Recorded music : performance, culture and technology 9780521863094, 0521863090

Citation preview

Performance, Culture and Technology

Edited-by

Amanda Bayley 3 es

_

CONTENTS Introduction

AMANDA

BAYLEY

Part I. Recordings and their contexts The rise and rise of phonomusicology

sTEPHEN COTTRELI

Illusion and aura in the classical audio recording

PETER JOHNSON Ethical and cultural issues in the digitalera

ANDREW BLAKE

The changing functions of music recordings and listening practices

ADAM

KRIMS

Part II. The recording process Producing performance

JAMES BARRETT

Modi operandi in the making of ‘world music’ recordings JOHN

BAILY

i

Recording and the Rattle phenomenon

=

DAVID PATMORE

Jazz recordings and the capturing of performance PETER ELSDON =

Part III. Recordings as texts

Jazz recordings as social texts

CATHERINE TACKLEY

Recordings as research tools in ethnomusicology JONATHAN

P. J. STOCK

Multiple takes: using recordings to document creative process AMANDA

BAYLEY

The phonographic voice: paralinguistic features and phonographic staging in popular music singing. SERGE LACASSE The track

ALLAN

MOORE

Part IV. Sonic creations and re-creations

From sound to music, from recording to theory }OHN DACK Modes of appropriation: covers, remixes and mash-ups in contemporary popular music.

VIRGIL MOOREFIELD

Painting the sonic canvas: electronic mediation as musical style ALBIN

ZAK

III,

Epilogue: recording technology in the twenty-first century

TONY GIBBS Select bibliography

Select discography Select webography

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Recorded Music Performance, Culture and Technology

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Research in the area of recorded music is becoming increasingly diverse. Drawn together here are contributions from a variety of fields, including music performance, composition and production, cultural studies and philosophy, bringing contrasting perspectives to a range of music genres. Discourses in jazz, ethnomusicology and popular music — whose histories and practices have evolved principally from recordings — are presented alongside those of Western classical music, where analysis of recordings is a relatively recent development. Different methodologies have evolved in each éf these subdisciplines where recordings have been contextualised variously as tools, texts or processes, reflective of social practices. This book promotes the sharing of such differences of approach. Attitudes of performers are considered alongside social contexts, developments in technology and changing listening practices, to explore the ways in which recordings influence the study of music performance and the nature of musical experience.

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Recorded Music Performance, Culture and Technology Edited by AMANDA

BAYVEY

CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY

PRESS

CAMBRIDGE

UNIVERSITY

PRESS

Cambridge, New York, Melbourne, Madrid, Cape Town, Singapore, Sao Paulo, Delhi

Cambridge University Press

The Edinburgh Building, Cambridge CB2 8RU, UK Published in the United States of America by Cambridge University Press, New York www.cambridge.org Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9780521863094 © Cambridge University Press 2010

This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press. First published 2010 Printed in the United Kingdom at the University Press, Cambridge A catalogue record for this publication is available from the British Library

Library of Congress Cataloguing in Publication data Recorded music : performance, culture and technology / edited by Amanda Bayley. Pp. cm: Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-521-86309-4

1. Sound recordings — Social aspects. 2. Music - Social aspects. musicology. 4. Sound recordings — Production and direction. I. Bayley, Amanda. II. Title. ML3916.R43

3. Sound recordings in

2009

781.49-dce22

2009039349

ISBN 978-0-521-86309-4 Hardback Additional resources for this publication at www.cambridge.org/9780521863094 Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for external or third-party Internet websites referred to in this publication, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is,

or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

In loving memoryof my parents

a 7

S

ie © (

Contents

List of figures [page ix] List of examples [xi] List of tables

[xii]

Notes on contributors — [xiii]

Notes and acknowledgements _ [xviii] Introduction Amanda Bayley PARTI —"

[1]

RECORDINGS AND THEIR CONTEXTS

[13]

The rise and rise of phonomusicology Stephen Cottrell [15]

Illusion and aura in the classical audio recording Peter Johnson

[37]

Ethical and cultural issues in the digital era Andrew Blake

[52]

The changing functions of music recordings and listening practices Adam Krims

PART II

[68]

THE RECORDING

PROCESS’

[87]

Producing performance James Barrett

[89]

Modi operandi in the making of ‘world music’ recordings John Baily

[107]

Recording and the Rattle phenomenon David Patmore_

[125]

Jazz recordings and the capturing of performance Peter Elsdon

[146]

viii

Contents

PART III

RECORDINGS AS TEXTS

[165]

9 Jazz recordings as social texts Catherine Tackley

[167]

10 Recordings as research tools in ethnomusicology Jonathan P.J. Stock

[187]

11 Multiple takes: using recordings to document creative process Amanda Bayley

[206]

12 The phonographic voice: paralinguistic features and phonographic staging in popular music singing Serge Lacasse [225] 13 The track Allan Moore

PARTIV

[252]

SONIC CREATIONS AND RE-CREATIONS

[269]

14 From sound to music, from recording to theory John Dack

[271]

15 Modes of appropriation: covers, remixes and mash-ups in contemporary popular music Virgil Moorefield [291]

16 Painting the sonic canvas: electronic mediation as musical style Albin Zak III

[307]

Epilogue: recording technology in the twenty-first century Tony Gibbs

[325]

Select bibliography Select discography Select webography Index

[360]

[333] [353] [358]

Figures

,

1.1 i

13

A possible schematic representation of the relationship between musical practice and recording technology. [page 20] Melogram of Iranian vocal ornamentation. Taken from Margaret Caton, “The Vocal Ornament in Takiyah in Persian Music’, Selected Reports in Ethnomusicology 2/1 (1974), pp. 43-53. Provided courtesy of UCLA Ethnomusicology Publications, UC Regents. [25] Melogram of an extract from a Charlie Parker solo. Taken from Thomas Owens, ‘Applying the Melograph to “Parker’s Mood”’, Selected Reports in Ethnomusicology 2/1 (1974), pp. 167-75. Provided courtesy of UCLA Ethnomusicology Publications, UC Regents.

1.4

[26]

Spectral analysis of an extract from a piano performance by Myra Hess. Taken from Daniel Leech-Wilkinson, “Using Recordings to study Musical Performance’, in Andy Linehan (ed.), Aural History (London: The British Library, 2001), p.9.

Dal

[27]

George Formby performing in front of an HB microphone. Reproduced with kind permission from EMI music.

D.2 re)

[91]

The dual ribbon, binaural microphone developed by Alan Blumlein. Reproduced with kind permission from EMI music. [93] The screened-off area in Columbia’s 30th Street Studio with the

musicians preparing to record the Miles Davis Kind of Blue album. Reproduced with kind permission from Don Hunstein/Sony Music Photo Archives. 10.1

Beiguan musician You Xijin (left) and the author (photo: C. Chou).

102

[97]

[189]

Musicians from the Baifushequ troupe playing suona (photo: J. P.J. Stock).

[195]

12.1

Beijing opera singer Zhou Xinfang from a CD reissue. Spectrogram of Tori Amos, “97 Bonnie and Clyde’

LZ.2

Spectrogram of Tori Amos, °97 Bonnie and Clyde’

10.3

(0'12”-0'24"). (4'36"-4'45").

[232] [236]

[198]

List offigures

12.3.

Spectrogram of Alanis Morissette, “Your House’

(7'28"-7'35"). 12.4

Spectrogram of Alanis Morissette, “Your House’

(7'35"-7'40"). 14.1

[238]

TARTYP.

[240]

From Pierre Schaeffer, Traité des objets musicaux

(Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1966), p. 459.

[279]

Examples

8.1(a)

8.1(b)

8.2

‘Chasin’ the Trane’, ‘|November 1961, Village Vanguard Copyright © 1977, renewed 2005, Jowcol Music, used by permission. [page 151] ‘Chasin’ the Trane’, 2 November 1961, Village Vanguard Copyright © 1977, renewed 2005, Jowcol Music, used by permission. [151] ‘Chasin’ Another Trane’, 2 November 1961, Village Vanguard Copyright © 1977, renewed 2005, Jowcol Music, used by

permission. 8.3

permission. 8.4(a)

5

[155]

‘Chasin’ the Trane’, Copenhagen, 22 November 1962. Copyright © 1977, renewed 2005, Jowcol Music, used by permission.

8.4(b)

[152]

First chorus from available post-1961 recordings. Copyright © 1977, renewed 2005, Jowcol Music, used by

[156]

‘Chasin’ the Trane’, Paris, 1 November 1963. Copyright © 1977, renewed 2005, Jowcol Music, used by permission.

10.1

Qi cun lian in gongche notation.

[157]

[193]

10.2

Qi cun lian in staff notation.

10.3

A four-line aria by Zhou Xinfang.

Lit

Opening of Michael Finnissy’s Second String Quartet. Copyright © 2007, Michael Finnissy, used by permission. Ben Folds Five: ‘Don’t change your plans for me’. [262]

13.1

[194] [199]

[215]

Tables

a

Sir Simon Rattle: volume of annual recordings 1981-6

8.1

1961 recordings of “Chasin’ the Trane’

8.2

Post-1961 recordings of “Chasin’ the Trane’

Malik

[154]

Sources of information relating to Michael Finnissy’s Second String Quartet

Lak

[page 138]

[150]

[213]

Phonographic staging effects in Peter Gabriel, ‘Darkness’

(027.4

aes

Notes on contributors

JOHN BAILY is Professor of Ethnomusicology and Head of the Afghanistan Music Unit at Goldsmiths, University of London. He holds doctorates in experimental psychology (1970) and ethnomusicology (1988) and is also a

graduate in ethnographic film making of the UK’s National Film and Television School. He has worked extensively on music in Afghanistan and in the Afghan diaspora since 1973 and has many publications, including CDs and DVDs. His report ‘Can you Stop the Birds Singing?’ The Censorship of Music in Afghanistan was published by Freemuse in 2001. Since then he has visited Kabul several timeS to assist with the regeneration of music in the post-Taliban era. He is also a performer and teacher of music from Afghanistan, playing the rubab and dutar lutes. JAMES BARRETT originally worked in hospital pathology obtaining Fellow of the Institute of Medical Laboratory Sciences status. He then gained a BSc (Hons) in music technology from London Guildhall University and set up BTEC courses at South Thames College. Moving to the University of Glamorgan he introduced Degree, HND, FdSc and Masters Courses in music technology and sound technology and is now Head of the Division of Music and Sound for the Cardiff School of Creative and Cultural Industries. He is a Director of the Music Producers Guild.

AMANDA BAYLEY is Reader in Performing Arts at the University of Wolverhampton. She completed her PhD on Bartok performance studies at the University of Reading (1996). She is editor of The Cambridge Companion to Bartok (2001) and has published on twentieth-century string quartets and Berio’s Sequenza VI for viola. She was awarded a Visiting Edison Fellowship at the British Library Sound Archive (2000-1) and was President of the Society for Music Analysis

(2004-8). In addition to analysing recordings, her research interests include issues of performance and analysis, ethnomusicology, and exploring the relationship between composer and performer. She is

xiv

Notes on contributors

currently leading a British Academy-funded research project with the Kreutzer Quartet and Michael Finnissy. ANDREW BLAKE. is Associate Dean, School of Humanities and Social Sciences at the University of East London. For a while in the 1980s he was a professional saxophonist. His writings include The Music Business (1992), The Land Without Music (1997), the edited collection Living

through Pop (1999) and Popular Music: the Age of Multimedia (2007), alongside numerous articles including a contribution to The Cambridge History of Twentieth Century Music (2004). He has also written on sport, consumer culture and fiction; his book The Irresistible Rise of Harry Potter (2002) has been translated into five languages. STEPHEN COTTRELL is Head of the Department of Music at Goldsmiths, University of London. His academic research is particularly concerned with ethnomusicological approaches to Western art music, his monograph, Professional Music-Making in London, published by Ashgate in 2004. He has contributed to a range of other publications, including The British Journal of Ethnomusicology, Ethnomusicology and twentieth-century music. He is an associate editor of the latter, and artistic director of the record label Saxophone Classics. As a performer he has released several CDs of contemporary music, both as a soloist and previously as the leader of the Delta Saxophone Quartet. He is presently completing a monograph on the saxophone for Yale University Press. JOHN

DACK

is Senior

Research

Electronic

Art,

Middlesex

University

(BA,

MA,

PhD),

Fellow

University. City

at the Lansdown

He

University

studied

at

(PGDip,

Centre

for

Middlesex MSc)

and

Goldsmiths College, University of London (MMus). His research has appeared in chapters and articles published by Harwood Academic Publishers, Laaber-Verlag, Transcript Verlag, Ashgate and Harmattan, and in the Journal of New Music Research and Organised Sound. Current research areas are history, theory and analysis of electroacoustic music; the music and works of the Groupe de recherches musicales; serial thought; and ‘open’ forms in music. PETER ELSDON is Lecturer in Music at the University of Hull, where he teaches music technology, jazz and popular music. He completed his doctorate at the University of Southampton on the solo piano improvisations of Keith Jarrett. He has published work on the music of Keith Jarrett and John Coltrane, and is working on a project on the

Notes on contributors

Icelandic rock band Sigur Ros. He works in his spare time as a jazz musician in the Yorkshire region. TONY GIBBs

is an author, photographer, sound engineer and lecturer on

sound art. He was a founder member (with Andrew Deakin and John

Dack) of Middlesex University’s pioneering BA Sonic Arts programme and has been its leader since 2002. In addition to a number of papers on sound and art, he has recently written one of the first introductory books on the subject: Foundations of Sonic Arts and Sound Design (AVA Books, 2007). Current projects include research for a projected work on creative applications of sound in the pre-electronic era with particular reference to landscape, architecture and culture. SERGE LACASSE

is Associate Professor at Laval University in Quebec City

where he teaches popular music theory and history. Serge is a member of both Le Centre de recherche interuniversitaire sur la littérature et la culture québécoises (CRILCQ) and Observatoire mternational de la création et des cultures musicales (OICCM). He is on the editorial board for Les Cahiers de la SQRM (Société québécoise de recherche en musique) and was the French editor for Intersections: a Canadian Musical Review

from 2002 to 2006. Favouring an interdisciplinary approach, his research projects deal with many aspects of recorded popular music. He recently co-edited (with Patrick Roy) Groove. Enquéte sur les phénomenes musicaux contemporains (Quebec: Presses du l'Université Laval, 2006)

and has published many scientific book chapters and articles. PETER JOHNSON is Professor of Music at the Birmingham Conservatoire (Birmingham City University). His Oxford DPhil was on Webern, and more recently he has published extensively on both the aesthetics and analysis of performance. He has developed purpose-built software for the analysis of recordings, and at Birmingham has pioneered the development of doctoral programmes, including performance as integral to research.

ADAM KRIMS is Professor of Music Analysis at the University of Nottingham. He specialises in music theory, urban geography and the political economy of music recordings. His most recent book is Music and Urban Geography (Routledge, 2007).

ALLAN MOORE is Professor of Popular Music at the University of Surrey. His work in popular music has produced four sole-authored books, three edited collections, and more than thirty book chapters and articles. He

Notes on contributors

appears from time to time on BBC Radio and TV as a popular music critic, and has contributed to various filmed documentaries, most particularly on the Beatles. He is a founder member of the Critical Musicology Forum, is founding co-editor of twentieth-century music and is on the editorial board of Popular Music. MOOREFIELD is Associate Professor of Music at the University of VIRGIL Michigan, Ann Arbor, a composer, percussionist and author. His most recent CD, Things You Must Do to Get to Heaven (2007), is available on

Innova Records. A companion work, The Temperature in Hell is Over 3,000 Degrees, is available on Tzadik, and his Distractions on the Way to the King’s Party was released by Cuneiform. A collaborative intermedia work, Chicago Union Station, was presented at the International Computer Music Conference in Miami (2004) and a collaborative CD,

The Emily XYZ Songbook, appeared on Rattapallax in 2005. His book, The Producer as Composer, was published by MIT Press in 2005. As a

drummer, Moorefield has worked with numerous rock and avant-garde artists, including Glenn Branca and Swans.

DAVID PATMORE’S research interests focus on commercial and cultural interactions within the history of the recording industry. His work has been funded by the Economic and Social Research Council and by the Arts and Humanities Research Council. Based at the University of Sheffield, he is currently a Research Fellow at the Centre for the History and Analysis of Recorded Music (CHARM). He has been reviewing and writing about recordings for over twenty-five years and has contributed to numerous consumer magazines and academic journals. He is the author of The A-Z of Conductors, published in 2007 by Naxos Records. JONATHAN P.J. STOCK is editor of the journal The World of Music, and Professor in Ethnomusicology at the University of Sheffield where he directs the Centre for Applied and Interdisciplinary Research in Music. He currently chairs the Arts and Humanities Research Council funding panel for research in the performing arts. His books include World Sound Matters: an Anthology of Music from Around the World (London, 1996), Musical Creativity in Twentieth-Century China: Abing, His Music, and Its Changing Meanings (Rochester, NY, 1996), and Huju: Traditional Opera in Modern Shanghai (Oxford, 2003). His primary research concerns the transformation of traditional musics under the impact of the modern world in China and Taiwan but he also has active interests in music education, English traditions, the history of ethnomusicology and intercultural music.

Notes on contributors

CATHERINE

TACKLEY

is Lecturer in Music at the Open University,

following several years as Head of the Centre for Jazz Studies UK at Leeds College of Music. She completed a doctorate on early jazz in Britain at City University, London and her book The Evolution of Jazz in Britain, 1880-1935 was published by Ashgate in 2005. She is editor of the Jazz Research Journal (Equinox) and a member of the editorial board of Studies in Musical

Theatre

(Intellect). She was awarded

a prestigious

Visiting Edison Fellowship at the British Library Sound Archive for 2006-7 and is currently writing a book on the performance history and practices of Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue. ALBIN ZAK 111 holds degrees in composition and performance from the New England Conservatory, Boston, Massachusetts and a doctorate in musicology from the City University of New York. His research specialisms are popular music studies and the history of soundrecording. He is the author of The Poetics of Rock: Cutting Tracks, Making Records (University of California Press, 2001), and editor of The Velvet Underground Companion: Four Decades of Commentary (Schirmer, 1997). He is currently working on a book entitled I Don’t

Sound Like Nobody’: Remaking Music in 1950s America (University of Michigan Press).

Notes and acknowledgements

Timings of recordings are referred to using the symbol for minutes and for seconds. Audio extracts for chapters 5, 10, 11, 14 and 16 are located on the website

for the book: www.cambridge.org/recordedmusic. Iam grateful to a number of people who have helped in the production of this book, not least of whom are the contributors themselves. Members of staff at the British Library Sound Archive have been exceptionally helpful: in particular I had many inspiring conversations with Tim Day (former classical music curator) that influenced a number of decisions made during the planning stages. Nicholas Cook, director of the Arts and Humanities Research Council’s Research Centre for the History and Analysis of Recorded Music (CHARM) from 2004 to 2009, kindly agreed to host audio extracts relating to specific chapters of this book on the CHARM website which were expertly organised by Carol Chan. This is now under the aegis of Kings College, London, so my thanks extend to Daniel LeechWilkinson and to staff at the Centre for Computing in the Humanities. I owe special thanks to Chris Foster for his assistance with citations and sources and for his astute academic observations, as well as to Julie Locke,

for her help with the index and her critical eye. Iam grateful to Vicki Cooper and Becky Jones at Cambridge University Press for their encouragement and advice which has helped to bring this project to fruition.

Introduction AMANDA

BAYLEY

*

Since the beginning of the twentieth century the recorded artefact has undergone considerable transformation. Developments in technology have ushered in ever-new forms of sound reproduction, which have led from the acoustic to the electric, and from analogue to digital recording. The cylinder phonograph has given way to the vinyl record and cassette tape and, more recently, the compact disc (CD) and digital tape are beginning to cede to the intangible, downloadable file. This technological progression has been paralleled by an increase in the accessibility of themachines on which the artefact or sound file is played back. Economic and social factors driving these developments have largely determined the changing role that recorded music has played in our everyday lives over the last hundred years. In this volume, rather than providing a history or chronology of recordings in relation to technology (a number of books already trace this fascinating story),' they are considered from various sociological, philosophical and musicological standpoints. Some important questions arising from these different perspectives include: who are recordings made for? What do recordings tell us about a performance? How do we listen to recordings? What are we actually hearing when we listen to recordings? How are live recordings different from studio recordings? How do these differences vary from artist to artist? How do we analyse what we hear? What do recordings show us about how musicians teach and learn? What can we learn from historical recordings? These questions and more are explored through this collection of essays which display a range of strategies for engaging with recordings. With a view to appealing to a wide readership, these strategies extend from informative approaches surveying a broad subject area to specific case studies on discrete topics.

This book presents some of the increasingly diverse research currently being undertaken in the field of recorded music and attempts to redress the balance between theory and practice, methodology and application, and technological means and knowledge. From the varying contexts in which recordings are listened to by music lovers, performers, teachers, composers

Amanda Bayley

and musicologists, it is important to evaluate the purpose they serve; the way they have been used in the past; how they are used now; what meanings they have; and how they are written about. In addressing these issues the book could have been structured according to genre but this would have perpetuated a division between subdisciplines already evident from studies of recordings.” As an alternative, chapters are broadly organised within thematic areas so that different genres are represented in each section, in order to promote new correlations between conventionally separate disciplines. When studying music as recorded sound, the concepts of process, product, text, context and creativity are inevitably fluid, and even controversial, often being interpreted differently for different genres. The reader is therefore warned against interpreting the section headings of the book too narrowly: some chapters could be placed in more than one location and a different ordering of chapters and sections would be equally viable. There are various paths that might be taken through the text, often guided by the consideration of concepts across genres; these are either identified below or indicated by cross-references in the main text or in endnotes. Since this book is not intended to be all encompassing (radio, television and film being significantly under-represented) readers are urged to explore further connections for themselves. Given the varied economic and social factors surrounding different music genres, each has tended to establish its own approach to recordings as tools, as texts or as processes, reflective of social practices. Yet traversing these

boundaries can provide fresh insights into different repertoire, the attitudes of performers, ways of listening and methods of analysis which all contribute to our understanding of recordings as musicological documents. For example, the study of recorded sound in Western classical music — which has only recently emerged from a paradigm shift away from notated scores — can share with and learn from ethnomusicology, jazz and popular music whose histories and practices have evolved principally from recordings.” Stephen Cottrell’s opening chapter indeed critiques the disciplinary nature of recordings within musicology, providing an academic framework that encapsulates the specific directions taken in this volume. He explores the relationships between process and product, proposing a model for articulating the association between recording technology, musical performance and creativity for different genres. Intersecting these three areas are the underlying cultural attitudes, social contexts and changing listening practices that form important subtexts to the book, as outlined below.

The history of recording technology has itself instigated different functions for recordings. At the beginning of the twentieth century, parallel to the use of

Introduction

the phonograph as a source of entertainment which fuelled an industry in popular culture, ‘as a tool [it] expanded the range, focus, and methods of academic engagement with the scientific study of culture’ thus fulfilling a significant role in preserving oral traditions.’ This role is represented by John Baily and Jonathan Stock, who demonstrate how ethnomusicologists have used recordings as a primary resource to inform their studies of non-Western and Western cultures, and by Amanda Bayley, who develops this functionality in relation to contemporary music. In their respective contexts Stock and Bayley illustrate the importance of recordings as tools for documenting field research whose full potential is still to be recognised. The evolution of oral music traditions has been strongly influenced by the role of recordings in enabling performers to hear what they have sung or played. Stock’s investigation of recordings as research tools in ethnomusicology exemplifies the field research methodology that Baily promotes to improve our understanding of the nature of music and its role in society. Drawing upon his experiences Stock examines the various functions of recordings at each stage of a research project and how they can subsequently be evaluated and interpreted. Extending this research beyond the boundaries of established oral traditions, Bayley makes a case for adopting an ethnographic approach to recordings more widely, arguing for a redefinition of what the end product represents beyond the artefact as simply the outcome of performance. The function of recordings as research tools rests on an obvious yet crucial attribute — their repeatability - which allows the immediate (or distant) past to be revisited and re-evaluated, and which has had, and continues to have, significant ramifications for music scholarship, pedagogy and the recording industry. The ‘regressive listening’ practices that result from listening repeatedly to the same recordings have been widely documented and are re-assessed by the film-maker, writer and teacher, Michael Chanan.° The problematic nature of this negative charge, originating from the writings of German philosopher Theodor W. Adorno, has recently been recognised by Eric Clarke: Though he briefly touches on jazz listeners, Adorno’s analysis is premised entirely on the values and practices of the Western art music tradition, infused with a deep pessimism about the totalizing domination of the culture industry and the falseconsciousness of its ‘victims.’ ... An engagement with music’s social content and context, with its ideological allegiances, and with the cultural work that it performs, are conspicuously absent from any of the listening categories that he describes.°

The following pages attempt to address some of these shortcomings. For example, from a historical perspective, recordings have served as informative,

Amanda Bayley

educational tools: the gramophone had a basic role in education in the 1920s, providing practical assistance for the study of subjects such as music, modern languages, shorthand and typewriting. Recordings have continued to aid beginners learning to play an instrument or to sing (whether in their own or other cultures - as Stock describes) but they have also acquired a more prominent status as texts, which have proved particularly inspirational for players, students, teachers and musicologists. Learning to play from recordings is an area of contention for score-based musical traditions. The pianist, Peter Hill, warns that a recording can all too

easily become a ‘lazy shortcut’ for learning a piece of music: ‘simply copying the way others play is an admission that what we have to offer is second rate’.’ He advises that the study of recordings ‘should be kept to a later stage of study when one is better placed to make an independent critical assessment’.® Some pedagogic practices, however, promote learning the notes from a recording (rather than from a score). For jazz, Gabriel Solis has

explained that recordings: are important because people learn to play from them, because people earn some portion of their living from them, and because they constitute resources of a shared past — resources which are used in various contexts to construct social or collective memories.”

Used in the appropriate way recordings are valuable study documents: for example, David Patmore draws upon interview evidence from performers, critics and record producers who have worked closely with Sir Simon Rattle,

to reveal the different functions that recordings can serve for a professional conductor; and, in a jazz context, Catherine Tackley shows how recordings contribute towards determining a history of performance. She engages with the concept of recordings as texts in relation to a history of jazz that has essentially been defined by recordings. She argues strongly for greater consideration to be given to the contextualisation of these recordings, from the position of listeners and other musicians contemporary with the recorded performances. Focusing on iconic contributions to the jazz canon (the Original Dixieland Jazz Band and Miles Davis) she shows how specific

recordings are able to influence perceptions of jazz when evaluated in different ways. Adopting an alternative stance, Peter Elsdon argues that ‘canonic’ jazz recordings render the concept of recordings as ‘texts’ problematic, especially when considering live as opposed to studio recordings. With detailed reference to John Coltrane’s work he shows how performances represented by recordings act as a window on to the ever-changing performance traditions of

Introduction

a musician or group of musicians. He cultivates a critical awareness of the social and technical forces involved in the recording process in order to discover more about what a recording actually represents, rather than the image that it appears to construct. At the beginning of the section on the recording process, James Barrett lays the foundations not only for the other essays in that section but also for the last section of the book, sonic creations and re-creations: the reader may indeed prefer to read this last section as a continuation of the second. * Barrett investigates the way in which the production process presents the recording within an aurally encoded cultural context, exploring the extent to which this is either dictated by the technology or chosen by the producer. He traces the non-linear process of technological development through examples that relate to the areas of interest covered in the rest of the book. He demonstrates how the role of a producer depends in part on the music genre but also identifies conventions of representation that appear to cross repertoires. The listener's perception is influenced by the record producer; the created virtual space encodes the producer’s cultural assumptions within acoustic phenomena. Examples of these acoustic phenomena are presented in extracts on the website for this book which can be found at www.cambridge.org/recordedmusic. The other three chapters in this section detail the artistic rather than the engineering perspectives on production: in addition to jazz (represented by Elsdon), case studies from classical and world music reveal the implications that the production process has for commercial and academic viability. Patmore explores the specific relationship between producer and orchestral conductor, evaluating Rattle’s role in the recording process as well as the significance of the resulting recorded product for the subsequent success of the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra. As with other chapters that potentially span different sections of the book, its content reveals as much about the information recordings provide as texts as about the recording process itself. Rattle’s insistence on recording in a concert situation (or at least after numerous concert performances of a work) resonates with the ‘incontext’ recordings that Baily describes (following John Blacking’s definitions) for ethnomusicologists, as opposed to a ‘test’ (or ‘out-of-context’) recording in which a piece is performed solely for recording purposes, often in a studio. Musicians have been able to learn from the different experiences that a studio and a concert hall offer but there are a number of contentious issues regarding the relationship between the two. Many artists work in both spheres, from which they can benefit in different ways, often having personal preferences; yet Glenn Gould famously rejected the concert platform

Amanda Bayley

in order to pursue his career in the recording studio. He described recorded ‘live’ performances as ‘events which straddle two worlds and are at home in neither’.'° The distinction between a recorded (live) performance and a studio

recording has an interesting historical precedent in the early nineteenthcentury pianistic culture where an analogous polarity existed between the work-as-performance and the work-as-text.'’ This association between the act of performing and the object, or documentation, of performance remains intriguing and sometimes contentious. For example, the extent to which live recordings allow access to social interaction between musicians

and audience (advocated by Peter Elsdon but disputed by Peter Johnson) sparks a debate to be continued beyond these pages. Here, the distinction between a recorded performance and a studio recording invites a reevaluation of illusion and aura such as that provided by Peter Johnson and Andrew Blake. Johnson considers the social function of recordings of Western art music from a philosophical perspective, arguing that they should be valued not as copies or imitations of live performance but as a distinct and valuable medium for the propagation of music. Recordings in general create a simulation of live sound in order to promote the live event and/or document it for wide circulation. For example Patmore reports how recordings can increase audience expectations, even though, from a conductor’s perspective, they are only a means to an end and should not be a substitute for live performance. However, for popular music, Allan Moore selects examples (of John Lennon in 1967 and King Crimson in 1969) to

show how recording no longer functions to publicise a live performance or to disseminate it, but becomes the end in itself: live performance became subsidiary to recording when, during the 1970s, tours began to serve the function of advertising recordings, the profits from which subsidised the costs of live performance. Additionally, owing to the manipulation of timbre and location that took place in the studio, it became impossible to reproduce the same sound in a live performance. Johnson’s argument for the proliferation of music through recordings is further strengthened when extending the context to include Baily’s examination of recordings of non-Western cultures, which shows how their widespread distribution has subsequently had an impact on the recording industry. Through a survey of the history of world music recordings, and reflections on his own field and studio recordings, Baily encourages ethnomusicologists to examine their own activities in relation to the creation of numerous musical hybrids in the recording studios of the West. He highlights the different functions of recordings according to the differing

Introduction

agendas and priorities of ethnomusicologists and producers, and exposes the issues surrounding the new contexts and meanings to which their projects give rise.

