New Wave, ch. 4. 50.  Indeed the disco canon contains many fully composed guitar solos that emphasize the sounds and techniques of rhythm guitar over those of lead guitar. 51.  For the emergence of four-­on-­the-­floor out of Philadelphia soul, see Lawrence, Love Saves the Day, 119–22. 52.  Hear also “I’m O.K., You’re O.K.” by American Gypsy, which presents a scintillating choir over the most rigid example of four-­on-­the-­floor one can find. (It’s probably an excess of scruple to point out that American Gypsy was in fact a Eurodisco project—not an American group—though the use of this slur was shamefully common in US popular-­music contexts as well.) 53.  The bite of this bass-­drum sound derives partly from the technique of putting a separate mic near the bass-­drum beater, which gives the bass drum a high-­frequency component that helps it cut through the mix. Sometimes the high-­frequency component would be enhanced by dumping all the midrange frequencies (below 1khz) and boosting the highs. This technique became common in disco from about 1979. 54.  Quoted in Chin, liner notes to Let’s Dance!. No t e s t o C h a p t e r 3   •   299

55.  Sylvia’s “L.A. Sunshine” (a minor soul hit in 1976) is a borderline case—a song that’s prevented from being heard (solely) as pop or as soul through its use of four-­on-­the-­floor. Slight departures from four-­on-­the-­floor, like a “cha-­cha variation” wherein the bass drum plays two eighth notes on the third beat of every second measure, gain a strong profile in the context of many songs that present undifferentiated quarter notes. (This rhythmic departure can be heard in two of Patrick Adams’s productions—Musique’s “In the Bush” and Salsoul Orchestra’s “Take Some Time Out for Love;” in the latter this departure locks in with the bass line’s rhythm, so much so that when the electric bass drops out in the break the bass drum seems to signify or stand in for it.) One should also say, since listeners who claim to be harmed by the pounding bass drum never do, that songs usually mix four-­on-­ the-­floor with other bass-­drum patterns: “Hit and Run” switches to straight eighth notes in the turnaround, for example. 56.  Talking Heads’ best album, Fear of Music (1979), presents four-­on-­the-­floor in nearly half of its songs; four-­on-­the-­floor is but one of many disco-­derived practices that appear on this record, not coincidentally released in disco’s biggest year. 57.  There are at least three reasons for this. First, many drum patterns in new wave are themselves constructed like fills in that they constantly circumnavigate the kit rather than focus on bass drum and snare. (This timbrally oriented or melodic approach is especially common in UK and New York City new wave of the early 80s—a period of intense development of professional-­and prosumer-­grade drum machines, electronic drums, and signal processors. Japan’s Steve Jansen might be the best exemplar of this style.) The fills may therefore sound no more spontaneous or improvisatory than do the patterns they diverge from. Second, the kind of personal expression the drum fill traditionally represents in rock may be considered old-­fashioned, irrelevant, or otherwise inappropriate. Reason three: some drummers are not so good. 58.  Some of this difference derives from disco’s more collaborative production process, in which composers, performers, arrangers, producers, engineers, and remix artists may each assert their ability to shape a convention’s realization. (Stratification can make these reshapings more audible.) Part of the difference has to do with the higher standards of musicianship mentioned above, n. 45. 59.  When synthesizers outrank guitars, as they do for Joy Division, the too-­ fast-­for-­disco four-­on-­the-­floor emphasizes the pattern’s automatic quality, lending industrial (and, later, techno) one of its crucial tropes. 60.  It’s actually harder for a trained rock drummer to play this pattern, since it goes against the grain of rock’s standard drum beats. 61.  This last strategy, too, can coexist with borrowings from disco. Wire’s “I Am the Fly”—an altogether interesting case of generic mixture—begins with a drone above a consistent four-­on-­the-­floor. It’s more dirge than disco initially. But the song includes hand-­claps and octave leaps in the bass, as well, signaling disco. Its shifting, asymmetrical phrase-­structure makes four-­on-­the-­floor function in part as a stable backdrop, much as it does in otherwise rhythmically irregular disco. This phrase-­ structure (given the melodic materials) also connects the song with self-­conscious 300  •   No t e s t o C h a p t e r 3

pseudo-­psychedelia like Pink Floyd’s “Bike.” Perhaps too we might enlist the lyrics’ “fly in the ointment” motif as part of a claim that the song seeks to parody more commercial new wave. 62.  See Fowler, Kinds of Literature (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1982), especially 88–92. But the generic signal always has a temporal dimension that the term signal shouldn’t let us forget: we have to pay attention to when it appears, how long its influence lasts, how quickly it takes effect, and so on, even if it happens at the beginning of a work. It also possesses a dimension of force or power: we should ask what medium or atmosphere it passes through, what it’s contending with, whether it creates friction against its background, whether it can be erased or displaced by something else. Questions of temporality and force are important to all elements if we’re focusing on stratification as a circulatory system. 63.  Such an allusion can serve the ends of pop as well as those of dance music. 64.  “Atomic” provides a multivalent example, because its fast four-­on-­the-­floor works initially as part of a surf-­rock pastiche; a listener needs the break to confirm this pattern’s disco associations. 65.  Disco’s influence on new wave wasn’t often acknowledged by journalists and new wave’s core audiences until after disco’s golden age, but that didn’t stop the songs from functioning as dance music. Even now it may sound odd to assert connections between new wave (and punk) and disco. This sense of oddness is itself worth investigating: why do critics and scholars feel comfortable claiming that music reflects social or historical forces but funny saying it reflects other music? If you’re making danceable music during the height of disco, enhancing your snare drum sound, adding instruments from dance music genres, using mixing creatively (even if partly under the influence of Jamaican dub), treating guitars percussively for rhythmic and timbral purposes, singing in a torchy style that’s saturated with sentiment, at the same time as you present four-­on-­the-­floor, how can you consider your genre impermeable to disco? 66.  The oscillating vocal melody has a new-­wave or punk quality, as mentioned, but it also rhymes with the bass line because the two share pitch and intervallic materials—both emphasize the tonic and lowered-­seventh degree in the verse and the lowered-­seventh and flat-­sixth degrees in the chorus—and they leave space and are sharply articulated. Of course this song’s melodic material also reflects the riff-­ based hard rock of Led Zeppelin et al. 67.  Haddon, “Dub Is the New Black: Modes of Identification and Tendencies of Appropriation in Late 1970s Post-­Punk,” Popular Music 36:2 (2017), 283–301; quoted phrases at 290 and 291. 68.  But with friends like drums machines, you didn’t need enemies. I remember a 1984 Cabaret Voltaire performance in which the duo fought first with a (taped) drum machine and then with each other while a hired percussionist just rolled his eyes. And this was human error, not a malfunctioning tape deck. Things could get even worse when the drum machine wouldn’t work—a year earlier I’d watched Herbie Hancock smack one around in Carnegie Hall. Equipment failure had always been a part of amplified music, but drum machines created new problems: when a No t e s t o C h a p t e r 3   •   301

drum machine winked out, there was often nothing left to fulfill the traditional role of the drums. (By contrast one could work around the absence of an electric guitar or keyboard, and if the power went out altogether, one would still have the acoustic sound of drums and voices.) 69.  Competence might be defined in a variety of ways, broadening the possibilities for diversity. It’s not trivial that a new-­wave group’s members would often look different from one another or, more specifically, that one member would stand out from the rest. Sometimes the band had sought to embody this diversity; in other cases you might sense that the band wished to create an image (or more plainly a look) that couldn’t be sustained by all of its members. Blondie traded on their constitution as four Jacks and a Jill, and Gang of Four made a point of hiring a female bassist after the departure of their original bass player, but other groups’ odd person out might be of a different ethnicity, age, or regional or national origin; one band member might wear longer hair or less-­tapered pants. (Think of Yello and the Hi Sheriffs of Blue.) The image of the Police as young, cute, and blond provides one famous example of a look that was hard to achieve: hair dye helped guitarist Andy Summers fulfill the blondness requirement but that’s as far as it went. New wave was still raced as white and gendered as male, and youth was the norm, but the function its diversity served in the discourse around the genre far exceeded the role diversity played in other rock genres. The fact that so many new-­wave bands sought diversity and made a feature of it suggests there were musical correlatives and consequences. Stratified textures eased the accommodation of these differences. 70.  Recall the Virgin Prunes, whose membership included Dave-­iD Busaras, the withdrawn younger brother of a friend of the band. He was asked to join the group after the band-­members witnessed him eating chicken theatrically. Initially he made mostly chicken-­related contributions to the group’s live shows; he ended up becoming the band’s third vocalist and sometime lyricist. (See dave​-­­id​.com and virginprunes​.com​/mute​/a​_conversation​_with​_daveid​_ part​_1​.html.) 71.  Hear Byrne’s My Life in the Bush of Ghosts (with Brian Eno) and The Catherine Wheel. These early-­80s examples create stratified textures partly by using found recordings but equally by employing specialists like disco bassist Busta Jones and studio drummer Yogi Horton to perform parts with clear meanings and functions. Laswell, who had done sessions for Byrne early in his career (and who praised Byrne for giving session musicians great freedom), adopted the layered approach with Material, Deadline, and the Golden Palominos, and on his solo album Bass Lines. Hear also Laurie Anderson’s Mister Heartbreak and Kip Hanrahan’s Coup de Tête, which foreground the lyrics while reflecting the Lower East Side’s trend of combining specialization and stratification. 72.  Byrne often talked about building songs in the studio by focusing on grooves and using stratified textures. See especially the interview in Musician Magazine, April 1982. A comportment more appropriate to the studio than the nightclub was certainly discernable in early live performances of the Feelies—another element that makes this group a precursor to the shoegaze style of the early nineties.

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73.  Led Zeppelin, Black Sabbath, and the hard rock and heavy metal bands they influence also employ riffs that emphasize the lowered seventh degree; songs by Gang of Four and others will often pun on this connection. One can usually determine whether a given example leans more toward a disco-­oriented bass line or a heavy guitar riff by listening to timbral features—both those of the line itself and those of the texture around it. 74.  The Dance’s “Looking for the World” provides a danceable no-­wave example. 75.  The few exceptions among the four-­on-­the-­floor users include those groups with the strongest ties to punk, like Stiff Little Fingers and X. 76.  It doesn’t matter in this regard that “I Love a Man in Uniform” includes drummer Hugo Burnham, while “Call Me Up” and “Is It Love,” recorded after Burnham’s departure, employ a drum machine. 77.  This includes some that possess danceable sections or danceable elements (most often the drums) in a layered texture, but don’t seem to have been intended for the dance floor, like “Paralysed” and “The History of the World,” and others that aren’t danceable at all, like “He’d Send in the Army.” 78.  Most AOR songs with four-­on-­the-­floor—and there aren’t a ton of them— do one of two things: shade toward pop (or toward a use of disco as pop), like Kiss’s “I Was Made for Loving You,” or use four-­on-­the-­floor in the intro for a sort of stop-­time punctuation, as in Foreigner’s “Juke Box Hero” (as in some metal-­based AOR songs). Foreigner flirts with four-­on-­the-­floor in several big hits—“Feels Like the First Time,” “Cold as Ice,” “Head Games”—but instead employs the relatively neutral and more rock-­friendly bass drum on beats one and three (only). 79.  By comparison, Deacon’s bass line and the rhythm arrangement around it sound rather Fisher-­Price: Chic’s four-­measure bass line, smooth minor mode, and independent guitar part become in the Queen song a two-­measure pentatonic bass line doubled at first by the guitar. It’s typical that Deacon treats the disco idiom as requiring a harmonic vocabulary simpler than rock’s—rock musicians always act this way—even though a quick comparison of the harmonic vocabulary in both genres shows this to be a misapprehension. Nevertheless, this simple harmony makes space for the timbral/textural explorations disco encourages. 80.  This synth part is closer to disco than to similar uses of synthesizer in AOR material like Styx’s “Come Sail Away” and several songs on the Steve Miller Band’s Book of Dreams. While these songs present non-­pitched synth parts as hooks, they also contain lyrics that talk explicitly of a voyage, and they foreground the synthesizer part in a separate section that attempts to make good on the song’s promise of a “trip.” The Steve Miller Band had tried this gambit as early as 1969’s “Space Cowboy;” their “Fly Like an Eagle” really established it as a trend (at least in the world of Top 40, outside of progressive rock, and synth-­based groups like Kraftwerk and Tangerine Dream), but its groove orientation (which gave the song access to the dance floor) makes it a somewhat different case. “Another One Bites the Dust” lies closer to disco in its use of the synthesizer for two reasons: (1) the synth part receives no thematic confirmation in the song’s lyrics, and (2) the song’s disco frame itself

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authorizes the break, so there’s no reason to hear the synthesizer part as the break’s reason for existing. 81. These associations include Western art music (“Death on Two Legs”), operetta and music hall (“Bohemian Rhapsody”), a vaguely defined Black church (“Spread Your Wings”), and the clunky pianistic style of the pop/rock singer/songwriter (“We Are the Champions”). 82. Note also the non-­pitched synthesizer in the background of Foreigner’s “Urgent,” starting in the second half of the first verse. This huge pop hit’s other (dance-­oriented) new-­wave touches include the futuristic 50s rhythm guitar at the opening, the processed saxophone, the snapped electric bass, and the enhanced percussion sounds. 83.  This is true as well for progressive artists like Adrian Belew, Holger Czukay, Brian Eno, Robert Fripp, Peter Gabriel, Percy Jones, Robert Wyatt, Yes, and Frank Zappa, and for art-­or glam-­rock artists like David Bowie, Bill Nelson, Roxy Music (and solo releases by their singer Bryan Ferry), and the Tubes. All these musicians come through new wave before doing anything truly dance-­oriented, as opposed to groups like Steely Dan, Chicago, and the Doobie Brothers, who still got played on AOR radio in the disco era but who had already left rock behind for soulful pop. The Steve Miller Band may constitute an exception. 84.  The longer twelve-­inch version of “I Was Made for Loving You,” remixed by disco specialist Jim Burgess (likely without the group’s participation), is a different case. But it becomes so precisely through the contribution of someone who wasn’t part of the band. 85.  And not because it rejects slavish fidelity to genre conventions, as a comparison with funk pastiches by Led Zeppelin (“The Crunge,” “Trampled Under Foot”) and the Rolling Stones (“Hot Stuff”) makes clear. 86.  We could say that with house music, starting as early as 1986, the nostalgia in disco becomes nostalgia for disco.

Chapter 4. Senses 1.  Drott, “The End(s) of Genre,” Journal of Music Theory 57:1 (2013), 1–45, especially 5–6. 2. See especially Kallberg’s “The Rhetoric of Genre: Chopin’s Nocturne in G Minor,” Nineteenth Century Music 11:3 (1988), 238–61; “The Harmony of the Tea Table: Gender and Ideology in the Piano Nocturne,” Representations 39 (Summer 1992), 102–33; “ ‘Voice’ and the Nocturne,” in Bruce Brubaker and Jane Gottlieb, eds., Pianist, Scholar, Connoisseur: Essays in Honor of Jacob Lateiner (Stuyvesant, NY: Pendragon Press, 2000), 1–46; Chopin at the Boundaries: Sex, History, and Musical Genre (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996). 3.  Stewart, “Out of the Darkness: Nocturnes,” in Poetry and the Fate of the Senses (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), 255–91.