During the last hundred years the recorded medium has enabled ethnomusicologists to develop sophisticated descriptive notations that have only recently led to progressive research in other genres. For popular music and jazz, where the use of prescriptive notation is minimal or non-existent, transcriptions have proved t6 be a valuable method for analysing performance,'~ and are often supplemented or superseded by spectrum or frequency analysis (as discussed by Cottrell). Serge Lacasse undertakes such an

analysis — in this case of recorded popular vocal music —- as a means of exploring the interaction between the subtleties of expressive vocal performance and the recording process. He shows how paralinguistic features of the recorded voice contribute to the mediation of emotions and then explores how, in the context of a recording, these vocal performances are phonographically staged through different technologieal parameters. His interdisciplinary approach, aided by spectrograms, refines the processes for analysing the expressive, timbral subtleties in the singing of Tori Amos, Alanis Morissette and Peter Gabriel. Moore explains how timbre and other techniques of sound manipulation are akin to the development techniques of notated music. He examines the working practices of producers and the role they play in creating the ‘track’ which has come to replace the more conventional popular song, constituting harmony, melody and lyric. The studio came to be preferred to the live venue because of its compositional resources. Sonic landscapes are considered by Albin Zak for rock and roll music where producers experimented freely with technologies of sound-recording and manipulation. His chapter traces the historical development of electronic mediation techniques as elements of a creative process that encompasses musical ideas, musical actions and sound sculpting, which subsequently influence musical style. Exploring the increasingly blurred division between composer and producer, Virgil Moorefield provides a means of understanding the technological processes involved in the re-creative acts that result in covers, remixes and mash-ups. He shows how a particular song may be rendered into a different form, its sound designed in response to current musical fashion. The argument for the value of listening to covers against one another resonates with the production of multiple versions proposed by Bayley and encourages a new level of creativity in performance, though this in itself is not a new proposition.’ This new dimension to creativity brings with it problems of its own: Blake examines the threat that copying — in the

Amanda Bayley

form of internet technologies and file-sharing — brings to the recording industry. He exposes the legal, cultural and ethical debates surrounding the global use of different formats. The new interactions facilitated by digital technology require reconsideration of the concepts of place and genre as well as a redefinition of music itself. Eric Clarke has observed that ‘the preoccupation with creativity in performance in the Western tradition is the result of a specific aesthetic outlook, and (in more recent times) commercial pressures’.’* Compared with

the improvised traditions to which Clarke refers, the examples provided by Moore, Zak and Moorefield show how creativity has been facilitated by recording technology to an extent that brings into question the whole notion of ‘performance’. To emphasise his point Clarke gives examples of ‘other [that is, non-Western] musical traditions in which the preservation of identity is the overwhelming imperative’, explaining that there is ‘a tendency to overlook these because of the concentration on music as art, rather than music as it is involved in a whole variety of other social functions’.'” Placing side by side essays that focus on different genres helps to draw attention to the characteristics that Clarke highlights. At the outset the distinction between creativity and identity is accommodated by Cottrell’s grid (mentioned earlier) in relation to performance and technology. While commercial pressures, symptomatic of Western capitalist society, can be

identified as partly responsible for a preoccupation with creativity in performance, they are also responsible for the commodification of music leading to recordings being regarded as fashion accessories. Adam Krims broadens the context of recorded music by considering a variety of its social functions interpreted in relation to fashion and in relation to place. He investigates the impact of the design of sound in social spaces. With design emerging as a major cultural and economic goal, he argues that the spatial and temporal aspects of musical recording fuse with other poetic aspects of built social space, whether interior retail space, the privacy of a car or the descriptive landscapes of television drama. Krims opens up these new lines of enquiry regarding shared or individual listening practices in the first section of the book, although changing listening practices that result from the different ways in which recordings are consumed and manipulated appear consistently throughout, either explicitly or implicitly. Within the last section John Dack presents Pierre Schaeffer’s theories which originate from studio practices of the 1960s and encourage all musicians to ‘hear better’. Dack shows a way in which recording technology led to thinking embodied in electroacoustic compositional practice. In this context, where recording assumes the central role in the compositional

Introduction

process, the listening conditions of repeated aural analysis are responsible for new theoretical concepts for sound description and classification that can be more broadly applied to contemporary music. Dack demonstrates the potential of Schaeffer’s theories for pursuing further directions in music analysis. Schaeffer’s idea of ‘reduced listening’ (whereby the listener perceives the sound for its own sake, as an object isolated from its source) lies at the opposite end of the spectrunf from the location and design of sound in space explored by Krims, although new contexts can also dissociate sounds from their original sources. Each extreme mode of listening contributes to the concept of the autonomy of recordings, another theme that runs through the book, sometimes viewed positively and sometimes negatively. The sociologist Simon Frith has acknowledged that ‘the twentieth-century threat to musical autonomy is not the rise of mass music ... but the development of recording technology’.'® For popular music, as is often the case with jazz and traditional or non-Western musics, courtesy of the recorded medium, ‘there can be “a specific performance which constitutes the work””.'” Where performance is surpassed by production practices, however, the separation between creation and re-creation is dissolved and the ontological status of recording changes from being a product to a process of transformation. Technology is responsible for altering the relationship between composer, performer and producer, which continues to need redefining in an age where the consumer can be all three. Recording can be used as an object of re-creation, returning to the idea of decontextualising sound advocated by Schaeffer, or, alternatively, recontextualising sound. The analysis of sound has much to offer developments in the musicology of recordings because of its attributes that notation cannot capture. Rather than being in any way conclusive, this collection of essays aims to inspire ongoing investigation into the complex relationships between sounds, contexts and meanings. Future applications and implications of recording technology in the twenty-first century, presented in the epilogue by Tony Gibbs, can be merely speculative, the only certainty being that the everchanging relationship between performance, culture and technology will remain in a fascinating state of high flux.

Notes

1. For example, Michael Chanan, Repeated Takes: a Short History of Recording and its Effects on Music (London: Verso, 1995); Pekka Gronow and IIlpo Saunio, An

International History of the Recording Industry (London and New York: Cassell,

10

Amanda Bayley 1998); Erika Brady, A Spiral Way: How the Phonograph Changed Ethnography (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1999); Timothy Day, A Century of Recorded Music: Listening to Musical History (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2000). . Different genres of music tend to attract different audiences so this division between disciplines is somewhat inevitable. For example, articles on jazz recordings tend either to appear in books devoted to jazz — such as Jed Rasula, “The Media of Memory: the Seductive Menace of Records in Jazz History’, in Krin Gabbard

(ed.), Jazz among

the Discourses

(Durham

and

London:

Duke

University Press, 1995), pp. 134-62 - or in journals dedicated to jazz. Exceptions to this trend include Gabriel Solis’s article, “A Unique Chunk of Jazz Reality”: Authorship, Musical Work Concepts, and Thelonious Monk’s Live Recordings from the Five Spot, 1958’, unusually published in a journal of a different discipline - Ethnomusicology 48/3 (2004), pp. 315-47 - and Evan Eisenberg’s book, The Recording Angel: Music, Records and Culture from Aristotle to Zappa, 2nd edn (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2005), which juxtaposes performance and listening practices and aesthetic contexts for all musical genres. . Robert Philip’s landmark book Early Recordings and Musical Style: Changing Tastes in Instrumental Performance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992) is widely recognised for having directed musicology towards studies of recordings rather than just scores. A recent manifestation of this development is evident from the Arts and Humanities Research Council Research Centre for the History and Analysis of Recorded Music (CHARM) directed by Nicholas Cook at Royal Holloway, University of London (www.charm.rhul.ac.uk/index. html) (last accessed 26 June 2009).

4. Brady, A Spiral Way, p. 2

. Michael Chanan, “The Microphone and Interpretation’, in Repeated Takes, pp. 116-36. See also Lee Brown, ‘Phonography, Repetition and Spontaneity’, Philosophy and Literature 24 (2000), pp. 111-25; and Theodor W. Adorno, ‘On the Fetish Character of Music and the Regression of Listening’ [Uber den Fetischcharakter in der Musik und die Regression des Hérens’], Zeitschrift fiir Sozialforschung 7 (1938), reprinted in J.M. Bernstein (ed.), The Culture Industry: Selected Essays on Mass Culture (London and New York: Routledge,

1991), pp. 29-60. . Eric F. Clarke, Ways of Listening: an Ecological Approach to the Perception of Musical Meaning (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), p. 142. . Peter Hill ‘From Score to Sound’, in John Rink (ed.), Musical Performance: a

Guide to Understanding (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), p. 133.

. Ibid., p. 143, n. 5. Solis:

cee

A Unique Chunk of Jazz Reality”, p. 343.

10. Tim Page (ed.), The Glenn

p. 340.

Gould Reader (London: Faber and Faber, 1984),

Introduction

Ale See Jim Samson,

“The Practice of Early-Nineteenth-Century Pianism’, in

Michael Talbot (ed.), The Musical Work: Reality or Invention? 12s

1:

14. i: 16.

(Liverpool:

Liverpool University Press, 2000), p. 112. See for example Peter Winkler, “Writing Ghost Notes: the Poetics and Politics of Transcription’, in David Schwarz, Anahid Kassabian and Lawrence Siegel (eds.), Keeping Score: Music, Disciplinarity, Culture (Charlottesville and London: University Press of Virginia, 1997), pp. 169-203; Philip Tagg, ‘Analysing Popular Music: Theory, Method, and Practice’, in Richard Middleton (ed.), Reading Pop: Approaches to Textual Analysis in Popular Music (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), pp. 71-103; and Fernando Benadon, ‘Slicing the Beat: Jazz Eighth-Notes as Expressive Microrhythm’, Ethnomusicology 50/1 (2006), pp. 73-97. In 1984 Daniel Leech-Wilkinson made a plea for ‘a greater freedom of approach, for more wide-ranging experiments’ in the interpretation of music, in his article, “What we are Doing with Early Music is Genuinely Authentic to such a Small Degree that the Word Loses Most of its Intended Meaning’, Early Music 12/1 (1984), p. 15. Eric F. Clarke, ‘Creativity in Performance’, Music Scientice 19/1 (2005), p. 158. Ibid., original emphasis. Simon Frith, ‘Adam Smith and Music’, in Taking Popular Music Seriously: Selected Essays (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007), p. 285 (originally published in New Formations 18 (1992), p. 77).

We Ibid.

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Now digital recording is cheap and available to everybody. You can buy a small, portable, digital studio for £2-300. Computer technology has obviously made that much more accessible to everybody. And it is the level of quality, the quality that you can achieve with digital recording is what we used to really aim for 25 years ago, 30 years ago as the professional standard.*®

Returning to ‘First Cut is the Deepest’, the recently released version by Sheryl Crow (2003) exemplifies the complex multisurface of digital productions, with each musical element built from a number of takes.*? The musical structure follows that of the Rod Stewart version rather than that of Cat Stevens but the arrangement is fuller throughout: strings appear in the second phrase and are featured from the second verse with the vocal and guitar solo multilayered. The sound of the drums in the chorus following the solo section is particularly striking: the producer has borrowed a technique from dance music production, heavily filtering the sound of the musical backing to shrink it back prior to the climactic out-verse. The following comments by producers illustrate their ambivalence towards the effects of digital technology. Tony Platt explains how ‘things have changed beyond recognition. Technology has moved so incredibly quickly’ as a consequence of which, Haydn Bendall acknowledges that ‘there are a lot of people making records ... who wouldn’t have been able to twenty or thirty years ago’” Yet both Platt and Bendall agree that certain ‘basic principles [such as] the importance of the musician, the artist and the performance haven't changed at all’.°' Platt continues: ‘the most significant negative is the extension of choice [which] has led people into ... deferring decisions ... choice escalates to a point where it’s too much to contend with’.°? Whereas tape-based technology limited the number of tracks that could be recorded, track counts of well over a hundred are common

for

popular music productions, and vocal performances are often compiled from around twenty or more separate takes. The plummeting budgets within an industry increasingly challenged both by alternative sources of cultural identity for the consumers of its product, and the freedom afforded by more compact and mobile equipment, have

101

102

James Barrett

influenced professional working practices. Several professional producers now use home-based studios for some of their work while others take mobile technology to the performer’s home.’ The same low-cost, small-scale equipment and systems are used by increasing numbers of aspiring producers to record themselves and their friends, or to construct home productions from ready-made samples for micto-scale dissemination on duplicated CDs. It is this leisure identity of the producer that has enabled the mass market necessary for the development of digital equipment so that professional systems become spin-offs from the self-financed consumer. Like paint in tubes, software sound processors and sampled sounds themselves have been made so manipulable that the skill thresholds required for artistic production are within the reach of the private enthusiast while the desire to be technologically involved in music has grown. Whereas passive listeners to the phonograph were once content to bring the concert hall into their homes, and might engage in music as amateur players, now the strong desire to feel part of the music, coupled with the exchange of mouse-manipulating skills for traditional motor skills, creates a new practice of productive consumption, the consequences of which are discussed by Virgil Moorefield in this volume. Notes

1. See for example, Kate Lowry “Thomas Jones: a Technical Study of his Oil Paintings’, in Ann Sumner and Greg Smith (eds.), Thomas Jones (1742-1803):

2.

3.

4.

5.

an Artist Rediscovered (New Haven and London: Yale University Press in association with National Museums and Galleries of Wales, 2003), pp. 89-99. “This morning the weather was better again, so I went out to paint. But it was impossible, I was missing four or five colours’. Vincent van Gogh letter to Theo van Gogh from Drenthe, September 1883 in Bruce Bernard (ed.), Vincent by Himself (London: Time Warner Books, 2004), p. 59. The Stroh violin uses a diaphragm, activated by the bridge, connected to a horn, resulting in a more strident but much more directional sound output. It was designed in 1899 by John Matthias Augustus Stroh and manufactured in London from 1901 by his son Charles. Problems in both mechanical and early microphone recording ofthe violin and their possible influence on violin technique are discussed by Mark Katz, Capturing Sound: How Technology has Changed Music (Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press, 2004), pp. 85-98. Mark Cunningham, Good Vibrations: a History of Record Production (2nd edn, London: Sanctuary Publishing, 1998), pp. 25-6. This would be multitrack recording, as later practised with magnetic tape. Sound-on-sound was included in grammophonplatten-eigene Stiicke, pieces written and performed by Paul Hindemith in 1930 (Katz, Capturing Sound,

p. 100).

Producing performance - Development work started in 1931 and some production from 1935. There was effectively no penetration of the technology outside Germany until the end of the war. . Cunningham, Good Vibrations, p. 27. The model 300 was released in May 1949, according to the Ampex Fact Book (Ampex, 1970). The first Ampex production model was the 200A, which was installed by ABC across the USA in April 1948, the first regular professional use of magnetic recording outside Germany. Details are available on http://recordist.com/ampex/docs/histapx/ampchrn.txt (last accessed 11 June 2009).

- Examples of four-track backing tracks can be found on The Beatles Anthology, vol. 2, Capitol, CDP 7243 8 34448 2 3, 1996. The quality of these as compared to the released recording is assessed by the recording engineer Geoff Emerick in Howard Massey, Behind the Glass: Top Record Producers Tell How they Crafted their Hits (San Francisco: Miller Freeman, 2000), p. 91. . Cunningham, Good Vibrations, p. 30. Joe Meek is credited with the introduction of close mic’ing in the UK by Adrian Kerridge; quoted in John Repsch, The Legendary Joe Meek; the Telstar Man (London: Cherry, Red Books, 2000), p. 317. There are many competing claims concerning the origins of the technique. 10. For further discussion of practices and consequences of close mic’ed vocals in performance practice and mechanical recording, as well as electronically mediated recording, and uses of artificial reverberation see Jason Toynbee, Making Popular Music: Musicians, Creativity and Institutions (London: Arnold, 2000), pp. 75-85.

Robert Alexander, The Inventor of Stereo: the Life and Works of Alun Dower Blumlein (Oxford: Focal Press, 2000), pp. 38-91. Arthur C. Keller is credited with making dual recordings with two microphones cutting two tracks on one disc in New York in 1928 but the discs are lost. Blumlein developed the single groove technique of later commercial vinyl discs. We Cunningham, Good Vibrations, p. 48; Alexander, The Inventor of Stereo, p. 92. 13% A three-track Ampex 350 was custom built for Okley Thorn to record dialogue, background music and sound effects on separate tracks for film but first used to record the NBC Symphony Orchestra with Duke Ellington and his band at Carnegie Hall (unreleased). RCA purchased two because of problems recording i

Jascha Heifetz (letter from David Sarser in Ampex-digest VI 863). Ampex introduced eight-track (AG-440-8), sixteen-track (AG-1000-16) and twentyfour-track (AG-1000-24) production models in June 1967 (http://recordist.

com/ampex/docs/histapx/ampchrn.txt), last accessed 11 June 2009. 14. Massey, Behind the Glass, p. 78.

signed Cat Stevens to its new Deram label the previous year (Cunningham, Good Vibrations, p. 123). ‘First Cut is the Deepest’ was written by Cat Stevens under the name Steven Demetre Georgiou and first recorded by

15: Decca

P. P. Arnold (1967).

103

104

James Barrett

16. Compare Brian Wilson: ‘Back in the days of “California Girls,” we would work

in 4-track. I’'d put the whole background orchestration on one track, then I'd do sets of background voices and bounce that over [to mono] so we'd have two lead

vocals, double-tracked.’ Interview in Massey, Behind the Glass, p. 47. 17. The signal-to-noise ratio partly depends on the width of tape used for a track,

which reduced with increasing track count, creating a quality trade-off. This is discussed by Geoff Emerick in Massey, Behind the Glass, p. 91. See also Tony Visconti in interview with Zenon Schoepe, “The Master on Musical Standards, the Fear of Commitment and Why Recording is No Great Mystery’, Resolution 4/4 (May/June 2005) p. 45. 18. The sixteen tracks are : backing vocals, Gaye, Gaye, backing vocals, saxophone,

piano, high strings, mid strings, low strings, congas, acoustic guitar, electric guitar, xylophone, drum overhead, kick drum, bass. Note also the presence of Gaye’s voice among the backing vocalists. 19: The Rod Stewart version was first released on A Night on the Town, reissued on Warner Bros/Wea, 47730, 2000. 20. Cunningham, Good Vibrations, pp. 48-50. This would have been custom built on the Ampex 300 transport. 2M Examples of multitracks recorded on to analogue tape can be found on the website for this book (www.cambridge.org/recordedmusic). This includes segments of the individual tracks, the final mix and comments on the processing and mixing of the track. Vip Richard Burgess, The Art.of Record Production (London: Omnibus Press, 1997), jo) US)

23% The intricacies of this relationship are explored by David Patmore in this

volume. 24. This would have been done with razorblade editing of analogue tape prior to

1989. In that year Digidesign introduced Sound Designer II and the Sound Tools system, which permitted computer-based digital editing in conjunction with DAT digital tape. Many other digital systems and media have followed. FSS, A spot microphone is used to capture instruments that might otherwise be overwhelmed in the main stereo pair. See also Tim Summerhayes’s comments on coincident-pair recording in interview with George Shilling, ‘Combining Live Sound and Studio Engineering Backgrounds to Yield a Prominent Career in Mobile Recording’, Resolution 4/6 (September 2005), pp. 40-5; and subsequent correspondence: ‘Headroom: Blumlein Technique, Peaked Quality Again and Audio Lookilikies’, Resolution 4/7 (October 2005), p. 66. 26. All recording was to optical tracks rather than magnetic tape. The details of the

Fantasound system became confused partly because there were different systems installed in the Broadway Theatre in New York and the Carthay Circle Theatre in Los Angeles and another system used for the touring road shows. Technical details can be found in William E. Garity and John N. A. Hawkins, ‘Fantasound’, Journal of the Society of Motion Picture Engineers, August 1941,

Producing performance which is available at www.widescreenmuseum.com/sound/Fantasound1.htm (last accessed 11 June 2009). 2h Katz, Capturing Sound, pp. 72-84. 28. Ashley Kahn includes transcripts of studio conversation and a detail from a

photograph of Adderley’s music stand taken by Fred Plaut as well as a wealth of well-researched background information in Kind of Blue: the Making of the Miles Davis Masterpiece (London: Granta Books, 2002). The first take of ‘Sketches’ (rejected by the engineers at the session) is available on the Kind of Blue reissue Columbia/Legacy CK64935, 1997. os

Ibid., p. 96.

30.

Ibid., p. 131.

ek. In the first session the positions of alto and tenor saxophones are reversed (ibid.,

p. 102). Note Wynton Kelly is on piano for ‘Freddie Freeloader’ in the first session, 2 March 1959. 328 Extensive details of this and other recordings of this era of Davis’s career can be found in Paul Tingen, Miles Beyond: the Electric Explorations of Miles Davis, 1967-1991 (New York: Billboard Books, 2003).

¥

33. An analysis of the editing of “Bitches Brew’ is provided in the extensive liner notes with the Columbia (remix) reissue Bitches Brew, C2K 065774 2, 1999.

Fuller notes and the session recordings can be found on Miles Davis: the Complete Bitches Brew Sessions, C4K 65570, 1998. An analysis of the editing of all of Bitches Brew and many other Davis recordings of this era has been made by Enrico Merlin and is available in Tingen, Miles Beyond, pp. 310-13. Tingen’s own comments on the edits and consequent sonata form are at ibid., pp. 67-72. Note that the remixes are from the session multitrack tapes and, although the original editing scheme is followed, they do not totally reproduce the original mix and processing of the first release (CBS 66236). 34. Simha Arom, African Polyphony and Polyrhythm, trans. Martin Thom, Barbara

Tuckett and Raymond Boyd (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), p. 117. Arom’s approach to fieldwork is unlike that of many ethnomusicologists (such as John Blacking) as he considers performance an inappropriate methodology for research — an issue that is critiqued by John Baily and contested by Jonathan Stock later in this volume.

35: John Blacking, How

Musical is Man? (Seattle and London: University of Washington Press, 1995), pp. 10-11. 36. African Sanctus was first performed by the Saltarello Choir in July 1972. aie BBC Television’s Omnibus made a documentary in 1974 (director Herbert Chappell) retracing and re-enacting with Fanshaw some of the original Sanctus journey in north and east Africa. 38. David Fanshaw, liner notes of African Sanctus (Philips, 6558 001, 1975). 393 ‘Strawberry Fields Forever’, Beatles (1967), ‘Crosstown Traffic’, Jimi Hendrix (1969) and ‘Whole Lotta Love’, Led Zeppelin (1967) are cited as examples of exotic use of stereo imaging by Katz, Capturing Sound, p. 42.

105

106

James Barrett

40. Fanshaw, liner notes of African Sanctus. 4l. John Baily explores related issues in world music recordings in ch. 6. 42. See Katz, Capturing Sound, pp. 137-57, and the chapters by Andrew Blake and

Virgil Moorefield in this volume. 43. Philip V. Bohlman, World Music: a Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford

University Press, 2002), p. 8. 44, Nicholas Cook, Analysing Musical Multimedia

(Oxford: Oxford University

Press, 2000), p. 261. 45. Nicholas Cook, Music, Imagination and Culture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990).

46. Joe Mauldin quoted in Cunningham, Good Vibrations, p. 43. 47. Massey, Behind the Glass, pp. 14, 15, 118, 124. 48. Andy East, former chairman of the Music Producers Guild, interview with the

author 3 August 2005. 49. ‘First Cut’ was released as a single, but this and a ‘country version are available on The Very Best of Sheryl Crow, A&M, Motown, 000152102, 2003. Production credits are Sheryl Crow, Bill Bottrell, Gareth Fundis, Kid Rock, John Shanks and Jeff Trott. 50. Tony Platt and Haydn Bendall in interview with the author 5 August 2005. oi, Ibid. D2) Ibid. 533 Mike Howlett and Phil Harding are examples of producers in the UK, Tony

Visconti in America, doing much work in their own home-based studios, with Frank Filipetti taking mobile equipment to James Taylor to record Hourglass, Columbia, COL 487748 2, 1997.

6

Modi operandi in the making of ‘world music’ recordings JOHN

BAILY

This chapter gives an etlnomusicologist’s perspective on the relationship between academia and the record business. It examines the early days of ethnological field recording and the making of commercial recordings outside the Western world, traces the growth of cross-marketing, and presents three rather different approaches to the making of world music recordings.

“World music’ The term ‘world music’ has been used in academia by ethnomusicologists for nearly fifty years. Perhaps the first university course with a ‘world music’ title was Bob Brown’s ‘World Music Program’ at Wesleyan University (a leading centre of musicological innovation) in the early 1960s.’ In 1964 Bruno Nettl used the term as though it were self-explanatory.” In 1972 an issue of the Music Educators Journal devoted to the topic ‘Music in World

Cultures’ included an article by Charles Seeger entitled “World Musics in American Schools, a Challenge to be Met’? In 1975 John Blacking estab-

lished an ‘Ethnography of World Music and Dance’ course as part of the MA in ethnomusicology at Queen’s University, Belfast. And finally, there are the ten volumes of The Garland Encyclopaedia of World Music, published between 1998 and 2002. This encyclopaedia in effect defines the boundaries of the term ‘world music’ as currently used by ethnomusicologists, showing that it refers to the totality of the ‘musics of the world’ other than Western art and Western popular music. In due course the term was adopted by the recording industry in the West. In 1987 a group of interested parties (representatives of independent record companies, concert promoters, broadcasters) held several meetings to: discuss details of a modest promotional campaign for the autumn, and to boost

sales of the increasing numbers of records being issued, as the boom in interest in African music continued and extended to other parts of the world. One of the This chapter is based on a paper given at the colloquium ‘Record Time: An International Conference on Recordings and the Record’, Jerusalem Music Centre, 10-14 May 1998.

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obstacles to persuading record shops to stock much of the new international product was reported to be the lack of an identifying category to describe it, record shop managers didn’t know whether to call it ‘ethnic’, ‘folk’, ‘international’, or some other equivalent, and were inclined in the absence of an appropriate niche in their racks simply to reject it ... the term chosen was ‘World Music’ ... No better short phrase has yet been proposed, and thus the term World Music has taken on quite a sturdy life of its own ...7

Subsequently the term has also come to refer to commodified recordings of non-Western music made for a Western market. Billboard introduced its world music album chart in 1990. World Music: the Rough Guide, which includes a substantial discography of commercial recordings, was first published in 1994.” Many commercial recordings of world music since the late 1980s have been recorded in technically sophisticated studios in Europe and North America, leading to the subgenre of ‘world beat’, which has been defined as: a hybrid musical form that combines European American popular music with selected elements from Latin American, African, Asian, Caribbean, Australian, European, and/or North American vernacular musics. The term is often contrasted with ‘world music,’ a label that describes non-Western folk and traditional art musics marketed to Western audiences — musics that lack obvious Western pop influences.°

The process of creating a world beat product ‘involves more than adding rock instruments to traditional music, or superimposing different musical styles - it is also a question of imposing sophisticated sound ideals and recording techniques, typical for rock music’.’ From this brief introduction it should be apparent that academia and the recording industry have rather different understandings of what is meant by world music.

A brief history of recording the musics of the world Thomas Edison patented his invention of the phonograph in 1878. Robust and portable, recording on wax cylinders, the phonograph was used by ethnomusicologists into the mid-1930s. Erika Brady’s A Spiral Way gives a highly informative account of the extensive use of the phonograph in documenting Native American language and music, starting with the recordings of Passamaquoddy songs made by Walter J. Fewkes in 1890. Many of the ethnologists (as these early American anthropologists called themselves) who documented Native American cultures in this period

The making of ‘world music’ recordings

relied heavily on the phonograph as a research tool, though there were contrasting views about its usefulness: For some, it provided a convenient and practical means to document the forms of verbal and musical expression considered the essential units of a community’s traditional culture; others considered it too cumbersome and intrusive to use on a regular basis. Some collectors welcomed the opportunity to make use of a dynamic new technological innovation; others saw the very novelty of the phonograph, and the social change its dissemination heralded, as a symptom of precisely that progressive force against which they were valiantly holding the line. Some regarded the device as a means to achieve a scientific objectivity in their work: others saw it as a cheap evasion of the skill in transcription essential to any well-trained ethnographer.®

A few years after the American lead in recording non-Western music, the phonograph was being used by anthropologists, explorers, missionaries and others to record music in many parts of the world. The year 1900 saw the establishment of the Berlin Phonogrammarchiy, a large collection of wax cylinders that comparative musicologists such as Erich von Hornbostel used as the principal resource for so much of their research. Like the Native American recordings, the cylinders in Berlin and other archives in Europe were research materials which were never made for commercial purposes. In about 1920, though, a limited edition of Hornbostel’s Demonstration

Collection was published in cylinder form. The phonograph was very useful as a recording machine with instant playback facility, but mass production of cylinders for commercial purposes was a problem. In 1895 Emile Berliner in the USA introduced the flat disc, opening the way for the large-scale pressing of records. The speed with which flat discs, and the gramophones on which to play them, was adopted is astonishing. It was a good example of practical modernity, not unlike the adoption of the mobile telephone a hundred years later. The exploitation of niche markets by the early record companies was also remarkable. Ethnomusicologist Pekka Gronow gives an exemplary account of the explosion in music recording activity in a broadly defined ‘Asia’, that occurred in the first decades of the twentieth century.’ Between 1900 and 1910 the Gramophone Company made over 14,000 records of Asian and North African music. Its main

centres of operation were Russia, Egypt

and India, from where its activities extended into adjacent regions, recording a great diversity of genres and songs in many languages. The Gramophone Company’s list catered for a wide range of cultures, addressing every market. The motivation was commercial, not so much to sell records as to sell gramophones, the equipment to play the records. One of the most

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documented sound recordists is Fred Gaisberg, who in 1902 was sent by the Gramophone Company to Calcutta, to ‘open up new markets, establish agencies, and acquire a catalogue of native records’.'° From India he went on to make recordings in Burma, Thailand, Malaysia, Java, China and Japan.'! There were no recording studios at that time; the medium was too new. The acoustic recording equipment would be set up in a hotel room or a theatre and in this sense the recordings were like ‘field recordings’. Considerable skill was required to achieve good results with this early equipment. An important role was played by middlemen — people with local knowledge - who would bring in appropriate performers to record. Sound recordists like Gaisberg were often scathing in their evaluations of what was being recorded.'* The main constraints imposed by the technology were the duration of two-and-a-half to three minutes of early recordings and the acoustic limitations of what could be successfully recorded with the available hardware.’* The ethnomusicologist Gerry Farrell gives a detailed account for early recordings in India of how vocal and instrumental renditions of ragas, with highly complex cumulative forms, could be précised in the short time span of the 78-rpm record.”* Another American company, Victor, sold records of East Asian music to Chinese and Japanese migrants in the USA, and released many of the Gramophone Company’s Turkish and Arabian recordings for the American ‘ethnic’ market. Gronow estimates that between 1900 and 1930 some 50,000-100,000 titles of “Oriental music’ had been recorded commercially. In the USA records were also made for immigrant communities from Europe and for distribution in their countries of origin. Many of the early recordings of Irish music were made in New York, for the Irish American community, and were exported to Ireland, where records by musicians like the fiddle-player Michael Coleman became extremely influential, being widely emulated at the local level. It would seem that the music of many other immigrant communities went through the same process. There was a marked decline in this recording activity in the 1930s as a result of the economic depression and the advent of radio and sound film. These early commercial recordings of the music of the world were extremely important at the local level within the sound communities which had given rise to them. Comments by the ethnomusicologist Jihad Racy, about the record industry in Egypt, are probably true for many societies: the gradual transformation of the phonograph from a curious toy into a serious musical mass medium that involved the performer, the audience, and the businessman ... evidenced a significant change in musical life represented by the

The making of ‘world music’ recordings emergence of the recording artist and by a musical market sustained by a recordconsuming audience.'”