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4.  Carl Dahlhaus, “New Music and the Problem of Musical Genre,” in Schoenberg and the New Music, trans. Derrick Puffett and Alfred Clayton (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 32–44; see 32. 5. Kallberg, “The Rhetoric of Genre,” 242. See also Drott, “The End(s) of Genre,” 4–6. 6.  Kallberg, “The Rhetoric of Genre,” 242ff. 7.  The piece doesn’t present a rhythmic unison again until very near the end, when these simultaneities start to occur with increasing frequency (mm. 77ff.). Carter’s sketch for this piece shows that the downbeat of m. 6 initiates a large-­scale structural polyrhythm that governs the rest of the piece. Reproduced with commentary in Felix Meyer and Anne Shreffler, eds., Elliott Carter: A Centennial Portrait in Letters and Documents (Suffolk, UK: Boydell, 2008), 260–62. But these rhythmic unisons serve clear—and quite traditional—rhetorical purposes. 8.  The flute sounds like a figure partly because of its registral placement (relative to mm. 6–7 and to the clarinet in mm. 8–9) but also insofar as it recalls the longer notes of the opening phrases. 9. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, trans. Robert Hullot-­Kentor (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 201. 10.  BACH belongs to the chromatic tetrachord (0,1,2,3), but Carter seems determined to suppress this reference: the piece doesn’t contain a single presentation of this interval collection in the BACH pitch order (1-­0-­3-­2). 11.  “Atonality has happened,” as Cage titled a section of his 1949 essay “Forerunners of Modern Music.” See Silence: Lectures and Writings (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1961), 63). 12.  Adorno moralized and generalized Schoenberg’s notion that musical material (a motive, say) has its own tendency that ought to be followed. See Aesthetic Theory, 38: “The real source of the risk taken by all artworks, however, is not located in their level of contingency but rather in the fact that each one must follow the whippoorwill of objectivity immanent to it, without any guarantee that the productive forces—the spirit of the artist and his procedures—will be equal to that objectivity.” 13.  Parker Tyler, “Music,” View 7:3 (1947), 43; discussed in Suzanne Robinson, “ ‘A Ping, Qualified By a Thud’: Music Criticism in Manhattan and the Case of Cage (1943–58),” Journal of the Society for American Music 1:1 (2007), 79–139; see 119–20. 14.  C.H., “Miss Ajemian Plays New Violin Numbers,” New York Times, October 24, 1947, 19. 15.  We could add that Anahid Ajemian’s assured performance of the violin part (with a male accompanist) served to complicate the piece’s composing subject. 16.  Jonathan Katz, “Cage’s Queer Silence; Or, How to Avoid Making Matters Worse,” GLQ 5:2 (1999), 231–52. 17. Cage, John Cage, Writer: Previously Uncollected Pieces, selected and introduced by Richard Kostelanetz (New York: Limelight, 1993), 34, 44. 18. Cage, John Cage, Writer, 11.

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19.  Kallberg, “The Harmony of the Tea Table,” 104–6. 20.  David Burge, “Four Nocturnes (Night Music II) for Violin and Piano by George Crumb,” Notes, second series 35:3 (1979), 718–19. 21.  Robert Moevs, “George Crumb: Music for a Summer Evening (Makrokosmos III),” Musical Quarterly 62:2 (1976), 293–302. 22.  Larry Lusk, “Music for a Summer Evening (Makrokosmos III) for Two Amplified Pianos and Percussion (Two Players) by George Crumb,” Notes, second series 32:2 (1975), 393–94. 23.  Edward Rothstein, “Music: George Crumb,” New York Times, February 6, 1984, C15. 24.  Pauline Oliveros, “Sonic Meditations,” Source: Music of the Avant-­Garde 5:2 (1971), 103–8; 104. 25.  Stewart, “Out of the Darkness: Nocturnes,” 255–80. 26. On Oliveros’s relation to Native American cultures see Tara Browner, “ ‘They Could Have an Indian Soul’: Crow 2 and the Processes of Cultural Appropriation,” Journal of Musicological Research 19:3 (2000), 243–63. 27.  A copy of this piece is held at Harvard, where Kim had been teaching since the late 60s. 28. Elaine Barkin, “Earl Kim: Earthlight,” Perspectives of New Music 19:1/2 (1980–81), 269–77; quoted phrases at 271, 275, 273. Daniel Albright, Beckett and Aesthetics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 152. 29.  Enoch Brater, The Drama in the Text: Beckett’s Late Fiction (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), 39.

Chapter 5. Forces 1.  Donald Tovey, Essays in Musical Analysis, vol. 3: Concertos (London: Oxford University Press, 1936), 3. 2.  Jeffrey Kallberg, Chopin at the Boundaries: Sex, History, and Musical Genre (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. 1996), 65 (quoting and translating Théophile Gautier). 3.  Susan Stewart, “Out of the Darkness: Nocturnes,” in Poetry and the Fate of the Senses (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), 255–91; quoted phrases at 266, 257. 4.  On femininities and masculinities see, respectively, Kallberg, Chopin at the Boundaries, especially 32–43, and Tia DeNora, “The Concerto and Society,” in Simon Keefe, ed., The Cambridge Companion to the Concerto (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 27–30. 5.  Stewart, “Out of the Darkness,” 276. 6.  Reproduced with commentary in Felix Meyer and Anne Shreffler, eds., Elliott Carter: A Centennial Portrait in Letters and Documents (Suffolk, UK: Boydell, 2008), 189.

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7. Schiff, The Music of Elliott Carter, 2nd ed. (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1998), 234; the first phrase is quoted in Arnold Whittall’s “The Concerto since 1945,” in Cambridge Companion to the Concerto, 164. 8.  Meyer and Shreffler, Elliott Carter, 189. 9.  Meyer and Shreffler, Elliott Carter, 188; they’re speaking here, tellingly, about this work’s “contrast between a sensitive, imaginative soloist and a massive, forcefully aggressive orchestra.” 10.  Or between moments or aspects that strongly reflect the genre and those that don’t. 11. Schiff, The Music of Elliott Carter, 234, again quoted approvingly by Whittall, “The Concerto since 1945,” 164. 12.  “John Cage’s Piano Concerto [sic], which is consistent and meaningful only through its taboo against every notion of coherent musical meaning [musikalischen Sinnzusammenhang], presents us with catastrophic music at its extreme” (“Music and New Music,” in Quasi una Fantasia trans. Rodney Livingstone (London: Verso, 1992), 249–68; quoted phrase at 257 (trans. mod.). (Sinnzusammenhang is a Weberian term that can be translated literally as “hanging-­together of meaning” but which is often rendered as “context” or “complex” or “nexus” of meaning.) Similarly, in “Vers une musique informelle,” also in Quasi una Fanstasia, Adorno says “works in which all [internal] interconnections have been radically eliminated as in Cage’s Piano Concerto, nevertheless create new meanings by virtue of that very rigor” (269–322; quoted phrase at 317). Of course this neglects the (positive or negative) role of genres like the concerto in establishing a “nexus of meaning.” Early on in “Vers une musique informelle” he provides this characterization of his encounter with the piece: “I was also deeply moved by a single hearing of Cage’s Piano Concerto played on Cologne Radio, though I would be hard put to define the effect with any precision. Even at the best times precise definition is anything but straightforward with works of this kind” (270). Later, in Aesthetic Theory, Adorno defines the effect all too clearly, placing it (reductively?) in a class of works that “impose on themselves a law of inexorable aleatoriness and thereby achieve a sort of meaning: the expression of horror.” Aesthetic Theory, trans. Robert Hullot-­Kentor (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 154. 13.  From Cage’s liner notes for the recording of the 25-­Year Retrospective Concert, reproduced in Richard Kostelanetz, ed., John Cage (London: Penguin, 1971), 130–31. 14.  Cage’s note for the Peters catalog, reproduced in Cage, John Cage, Writer: Previously Uncollected Pieces, selected and introduced by Richard Kostelanetz (New York: Limelight, 1993), 57; see also Kostelanetz, John Cage, 130. 15. Kostelanetz, John Cage, 130–31 16.  This reading is supported by Cage’s oft-­quoted claim, in the liner notes: “My intention in this piece was to hold together extreme disparities, much as one finds them held together in the natural world, as, for instance, in a forest or on a city street” Kostelanetz, John Cage, 130–31 (emphasis added). (Cage adds in the following paragraph that he did not intend a “harmonious fusion of sound.”) But of

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course this coexistence depends partly on the players and audience members, and as James Pritchett notes, “the premiere performance was a disaster,” partly because the orchestral performers “disregarded his instructions” and, “in Cage’s words, ‘acted like idiots.’ ” The Music of John Cage (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 211 n. 3). 17.  Quoted phrase translated from Daniel Charles, Gloses sur John Cage (Paris: 10/18, 1978), 134. 18.  Quoted phrases from Pritchett, The Music of John Cage, 123. Pritchett adds that “most of Cage’s compositional attention was paid to the Concert’s Solo for Piano” (113). The Solo for Piano was so visually striking, too, that it gained special notice when displayed concurrently in a gallery show of Cage’s scores; See Dore Ashton, “Cage, Composer, Shows Calligraphy of Note,” New York Times, May 6, 1958, 33. 19. Pritchett stresses the difference between Cage’s strong relationship with Tudor and his unfamiliarity with many of the accompanying musicians (The Music of John Cage, 123). 20.  Cage cites Tudor’s control of dynamics as a main innovative feature of the pianist’s playing in the 1950s (John Cage in conversation with Daniel Charles, For the Birds (Boston: M. Boyars, 1981), 126). 21.  See above, n. 9. It’s worth noting what John Holzaepfel points out: that Tudor made extensive realizations of Cage’s ad hoc notations, carefully rendering them in traditional notation, which he then practiced and read from at the premiere. (“David Tudor and the Solo for Piano,” in David Bernstein and Christopher Hatch, eds., Writing through John Cage’s Music, Poetry and Art (Chicago: University of Chicago Press 2001), 138. 22.  Virgil Thomson, “Cage and the Collage of Noises,” New York Review of Books (April 23, 1970); reprinted with minor changes in Thomson, American Music since 1910 (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1971), 67–81. 23.  Adorno’s “Difficulties” trans. Susan Gillespie, in Richard Leppert, ed., Essays on Music (Berkeley, University of California Press, 2002), 644–80, contends that although the effects of Cage’s pieces may not be as radical as their programs, “his best pieces, like the piano Concerto, still emit an extraordinary shock that stubbornly resists all neutralization” (658). 24.  Though in the Cologne premiere too, which again featured Tudor as soloist, the orchestral musicians upset Cage with their inappropriate behavior. 25.  Hans Werner Henze calls the soloist in his second violin concerto a sort of Baron Münchausen (liner notes to Decca Head 5, 1974). Thea Musgrave determined that the violist in her second chamber concerto “should impersonate Rollo, a character invented by Ives and representing the typical Victorian conservative” (“A New Viola Concerto” Musical Times 114 (1973) 790–91). Carter has suggested that the way the soloist concludes the Piano Concerto “—not triumphantly, but with a few, weak, sad notes—[is] sort of Charlie Chaplin humorous” (Kurt Stone, “Treat Worth the Travail,” Time 89:2 (January 13, 1967), 44; quoted in Schiff, The Music of Elliott Carter, 258). Listeners, too, project characters onto solo instruments, of 308  •   No t e s t o C h a p t e r 5

course, sometimes quite generously, as when Arnold Whittall says that in Harrison Birtwistle’s Melencolia I “the solo clarinet is Don Quixote to the harp’s Sancho Panza (or Orpheus to its Eurydice)” (Music & Letters 59:1 (1978) 110). 26.  The liner notes to a recording of John Harbison’s piano concerto say the work “was completed in 1978 (although the full score was not completed until two years later)” (CRI CR 875, 2001). Composers like Harbison, who were linked to modernism before and despite a turn from twelve-­tone composition to neo-­ romanticism, might be embarrassed to admit they’d “completed” a symphony and later gotten it up for orchestra—modernist compositional orthodoxy asserted the inseparability of musical ideas from their specific instrumentation and orchestration—but apparently had no problem writing concerted pieces this way. On Harbison’s development, see Howard Pollack, Harvard Composers: Walter Piston and His Students from Elliott Carter to Frederic Rzewski (Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow, 1992), especially 403–12. 27.  I’m using “this-­that-­this-­that” as a (deliberately crude) shorthand for both textural contrast between soloist(s) and orchestra and formal contrast between ritornello and episode, and “here-­there-­here-­there” to denote spatial play. 28.  This consideration lies behind Carter’s decision that the “Piano Concerto, partly to save rehearsal time, relegate[s] much of the difficult playing to a concertino of soloists” (“The Orchestral Composer’s Point of View,” in Carter ed. Else Stone and Kurt Stone, The Writings of Elliott Carter: An American Composer Looks at Modern Music, 291). 29.  Whittall’s “The Concerto since 1945” notes several of these factors (Cambridge Companion to the Concerto, especially 161–67), as does Paul Griffiths’s Grove entry on the concerto in the twentieth century (“Concerto,” Grove Music Online). 30.  This is more or less every concerted piece I could find a score or recording for; I gained access to another hundred or so as this research progressed. (A lot of this research has involved me listening to pieces so you don’t have to.) I haven’t included works labeled “concerto for orchestra” or “chamber concerto” unless they advertise the presence of a particular solo instrument or solo group. 31.  By “works with an American connection” I mean not only pieces written by composers from the Americas but also works written, premiered (or performed in high-­profile settings), recorded, published, written about, taught, or borrowed from in the Americas, and other works that make overt use of American materials (like Sofya Gubaidulina’s pieces for jazz group and orchestra, Maki Ishii’s Afro-­Concerto for percussion and orchestra, etc.); this is a repertoire of about seven hundred pieces, with a core of three hundred that possess several of these connections and were completed between 1968 and 1984. 32.  This is a conversation that Joseph Kerman’s Concerto Conversations (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999) doesn’t quite make space for. 33.  Sometimes composers’ self-­understandings are granted too much authority, especially in the shadow of the autonomous-­work ideal. And histories of institutions, styles, “isms,” cultural themes or intellectual developments don’t usually involve siftings through large volumes of the ordinary stuff scores are filled with. No t e s t o C h a p t e r 5   •   309

34.  As earlier chapters have noted, the ineradicable “thereness” of conventions must contend with the contingencies of their reception and acknowledgment. 35.  There’s also the specifically modernist metaconvention of denying the importance of the solo entry, of refusing to make it an issue. We’ll note similar modernist refusals of virtuosity, which (nevertheless) remains one of the concerto’s central metaconventions. 36.  One example of the latter, discussed below: the modernist metaconvention of questioning the traditional triumphant ending congeals into a conventional quiet close. 37.  We could say it’s common as opposed to rare, and part of the commons rather than anyone’s specific property. In what follows I’ll make clear that assertions of sonic materiality bring out the former sense at the expense of the latter—sonic materiality gets thrown into the foreground all the time, but each such assertion depends upon its singularity—and that late-­modern uses of scales in concertos emphasize the latter sense without actually occurring as often as the other conventions I point to. 38.  Measures 605–24 (mvt 2, 9:18–10:07). See Schiff, Music of Elliott Carter, 120–22; Kerman Concerto Conversations, 120; Meyer and Shreffler, Elliott Carter, 191; Max Noubel, Elliott Carter ou le temps fertile (Geneva: Contrechamps, 2000), 122; also Carter, Writings, 356. 39.  The piece ends differently than this implies, however: a bit later than expected, and with the unaccompanied soloist’s “Charlie Chaplin humorous” ending (Carter’s phrase, quoted above, n. 25; a characterization I confess I fail to hear). 40.  The rhythmic complexity here is actually below average for this concerto’s solo part. 41.  Between these he composed the Concerto for Orchestra (1969); after the oboe concerto there were nine concerted works, including seven solo concertos. 42.  That is, B 3; henceforth I’ll return to the convention of labeling pitches based on middle C as C4. 43.  Noubel mentions this consistent rhythmic spacing (Elliott Carter, 224). 44.  It appears only twice before, in m. 13, near the end of the soloist’s third phrase, and in m. 149, [6:50]; it occurs again in mm. 311 and 345, and finally as the oboe’s penultimate note, again following the high A (mm. 431–32). All these instances are easy to hear. (Less so are two uses in passing: mm. 207 and 291.) I should add that there’s no other notable instance of repeated notes in the solo part: the closest thing is the short, strongly rhythmized E-­flats in mm. 341 and 344. 45.  Michael Steinberg is right to tell lay audiences that “the B is not a sound you will hear often, and once you have heard it, especially as it is so baldly presented in Carter’s concerto, you will not forget it” (The Concerto: A Listener’s Guide (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), 161 and n. 6). The oboe’s low B will receive further attention below, in connection with the use of a solo instrument’s registral extremes. 46.  The way I’m putting this may create unclarity about where minimalism stands, but because there were no minimalist concerted pieces—or anyway none