The possible effects of the new sound medium on musical life, especially in societies where music was an oral rather than a notated tradition, include the following:

1. Standardisation: a record in an oral tradition becomes a fixed item; that which was always transient and ephemeral has now become tangible. The record conveys general information about a genre, may say something about the ‘cutting edge’ within that genre, and contains very specific information which can be used as a model from which to learn. Thus a record may become a learning resource which codifies a particular performance and thereby tends to standardise it. 2. Stylistic change: the opposite process to (1) may also take place. Exposure to records and learning from records may lead to an accelerated rate of stylistic change. New ideas in music are comnrunicated much more quickly via recordings than through live performance. Processes of change, which in other circumstances might take fifty to a hundred years to unfold, may now occur in a very short time span. There is something about marketing records which generates a need to experience forward movement and innovation. 3. Raising of social status: the medium of sound recordings is an aspect of modernism and modernisation and carries with it a certain notion of progressiveness and respectability. The decontextualisation introduced by the possibility of sound recording, the separation of sound from source, listener from performer, can result in an elevated status for the performer, who is no longer at the behest of a live audience. 4, Emergence of the recording artist: a new kind of status for the musician may arise, often connected with a ‘star system’ in which particular songs

are identified with known artists and are viewed with reference to the total body of that individual’s creative work. There is a keen interest in the latest work of the individual and the private lives of stars are the subject of much comment and gossip. Early commercial records were directed primarily to local markets, to

specific cultural communities. However, there must have been some degree of ‘leakage’ in a city like New York, a centre for the nascent recording industry with its many immigrant communities. The record companies were ready to exploit any niche market, such as a Western intelligentsia with an interest in the music of people beyond the West. It is clear that the

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industry made some efforts to address an audience with a potential interest in the music of ‘the other’. One example is Musik des Orients, an album of fourteen 78-rpm records, compiled and edited by Hornbostel in 1931. It included recordings of Japanese, Chinese, Thai, Javanese, Balinese, Indian and Arab music and has been reissued several times. There are probably other examples but their identification awaits further research. Records were also cross-marketed to the non-Western world. A good example is provided by the HMV GV series of Latin American records, about 250 of them, released between 1933 and 1958. They were drawn from the Gramophone and Victor catalogues (hence “GV series’), cheaply manufactured, and aimed initially at the West African market, becoming very popular also in Central Africa where they were important in stimulating new genres of African popular music. Known locally by their GV numbers rather than by their titles, GV records formed a staple part of the output of local radio stations in Africa which were established around the late 1930s to early 1940s.'° The popularity of Latin American music parallels the export of North American popular music, especially jazz and related genres, to much of the rest of the world. The next stage in cross-marketing “ethnic recordings’ to a Western market came about with the Folkways enterprise in New York. Asch started Folkways Records in 1949, soon after his earlier company, Disc Records, was declared bankrupt;'’ 1949 was also the year when the first 33-rpm long-playing discs were published. The Folkways catalogue, of more than 2,000 LPs, cover[s] nearly every corner of the globe. Many of these records do not sell more than a hundred copies ... Folkways keeps costs down by not going in for three-color pictures on the jackets, and by spending practically nothing on advertising. By charging relatively high prices, it can break even.'*

Ethnomusicologist Anthony Seeger (the nephew of folk musician, Pete Seeger) became the director of Folkways when the archive was purchased by the Smithsonian Institution in 1986. He writes: Folkways was famous as a publisher of ‘scholarly’ ethnographic recordings — thick LP records in heavy cardboard sleeves, replete with 12 or more pages of liner notes. Although not a scholar himself, Moses Asch believed strongly in the importance of documenting and preserving musical traditions of all kinds from all parts of the world. Folkways was the precursor of many of the later ‘world music’ labels such as Auvidis, Rounder, Arhoolie, and others. Folkways was also famous for its role in the US (and world) folk music revival of the 1950s-1960s and for its policy of keeping all recordings in print .... Examination of Folkways’ sales for the last 4 years that Asch ran it (1982-86) showed 30% of the titles had sold less than 10 copies, and only

The making of ‘world music’ recordings 75 of the 2165 titles sold more than 500 copies. Major record companies often delete a title that is selling less than 10,000 per year.'°

It is clear that Asch was not interested in ‘big money’; his was an altruistic enterprise. His earliest attempts at releasing ‘ethnic’ records was described by Billboard in 1947 as ‘an educational rather than a musical set ... of interest to anthropologists, folklorists and perhaps dance students’.*° Asch was described as ‘the “conscience” of the recording business’ because of the lenient way that his creditors treated his bankruptcy." As already noted, Anthony Seeger describes Folkways as the precursor of many of the later world music labels. These had similar educational intentions but rather than being the product of a private company they received a measure of state or institutional sponsorship. Perhaps the best example is the UNESCO Collection of Traditional Music founded in 1961 by Alain Danielou in collaboration with the International Music Council, with technical and financial assistance from the now defunct Institute for

Comparative Music Studies and Documentation in Berlin. The Barenreiter UNESCO series was published in 12”-LP format, starting in 1961. Now the record sleeve opened out into a booklet, usually in three languages. The motivation was scholarly, part of UNESCO’s programme for the preservation and revitalisation of the ‘intangible musical heritage’. The records were usually compilations, drawing together a number of different genres to give an overall view of the particular musical culture as a whole and with very little attention to individual artists. The people who made the original recordings were usually ethnomusicologists of one kind or another, for whom recording was just one part of their fieldwork. These records had little impact in the countries of origin where they passed unnoticed. They were not made for local markets where LP-playing equipment was not readily available. After the Barenreiter series came many similar endeavours, especially in France, with Musiques du Monde, Auvidis and Ocora.”” In the USA, apart

from Folkways, Lyrichord and Nonesuch were the main producers. With the advent of the CD in the 1980s there has been a spate of new labels, such as Real World, World Network, Music of the Earth and Music of the World. Today, a large number of recordings of traditional music from all over the

world are available. Clearly, these developments were not occurring in isolation but were part of wider social currents in the post-colonial world,

such as improved travel, migration, tourism, cultural eclecticism, the growth of minority arts organisations, multicultural concerts and festivals, and multicultural music curricula in schools.

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Three case studies of making world music recordings This section examines the practices of three individuals who are representative of different approaches to the recording of world music.

Hugh Tracey and the International Library of African Music A good example of a particular modus operandi is provided by Hugh Tracey, in his paper ‘Recording African Music in the Field’, published in 1955. Tracey was a freelance broadcaster in South Africa with a keen interest in African music, who later started the African Music Society. He was the editor of its publication African Music, and founded the International Library of African Music. Part of his work was with a small record company, Gallo, which sold 78-rpm records to a predominantly black South African market. His paper reveals how the recordist may quite deliberately shape the recording. He says: you must first face the fact that any sound recording is only a partial statement of the whole event ... recording is an art form operating within the limitations of a frame which demands its own set of rules ... A recording, however good, is never the real thing, but a representation of the original ... an artistic discrimination which will bring out the essential characteristics of the music within the limitations of time and space dictated by the medium.”

Tracey's recordings were destined to become 78-rpm records, and the threeminute time constraint applied even though by this time he was recording on quarter-inch tape. He discusses at length the problem of getting a 3-minute performance from musicians for whom ‘time is no object’. ‘How to keep a musician’s mind on his job of recording actively without sinking back into an easy doze of repetitions has always been a problem without issuing spoken instructions which would spoil the recording.”* Tracey explains some of the signs and signals to performers that help to overcome these problems. He continues: Starting and stopping requires special care. The beginning of a recording can make or mar the whole performance. The habit of allowing the performers to get into their stride first then fading in the recording has nothing to recommend it, and the same applies to endings which are faded out. It leaves an incomplete picture, a raw end which produces a sense of frustration in a keen listener. Starting cleanly and firmly, straight into the item at the correct tempo and with the right attack is not easy ... Eager performers often beat the pistol ... and to prevent this I usually hold one

The making of ‘world music’ recordings hand high. An exaggerated sweep downwards of the hand after a two or three second pause will then get the performers under way with a feeling of confidence ... During the course of an item I find it essential to glance constantly at the stop watch, not only to note the passage of time, but to measure the exact duration of a verse or stanza. In this way one can gauge the number of verses which will fit into the allotted time limit and so prepare the performers for a proper ending. This I do by raising one arm to shoulder level with the hand in front of the face. Then, as the last verse is ending I make a wide slow sweep of the arm outwards and downwards, at the same time bending the knees. This bending of the knees is a universal African gesture and never fails to indicate the ending.

Tracey is very good at the need to get the balance right between the various sounds produced by the performers, and in getting the right kind of natural reverberation: a recording of an outdoor working song in a hall with high reverberation, out of its normal context, is usually unsatisfactory. On the other hand, hymns sung in the open air by few voices with no appreciable assistance from reverberation may sound out of place on the finished recording. The degree of reverberation which creates the background out of which the item emerges is most important ... a plain wall, or a sheltered verandah makes an almost perfect studio in which one can alter the degree of reverberation at will by placing the performers nearer or further away from the surface of the wall ...*°

This account is particularly sophisticated for its time, and shows the extent to

which field recordings may be the constructions or creations of the recordist.

Recording the music of Afghanistan When I embarked on what turned out to be a career in ethnomusicology I took it for granted that a good deal of my research would involve making sound-recordings. My recording work was typical of ethnomusicologists of the late 1960s to the 1990s using quarter-inch analogue tape, freed from the 3-minute time constraint. When I started work in Afghanistan in 1973 I was equipped with a Sony TC800B, a simple half-track mono open-reel battery-operated recording machine, a sort of ‘poor man’s Uher’, which I used with the microphone supplied.”’ Given the low cost of the equipment, the technical results were quite satisfactory. My research was conducted in collaboration with Blacking at Queen’s University. The object of study was a new musical instrument - the fourteen-stringed dutar - that had recently appeared in the city of Herat,

in western Afghanistan. I was guided from afar by Blacking who had

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worked for Tracey for several years and had extensive experience of field recording during his two years of Venda fieldwork in South Africa. Through my mistakes I soon learned about the importance of microphone placement, getting the record level right and adjusting it very gradually. Blacking made a distinction between what he termed ‘test’ and ‘in-context’ recordings. The test recording, which might also be termed the ‘out-of-context recording’, is of a performance put on specifically for the purpose of making the recording. The in-context recording is made at a musical event which would take place whether or not the event was recorded. The performance is thus recorded within its normal social context, though subject to a degree of alteration by the presence of the recorder and recordist. In my first year of fieldwork my recordings were mainly of the ‘test’ variety. I concentrated on recording players of the dutar, a long-necked lute, which existed in several versions, with two, three, five and fourteen strings.

I tried to identify a representative dutar repertoire, and recorded many performances of the same five tunes played by dutar players of different levels of expertise. Some of the dutar players I recorded were unskilled learners, but that was all part of the investigation, to see how the dutar player’s skill developed. On occasion I felt impelled to tune an informant’s instrument because it was so painfully out of tune. Some of these recordings were made in hotel rooms rented for the purpose, some were in my own home, some in other places. I also recorded my dutar lessons with three teachers who would play simplified and slowed down versions for me to learn from. I made written transcriptions, both in the field and back in Belfast. I also filmed some dutar players performing the five tunes, using mute super 8 film, and made asynchronised audio recordings at the same time. I did much more in-context recording in my second year of fieldwork (1976-7). Inow had a better understanding of an anthropological approach to the study of music. While I still made many out-of-context recordings of individual musicians, I was mainly interested in events where music was performed, such as weddings, spring country fairs, Ramazan concerts and quasi-musical religious performances such as Shiah mourning ceremonies and Sufi rituals. I needed to record complete events lasting for several hours, rather than simply sampling them, and I started using a cassette recording machine (Sony TC55 with external microphone) for these long events. My recordings were made as research documents, without thought as to their eventual publication as world music records. Issues of copyright and ownership did not concern me. When I made test recordings I paid those who recorded for me but as I got to know certain people very well the issue of payment seemed to fade away. For in-context recordings I did-not usually

The making of ‘world music’ recordings

pay anything. The radio-cassette machine had just become widespread in Herat in 1973, usually brought back from the Gulf or from Iran by young migrant workers. The convention had been established that one could set up and record any live event as of right. At the Ramazan concerts I attended there was usually a bevy of amateur sound recordists in front of the stage, microphones attached to the aerials of their radio-cassette machines instead of to microphone stands. It was fifteen years before any of my recordings found their way into the public domain. The first publication was the audio cassette that went with my monograph on music in Herat, published in 1988.7* The idea of a book accompanied by audio materials was becoming more common at the time, although it faced certain marketing problems.”” When the time came to publish some of my recordings in CD format, I regarded them as substantial academic publications, reminiscent of the Folkways/UNESCO concept of the scholarly publication with extensive notes. I was not motivated by financial considerations, in the sense of expecting to earn any money from these publications, but of course they contributed to my academic profile and career. One CD was a collection of pieces played by Rahim Khushnawaz on the rubab, under the title The Rubab of Herat. Another was a compilation of pieces from a number of musicians The Traditional Music of Herat.*°

Peter Gabriel, WOMAD

and Real World

In 1980, the rock musician Peter Gabriel, formerly of the group Genesis, established the World of Music, Art and Dance (WOMAD)

festival, an

annual event bringing together musicians from many parts of the world. In due course various educational projects developed from this, aimed at providing materials appropriate for teaching world music in British schools. And there were other aspects, too: as Peter Gabriel explains, when the WOMAD festival went on tour there were ‘frequently “spontaneous” interactions’ between musicians of widely differing backgrounds. In 1991 Gabriel decided to bring a group of seventy-five musicians and producers together for a week at his complex of studios in rural England,

in an attempt to record eight albums for release on the recently established Real World label. Some of the recordings for the CDs were made at a concert held for local villagers during the week. A BBC film was made of this experiment, called A Real World Recorded.”'

Clips from this show

rather clearly a modus operandi which is probably representative of much world music recording activity: the Real World Studios were built to

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create what Gabriel calls ‘the marriage of hand-made and high-tech’, making sophisticated studio technology available to artists who could not usually have access to it. He explains how the artists interacted: The festival thing is now built with this group of artists to fourteen countries. So that this sense of community these artists for the first time saying, ‘Oh, that melody’s there are all these common elements and to get that jamming which happens on all those festival tours into we've tried to do that.**

that travels around together builds up on the road, with like our old folk song’. And sense of improvisation and the studio: it’s the first time

Senegalese drummer, Arona, adds percussion to a track of Ugandan musician, Ayub Ogada, singing and playing his niatiti lyre. Sound engineer, Dave Botrill, dances about the studio to the music. At the end of the track Ayub says ‘he just played some fantastic drums on one of my songs without even a rehearsal’.*’ A little later Dave Botrill explains to another musician what he wants: When you hear something like this which is a certain groove ... you hear it a certain way and you will interpret it and play the full soup of that ... it will become like an ethnic stew. And hopefully, when these other rhythms are done you can start some rhythms for other people to build on.

It seems clear from what we see on screen that the studio technique known as overdubbing (used extensively in making popular music records) is being employed here, which involves assembling the piece track by track. However, some critical voices are also heard in the film. Karl Wallinger of the band World Party, who produces some of the recordings, says (of Peter Gabriel): I get the feeling that he really wants a song to come out of this, that works in its own right ... like a number ... wafting out of a café ... He very much wants to try and find a song, rather than just having the groove. It’s easy in a way to lay down tracks with everybody on them, but to make something that makes sense ... It would be nice if it came out on Radio One and made sense to a lot of people.**

Earlier in the film, BBC world music programme-maker, Andy Kershaw, voices his doubts: I have to see how these collaboration things work out. I’m not entirely easy about the idea of those. I can’t really see any reason why there should be any compatibility between a group from Colombia and a group from Tanzania, or whoever gets together with who[m]. These things can sometimes sound fine on paper, but they can be a frightful mess once they are on tape.”

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Such evidence suggests that the ‘spontaneous interactions’ that occur between musicians on tour are perhaps not so easily transferred to the studio. It is not clear that anything particularly significant emerged from Real World Week, which indicates that experiments of this kind are unlikely to produce anything of ‘value’ (an admittedly difficult quality to assess). Gabriel’s ‘marriage of hand-made and high tech’ - making sophisticated studio technology available to artists usually unable to gain access to it — does not quite seem to be what is happening. Dave Botrill appears to have a very clear idea of what he wants and to be much in control. Creating an ‘ethnic stew’ is perhaps an unfortunate way of describing the required end result, although it is a good example of culinary and gustatory language in talking about music. However, this was undoubtedly a learning experience for WOMAD artists, who took from it insights into the technology and possibilities of the recording studio and began to apply some of them back home (technical resources permitting). The recordings made by musicians like Ogada in the UK probably achieve little currency in the countries from which they originate. Such musicians no doubt address their own audiences in very different ways.

Conclusions

Ethnomusicologists and producers of world music records have very different projects and very different ways of working although there are areas of commonality, as exemplified in the work of Tracey. The distinction between recordings of music made to document research and recordings made to sell records has existed from the earliest days. For ethnomusicologists, making audio recordings is just one of the techniques they use in their participant observation field research methodology. Ethnographic documentation involves the writing of extensive fieldnotes, holding discussions, conversations and interviews, taking photographs, using the video camera as a research tool, conducting tests of sound perception, and the use of other research techniques as well as making audio recordings of

musical performances, all of which are discussed by Jonathan Stock in this volume. The objective is to gain a better understanding of the nature of music and its role in human society in the belief that ethnomusicology is the study of all music: as sonic structure, as cultural process, and as social act.°° Independent producers of world music records may well share the enthusiasm of ethnomusicologists for exotic music, and making recordings and publishing records is one way of expressing that engagement, and

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earning a (usually) modest living at the same time. But the focus is on the sound

in its own

terms, divorced from its original context, and often

invested with a new set of meanings that help promote sales. In recent years, however, there has been something of a return to more basic ways of making commodified world music recordings, with a renewed emphasis on field recordings and an avoidance of excessive studio intervention. In 1997 the publicity advertised by Multicultural Media, a mail order company in Vermont with an extensive world music catalogue, stated a propos its new Music of the Earth collection: Multicultural Media — Introduces a comprehensive collection of field-recorded traditional music which transports the listener directly into the villages, the homes, the fields, the celebrations and the ceremonies of the peoples of the world. No stages. No studios. No special effects. All recordings are complemented with maps, photos, and notes from the original recording sessions.*”

In the same vein, Robin Broadbank, who produced many world music recordings for Nimbus Records, offered the following information in 1998 when asked to comment on his recording technique: Pm interested in recording musicians who can give a performance in real time rather than using studio facilities to achieve a particular sound. I use a minimalist recording technique ... a ‘soundfield’ microphone ... and DAT recorder ... Balance everything acoustically - by finding [the] right position for musicians and mic{rophone]. Involve musicians in deciding good balance ... Don’t use any eq[ualisation], extra r[e]verb etc. Musicians hear on playback exactly [the] same kind of sound as will be on [the] final CD ... [I am] [c]onvinced that much acoustic

music has an internal balance which can be successfully recorded ... in this minimalist way. Also, that a more satisfying result would not have been achieved with multitrack recording facilities.**

While ethnomusicologists acknowledge that the ethnographies they produce (in the form of monographs, papers in learned journals, conference presentations, radio programmes, CDs, films and so on) are to some extent their own creations, they seek to make recordings that more or less document an ongoing actuality. Record producers, on the other hand, are more interested in creating a sonic product that will sell, and in order to achieve that goal have recourse to all the resources for manipulating sound that are provided by the advanced technology of the recording studio. There are good reasons to believe that many ethnomusicologists view the modi operandi of at least some world music producers with a degree of unease and disquiet, and two specific areas of concern can be identified.

The making of ‘world music’ recordings

The first concerns the issue of the unauthorised sampling of recordings of traditional world music to create ‘club dance music’. In 1996 Steven Feld made a strong attack on the ethics of the album Deep Forest, in which ethnographic recordings of music from Ghana, Senegal, Cameroon, Central African Republic and Burundi were sampled and given the studio treatment to produce a CD which sold several million copies and made the producers of Deep Forest a great deal of money. Feld states: The primary circulation of several thousand small-scale, low-budget, and largely non-profit ethnomusicological records is now directly linked to a secondary circulation of several million dollars worth of contemporary record sales, copyrights, royalty and ownership claims, many of them held by the largest music entertainment conglomerates in the world. Hardly any of this money circulation returns to or benefits the originators of the cultural and intellectual property in question.”

This is essentially an issue of cultural rights. Following the critical lead of Feld, ethnomusicologists have become much moreraware of the need to protect their field recordings from appropriation by others. A second issue concerns what might be termed ‘forced hybridisation’. The practice of trying to create new music by putting musicians from different backgrounds together in the studio needs careful examination. Ethnomusicologists understand that innovation in music has often resulted in the past from interactions between different cultures placed in long-term direct contact with each other. The origins of African American musics in Latin and North America are good examples of this process, variously called acculturation or transculturation.*” One of the effects of the invention of sound-recording, as noted earlier, has been to accelerate the rate of stylistic change in music, through allowing people to listen to the music of other cultural communities without continuous first-hand contact. However, that

is rather different from trying to create innovation in the studio, whether through interactions between performers of different kinds of world music, or through imposing the sound ideals and recording techniques typical of Western popular music. The attempt to bring together different musical systems is more likely to succeed when those engaged in the enterprise have a respect for and an understanding of the structural principles underlying each other’s music, an understanding usually gained through working together over a period of time. In addition some ethnomusicologists have a certain dislike for what they see as the overcommercialisation of world music. World music magazines,

world music awards, world music record fairs and world music radio programmes do not necessarily support the work of indigenous music-makers

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around the world, many of whom perform traditional genres on the verge of extinction. This point of view was recently articulated by music critic Michael Church concerning BBC Radio 3’s world music awards: What is this ‘world music’? With very few exceptions, the groups favoured by Radio 3 offer street-smart fusions — local styles with an internationalised electronic top-dressing reflecting a universal aspiration to make it big in the West. We're talking, by and large, about global pop ... This is not the music of the world: it’s music filched from other cultures, and filtered for consumption by the West. It’s significant that Radio 3’s leading partner in these awards is Womex, which represents the interests of the record industry. One ironical side-effect of this world-music boom is that record companies specialising in the real music of the world — traditional music recorded in traditional contexts - are now in difficulties ... the cds [sic] of musicologically top-notch labels like Ocora and Institut du Monde Arabe are being forced off the shelves.*"

Church’s remarks may have been music to the ears of some ethnomusicologists but they go beyond the bounds of the present discussion. Nevertheless, the bigger issues he raises are indeed closely linked to differing modi operandi in the making of world music recordings.

Notes

1. Mark Slobin, personal communication with the author, December 2005. 2. Bruno Nettl, Theory and Method in Ethnomusicology (New York: The Free Press of Glencoe, 1964), p. 22. 3. Charles Seeger, “World Musics in American Schools: a Challenge to be Met’, in Michael E. Besson (ed.), Music in World Cultures (Washington: Music Educators

National Conference, 1972), pp. 91-5. This is a reprint of Music Educators Journal 59/2 (October 1972), pp. 107-11. 4. Philip Sweeney, The Virgin Directory of World Music (London: Virgin Books,

1991), p. ix. 5. Simon

Broughton, Mark Ellingham, Dave Muddyman

and Richard Trillo

(eds.), World Music: the Rough Guide (London: Rough Guides, 1994).

6. Jeremy Wallach, ‘World Beat’, The Garland Encyclopedia of World Music (New York: Garland, 2001) vol. III, p. 337. 7. René Van Peer, “Taking the World for a Spin in Europe: an Insider’s Look at the World Music Recording Business’, Ethnomusicology 43/2 (1999), p. 383. 8. Erika Brady, A Spiral Way: How the Phonograph Changed Ethnography (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1999), p. 88. 9. Pekka Gronow, “The Record Industry Comes to the Orient’, Ethnomusicology

25/2 (1981), pp. 251-84.

The making of ‘world music’ recordings

10. Fred W. Gaisberg, The Music Goes Round (New York: Macmillan, 1942), p. 48.

i

The term, ‘recordist’ refers to the person who makes a sound-recording as opposed to a sound engineer or recording engineer who is an expert in using highly complex recording equipment in a studio setting. A CD of recordings made in Central Asia in 1909 by the Gramophone Company has been published by the British Library under the title Before the Revolution. Compilation and text by Will Prentice, Topic Records, TSCD921, 2002.

P

12. Gronow, ‘The Record Industry Comes to the Orient’, p. 273. Ist Peter Copeland, Sound Recordings (London: the British Library, 1991). 14. Gerry Farrell, “The Early Days of the Gramophone Industry in India: Historical,

Social and Musical Perspectives’, British Journal of Ethnomusicology 2 (1993), pps ole: 15: Ali

Jihad Racy, ‘Record Industry and Egyptian Traditional Music’, Ethnomusicology 20/1 (1976), pp. 25-6. 16. Janet Topp Fargion, Out of Cuba: Latin American Music Takes Africa by Storm. Booklet for eponymous CD. (London: Topic Records¢2004), TSCD927. Wei Peter D. Goldsmith, Making People’s Music: Moe Asch and Folkways Records (Washington: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1998), ch. 4, pp. 171-223. 18. Pete Seeger, The Incompleat Folksinger (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press,

1979), p. 441. L9; Anthony Seeger, ‘Ethnomusicologists, Archives, Professional Organizations,

and the Shifting Ethics of Intellectual Property’, Yearbook for Traditional Music 28 (1996), pp. 93, 103-4.

20. Goldsmith, Making People’s Music, p. 200. PAI:

Ibid., p. 214.

Pipye Van Peer, “Taking the World for a Spin in Europe’, pp. 374-9. Way Hugh Tracey, ‘Recording African Music in the Field’, African Music 1/2 (1955),

p. 7. Emphasis in the original. 24, Ibid., p. 8. Hs). Ibid. 26. Ibid., p. 9.

Die The Uher 420 Report Monitor was a reel-to-reel battery-operated portable tape-

recorder commonly used by ethnomusicologists at the time. Those with better funding would use a superior machine such as the Nagra. 28. John Baily, Music of Afghanistan: Professional Musicians in the City of Herat (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988). Do: The problem here was whether to regard the printed-text/audio-recording package as a book or as a record. Bookshops were reluctant to stock what their proprietors regarded as records (in the form of audio cassettes). This problem was largely resolved with the CD of audio examples that sits in a pocket inside the back cover of the book.

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30. These CDs are Afghanistan: The Rubab of Herat, VDE CD-699,

1993, and The Traditional Music of Herat, AUVIDIS/UNESCO D 8266, 1996. 3 A Real World Recorded. A Tribute Real World Production in association with BBC-TV. 1992, 55 minutes. SV, Ibid., 10'20" from start. 33) Ibid., 8'30" from start. 34, Ibid., 10'55" from start. BS). Tbid., 3'00" from start. 36. I offer this as my own definition of ethnomusicology. In principle ethnomusi-

cology includes the study of Western art and popular music, but in fact ethnomusicologists usually study non-Western music. Si. Multicultural Media’s catalogue for 1997, pp. 48-9. 38. Personal communication, 1998. aby). Steven Feld, ‘Pygmy POP: a genealogy of Schizophonic Mimesis’, Yearbook for Traditional Music 28 (1996), p. 27. 40. Margaret J. Kartomi, “The Processes and Results of Musical Culture Contact:

a Discussion of Terminology and Concepts’, Ethnomusicology 25/2 (1981), pp. 227-49. 41. Michael

Church, “The BBC’s growing debasement of world music’, The Independent, 28 February 2005, emphasis in the original.

yi

Recording and the Rattle phenomenon DAVID

PATMORE

The appointment of Sir Simon Rattle as chief conductor of the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra in 1999 rocked the musical world. The successor in this post to Arthur Nikisch, Wilhelm Furtwangler, Herbert von Karajan and Claudio Abbado was a musician who had developed outside the Central European tradition, and who was from England to boot — dubbed ‘the land without music’ in the nineteenth century. This chapter investigates the relationship between recording and Rattle’s career up to this momentous point.

Rattle and recording Rattle has clearly enunciated his views on recording ever since he commenced work in this field during the latter half of the 1970s, and especially from the time of his first major recording, of Mahler’s Tenth Symphony, which was made in June 1980 and released in December of the same year.' In an interview with the pianist Imogen Cooper and critic Rob Cowan, published in 1997, Rattle stated: ‘I don’t necessarily know whether I’m a recording artist — I would rather think it’s one of many means to an end.” He had earlier enlarged on this comment in an interview published in 1996: ‘T think recording is a step on the way to the real thing - which is a live unrepeatable experience of which the only repetition is whatever peculiar patina is left on people’s memories and the walls of the building.”* Thus for Rattle the fundamental objective of music, or music-making, is the live performance, which by its very nature is unique. Recording cannot be a substitute for this. In November 1984 Rattle gave an extended interview with the American writer James Badal on the subject of recording, the contents of which are very revealing. On the issue of the ephemerality of music Rattle is very clear: I think the greatest danger of recording is that one can be standardized and that one can think having done a piece, that then, there it is! ... music is always changing; it

was not meant to be captured; it was not meant to be the same each time. Music was F 4 not meant to sound like gramophone records.

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He made the same point even more forcefully fifteen years later in 1999 extending the parallel between music and life further: ‘I do think that there are certain things — such as human discourse, friendship and music — which are meant to be live.” Rattle is well aware of the several dangers associated with recording in relation to income and reputation, and the distorting effects that these may exert upon musicians. In the interview just quoted he also said: “The problem with the new technology is that musicians have used it for profit rather than for lifting the art. Karajan was a great man, a great conductor, but he’s got a lot to answer for.’° Rattle goes on to suggest that as part of the development of the financial machine that Karajan’s recordings constituted, he (Karajan) encouraged the expectation that ‘electronic reproduction would provide the best of all possible musical worlds’. The promotion of Karajan’s recordings (and in this Karajan was by no means alone) denied what for Rattle is the essence of music, its live performance. Another consequence laid at Karajan’s door by Rattle is an overriding emphasis upon core repertoire: ‘the core repertoire, which means the 20 pieces Karajan played all the time. These are dreadful words.’”* The huge demand created by technological innovation has led to the overproduction of recordings. Many recordings of core repertoire have been produced with little distinctiveness, and with limited deviation from the interpretive ‘norm’, thus producing standardisation. Rattle admits that he ‘wouldn't want to inflict another second- or third-rate recording of Beethoven’s Seventh on anyone. I think there are plenty of second- or third-rate recordings without my adding another one. Who knows, it could be worse.” Rattle relates this excess of supply back to the essential impermanence of musical performance: ‘In many cases, recordings are only snapshots, the best you can do at a given time. Music’s not really meant to be caught in time. It’s meant to be communicated directly to a group of people.’'° If music is essentially a live experience, and if, as a result of extreme commercial development, there is an excess of recordings, what then are the circumstances for Rattle under which recordings might be justified? Rattle has set an agenda: “There should be an ideal world where people are going around, listening to performances, and deciding: this is the moment when it has to be taken. It doesn’t need to be planned five years in advance.’!! Although this approach is utopian and is acknowledged to be so, an example does exist of the philosophy that it represents actually being put into practice. In an interview with record producer Andrew Keener, for The Gramophone, Rattle related how in 1982 he had contacted EMI with the proposal to record Rachmaninov’s Symphonic Dances at the point at which

Recording and the Rattle phenomenon

the rubato within the performance ‘had got to the stage where they [the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra (CBSO)] could judge that as one person, with me sitting in the auditorium’.'* A rehearsal for a concert at the Snape Maltings became a recording session - ‘and we have what I would call a real record, an accurate reflection of how we do the piece’.'° Rattle’s attitude to recording is therefore considerably different from that of musicians of previous generations who were able to make use of, or participate in, this still relatively young technology. Unlike many conductors who have been prepared to accept the best that can be achieved under studio conditions, but with the exception of certain distinguished figures such as the Romanian Sergiu Celibidache, who eschewed studio recording altogether after an initial postwar foray with Decca, Rattle sees recordings as needing to stand in stark contrast to the act of the ‘normal’ performance. He is prepared to recognise the consequences of this and has developed a practical logic that accepts the recording of a performance when it has reached a point of exceptionally high quality. ,

Listening: Rattle’s views on and use of records Nicholas Kenyon’s biography of Rattle illustrates the importance that recordings played in his early life:'* his mother was working in a record shop at the time when she met his father;’” as a child Rattle would perform percussion ‘concerts’ to the accompaniment of recordings selected from the local library.’® In interview with Badal, Rattle remembered that ‘as a teenager, I found records of Furtwangler, Kleiber, Toscanini, Bruno Walter ... an enormous inspiration’.’” An early interview, with Keener, refers to the existence of a substantial

record collection in Rattle’s home at this time: ‘a large, used record collection prompted talk of formative recordings, in which the old Karajan/ Philharmonia issues featured prominently’.'® The same interview quotes Rattle in discussion about these particular recordings: They're marvellous — that ‘Pictures from an Exhibition’ is very special ... I doubt whether you'd hear it any better now ... the influences were so rich at the time of the recording - [Guido] Cantelli and Furtwangler were still associated with the orchestra — on record at least.

19

In interview with the author, CBSO manager Ed Smith described Rattle’s view of records: ‘I think in a sense Simon would treat them as being like a museum catalogue.” This applies both to recordings of the past, and to his

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own recordings: ‘Simon’s disc of Mahler Ten done in Bournemouth ... is a historical photograph.’ Rattle’s perspective on recordings is part of a wider phenomenon in which interest in past performance practice has increased. Recordings are seen as a

guide to aspects of such practices, and a part of the process of learning about them. A good example of this awareness in another contemporary conductor was given in an interview with James Jolly, editor of The Gramophone: Someone like [Riccardo] Chailly [former Music Director of the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra, Amsterdam] is quite interesting because he has obviously made a considerable study of [Willem] Mengelberg ... he talks eloquently about Mengelberg’s performances ... he probably uses a lot of the scores that have Mengelberg’s writing on them.”

Recordings serve two separate learning functions for the conductor: first, they can stimulate understanding by showing how conductors of previous generations have tackled specific musical problems; secondly, they can assist in extending awareness of repertoire. To quote Kenyon in interview, recording is now one of the resources which conductors can use to prepare their performances, in a way that was not possible in the old days ... Arguably with the explosion of repertoire you need that now ... the range of stuff that Furtwangler did in his life [was] probably narrower.”

Other interviewees reinforce these perspectives: record producer David Murray reports that Rattle listens to recordings ‘as a source of stimulation, either to confirm what he believes about a piece ... or just for the experience of hearing that particular famous recording, of what happened’.** Another producer, John Willan, was very direct and close to Rattle’s own point of view: ‘If he thinks that to listen to a scratchy old Bruno Walter Beethoven recording is worthwhile, he will listen to it, and would be interested and stimulated by it. He may disagree with it.”* When music critic Paul Griffiths asked Rattle, in 1995, if he listened to records, he replied: not my own at all. I like to steal other people’s good ideas. I tend to perform pieces and then listen to recordings, because often you can’t tell what the solutions are until you've found the problems. Also, if you listen first, you pick up people’s idiosyncrasies, and what’s important to me is to own it.”°

Eleven years earlier he had made virtually the same comment: ‘I listen to recordings out of interest to find out how Mr or Ms X gets around a particular problem.”° Study of the work in question thus takes place before

Recording and the Rattle phenomenon

examining how other musicians approach it through the medium of recordings. For Rattle insight into different interpretations through recordings helps to spread the boundaries of interpretative possibility. ‘I think it is important to listen to old recordings and not say when those things come unexpectedly upon you, “Oh, but that’s ridiculous”. Actually sit and ponder why, at that particular time, that was deemed to be necessary.’*” Recordings may be seen as one, more recent, educational resource among several, within the wider context of learning. For example, in an interview with the author, Willan commented upon musicians of Rattle’s generation attending the concerts and rehearsals of other conductors, as was common among young conductors of previous generations: ‘I sat in the concert hall on a number of occasions when Simon was in there listening to Klaus Tennstedt doing Mahler, or listening to Bernard [Haitink] doing Wagner.’* An even more specific example of the learning process, which also involved recording, is given by Rattle’s teacher, John Carewe. In Kenyon’s biography Carewe discusses Rattle’s preparation for His first performance of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony: I think he knew that his role model in this had to be Furtwangler. Obviously he wasn't going to do it in the same way as Furtwangler — nobody could - but he realised (and I’m sure he sifted through various recordings of the piece) that of all the conductors of this work it was Furtwangler who provided the insight.”

Rattle himself confirmed his study and admiration of Furtwangler in his interview with Badal: ‘He [Furtwangler] understood all the foundations of harmony, counterpoint, and structure, and so his departures [from the written text] were all structural and all organic to the music. As a young conductor,

you can listen, and it’s like being set free.” Thus through questioning the musical actions and decisions contained within recordings, one’s own musical understanding and creativity, or re-creativity, may be significantly enhanced. However, Rattle has also developed an awareness of the negative side of recordings: What Id learned from listening to [Otto] Klemperer’s recordings, from talking to [Carlo Maria] Giulini, from watching Kurt Sanderling at work, didn’t square with my experience of working with early instruments. Playing Mozart recently with Alfred Brendel, whom I adore, I realised how far my instincts ... have moved away

[from the styles of these performers]. I loved doing it, but it was a bit like doing 31 somebody else’s performance.

In the same interview Rattle mentioned the occasion when he had sought to demonstrate, in the television programme The South Bank Show several

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years previously, the impossibility of playing the “Eroica’ Symphony at the speeds indicated by Beethoven’s metronome markings. To illustrate this point he had actually attempted to conduct at these speeds: the result was revelatory. He recalled: ‘I can see it was without doubt the only place ... where the face of Beethoven peeps over the parapet of this serious, solemn young man trying to be 60. It was wild and thrilling — just like Beethoven.” Rattle here acknowledges that recordings, and by extension received wisdom, may stand in the way of an individual’s instinctive reaction to a piece of music. He develops this point in an interview with music critic Edward Seckerson, published seven days after that just quoted: Any thinking musician of my generation cannot help but be a product of the gigantic flux of performing styles which have informed the last 40 years ... The remembrance of things past - remembered interpretation, remembered emotion — is a real problem for young musicians tackling core repertoire today.”

The contemporary musician may be familiar with old recordings but ultimately must find his or her own way to the centre of the music’s meaning, with recordings as an aid, but which must not be allowed to overwhelm instinct. To quote Rattle directly: ‘I just think that you have a duty towards that music and that you have to be able to look that music straight in the face without being embarrassed.”** Rattle also notes that this aspect of the influence of recordings can pose an acute risk to musicians: “They can ... act as a contraceptive to musicians who may become too terrified to take a risk or play a wrong note.’*’ Excessive familiarity with recordings can thus suppress the individual musical instinct. Records have value in demonstrating how different musicians from different periods have tackled musical issues and problems that are also common or of interest today. In this sense they have extended the range of available knowledge, and in particular have increased awareness both of repertoire and of interpretative possibilities. Music is now perceived as a pluralist universe. It may be viewed through different lenses that were not available to conductors of earlier generations.

Planning: repertoire decisions There are several different objectives by which Rattle demonstrates that he can be both pragmatic and single-minded about decisions regarding repertoire. These factors may or may not be combined, depending upon the precise circumstances of each decision:

Recording and the Rattle phenomenon

Rattle has ‘something to say’ in relation to the interpretation of the proposed work. The proposed repertoire is often either new music or music of the twentieth century and may reflect unusual juxtapositions of works. The repertoire to be recorded will act as a stimulus to learning by the public in terms of unusual repertoire, or by the orchestra in terms of enhanced performance, or both. _

Much of the interview evidence directly relating to the idea of only choosing to record those works where the performer can definitely make some sort of contribution to the knowledge of the work in question comes from the early stages of Rattle’s career. The logic of this standpoint relates to overproduction in the classical music recording industry, with excessive numbers of recordings available of the basic repertoire. Rattle clearly expressed his position to the journalist Robin Stringer in an interview given in 1979, prior to the recording of Mahler’s Tenth Symphony: ‘of those types of pieces, it’s the only one I could make any contribution to’.°° In the same interview the idea of using recording strategically had clearly already been considered: “You can imagine my problem. “Would you like to make a record?” they say. What can you possibly do to make an impression?” For Rattle recording of itself has limited value there needs to be a firm objective behind the decision to record, and therefore the repertoire to be recorded. Even at this relatively early date, Rattle’s personal philosophy is clear: ‘It’s very much up to the conductor to change things. One asks oneself, “Do I do this eccentric thing which I believe in or do I just bend?” The way to knowledge is to take the risk.’** The sense of the individual voice raised against standardisation, and the idea of risk-taking as a means of extending understanding, are here fully apparent. Rattle’s logic and preferences take him to works outside the mainstream repertoire, and which he can interpret with unusual skill. Rattle’s desire to feature new music significantly reflects the fact that this is the repertoire with which until recently he has been most comfortable, as much as displaying any proselytising zeal. Both Kenyon and Murray concur on this point: These people [Simon Rattle and Esa-Pekka Salonen] came to conducting through Mahler, Jandéek, Schoenberg, Prokofiev, Bartok ... the orchestral showpieces of

the twentieth century were what they cut their teeth on ... They did not learn, like all those pre-war conductors did, the classical repertory as the essential bit of ee: conducting.

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His centre of gravity is up until, I would say, five or six years ago, very much in the twentieth century. I would suggest that now [1999] his centre of gravity is both twentieth century and late eighteenth century.”

In this context the conductor is very much leading both audience and orchestra into those areas which he or she knows best. New music is not an unwelcome extension of the traditional repertoire, but the very core of it for certain conductors, such as Rattle, born in the second half of the twentieth century. Rattle’s commitment to new music as a realm of experience to be made more generally available has been clearly expressed: ‘those prepared to meet the challenge of new music have found themselves taken into worlds that are exciting and rewarding’.*" Essentially he seeks to share these new worlds with a broader public through the medium of recording. Rattle’s penchant for unusual juxtapositions of repertoire has helped to push forward the boundaries of knowledge and of experience, as noted by the critic Jeremy Beadle in an article published in Classic CD magazine in 1993: He thrives on juxtapositions ... as well as themed evenings and series. Rattle’s innovative Mahler-Strauss and subsequent French music concert series with the Philharmonia caused a minor revolution in London programming and “Towards the Millennium’ certainly won’t be the last.**

In 1996 Rattle used such contrasts to highlight the versatility of the CBSO: ‘They can turn in the space of three weeks as they did in March, to do Stockhausen, to West Side Story the next week, to Haydn on period instruments the next week.’*” This catholicity of repertoire and fondness for extremes also has a practical application. In the summer of 1998 Rattle recorded two works for EMI: Szymanowski’s opera King Roger** and Leonard Bernstein’s musical Wonderful Town," with the CBSO and its offshoot, the Birmingham Contemporary Music Group, respectively. The ability to tackle such a diverse brace of works must be attractive to a record company, who may expect a quick return from Bernstein to counterbalance the longer return on investment that may be expected from Szymanowski. This was noted by Jolly: “You can ... see in these two ... a pay-off.’*° A further, and very important, consequence of encouraging orchestras to develop their range of repertoire is to prevent them being squeezed by specialist performance groups active at both ends of the chronological spectrum of repertoire. By developing greater versatility of performance orches-

tras such as the CBSO are also ensuring for themselves a place in the future.

Recording and the Rattle phenomenon

To counterbalance Rattle’s determination to record the works in which he strongly believes, it is also necessary to take into account the position of the record company. Several interviewees have hinted at Rattle’s awareness of the influence of the record company. Murray, as close as anyone to Rattle’s recording plans, comments: 1am not so sure that one should simply, in a longer recording relationship, assume that what conductors record ‘will accurately reflect their entire wishes. Certainly in the last eight years to do with Rattle [1991-9], there has been a strong downturn in the record industry. All conductors, all artists have had to take on board that their wishes of what they would like to record have to be balanced against what the company thinks is commercially viable. There are very many more projects thrown out than those recorded.*”

In this context the juxtaposition of repertoire, combined with the desire to force boundaries forward, gives the record company and the musician a wider range of options from which to choose and, as mentioned above, the opportunity to balance the familiar and potentially commercial with the unfamiliar and possibly uncommercial, at least in the short term. Thus the primary purpose of learning through extending knowledge of the repertoire may also, as a secondary benefit, increase the range of options relating to works that might be considered for recording. The potential that recordings possess as aids to learning may be seen in relation to repertoire planning in comments concerned with several repertoire proposals that ultimately were not successful. In an interview with the American critic Herbert Kupferberg, published in the magazine Stereo Review in November 1992, Kupferberg notes that Rattle ‘would like to see his Millennium series [the long-term “Towards the Millennium’ series of concerts] better represented on records, with perhaps one CD devoted to

each decade’.** Such a proposal cannot have been made from a purely commercial perspective. The desire to see such repertoire strands recorded has to be viewed therefore as an initiative to increase accessibility to the works being performed in the concert series. This purpose was served in 1996 when, as

part of the presentation of a seven-part television series devoted to the music of the twentieth century, entitled “Leaving Home’, EMI released two CDs illustrating the series with twenty-eight excerpts from key works.*? These were performed by the CBSO and Rattle, who introduced the programmes.

A book based on the scripts of the television programmes also accompanied this project, thus further reinforcing the value of the CDs as well as the

2% 50 television programmes themselves.

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A number of observers have commented upon Rattle’s resolve and decisiveness, especially in relation to repertoire planning. This was apparent in his determination to record contemporary music with his own orchestra. Kenyon mentions Rattle’s ‘flinty’ determination to record with the CBSO: ‘Simon was absolutely insistent that the recordings that he did with the CBSO reflected the full range of their repertory.’”’ The same determination to use local forces is also noted by Willan who had proposed an alternative orchestra for the recording of Britten’s War Requiem” that Rattle was to conduct: “How about the Philharmonia, Simon?” ... “No, Birmingham”. Absolutely single-minded.” Broadly speaking Rattle is controlling and utilising the medium to achieve objectives that he himself has recognised and set. He is not permitting the medium either to use him or to change his beliefs. Such a thoroughgoing approach to recording and its potential uses is rare. A historical parallel may be made with Beecham using the income from recordings to sustain the London Philharmonic and Royal Philharmonic Orchestras in their early days.”*

Doing: the act of recording Rattle’s attitude to the act of recording is different from that of his predecessors. The demand for new recordings that can demonstrate new technologies has been intense, particularly during periods of commercial expansion following the introduction of stereophonic recording during the later 1950s. Then record companies would book orchestras for extended periods, and rehearsals and recordings were all done within the time for which the orchestra was hired, frequently without reference to the orchestra’s parallel concert performances. With Rattle the situation is completely different. Murray makes this point forcibly in interview: in a Rattle situation that is completely unacceptable. The fact is that we only ever made about two recordings in my fifteen-year span, where we had to rehearse [and] record, And they were in situations where we had to do a solo recording and the soloist had cancelled. So he then used the first two days just to rehearse. In general the situation was that things were well run-in in concert. Maybe the process started even two years before the recording.”

Murray continues to describe the benefits of the system used by Rattle. These relate to the prior preparation and performance of the work to be recorded in a concert situation. “Having a lot of concert activity, of doing

Recording and the Rattle phenomenon

that piece ... it is in their bones and then you immediately get a higher level of interpretative and musical ability from the first take, because they know exactly what they are doing with the piece.””° The close link between conductor and orchestra that developed as Rattle grew into his position as music director of the CBSO quickly opened an avenue that allowed recordings to be made in a more coherent way than usual. As Murray indicates, Rattle was soon only prepared to record works that had become embedded within the orchestra through frequent performance. Rattle explained his position clearly in his 1984 interview with Badal: ‘I will no longer record works that have not been played by the orchestra and myself many times in performance.” This approach stands in opposition to the more usual practice, in the UK at least, of using recording sessions both to rehearse and to perform works for recording during session time. One of the reasons for recording only when the work is in the performers’ ‘bones’ is to ensure consistency of tempo and so to allow for cross-cutting between different takes or performances, as Murray explains: ‘the importance of knowing a piece well enough that you instinctively always take the same basic tempo ... is crucial. That is why performance beforehand is so vital to a good recording artist ... because all that will have settled down.’”® Murray gives a concrete example of how Rattle developed the capability to maintain consistent tempi and direct a performance that was worth preserving. In 1991 following the scrapping of a studio recording of Mahler’s Seventh Symphony because of Rattle’s personal dissatisfaction with his conducting, the same forces recorded it at the Snape Maltings, using two public performances given on consecutive days as part of the

Aldeburgh Festival. It was a combination of these performances that was issued commercially.”” Having developed a philosophy of recording that allows both conductor and orchestra to give of their best, Rattle has refined his recording technique further. Murray describes how Rattle works against the tendency of orchestras not to give of their absolute best in the recording studio, knowing that retakes are possible. By rehearsing in the recording session he will ‘then in one take put fifteen points right ... because the orchestra knows that it has not got time to do this zillions of times ... There are not many conductors who can take those calculated risks.’°’ The benefit of this technique is that in

addition to improving deliberately on what has gone before, it also helps to generate an approximation of the intensity of the live performance. It is more usual for conductors to approach the act of recording in an ad hoc

manner, without exploiting the tension generated by the financially dangerous use of limited time.

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Rattle, while being aware of the cosmetic opportunities for improvement that current recording technologies allow, seeks to achieve in his recordings a heightened level of performance beyond that which might be achieved in the studio under the ‘old system’ of rehearsal and recording within a session. In other words, because of the close link with his orchestra, and because of the greater understanding achieved through many performances, the objective with a recording is to capture that performance which is a summation of all this experience. In this sense the artificial aesthetic to which Rattle’s predecessors were accustomed has been superseded by an alternative, which is once again more closely rooted in the actual live performance with an audience present.

Improving: recording and performance standards Just as repertoire is used as a device to extend learning and performance capability, so recording itself may play a strong part in improving standards of performance. In interview, Smith made the interesting point that the process of performance followed by recording, if followed in turn by further performances, could result in performances that exceed the recording in quality. In other words the process of improvement is continuous: ‘the difference between pre-recording and the post-recording concerts was extraordinary. In a sense we were almost using the recording sessions to

give even better concert performances - not consciously and deliberately but the effect was tangible.”°' (While recordings on the one hand may result in even finer concert performances of the same repertoire, on the other hand, there is the more general danger that, by projecting a consistent image of musical excellence, recordings may encourage concert audiences to expect such excellence as a matter of course. This expectation may generate a considerable burden for the musician in live performance, which, in extremis, may be impossible to satisfy. Sir Georg Solti’s landmark recording of Wagner’s Der Ring des Nibelungen for instance,°* created an aural vision of the work specifically tailored to sound-recording. At later live performances, such as those given at the Bayreuth Festival in 1983, it proved difficult to emulate the quality of these recordings.) The commencement of Rattle’s relationship with the CBSO was highly fortunate from the point of view of recording, in that EMI had already established a relationship with the orchestra. Smith explains the nature of this relationship, based on the ability of the management of the British regional orchestras

Recording and the Rattle phenomenon

to provide the services of the orchestra in return for free time ... Instead of having to pay for recording sessions, one day of recording, six hours [of] two three hour sessions, could be compensated for by one-and-a-half free days. So you did not

actually have to pay any money.

In other words, in return for a day’s recording, members of the orchestra received a day-and-a-halfs

free time, which would

have been covered

financially by their annual-contract. Thus neither record company nor the orchestra’s management had to provide cash to pay for the services of the orchestra’s members for recordings made under such conditions — a considerable incentive for the record company, in this case EMI. Smith elaborates on the commercial application of this arrangement: ‘EMI was the only company to exploit it ... some pretty good orchestras [were recorded] for next to nothing.’ Rattle was at this time working with these orchestras, so it was to be expected that he might feature in recording plans with EMI, as proved to be the case: ¥

Simon’s early work was with orchestras like the Northern Sinfonia, ourselves, Bournemouth. So I think it was a natural thing that EMI should have started with him and he with EMI... In the early stages I think EMI began recording with him in just the same way as they recorded with Simon’s predecessors.°°

Essentially the principle was the same as that behind the recording of orchestras in the USA before and during the Second World War. The orchestra’s management achieved the profile for the orchestra that recording gave and the record companies were able to publish recordings without the need for substantial investment in the form of orchestral fees ‘up front’. If a record was commercially successful both parties benefited: the record company could look forward to profits, and the orchestra would receive a royalty on sales achieved, as well as the public profile desired. The union arrangement for the recording of regional orchestras active at this time therefore worked as an influence and an incentive for EMI to record Rattle conducting the CBSO, just as it had done with his predecessor, Louis Frémaux. Rattle progressively recorded more and more with the CBSO, although during the early years of his music directorship he also recorded with the Philharmonia Orchestra. From 1982 the proportion of records made with the CBSO became notably higher. These recordings are outlined in table 7.1 for the six years 1981 to 1986. These simple statistics show that Rattle and the CBSO had made twenty published recordings within the first six years of their relationship. This number of recordings far exceeded the recorded output of any other English regional orchestra for a similar period at this time. As has already been

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David Patmore

Table 7.1 Sir Simon Rattle: volume of annual recordings, 1981-6 ne, LEE EEEEEEEEEEEEEEE SEE nnn

| Other orchestras

No. of recordings

Year

No. of recordings

1981 CBSO 1982 CBSO.

1 4

Philharmonia Philharmonia

1 1

1983 CBSO

»

Nil

Nil

1984 CBSO $985°CBSOU 1986 CBSO

6 2 5

Los Angeles Philharmonic Philharmonia London Sinfonietta

1 1 i

noted, this was valuable in creating a national and international platform for both Rattle and the orchestra. The advent of the CD in 1983 and the increase in demand as well as the expansion of the market for recordings that this fuelled, may also account for some of this notable increase, alongside the union agreement then in place. Between 1981 and 1995 global sales of recordings, all formats taken together, increased by 64 per cent.°° Record companies needed to feed this increase in demand. The combination of the timing of technological innovation, the presence of a favourable financial model for recording, historical links between record company, conductor and orchestra, and high and improving performance standards from Rattle and the CBSO, created a set of circumstances which led to previously unattained levels of recording activity by the orchestra. The resulting recordings had valuable benefits in both the short and long term. Rattle’s relationship with the CBSO was sustained by a series of long-term plans, one of which was the “Towards the Millennium’ series of concerts in which the music of an individual decade between 1901 and 2000 was each year reviewed and performed. To quote Kenyon in interview: “Towards the Millennium” ... All those different things were part of a big plan to make the CBSO better.’°” The function of these recordings was to generate a significant change in the playing of the orchestra, a strategic objective not often found within the world of recording. Rattle was explicit about his purpose in his 1984 interview with Badal: ‘I use recording now as a tool in orchestra building, as well as a remarkable discipline for us and as a place where one simply has to sort out the problems.”°* In the same interview Rattle related recording to the more general task of developing standards: It’s an enormous incentive for everybody to be working their best. I think that’s what one must be aiming for with an orchestra all the time. Give them opportunities and places where they must give their best and better. And then one can jump from plane to plane. As one reaches a certain height, then that is the expected standard.

Recording and the Rattle phenomenon Then one can move on from there, and for me, in a way, that is the most important aspect of my recording.”

Considering recordings such as Mahler’s Second Symphony (1986)” retrospectively, — Rattle could only have been looking forward to it in the interview just quoted — Kenyon reiterates Rattle’s objective and its successful attainment: ‘I think they were more important in the process than they were successful as recordings .. Mahler Two is a good example of something which probably did push on the orchestra to a tremendous extent, but may not for all time be thought of as successful.’ Kenyon succinctly locates the recordings and their purpose with the comment, ‘I think he saw it as an ongoing process rather than as creating a set of finished artefacts.’”' Smith explains in more detail how improved performance was directly related to the additional time for preparation that recording provided: the opportunity to study a big Mahler symphony in depth over five days, seven three-hour sessions ... is one which has reaped enormous benefits in the quality of performance and understanding of the musicians. Musicians usually have perhaps two days’ rehearsal, then you do a concert and then perhaps repeat it once or twice, but to record, to actually immerse yourself in something for the best part of two weeks ... it would not be too far fetched to say that recording has been a lever in the process of improving performance.

The benefits of recording were far reaching, with the commercial nature of the music industry allowing for a general and permanent improvement to be sold strategically, notably to foreign buyers. In essence the international release of recordings of the CBSO distributed its new and heightened performances beyond territories that it had previously reached, as Smith clearly expresses: ‘[recording] has universalised the message about what he [Rattle] has achieved in orchestral standards and training ... People all over the world, if they can get the CD ... can make up their own minds.’”°

The combination of high standards and a long established brand such as EMI, with its own associations of quality, enabled the orchestra to secure tours to countries such as Japan. To quote Smith: I think we were probably the first regional orchestra from the UK to tour Japan and to persuade the promoters that “here was a young man whose recordings you can hear, and see the investment that EMI have put into him. You may not have heard of the CBSO but trust us and trust Rattle and EM? ... Without that I don’t think we would have got into [the international circuit].”*

Another pecuniary factor that flowed from the increase in the number of recordings was that when the old ‘recording for free time’ union agreement

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David Patmore

changed to additional cash payments, the orchestra’s players found themselves with higher salaries. According to Smith: ‘On average in Simon’s heyday years ... in the early 90s, suddenly our players would be picking up an average of about £1,100 a year [for recording].’”” Although the level of recording is now less, the additional activity and its consequent income, in conjunction with other factors, made playing for the CBSO a financially attractive proposition, thus assisting the recruitment of higher-calibre players than might otherwise have been the case. Recording or, rather, successful recording, may be used to raise standards: it acts as a calling card which may in turn result in tours that generate extra income for the orchestra and stimulate increased sales of recordings. During the twentieth century this positive circle of influence has been assisted by the development of global transport systems making it easier for musicians to travel internationally. In an interview with the Viennese newspaper Die Presse, published in 1996, Rattle baldly states (as he has done on a number of occasions): ‘For me

the ideal in music is a good string quartet. Somehow or other the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra is the world’s biggest string quartet ... I always ask the musicians to play chamber music, to play their phrases as their pleasure and mood dictate.’””° In the same year, and in the context of the CBSO’s Beethoven cycle, Seckerson asked Rattle to nominate the orchestra’s finest hour. Rattle’s reply was revealing. He claimed that the cycle performed with the orchestra that year ‘was the moment all of us realised that, yes, we really could play like a string quartet’.’” Recording may assist in the process of moving towards the attainment of the ideal performance in broad terms. The depth of preparation and concentration which ‘working in the studio’ allows may force up standards, and eventually may, as in the case of the CBSO, result in an extremely high level of performance. The key point is that it is the act of recording itself that helps to produce these results. The actual product of ‘working in the studio’, the published recording, is secondary, in that the decisive moment has by then passed.

Conclusions

This chapter has sought to identify those areas where the record industry and recording may be seen to have exerted an influence upon musical activity. A variety of evidence has indicated that recording has been an influence in the case of Sir Simon Rattle. It is a potential resource for

Recording and the Rattle phenomenon

learning, but it can both develop and restrict, depending upon how it is viewed by the user; it shows the way both to diversity of repertoire and to diversity of interpretation; it can help to improve standards of performance as part of a planned programme of development; it assists in the process of attracting high-calibre players, by enhancing the earnings of orchestral players through recording fees; and it makes the achievements of both conductor and orchestra known in geographical territories where they would normally have no physical presence. Perhaps more importantly, on the other side of the equation, the record company has not influenced Rattle’s decisions regarding the immediate repertoire to be recorded. Nor has technology played a role in determining the end product. From studying Rattle’s recording career up to 1999, it is clear that he developed a consistent intellectual rationale in relation to the medium of recording. At every stage of the recording process he showed himself to be in control of the medium, using it for musical ends, in ways which stand out as significant examples to other musicians, as well as Skilfully employing it within the context of long-term strategic plans. At the same time he was aware of and accepted the commercial imperatives with which the record industry must live if it is to flourish.

Notes

1. Gustav Mahler, Symphony No. 10 (Deryck Cooke performing edition, second version, with additional revisions for this recording by Simon Rattle and Berthold Goldschmidt). Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra, Simon Rattle (recorded Guildhall, Southampton,

June 1980). First release: EMI: SLS 5206

(LP), TC-SLS 5206 (tape cassette).

2. Imogen Cooper and Rob Cowan, “Table talk’, The Gramophone, 74/885 (February 1997), pp. 14-16, 16. (The majority of the material that first appeared in interviews published in newspapers and magazines has been taken from the files held by Rattle’s agency, Askonas Holt Ltd, which kindly granted access to them: this assistance is gratefully acknowledged. In many instances it has not been possible to identify the precise page number of the publication in which the material first appeared and from which the relevant cutting was taken. However, date and title of publication have been given in all instances.) 3. Edward Seckerson, ‘Revolution in our Living Rooms’, Classic CD (September 1996), p. 7. 4. James Badal, Recording the Classics: Maestros, Music, and Technology (Kent,

Ohio and London: Kent State University Press, 1996), p. 74. 5. John Whitley, ‘What will the Music of the New Millennium Sound Like?’, The

Daily Telegraph (27 February 1999), p. A7.

141

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David Patmore

Ibid. Ibid.

.

. Adam Sweeting, ‘Stompin’ Simon’, Classic FM Magazine (September 2000),

pp. 20-4, 24. . Badal, Recording the Classics, p. 77. . Stephen Pettitt, ‘Rattle and Brum’, The Sunday Times (20 August 1995). . Paul Griffiths, ‘Rattle shakes up Beethoven’, The Daily Telegraph (7 October 1995). PE Andrew Keener, ‘Simon Rattle’, The Gramophone 60/719 (April 1983), p. 1136. 13%, Ibid. Sergei Rachmaninov, Three Symphonic Dances; Vocalise. City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra, Simon Rattle (Dances recorded at The Maltings, Snape, October 1982; Vocalise recorded at Birmingham University

Great Hall, February 1983). First release: EMI: ASD

1436111 (LP), TC-ASD

1436114 (tape cassette). 14. Nicholas Kenyon, Simon Rattle: the Making of a Conductor (London: Faber and

ile). 16. Wie 18. 19: 20.