b

b

b

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during the long 70s—I will not pursue the matter. (The earliest exception is Philip Glass’s resolutely post-­minimalist violin concerto of 1987.) 47.  Stephen Banfield’s 1979 review notes the (potential) irony of assigning this piano part to the Australian virtuoso Roger Woodward, the piece’s dedicatee, which might make the piece seem like an “anti-­concerto” (Music & Letters 60:4 (1979), 499). For Paul Griffiths, the piano part’s “concentration on minimal effects” renders it—yes—an “anticoncerto” (“Shimmering Orchestral Tapestries,” New York Times, January 31, 1999, section 2, 27). (Both reviews come around to suggest something subtler, however.) This sort of opening occurs in several other pieces of the 70s and 80s, however, like Betsy Jolas’s Stances for piano and orchestra. Precedents include Bartok’s first piano concerto, at the beginning and throughout, though the repeated-­note motive quickly gives way to strongly profiled melodic material, the repeated chord in Stravinsky’s concerto for piano and winds (third movement; mentioned in Kerman’s Concerto Conversations, 31), and the (rewritten) opening of Bruno Maderna’s concerto for two pianos. 48.  Paraphrased from Hubert Howe’s discussion of Feldman’s Cello and Orchestra as “the one outstanding exception” to a trend toward “works [with passages] where the players were flailing away furiously, doing nothing in particular.” “Sometimes,” he adds, “the activity seemed pointless” (“The 1974 ISCM World Music Days,” Perspectives of New Music 13:1 [1974], 228). 49.  This is an edgier form of what open strings accomplish in this period: see below. 50.  Samuel Adler’s textbook The Study of Orchestration (New York: Norton, 1982) begins its discussion of the concerto with the not entirely implausible suggestion that this is the reason for the piano’s popularity as a solo instrument in concerted works (496). Kerman too calls this difference a major factor in the genre’s development (Concerto Conversations, 84). But this dynamic is complicated in Piano and Orchestra by the presence of the orchestral piano, as Griffiths’s review notes (“Shimmering Orchestral Tapestries,” 27). Luciano Berio’s 1973 concerto for two pianos similarly includes a third (orchestral) piano. 51.  Feldman and other composers actively seek, with the aid of repeated notes, to move beyond traditional uses and understandings of motives. One hears this in 1970s concerted pieces like Iannis Xenakis’s Erikhthon and Krzysztof Penderecki’s Partita for harpsichord and orchestra. A reoriented sense of what can count as a motive is one entailment of what the score calls the soloist’s “indifferent” repetition of the D3 that begins Witold Lutosławski’s seminal cello concerto of 1970; this piece too employs repeated notes throughout the solo part, notably at the beginning and conclusion, in a way that can keep these dark thoughts in the listener’s mind. All these works allow the soloist’s repeated notes to play major structural roles. A more radical strain in Feldman’s thinking suggests he wants to take away the figures so we have to focus on the ground: in a 1969 article that has drawn attention, he wrote that his pieces were “really not ‘compositions’ at all,” but “time canvases in which I more or less prime the canvas with an overall hue of the music.” See Morton Feldman Says: Selected Interviews and Lectures (London: Hyphen, 2006), 88. On this No t e s t o C h a p t e r 5   •   311

topic more broadly (though with different emphases) see Jonathan Bernard, “Feldman’s Painters,” in Stephen Johnson, ed., The New York Schools of Music and Visual Arts (New York: Routledge, 2002), 182–89. 52.  Flute and Orchestra shows how they can work in middles (see especially mm. 40–59 and 518–71); Cello and Orchestra employs them to create closure (mm. 284–324). 53.  Written in memory of Duke Ellington, the second movement of George Walker’s piano concerto uses repeated C7s, echoing Ellingtonian repeated C4s in muted trumpets, under a gradual diminuendo and decelerando, as a bridge to its cadenza (figures 32–33): this creates the (not quite borne out) impression that the cadenza will be more elegiac than virtuosic. In Morton Subotnick’s Parallel Lines for piccolo, “ghost electronics” and ensemble, the cadenza’s repeated notes “change” as the result of both extended techniques and live signal-­processing. (The solo part as a whole contains much difficult passagework, but it’s often backgrounded, and it’s largely kept out of the cadenza.) Britten’s 1963 Cello Symphony shrewdly deploys flamenco-­g uitar-­like repeated notes on double-­stopped unisons, successively using the open G, D and A strings, to (1) connect with the timpani tremolo G that leads in to the cadenza, (2) create “internal dialogue” between contrasting figures, and (3) establish the harmonic context of the final movement, which it immediately precedes (figures 61–62). Similarly in Joan Tower’s Black Topaz for piano and six instruments, a repeated E1 creates a clever way for the cadenza to both pull back from virtuosic display and push its already established internal dialogue toward greater contrast (m. 241). These even-­duration repeated notes also provide a rough-­ and-­ready means for transition into the work’s final section: the first instrument to reenter after the cadenza is a tom-­tom matching the piano’s measured eighth notes, and this eighth-­note rhythm (and other notes, chords, and short figures in even durations) maintain a quasi-­motivic presence through the end of the piece. 54. Feldman’s Violin and Orchestra, the monster of the cycle at about fifty minutes, contains stretches of this sort. See pp. 20, 25, and the first system of p. 75; pp. 71–72 and the second system of p. 75 vary the rhythm a bit but create a similar effect. 55. And it has encouraged composers to think rhetorically. John Harbison’s program note says his violin concerto “involves a transformation of a sinister fanfare into a folk-­fiddling riff”; both ends of this transformation emphasize repeated notes, as does the related material in between. 56.  This is an old topos, of course, but strings of repeated notes can reinvigorate it: Alberto Ginastera’s first cello concerto (opening of second movement) and Lutosławski’s double concerto (third movement, especially figure 59) are good examples. Traditional (Beethovenian) scherzo effects can be heard in the “mechanical” repeated notes in Penderecki’s violin concerto (mm. 305–8, 323–26). As a trope on this mechanical topic, Corigliano’s clarinet concerto begins a motor-­rhythmic twelve-­tone theme the score marks “computer-­like” with a string of five repeated notes (third movement, figure 1, p. 73; mentioned in program note).

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57.  The repeated notes are a sign of intensity when they appear at the end of the soloist’s long (and long-­delayed) first phrase in Thea Musgrave’s viola concerto (figure 9). Once the newly composed accompaniment starts to emerge around it, the oboe part in Berio’s Chemins IV (which derives from the composer’s oboe Sequenza) seems a bit obsessive; so too a passage in Harbison’s viola concerto (second movement, mm. 33–45). 58.  We hear this in William Kraft’s piano concerto (especially p. 49, first system), and in the slow middle movement of Harbison’s violin concerto (thus between the fanfare and the fiddling; see above, n. 55). This effect is quite pronounced in George Rochberg’s oboe concerto, because it’s partly unaccompanied and played molto ritard (mm. 144–48). Kraft’s piano concerto uses repeated notes in both “mechanical” and “expressive” ways. Likewise Corigliano’s clarinet concerto (mentioned above, n. 56): the soloist also plays repeated notes in accelerating-­decelerating figures, in accordance with that typically “expressive” use of this convention. 59.  The first movement of Britten’s Cello Symphony presents (and varies) such a repeated-­note motive (figures 6–7). 60.  Near the end of this piece the soloist is joined in antiphonal play by four orchestral horns disposed around edges of the hall (with optional doublings of three, in the balcony, to make seven). Thrice the soloist plays a repeated D4 that’s “echoed” individually by each of the four, the first time literally, with the D4, the other times with their own repeated notes, forming together a five-­note chromatic cluster (figures 69, 72, 74). The first two times, the soloist is asked to turn left, right, forward, and back, directing each note toward one of the orchestral horns. In addition to the echo effects and spatial play these episodes create, they also make good on a repeated-­note “distant-­fanfare” figure: see especially figure 53, mm. 3–4. Olly Wilson’s Akwan, a concerto for piano doubling on Fender Rhodes, contains similar effects of repeated notes as a delicate decaying echo; here this relates to both the piece’s other, more forceful presentations of repeated notes and, as a trope on electronic sound-­processing, its use of the electric piano and amplified strings. Sometimes the repeated notes can be literally echoed through electronic sound-­processing, as in Sidney Hodkinson’s The Edge of the Olde One, m. 397ff. Note also the “sinister fanfare” in Harbison’s violin concerto, first movement (see above, n. 55). 61.  As in Ligeti’s 1974 Double Concerto for flute and oboe, which assigns repeated notes or oscillating figures to the soloist only when they’re being incorporated into the larger mass; see also his cello concerto, second movement, mm. 64–66. Joseph Schwantner’s Canticle of the Evening Bells, for flute and ensemble, treats the soloist’s repeated notes similarly until a culminating subtract-­a-­note passage near the end. Or, as in the first movement of Harbison’s violin concerto, the even-­duration repeated notes (the composer’s “sinister fanfare”) can bubble up from the orchestral accompaniment and finally become the dominant element in the solo part: in the third movement the motor-­rhythmic repeated notes become what the composer calls the “folk-­fiddling riff” (see above, n. 55). The end of Robert Erickson’s Night Music has the trumpet soloist return to softly playing notes of the

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prevailing F-­C drone, allowing it to slip back into the large ensemble whence it first emerged. 62.  See the Violin and Orchestra passages cited above, n. 54. A borderline case might be the second movement of Glass’s violin concerto, particularly its latter half; but despite its use of repeated notes for the soloist this movement’s pleasure-­creating strategy has more to do with traditional flows of melody and harmony. On pleasure and repetition see Robert Fink, Repeating Ourselves: American Minimal Music as Cultural Practice (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005), especially 31–61. Richard Middleton has treated this issue in many publications, beginning with “ ‘Play It Again, Sam’: Some Notes on the Productivity of Repetition in Popular Music,” Popular Music 3 (1983), 235–70. 63.  A puzzling episode in Schwantner’s 1983 Distant Runes and Incantations uses motor-­rhythmic repeated notes in the solo piano, the marimba, and the strings to launch into an apparent pastiche of Steve Reich, à la Music for Eighteen Musicians (mm. 201–50). 64.  Hear Ginastera, second movement. 65.  Needless to say, Carter’s repeated notes aren’t treated as a convention. 66. This might include truly interesting pieces, like Lutosławski’s cello concerto and Berio’s Points on the Curve to Find, as well as works like Erb’s trombone concerto. 67.  As in Carson Kievman’s Concerto for Bassoon and Percussion Ensemble (Fire Alarm System), pp. 2–3. Liszt famously practiced fast repeated notes. 68.  In response to this piece Stuart Dempster, whom it was composed for, wrote a primer on circular breathing. See John Suess, “The Solo Concerti of Donald Erb,” in Anne Trenkamp and Suess, eds., Studies in the Schoenbergian Movement in Vienna and the United States: Essays in Honor of Marcel Dick (Lewiston, NY: Mellen, 1990), 132. 69.  Note also the left-­hand pizzicato on the open C (0:23). 70. Tovey, Concertos, 221. 71. The “Spectral School” embraced this foundation explicitly, going much beyond the often less-­than-­intended grounding in basic acoustical properties I’m signaling here; this approach can be heard in concerted spectral works like Gerard Grisey’s Jour, contre-­jour and Tristan Murail’s Mémoire/Erosion. 72.  It’s not to the work’s credit, however, that this gesture later becomes a conventional rhythmic/melodic motive, perhaps in deference to the prestigious commissioning group. 73.  Exposed open strings have been assigned to the soloist at the beginnings of concerted works as a way of blurring the boundary between the piece and what precedes it: clear instances include the slow strum across the open strings in Gyorgy Kurtag’s Grabstein für Stephan for guitar and ensemble; and the soloist’s similarly relaxed rising arpeggio, in left-­hand pizzicato, that opens Henze’s Compases para preguntas ensimismadas for viola and ensemble. Players typically make such gestures right before they begin to play, as a final check that their instrument is in tune.

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(Thus they’re another example of the poetics of starting out, along with repeated notes and scales.) 74.  This is partly because scordatura tunings of solo stringed instruments are exceedingly rare in the twentieth century: Aldo Clementi’s 1977 concerto for violin, small orchestra and carillon, Schnittke’s Monologue for viola and strings, and little else. Louis Andriessen’s string orchestra piece Symphony for Open Strings exploits scordatura tunings in a properly symphonic (as opposed to concerted) mode. 75.  All this may make them stand out more than the composer wants them to, as in Charles Wuorinen’s concerto for amplified violin, mm. 407–20; this cadenza-­like moment takes advantage of open strings to enable some difficult passagework, but the open strings become its most prominent feature. The practice of avoiding open strings goes back to the mid-­eighteenth century, especially on violin, but becomes standard practice only with the twentieth-­century rise of constant vibrato (which makes vibrato-­free open strings jut out even more). For an eighteenth-­century objection to the sound of open strings see Leopold Mozart, A Treatise on the Fundamental Principles of Violin Playing trans. Editha Knocker (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985), 158; my thanks to Herbert Myers for this reference. On twentieth-­ century vibrato, see Mark Katz, Capturing Sound: How Technology Has Changed Music (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004), 86–92. Violists have always been less strict about this avoidance, partly because the louder sound of open strings is often a desired effect. 76.  Borderline cases include works that refer to the open-­string-­friendly keys of canonical concertos for strings, like the D-­centricity of Rochberg’s violin concerto, which echoes Brahms’s; but the sounds of open strings (1) don’t do a great deal of work in the Rochberg and (2) are not what he’s referencing in the Brahms. ­Wuorinen’s violin concerto borrows Stravinsky’s open-­string-­dependent idea of beginning each movement of the 1931 violin concerto with iterations of the same unusual chord, but without using open strings. 77.  And in the concerto this doesn’t merely include Western instruments, as the shamisen in Takemitsu’s 1967 November Steps makes clear: the New York audience for the work’s premiere may not have known this instrument’s codes but would still have recognized the sound of open strings. 78.  Like the oboe’s B 3, pedal tones tend to jut out in concerted works. In ­Erickson’s Night Music (mentioned above, n. 61) the trumpet soloist’s first entrance is a pedal F2 that conforms to the ensemble’s F-­C drone but stands out timbrally, partly because (on the CRI recording, anyway) its unsteady pitch suggests it’s hard to play. Difficult or not, this solo entrance uses a pedal-­tone to stage a “beginning”: the instrument’s emergence from a primal source. 79.  Recall the juxtaposition of B 3 and A6 in Carter’s oboe concerto; Corig­ liano’s 1975 oboe concerto does the same thing (first movement, mm. 178–89). A cadenza in Ursula Mamlok’s oboe concerto juxtaposes the B 3 to a biting multiphonic (third movement, mm. 129, 132). These three pieces are among a small handful that exploit the B 3.

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80.  On mistakes and the poetics of trying, at the jazz/classical border, see ­ obert Walser, “Out of Notes: Signification, Interpretation and the Problem of R Miles Davis,” Musical Quarterly 77:2 (1993), 343–65. 81.  Joseph Hunt, “Blacks and the Classics: Conversation with T. J. Anderson,” Black Perspective in Music 1:2 (1973), 163. Anderson goes on to mention timbral variety, vibrato, and the “availability of free forms” (163–64). Ornette Coleman said he taught himself trumpet in order to demonstrate to the classical trumpeters he was working with that the high passages he’d written were playable: see John Litweiler, Ornette Coleman: The Harmolodic Life (London: Quartet 1992), 144. High trumpet writing is a notable feature of Coleman’s Skies of America, discussed below. 82.  Kim, mm. 88–135; the scales appear 113–28. 83. Feldman, Give My Regards to Eighth Street: Collected Writings of Morton Feldman (Cambridge, MA: Exact Change, 2000), 152. 84.  Hearing Perlman play scales in thirds, octaves and tenths recalls his recording of the Paganini Caprices (including its sometimes iffy intonation). But the virtuoso economy extends to the major-­label release of this work (on EMI) in a performance by Perlman with the Boston Symphony Orchestra under its principal conductor, Seiji Ozawa. 85.  Scales appear prominently twice again in the solo part, including in the cadenza. The scales here are worth comparing to the equally genre-­inflected uses of ordinary materials in Kim’s nocturnal Earthlight, as discussed in chapter 4. 86.  Among pieces that also employ the other sorts of ordinary material discussed thus far, Harbison’s violin concerto (with its many diatonic scales), and Murray Schafer’s flute concerto are worth mentioning. In the vein of the traditionally virtuosic concerto for superstar soloist, Rochberg’s violin concerto stands out: written for Isaac Stern, this work plays like someone was getting paid by the scale step (though you’d have made out OK if you’d had a piece of the action on arpeggios or any other sort of traditional passagework). 87.  Coda 9:1 (1969), 27. 88.  Drawing explicitly on Taylor’s customary mode, Michael Finnissy’s third piano concerto has “the piano, rather than being accompanied as in a concerto, present[ing] materials to be ‘discussed by the ensemble’ (Finnissy).” See Michael Rebhahn trans. J. Bradford Robinson, liner notes to Composers–Conductors: Composers Conducting Their Own Works [Darmstadt Aural Documents Box 1] (Neos 11060, 2010), 40; original German 22. I owe Mark Applebaum the point about Taylor’s likely inaudibility. 89.  Ron Welburn, “The Black Aesthetic Imperative,” in Addison Gayle, ed., The Black Aesthetic (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1971), 142. 90. Whittall suggests, reviewing some of Berio’s concerted works, that this “dialogue of an instrument with itself . . . is a more refined, suitably modern view of the concerto principle.” Music & Letters 65:1 (1984), 125. 91.  This moment’s status as a high plateau justifies the return of this material at the conclusion of part 1. 316  •   No t e s t o C h a p t e r 5