Faber, 1987). A second, revised, edition of this biography was published in 2001 under the title Simon Rattle: from Birmingham to Berlin, with a paperback version appearing in 2002 (London: Faber and Faber). Ibid., p. 25. Ibid., p. 29. Badal, Recording the Classics, p. 71. Keener, ‘Simon Rattle’, p. 812. Ibid. Ed Smith, the manager of the CBSO throughout Rattle’s period as Music Director of the Orchestra (1980-98). Interviewed by the author, Birmingham,

13 July 1999. Pile James Jolly, the editor of The Gramophone magazine from 1990 to 2005, and a

close observer of Rattle’s recording career. Interviewed by the author, Harrow, 14 July 1999. ipl Nicholas Kenyon, interviewed by the author, London, 9 September 1999 (see also note 19). 23% David Murray, the producer of Rattle’s recordings for EMI from 1983 to 1998.

Interviewed by the author, London, 22 September 1999. 24, John Willan, the producer of Rattle’s earliest recordings for EMI from 1977,

prior to Andrew Keener and David Murray, and subsequently the manager of the London Philharmonic Orchestra. Interviewed by the author, London, 8 July 1990: 20% Griffiths, “Rattle shakes up Beethoven’. 26. Badal, Recording the Classics, p. 72. De Ibid., p. 74. 28. Willan, author interview, 8 July 1999, Ue), Kenyon, Simon Rattle, p. 79. 30. Badal, Recording the Classics, p. 73.

Recording and the Rattle phenomenon . Griffiths, “Rattle shakes up Beethoven’, 1995. . Ibid.

. Edward Seckerson, “You Feel yourself Stretched on some Kind of Psychological Rack’, The Independent (14 October 1995). . Badal, Recording the Classics, p. 77.

. Ibid., p. 78. . Robin Stringer, ‘Simon Rattle’, The Gramophone 56/668 (January 1979), p. 1272.

. Ibid. . Ibid.

t

. Kenyon, author interview, 9 September 1999. . Murray, author interview, 22 September 1999. . Anonymous, ‘Twentieth Century Rattle — Part IP’, Classic CD (November 1996),

p. 38.

. Roger Mills and Jeremy Beadle, “The Complete Guide to Simon Rattle’, Classic CD (September 1993), pp. 18-22, 21. . Joanna Pitman, “Orchestral Manoeuvres’, The Times (24 August 1996).

. Karol Szymanowski, King Roger; Symphony No. 4, Op. 60 (Sinfonia concertante). Thomas Hampson, Ryszard Minkiewicz, Elzbieta Szmytka, Philip Langridge, Jadwiga Rappé, Robert Gierlach, Lefi Ove Andsnes, City of Birmingham Symphony Chorus, Youth Chorus and Orchestra, Simon Rattle (recorded Symphony Hall, Birmingham, October 1996 and July 1998). First release: EMI: CDS 5 56823-2 (CD: 2 CDs). 45. Leonard Bernstein, Wonderful Town. Kim Criswell, Audra McDonald, Thomas

Hampson, London Voices, Birmingham Contemporary Music Group, Simon Rattle (recorded EMI Abbey Road Studios, June 1998). First release: EMI: CDC

5 556753-2 (CD). 46. Jolly, author interview, 14 July 1999. 47. Murray, author interview, 22 September 1999. 48. Herbert

Kupferberg,

‘An

Interview

with

Simon

Rattle’,

Stereo

Review

(November 1992), p. 161.

49, Leaving Home: an Introduction to 20th-Century Music. City of Birmingham

Symphony Orchestra, Simon Rattle. First release: EMI: 5 66136-2, 5 66137-2 (CD: 2 CDs). 50. Michael Hall, Leaving Home: a Conducted Tour of Twentieth-century Music with Simon Rattle (London: Faber and Faber, 1996). pile Kenyon, author interview, 9 September 1999. Sy. Benjamin Britten, War Requiem. Elisabeth Soderstrém, Robert Tear, Thomas

Allen, Boys of Christ Church Cathedral, Oxford, City of Birmingham Symphony Chorus and Orchestra, Simon Rattle (recorded Great Hall, Birmingham University, February 1983, March 1983). First release: EMI: SLS 10 77573 (LP: 2 LPs), TC-SLS 10 77579 (tape cassette: 2 tape cassettes).

DS: Willan, author interview, 8 July 1999.

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David Patmore

54. See David N. C. Patmore, ‘EMI, Sir Thomas Beecham and the Formation of the

London Philharmonic Orchestra’, Journal of the Association of Recorded Sound Collections 32/1 (spring 2001), pp. 11-27, and David N.C. Patmore, ‘Sir Thomas Beecham: the Contract Negotiations with RCA Victor, Columbia Records and EMI, 1941-1959 - Artistic Aspirations vs. Commercial Reality’, Journal of the Association

of Recorded Sound

Collections 33/2 (fall 2002),

pps 175=213: SBE Murray, author interview, 22 September 1999. 56. Ibid. Dy. Badal, Recording the Classics, p. 75. 58. Murray, author interview, 22 September 1999. 59! Gustav Mahler, Symphony No. 7. City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra, Simon Rattle (recorded The Maltings, Snape, June, 1991). First release: EMI: CDC 7 54344-2 (CD).

60. Murray, author interview, 22 September 1999. 61. Smith, author interview, 13 July 1999. 62. Wagner: Das Rheingold, Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra, Georg Solti (recorded Sofiensaal, Vienna, 24-26, 29, 30 September, 1-3 and 6-8 October 1958). First release: Decca mono LXT 5495-7, Decca stereo SXL 2101-3 (LP: 3 LPs). Die

Walkiire, Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra, Georg Solti (recorded Sofiensaal, Vienna, 29, 31 October, 2-5 and 12-19 November 1965). First release: Decca mono

MET

312-6, Decca stereo SET 312-6

(LP: 5 LPs). Siegfried, Vienna

Philharmonic Orchestra, Georg Solti (recorded Sofiensaal, Vienna, 6-17 May and 21 October—5 November

1962). First release: Decca mono MET

242-6,

Decca stereo SET 242-6 (LP: 5 LPs). Gétterdémmerung, Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra, Georg Solti (recorded Sofiensaal, Vienna, 20 May-6 June, 26-31 October, 2-5 and 17-24 November 1964). First release: Decca mono MET 292-

76, Decca stereo SET 292-7 (LP: 5 LPs). 63. For the gramophonic nature of the Solti Ring, see David N. C. Patmore and Eric

F. Clarke, ‘Making and Hearing Virtual Worlds: John Culshaw and the Art of Record Production’, Musicae Scientiae 11/2 (fall 2007), pp. 269-93, and David

N.C. Patmore, ‘John Culshaw and the Recording as a Work of Art’, Journal of the Association of Recorded Sound Collections, 39/1 (spring 2008), pp. 19-40. For Solti’s problems with the performance of the Ring at the Bayreuth Festival in 1982, see Frederick Spotts, Bayreuth: a History of the Wagner Festival (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1994), p. 297. 64. Smith, author interview, 13 July 1999. 65. Ibid. 66. Pekka Gronow

and Ilpo Saunio, An International History of the Recording Industry (London and New York: Cassell, 1998), p. 193. 67. Kenyon, author interview, 9 September 1999. 68. Badal, Recording the Classics, p. 76. 69. Ibid., pp. 76-7.

Recording and the Rattle phenomenon

70. Gustav Mahler, Symphony No. 2 (Resurrection). Arleen Augér, Janet Baker,

City of Birmingham Symphony Chorus and Orchestra, Simon Rattle (recorded Watford Town Hall, April 1991, May 1991, June 1991). First release: EMI: EX 270598-3 (LP: 2 LPs), EX 270598-5 (tape cassette: 2 tape cassettes), CDS 7

47962-8 (CD: 2 CDs). File Kenyon, author interview, 9 September 1999. jpn Smith, author interview, 13 July 1999. a

Ibid.

f

74. Ibid. Viey Ibid. 76. Willhem Sinkowicz, ‘Maestro of the Philharmonic: Vintage 2000’, Die Presse (1 August 1996).

Li. Seckerson, ‘Revolution in our Living Rooms’, p. 7.

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8

Jazz recordings and the capturing of performance PETER

ELSDON

[A] score by Beethoven or Schoenberg is a definitive document, a blueprint from which various slightly differing interpretations can be derived. A jazz recording of an improvised performance on the other hand is a onetime thing, in many instances the only available and therefore ‘definitive’ version of something that was never meant to be definitive.’

When Gunther Schuller set out this theoretical stance on recordings at the start of his book, Early Jazz, he was establishing a position which has proved fundamental to jazz historiography. He identifies a crucial part of the appeal of recordings, namely the way in which they allow a single performance to be ‘captured’ and repeated. The effects of this capturing of the ephemeral seem fairly clear: to echo Walter Benjamin’s famous article ‘Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’, through recording, a performance is preserved in such a way that it can be mechanically reproduced in contexts divorced from the usual rituals associated with performance.” The recording serves to freeze a performance in time and thus allows that performanceto be revisited or, as expressed from another philosophical standpoint, ‘recordings freeze their subject for posterity.’ Within jazz historiography recording tends to be viewed as a tool of preservation: it provides access, as Jed Rasula has pointed out, to a historical past.* In recent times some commentators have viewed recordings in a critical light, and concluded that they are actually highly problematic in historiographic terms. In a 1995 essay entitled “The Media of Memory, the Seductive Menace of Records in Jazz History’, Rasula laments the fact that ‘historians have tended to avoid theorizing the actual status and function of these artifacts’.” However, the question about recordings extends far beyond simply what kind of performances they capture, as shown in the following comment by John Gennari, writing about Schuller’s The Swing Era: Schuller’s claim that the truth of jazz is to be found in recordings ... is at odds with the most fundamental and enduring article of faith in jazz — namely, that its truth is Early versions of this chapter were presented at the University of East Anglia, at the Leeds College of Music, and at the 2005 Leeds International Jazz Conference. I am grateful to everyone who made comments on those occasions.

Jazz recordings and capturing performance

located in its live performance aesthetic, its multitextual, non-recordable qualities of emotional expressiveness and response.°

Another jazz scholar, Matthew Butterfield, makes a similar point: ‘recording and the music culture it has produced work against the integrative social function of jazz music-making activities’.’ Such opinions emphasise the loss that recordings create, the price that has to be paid for this sonic capture, but both Gennari and Butterfield also agree that it seems to be highly problematic to hold on to a history predicated so heavily on recordings and at the same time emphasise those musical aspects of jazz which rely on the ephemerality of performance.® This seemingly overly pessimistic view of the jazz recording is redressed in Rasula’s recommendation that scholars should ‘concede a tension between the clean material realm of recorded artifacts and the scattered, rumored, remembered, and intimated “live” [unrecorded] totality of the music’.” The

gap between the image recordings appear to construct and the reality of what they actually represent requires further exploration. The following narrative investigates one particular species of recording in jazz: the live recording. The live recording is somewhat unusual in the sense that it is normally studio recordings which serve as the mainstays of the jazz canon. However, the critic Evan Eisenberg suggests that ‘[o]nly live recordings record an event; studio recordings, which are the great majority, record nothing’.’° While this position might seem a little extreme, there are good reasons for reconsidering the potential that live recordings offer.

Recordings and performances The musicologist Eric Clarke has written of a ‘deep-seated uncertainty about how recordings should be understood — whether as captured performances or as studio creations’.'' These two conceptions of recording represent an important practical faultline, a division which might be mapped on to the terminology proposed by philosopher Theodore Gracyk: recording either ‘reproduces’ or ‘represents’ a performance.’* Seeking to categorise recordings in this way articulates the relationship between the listener on the one hand, and the images constructed by recordings on the other. In other words, the uncertainty Clarke points to stems from the recognition that what is presented through a recording is not necessarily all it may seem — the access we are given to a musical event is never unmediated, even if the illusion to the contrary may be extremely powerful. Before turning to jazz, it is worth considering in general

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Peter Elsdon

terms how recordings were conceptualised within the traditions of the classical and popular recording industries in the twentieth century. The idea of ‘fidelity’ has been of central concern to the classical music recording industry.'* Fidelity implies faithfulness to someone or something and in this sense reflects the manner in which a recording reproduces a performance; but it does not mean capture in a literal sense in order for a single continuous performance to form the basis of a recording. For a large part of the twentieth century, editing (in the form of tape splicing and latterly computer-based editing) has become standard practice so that the performance which is actually committed to record or CD may be a composite of any number of performances.'* Recording practice in some cases may involve recording individual sections of a piece and later joining them together to produce a complete performance. The important point here is that classical recordings always aspire to produce the image of a single coherent performance; any editing is required to be, in effect, invisible. The literature on popular music constructs a very different kind of narrative with regard to the development of recording: one of the key points was the realisation that the recording studio did not have to serve simply as a means of documenting a live performance, but was in itself a compositional too

12? The recording sessions Elvis Presley undertook at Sun Studios in

Memphis in 1954 are often cited as the turning point. For example, Gracyk identifies the Sun sessions as the first recordings to demonstrate that the studio could deliberately create something sonically quite removed from what an artist might sound like to an audience in a live performance, which subsequently brought about the gradual adoption of the studio as an instrument.’® In his book about music technology and the recording industry, Paul Theberge describes this move as the rise of the ‘aesthetics of sound’ in studio recordings; the idea of recording not as ‘reproductive’ but as ‘productive’.'” Gracyk goes further and argues that recording is rock’s primary medium, and that recordings only ‘represent’ performances, as they may have been assembled from different recordings, takes, tape splices and so on. Furthermore, the very sound of the recording achieved in the studio, whether the timbre produced by a specific microphone or (in the case of the famous Sun sessions) the application of a reverb or delay effect, becomes part of this text. The position Gracyk describes is one which is now considered normative in popular music recording where, to use Clarke’s terminology, the recording is more studio creation than captured performance. The recording aesthetic that jazz has generally employed is slightly different from both of the positions outlined above. There are of course many similarities: for example, the reliance on a performance-based aesthetic

Jazz recordings and capturing performance

which sometimes results in the fact that, as Gracyk has pointed out, overdubs and splices are regarded in some ways as ‘cheating’.'® At the same time, as explained by Butterfield, contemporary production techniques mean that overdubs and edits are commonplace; musicians may not even have to be in the studio at the same time to produce a performance which sounds as if they were playing together.'” One of the abiding aesthetic principles of jazz is that ‘in performance’ musicians reinvent and reinterpret material rather than bringing precomposed works into sounding existence. The compositions that jazz musicians perform are best understood as kinds of blueprints or referents which serve as springboards for musical excursions. The point of performing is not to reproduce existing material but to reinterpret and reinvent that material. While jazz recordings may reproduce or represent performances, those performances are not of something in the way in which that term has usually been conceived in musicological discourse.*” This goes some way to explain the vogue for reissuing alternate versions and complete sessions (nowhere is this more apparent than in the catalogue of Miles Davis) for avid jazz consumers. Such recordings are much more than merely slightly different versions of the same thing. In order to look at the potential live recordings offer, a series of recordings made by John Coltrane will be explored in some detail.

‘Chasin’ the Trane’ - a history in recordings ‘Chasin’ the Trane’ first appeared on Coltrane’s 1962 album Live at the Village Vanguard, recorded at New York’s Village Vanguard Club in November 1961.7’ Indeed this particular album rapidly became famous, largely because it ignited a critical debate around Coltrane and what some critics saw as his modernist tendencies.” The recordings for Live at the Village Vanguard were made by engineer Rudy van Gelder in the course of a Coltrane engagement at the venue.*’ As listed in table 8.1, there were three versions of this tune recorded by van Gelder during the Coltrane group’s stay at the club, although only version 3 was issued on the original 1962 live album. ‘Chasin’ the Trane’ is a rather unusual piece for Coltrane for a number of reasons. While Coltrane’s regular group at this time was a quintet (with saxophonist Eric Dolphy, pianist McCoy Tyner, bassist Reggie Workman and drummer Elvin Jones), after the Village Vanguard sessions this piece was always performed in a trio format (saxophone, bass and drums).** In these initial versions the trio is augmented by Dolphy who solos on versions 1 and 2 while, on the second version, Tyner plays for the first two choruses

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Peter Elsdon

Table 8.1 1961 recording of ‘Chasin’ the Trane” a

nn ee, EEUU EEEEEE EEE!

Version 1: Wednesday 1 November 1961, Village Vanguard, New York. Duration: 9'41" John Coltrane (tenor saxophone), Eric Dolphy (alto saxophone), Reggie Workman (bass), Elvin Jones (drums)

Originally issued in 1977 on The Other Village Vanguard Tapes (Impulse

AS9325).

;

Version 2: Thursday 2 November 1961, Village Vanguard, New York. (NB. This recording was subsequently titled ‘Chasin’ Another Trane’.) Duration: 15'26". John Coltrane (tenor saxophone), Eric Dolphy (alto saxophone), McCoy Tyner (piano), Reggie Workman (bass), Roy Haynes (drums). (Tyner drops out after the first two choruses.)

Originally issued in 1979 on Trane’s Modes (Impulse 1Z-9361). Version 3: Thursday 2 November 1961, Village Vanguard, New York. Duration: 15'55” John Coltrane (tenor saxophone), Jimmy Garrison (bass), Elvin Jones (drums)

Originally issued in 1962 on Live at the Village Vanguard (Impulse AS-10). “ The discographical information for these sessions is contained with the CD box set The Complete 1961 Village Vanguard Recordings, Impulse, IMPD4-232, 1997.

before dropping out.”° In the liner notes to the recording Coltrane said this about “Chasin’ the Trane’, quoted by jazz critic, Nat Hentoff: Usually, I like to get familiar with a new piece before I record it, but you never have to worry about the blues, unless the line is very complicated. In this case, however, the melody not only wasn’t written but it wasn’t even conceived before we played it. We set the tempo, and in we went.”°

Such an attitude to performing is not of course at all unusual in jazz, particularly with a form like the blues where the underlying harmonic structure is known by all musicians. Sometimes horn players may ‘call’ a blues and invent a ‘head’ (a melodic theme) on the bandstand, tagging together stock phrases in order to create something with as strong a thematic identity as possible. Thus, apparently, what we now know as ‘Chasin’ the Trane’ was not composed prior to performance — it was just a blues played on the bandstand, with nothing more than key or tempo agreed beforehand. Comparison of the opening of each of the three takes recorded at the Village Vanguard seems to bear much of this out. Both recordings 1 and 3 (from table 8.1) are in the key of F, and have strong thematic similarities. In each case (see

example 8.1)” there is a ‘head’ which begins with a rising F triad, followed by a long line which traces a descent to an F an octave below the starting point, although the manner of this descent is different in each case. The second version listed in table 8.1 fills in another part of the picture: the titling is posthumous as it was not released until 1979, well after Coltrane’s

Jazz recordings and capturing performance

Example 8.1(2) ‘Chasi’ the Trane’, 1 November 1961, Village Vanguard

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Example 8.2 ‘Chasin’ Another Trane’, 2 November 1961, Village Vanguard.

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death in July 1967. ‘Chasin’ Another Trane’ is in the key of Bb and, while melodically this version does not have quite the same contour as the other two, its opening is nevertheless strongly based on triads (see example 8.2).* This melodic shape, combined with the fact that Tyner starts playing then drops out, indicates that this recording is still closely related to what has now become widely recognised as “‘Chasin’ the Trane’. Indeed, the copyright position is that there is no distinction between these two titles, one simply happens to be an ‘alternative’. ‘Chasin’ the Trane’ first came to be known from the third recording released on the Live at the Village Vanguard LP in 1962. Despite Coltrane’s explanation of the piece in the liner notes (quoted above), on the LP the track was listed as being composed by John Coltrane. Listing a composer in this sense was in large part for reasons of copyright - a composer had to be credited in order to receive royalties for a composition.” But this might also be described as an example of the way in which the economics of recording valorises composition over performance. The nature of ‘Chasin’ the Trane’ as described here suggests that it did not have a stable compositional identity, certainly not in the same way as the other pieces he was performing at the time, such as ‘Impressions’, and ‘My Favorite Things’. If these three

recordings are to be considered as different versions of the same piece, then there necessarily must have been an original. The fact that Coltrane is

Jazz recordings and capturing performance

credited as composer indicates the potential confusion that can arise from how copyright law interprets the notion of composition. When Eisenberg states that ‘[i]n jazz the record is the work’ he pinpoints the effect that this recording had for a historical understanding of ‘Chasin’ the Trane’; in other words, the recording creates an original where there was not one previously.*’ By presuming recording to be a transparent medium, as is evident from so much jazz historiography, it is easy to ignore its ability to create the works that Eisenberg describes. The fact that ‘Chasin’ the Trane’ is ubiquitous in historical accounts of this period is a direct byproduct of the process of recording.*’ Yet when historians cite ‘Chasin’ the Trane’ they are actually referring to one particular performance which was never intended to be definitive in any sense at the time it took place. Recording may represent a performance (to use Gracyk’s terminology) but it also accomplishes an important kind of cultural work in investing certain performances with an authority which appears to contradict the historical reality. This is precisely the kind of tension that Rasula describes in his essay on jazz recordings, a kind of dangerous narrowing that occurs through the lens of recording. However, as will be seen below, the consequences of the release of this recording in 1962 extend rather further. According to available discographical information, after the Village Vanguard engagement Coltrane does not seem to have played “Chasin’ the Trane’ again until November 1962 (see table 8.2). It is worth noting that the Coltrane group’s repertoire was fairly stable. They tended to work through a relatively small roster of tunes which were brought out on the bandstand night after night, including such staples as the version of ‘My Favorite Things’ Coltrane had recorded in 1960, and ‘Impressions’, the tune based on the chord changes to Miles Davis’s ‘So What’ (1959). However, once ‘Chasin’ the

Trane reappears in Coltrane’s set lists an interesting musical change emerges. Example 8.3 displays the first chorus from each of the available recordings. The first point to note here is that the anacrusis or ‘pick-up’ has disappeared entirely so that Coltrane begins on a downbeat. However, the most significant factor is that the melody of the first chorus has become standardised — in relation to the released Village Vanguard performance (example 8.1(b)). Not only is the first phrase in each of these recordings more or less identical to the Vanguard recording but example 8.3 hints at a

further ongoing process of standardisation, which might not be surprising at first glance, but leads to an interesting implication. ‘Chasin’ the Trane’ follows a reasonably traditional paradigm - that of a composed head

followed by improvisations — although Coltrane never literally recapitulates the theme at the end of any performance. But how has this transition from a

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Table 8.2 Post-1961 recordings of ‘Chasin’ the Trane” a

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Version 4; 22 November 1962, Copenhagen. Duration: LOWY

John Coltrane (tenor saxophone), Jimmy Garrison (bass), Elvin Jones (drums) Unissued. Version 5: 2 December 1962, Milan. Duration: 4/15” John Coltrane (tenor saxophone), Jimmy Garrison (bass), Elvin Jones (drums)

Unissued and currently unavailable. Version 6:

10 June 1963, Showboat, Philadelphia. Duration: 10’50”

John Coltrane (tenor saxophone), Jimmy Garrison (bass), Elvin Jones (drums) Unissued. Version 7: 2 November 1963, Berlin. Duration: 5'41” John Coltrane (tenor saxophone), Jimmy Garrison (bass), Elvin Jones (drums) Issued on Pablo Live 2620-101.

Version 8: Date unconfirmed, sometimes attributed to 1 November 1963, Paris.

Duration: 5/21” John Coltrane (tenor saxophone), Jimmy Garrison (bass), Elvin Jones (drums) Unissued.

“ The information here is drawn from a number of sources. These include information distributed through the John Coltrane email list (the list does not currently seem to have a homepage, but information can be found http://adale.org/Jazz.html, accessed 16 June 2009), discographer David Wild’s website (http://home.att.net/~dawild/, accessed 16 June 2009) and Lewis Porter’s chronology in John Coltrane which provides a means of cross-checking certain facts. See also Allan Sutherland’s ‘John Coltrane Sessionography, 1960-1964’ (http:// www.kyushu-ns.ac.jp/~allan/Documents/JC_S_60-64.HTML, accessed 16 June 2009). Since the information in this chapter was compiled, Lewis Porter, Chris DeVito, David

Wild, Yasuhiro Fujioka and Wolf Schmaler have published The John Coltrane Reference, a comprehensive discography and sessionography (New York: Routledge, 2007).

loose unrehearsed blues The following evidence place because Coltrane interview with historian, Kofsky:

to a melodically standardised piece been effected? suggests that it must almost certainly have taken had listened to his own recording. Witness this Frank Kofsky:

Did you ever listen to that selection [“Chasin’ the Trane’] much?

Coltrane:

Only at the time it came out. I used to listen to it and wonder what happened to me. Kofsky: | What do you mean? Coltrane: Well, it’s sort of surprising to hear this back because - I don’t know, it came back another way.”

Coltrane was known to be a relentlessly self-critical performer. Indeed, there

are stories of his wife bringing a tape-recorder to his gigs so that he could

Jazz recordings and capturing performance Example 8.3 First chorus from available post-1961 recordings.

2/11/62, Copenhagen

10/6/63, Philadelphia

1/11/63, Paris

2/11/63, Berlin

listen to the playbacks later on. Thus Coltrane maintained a kind of dialogue with his earlier performance, possible because of the mediation of recording technology. Apart from the melodic reshaping and standardisation of ‘Chasin’ the Trane’ there are also interesting developments in the rhythm section. In the

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Peter Elsdon

Example 8.4(a) ‘Chasin’ the Trane’, Copenhagen, 22 November 1962.

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attempt within the rhythm section (possibly initiated by Coltrane) to arrive at a simple arrangement to help make the head distinctive. Although the

Jazz recordings and capturing performance Example 8.4(b) ‘Chasin’ the Trane’, Paris, 1 November 1963.

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piece may be standardised melodically, there are clearly other respects in which an ongoing process of re-invention can be observed. Recording does not merely allow access to performances; it intrudes right into the development of the very musical traditions to which it provides access. While recognising its transparency of representation, it needs to be remembered that the ways in which recordings were made and disseminated in fact shape the musical practices of jazz.** The history of ‘Chasin’ the Trane’ begins rather than ends with the 1962 Vanguard recording, which was available both to Coltrane and to the general public. Recording accomplishes far more than merely documenting something - it writes itself into musical history. Consequently, as alluded to earlier, the very act of recording, releasing and titling “Chasin’ the Trane’ culturally constructs it as a composition which Coltrane came to repeat. It is easy to forget that recordings are in themselves the act of inscribing a history (as Rasula points out) and that they often have an important effect at the very historical moment they supposedly document. The history of ‘Chasin’ the Trane’ that evolves from these recordings is somewhat tricky, and even problematic; it certainly defies any notion of the tune as a composition fixed at a particular point in time. The case of ‘Chasin’ the Trane’ provides an ideal opportunity to rethink jazz recordings specifically in terms of exactly what is being captured. Referring back to the charge Gennari makes against Schuller’s view of recordings, quoted in the first section of this chapter (see pp. 146-7), Gennari positions the ‘truth’ of jazz

bS7

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beyond the representative capabilities of recording. While it is impossible to disagree, there are ways in which recordings can be utilised at least partly to address the ‘live-ness’ of jazz. There are two significant points to note about the way the Coltrane group worked. First, they rarely rehearsed: new compositions were often introduced on the bandstand with none of the players having heard them before. Secondly, during this period in the early 1960s, once arrangements were worked out (and this was usually the case if tunes had been recorded during a studio session) they were repeated verbatim in live performance.’ The examples presented here show the results of musical interactions on stage — of the important interpersonal aspect to music-making which is especially crucial in jazz*° and is thought to be lost in the process of recording — what Gennari calls the ‘live performance aesthetic’, or what Butterfield describes as the ‘integrative social function of jazz music-making activities’.°’ By drawing attention to these interpersonal aspects of musicking in jazz, recordings have the potential to resist their interpretation as purely musical objects, particularly when considering multiple recordings of the same piece. Precisely because they emphasise difference, recordings write back into the object of study the contingency of performance, something which tends to be radically reduced in the process of recording. Live recordings allow access to another kind of social interaction - that between musicians and audience — where it is possible to hear something of the spaces in which Coltrane was performing (the Paris recording for example is made in a concert hall, whereas the Philadelphia recording takes place in a small club). In this sense live recordings are not just documents of performances but documents of reception.

Re-evaluating the text The underrated yet critical issue regarding jazz recordings relates to what Gennari identifies as the ‘multitextual’ qualities of jazz. The above exploration of ‘Chasin’ the Trane’ resists the widespread dependence on the released 1961 recording by recovering a sense of what that performance meant historically. ‘Chasin’ the Trane’ does not therefore exist through any single recording, nor is it a combination of all its recordings, but instead is a kind of notional

totality — in essence, the sum of all the times it was performed. This idea is perhaps similar to one suggested by Schuller and later taken up by musicologist Ekkehard Jost, namely that a musician’s improvisations can be regarded as existing along a continuum.” In this sense, the more points on the continuum that are known about, the better our understanding of the

Jazz recordings and capturing performance

improvisatory processes by which that musician works. The next stage is to see how this theory might be applied to a piece like ‘Chasin’ the Trane’, The problem of addressing jazz in relation to the conventional model of works is much debated. Musicology has traditionally been preoccupied with an extremely eurocentric view of works and performances, from which many of its central tenets are derived, and has yet to accommodate cases such as ‘Chasin’ the Trane’ which do not fit with a standard model of works. Considered in relation to any oral tradition, such as folk music or storytelling, the performance history of ‘Chasin’ the Trane’ looks perfectly normal — hardly remarkable at all. The musicologist, José Bowen, has even suggested considering the history of a piece in jazz through invoking the concept of family resemblance in the context of a changing tradition that is perceived as a ‘collective memory’.*’ Taking this a step further, the idea of intertextuality is invoked in relation to ‘Chasin’ the Trane’.*° As the term is used here, intertextuality is not merely about the relationships between one text and another; rather it constitutes a radical retheorisation of works and texts. Turning to the writings of literary theorists, Roland Barthes identifies an inversion of the commonplace classical conception of texts as giving physical existence to works, describing the work as something semantically stable, which also exists as a physical object.*’ The text is reconceptualised as a ‘methodological field’, which Graham Allen describes as ‘radically plural’.** Thus intertextuality works against semantic stability and the concept of the closed work.” It serves as a means of resisting the autonomous text, and acknowledging the complex relationships that one text has to other texts. As expressed by music theorist Kevin Korsyn, this serves to dismantle the idea of a text/context dichotomy.”* Serge Lacasse has formulated a specific kind of intertextuality in relation to recordings with reference to the literary theory of Gérard Genette.*” Genette’s notion of hypertextuality outlines a number of specific types of intertextual practice which Lacasse has applied to popular music recordings, for example where one recording quotes from another, either literally or through allusion. While this is an extremely useful move towards a better understanding of the types of practice which characterise popular music, this kind of theoretical framework preserves the idea of texts as independent and individual. In part this is because Genette’s brand of intertextuality is a highly structuralist one, and it is the radical poststructuralist version of intertextuality that is most useful for the case under consideration here. The retheorising of the text which Barthes undertakes has resonances with recent moves in musicology to reconceptualise performance within discourse about musical works. The musicologist, Nicholas Cook, has suggested, partly through a turn towards

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contemporary performance studies, that performances have to be understood ‘in relation to other performances ... rather than in relation to the original vision supposedly embodied in an authoritative text’.“° The new theoretical position Cook proposes is one in which ‘there is no ontological distinction between the different modes of a work’s existence, its different instantiations, because there is no original’.*” This exercise results in a similar decentring strategy to that already described, by moving away from the purely musical object towards a more inclusive ideal of what it is that we study. By adopting the argument that there is no original, our orientation necessarily shifts towards exploring how different recordings chart the musical practices of a musician or group of musicians. Included in this radically plural notion of the object of study has to be the medium itself. As demonstrated in this chapter, recording has a crucial effect on musical practices: it interferes at the historical moment that it supposedly represents. The medium itself is not invisible, but rather it shapes the objects to which we gain access through the act of listening. By removing recording’s claims to transparency its cultural agency is acknowledged and its mode of representation becomes part of the object of study. A rethinking of jazz recordings results in what is best described as a strategy of resistance. This resistance fights against the idea that a single recording, even if we somehow believed that it represented the intentions of the musician, and that it was the best document available, should come to stand in for historical reality. Such a strategy also resists the clean, clinical, artificial world of the recording studio, though this is not to suggest that recordings made in the studio should be thrown away, far from it. Rather, it is to recognise that studio recordings represent a very different kind of performance from live recordings. There is much to be said for celebrating the dirty, low-fidelity world of the live recording as a more honest and in many ways faithful representation of what happens when musicians (and audiences) engage in the profoundly social interaction that is called performance. This is to see recording as a complex process which writes itself into history in the act of appearing to capture a performance. Notes

1. Gunther Schuller, Early Jazz: its Roots and Musical Development (New York: Oxford University Press, 1968), p. x. 2. Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’, in Hannah Arendt (ed.), Illuminations, trans. Harry Zohn (London: Fontana, 1973 [1936]), pp. 219-53. See Peter Johnson’s chapter in this volume for a closer look

at Benjamin’s writings about recording.