92.  Musgrave’s horn concerto presents quarter-­tone scales in the solo part in a way that puns on—and in practical terms relies on—the instrument’s upper partials. See figures 75, 79, 89. 93.  Diatonic scales especially have been used to neutralize chromatic motives in a move toward closure: this happens in George Perle’s Serenade for viola, for example, when a descending diatonic scale creates a “domestication” of the main motive (first movement (“Rondo”), mm. 133–34). 94.  A common gambit for aggregate-­completion in twelve-­tone music can be observed in Wuorinen’s concerto for amplified violin (mm. 578–81) and Feldman’s Violin and Orchestra (p. 71, top system): you make an ad hoc ascending scale using as many small steps as the piece’s series “allows,” leaving out the two or three pitch-­ classes you “can’t” include, and then you pick up the loose change at the end. Thus Feldman’s violin plays G-­A -­B -­B-­C-­D-­E -­E-­F and then A-­C -­F. Wuorinen’s piece is earnestly twelve-­tone while Violin and Orchestra just points toward twelve-­tone techniques (in homage to Webern; Feldman considered calling the piece Why Webern?). 95.  Especially the 1970s concertos premiered by Isaac Stern, who (much more than Perlman) was so ubiquitous as a performer of new neo-­tonal concertos that the composer Eli Siegmeister joked in print about Stern’s role in the stylistic shift to new romanticism: “(Is Stern somehow at the bottom of all this?)” See “Three Points of View,” Musical Quarterly 65:2 (1979), 284. There’s a real question how these encounters between academic composers and big-­name performers affected the products of their collaboration. There are certainly cases of interference after the fact: Rochberg sliced fourteen minutes out of his violin concerto at Stern’s insistence (and later restored them, though the results rather vindicate Stern); James Galway simply didn’t play the quarter-­tones specified in Henri Lazarof’s flute concerto, perhaps because he worried listeners would figure he was playing out of tune. But more interesting are the subtler ways that pieces are shaped to the prominent performers and institutions that commission and perform them, as with Druckman’s viola concerto. This includes ideas about instrumental sound (star performers vs. new-­music specialists) and a crucial social dimension: wanting to keep the stars happy vs. assuming the new-­music players enjoy punishment. 96.  His drone-­based Night Music, mentioned above, avoids diatonic scales altogether. 97.  Ogerman’s preface to the published version of the piece (for solo piano) reassures us that Symbiosis contains some twelve-­tone techniques (though only for local color): we can’t entertain the thought that it’s diatonic because the composer doesn’t know any better. William Bolcom’s piano concerto might be a similar case. It begins with slow, unaccompanied major scales in tenths, in even quarter-­notes, all white-­note, but then starts to plainly “deform” them: in m. 9 the piano adds A and B , then the orchestra enters, also with A and B (m. 10). 98.  Beyond the first orchestral tutti: Evans begins an episode with a highly chromatic version of material from the opening, starting 2:06; the opening section also becomes a basis for Evans’s improvisation with the rhythm section.

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99.  For Evans, Symbiosis and his 1972 collaboration with George Russell on Living Time—another album-­length concerted work—constituted a “return” to modal jazz, even though these pieces placed Evans in unfamiliar stylistic, generic, and formal contexts. Russell’s liner note to the Columbia recording (KC 31490) says this explicitly. 100.  This paraphrases Iris Murdoch’s remark about red as a concrete universal (“The Idea of Perfection,” in The Sovereignty of Good (New York: Schocken, 1971), 1–45; 29). 101.  We noted this is true of open strings as well. 102. The histories of practicing them too has had an impact on concerted pieces. 103.  But “what there is” changes. Kerman suggests the scales in Beethoven’s third piano concerto counted as a novel effect because they rise to high notes that had just recently been added to the instrument’s gamut (Concerto Conversations, 14–16). 104.  Thus when Whittall says of Michael Tippett’s scale-­friendly Triple Concerto that “not all of the material is particularly memorable,” one hardly wants to leap to the work’s defense, but one could stand an acknowledgment that Tippett is operating in accord with the concerto’s practices (“The Concerto since 1945,” 166). 105.  This question arises in addition to what Stravinsky’s and Hindemith’s concerted pieces were already asking in the 1920s and ’30s: what are you buying into, when you use diatonic scales—tonality, diatonicism, neoclassicism, the popular or ordinary, a program for useful music? If you’re looking back, how are you looking back, toward what? What are you adding to the history of this material? 106.  “The Black-­American Composer and the Orchestra,” Black Perspective in Music 14:1 (1986), 33. 107.  See for example Pollack, Harvard Composers, 108, on Carter; also Schiff, 209; Connoisseur 216: 893–98 (1986), 89: “ ‘All of the rhythms in my music are derived from jazz,’ he remarks, ‘particularly people like Fats Waller.’ ”). See liner note to Druckman/Colgrass New World NW 318; Druckman’s Boosey & Hawkes bio. James Boros, “A Conversation with Donald Martino,” Perspectives of New Music 29:2 (1991), 217. Rorem, Setting the Score on Basie (21), Holiday (passim) et al. At the creepy extreme, Harbison notes in the preface to his viola concerto that though he made lots of money playing jazz piano in his youth, his true love was the viola. The first Black recipient of the Pulitzer Prize for music was George Walker (1996), who too was careful to put jazz in its place, though of course for different reasons. 108.  Boros, “A Conversation with Donald Martino,” Perspectives of New Music 29:2 (1991), 217. The piece, however, is more complicated: some of its most compelling passages reflect the melodic language of bebop, as when the three soloists suddenly play a unison line in mm. 483–86. 109.  Liner note to Decca Headline HEAD 8, 1975, written around the time of Musgrave’s move to the United States; the piece was composed in 1971 for the Dartmouth Congregation of the Arts. Wilson, “The Black-­American Composer and the Orchestra,” 33.

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110.  Wilson, “The Black-­American Composer and the Orchestra,” 33; “The Significance of the Relation between Afro-­American Music and West African Music,” Black Perspective in Music 2:1 (1974), 16. 111.  For Baker’s comments along these lines see his article “The Battle for Legitimacy: ‘Jazz’ Versus Academia,” Black World 23:1 (November 1973), 27; for Braxton’s see Composition Notes C (Oakland, CA: Frog Peak, 1988). 112.  Hale Smith said in an interview that his “use of the bass clarinet and the flute are directly influenced by my exposure to Eric Dolphy. We were very close, and he showed me certain things about these instruments that he had discovered.” But then Smith added that he “incorporated these in my piece [Contours, for orchestra], in passages that by no stretch of the imagination could be considered jazz” (Black Perspective in Music 3:1 [1975], 69). 113.  Even Cage, who, as George Lewis notes, failed to do justice to the effects of jazz on avant-­garde Western art music, acknowledges in a disturbing passage of “Composition as Process” (1958) that the “orchestral timbres” of the Concert for Piano and Orchestra “invite the timbres of jazz, which more than serious music has explored the possibilities of instruments” (Silence: Lectures and Writings [Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1961], 31). This connects with Cage’s intention to employ “as many various uses of the instruments as could be discovered.” (Kostelanetz, ed., John Cage: Writer, 57). But Cage suggests this surprised him, since jazz was one of three “kinds of sound” that had been “distasteful” to him (Silence, 30). On Cage, jazz, and the avant-­garde(s) see Lewis “Improvised Music after 1950: Afrological and Eurological Perspectives,” Black Music Research Journal 22 (2002), especially 221–33 and 242–43, and A Power Stronger Than Itself: The AACM and American Experimental Music (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008), 379–82. 114.  On Cage’s “sounds as themselves,” and the “distancing of personal narrative” this notion entails, see Lewis, “Improvised Music after 1950,” 241–43. 115.  Like Druckman’s viola concerto this was in the Philharmonic’s series of concertos for its principal players. 116.  Liner notes to the first recording of Déjà Vu provide one example: see New World NW 318, 1983. 117.  “Improvised Music after 1950,” 241. Lewis characterizes “sound,” in this sense, as the Afrological equivalent to the “Eurological concept of compositional ‘style.’ ” 118.  Paul Chihara’s Grass, for two contrabasses and orchestra, presents a similar contrast, but in a manner that shows greater respect for and knowledge of past and present jazz. 119.  Quotations from Composition Notes C, 398, 414. Braxton didn’t share these writings with the performers, Lewis explained in conversation, but his Notes do tend to underscore features audible in the first performances. 120.  Mentioned in Marion Schrock, “Aspects of Compositional Style in Four Works by Olly Wilson,” Black Music Research Journal 9:1 (1989), 99, which also notes the connection between the trombones’ pattern and the textures discussed

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in Wilson’s “The Significance of the Relation between Afro-­American Music and West African Music.” 121. “The Significance of the Relation between Afro-­American Music and West African Music,” 16, 15. See also “The Heterogenous Sound Ideal in African-­ American Music,” in Josephine Wright and Samuel Floyd, eds., New Perspectives on Music: Essays in Honor of Eileen Southern (Warren, MI: Harmonie Park, 1992), especially 328–29; this ideal is the pursuit of “dramatically contrasting” timbres both among instruments and/or voices in a texture and within an individual line (329). 122.  Welburn, “Dance and the New Black Music” Black Review 2 (1972), 61, 62. Welburn’s dismissal of the electric piano relies partly on a false claim that “today’s electric pianists were never comfortable in the free-­styled context.” See Lewis, Power Stronger Than Itself, 148–49, on Welburn’s failure to understand electronic and amplified sound (as revealed in his “The Black Aesthetic Imperative,” cited above, n. 89). 123.  Wilson’s writing for the Rhodes shows great understanding of the instrument’s muddy-­to-­metallic capacities, especially in passages where it produces both a murky background and foreground elements that jut out: see especially mm. 252–81. 124.  “The Black-­American Composer,” Black Perspective in Music 1:1 (1973), 36; earlier in this paper Wilson states that “the source of the black composer’s music lies deeply embedded in the collective consciousness of his [sic] people” (34), no matter “the many [“non-­black”] influences that bear upon” him (35). Here I may be departing from Lewis’s argument, which connects white-­avant-­garde assertions of impersonality with the Eurological notion of an “autonomous significant structure” (“Improvised Music after 1950,” 242–43). In some cases I see (unacknowledged) borrowings from African American critiques of the autonomous subject. 125. Litweiler, Ornette Coleman, 145. 126.  For clarity, and to make a point, I’ll be using Coleman’s first name (as jazz fans typically do) only when referring to him as a performer on this work. 127.  Besides looking at the written score, which fails to correspond fully with the recorded version, we can go backwards to the four earlier Coleman heads that reappear as themes in Skies, to the history of its composition and (partly self-­)funding, and forward to later reuses of some themes, the 1983 performance conducted by John Giordano with Coleman’s electric Prime Time group (documented in Shirley Clarke’s 1985 film Ornette: Made in America), Giordano’s subsequent paint-­by-­ numbers reorchestration, and the 2000 rerelease of the 1972 recording. 128.  Litweiler, liner note to rerelease of Skies of America (Columbia [CK] 63568, 2000). 129.  This was a protectionist move that says in effect “If you want jazz musicians we have them here; you don’t need to import any”; but Coleman’s quartet-­ members at the time—longtime sidemen Charlie Haden and Ed Blackwell plus tenor saxophonist Dewey Redman—were not exactly off the rack. Litweiler notes that for UK visits in 1965 and 1968 Coleman had to schedule performances of his notated works in order to gain entry as a classical composer, his right to work as a jazz musician not having been granted (Litweiler, Ornette Coleman, 144). 320  •   No t e s t o C h a p t e r 5

130.  See first half, figures R and S. Aside from very high horn and trumpet writing that marks the piece as a whole, however, these sections don’t contain anything especially hard in the individual parts. Nor does the coordination of these parts present special problems. Litweiler claims these sections were cut because of worries about the whether the work would fit on a single LP, but their combined length plus the forty-­one minutes on the record would’ve allowed plenty of wiggle room. One wonders whether these sections were left out partly for aesthetic reasons: nothing on the record contains anything approaching their contrapuntal intensity, which could be not unfairly described as twenty simultaneous Coleman solos. 131.  See Litweiler, Ornette Coleman, 145. Litweiler says the names were added only after Columbia decided to chop up the piece, but they’re present in the score. (The titles on the record don’t always correspond to the points at which they appear in the score; the CD rerelease makes no attempt to square these discrepancies.) 132.  Heckman, “Coleman’s ‘Skies of America’ in Debut,” New York Times, July 5, 1972, 31. 133.  Nowhere does the original recording credit Coleman as performer. 134.  Heckman’s review of the record actually calls it “a work for string orchestra and alto saxophone” (“Newport Jazz—Hanging on to the Memory,” New York Times, July 9, 1972, D18) Akwan also appeared on Columbia, as part of the Black Composers Series, but Columbia did not actually produce these recordings. 135.  In 1972 engineer Anthony Clark also worked on Babe Ruth’s First Base, a record known for its drum sounds, particularly on the much-­sampled “The Mexican.” 136. And unlike his unaccompanied trumpet interludes on the 1967 RCA recording of his wind quintet Forms and Sounds, Coleman’s playing on Skies of America is (1) mostly accompanied and (2) on his main instrument. 137.  Heckman, “Newport Jazz—Hanging on to the Memory.” 138.  Biographia Literaria, ed. James Engell and W. Jackson Bate (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1983), vol. 2, 142. 139.  The set drummer (like all the orchestral players) is unnamed and is not thought to be anyone Coleman had worked with in a jazz context. The part’s rhythms are notated but the player takes liberties. 140.  More precisely this section is labeled “Love Life” on the record (and the CD rerelease): this name applies to a different place in the written score. It’s unclear where the mistake lies and indeed whether these section titles really belong to the piece anyway. Columbia elected to release this section as a single, believe it or not. 141. David Baker’s “ ‘Jazz’ Versus Academia” (Black World 23:1 (November, 1973), 20–27; see 23–25) treats this as very much a live issue, however; Baker defends Coleman’s approach without denying his departures from conventional Western intonation. 142. See Musician 100 (1987), 34. 143. Litweiler, Ornette Coleman, 157. 144.  When Coleman’s liner note asserts that Skies of America is “based on a theory book called The Harmolodic Theory,” we can see that the very systematicity of harmolodics, too, conveys authority (even though this book was never published). No t e s t o C h a p t e r 5   •   321

145. Litweiler, Ornette Coleman, 148. 146.  See their Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire (New York: Penguin, 2004), especially 103–15. What Hardt and Negri call “production of the common” (196–211) gives perhaps too little attention to performances of singularity that stall incorporation into commonality; see also 216–17. 147.  Musgrave, “A New Viola Concerto,” 791. 148. Adler, The Study of Orchestration, 496–507; quoted phrase at 496. His five other guidelines are (1) “separating solo and tutti by rhythmic independence,” (2) “assigning foreground and background roles to both solo and tutti,” (3) putting the soloist into a variety of textural contexts, including (4) “the most transparent . . . textures,” and (5) thinking carefully about register so the soloist doesn’t get buried. 149.  The NY Phil did little commissioning in its early years—­Gershwin’s piano concerto was the only concerted work among the thirteen works commissioned by or for the Philharmonic through 1960. But starting with the move to Lincoln Center in the Fall of 1963, the concertos became more frequent: of the 108 commissioned works premiered between September 1963 and the end of the millennium, forty-­one are pieces for instrumental soloist(s) and orchestra (along with three concertos for orchestra). In the 70s and 80s, eighteen of the thirty-­five commissions were for concertos. Before 1999 there were only six exceptions among the otherwise white, male, American concerto commissionees. Three wrote pieces emphasizing their non-­Euro backgrounds: David Baker (who wrote a Third-­Stream concerto featuring high-­profile jazz soloists like Dexter Gordon), Ravi Shankar (who also played his piece’s solo sitar part) and Takemitsu (who contributed the seminal “East meets West” piece November Steps). The other three were Berio (the 1973 concerto for two pianos mentioned above, n. 50), Schnittke (his seventh symphony, which has a solo violin part), and Walker (a cello concerto from 1982 that has never been published or recorded). The exceptions became more frequent starting in 1999. 150.  Musgrave, “A New Viola Concerto,” 791. Rock concertos were written and performed by Deep Purple, Keith Emerson (with both the Nice and Emerson, Lake and Palmer), Rick Wakeman, and others. Also notable in this regard are the piano concertos by Gordon Parks and Charles Stepney: see Parks, Voices in the Mirror: An Autobiography (New York: Doubleday, 1990), 185–87, 189, 198–99, 330. 151.  [untitled review], Music & Letters 68:3 (1987), 306. 152. Like November Steps Takemitsu’s Quatrain and Far Calls, Coming Far also had US commissioners and recordings. 153.  Late-­modern concertos that combine a modal harmonic practice with a modernist aesthetic orientation often reveal this tension between contrast and stasis, as in Erickson’s and Lou Harrison’s concerted pieces. 154. Erickson’s Garden for violin and orchestra ultimately absorbs the soloist into the orchestral violins (mm. 233–60). Perhaps unintentionally Subotnick’s Parallel Lines and Erb’s Keyboards Concerto bury their soloist at times. 155.  A Long Time Man, p. 61 and insert. This point is perhaps complicated by the presence later on in the piece of a substantial, difficult solo passage for the piano (“Variation 18,” p. 70). Rzewski likely encountered “It Makes a Long Time Man 322  •   No t e s t o C h a p t e r 5

Feel Bad” on the album Negro Prison Songs (Tradition TLP 1020, 1958), produced by Alan Lomax. These songs were recorded at the Mississippi State Penitentiary at Parchman in 1947; “It Makes a Long Time Man Feel Bad” was an old railroad song, sung here by a group marking the downbeats with axe-­blows. 156.  Figures R and S; see also the performance note on p. 45. This passage isn’t unaccompanied—two cellos and two basses play soft glissandi underneath, and they’re eventually joined by two horns and trombone playing held tones—but its formal position and the sonic properties of its viola writing make it function as a trope on the cadenza. 157.  Tovey’s words: see Concertos, 173, 192, and (for similar phrases) 103, 114, 120, 147, 158, 166, 194. Tovey’s favorite language for concerto endings after Mozart also includes brilliance, brilliancies, brilliant or brilliantly (103, 106, 158, 166, 200, 209, 220), glory or glorious (96, 137, 152), and “high spirits,” “happy end” or “spirited end” (152, 169, 181, 200, 203). See Kerman Concerto Conversations, 112–13, on the convention of “triumphant endings,” which he traces to Liszt (whom Tovey ignores, along with Tchaikovsky). 158.  Early instances might include Beethoven’s second Romance for violin and orchestra and Dvorak’s Romance for violin and orchestra (though their endings are strictly speaking delicate rather than quiet as such), Strauss’s Romance for cello and orchestra, and D’Indy’s Lied for cello and orchestra. 159.  Concerto Conversations, 114–19; quoted phrases at 118, 119. 160.  Perhaps this requires a gloss: the piece comports itself like an angel, in this closing section, but that doesn’t mean butter wouldn’t melt in its mouth—in front of the fireplace are signs of a recent struggle. Concertos, 217. 161.  Though Kerman is careful to say that we don’t always know what or who is being mourned (Concerto Conversations, 115). 162.  We could say the same about the “much butter” ending of Lukas Foss’s 1972 Orpheus, which after presenting a “sudden, violent climax” that represents the Furies [sic] doing their worst (I guess they didn’t enjoy that song as much as everyone thought), has the “violinist-­Orpheus walk slowly offstage past suspended bells, playing them with a bow as he goes.” 163.  Liner notes to Musica Contemporanea [la Biennale Musica ’79] Fonit Cetra Musica/Aperta LMA 3002. 164.  It’s unfair but telling that Harold Schonberg’s review of the premiere calls it “very dense, very complicated, and very reminiscent of Stockhausen, Stravinsky and others. Mr. Berio really does not have much in the way of an original statement to offer” (New York Times, March 17, 1973, 18). He does say there’s “something like a coda,” one notes. 165.  Stephen Banfield’s review suggests, indeed, that “perhaps one just has to listen harder” for Piano and Orchestra’s “familiar interplay between soloist and orchestra” (Music & Letters 60:4 (1979), 498). 166.  Quoted phrase from Annette Baier, The Commons of the Mind (Chicago: Open Court, 1997), 41; here as elsewhere Baier pictures thinking and intending as socially dependent. No t e s t o C h a p t e r 5   •   323

167.  This draws on Baier’s linking of trust and vulnerability: see Moral Prejudices: Essays on Ethics (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995), especially 98–110.

Afterword 1. Lorde, Sister Outsider (Berkeley: Crossing, 2007), 36–39; quotation at 39. 2.  Alejo Carpentier, Concierto Barroco (San Juan: Editorial de la Universidad de Puerto Rico, 1994), 47; Carpentier, Concierto Barroco trans. Asa Zatz (Tulsa, OK: Council Oaks, 1988), 96. Further page references will be in the text, in parentheses, with the original followed by the translation. 3.  Son-­montuno form was mentioned in chapter 2 as a formal strategy that enters 70s soul. 4.  González Echevarría, Alejo Carpentier, the Pilgrim at Home (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1977), 266. 5.  Lorde, “The Transformation of Silence into Language and Action,” in Sister Outsider, 40–44; quotation at 42. This connects to what Saidiya Hartman later calls the violence and excess in the archive of slavery: the unbearable fact that for every extant account of a dead girl, “there are hundreds of thousands of other girls who .  .  . have generated few stories” (“Venus in Two Acts,” Small Axe 26 [2008], 1–14; quotation at 2). See also Brent Hayes Edwards, “The Taste of the Archive,” Callaloo 35:4 (2010), 944–72, especially 961, 969–70. On this “archival turn” see Stephen Best, None Like Us: Blackness, Belonging, Aesthetic Life (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2018), 13–20. 6.  Lorde, “Age, Race, Class, and Sex: Women Redefining Difference,” in Sister Outsider, 114–23; quotation at 116. 7.  Tim Lawrence, Love Saves the Day: A History of American Dance Music Culture, 1970–1979 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003), 433–41; quotation at 441.

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I n de x

Aletti, Vince, 285n53, 292n138 Allen, Johnny, 108–9, 109–10 All ’N All (Earth, Wind and Fire), 28, 31–32 Altman, Rick, 259n4, 265n60 Amazing Grace (Franklin), 289n91 American Breed, 278n75, 279–80n95 American Gypsy, 299n52 “Andaluza” (Lecuona), 55, 274n34, 275n37 Anderson, T. J., 220–21, 229 Anita Kerr Singers, 83 “Another One Bites the Dust” (Queen), 166–68, 169, 303–4n80 arbitrariness, in disco, 147, 295n18, 296– 97n27; in new wave, 163, 166, 167 Area Code 615, 51, 279–80n95 Arendt, Hannah, 287n72 Ashford, Nick, 295n15 Ashford and Simpson, 156, 295n15 Associates, the, 157 Association, the, 75 Astral Projection, 279n88 “At Home He’s a Tourist” (Gang of Four), 164 Atlantic Starr, 136 “Atomic” (Blondie), 157, 159, 301n64 Attali, Jacques, 264n47 Au Pairs, 163 “Auroras of Autumn” (Stevens), 35 Auslander, Philip, 25 Averne, Harvey, 279–80n95 Axelrod, Steven Gould, 269n114 Ayers, Roy, 155

5th Dimension, 279–80n95 125th Street Candy Store, 96 “ABC” (Jackson 5), 114 Adam Ant, 157 Adams, Patrick, 142, 144–45, 149–50, 155, 156, 296n25, 298nn37–38 Adler, Samuel, 241, 311n50 Adorno, Theodor, 179, 203, 205, 263n41, 305n12, 307n12 Afro-Cuban dance, 252 Afro-Cubanism, 251 Afro-Cuban music, 142, 217; musical values of, 252–53; son-montuno form in, 119, 252–53 “Ain’t No Mountain High Enough” (Gaye and Terrell), 143–44 “Ain’t No Mountain High Enough” (Inner Life), 142, 144–52, 169, 295n16, 297– 98n36, 298n38 Akwan (Wilson), 230, 231–32exp., 234, 235, 242, 313n60 Albright, Daniel, 195 album-oriented rock (AOR), 140–42, 147, 150, 166–68, 299n45, 303n78; as an alternative to AM radio, 140; exchanges with disco and new wave, 165–68; guitar solos in, 154; as a musical genre, 140–41, 142; compared to progressive rock, 140–41; and rock’s conventions, 152–53. See also four-on-the-floor, and the uses of conventions

325

B-52s, 157, 163 Babe Ruth, 321n135 Bacharach, Burt, 72, 73 Baier, Annette, 323n166, 324n167 Bailey, Philip, 29 Baker, David, 224, 229, 322n149 Bakhtin, Mikhail, 262n31 Baldwin, James, 93 Baldwin Electric Harpsichord, 82 Banana Splits, the, 50, 277n59, 277n61, 279–80n95 Banfield, Stephen, 311n47, 323n165 Baraka, Amiri, 93, 97 Barkin, Elaine, 195 Barney, Lem, 115 Barrett, Vinnie, 127, 290n111 Bartók, Béla, 174, 191, 241 Beach Boys, the, 72, 83 Beatles, the, 44, 72, 73, 74, 75, 134 “bebop” school, 228 “Because You Came to See Me Today” (the Critters), 279–80n95 Beckett, Samuel, 196 Bedford, David, 242–43 Beethoven, Ludwig van, 76, 220 bel canto lyricism, 171 Bell, Pedro, 7–8 Bell, Thom, 95, 97, 98, 99, 100, 101, 102, 112, 123–26, 136, 283n21, 283n28, 287n78, 292n132; on Creed’s race and gender, 103 bells, 244, 245, 278n83, 323n162 Benjamin, Walter, 26, 84, 271n9, 276n56 Berio, Luciano, 241, 245, 316n90, 322n149, 323n164 Bermuda Jam, 279–80n95 Best, Stephen, 324n5 Birdsong, Edwin, 155 Bishop, Elizabeth, 28, 34–41, 268–69n107. See also “View of the Capitol from the Library of Congress” (Bishop) Black action films, 111–12, 285–86n60; soundtracks of, 87, 91, 107, 108–09 Black Americans, 90, 93; Black female visibility, 127–29; Black male collectivity, 136; Black male interiority, 96, 136; Black male visibility, 108. See also Black composers, cultural position of; Black

culture; Black music; disco dancers, Black Black church practices, 99, 118, 288n86 Black composers, cultural position of, 189–90, 228–29 Black culture, 25, 79, 81, 93, 103, 104, 228 Black music, 67, 89, 95–96, 228, 281n1; Black action film soundtracks, 138; conveyance of effort in, 64; Black musical practices, 186; early-70s Black music, 90; and the record industry boom of the late 1970s, 7; role of in the Western art music tradition, 229; soul music as the umbrella term for, 95–96; as supergenre, 266n74 Black Sabbath, 303n73 Blackwell, Ed, 236, 320n129 Blaine, Hal, 81, 280n99 Blakey, Art, 119 Bloom, Harold, 269n109 Blondie, 157, 159 Boettcher, Curt, 70 Bolcom, William, 228 Bolden, Tony, 12 Book of Dreams (Steve Miller Band), 303–4n80 Bootsy’s Rubber Band, 5 Born, Georgina, 82, 97, 259n2, 265n61, 266n69 bossa nova, 29, 51, 69, 75, 81, 268n103, 279n94 Bostic, Earl, 275n45 Boston, 140, 153, 299n47 Boulanger, Lili, 181 Boulez, Pierre, 178 Boyer, Horace Clarence, 282n18, 288–89n90 Brackett, David, 91, 259n1, 265n63, 266n66, 266n69, 271n2, 275n42, 293n3 brass fanfares, 76–78, 89 Brater, Enoch, 196 Braudy, Leo, 15, 16, 264n52; on communal musical events, 17 Braxton, Anthony, 229, 230, 237, 246 “Brazilian Rhyme (Interlude)” [Earth, Wind and Fire], 28–34; allusions to música popular brasileira (MPB), 30; listening to modes of temporality in,

326  •   I n de x

30–31; mix of genres in, 29; and the play of genres, 28–29, 32–33; multiple centers in, 33; “rawness” of, 31–32; role of the Fender Rhodes electric piano in, 29–30; sense of compression in, 31 “Breeze and I, The” (Valente), 55–60, 61, 85, 86–87, 274nn31–32; complex space and manifold temporality of, 59–60; Cuban and Iberian sources of, 58–59; multiplicity and multidimensionality of the hooks in, 58–59; musical economy of, 58; “personality”/“voice,” in, 59 Brill Building, 44, 72 Britten, Benjamin, 218, 312n53, 313n59 Brosses, Charles de, 253 Brown, Earle, 216 Brown, James, 23, 47, 73, 77–78, 94, 97, 106, 268n98, 268n102, 279–80n95; crossover success of, 88; foundational status of, 8; funk style of, 5, 120; grooveoriented output of (1965 through 1974), 5; varied output of, 5–6 Brown, Jocelyn, 142, 145, 146, 150–51 Brown, Wendy, 45, 267n91, 272n14; on “left melancholy, 84–85, 271n9 Browner, Tara, 305n26 “bubblegum” music, 65–68, 277nn60–61, 277n67, 279–80n95 Buffoons, the, 72, 272n17, 279–80n95 Bullitt (1968), 111 Burgess, Leroy, 156 Burney, Charles, 253 Burnim, Mellonee V., 25, 119 Butler, Mark, 273n27 Buzzcocks, the, 157, 163 Byrne, David, 161, 302nn71–72 Cabaret Voltaire, 163, 301–2n68 Cage, John, 64, 174, 175, 181–88, 191, 194, 195, 202, 203–6, 209, 234, 305n11, 307nn12–14, 307–8n16, 308n19, 319n113 Caldwell, John, 262n28 “Call Me Up” (Gang of Four), 163–64 Cannonball Adderley Quintet, 113 Canterbury Records, 70–71, 278n76 Cardinals, the, 61 care, objects of, 1, 3, 17, 19, 23, 83, 85–86, 248, 249, 250, 255–56; and the concerto,

247, 248, 249; in funk, 6, 9, 10; in late-60s pop lyrics, 80–81, in soul, 94, 110 Carmichael, Greg, 142, 298n37 Carnival, 51 Carpenter, Richard, 49–50 Carpenters, the, 49, 69 Carpentier, Alejo, 248, 250–51 Carson, Charles, D., 285n56 Carter, Elliott, 175, 176–80, 202–3, 210–12, 228, 241, 246, 305n7, 309n28, 315n79; aesthetic practices of, 39–40, 176–80, 180, 202–03, 318n107. See also Carter, Elliott, musical setting of Bishop’s “View of the Capitol from the Library of Congress;” Esprit Rude / Esprit Doux (Carter); Glock Birthday Fanfare (Carter); Oboe Concerto (Carter); Piano Concerto (Carter) Carter, Elliott, musical setting of Bishop’s “View of the Capitol from the Library of Congress,” 28, 34, 269n113, 269n116, 270n118; different modes of comportment in, 40; importance of listening for genres in, 40; interaction in with the genre of vocal chamber music, 38–39, 41; and the play of genres in, 37; rendering of band music in, 37–39, 41; funeral march in, 39–40, 41, 270n129 Carter, Johnny, 62 Catalyst, 291–92n129 Cateforis, Theo, 293–94n7, 299n49 Cavitch, Max, 20, 26 Cello and Orchestra (Feldman), 311n48 Cello Symphony (Britten), 312n53, 313n59 Centering (E. Brown), 216 chamber music, incorporation of percussion in, 17 Chambers, Roland, 123 Change, 155 Charles, Daniel, 307n7 Charles, Ray, 14, 92, 94, 106 Cherry, Don, 239 Chess Records, 267n93, 276n48, 276n52 Chic, 166, 169, 296n25, 297n30 Chihara, Paul, 319n118 Chopin, Frédéric, 172, 173, 181 cinema. See film/film genres