Jazz recordings and capturing performance

. Theodore Gracyk, Rhythm and Noise: an Aesthetics of Rock (London: Duke University Press, 1996), p. 53. . Jed Rasula, ‘The Media of Memory: the Seductive Menace of Records in Jazz History’, in Krin Gabbard (ed.), Jazz among the Discourses (Durham and

London: Duke University Press, 1995), pp. 134-62. . Ibid., p. 134. See Catherine Tackley’s chapter in this volume for a detailed overview of the debate about recordings and their historiographic role. . John Gennari, ‘Jazz Criticism: its Development and Ideologies’, Black American Literature Forum 25/3 (autumn 1991), p. 459.

. Matthew Butterfield, “Music Analysis and the Social Life of Jazz Recordings’, Current Musicology 71-3 (spring 2001-spring 2002), p. 342. . For a critique of canonic tendencies within jazz historiography, see Krin Gabbard, ‘Introduction: The Jazz Canon and Its Consequences’, in Gabbard, Jazz among the Discourses, pp. 1-28. . Rasula, “The Media of Memory’, p. 144. 10. Evan Eisenberg, The Recording Angel: Music, Records and Culture from Aristotle to Zappa (2nd edn, New Haven and London: Yale University Press,

2005), p. 89. 11. Eric

F. Clarke,

‘Listening

to Performance’,

in John

Rink

(ed.), Musical

Performance: a Guide to Understanding (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), p. 187. 12: Gracyk, Rhythm and Noise, pp. 44-6. aS: On this notion of fidelity, see Andrew Blake, “To the Millennium: Music as Twentieth-Century Commodity’, in Nicholas Cook and Anthony Pople (eds.), The Cambridge History of Twentieth-Century Music (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), pp. 484-5, and John Corbett, Extended Play (Durham:

Duke University Press, 1994), pp. 40-4. 14. The history of recording technique within classical music is quite a complex one. For an outline see Timothy Day, A Century of Recorded Music: Listening to Musical

History (New Haven:

Yale University Press, 2000), and Michael

Chanan, Repeated Takes: a Short History of Recording and its Effects on Music (London: Verso, 1995). ey See Albin Zak’s chapter in this volume for a detailed look at production

16. 7:

18. 1); 20.

techniques in postwar pop and other chapters in the last section of the book for different perspectives on recordings as compositional tools. Gracyk, Rhythm and Noise. Paul Théberge, Any Sound you can Imagine: Making Music/Consuming Technology (Hanover: Wesleyan University Press, 1997), p. 216. Gracyk, Rhythm and Noise, p. 40. Butterfield, ‘Music Analysis and the Social Life of Jazz Recordings’. Richard Middleton describes this phenomenon more generally as a ‘thorough blurring (or non-recognition) of the boundary between “performance” and “composition”,’ in ‘Work-in-(g) Practice: Configuration of the Popular Music

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Intertext’, in Michael Talbot (ed.), The Musical Work: Reality or Invention (Liverpool University Press, 2000), p. 60. Ale John Coltrane, Live at the Village Vanguard, Impulse AS-10, 1962. For the definitive account of Coltrane’s life and music, see Lewis Porter, John Coltrane: Ul

23

24.

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26.

Die

28.

his Life and Music (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1998). This controversy was played out in the pages of Down Beat magazine, which ran two reviews of this album in their 26 April 1962 edition. Running two reviews of an album was rare for Down Beat, but the reason was clearly the increasing controversy surrounding Coltrane’s work around this time. For a useful background to van Gelder’s career as an engineer up to this point, see Dan Skea, ‘Rudy Van Gelder in Hackensack: Defining the Jazz Sound in the 1950s’, Current Musicology 71-3 (spring 2001-spring 2002), pp. 54-76. Dolphy’s presence in the group was temporary as he would leave in April 1962 while bassist Reggie Workman was replaced by Jimmy Garrison in late 1961. The resulting group (Tyner, Garrison, Jones) has become known as Coltrane’s ‘classic’ quartet: Porter, John Coltrane. In version 2 Tyner joins again on the final chord of the performance along with Dolphy as the band pauses momentarily on the tonic Bb chord. On the first two recordings Coltrane plays a long first solo, Dolphy then plays a shorter second solo, and Coltrane then solos again for a number of choruses before closing the tune out. Nat Hentoff, Liner notes to John Coltrane, Live at the Village Vanguard, Impulse AS-10, 1962. I am grateful to Jowcol Music for granting permisson to reproduce these musical examples. The views expressed on “Chasin’ the Trane’ in this article are of course the author’s, and should not be taken as representative of those of the Coltrane estate. This tune to me bears a resemblance to a tune Coltrane recorded the previous year for Coltrane Plays the Blues titled “Blues for You’. Thus I suspect that ‘Chasin’ Another Trane’ may be as much related to ‘Blues for You’ as to the versions of “Chasin’ the Trane’ in F. John Coltrane, Coltrane Plays The Blues, Atlantic 8122073743-2, 1962.

MY), My thanks to Scott DeVeaux for pointing this out. 30. Eisenberg, The Recording Angel, p. 123. Sik See for example Gary Giddins, Visions of Jazz: the First Century (New York:

Oxford University Press, 1998), pp. 476-90. 2) Frank Kofsky, John Coltrane and the Jazz Revolution of the 1960s (New York:

Pathfinder, 1970; 2nd rev. edn, 1998), p. 443. 38h Lewis Porter points out that Coltrane used to record his practice sessions,

listening to them afterwards, in John Colfrane, p. 255. We also know that in 1957 Coltrane’s wife recorded him using a portable tape-machine playing with Thelonious Monk at the Five Spot Club, a tape that would be issued decades later on CD. Eric Nisenson, Ascension: John Coltrane and his Quest (New York:

Da Capo Press, 1995), p. 47.

Jazz recordings and capturing performance

34. This idea is one which Catherine Tackley explores further in her chapter in this

volume. 35: See Porter, John Coltrane, p. 183, on Coltrane’s practice of working out rhythm

section parts for recording sessions. Saying Something: Jazz Improvisation and Interaction (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1996). ave Matthew Butterfield, “Music Analysis and the Social Life of Jazz Recordings’, p. 342. lam thinking here of Christopher Small’s notion of ‘musicking’: music as an act not a thing, and an act in which the participants are all of those involved in the social interaction of performance. Christoper Small, Musicking: the Meanings of Performing and Listening (Hanover: Wesleyan University 36. See Ingrid Monson,

Press, 1998).

38. Jost suggests that ‘the improvisations of a given musician form a chain of non-

definitive phenomena’. Ekkehard Jost, Free Jazz (New York: Da Capo Press, 1974), p. 14. In doing so, he quotes Schuller suggesting that ‘Jazz improvisation constitutes “work in progress”. Schuller, Early Jazz, p.X. 39. José A. Bowen, ‘Finding the Music in Musicology: Performance History and Musical Works’, in Nicholas Cook and Mark Everist (eds.), Rethinking Music

(Oxford University Press, 1999), p. 425. See also José Bowen, “The History of Remembered Innovation: Tradition and Its Role in the Relationship between Musical Works and their Performances’, The Journal ofMusicology 11/2 (1993), pp. 139-73. 40. Ingrid Monson has applied the idea of intertextuality to jazz previously, but

under her term ‘intermusicality’. I prefer the term intertextuality specifically because it is the definition of the text that is of most concern here. Monson, Saying Something, pp. 127-8. 41. See for example Barthes’s essay ‘From Work To Text’ in Roland Barthes, Image, Music, Text, trans. Stephen Heath (London: Fontana Press, 1977), pp. 155-64.

42. Graham Allen, Intertextuality (London: Routledge, 2000), p. 66. 43. Richard Middleton makes a similar point in “Work-in-(g) Practice’, p. 61.

Korsyn, ‘Beyond Privileged Contexts: Intertextuality, Influence, and Dialogue’, in Cook and Everist, Rethinking Music, p. 56. 45. Serge Lacasse, ‘Intertextuality and Hypertextuality in Recorded Popular Music’, 44. Kevin

in Michael Talbot (ed.), The Musical Work: Reality or Invention? (Liverpool:

Liverpool University Press, 2000), pp. 35-58. 46. Nicholas Cook, ‘Between Process and Product: Music and/as Performance’,

Music Theory Online 7/2 (April 2001), p. 16. 47.

Ibid., p. 17.

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W' he took a collection of songs that inspired him, and made them his own. One may like or dislike the glam rock production style of Pin Ups but there is no doubt that each song is forged into something unique to Bowie and his band at the time.'®° In some cases, such as ‘Rosalyn’, he manages to capture the fury of the original while simultaneously seeming to distance himself from it, or somehow keeping the song at an ironic arm’s length. Again, this comes across most clearly when one directly compares the

original with the cover version. Recently, covers have again come into vogue for a variety of reasons. In a recent article, an American

observes:

writer and musician,

Franklin

Bruno,

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Virgil Moorefield Clearing a sample legally can be prohibitively expensive, with large portions of a producer's royalties, or even upfront cash, flowing to the owners of the master recording. By contrast, songs aren’t free, but they’re relatively cheap, and the ground rules are clear. Any artist can release a version of any song, so long as a mechanical royalty — currently 8 and % cents, in most cases — is paid to whoever owns the publishing (which often isn’t the songwriter, but that’s intellectual property for you).'”

Beyond such utilitarian issues, there is also a heightened awareness of the interpretative possibilities inherent in covering songs due to the popularity of remixes and mash-ups. The recent resurgence of cover albums is partly due to remix culture in general, which prizes combining different styles into one artefact.’*

Remixing The concept of remixing could be viewed as a cover of the concept of covers. Remixing updates covers to reflect the technology of the late 1970s (the appearance of samplers and the widespread use of multitracking); mashups, in turn, cover remixing, reflecting the widespread availability of fast computers and sophisticated phase vocoder algorithms (independent time and pitch manipulation of sound files) as of the late 1990s. In recent times the concept of remixing has been appropriated from the world of recording and disseminated on a broad scale. The Coca Cola Company has been marketing various flavours of its Sprite beverage as ‘Sprite Remix’. These liquid ‘remixes’ are sold in almost every country in the world, with regional variations. Thus in Hong Kong one finds ‘Sprite on Fire’, a spicy, ginger-flavoured variant of the ubiquitous drink; Korea has ‘Sprite Blue’, which is mint flavoured.'? Cars are remixed: cross a DeLorean with a Chevy Blazer, and you get a Delorasaurus rex — a different kind of hybrid car. Fashion entrepreneurs are creating shirts that feature ‘logo hacks’, the alteration of well-known brand names (for example, the famous ‘Yes’ logo, familiar since the band’s success in the 1970s, becomes ‘No’).”° Popular culture has embraced the concept of remixing wholeheartedly, and on a broad scale; but the origins and true home of remixing are in the pop music recording studio. Remixes have made it to Billboard’s Top Ten, and the mash-up is arguably the most exciting development in music since drum’rbass. The concept of recontextualisation can be traced back at least to Marcel Duchamp’s urinal (1917) and the collages of Kurt Schwitters (from 1918).7!

In these works of art, context is key: the meaning of an iconic object or

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fragment is changed by its juxtaposition with another iconic object or fragment. Meaning is contextual, rather than absolute, and can take place on multiple, simultaneous levels. Nowhere is simultaneity as readily perceivable as in the audio domain. Research has shown that humans are able to focus on multiple streams of audio simultaneously, but that only one visual stream can be processed at a time.” Therefore shuffling the order of multiple layers of perception is uniquely suited to audio. Tracks were being remixed long before the rise of personal computing. The beginnings of remixing are to be found in Jamaica and the dub style that evolved there in the 1960s. Seminal remixer Osbourne Reddock (known as

‘King Tubby’), originally a tinkerer who enjoyed fixing radios and building amplifiers, soon discovered that he had a special talent: making ‘specials’, or one-off custom acetates, intended for use on big sound systems. Reggae producer Lee Perry (also known as ‘Scratch’), of the Upsetters, and Bob Marley and the Wailers, was also noted for his dub mixing skills, and worked with Tubby. One of Perry’s signature moves was to recycle backing tracks time and again, substituting singers and renaming the single with each new iteration. In the late 1970s, American DJs started dissecting the 3-minute song and reassembling it into an artefact suitable for dance club use. Remixing for extended play began in New York, in conjunction with disco music. Extended play was initially achieved by deft cutting and splicing of studio tape mixes. Early remixers include Tom Moulton as well as Larry Levan, both active in New York from the late 1970s. Levan is known for deejaying at the Paradise Garage on King Street (hence the genre of dance music known as ‘garage’), while Moulton brought remixing to the disco dance floor by creating tapes for Fire Island’s Sandpiper disco in the mid-1970s. These early mixes are more properly called ‘re-edits’, since they did not actually involve rebalancing and replacing elements of the mix (access to the studio multitrack masters is needed for this), but rather skilful tape editing and splicing. Moulton’s rationale for his early work was that: Of course all the songs [at the disco] were three minutes long and ... ‘il’s a shame

because the minute the song is over they start mixing in this other song and they don’t know whether they should dance to the new song or keep dancing to the old one.’ And then people would just walk off the floor ... I said ‘there’s got to be a way to make it longer where you don’t lose that feeling. Where you can take them to So that’s another level.’ And that’s when I came up with the idea to make a tape. what I did.??

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Moulton is also credited with inventing the concept of the 12-inch single. In an interview he gives a convincing account concerning how he attended a mastering facility one weekend, working with mastering engineer Jose Rodriguez, when they found that there was no more 7-inch stock; therefore they used 10-inch, and found it sounded so good that they soon graduated to 12-inch.** . Technology plays a crucial role in these musical developments. In the context of Motown, transistor radios accented mid-range frequencies. Yet large disco systems featured the capacity to project low frequencies at high volume. Thus, though it may be true that the EP (extended play 12-inch single) was initially used out of temporary necessity, the reason it came into wide use is that 7-inch singles could neither accommodate longer play times nor the wider grooves needed to cut enhanced bass frequencies into vinyl. By the late 1970s, remixing began to be noticed by the pop mainstream. The actual beginning of the dance remixing of rock acts is hard to trace. Rod Stewart recorded his dance hit ‘Do Ya Think I’m Sexy?’ in 1978, a striking stylistic departure for the rock singer. The best reliable information on the emergence of rock songs remixed for the dance floor is to be gleaned from news accounts of the early 1980s, such as this 1983 excerpt from a report in Variety, entitled ‘Pop Artists Getting into Dance Music’: New production values spawned by post-disco, modern dance music are now

making an impact on mainstream rock. Some pop artists are making dance floor remixes of rock album cuts ... Among the established pop artists who have recently released or plan to release dance remixes are Greg Kihn, Cheap Trick, Daryl Hall and John Oates, Devo, Ric Ocasek of the Cars, (and) the Clash ... RCA Records

black music a & r veep Robert Wright, who has made hit dance remixes for Hall & Oates, pointed to a new ‘fusion of cultures’ that’s striking a balance between black radio’s emphasis on ‘beat and rhythm’ and pop radio’s orientation toward ‘melody and lyrics’.”°

Initially, the dance remix was just a way to get songs on to the dance floor. Yet the DJ was also becoming an artist: at times, a remix could supplant the original producer’s work. Gradually, the DJ became a producer in his own right: the ability to reorganise, to re-imagine and recontextualise tracks evolved through a synergy of technology and imagination. Remixers have performed sonic alchemy on countless tracks. In the process of re-making songs, they have also crossed cultural boundaries by re-placing the source material’s context into a variety of dance and abstract music genres. Music is usually consumed along strict sociological lines; one can expect middle-aged professionals to attend the symphony and the opera,

Covers, remixes and mash-ups

and hip twenty-somethings to frequent dance clubs. The groups are also divided into subgroups: the audience for early Chicago house music was predominantly black and gay,”° while IDM (‘intelligent dance music’) has tended to attract white college kids. The remix is where these boundaries tend to break down. As such, it is the harbinger of an age of musical equality, of emancipation, or, to borrow a

phrase from the composer David First, ‘swirled music’.’” The remix audience is not necessarily awaré of this cultural transformation, of this crossing of musical boundaries. In his book, Popular Music and Society, Brian Longhurst talks to early rap DJ Afrikaa Bambaataa who says: I started playing all forms of music. Myself, I used to play the weirdest stuff at a party. Everybody just thought I was crazy. When everybody was going crazy I would throw a commercial on to cool them out - I'd throw on The Pink Panther theme for everybody who thought they was cool like the Pink Panther, and then I would play ‘Honky Tonk Woman’ by the Rolling Stones and just keep that beat going ... I'd throw on ‘Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band - just that drum part. One two, three, BAM - and they'd be screaming and partying. I'd throw on the Monkees, ‘Mary Mary’ - just the beat part where they'd go ‘Mary Mary, where are you going?’ - and they'd start going crazy. I'd say, “You just danced to the Monkees.’ They'd say, ‘You liar. I didn’t dance to no Monkees.’ I'd like to catch people who categorize records ...**

By 1982, rap tracks such as Bambaataa’s classic ‘Planet Rock’ began to explore the juxtaposition of disparate elements over a unifying beat. Borrowing from German electronic group Kraftwerk’s “Trans Europe Express’ and ‘Numbers’, and rapping on the same track, Bambaataa captured the cross-fertilisation taking place in New York clubs such as The Roxy, where both white New Wave kids and Uptown black and latino clubgoers hung out. The impact on the music was to make it more universal, and also more visible still to white mainstream audiences. The contemporary remix artist/producer is an integral part of the act of creating hip-hop tracks. According to producer Brian Eno, creating music in the studio is becoming more the act of a curator than of a composer in the traditional sense.”” Increasingly, ‘writing’ has come to mean the deft combination of samples from various sources, or in the case of the next recording to be discussed, the reconstruction of an entire track around the original vocal. Brian Transeau’s 2004 remix of ‘Break on Through (To the Other Side)’ by the Doors is captivating from the standpoints of sound, marketing and conception. Sonically, it offers an accomplished update of the Doors’ 1967

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classic.*° It is a re-make of an anarchic and energetic 1960s’ rock hit. The remix keeps the original vocals and discards everything else, replacing and rethinking the original instrumental performances entirely. The new tracks are tight, disciplined and captivating, placing Jim Morrison’s voice in a completely new context without taking away any of his passionate vocals and poetic imagery. Fronta marketing standpoint, it is interesting that this song is presently available only online, and that it is to appear as part of a game from Electronic Arts, ‘FIFA Street’. Conceptually, it is also interesting that Brian Transeau is listed as remixer and producer, while the surviving three members of the Doors — Ray Manzarek, John Densmore and Robby Krieger — are listed as co-producers. It is as though Transeau has taken over Morrison’s central position in the band. The original recording quickly builds a momentum that seems to take off in every direction at once. The song opens with a bossa nova beat by drummer John Densmore, joined almost immediately by a growling electric piano and electric guitar. The ear searches in vain for the expected bass guitar, because the Doors never had a bass player (part of the reason for their quirky sound). Once the distinctive voice enters, it is clear something special is going on; poet/performer Morrison is delivering a message, both through his lyrics and through his performance. At 2'29", the original ‘Break On Through’ is about a third as long as the remix, which clocks in at 7'07” and seeks transcendence through repetition. The track opens with drums, as does the original; but this is not a 1960s’ drum sound, nor is it a bossa nova. Instead, there is a minute-and-a-half of powerful, yet restrained (because compressed and gated) computer-driven drums, mixed with various bleeps, scrapes, reverse-decay cymbals and a minimal, slowly building bass line. Morrison’s voice first enters briefly at 0'26", but it is only momentary, and it is modulated so as to sound grainy, as well as being put through a delay. As he says ‘break on through’, a lower frequency is added to the kick drum, and the synthesised bass is raised in the mix, thus intensifying the overall feel of the groove. Small rhythmic and timbral details are added and subtracted to keep the mix from sounding too repetitive, but Morrison’s voice is not brought in again until around 1'30". Once his voice does enter, a second bass synthesiser becomes more prominent in the mix, its resonant filter opening and closing for a ‘wah-wah’ effect. Soon the bass synthesisers seem to be having their own conversation under Morrison’s voice, which is made to overlap itself, modulate and fit exceedingly well with the groove. This latter effect is probably achieved by working in a digital workstation, and sliding words, syllables, even individual consonants and vowels back and forth in order to fit the groove. This technique,

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while labour-intensive, can be used to create the impression that the singer was listening to the remixed backing track when he sang the original.

Mash-ups Another area of contemporary remixing seems to have returned to the era of re-edits, with a digital twist. This return to re-editing is born out of the same necessity that existed when Moulton re-edited Double Exposure’s “Ten Percent’. Since the average person cannot access studio masters the computer has facilitated a new phenomenon: the mash-up. Thanks to beat, key and tempo matching, now commonly available in inexpensive music software packages such as Sony’s ACID and Ableton’s Live, it is possible for anyone to match up (mash-up) different albums and hear how they sound together.*! The most notable mash-up in recent memory is DJ Danger Mouse’s The Grey Album (2004), which famously mixes together the Beatles’ White Album (The Beatles 1968) and Jay-Z’s The Black Album (2003).°7 Danger Mouse’s

approach was to loop short segments of the Beatles’ tracks behind Jay-Z’s voice: the track ‘99 Problems’ works rather well, mashing together segments of the Beatles’ ‘Helter Skelter’ and Jay-Z’s rap.° There is even a Jay-Z Construction Set, 650 MB of samples and other remixes, available via peer-to-peer (P2P) networking. The set is distributed using a method adapted from Napster: a P2P program called Bit Torrent links computers that have already downloaded the Construction Set toolkit to those who wish to do so, thus decentralising the data-intensive downloads. Once again, technology makes new forms of music possible — or perhaps the new music is created as a result of the technology being

available. Once the prospective remixer has obtained the Construction Set, he/she can listen to what others have done with the samples, and construct his/her own, uploading them on to the internet for all to hear. By employing the four-square computerised grid of the digital sequencer as a principal organising device, the remixer acts at once as a reductionist, a leveller of all

musics, but also as someone who crosses cultural boundaries. The glue between styles is usually the four-on-the-floor beat (bass drum on every crotchet): the most diverse types of music can be (and are) made to fit together over the common denominator of a steady dance beat. Recently, mash-ups have gone even further towards blending entire tracks together. The effect of a mash-up tour de force such as Mark Vidler’s ‘Ray of Gob’ (2003), for example, is to amaze his listeners with

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his ability to choose two tracks that make a new track, while also retaining much of their separate, individual characters. To listen to his mix of Madonna’s ‘Ray of Light’ (1998) and the Sex Pistols’ “God Save The Queen’ (1977) is to experience at once a new sound, and the shock of

recognising the disparate, yet very familiar sonic signatures of the tracks of which it is comprised.* The archetypal punk sound of the Sex Pistols blends seamlessly with a dance track featuring one of Madonna’s better vocals. The fury of punk meets disco-based dance music - pace Steve Dahl (of Comiskey Park infamy) — to create a new organism. Improbably, the disparate elements mesh perfectly. Listening to the mash-up, and knowing both originals, there are moments of high-wire suspense at the ends of phrases. One wonders: how will he get out of this? What will he do next? Vidler, in Houdini-like fashion, invariably succeeds in wriggling free of all the constraints that would ensnare a lesser mixologist. One of the simpler techniques applied here is to select portions of the Sex Pistols track that contain no vocals and repeat them underneath a segment of the Madonna track lifted from the breakdown (with little or no instru-

mental backing). The opening of ‘Ray of Gob’ features these two elements, and a pitch-shift of Madonna’s voice downward to match the keys (‘Ray of Light’ is in Bb, while ‘God Save the Queen’ is in A). The effect is to retain the exact punk timbres originally recorded by Chris Thomas in the 1977 sessions; lowering Madonna’s voice gives it a heavier quality that matches the power of the instrumental track, though still soaring over it. Success with such a mash-up is part luck, part hard work and partly also realising, as Vidler says, that ‘both songs should be relatively well known, but the combination of the two should be unexpected’.** Even as it embraces hybrids and composites, the remix erases divisive difference, because in a remix, everything contains some part of something else. This process may be seen as a way to achieve harmony, to attain the ‘gorgeous mosaic’ that was a core idea of New York City racial politics of the early 1990s.*° It is also subversive: remixing takes from what is forbidden, from the copyrighted, from the other culture’s music, from another person’s idea, and makes something new. Finally, there’s the insider appeal of being able to identify the artist, era and genre from which a particular recorded fragment is drawn. In a larger cultural context, there seem to be two principal enabling, or motivating forces behind the multilayered phenomenon of copying, re-ordering and recontextualising musical material. The first is simply the wide availability of increasingly advanced recording technology. As we have seen, there is a linear development of appropriation of pre-existing

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music that goes hand in hand with increasing technological sophistication. What started out as a simple means for making easy money - the close copying and re-recording of a successful song at the turn of the twentieth century — subsequently evolved into an art form in its own right. The cover has also recently been revitalised by commercial considerations such as the lower cost of re-making, rather than sampling a recording. Following the advent of the remix, which again was made possible by the advent of a new technology — multitrack recording - there was also a radical broadening, or democratisation, of recombinant musical activity owing to cheap computing and advanced technology. The person who cannot obtain the studio master can now combine two completely separate tracks into something new via the mash-up. The other underlying mechanism at work in all this recontextualisation is the erasure, or at least the crossing of cultural boundaries. The mash-up is inherently the most radical recontextualisation of previously recorded tracks, and points to the larger phenomenon of cultural recombination, most generally expressed as the trend to remix absolutely everything. This is probably due in part to media overload; channel-surfing hundreds of television programmes, remote control in hand, while simultaneously jumping from site to site on one’s laptop (perhaps even while talking on the mobile phone) is an increasingly common activity. Inherent in such octopoidal consciousness is the desire for absolute simultaneity, the ability to be everywhere at once. The result is strange juxtapositions, edits and segues, bringing together the most unlikely sources. While such a state of multilevel distraction may be viewed as a narcotic, it can also yield unexpected, hilarious and at times even enlightening juxtapositions. The fragmentation of media has the perhaps unintended consequence of erasing difference in a potentially positive way.

Conclusion

Given the times in the past that a new technology has failed to usher in a utopian age of music, one is hesitant to make pronouncements, but it does

seem as though there is a more participatory culture afoot. As one message

board participant put it, ‘Remember TV? It was like the Internet, only you ve, couldn’t do anything with it’. In this context and from a cultural perspecti

who can Timothy Taylor has expressed the hope that ‘people — at least those again using afford computers - will begin to make music for themselves » 36

their computers and cheap, easily available software’. .

.

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While one may object that there have been garage bands making music for themselves all along, people are now able to make their own metastructural works with greater ease than ever before. However, the need for technique has not been dispensed with, it has merely shifted. Where it was once necessary to learn scales and harmony, the aspiring mash-up artist must now be conversant in pitch shifting and tempo matching, dispose of fluent digital editing technique, and even find ways of exploiting phase cancellation to remove vocal tracks. Purists who may be inclined to bemoan the loss of ‘musicianship’ may rest assured that there is a great deal of skill involved in doing mash-ups well. Indeed, the results can be so surprising as to seem alchemical. As Arthur C. Clarke once famously observed, ‘any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic’.°” Notes

1. William Gibson, ‘God’s Little Toys: Confessions of a Cut & Paste Artist’, Wired 13/07 (July 2005), pp. 118-19, www.wired.com/wired/archive/13.07/gibson. html (last accessed 14 June 2009).

2. A search for the song reveals that the artist was Enzo Jannacci. The lyrics are by Dario Fo who won the 1997 Nobel Prize for literature. The title translates to ‘I Wanna Tag Along’, which the protagonist does not get to do. 3. See the Wikipedia article about pop covers http:/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/cover_ version, especially the link to ‘Multiple versions in various formats or locations’ (last accessed 14 June 2009).

4. Jimi Hendrix, ‘All Along the Watchtower’, from the album, Electric Ladyland, Reprise, 2RS 6307, 1968. Bob Dylan, “All Along the Watchtower’, on the John Wesley Harding album, Columbia, CBS S$ 63252, 1968. 5. The Sugarhill Gang, “Rapper’s Delight’, Sugarhill, 1979. Re-released Castle Music, CMRCD

574, 2002.

6. From the album Do You Want To Dance?, Josie, 45-835, 1958.

7. The Beach Boys, ‘Do You Want To Dance With Me?’, from the album The Beach Boys Today! Capitol/EMI, 1 2269, 1965; The Ramones, ‘Do You Wanna Dance?’, from the album Rocket to Russia, Sire, SR 6042 1977. There were also covers by Bette Midler and T. Rex, among others. 8. As I have discussed elsewhere, Les Paul had an eight-track recorder manufactured by Ampex by 1958. See Virgil Moorefield, The Producer as Composer: Shaping the Sounds of Popular Music (Cambridge, MA and London: MIT Press,

2005), p. 28.

9. Ibid., pp. 16-19. 10. Tod und Verkldrung comes to mind. 11. Capitol/EMI, CL 15475, 1966.

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12. Cousin of Jon Bon Jovi whose career he helped to launch. 13: A Marshall stack is the combination of the amplifier, or head, and one or more

speaker cabinets. In this context, it is of interest that Bongiovi apparently also engineered Hendrix sessions early in his career (Hendrix being famous for the sounds he got out of his Marshall amplifiers). 14. This process has been vastly simplified by the iTunes Music Store, the best online music source as of 2006. One only wishes its holdings were more complete. Ps LS: For some recent examples, see Noel Murray, ‘Inventory: Six Unlikely Covers Albums by Overqualified Hard-Rockers’, www.avclub.com/content/node/ 49640 which reviews recent cover CDs by Def Leppard, Ozzy Osbourne, and others (last accessed 14 June 2009).