I n de x  •   327

Clark, Anthony, 321n135 Clark, Sue Cassidy, 287n78 Clarke, Eric, 283n27 Clash, the, 157, 159, 163 Clinton, George, 4–5, 7–8, 10, 261n18; varied sources of his lyrics, 8 Clooney, Rosemary, 83 Cohen, Sara, 283n28 Cohn, Nik, 85, 271n9, 278n78 Coleman, Ornette, 208, 225–26, 234–40, 316n81, 320n127, 320n129, 321n130, 321n139 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 236, 269n109 Colgrass, Michael, 228, 229–30 Colie, Rosalie, 264n55 Collins, Bootsy, 5, 260n8, 261n18 Collins, Catfish, 5, 260n8 Coltrane, Alice, 133 Coltrane, John, 116–17, 133 Columbia Records, 30, 70, 120 “Come On-a My House” (Clooney), 83 Come to My Garden (Riperton), 267n93 Communications #11 (Jazz Composer’s Orchestra), 221 competence, 145, 153–54, 161, 165; in funk, 32; variety of definitions for, 302n69 Composition 63 (Braxton), 230, 246 Concerto for Bassoon and Percussion En­semble (Fire Alarm System), (­K ievman), 244–45 Concert for Piano and Orchestra (Cage), 203–6, 209, 234, 319n113 concertos, 2, 24, 255; basic mechanisms and schemes of, 206–07; and Black-music practices, 207, 220–21, 227–41 passim; concept of the “anti-concerto,” 202, 212, 243, 311n47; “concertos of lamentation,” 243–4; conventions and metaconventions of, 208–09, 215, 239–40, 241–43, 246; as force, 200, 247, 249, 250, 251–52, 253; and the history of exceptions, 243; the idea of the quiet concerto, 246–48; and the idea that the concerto can “say something,” 247; jazz-influenced concertos, 220–21, 224, 227–30; the latemodern concerto’s commons, 241–48; open strings in, 207, 211, 218–20; ordinary materials in, 207, 210–27;

persistence of, 201–8; quiet endings of, 243–46; registral extremes in, 220–21; repeated notes in, 210–18; scales in, 221-27; sonic materiality in, 211, 215, 218, 221, 225, 227–41, 242, 310n37; tensions within, 217–18; Tovey on, 201, 219, 241, 244, 323n157; versus the nocturne, 200–01. See also scales, in the concerto; virtuosity Concert-Variations on a Theme of Beethoven (Schmidt), Tovey on, 244 Concierto Barroco (Carpentier), 248, 250– 51; central concerto-grosso episode of, 251–53; the “conversation” and “competition” of, 253; multisensory musical experience in, 253; son-montuno form in, 252–53 Connolly, William, on late modernity, 26, on authority versus power, 287n72 contingency, 3, 9–10, 19, 26, 28, 247–48, 250, 256; in Concierto Barroco (Carpentier), 253, 254; of conventions and metaconventions, 139–40; genericity underscores contingency, 20–21; of the exchanges between disco and new wave, 165–66; in the late-modern nocturne, 171, 172, 173, 175, 201; of the occasional piece, 175, 178–81; of the pop hit, 45, 71; of the pop song’s people, 81–82; of soul’s social spaces, 100 conventions/metaconventions, 6, 11–13, 22, 32, 139–40, 157–58, 208–9, 266–67n80, 273n25, 298–99n44, 310n34; conventions do not require verbalization, 217; “hidden” conventions, 217; modernist metaconventions, 310n35. See also concertos, conventions and metaconventions of; disco’s conventions, in new wave; disco, conventions and metaconventions of; four-on-the-floor, and the uses of conventions; genre conventions; nocturnes, conventions of; nocturnes, metaconventions of; pop music, conventions of; rock & roll, conventions of Cooder, Ry, 161 Cooke, Sam, 92 Copland, Aaron, 174, 181, 188 Coral electric sitar, 49, 272n16

328  •   I n de x

Corigliano, John, 312n56, 313n58, 315n79 Cornelius, Don, 260n12 Cowell, Henry, 252 Cowsills, the, 48, 50, 67 Crawford, Hank, 106, 181 Cream de Coco, 155 “Creator Has a Master Plan, The” (­Sanders), 120 Creed, Linda, 97, 103, 123, 125, 126, 127, 283n28, 285n51; debt to Motown, 100; lyrics of, 100–102; performances of gender and ethnicity by, 103–4 Crimp, Douglas, 293n1 Critters, the, 279–80n95 Crosby, Bing, 132 Crossley, Nick, 293n6 Crouch, Andraé, 51 Crumb, George, 174, 175, 191–92, 194, 195 Cugat, Xavier, 55, 57, 274nn31–32 Cunningham, Merce, 184 curiosity, 19, 265n62 Dahlhaus, Carl: approach to genres in Western art music, 15; decline-of-genres theory of, 173; Drott’s critique of, 38; genre theorizing of, 15, 16 Dance to the Music (Sly and the Family Stone), 78 Danielsen, Anne, 260n7 “Day in the Life, A” (the Beatles), 74, 75 Deacon, John, 166, 168, 303n79 Debussy, Claude, 61, 191, 196 De Couteaux, Bert, 121 Dedrick, Sandy, 49 Déjà Vu (Colgrass), 229–30 Delany, Samuel R., 66–67, 68, 86 Delfonics, the, 49, 50, 95 Dells, the, 29, 50, 61–65, 80, 95, 272n20, 275n45, 276nn51–52 Delta 5, 157 democracy, 45–46, 271n13, 272n14; genre of as gothic romance, 46; melancholy democracy and the pop song’s people, 81–88; as unable to bear the realization of its ideals, 51 Dempster, Stuart, 314n68 DeNora, Tia, 306n4 Derrida, Jacques, 16, 264n51

Dettmar, Kevin, 272nn22–23 DeVeaux, Scott, 275n43 Diamond, Leo, 61, 274n31, 275n44 Dimock, Wai-chee, 25 disco, 2, 5, 12, 16, 20, 24, 32, 33, 34, 41, 87, 91, 92, 98, 126, 127–28, 152, 165, 255, 256, 294n8, 300n58; and AOR, 140–42; distinctiveness of, 137; Eurodisco, 148, 155; features that derive from, 160; flexibility of, 147, 157; framing of verses and choruses as pop songs, 142–43; hearing connects with moving in, 145; Italian disco, 297n30; market for in the late 1970s, 8–9; Philadelphia-associated disco records, 128–29; Philadelphia soul and the move to disco, 133, 135–37; pressure of on funk, 8–9; purposes of, 138–39; and the record industry boom of the late 1970s, 7; stratified textures in, 144, 147, 150, 160–63, 165, 169–70; temporalities of, 150–52; thematic category of figure↔ground in, 147–148, 297n29; thematic category of human↔mechanical in, 148–49; trope of “timelessness” in, 152; use of as irony/ sentiment, 164; use of synthesizers in, 145–46, 147, 148–49 disco, conventions in, 143–44, 152–57; conventions of possess materiality, 139; conventions are sedimented with history, 139; expressive conventions, 139; and metaconventions, 139–40. See also four-on-the-floor, and the uses of conventions disco’s conventions, in new wave, 157–65 disco dancers, 145, 297n31; Black disco dancers, 99, 131, 132–33 “Disco Strut” (Cream de Coco), 155 “distant reading,” 13, 263n36 DJs, 145, 148, 266n65, 278n80, 293n140 “Does Anybody Know I’m Here” (the Dells), 95 Dolphy, Eric, 319n112 “Don’t Cry Baby” (Free Design), 74 “Don’t Leave Me This Way” (Harold Melvin and the Blue Notes), 136 “Don’t Leave Me This Way” (Houston), 136 Dorsey, Jimmy, 55, 274nn31–32

I n de x  •   329

doubt, 42, 171, 241, 245, 250, 255, 256, 273n25; and the concerto, 215, 225, 240–41, 243, 245, 246, 248; and the nocturne, 173, 175; and pop, 45–46, Doyle, Peter, 54, 275n40; on echo and reverb on steel guitar, 274n30 Dramarama, 157 “Drifter, The” (Nichols), 69 Drott, Eric, 38, 171, 264nn46–47, 281n5, 305n5 Druckman, Jacob, 219, 228, 317n95, 319n115 drum machines, 161, 169, 294n12, 300,57, 301–2n68, 303n76 drum patterns, 67, 300n55; four-on-thefloor, 20; funky, 49, 73, 78, 279–80n95; new wave, 300n57 Duke Ellington and His Orchestra, 86 Dupree, Cornell, 106, 107 Dury, Ian, 157 Dyer, Richard, 293n1 Dyson, Michael Eric, 287–88n80, 288n83 Early, Gerald, 284n39 Earth, Wind and Fire (EWF), 8, 28, 30, 31, 267n93, 268nn103–4. See also “Brazilian Rhyme (Interlude)” Earth, Wind and Fire) Earthlight (Kim), 195–96, 197–98exp., 199 Echols, Alice, 293n1 Edge of the Olde One, The (Hodkinson), 313n60 Edmonds, Ben, 116, 287–88n80, 288n81 Edwards, Brent Hayes, 324n5 Edwards, Gordon, 106 Eidsheim, Nina, 284n43 Electric Indian, 51 Electric Light Orchestra, 140 electronic dance music (EDM), 163, 166, 170 electronic music, 17, 228, 229 “Elegy, An” (Free Design), 49 Eli, Bobby, 123 Ellington, Duke, 14, 86, 312n53 Ellis, Don, 228 Ellis, Pee Wee, 106 Ellison, Julie, 269n115 Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 52, 110, 269n109 Erb, Donald, 216, 219

Erickson, Robert, 224, 313–14n61, 315n78, 322n154 Errico, Gregg, 78 Eruption, 294–95n14 Esprit Rude / Esprit Doux (Carter), 178–81 Esthero, 44, 52, 53 Eternity’s Children, 71 Evans, Bill, 225, 317n98 Evans, Gil, 57 Everett, Walter, 275n43, 279n86, 280n103, 292n131 “Everyday Is a Holiday (With You)” (Esthero), 44–45, 44exp. Fabbri, Franco, 18, 259n1, 259n4, 266–67n80 Family Tree, 74 Farr, Mel, 115 Fear of Music (Talking Heads), 300n56 Feldman, Morton, 208, 212, 215, 216, 223, 226, 241, 242, 246–47, 311n48, 311– 12n51, 312n54, 317n94 Fellesz, Kevin, 262n34 Fender Rhodes electric piano, 29–30, 231, 234, 313n60 Field, John, 173, 181 Fifth Dimension, 50 film/film genres, 14, 15, 16; communal musical events as cinema’s “major ­musical trend of the late 1960s,” 17; “non-genre film,” 15. See also Black action films Fink, Robert, 82, 84, 95, 314n62 Finnissy, Michael, 316n88 First Choice, 128 First Nocturne (Kay), 188–89, 190exp. Five Stairsteps, the, 67 Flack, Roberta, 290n112, 298n38 “Flash Light” (Parliament), 8 flamenco, 56, 57, 58, 312n53 Fletcher, Angus, 26 Flory, Andrew, 284n32 Floyd, Samuel, 12, 260n11, 261n26 Flute and Orchestra (Feldman), 223, 224exp. Follow Me (1969), 51, 79 Fontaine, Eli, 116, 118 Foreigner, 140, 141

330  •   I n de x

“For the Love of Money” (the O’Jays), 96, 97–98, 129–34; bass line of, 129–31, 131exp; bible verse in, 131–32; political mode of, 132–33 “For Your Love” (Townsend), 291n127 Foss, Lukas, 323n162 Foucault, Michel, on curiosity, 19, 265n62 “Found a Cure” (Ashford and Simpson), 156 four-on-the-floor, and the uses of conventions, 152–57, 158–59, 161, 163, 166, 300n56, 303n78; as illustrating disco’s use of conventions, 154; as a means of exchange between disco and new wave, 159–60; and metaconventions, 156 Four Nocturnes (Night Music II) (Crumb), 191–92 Fowler, Alastair, 19, 159, 259n4, 265n63, 266n75, 266n79, 273n26, 301n62 Franklin, Aretha, 104, 107, 289n91, 289n112 Free Design, 49, 50, 70, 74 “Freeze, The (Sizzaleenmean)” (Parliament), 4–5, 6, 8–9, 10, 16, 28, 260n8; call-andresponse between Clinton and his backing singers, 4–5, 6–7, 8, 9; funk aspects of, 5; as a homage to James Brown’s groove-oriented output, 5; impingement of music, culture, and institutions on, 7–8, 10; influence of James Brown on the sounds and practices of, 8. See also “Freeze, The (Sizzaleenmean)” (Parliament), interaction of with musical genres “Freeze, The (Sizzaleenmean)” (Parliament), interaction of with musical genres, 11–13; and the 1970s trend toward self-­reflexiveness, 12; impingement of various genres on, 11; use of genre conventions in, 11–12 Frith, Simon, 43–44, 82, 87, 259n1, 266– 67n80, 267n93, 271n4, 271n12, 272n23, 275n36, 278n79 From a Whisper to a Scream (Phillips), 104 Frow, John, 261–62n26, 262n31, 264n51, 266n73 Funkadelic, 5, 261n23; gold records of, 7 Funkentelechy vs. the Placebo Syndrome (Parliament), 261n18

funk of the 1970s, 5–7, 17, 24, 63, 126, 138, 261n20; call-and-response convention of, 9; depth of engagement with the past in, 9; embrace of contingency by, 9–10; freewheeling attitude of, 9; funk drum patterns, 78–79; influence/pressure of disco on, 8–9; investments of in jazz and rock, 8–9; persistent jokiness of, 9, 260n10; and the mix of genres in, 6, 31–32; modes of comportment in, 31–32; multitemporalities of, 33–34; tensions within the genre, 7; use of genre conventions and metaconventions in, 6; varied sources of funk lyrics, 8 Fuqua, Harvey, 261n20 fusion, 227, 262n34; jazz-funk fusion, 33 Gamble, Kenneth, 97–98, 99–100, 122, 127–28, 129, 134 Gamble Records, 128 Gang of Four, 157, 159–60, 163–65, 166 Garden (Erickson), 224–25, 322n154 Garland, Phyl, 93, 107–8, 281n1, 282nn10– 12, 283n27, 284n35, 285n53 Gary’s Gang, 156 Gates, Henry Louis, 26, 260n11 Gaye, Marvin, 91, 96, 112–18, 119, 127, 130, 143; background of as a drummer, 118 gender, 5, 18, 28, 57, 100, 102–3, 107, 126, 128; gender imbalances, 128–29, 290n112 “generic contract,” 21 genericity, 19–21, 27, 172 Genette, Gérard, 264n55, 266n68 genre conventions, 6, 11–12, 22 genres, dimensions of, 22–25, 266n74, 266–67n80; audiences, people, participants, stakeholders, 22; contexts, 22; form, 22, 24; functions and effects, 22; history and tradition, 22; materials, features, conventions, 22; medium, 22; metageneric relations, 23, 25; modes of dissemination and consumption, 22; names, titles, paratexts, 23; objects, resources, technologies, 22; origins, 22; practices, activities, behaviors, 21; principles, 23; size, 22; stylistic features, 23; temporalities, 22; themes, subject matter, ideas, 23; values, 23

I n de x  •   331

genres of the 1970s, 256; as adding something to the fabric of the world, 247– 48; as collections, 2; comparing genres multidimensionally, 24–25; effects of exchange between, 165–68; languageuse in a genre, 23; “living genres,” 25–26; long-standing assumptions concerning, 3; and genres making things matter, 1–2; questions concerning small details of, 3; pressure on postwar artistic genres, 26–27; what genres illuminate, 2. See also genre conventions; genres, five characteristics of musical genres; genre theories in the 1970s; genres, what they are, how they work, what they do genres, five characteristics of musical genres: (1) genres are part of the material world, 2, 19; (2) genres can’t be experienced outside of time, 2–3, 19; (3) genres are irreducibly multidimensional, 3, 19, 20, 24–25; (4) each genre is a metagenre, 3, 19, 25; (5) genres are subject to contingency, 3, 19, 26 genre theories in the 1970s, 10–19, 249–50; complexity and genre theory, 13; and the “decline of genres,” 18; failure of genre theorists to acknowledge changes in musical networks of the 1960s and 1970s, 17; generalizations inherent in, 18; genre-dismissing line that there are only “two kinds of music, good and bad,” 14; genre theory and artistically significant works, 14; genre theory and the handling of masses of texts, 13–14; “high,” “low,” and “middlebrow” musical genres, 17, 18; listening to many works for specific genres, 10–11 genres, play of, 27–34, 250–51; and multitemporality, 27–28, 33–34. See also “Brazilian Rhyme (Interlude)” (Earth, Wind and Fire); “View of the Capitol from the Library of Congress” (Bishop) genres, what they are, how they work, what they do, 19–27; and the dimensions of genre from the perspective of texts, 21; “genre rules,” 21; genres constellate features as much as classify works, 21. See also genericity

gentrification, 97, 283n27 George, Nelson, 286n61, 290n116 Gershwin, George, 322n149 “Get Down” (Mayfield), 289n93 “Ghetto Woman” (McFadden), 127–28 Gibbons, Walter, 155 Gilbert, Roger, 269n108 Ginastera, Alberto, Cello Concerto no. 1 of, 216–17, 223, 226, 312n56 Glock, William, 176 Glock Birthday Fanfare (Carter), 176–78, 177exp; “Happy Birthday” quotations in, 176–78, 177exp Gloryhallastoopid or Pin the Tale on the Funky (Parliament), 4, 7 Goldstein, Richard, 278n81 González Echevarría, Roberto, 253 “Good Times” (Chic), 166, 169, 297n30 Gordon, Dexter, 322n149 Gordy, Berry, 284n32, 284n39, 288n83 gospel, 8, 32, 51, 69, 81, 91, 92, 119, 126, 134, 136, 282n13, 286n69, 289n91; gospel-soul fusion, 134; as source of “message songs,” 282n18; in “Put Your Hands Together” (the O’Jays), 99; vaguely alluded to in “Spread Your Wings” (Queen), 304n81 Grande Aulodia (Maderna), 245 Grass (Chihara), 319n118 Green, Al, 288n84 Greeting Prelude (Stravinsky) 176 Greitzer, Sol, 219 Griffiths, Paul, 309n29, 311n47, 311n50 Grubbs, David, 265n56 Gruppo Sportivo, 157 Gubaidulina, Sofya, 309n31 Gulda, Friedrich, 255 Guerrero, Ed, 285n61 Guryan, Margo, 71 Gyrate (Pylon), 157 Hacking, Ian, 267n85 Haddon, Mimi, 160 Haden, Charlie, 320n129 Hall, Overton, 7–8 Hancock, Herbie, 268n101, 301n68 Handel, George Frideric, 14, 251–52 Handler, Ken, 70–71