16. For reviews

of this album

see www.superseventies.com/bowie3.html

(last

accessed 23 June 2009).

17. Franklin Bruno, “Copycats: the Cover Album Makes a Come-back’, www.slate. com/id/2121216, posted 23 June 2005 (last accessed 14 June 2009). 18. This idea reveals interesting parallels with the production of multiple takes,

especially in jazz, which is also considered for contemporary music by Amanda Bayley in ch. 11. 19 See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sprite_(soft_drink) (last accessed 14 June 2009). 20. See Jack Boulware, ‘Crashups: Gearhead Hackers Redefine the Hybrid Car’, in

Wired 13/07 (July 2005), pp. 122-33, www.wired.com/wired/archive/13.07/ crashups.html (last accessed 14 June 2009). re

Kurt Schwitters’s famous Merzbild is a good example. See “Merz ist Kunst und Nichtkunst’, www.kurt-schwitters.org/m,1000021,1.html (last accessed 14 June

2009). 22) Albert S. Bregman, Auditory Scene Analysis: the Perception and Organization of

Sound (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1990), p. 153. Ds See the Tom Moulton Tribute Page, www.disco-disco.com/tributes/tom.shtml (last accessed 14 June 2009).

24. Interview with ‘Discoguy’, ibid. 2: Richard Gold, ‘Pop Artists Getting into Dance Music’, Variety 310 (9 March

1983), p. 12. Reynolds, Generation Ecstasy: into the World of Techno and Rave Culture (New York: Routledge, 1999), p. 132. ie David First organised a new music festival in New York in 1996 called ‘Swirled Music’ in which the author participated. 1995), 28. Brian Longhurst, Popular Music and Society (Cambridge: Polity Press,

26. Simon

p. 152.

The Wire, 29. See Brian Eno’s contribution to Rob Young, ‘Presents for Future Use’, 147 (May 1996) which can be viewed at http://music.hyperreal.org/artists/

brian_eno/interviews/wire96b.html (last accessed 14 June 2009).

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30. Brian Transeau (BT), The Doors, ‘Break on Through (To the Other Side)’ BT vs.

The Doors remix MP3 format, 2004. tile The technology underlying these programs is granular synthesis which essen-

tially consists of chopping up sound files into very short time slices, processing and re-ordering them, and creating a new, altered sound file. See Curtis Roads, The Computer Music Tutorial (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996), pp. 168-84. 32) Refer to ch. 3 for further discussion of The Grey Album. 33: See DJ Danger Mouse, The Grey Album (29 November 2004), www.illegal-art. org/audio/grey.html (last accessed 14 June 2009).

34. Francis Preve, ‘Mash It Up’, Keyboard, January 2006, www.keyboardmag.com/

story.asp?storyCode=12660. (last accessed 14 June 2009). 3% The term ‘gorgeous mosaic’ was coined by Mayor David Dinkins in his 1989

campaign for mayor of New York. See Tamar Jacoby, “The Rainbow Myth’, The New York Sun (9 October 2002), www.manhattan-institute.org/html/_nys-

rainbow_myth.htm (last accessed 14 June 2009). 36. Timothy D. Taylor, Strange Sounds: Music,

Technology, and Culture (New York: Routledge, 2001), p. 4. a7 This is one of Clarke’s Three Laws, formulated in the revised editions of Profiles of the Future: an Inquiry into the Limits of the Possible (London: Victor Gollancz, 1982), p. 36. See also http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clark%27s_Three_Laws (last accessed 14 June 2009).

16 | Painting the sonic canvas: electronic mediation as musical style ALBIN

ZAK

III

Historically, conceptions of musical style are commonly divided into formulations of music’s syntactic characteristics and its idiomatic performance practices. Syntactic qualities are essential to a work’s identity because they endure over time and through myriad renditions, whereas performances belong to an ephemeral musical moment. The era of recorded sound, however, has brought about a new style formulation that resists such division, for recordings render both the syntax and performance elements of a musical event repeatable, in effect fusing the musical idea with its utterance in a more or less *permanent form.’ Furthermore, recordings add another element to the style matrix: sound itself, including the acoustic patina of performance spaces. Shaping relationships among the sounds collected on recordings, then, is also a matter of style, that is, of aesthetic choice. Sound recording changes the calculus of a work’s identity and creative process as it renders all aspects of musical production equally enduring, subjecting hierarchical aesthetic assumptions to new scrutiny.

This characteristic fact of recordings is viewed differently depending on the musical tradition.” For some musics, developed in a pre-electric sound-world, recordings are more craft than art. The technology allows for preservation and broad dissemination, which has real consequences for profit, enjoyment, education, archiving and so forth. However, recording technology must also reckon with long-standing aesthetic beliefs, ideological traditions and performance practices. By contrast, commercial popular music, always concerned with new opportunities for market appeal, embraced electricity early on as an expressive ally. The profound influence of the microphone on styles of vocal performance is a case in point. In the popular sphere, aesthetic traditions are fluid, and always open to revision and updating. Experimentation is welcome and its success easily measured by market response. In pop music’s developing historiography, there is a growing appreciation of the inventive sound engineers and record producers whose contributions to the recorded a canon have influenced pop’s stylistic lexicon.’ Studio craft underwent Second the remarkable transition in the first two decades following

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World War as the resources of electronic mediation became increasingly sophisticated. In an atmosphere of sonic experimentation, engineers, musicians, producers and audiences came to appreciate the expressive

qualities of electronically manipulated sound. In the process, the foundation was laid for what has become a commonplace of pop music record production: that recordings assert their own versions of acoustic reality, and that a recording’s sound-world is defined by its makers through a process of creative distortion of real-world musical events.’ In addition to a favourite song or performance, indeed entwined with them, is a unique sonic landscape, made especially apparent through the intimacy of headphones in the era of the Walkman, Discman and iPod. This chapter is concerned with the early aesthetic history of these artificial sound-worlds, and with the implications for musical composition and musical style.

The ‘sonic halo’ In 1947 Jerry Murad and the Harmonicats had a hit with their recording of ‘Peg O’ My Heart’, a song from 1913 written by Alfred Bryan and Fred Fischer.” The Harmonicats’ version, recorded by Bill Putnam at his Universal Recording studio in Chicago, is an instrumental, an arrangement for three harmonicas (lead, chording, bass), guitar and bass, which can be heard on the website for this book.° The track begins with a single chord whose sharp cut-off reveals a reverberant after-sound. Following the brief reverberant pause, the recording proceeds with a fairly transparent representation of the musical/acoustic event it captures. The highly reverberant (wet) sound is replaced with a drier one imparting to the listener a sense of close proximity. Between the first two iterations of the melodic theme, during the turnaround, there is a brief suggestion of increased reverberation but it quickly recedes as the melody begins anew. About one minute into the track, as the melody concludes its second iteration, the music, its pulse suspended, modulates dramatically up a semitone (from F# to G) and seems suddenly to be transported to some other place. As the melody begins to repeat in the new key, the sonic scene has changed as well. The lead harmonica sound is now bathed in deep reverberation implying a cavernous space. In addition to its aural dimension, the added reverberation seems somehow to imply a change of character, of affect, of meaning; in short, the move from dry sound to reverberant sound creates a sense of dramatic narrative in which the track’s introductory chord turns out to have a

Electronic mediation as musical style

foreshadowing role. As such, the reverberation itself becomes a thematic element that participates in the track’s narrative form, an impression confirmed in the course of what follows as the fourth melodic iteration returns to the dry sound. This ABA sonic structure, however, is not reflected by the key scheme, for when the dry sound returns the track remains in the new key. There are, then, two different formal plans unfolding simultaneously - tonal and textural - the latter of which proves the more elaborate. In addition to the textural shifts from introduction to verse one, and from verses two to three and three to four, the final verse (the fourth) ends with a crescendo of reverb, followed

by a brief cadenza-coda that summarises the theme of textural contrast. The coda’s three melodic phrases are presented in a three-part ambient configuration of wet—dry—wet. Bruce Swedien, best known for his work as Quincy Jones’s long-time engineer, recalls that, in his mind, ‘Peg O’ My Heart’ , was the first time that anyone used reverb artistically ... Up till then, people used reverb only to re-create the sound of the studio, tried to use it in a ‘natural’ manner. Bill changed all that. That record sounded unlike anything on the radio at that time. I was just a youngster in Minneapolis when I first heard it, and I wore out many, many copies of that record.’

The track, which spent eight weeks at number one on the sales charts, so impressed the young Swedien that he travelled to Chicago and became a Putnam apprentice. Putnam was among the leaders in the postwar recording boom, not only as an engineer and producer but as the owner of recording studios and electronics firms marketing such studio tools as the Teletronix LA-2A and the Urei 1176LN (Putnam’s own design) compressors, tools now considered ‘classic’ by way of their roles in shaping the

sounds of myriad hit records. While it had been an interest of avant-garde artists since the early twentieth century, such artful manipulations of acoustic reality on commercially released recordings began making their first prominent public appearances in the late 1940s and early 1950s. Les Paul and Mary Ford, of ‘How for example, garnered wide attention with their 1950 recording

High the Moon’, which featured multiple overdubbed guitar and vocal y, performances.® The recording took advantage of magnetic tape technolog both n productio record the new medium then revolutionising pop music

his hands in terms of recording and editing. But even before he first got the more used had Paul on a tape machine (compliments of Bing Crosby) artifice primitive disc recording technology to fashion recordings whose

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included multiple layered performances, echo, added reverberation and electronic timbral effects.’ Mitch Miller, a friend of Paul’s and perhaps the single most prolific pop producer of the 1950s, also used overdubbing as part of his studio arsenal in crafting records that combined diverse style fragments to create unique pop confections. In 1948, he produced a Patti Page recording for Mercury, ‘Confess’, on which Page sings antipho-

nally with herself. The lead voice is more or less dry, the answering voice drenched in reverb. While the lyrics for both parts are nearly the same, the melodies differ. The dialogue includes the illusion of ‘two’ voices emanating from different places. Two years later, Page would make her landmark recording of ‘The Tennessee Waltz’, singing close parallel harmony with herself throughout. (It is not clear whether Miller had a role in this recording; he left Mercury for Columbia shortly before it was released.) The impact of ‘The Tennessee Waltz’, with some six million records sold, was such that its artifice insinuated itself prominently into the public soundscape.'° As one writer has explained, the record was a ‘tricked-up, technologically evolved sort of pseudo-folk song ... [that] created a new standard for

the manipulation of artificially produced sounds - a standard that would prove central to the aesthetics of rock and roll’."’ The array of aural illusions and timbral manipulations that shape a record’s sound are, in effect, distortions, for they distort the apparent acoustic ‘truth’ a recording represents. Though their recordings would have the listener believe otherwise, the truth is that Patti Page did not sing two parts simultaneously, and the Harmonicats did not wander in and out of a cathedral at key moments during their performance. While the craft of sound manipulation sometimes takes a form that shapes the musical surface markedly, it may also work in less apparent ways. Engineer Frank Laico, for example, relates how he and Miller, working at Columbia’s 30th Street Studio in the 1950s, shaped specific ambient images for such singers as Johnny Mathis and Tony Bennett by tailoring the signal path along which the voice travelled to the reverberant chamber. The variables included echo (time delay) added before the chamber, equalisation (EQ) and mic placement within the chamber. Laico describes this process: ‘Once we'd honed Mathis’ [sic] vocal sound ie., the amount

of echo, shades of EQ, where the mic was situated in

the chamber, etc. - we'd mark it down, and presto, that would be the formula for him’.'* The crafted ambient image, which Miller characterised as a sound’s ‘halo’, was then combined with the unprocessed vocal sound to give each singer a particular ambient signature identified with his recorded vocal style.'* This fusion of voice and what amounts to

Electronic mediation as musical style

an imaginary space demonstrates an aesthetic ambition to create unique aural experiences whose expressive qualities are complexes of musical activities and sonic features. A further step in this direction is evident in the rock and roll records of the 1950s, many of whose central features

are shaped obviously and indelibly by electronic manipulation. More than a subtle, or ‘subtextual’, linkage between performance and performance space, they present a musical surface sculpted and tinted by overt electronic mediation.

r

The issue of fidelity The idea that a recording should do anything other than offer a transparent representation of a real-world sonic event, was, in the 1940s, a novel one for most musicians and listeners. The development of sound recording technologies had tended generally towards capturing sonic events with increasing fidelity. Ever since Thomas Edison recorded his barely intelligible rendition of ‘Mary Had a Little Lamb’ in 1877, each advance went a little further in the direction of a more faithful representation, which required attention to such issues as frequency response, dynamic range and extraneous noise.'* Historically, musical practices involved singing and playing instruments, not recording or amplification; the electronic medium was a means not of reshaping those practices, but of capturing, preserving and disseminating an accurate representation

of musical events. Classical music in particular, the gold standard of Western musical culture, fed the aspiration to high fidelity.'° This was music that had attained a place of unquestioned cultural value in a sounding form unmediated by electricity. High fidelity was a matter of honouring and faithfully transmitting the music’s unamplified sonic tradition. Thus, musical and technological values were joined in the same aesthetic project. Moreover, because classical music had already attained its perfect sounding form in the natural sound world, it gave the project of recorded representation something to aim for as recordists sought to push the electronic wizard ever further behind the veiling curtain.'® Popular music, by contrast, was more fertile ground for novel approaches to record production. In the popular sphere, in novelty songs, novelty piano music and novelty arrangements, there is ample evidence of gimmickry raised to the level of craft.'” As it became possible, and then easy, to manipulate sound for unusual effect, popular music was well situated aesthetically to seize the opportunity. Fascination with novelty, however,

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was only one of the factors driving developments in postwar pop-record production. Another key element in the changing shape of the public soundscape was the resurgence of independent record labels. Record sales, which after a lucrative decade in the 1920s slumped badly during the 1930s, rebounded in the 1940s and 1950s, bringing many new record companies into the field. These small entrepreneurial ventures had nothing like the production resources, distribution or marketing ability of the majors and their products lacked the same professional polish. With tiny recording budgets, projects were rarely recorded in good studios with stateof-the-art equipment and experienced professional staff. Their sound might be summarised as rough hewn, from the performance style to the balance of musical parts to the relative clarity of the overall sonic image. Yet the products of independent producers increasingly found success in the marketplace, winning a growing audience despite their low-fi sound. Furthermore, the artists that appeared on independent labels represented largely regional musics - rhythm and blues, country, early rock and roll idioms whose performance styles were quite different from the mainstream pop music that had blanketed the United States via the large radio networks. As long as the independent records remained confined generally to their specific markets, they had only a marginal effect on the public’s collective sonic awareness. But as they began to win over music fans and to garner media exposure widely enough to be noticed beyond their intended audience, their widespread dissemination effected a gradual change in notions of acceptable musical sound. The style changes in postwar pop records, then, were not only the result of studio artifice, but also the unpredictable workings of a musical economy in transition. The rapidly expanding market, driven increasingly by the tastes and money of teenagers, led record companies to turn out records at an unprecedented rate. The postwar recording boom saw independent record companies thrusting unknown musicians in front of microphones at a fevered rate. In search of what, no one quite knew, but it was apparent to those on the ground that a market was developing rapidly among young people for music beyond the pop mainstream. Stan Ross, chief engineer and co-owner of Gold Star Studios in Los Angeles, recalled that ‘every time engineers went into the studio, we were feeling our way, trying to find out what rock and roll was’.'* The general aim seems to have been sonic distinctiveness, rather than fidelity, and a sense of emotional authenticity. ‘If you transmit an emotion to the listener, it’s a good record’, says Cosimo Matassa, the engineer behind the recording console for Fats Domino, Lloyd Price, Little Richard and innumerable other recordings made at his

Electronic mediation as musical style

J&M Studio in New Orleans. ‘It’s a fundamental thing, and yet totally elusive.” In their opportunistic quest for hit records, producers, unburdened by established aesthetic criteria, were willing to try anything to create records that might claim a distinctive sonic personality. As the Harmonicats example suggests, the earliest widespread sound manipulation techniques were in the area of reverberation, or ambience. Any sound recorded by a microphone bears some degree of patina imparted by the space in which the sound was produced, and such broadcasting and recording companies as Columbia and RCA had, since the 1930s, been concerned to build rooms with an appealing ambient character.*” However, a room’s ambient signature can also be augmented by the sound of a second room, commonly referred to as an ‘echo chamber’. By combining the two room sounds, recordists may effectively craft a virtual acoustic space unique to the recording. Examples of ambient enhancement abound; the effect has long been used in small, unremarkable doses to enliven a too-dry recording made ina ‘dead’ recording space. What is striking, however, is the degree to which reverb became a musical element in itself. In the bridge of Johnny Ray’s recording of ‘The Little White Cloud that Cried’ (1951), for example, elements common to heightened musical expression - a modulation up a fourth and the resulting rise in vocal tessitura along with an increased dynamic level are joined by the vocal reverb’s increased prominence.”' Similarly, in the guitar solo on Booker T. and the M. G.’s ‘Green Onions’ (1962), the

two choruses are distinguished by the sonic contrast of dry and reverberant images.” The syntactic material is minimal throughout the solo; the second chorus — the reverberant one - is simply a repeated riff. Yet despite the harmonic and melodic minimalism, there is a clear sense of progression sonically from one scene to another. On a larger scale, ambient design takes on the kind of thematic quality heard in ‘Peg O’ My Heart’, where it participates in shaping the track's narrative form. Another famous example of reverb’s thematic use is Buddy Holly’s ‘Peggy Sue’ (1957), which sets up a contrast motif in the track’s introduction between dry and highly ambient drum sounds alternating every two beats.2° The effect is similar to a zoom lens, the ambient drums receding into the distance, the dry ones rushing to the front of the mix. Having caught the listener’s attention from the outset, the contrast motif slows its alternating rhythm when the voice enters; the entire first verse is accompanied by the ambient drum image, while the two-bar interlude between verses one and two is dry. This pattern is followed generally throughout the track, but with variation. In subsequent verses the dry

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drum sound sometimes interjects between vocal phrases, imparting a sense of impatience as it rushes forward for a bar, only to recede just as quickly. There is an impulsive, schizophrenic quality to the textural changes, as though the relentless drum part (a continuous stream of semiquavers reflecting the protagonist’s youthful, excitable ardour) is uncertain of its stance. As Holly sings in different voices, trying his plea from different angles, is he directing all of this at the actual Peggy Sue? Or is he rehearsing his plea in private? Are the ambient drums a suggestion of distance from his beloved, and his shy uncertainty about making an approach, while the dry drums are interjections of courageous resolve? This interpretation is no doubt whimsical. The point, simply, is that the textural shifts, clearly intentional, invite the listener to engage with the recording not simply in terms of song and performance, but as a complete sonic experience.~*

Ambient style In the 1950s, exaggerated reverb became a stylistic signature for some recording artists and producers. Among the most famous examples are the recordings by guitarist Duane Eddy produced by Lee Hazelwood at Phoenix’s Ramco Audio Recorders. Eddy’s string of hit recordings, beginning with ‘Rebel Rouser’ (1958), established in the public soundscape an individual musical style featuring reverb as a key ingredient.*°? More influential still were the productions of Phil Spector. Spector began producing records the first time he entered a recording studio at eighteen with his group the Teddy Bears to record their lone hit, “To Know Him Is to Love Him’ (1958).°° One of the group members, Marshall Lieb, recalled that, even then, Spector was fascinated with reverb: We were working on the transparency of music ... You had a lot of air moving around, notes being played in the air but not directly into the mikes. Then, when we sent it all into the chamber, this air effect is what was heard — all the notes jumbled and fuzzy. This is what we recorded — not the notes. The chamber.””

By ‘transparency’ Lieb clearly does not mean fidelity. Rather, he implies that the young recordists were focused on tailoring a disembodied image, more air than substance, and in crafting a dreamy, impressionistic sonic expression. In 1959, between the demise of the Teddy Bears and the beginning of his remarkable run of production success, Spector sat in on some of the Duane Eddy recording sessions in Phoenix, absorbing Hazelwood’s production techniques. In 1960, he settled into Gold Star

Electronic mediation as musical style

Studios in Los Angeles where “To Know Him Is to Love Him’ had been recorded by Stan Ross. Gold Star had two ambient chambers designed and built by studio

co-owner

Dave

Gold, who

handled

most

of the

technical and design chores. Ross recalls the motivating influence of Miller-era Columbia records on the two young studio owners: “All the Columbia records made in New York during that time had the most wonderful echo sound, and it was because they had these beautiful echo chambers there ... So, right away, that was something we wanted to have on our own productions.’** The sound of the chambers became storied, helped in large measure by the success of Spector’s reverberant ‘wall of sound’ productions. On such recordings as the Crystals’ “He’s a Rebel’ (1962) and the Ronettes’ ‘Be My Baby’ (1963), Spector crafted recordings in which individual instruments meld into composite ambient textures unique to the record.”? Spector’s production style became a topic in the lexicon of rock recordmaking. Paul McCartney, referring to an instance of exaggerated ambience in the coda of the Beatles’ ‘Hello, Goodbye’ (1967) pinpointed the ‘wall of sound’ association with a coined verb: ‘We Phil Spector’d it’.*° Much later, the Cocteau Twins would forge a style with washes of such ambience as a central feature. Band member and producer, Robin Guthrie, similarly

acknowledged Spector as ‘an obvious influence’.*! While early reverberation enhancement was supplied by some kind of architectural space, crafting reverberant signatures became easier as artificial reverberation techniques using springs and metal plates were developed. Spring reverb, which produces a reverberant impression by passing sound through springs, was installed on Hammond organs as early as 1940, and in the 1950s it was installed in guitar amplifiers. The sound of guitar melodies sporting the slightly ‘boing-y’ sound of springs is a common feature of surf records from the late 1950s and early 1960s. In the 1980s, the widespread adoption of digital reverb brought a newly diverse range of ambient imagery into pop record production. With the ability to tailor ambience at the touch of a button, acoustic spaces could be made to behave in ways never heard in the natural sound-world. For example, a reverberant envelope with an explosive attack phase evoking a large, cavernous space could be programmed to decay suddenly. The result was a paradox: a sound appeared to inhabit both a large space and a small space at the same time. This is the technique employed for the widely imitated drum sound on Peter Gabriel’s ‘The Intruder’ (1980).*” Though the effect in this case was created with actual space and noise gates, digital reverb made the so-called ‘gated reverb’ effect easy to replicate, and

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it became a standard preset on digital reverb units. Another common preset is ‘backwards’ reverb, produced by reversing the reverberant envelope. Again, such a manipulation has nothing to do with representing sonic events in the natural sound-world. Rather, the natural spatial asso-

ciations of reverb are stripped away, reducing the sound of space to abstract sonic colour.

Echoes

Related to reverb, yet distinct in its sound and application, echo is a technique of sound manipulation that involves capturing a sound’s discrete replica.” The expressive possibilities of echo were recognised early on by Les Paul, who employed the effect as early as 1941.°* The nature of the echo effect, which ranges from rhythmic to timbral, depends on the configuration of the relationship between the echo and its source. The parameters of the relationship include the relative loudness of the two sounds, the time lapse between them (delay time), and the number of

repeated echoes (feedback). Further, the replica may be processed independently or moved to a different area of the stereo soundstage from that inhabited by the source sound, enhancing its distinctiveness. Very short delay times tend to produce primarily textural and timbral effects such as thickening or phasing, while with longer delay times the relationship between the sounds takes on a rhythmic character. The latter is a basic feature of the so-called ‘slapback’ effect common on rockabilly-style recordings. Slapback, which involves a time delay of around 70 milliseconds between source and echo, creates a percussive effect whose rhythmic relationship to a track’s tempo may be quite oblique, providing an ongoing rhythmic tension.” Some of the most famous early examples of slapback echo are found on the recordings produced by Sam Phillips at his Memphis Recording Service. Phillips was ever alert to novel sonic representation. At one memorable session in 1950, for example, he featured the sound of a guitar amplifier that had suffered a lacerated speaker cone, in this case the unintentional result of an accident. Rather than cancel the session, he stuffed the cone with paper, found the sound agreeable, and highlighted it in the mix. The resulting distorted guitar part is widely cited as a particularly effective device on Jackie Brenston and the Delta Kings, ‘Rocket “88” (1951).°° Similarly, the echo-produced distortion of sonic events in his studio appealed to Phillips as a way to enhance the texture of the sparse

Electronic mediation as musical style

instrumental ensembles he recorded. Owing to the fact that Phillips produced his echo effects with a tape-recorder, the time delay configuration of slapback was restricted by tape speed and by the distance between record and playback heads. The technique, however, could produce a range of musical effects depending on the tempo and style of the performance, and the loudness of the echo. On Elvis Presley’s 1954 recording of ‘Blue Moon of Kentucky’, for example, the echo on the voice creates a sense of urgency as it competes with the main vocal in a too-crowded temporal frame. The incisive vocal attacks, especially on consonants, impart a similar edge to the echo, which, however, is restricted in loudness so as not to detract from the lead. As a result, its presence is felt less as a distinct character than as a source of general rhythmic clutter resonant with the youthful exuberance of the performance. By contrast, on Presley’s recording of the ballad ‘Blue Moon’, recorded a month later, the voice’s echo casts a languid shadow clearly audible in the spaces between phrases. Here, the echo takes on a ghostly character that, again, enhances the track’s overall stylistic effect as it reflects the dreamy character of Presley’s performance.”” Echoes occurring at greater temporal distances from their sources can be made to fit precisely into a track’s metric grid a semiquaver, say, or quaver removed from their source sounds. Again, Les Paul was one of the first to make musical use of this technique by moving the heads on a tape recorder to vary the distance between record and playback heads. Listen, for example, to his and Ford’s recording of ‘Falling in Love with Love’ (1955), where a persistent semiquaver echo on the guitar obbligato enhances the watery effect of the rippling guitar lines.”> Moving tape heads, of course, is possible only within a limited range. Longer rhythmic durations require the use of tape loops. In 1974 Queen and producer Roy Thomas Baker used a tape loop of nearly 10 feet to produce the two-beat delay for ‘Now I’m Here’.*” All such processes, however, are laborious, and it was not until the mass marketing of digital delay machines in the 1980s that echo became a common rhythmic element on recordings of various stylistic persuasions. With the ability to dial up a delay time suitable to any rhythmic subdivision at any tempo at the touch of a button, the effect was used widely and became a fixture, along with sequencers and drum machines, in the decade’s mechanised

groove.” As digital technology made the temporal relationship between sounds and their replicas more flexible and easier to control, the timbral and

textural possibilities of echoes — automatic double tracking (ADT), flanging,

SU,

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phasing, chorusing — increasingly took their place in recordists’ palettes. These effects work on the principle that delay times shorter than about 40 milliseconds mask the discrete identity of an echo, which allows the replica to work behind the scenes, as it were, as a colouring device or thickening agent. Again, such timbral manipulation has a decades-old, pre-digital history in pop-record production. Les Paul had achieved phasing effects with disc-recorders in the 1940s, but the recording usually credited for stamping the effect indelibly on the public soundscape was Toni Fisher’s ‘The Big Hurt’, released in 1959.* According to engineer Larry Levine, the producer Wayne Shanklin, seeking a fuller sound for the recording, asked Levine to record the mixed track on a second tape and then play both together. Levine advised him that there was no way to ensure that the two tapé-machines would remain synchronised, but Shanklin persisted. As the two tapes lost synchronisation, the phasing effect occurred as the trailing tape took on the role of replica. Shanklin, to Levine’s surprise, was excited by what he heard and wanted to use it for the record. The process could only proceed a few bars at a time before the delay time became too great — the replica’s identity was revealed — so the new mix was constructed through a series of tape splices.** The whooshing, phased sound of the record, coupled with other bits of exotica like the repeated semitone chord sequence (D/E-b/D/E-b) and the siren-like backing voices, combine to create a sonic experience akin to what one might hear in a science fiction fulness A959" . Other key techniques for shaping the recorded image include equalisation (EQ) or filtering, which shapes the frequency content of individual

sounds and/or composite textures; compression, which shapes the dynamic envelope; and tape splicing, which edits narrative flow. Each of these may be used for purely utilitarian reasons, its presence barely noticeable, if at all, yet each is also capable of exerting a distinctive influence on a given track, or even defining central features for entire styles or genres. Paul McCartney, for example, speaks of exaggerating the high end of the lead guitar on “Nowhere Man’ (1965) by passing the signal through multiple console inputs, each with its high end fully boosted.** As a result, the already chiming sound of the electric twelve-string guitar is especially bright, a notable style feature of the track. On a larger scale, EQ choices favouring high frequencies became stylistic conventions during an entire decade of pop-record production, the high-end happy 1980s. Likewise, the loudness enhancing effect of compression — whether produced by a dedicated machine or by the effect of recording hot signals to tape, producing so-called tape compression - is a central component of rock recordings

Electronic mediation as musical style

generally. As producer Tony Visconti puts it, compression is ‘the sound of rock and roll’.“* Note that all of these sound-processing techniques shape in some way the physical form of the record. As such, their use has a compositional component as well as a utilitarian one; that is, their use involves aesthetic decision-making informed by the rhetorical system, the stylistic idiom, that the record inhabits. The principles of compositional thinking represented in such terms as motif, theme, form and design are all applicable to the record-making process. Since pop recordings are musical works in themselves, techniques of sound manipulation are akin to the development techniques of scripted music.

An ‘infinite palette’ By the 1960s much of what had begun as novelty, and was often referred to as gimmickry, had become part of a stylistic lextcon familiar to the second generation of rock recordists. The quest for novelty had developed into an aesthetic attitude that viewed sonic distortion as an expressive mode. Recording studios became the primary sites for the development of rock’s sonic aesthetic because they offered a broader array and finer control over sound shaping techniques than was possible with contemporary live performance technology. Many at the forefront of musical developments in the 1960s — the Beatles, Brian Wilson, Jimi Hendrix — came to prefer the studio to the live venue, both for its compositional resources and its seclusion from the demands of pop stardom. As record-making entered a new phase in its history, and it became widely apparent that the practice had become a fully fledged compositional process, the Beatles repeatedly pushed the leading edge of development. Working with producer George Martin, the influence of their innovations permeated musical style, recording

practices

and aesthetic

assumptions

across

rock’s

universe. The commitment of the Beatles to developing their work in a studio context was confirmed dramatically by their suspension of live performances altogether in 1966, and their pursuit of ever more sophisticated studio artifice. Martin summarised the group’s aesthetic aims in his memoir, All You Need Is Ears: only are we For me, making a record is like painting a picture in sound ... Not

were painting sound pictures, but our palette is infinite ... I was able to explore what ... es techniqu eed multi-sp : then the more curious corners of innovative recording possible every lifting a tape off and recording it backwards, unusual sound-effects way of building up a picture in sound.”