332  •   I n de x

Harbison, John, 218, 228, 309n26, 213n55, 313nn57–58, 316n86, 318n107 Hardy Boys, the, 50, 66, 67 Hardt, Michael, 240 Harold Melvin and the Blue Notes, 98, 133, 134, 292n136, 292n139 harpsichords, 47, 49, 50, 68, 75, 82–84, 85, 86, 88, 92 Harris, Eddie, 69 Harris, Norman, 123 Harrison, Lou, 322n153 Hartman, Dan, 143, 156, 169 Hartman, Saidiya, 324n5 Hathaway, Donny, 287n75 Hayes, Isaac, 90, 108–12, 286n62, 288n88, 296n26 Heart, 140, 153 Heckman, Don, 235, 236, 321n134 Hendrix, Jimi, 14, 17, 109 Henze, Hans Werner, 308–9n25, 314–15n73 “Here Come the Hardys” (Hardy Boys), 66 “Hey Jude” (the Beatles), 134, 292n131 Hi-Fi Nightingale, The (Valente), 58 “Hills of Katmandu” (Tantra), 155 “Hit and Run” (Holloway), 155 Hodkinson, Sidney, 313n60 Hoeckner, Berthold, 275n40 Hollander, John 269n110 Holloway, Loleatta, 155, 298n40 Hollywood Genres (Schatz), 13 Holt, Fabian, 261n25, 266n69, 267n80 Holzaepfel, John, 308n21 “Home Is Where the Hatred Is” (Phillips), 104, 105–08, 112 “Home Is Where the Hatred Is” (ScottHeron), 97, 104–6, 107 Honig, Bonnie, 46, 271n13 hooks, 9, 52, 53, 54, 56, 77, 139, 143, 162, 165, 273n26; broader conception of, 53; futuristic hooks, 169; mechanical hooks, 296n23; melodic hooks, 110, 143, 169–70; vocal hooks, 66–67, 89, 109 Houston, Thelma, 71, 136, 279n92, 279–80n95 Howe, Hubert, 311n48 Huff, Leon, 98, 99–100, 121–22, 128, 129, 134 Hubbs, Nadine, 293n1 Hughes, Charles, 286n31

“I Am the Fly” (the Wire), 157, 300–301n61 “I Can’t Get Next to You” (the Temptations), 114, 287n76 “If and When” (Three Degrees), 128 “I’ll Take You There” (the Staples), 134 “I Love a Man in Uniform” (Gang of Four), 163–64, 303n76 “I’m O.K., You’re O.K.” (American Gypsy), 299n52 impingement, 11, 20; direct and indirect record industry pressures’ role in, 8; genres as forces that impinge on a musical work, 37; impingement of music, culture, and institutions on record production, 7–8 Impressions, the, 113, 288n85 Inner Dialogue, 50, 70, 75, 80 Inner Life, 142, 144, 148–49, 151–52, 169, 298n38 In Philadelphia (Pickett), 98 instrumental solos, as a convention in rock, AOR, and new wave, 153–54 In Through the Out Door (Led Zeppelin), 140 Ishii, Maki, 309n31 “Is It Love” (Gang of Four), 163–64 Ives, Charles, 37–38, 41 Iyer, Vijay, 259n2 “I Want You Back” (Jackson 5), 68 “I Was Made for Loving You” (Kiss), 167, 303n78, 304n84 Jack of Shadows (Bedford), 242–43 Jackson 5, the, 50, 67, 68, 81, 114, 277n67 Jackson, Anthony, 97–98, 129, 130, 292n135; funky bass line of, 131exp. Jackson, Joe, 163 Jackson, John, 283–84n29, 284n30, 284n33, 285n47, 290n116, 292nn134–135 Jamerson, James, 118 James Bond movies, 111 Jameson, Fredric, 13–14, 15–16, 26, 89–90, 263n38, 263n42, 281n3 James White and the Blacks, 157 Jan and Dean, 70 Japan, 163, 300n57 Jauss, Hans Robert, 13, 264–65n55 jazz, 17, 32, 51, 81, 91, 282n13, 319n113; modal jazz, 105, 119, 133–34, 291n128,

I n de x  •   333

jazz (continued) 291–92n129, 318n99; use of synthesizers in, 17 Jefferson Starship, 140 Jisi, Chris, 291nn121–122 Johnson, Lorraine, 136 Jolas, Betsy, 311n47 Jones Girls, 155 “Journey in Satchidananda” (A. Coltrane), 133 Joy Division, 157, 163, 300n59 “Jungle Fever” (the Chakachas), 297n28 Junior, Marvin, 62, 272n20 Kahn, Ashley, 280n106 Kallberg, Jeffrey, 172–73, 174, 191, 259n4, 306n2, 306n4 Kansas, 140 Katz, Jonathan, 184 Katz, Mark, 315n75 Kay, Ulysses, 174, 188–90 “Keep on Dancing” (Gary’s Gang), 156 Keightley, Keir, 276n58 Keil, Charles, 297n33 Kerman, Joseph, 243, 244, 309n32, 311n47, 311n50, 318n103, 323n161 Kievman, Carson, 244 Kim, Earl, 175, 191, 195–96, 221, 226 King, Jon, 164 King Crimson, 141 Kingsley, Gershon, 272n17 Kiss, 167, 303n78 Kool & the Gang, 8, 260n10, 268nn102– 103, 291n124 Kraft, William, 313n58 Kurtag, Gyorgy, 314–15n73 LaBelle, Patti, 273n29 Labelle, 290n112 Lady Love (Mason), 128 Lambert, Hendricks and Ross, 29 Larkin, Rochelle, 89, 93–94, 96, 281n1, 292n131 “L.A. Sunshine” (Sylvia), 300n55 Laswell, Bill, 161 Latour, Bruno, 261n19 “Law of Genre, The” (Derrida), 264n51

Lawrence, Tim, 135, 283n27, 290n110, 292n137, 293n1, 324n7 Lazarof, Henri, 317n95 Lecuona, Ernesto, 55, 274n34 Led Zeppelin, 140, 301n66, 303n73, 304n85 “left melancholy,” 84, 271n9 Lena, Jennifer, 21, 259n3, 266n69, 266nn77–78, 271n2, Lennon, Sean, 44 Le Pampelmouse, 155 “Le Spank” (Le Pampelmouse), 155 “Let It Be Me” (J. Brown), 279–80n95 Levan, Larry, 142, 145–46, 295n19, 296–97n27 Lewis, George, 230, 282n13, 319nn113–114, 320n122, 320n124 Leydon, Rebecca, 273n28 Ligeti, György, 218–19, 246, 313–14n61 Light, Enoch, 70 Like It Is, Like It Was (the Dells), 61 “listener’s song,” 261n20 “Listen Here” (Harris), 69 Listening in Detail (Vasquez), 260n6 “Little Bits of Paper” (Inner Dialogue), 80 Litweiler, John, 320n128, 320n129, 321nn130–31 Living Time (Russell), 318n99 Long Time Man, A (Rzewski), 242 “Looking for the World” (the Dance), 303n74 Lorde, Audre, 23, 26, 250, 255, 266n76 Lordi, Emily, 281nn1–2, 282n11, 282n15 “Lost in the Supermarket” (the Clash), 157, 159 Lott, Eric, 280n111 Lounge Lizards, the, 163 Love, Airron, 124 “Love Is Blue” (Mauriat), 68–69, 83, 277n71 “Love and Let Love” (the Hardy Boys), 67 “Love So Fine” (Nichols), 69 Love Supreme, A (J. Coltrane), 117, 133 “Love You Save, The” (Jackson 5), 114 LP recordings, 90–91, 265n58; and reconfiguration of the ways genres operate, 17 Lucas, Reggie, 129 Luongo, John, 156 Lutosławski, Witold, 311–12n51, 314n66

334  •   I n de x

Maderna, Bruno, 245 Mahler, Gustav, 37, 60, 270n118 Mahon, Maureen, 12 “Make the Music Flow” (The Cowsills), 49; presence of the sitar in the lyrics of, 49 Mamlok, Ursula, 315n79 Mantler, Michael, 221–22 Manzarek, Ray, 161 March Violets, 294n12 Margalit, Avishai, 260n5 Martha and the Muffins, 163 Martin, Bobby, 98 Martino, Donald, 228 Mason, Barbara, 128 Massenburg, George, 29, 30, 268n96 Match, the, 272n17 materiality, of conventions in recorded music, 139; of genres, 2, 19. See also concertos, sonic materiality in Mattel Toys, 71 Maultsby, Portia, 91 Mauriat, Paul, 68, 83, 277n69, 277n71 Mauss, Marcel, 139, 159 May, Brian, 166, 168 Mayfield, Curtis, 117, 127, 134, 286n61, 289n93, 292n130 McCartney, Paul, 74 McCoy, Van, 121 McCrae, Gwen, 291n129 McFadden, Ruth, 127–28, 290–91n117 “Medley: Can Sing a Rainbow and Love Is Blue” (the Dells), 64, 80 Melvin, Harold, 98, 133, 134, 292n136, 292n139 Memphis sound, 97, 284n31 Mendes, Sergio, 272n17 Mercury, Freddie, 166 “Mercy, Mercy, Mercy” (Cannonball Adderley), 113 “Message from a Black Man” (the Whatnauts), 94 “message songs,” 93–95, 96, 104; in Philadelphia soul, 119–35 passim; “People Make the World Go Round” (the Stylistics) as message song, 123–25; “What’s Going On” (Gaye) as message song, 112–18

Middleton, Richard, 314n62 Midsummer Nocturne (Copland), 188, 189exp. Millennium, the, 51, 70 Miller, Carolyn, 259n4 minimalism, 216, 310–11n46 Mirror on Which to Dwell, A (Carter), 37, 39 Miss Butters (Family Tree), 74 “Moanin,” (Blakey), 119 modernity/modernism, late, 15, 26, 212 Monk, Thelonious, 188, 275n43, Monson, Ingrid, 291n128, 297n32 Montage, 51 Montana, Vince, 123, 155 Monteux, Pierre, 176 Moore, Allan, 283nn26–27 Moore, Jackie, 128, 136, 293n140, 298n41 Moore, Robin, 288n89 “More I Get, the More I Want, The” (­Johnson), 136 “More I Get, the More I Want, The” (­Pendergrass), 136 Moretti Franco, 263nn36–37, 263n39 Morgan, Lee, 119 Morris, Mitchell, 87, 102, 109, 113–14, 285n44, 287n73, 289n95 Motown Records/Motown sound, 91, 97, 126, 143, 151, 288n87; “assembly-line” approach of, 7–8, 98 Mozart, Leopold, 315n75 “Mrs. Bluebird” (Zekley), 71 Mueller, J.H., 262n40 Müller, Werner, 57, 275n41 multitemporality, of genres, practices and works, 2–3, 7, 22, 27–28, 33–34, 36–37, 150–52, 250 Murdoch, Iris, 318n100 Musgrave, Thea, 216, 228, 230, 241, 308– 9n25, 313n57, 317n92 music journalism, 17; and Philadelphia soul, 121–22 Music for a Summer Evening (Makrokosmos III) (Crumb), 191–92, 193exp. Myers, Herbert, 315n75 Nascimento, Milton, 30, 33 Native Dancer (Wayne Shorter), 30

I n de x  •   335

Neal, Mark Anthony, 107, 284n43 Neale, Stephen, 18, 264n53 Negri, Antonio, 240 Negus, Keith, 54, 262n28, 280n102 Neon Philharmonic, 51 new wave, 150, 152, 165, 166; and AOR, 140–42; AOR’s borrowings from disco come through new wave, 167–68; borrowings from and influence of disco on, 163–64, 301n65; disco conventions in, 157–65; diversity in, 161; drum patterns in, 300n57; guitar solos of, 153–54, 299n48; impurity of, 141; initial definition of, 141; principle of stratification in, 163–65. See also four-on-thefloor, and the uses of conventions New York Philharmonic, 322n149 “Newsy Neighbors” (First Choice), 291n120 Nichols, Roger, 69–70, 278n75 night music, 174, 191–92, 200 Night Music (Erickson), 313–14n61, 315n78 Nocturne for Violin and Piano (Cage), 181–88, 181exp.; heterogeneity of, 188 nocturnes, 2, 23, 24, 171–75, 201; communication of doubt, fallibility, and contingency in, 173–74; and the creation of mood and the success of surface effects in, 172; foundational conventions of, 172; and genre-focused scholarship concerning, 172–73; history of the nocturne, 171–75; light-jazz nocturnes, 186; metaconventions of, 172; occasion and contingency in, 173–75; reasons for changes in the genre of, 172; and the senses, 190–99 passim. See also night music Nolen, Jimmy, 109 “Not Great Men” (Gang of Four), 159–60, 166; use of stratified textures in, 160–61 “(Not Just) Knee Deep” (Funkadelic), 8 novelty, as a means of exchange between genres, 52 November Steps (Takemitsu), 315n77 Noubel, Max, 315n75: Meyers should be Myers., 310n43 “Number Nine” (Van Dyke Parks), 76 Oboe Concerto (Carter), 210–11, 212, 215, 216, 314n65, 315n79

occasional pieces, 175–81; as hidden genre, 175–76; “View of the Capitol from the Library of Congress” (Carter) as occasional piece, 36, 37, 39–40 Offering (The Carpenters), 49–50 “Off Shore” (the Dells), 61–62, 276n51 Ogerman, Claus, 225, 317n97 “Oh By the Way” (Riperton), 279–80n92 O’Jays, the, 96, 97, 98, 99, 112, 129–30, 136, 283–84n29. See also “For the Love of Money” (the O’Jays) Oliveros, Pauline, 175, 191, 194–95 OMD, 157 “One Nation Under a Groove” (Funkadelic), 8, 261n23 opera, 17, 39 operettas, 74 Orpheus (Foss), 323n162 “Papa Was a Rolling Stone” (the Temptations), 95 “Papa’s Got a Brand New Bag” (Brown), 77–78 “Paper Castle” (Rotary Connection), 48 Parallel Lines (Subotnick), 216 “Paralysed” (Gang of Four), 164 Pareles, Jon, 43 Parker, Maceo, 5, 6 Parks, Gordon, 108, 322n150 Parks, Van Dyke, 109 Parliament-Funkadelic (P-Funk), 4, 5, 261n17; gold records of, 7; production process of (the “assembly line”), 7–8; late 1970s mega-hits of, 8. See also “Freeze, The (Sizzaleenmean)” (Parliament); Funkadelic Paul, Billy, 127 Paul, Les, 57 Peebles, Ann, 294–95n14 Penderecki, Krzysztof, 224, 311–12n51, 312n56 Pendergrass, Teddy, 133–34, 136 “Penny Lane” (the Beatles), 74 “People Get Ready” (the Impressions), 134 “People Make the World Go Round” (the Stylistics), 122–27, 130; Creed’s role in, 127; as a message song, 123–24 Peppermint Rainbow, 48, 50, 80

336  •   I n de x

Perlman, Itzhak, 221, 316n84 Pet Sounds (the Beach Boys), 71, 72 Petty, Tom, 293n5 Philadelphia soul, 95, 97, 103, 138, 151, 290n108; and Black listeners, 122–24, 124; and the move to disco, 135–37; shorter-length tracks of, 127; soft soul records, 121, 126–27; variety and relationality of themes in, 124. See also Philadelphia soul, approaching politics in Philadelphia soul, approaching politics in, 119–35 passim; fundamental tensions within, 120–21; and gender imbalance, 128–29; and long groove-driven song models, 119–22, 126, 127; and Philadelphia soul’s fraught relation with the rock press, 121–22 Phillips, Esther, 97, 104–8, 112, 285n53, 290n112 Piano and Orchestra (Feldman), 212, 213–14exp. Piano Concerto (Carter), 202–03, 205, 210, 246, 308n25, 309n28, 310n39 Pickett, Wilson, 98, 292n131 Pierrot Lunaire (Schoenberg), 39 Pink Floyd, 140 “Pink Lemonade” (Peppermint Rainbow), 48–49, 80 Pitts, Charles, 109 “Poetry Is Not a Luxury” (Lorde), 26, 250, 255 Police, the, 157, 167, 302n69 Pollack, Howard, 309n26 Pond, Steven, 281n2 Pop Group, the, 157, 163 pop music, 1, 2, 17, 47, 270–71n2, 272n15; and the ability of a song to define itself, 87; borrowing from by other genres, 43–44, 46, 271n4; conventions of, 143–44, 298–99n44; foreign elements of, 271n13; function of, 45; and the history of not rock & roll, 51–54; lack of an originary moment in, 85; melancholy of, 85; as “not an art but a craft,” 45; persistence of with or without strong industry support, 46; and the polarization of rock and pop, 51–52; pop music conventions, 52–53; the “pop-rock

aesthetic,” 58; in the post–rock & roll era, 45–46; power pop, 141; sonic materiality of, 64; tensions between pop and soul, 63–64; traditional status as music for “everyone,” 82; traditional virtues of (simplicity and artlessness), 66; “universality” of, 71 pop music, grasping pop’s small musical objects, 72–81; and brass fanfares, 76–78, 88; and “foreign” musical elements, 72–73; and funk drum patterns, 78–79; and harpsichords, 73, 82–84; and lyrics that reflect multiplicity, 79; and lyrics, vividness of, 79–81; and methods of exchange, 73; and the momentary possibility of human communication, 81; and music’s capacity to get beyond language, 80–81; and the object-oriented aesthetic, 81; objects that define the heaped-up style, 73, 86; and tropes of simplicity and directness, 73 pop music, heightened pop style of, 47–49, 50–51, 71–72, 73–74, 85–86, 87–88; object-oriented aesthetic in, 50; pop’s lack confronting heightened style, 71; rudiments of, 60–72 pop music, moving away from the rockcentric view of, 52; and the defining qualities of pop, 52–53; and the ontological status of the pop song, 54; rock is part of pop, 53; the “rock vs. pop” dichotomy does not do justice to the soul tradition, 53 pop music of the 1950s, 55–60; increasing reliance on musical elements that are not written down, 53–54 pop music of the late 1960s, 25, 69, 79; engagement of with its musical context, 60–61. See also pop music, heightened pop style of; pop music of the late 1960s, and the pop song’s “more” pop music of the late 1960s, and the pop song’s “more”, 47–51; and the concept that pop songs establish a balance between familiarity and novelty, 47, 50; and “lack” dialectically engaged with “more,” 47; and pop’s ideals of simplicity and polish, 47

I n de x  •   337

Porter, Eric, 289n92 Portion Control, 294n12 Prelude Records, 136 Pritchett, James, 307–8n16, 308nn18–19 Project 3 Records, 70 Pruter, Robert, complaints about mostness, 276n52 Public Image Ltd., 157, 163 punk, 293n6; first-generation British punk, 23; as underwriting new wave, 141–42 Purdie, Bernard, 106 Queen, 140, 166–67, 169, 303n79 Ranwood Records, 70 Ravenscroft, Brenda, 270n129 Read, Herbert, 266n81 record production, 282–83n19; impingement of music, culture, and institutions on, 7–8 Redman, Dewey, 320n129 Redmond, Shana, 281n2, 282n18 Regev, Motti, 54, 56, 273n29 rhythm & blues (R&B), 51, 282n13 Righteous Brothers, the, 83 Riley, Clayton, 99–100, 131, 282n11, 284n36 Riperton, Minnie, 48, 267n93, 279n92, 290n112 RMI Rock-Si-Chord, 82, 83 Robinson, Smokey, 100–01, 284n42, 288n84 Rochberg, George, 224, 315n76, 316n86; 317n95 rock, 81, 273n26; of the 1970s, 17; conventions of, 152–53; funky rock, 140; jazz rock, 140; Latin rock, 140; “prehistory” of, 51; and the polarization of rock and pop, 51–52; progressive rock, 140–41; and the “rock aesthetic” before the emergence of rock & roll, 54; “rock” as a genre-neutral value word, 52; viscerality of sound in, 64 Rolling Stones, the, 304n85 Roman, Camille, 269n114 Robbins, Ira, 299n49 Rorem, Ned, 228 Ross, Jimmy, 296–97n27, 297n30 Rotary Connection, 29, 48, 50, 64, 276n52, 279n92

Royster, Francesca, 261n22 Russell, George, 220, 318n99 Rzewski, Frederic, 242 salsa, 17, 92 Salsoul Records, 135–36 Salt Water Taffy, 50 Sanders, Pharoah, 120, 134 Sanjek, David, 282n10 Satie, Erik, 184 Satterfield, Louis, 276n48 scales, in the concerto, 218, 221–23, 236, 278n82, 316n84; diatonic scales, 317n93; normativity of, 223; practice of, 226; “return” to scales, 226–27; for soloists, 224–25; surprise effect of, 222–23 “Scarborough Fair” (the Delfonics), 49 Scarlatti, Domenico, 251, 252 Schafer, Murray, 316n86 Schatz, Thomas, 13, 15, 16, 262n26 Schiff, David, 202 Schmidt, Franz, 244 Schnittke, Alfred, 315n74, 322n149 Schoenberg, Arnold, 39, 184–85 Schonberg, Harold, 323n164 Schrock, Marion, 319–20n120 Schwantner, Joseph, 228, 313–14n61, 314n63 Scott-Heron, Gil, 97, 104–6, 107 Sebesky, Don, 106 seeing/hearing space, identity, and motion, 108–12 self-reflexiveness, 11, 12, 13, 56, 60, 209, 250, 261–62n26; in the songs of Tin Pan Alley, 57 self-theorizing musical works, 12 Sex Pistols, 163 Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band (the Beatles), 72 Shaft (1971), 90, 108–12, 135, 287n71; and the credit sequence’s visual, 111–12; films following the tradition of, 286–87n70; Hayes’s and Allen’s modus operandi during, 110–11; the musical theme parallels the visual track in, 110–11; Shaft as continually in motion during, 111–12; variety of genres in the sound­ track of, 110–11. See also “Theme from Shaft”

338  •   I n de x

Shankar, Ravi, 322n149 Shelemay, Kay Kaufman, 25 Shelley, Braxton D., 288–89n90 Ship Ahoy (the O’Jays), 98–99, 112 Shorter, Wayne, 30 Shostakovich, Dmitri, 246 Shreffler, Anne, 38, 39, 268n105, 307n9 “Sidewinder, The” (Morgan), 119 Sigma Sound studio, 97, 101, 120, 129 Simon and Garfunkel, 49 Simone, Nina, 94 Simple Minds, 157 Simpson, Jimmy, 145 Simpson, Valerie, 295n15 Sing for Very Important People (Free Design), 74 Skies of America (Coleman), 208, 225–26, 234–40, 243, 246, 320n127, 321n130, 321–22n144; authority of Coleman in, 238–40; Coleman as a soloist in, 236– 37; role of scales in, 237 Slightly Baroque (Anita Kerr Singers), 83 Sly and the Family Stone, 78, 94 Smith, Hale, 319n112 Smith, Jeff, 286n64 Smitherman, Geneva, 288n86, 288n105 Snead, James, 289n99 social space, in early 1970s soul, 96–108; five key concepts of, 100; gendering and racializing of space, 107–8; and the making of social space in message songs, 105–5; and the shaping of a musical genre, 98–99; as shorthand for a relational complex of real and virtual spaces, 97; social space across elements of a record, 101; social spaces of soul music, 97; and the spatial imagery of lyrics, 101. See also seeing/hearing space, identity, and motion Solid Gold (Gang of Four), 164 Sonatas and Interludes (Cage), 64, 184 Sonic Meditation V (“Native”) (Oliveros), 194–95, 199 “Soul Man” (Rotary Connection), 64 soul music, of the 1960s, 95–96, 119–20 soul music of the 1970s, 2, 17, 29, 32, 62, 63, 89–91, 138; as a “complex,” 91; and the making of social space in early 1970s

soul, 96–108; southern soul, 126; at the start of the 1970s, 91–96; tensions between pop and soul, 63–64; as the umbrella term for Black music, 95–96; variety of elements and cultural density of, 92–94. See also Philadelphia soul Souxsie and the Banshees, 157 Southern, Eileen, 281n2 Specials, the, 163 Spectral School, the, 314n71 Sperb, Jason, 262n28 Spicer, Mark, 142 Spinners, the, 104, 287n78 Springfield, Dusty, 284n31 Staples, the, 134 Staton, Candi, 143, 166, 169 Stax Records, 91, 110; “freak studio” of, 97 Steinberg, Dianne, 291n119 Steinberg, Michael, 310n45 Stepney, Charles, 29, 48, 50, 61, 63, 81, 95, 112, 121, 276n53, 279n92; complaints about music critics, 283n22; envelopepushing fanfares of, 76–78, 88 Stern, Isaac, 316n86, 317n95 Steve Miller Band, 140, 303–4n80, 304n83 Stevens, Wallace, 35 Stewart, Susan, 173, 174, 194, 306n3, 306n5 Stiff Little Fingers, 157, 159 Stillman, Al, 56–57, 274n35 “Stop, Look, Listen (to Your Heart)” (the Stylistics), 100, 127; and the creation of social space, 101–3 stratification, and disco’s fragile musical economy, 169–70. See disco, stratified textures in; new wave, principle of stratification in Stravinsky, Igor, 318n105, 323n164 String Quartet and Orchestra (Feldman), 242 string quartets, 15, 17 Stromme, Carol, 80 Stylistics, the, 98, 100, 102–3, 104, 122–23, 126, 282n7. See also “People Make the Workd Go Round” (the Stylistics); “Stop, Look, Listen (to Your Heart)” (the Stylistics) Styx, 140 “subliterary” genres, 13, 15; “half-life” of, 26; preponderance of, 14; sharp border

I n de x  •   339

“subliterary” genres (continued) between literature and the sub­literary, 14 Subotnick, Morton, 216, 312n53, 322n154 Suicide, 163 Sweet, 140 Swingle Singers, 29 Sylvia, 300n55 Symbiosis (Ogerman), 225 synthesizers, 145–46, 148–50, 166, 167, 295–96n20, 296n23, 300n59, 304n82 Takemitsu, Tōru, 241, 242, 246, 315n77, 322n149 Talking Heads, 157, 163, 300n56 Tarsia, Joe, 120, 130 Tartaglia, John Andrews, 51 Taylor, Cecil, 221–22 Taylor, Creed, 106 Taylor, Roger, 168 Temptations, the, 95, 114, 287n76 Terrell, Tammi, 143 “Thank You (Falettinme Be Mice Elf Agin)” (Sly and the Family Stone), 94 “Theme from Shaft,” 109–11, 286n62, 287n71, 296n26 Thiele, Bob, 83 Thompkins, Russell, 101 Thompson, Tony, 296n25 Three Degrees, 128 Tin Pan Alley, 56–57, 70, 74, 174, 186; AABA structure of Tin Pan Alley ballads, 61, 275n43; self-reflexiveness in the songs of, 57; songwriting values of, 53 Tippett, Michael, 318n104 T.K. Records, 91 “To Be Young, Gifted and Black” (Simone), 94 “To Put Up with You” (Nichols), 278n75 Todorov, Tzvetan, 264n55 Toynbee, Jason, 271n2 Tovey, Donald, 201, 219, 241, 244, 323n157 Tower, Joan, 312n53 Tower Records, 71 Townsend, Ed, 291n129 “Tracks of My Tears” (Robinson), 100–101, 284n42 Transition (Mason), 128

Tricycle, 50 Triple Concerto (Martino), 228 Tuckwell, Barry, 228 Tudor, David, 203–4, 308n21, 308n24 Turnier, Gary, 156 U2, 157, 163 Upchurch, Phil, 48, 64 Valente, Caterina, 55–60, 62, 67, 85, 86–87; “exotic” accent of, 58; as self-possessed cosmopolitan subject, 57–58 Valli, Celso, 155 Van De Pitte, David, 118, 287–88n80 Van Gelder, Rudy, 106 Vasquez, Alexandra, 260n6 “Vertigo/Relight My Fire” (Hartman), 143, 156, 169 Vicari, Frank, 106, 107 “View of the Capitol from the Library of Congress” (Bishop), 28, 34–41, 269n109, 269nn114–15, 270n118; as a mock-Stevensian meditation on whiteness, 35–36; movement among genres in, 35–36; as an occasional poem, 36; use of genre in as a “field of potential identities,” 37. See also Carter, Elliott, musical setting of Bishop’s “View of the Capitol from the Library of Congress” Vincent, Ricky, 260–61n14 Violin and Orchestra (Feldman), 216, 312n54, 314n62, 317n94 Virgin Prunes, 302n70 virtuosity, in concertos 201, 206, 215–16, 217, 218, 221, 228, 239, 240, 242, 245, 251, 316n86; in concertos, absence/refusals of, 205, 210, 212, 213exp, 215–16, 217, 218, 224, 225, 230, 239, 242, 310n35, 311n47; in Earthlight (Kim), 195–96; in funk, 30; in progressive rock, 141 Vivaldi, Antonio, 251, 252 Viva Soul (Averne), 279–80n95 Voices of East Harlem, 96 Voloshinov, V.N., 262n31 Vox Balaenae (Crumb), 195 “Wake Up Everybody” (Harold Melvin and the Blue Notes), 133, 134–35, 136

340  •   I n de x

Wake Up Everybody (Harold Melvin and the Blue Notes), 136 Waksman, Steve, 266n70, 266n75 Wald, Gayle, 281n2 Walker, George, 312n53, 318n107 Walser, Robert, 260n11, 316n80 “Warm” (Stromme), 80 Warner Brothers, 91 Washington, Dinah, 104 Washington, Larry, 123 Washington, Tom, 29 Watts 103rd Street Rhythm Band, 96 Webb, Jim, 71 Webern, Anton, 183, 184, 191, 230, 317n94 Welburn, Ron, 222, 231, 320n122 Welk, Lawrence, 70 “We’re a Winner” (the Impressions), 113–14 Wesley, Fred, 261n21, 268n101 Western art music, 1, 21, 171, 172–73, 186, 227–28, 241, 304n81; effects of jazz on, 319n113; late-modern, and questions of how to go on, 183–84; postwar, 15; role of Black music in, 229 “We’ve Only Just Begun” (the Carpenters), 69 “What’d I Say (Parts 1 and 2), (Charles), 94 Whatnauts, the, 94 “What’s Going On” (Gaye), 91, 96, 112–18, 119, 130, 135; dual lead vocal in, 116–17; experience of listening to, 115; Gaye’s overdubbing in, 115–16; message of, 118; sonic spaces and house-party aspects of, 114–15 What’s Going On (Gaye), 112–13 “When the Swallows Come Back to Capistrano,” 62–63 “When You Wake Up Tomorrow” (Staton), 143, 166, 168 White, Barry, 121 White, Fred, 29

White, Maurice, 29, 31, 32, 267n93 White, Verdine, 29, 30 Whitelaw, Reid, 278n73 “Whiter Shade of Pale” (the Dells), 64, 80 Whitfield, Norman, 95, 288n87 Whitney, Marva, 260n9 Whittall, Arnold, 241–42, 308–9n25, 309n29, 316n90, 318n104 “Who Says a Funk Band Can’t Play Rock” (Funkadelic), 8 Williams, Alan, 264n54 Williams, Otis, 288n87 Williams, Pat, 51, 278n72 Willis, Ellen, 141 Wilson, Olly, 227, 228–29, 230–234, 242, 313n60, 319–20n120, 320n124 Wire, 157, 300–301n61 “Wishbone” (Tantra), 155 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 26, 36, 269n112 Wittgenstein, Paul, 244 Woodward, Roger, 311n47 “World War Three” (Mason), 128 Wright, Amy Nathan, 7, 261n16 Wuorinen, Charles, 315nn75–76, 317n94 X, 157, 161 Xenakis, Iannis, 311–12n51 XTC, 157, 163 Yello, 163, 302n69 “Yellow Balloon” (Zekley), 70 You Could Be Born Again (Free Design), 49 “You Make Me Feel Brand New” (the Stylistics), 102–3, 104 “You’re My Best Friend” (Queen), 167 Zak, Albin, 54, 273n24, 273n29 Zawinul, Joe, 113 Zekley, Gary, 70–71 Zombies, the, 75

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