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As the Beatles gained success, affording themselves practically unlimited studio time, a working culture developed in which sonic experimentation was a matter of habit. Revolver (1967), the first album to

showcase a full range of the Beatles’ developing palette, features all the innovative techniques to which Martin refers, and more.*° A particularly intriguing technique, used on ‘I’m only Sleeping’, “Eleanor Rigby’, and other tracks, is the stereo splitting of the voice using the newly developed ADT, a modification of tape echo that allowed for very short, and continuously variable, delay times. Developed by Abbey Road Studios technician, Ken Townsend, ADT used a second tape-machine fitted with a variable-speed motor. The relationship between source and replica was no longer restricted by the spacing of tape heads or fixed tape speed. It could be configured at very short delay times to simulate actual overdubbed doubling (hence the effect’s name), or varied as the track played to create a range of phasing-type timbral effects. In ‘I’m only Sleeping’ the replica of the voice trails the source by a delay time short enough so as not to assert an independent presence. In mono, it sounds like a vocal thickener but in the stereo mixes the voice and replica are placed on opposite sides of the soundstage; although the delay time is short, the separation gives the echo just enough individuality to suggest a fractured vocal persona. (Listen to the way the voice seems to project from right to left with each phrase.) The impression created is of a persistent vocal shadow curiously split from its source. Further, the absence of the voice in the middle of the stereo soundstage, its usual position, enhances the voice’s marginalisation associated with its split personality, all of which resonate with the disaffected expression of the song’s protagonist. No such interpretation is required, however, simply to notice that the ADT effect on the voice, employed in stereo, enriches the track’s surface and creates, from a vocal sound flaunting its disembodiment, a frame encompassing both space and dramatic character. By the late 1960s, after Sergeant Pepper and Magical Mystery Tour, it was clear that electronic manipulation was as much a part of the musicmaking process in pop as was songwriting and performing. Stereo had supplanted mono; distorted guitars were the norm; phasing, flanging and filtering were no longer novelties. In the Small Faces’ ‘Itchycoo Park’ (1967), for instance, flanging is part of the record’s hook; and the increasingly popular wah-wah pedal made variable filtering an element of guitar technique, and ultimately a stylistic staple of early funk.*” Among the many landmark recordings of the 1960s exemplifying the compositional and aesthetic sensibility described, none surpasses Jimi

Electronic mediation as musical style

Hendrix’s Electric Ladyland (1968) for its seamless fusion of songwriting, performance and sonic spectacle, and no single track better exemplifies the scope of Hendrix’s aspiration than ‘1983 ... (A Merman I Should Turn to Be)’, which adjoins ‘Moon, Turn the Tides ... Gently Gently Away’.”* Within this piece (which is just under fifteen minutes long), pop song, blues and free improvisation are woven together in a sonic kaleidoscope that features echo, ambience, backward tape, wah-wah, feedback, the distortion of overdriven circuits and various guitar-based sound effects that feature electronic mediation as a component of musical performance. The sound-world created seems impressionistically to reflect the metaphoric world alluded to in the song’s lyrics an undersea utopia (‘Atlantis full of cheer’) reached via a series of chromatically descending harmonies (‘So down and down and down and down and down and down we go’). While most of the track’s timbres are transformations of voices or musical instruments, the coda is a free sound collage; that is, its sounds have no real-world analogues. As the song leads the listener deep beneath the sea, the sonic narrative, too, leaves behind all vestiges of the natural sound-world. In its blending of the elements of meaning gleaned from words, musical syntax, performance, and sound, forming an overall impression, the track exemplifies the integrated creative consciousness that is modern record production. The language of contemporary pop music, incorporating the novelty experiments and sonic gimmickry of the 1950s, developed a system of musical meaning shaped in its essence by electronic mediation. The gimmicks became rhetorical devices with historical and stylistic associations. The accumulation in the public soundscape of musical utterances shaped by electricity, developed into a lexicon of expressive techniques and a mode of compositional thinking, combining musical and technological ideas and actions in a multifaceted creative process. The results inform a musical practice comprising several types of creative activity, each of which leaves its traces on the sounding musical surface. As listeners, we are presented with a total experience. We may choose to delimit our perception or analysis of a record’s features, opting for an aesthetic hierarchy based on traditional or personal notions of what is musically essential. Nevertheless, the history of recording practice demonstrates repeatedly a process that combines songwriting, performance, arranging, recording and mixing in an interactive artistic project whose resulting

works

expand

meaning and style.

traditional

conceptions

of musical

content,

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Notes

Le For a discussion of the ontological situation of recordings, see Theodore

Gracyk, Rhythm and Noise: an Aesthetics of Rock (London: Duke University Press, 1996), pp. 1-36; Albin J. Zak III, The Poetics of Rock: Cutting Tracks, Making Records (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001), pp. 37-47. . Concerning the effects and uses of sound recording in various musical economies, see Mark Katz, Capturing Sound: How Technology has Changed Music (Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press, 2004); Peter Manuel, Cassette Culture: Popular Music and Technology in North India (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993). ‘

.

.

.

.

. See, for example, David Simons, Studio Stories (San Francisco: Backbeat, 2004);

William Clark and Jim Cogan, Temples ofSound: Inside the Great Recording Studios (San Francisco: Chronicle, 2003); Howard Massey, Behind the Glass: Top Record

Producers Tell how they Craft their Hits (San Francisco: Miller Freeman, 2000). . This idea is similar to what James Barrett characterises as ‘discourses of fantasy’, earlier in this volume.

. Harmonicats, “Peg O’ My Heart’ (Vitacoustic 1, 1947). Information on Vitacoustic, Universal Recording, and Putnam’s use of reverb is collected by Robert L. Campbell, Robert Pruter and Tom Kelly at http://hubcap.clemson. edu/~campber/vitacoustic.html (last accessed 10 June 2009).

. www.cambridge.org/recordedmusic. 7. Jim Cogan, ‘Bill Putnam’, Mix (October 2003), http://mixonline.com/recording/interviews/audio_bill_putnam/index.html

(last accessed

10 June

2009)

(original emphasis). . Les Paul and Mary Ford, ‘How High the Moon’, Capitol 1451, 1950. . For brief descriptions of Paul’s early innovations, see Harald Bode, “History of Electronic Sound Modification’, Journal ofthe Audio Engineering Society 32/10 (1984), pp. 730-9. 10. Patti Page, ‘Confess’, Mercury 5129, 1948; “The Tennessee Waltz’, Mercury

5534, 1950. For an illuminating study of the latter, see James M. Manheim, ‘B-Side Sentimentalizer: “Tennessee Waltz” in the History of Popular Music’, The Musical Quarterly (autumn 1992), pp. 337-54. Wks James Miller, Flowers in the Dustbin: the Rise of Rock and Roll 1947-1977 (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1999), p. 47. 2, Simons, Studio Stories, p. 30. 13. Eric Olsen, Paul Verna and Carlo Wolff, The Encyclopedia of Record Producers

(New York: Watson-Guptill, 1999), p. 539. 14. The issue of fidelity is remarkably slippery. The historical debate over the

musical merits of faithful sonic rendering is summarised in Oliver Read and Walter L. Welch, From Tin Foil to Stereo: the Evolution of the Phonograph (Indianapolis: Howard W. Sams, 1959), pp. 373-89.

Electronic mediation as musical style

15: In 1951, the American

magazine High Fidelity began its publication run. It featured articles for audio enthusiasts ranging from foundational topics, such as principles of acoustics and electronic design, to reviews of sound reproduction equipment and recordings. The magazine had a specific aesthetic stance, both in terms of repertory and in standards of sonic representation (stated unequivocally in its title). As the monthly record reviews demonstrate, recordings of classical

music were valued above all. However, there have been a few famous mavericks in classical record production who saw creative opportunity in the interface between music and the recording medium, including Leopold Stokowski, John Culshaw and Glenn Gould. See Evan Eisenberg, The Recording Angel: Explorations in Phonography (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1987) and Andrew Kazdin, Glenn Gould at Work: Creative Lying (New York: E.P. Dutton, 1989). For a review of midcentury audiophile objections to added reverberation, and their gendered implications, see Rebecca Leydon, ‘The Soft-Focus Sound: Reverb as a Gendered Attribute in Mid-Century Mood Music’, Perspectives ofNew Music 39/2 (summer 2001), pp. 96-107. 16. Recordist, a term that originally meant ‘recording emgineer’, is now used conventionally to refer to anyone involved in the record-making process. LV See, for example, Ronald Riddle, ‘Novelty Piano Music,’ in John Edward Hasse (ed.), Ragtime: its History, Composers and Music (New York: Schirmer Books, 1985), pp. 285-93; and for novelty arrangements, the Spike Jones CD, Spiked: the Music of Spike Jones, Catalyst (BMG) 09026-61982-2, 1994). 18. Mark Ribowsky, He’s a Rebel (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1989), p. 29. (Ie Todd Mouton, ‘Back Talk with Cosimo Matassa’, www.offbeat.com/artman/

publish/article_579.shtml#top (last accessed 10 June, 2009). 20. See Susan Schmidt Horning, ‘Chasing Sound: the Culture and Technology of Recording Studios in America, 1877-1977’, PhD dissertation (Case Western Reserve University, August 2002), pp. 147-84. ile Johnnie Ray, ‘The Little White Cloud that Cried’, Okeh 6840, 1951. Wk Booker T. and the M. G.’s ‘Green Onions’, Stax 701, 1962. 235 Buddy Holly, ‘Peggy Sue’, Coral 61885, 1957. 24. For an in-depth look at thematic uses of reverb, see Peter Doyle, Echo and

Reverb:

Fabricating

Space

in

Popular

Music

Recording,

1900-1960

(Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2005). 25: Duane Eddy, ‘Rebel Rouser’, Jamie 1104, 1958. 26. Teddy Bears, “To Know Him Is to Love Him’, Doré 503, 1958.

Ai Ribowsky, He’s a Rebel, p. 44. 28. Simons, Studio Stories, p. 31.

Baby’, Philles 22 The Crystals, ‘He’s a Rebel’, Philles 106, 1962); The Ronettes, ‘Be My 116, 1963.

y Books, 30. Mark Lewisohn, The Beatles Recording Sessions (New York: Harmon

1988), p. 15; ‘Hello, Goodbye’, Parlophone, 5655, 1967.

323

324

Albin Zak II

eile Robin Guthrie, ‘Robin Guthrie of Cocteau Twins Talks about the Records Se Bab

34.

35

that Changed his Life’, Melody Maker (6 November 1993), p. 27. Peter Gabriel, “The Intruder,’ Peter Gabriel, Geffen 2035-2, 1980. Reverb and echo are commonly confused owing in large part to an imprecise terminology; an architectural space used to generate reverberation, for example, is commonly referred to,as an ‘echo chamber.’ Reverb, however, is comprised of innumerable echoes melding together to impart a general impression of space, while echo is a discrete repetition of a sound. Bode, ‘History of Electronic Sound Modification’, p. 733. For example, in a track played at crotchet equals 120, a 70 millisecond delay adds to the texture persistent rhythmic attacks approximately one-seventh of a beat behind the original sound.

36. Jackie Brenston, ‘Rocket “88”, Chess 1458, 1951; Colin Escott with Martin

Hawkins, Good Rockin’ Tonight: Sun Records and the Birth of Rock ’n’ Roll (New York: St Martin’s, 1991), pp. 24-6. fs Elvis Presley, ‘Blue Moon of Kentucky’, Sun 209, 1954; “Blue Moon’ (RCA LPM 1254, 1956), recorded 19 August 1954, but withheld until Presley’s first RCA album release. 38. Les Paul and Mary Ford, ‘Falling in Love with Love’, Love Songs by Les Paul and Mary Ford, Ranwood 8260-2, 1997. First UK release on Les and Mary, Capitol EE'6701G 19552

3h Rick Clark, “Radical Recording: Creative Chaos in the Control Room’, Mix

(May 1998), p. 38. The track is on Queen’s Sheer Heart Attack, Elektra 1026,

1974.

}

40. Such rhythmic effects are innumerable on records of the 1980s. A few examples

representing different genres include: David Bowie, ‘Let’s Dance’, EMI America 50-17093, 1983; Tom Petty, ‘Don’t Come Around Here No More’, MCA 52496,

1985; Paul Young, ‘Everytime You Go Away’, Columbia 38-04867, 1985. . Toni Fisher, “The Big Hurt’, Signet 275, 1959.

. This account is from a personal interview with Larry Levine on 27 June 2002. . The Beatles, “Nowhere Man’, Rubber Soul, Parlophone 1267, 1965; Lewisohn, The Beatles Recording Sessions, p. 13. . Rick Clark, “Mixing It Up with Analog and Digital’, Mix (June 1995), p. 37 (original emphasis).

. George Martin, All You Need Is Ears (New York: St Martin’s Press, 1994), p. 141.

. The Beatles, Revolver, Parlophone 7009, 1966. . Small Faces, ‘Itchycoo Park’, Immediate 501, 1967. . Jimi Hendrix, 1983 ... (A Merman I Should Turn to Be)’, Electric Ladyland, Reprise, 2RS 6307, 1968.

Epilogue: recording technology in the twenty-first century TONY

GIBBS

Set at an unspecified time in the early part of the twenty-first century, the teenage heroine of William Gibson’s 1988 eponymous novel Mona Lisa Overdrive’ is an avid fan of a hypothetical electronic medium - ‘simstim’ - a developed form of recorded immersive telepresence in which the consumer experiences the sensory perceptions of the protagonist, usually (in a remarkably prescient anticipation of the current obsession with celebrity) someone famous. Typical scenarios include society parties, sexual encounters and other events to which the adolescent might aspire. Gibson ingeniously blurs the nature, form and content of ‘simstim’, suggesting that while parts thereof may be based upon actuality, a considerable proportion is staged and hence essentially fictional. Furthermore, he suggests that various forms of (presumably electronic) intervention are used to modify and optimise the final product. In blurring the distinction between the ‘real’ and the ‘virtual’ (the performed as opposed to the sequenced, synthesised, sampled and scripted) this imaginary medium takes much of its form and some of its practices from studio recording in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. The final product is experienced through direct neural — rather than sensory — stimulation but, as an individually consumed medium, in other respects it bears a striking resemblance to the consumption of downloaded MP3 files via an iPod or similar device. Interestingly,

in an earlier short story “The Winter

Market’

(1986)°

Gibson adopts a narrative position which initially appears to be that of a conventional recording studio engineer who persuades the owner to allow him to use downtime to record his protégé. A significant part of the tale elapses before we realise that the performer is not a singer or musician but a dreamer of lucid dreams: the ‘engineer’, however, has much the same function as a contemporary sound engineer. His role and his relationships to artist and hardware are clearly recognisable as reflections of contempo-

rary recording studio practices. Gibson’s engineer (interestingly, he uses the term ‘editor’) apparently uses substantial and arcane technologies in his

work. As such, in his exclusivity of access to and control of the medium and

its technology, he resembles the operator of a large mixing desk or perhaps, in an earlier incarnation, the systems manager of an old-style mainframe

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computer. The technology he commands is highly complex, and the competence required to operate it effectively demands a correspondingly high degree of specialist knowledge and experience. Furthermore, his contribution extends beyond the purely technical. He fulfils a crucial role in the creative process, as intermediary between the artist and the medium. However, the role of the engineer has virtually disappeared with the emergence of the personal computer and the home studio and this is acknowledged in Gibson’s subsequent writings. In later examples, the ‘simstim’ material that Mona so avidly consumes is apparently created with far less overtly complex, and hence less exclusively controlled intervention. One senses that the operators are using something resembling laptop technologies as opposed to those of large mixing desks and multitask recorders. (In another interesting technological parallel in “The Winter Market’ Gibson refers to a simpler, more accessible technology, which appears to bear much the same relationship to the professional studio, as did the cassette-based portastudio of the 1970s.) The sophistication of intervention in Mona’s world is perhaps increased but individual access to the processes is similarly enhanced. Once again we can see parallels in our own history: consider for example the evolutionary process that has led from Max Matthews’s Music 1 punchcard-based language to systems such as ProTools or perhaps more ce significantly (in terms of the mass” market’), Cubase and the like. The significance of this shift of control from informed elite to mass user is easy to underestimate. Much commercially recorded and released material is now created in semi-domestic situations using little more than a standard home computer with a few expansion options added. A more dramatic example of this so-called ‘democratisation’ process was provided — albeit predominantly in a different medium - by the coverage of the London terrorist bombings of July 2005. For the first time, the major television news footage was derived, not from professional crews using broadcast equipment, but from members of the public using the still and video capabilities of their personal mobile phones. This development and the emergence of the web log (blog) — most conspicuously during the second Iraq war — as an influential medium that is essentially under the control of the individual suggests that, for a significant number of people, the roles of creator and consumer may have become negotiable on a case-by-case basis and that we may be constrained to reconsider the relationship that this implies, not least in respect of the ‘quality’ of product and the expectations of its consumers. These technologies not only impact upon ‘creative’ activities but, more fundamentally (as Andrew Blake and Adam Krims discuss), they play an increasingly prominent role as a means by which identity is conferred and

Epilogue

confirmed: technologies become yet more central to our culture and to our individual psyche as evidenced by magazine columns that seek to derive information about celebrities by attempting to discover what material they have on their personal stereos. In his works Gibson has created a new medium with its own evolutionary history (described in several different forms and stages of development) but has given it technological and, to some extent, contextual qualities that can be recognised from contemporary sound recording and studio practice. Furthermore, he has anticipated the historical development and at least some of the possible content of this medium and the manner of its consumption. In most of these respects, he has drawn upon technical ideas yet to be established at a practical level: however, the overall form of his medium is clearly recognisable as a reflection of the current situation, and its historical development parallels that of sound recording. This raises the question of what part of any recording-based medium is intrinsic to its being a recording and what is a function of the specific medium itself. Can it be argued, for example, that home video-recording and the ‘ripping’ of CDs have shared qualities by virtue of the resemblance of the technological acts involved or does the nature and content of their respective media make them wholly different from each other? It would seem from both the fiction of Gibson and the all-too-real recent history of newsgathering that we can expect future development to be recognisable in terms of current practices, in as much as many electronic media appear to have at least some characteristics that may be regarded as universal. Once again, Andrew Blake has highlighted an aspect of this future situation that is already to some extent with us, in his observations that, by virtue of the context in which it is experienced, the personal stereo has already assumed a filmic and hence (to some extent) multisensory modality and this may, perhaps, anticipate future developments. To anticipate the possible nature of a future medium that has technology at its base is, however, fraught with hazard. There is good reason to think that in the present century we will witness technological changes that are as radical and unexpected as those of the last. In 1900 the field of electronics did not exist. Would it have been possible then to predict the development of the computer to its current levels of capability, or, indeed, to posit its existence at all, given Charles Babbage’s mechanical devices as the only notable precursors? Probably not. We may imagine future technologies but can we reasonably expect to anticipate their application, particularly to creative activities in the visual and audible arts? Almost certainly not. It is impossible to know how technological developments will influence recording, or what the nature of recording itself will be.

a27

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On the face of it, the punchcard computer, at least in the functional form of Music 1 and the like, was a somewhat unlikely candidate for involvement, yet its lineal descendants in the form of Cubase and ProTools now command centre stage in virtually every recording studio, regardless of professional, or indeed amateur, level. Current developments in computing technology suggest greater speeds and enhanced processing power to come but this reveals little of the essential nature of our future. What will we be recording so quickly and what processes will be so powerfully delivered in our service? The types of material recorded on the early phonograph in the late 1800s were not at all the same as those recorded on the machines of a hundred years later. Indeed the very idea of recording had, by then, been transformed. This transformation was so radical as to render the term ‘recording’ literally inaccurate. The products of multitrack technology were not generally ‘recordings’ in the sense of being a record of the event of a performance (as was initially the case). Rather, the ‘recording’ process had become an event (or, strictly speaking a series of events) in itself. Thus, by the late 1960s, much socalled ‘recorded’ work was hopelessly misnamed. In a strict use of the term, the final product could correctly be said to have been synthesised (although not, obviously, in the sense of having been created through the agency of the instrument called a synthesiser) but not to have been recorded: it had never existed as a single entity and hence could not have been ‘recorded’ in the conventional sense of the term. Here we see technology and its associated processes having influence upon the form and nature of the final ‘product’: as Blake implies, the evolution of software from the form and function of the Composers Desktop Project (CDP) to that of Apple’s GarageBand is not simply a technological development but also signifies and directly influences what is created, as well as the means by which the work is realised. This is a situation that, although offering tremendous opportunity, carries risks, as the electroacoustic composer Trevor Wishart has identified in his 1994 work Audible Design. Commenting upon the use of the CDP system, he warns that: This danger of overkill is particularly acute with the computer processing of sound as anything and everything can be done ... Just as with the traditional acoustic instrument, the task is to use it, to play it, well. In sound composition, this means to use the new tools in a way appropriate to the sound we are immediately dealing with and with a view to particular aesthetic objectives. There is no inherent virtue in doing everything.”

The difficulty of predicting the detailed direction of technological developments is self-evident. Consider, for example the impact of the Short Message System originally offered as an almost throwaway peripheral option by

Epilogue

mobile phone operators. Who would have predicted the rise and dominance of the text message and its impact upon social interaction, and even upon language itself? Nor for that matter can we be at all sure about exactly what we will be recording: will the idea of the single medium (such as music) or a simple composite (such as video) endure, or will the consumer opt for the greater degree of immersion potentially available from multisensory media? Gibson cleverly took an existing medium and its practices and extrapolated from that point to embrace his own ideas. The ideas were revolutionary but the means by which they were to be realised is surprisingly recognisable. This raises the question of whether all electronic media may tend to have an inherent and broadly common operational form. Possible future technological developments make it difficult to continue this relatively direct extrapolation, not least because of the ever-increasing rate of change. To help consider possible future forms, it may therefore be useful to review the changes thus far. From its initially simple and literal role, the ‘middle period’ of recording saw its product undergo substantial reification. From the descriptive term for a collection of shellac discs required to render a classical symphony into recorded form, the ‘album’ metamorphosed into an art object in its own right. The graphic sleeve styling of jazz recordings on the Blue Note label prepared the ground for the upsurge of package-based art that supported the explosive development of the LP as concept-based art form in the mid-late 1960s. The concept of the album became the concept album. With the demise of so-called ‘progressive’ music in the mid-1970s, the significance of the LP as art object receded, this recession accelerated by the smaller physical size of its successor, the CD. During the supremacy of the CD, the significance of the album as object was largely destroyed by the lack of spectacle of the small images on the packing and the unreadability of these sleeve notes in necessarily tiny print sizes. The advent of the downloadable file with no visual (or other) content than the sound itself com-

pleted the process: de-reification was effectively complete and recorded sound had reverted to being a ‘pure’ single medium - a move opposite to the predictions of the proponents of immersive virtual reality as the ‘next big thing’. Significantly, this process took place at exactly the time when computer power was beginning to make virtual reality a serious possibility. The recorded product was thus transformed

from (literal) record to

ephemerally supported object and subsequently to detached, abstracted soundfile. Such identity as remains is entirely a function of what can be heard from that sound file supported by associative information gleaned , from other, essentially unconnected sources such as television, magazines

o29

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and so on. Attempts have been made to associate other media with the recording but to minimal effect. Fashion is, perhaps, the most crucial factor influencing the present and future state of recording. Today fashion determines that the recorded work as an object is no longer valued in the way it once was. The industry has embraced the extraordinary speed and intensity of technological development, with studios vying with each other to offer the latest and most revolutionary of resources. Inescapably these have often been superficial and of little more substance than the fashions of the clothing industry. For example, sonic fashion has successively dictated a dry drum sound, followed by an electronically processed one (in the form of gated reverberation) and subsequently by large-scale (and usually simulated) acoustic environments. In the design of musical sound, and hence the resulting popularity of enabling technologies, fashion rules supreme. To predict clothing fashion over years to come might reasonably be regarded as impossible or at least futile and the same consideration may well apply to the sonic design of recording and the musical forms and styles that it serves. All of this leads to the inescapable conclusion that little of the future of recording can be predicted with any degree of certainty. The context of this volume, however, provides a rare indulgence to speculate about what alternatives may lie ahead. The first point to consider is what we shall be recording in times to come. Music seems likely: the demand for the classics endures notwithstanding the vicissitudes of the marketplace, but whether the future mainstream product will remain ‘simply’ musical seems open to question. Critical to this issue is the nature of possible future media and their relationships to enabling technologies. There is a view (once again previously raised by Blake) that suggests that technology, particularly that of the personal computer, has had a generally emancipating impact upon the creative media arts and that the apparently unstoppable rise in the power of such machines implies that this process will continue. The technological cottage industry seems fated to continue to supplant the industrial monolith, at least in this area. The second point questions the possible social impact of new, as yet undeveloped media, thus approaching some of the ideas mooted by Gibson. He suggests that, beyond certain levels of ‘consumption’, involvement with immersive media has the potential to lead to withdrawal, even to the point of virtual catatonia; doubtless, the widespread adoption of immersive media will be accompanied by public expressions of alarm at such perceived threats. In this respect, any hypothetical new media are unlikely to differ significantly from their antecedents. The third point concerns the use of science fiction which, as an exemplar, may appear academically unsound at first glance. Despite its tenuous nature

Epilogue

there is good anecdotal evidence to suggest that some of its predictions can be quite accurate.’ This is not, of course, to suggest that the day when consumers will insert the equivalent of a modern-day USB memory stick into a surgically implanted socket and be discorporated into another virtual sensory world is just round the corner; indeed, it seems that the mapping of detailed sensory function has, as a prerequisite, a paradigm shift in the comprehension of the workings of the human brain that is still some way in

the future.

f

The apparently inexorable rise in computer power that underpins the technological basis of current recording practice does allow some reasonably reliable predictions to be made. Wider bandwidth, higher resolution, multiplicity of channels, more sophisticated processing, increased volumes of data and so on, are all in a sense fairly obvious in terms of their implications for creative practice: for example, we may reasonably predict the need for storage and replay of far greater capacity and speed than current CDs and DVDs. The first signs of this have alfeady emerged with the recent format wars between Sony’s Blu-Ray disc and the rival HD-DVD system. Less obvious, perhaps, are the forms that interaction with these systems may take. The QWERTY keyboard and mouse have proved themselves to be a remarkably adaptable and enduring interface despite having been initially designed for handling text rather than sound and/or other media. Some recent developments have focused upon creating more activity-specific interface designs: for example, recent computer-based recording systems have sought to emulate a traditional mixing desk, albeit with considerably expanded functionality, and video editing systems have increasingly come to resemble their hardware-based antecedents. Even the art of the DJ is increasingly supported by computer systems which use controllers that have a functional resemblance to turntables and mixers. These developments might appear oddly retrogressive, as if their users find computer-based systems somehow

uncomfortable and hence seek the reassurance of familiar interfaces. For all the responsiveness shown by manufacturers to technological fashion, there does remain a significant degree of conservatism in the responses of users to new and innovative systems. One may conjecture that this is, to some extent, because there is not, as yet, a generation of recording engineers for whom the mixing desk has its primary existence on a screen rather than as a physical object. However, the activities of software developers suggest that they anticipate a time when the current situation will change. At this point, not only will the recorded product be de-reified but so will be the means of its creation.

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The ability to create an abstracted product by equally abstracted means may imply a paradigm shift in our relationship to recorded media. It might in turn be argued that the present, relatively formalistic material that is created through the various forms of music practice may be susceptible to competition from more abstract forms. Taking as a basis the runaway success of computer game’ that depend upon virtual worlds in which events unfold, and interactions which determine the direction of these events, one may speculate, for example, that ‘conventional’ music may have its preeminence in recorded media challenged by expanded, interactive soundscapes and other forms, perhaps more directly descriptive or narrative in content than music per se. The foregoing projections presuppose the continuation of so-called ‘democratisation’ but assume relatively little in terms of the impact of ongoing technological development: history suggests that we underestimate this at our peril. It could be argued that the holy grail of electronic media the ability directly to interface and interact with the consumer (if, given earlier arguments, such an appellation is still appropriate) without conventional sensory mediation —- remains unchanged. Unfortunately for our purposes, the possibility of direct neural rather than sensory stimulation seems at present to be almost as distant as during the later years of the last century although, at the time of writing, anecdotal evidence suggests that we may be witnessing the first steps in this direction. The dizzying advancements of at least one hundred and thirty years of recording practice suggest that anything is still possible and that the most fantastic developments that we can imagine are, in all probability, a pale reflection of what will actually happen. Notes 1. William Gibson, Mona Lisa Overdrive (London: Victor Gollancz, 1988).

2. Gibson uses the word ‘sensorium’, to cover the sum total of a person’s sensory experience. 3. William Gibson, “The Winter Market’ (London: Victor Gollancz, 1986).

4. Trevor Wishart, Audible Design (York: Orpheus the Pantomime Ltd, 1994), p. 5. 5. Bruce Sterling, “A Century of Science Fiction’, Time, 29 March 1999, www.time. com/time/time100/scientist/other/science.html (last accessed 30 July 2009).

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Nyman, Michael, Experimental Music: Cage and Beyond reprinted with foreword by Brian Eno (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999). Olsen, Eric, Paul Verna and Carlo Wolff, The Encyclopedia of Record Producers (New York: Watson-Guptill, 1999). O’Meally, Robert, The Jazz Cadence of American Culture (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998). O’Meally,

Robert,

Brent

H.

Edwards,

and

Farah

J. Griffin

(eds.),

Uptown

Conversation: the New Jazz Studies, New York: Columbia University Press, 2004. Owen, David, “The Soundtrack of Your Life: Muzak in the Realm of Retail Theatre’, The New Yorker, 10 April 2006, www.newyorker.com/fact/content/articles/ 060410 fa_fact (last accessed 23 June 2009).

Owens, Thomas, “Applying the Melograph to “Parker’s Mood””’, Selected Reports in Ethnomusicology 2/1 (1974), pp. 167-75. Bebop: the Music and its Players (Oxford University Press, 1995). Page, Tim (ed.), The Glenn Gould Reader (London: Faber and Faber, 1984).

Parsonage, Catherine, “The Popularity of Jazz - an Unpopular Problem: the Significance of Swing When You’re Winning’, The Source: Challenging Jazz Criticism 1 (2004), pp. 55-74. The Evolution of Jazz Britain, 1880-1935 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005). Patmore, David N. C., ‘EMI, Sir Thomas Beecham and the Formation of the London Philharmonic Orchestra’, Journal of the Association of Recorded Sound Collections 32/1 (spring 2001), pp. 11-27. ‘Sir Thomas Beecham: the Contract Negotiations with RCA Victor, Columbia Records and EMI, 1941-1959 - Artistic Aspirations vs. Commercial Reality’, Journal of the Association of Recorded Sound Collections 33/2 (fall 2002), ppyl7s=213:

‘John Culshaw and the Recording as a Work of Art’, Journal of the Association of Recorded Sound Collections 39/1 (spring 2008), pp. 19-40. Patmore, David N.C., and Eric F. Clarke, ‘Making and Hearing Virtual Worlds: John Culshaw and the Art of Record Production’, Musice Scientice 11/2 (fall

2007), pp. 269-93.

Pennock Speck, Barry, “The Pragmatic Effects of Creaky Voice’, unpublished paper

delivered at the 9th International Pragmatics Conference, Riva del Garda, Italy,

1-15 July, 2005.

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Pettitt, Stephen, ‘Rattle and Brum’, The Sunday Times (20 August 1995). Philip, Robert, Early Recordings and Musical Style: Changing Tastes in Instrumental Performance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992). Performing Music in the Age of Recording (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004).

Pian, Rulan Chao, ‘Aria Structural Patterns in the Peking Opera’, in James Irving Crump and William P. Malm (eds.), Chinese and Japanese Music Dramas (Ann Arbor, Center for Chinese Studies, University of Michigan,

1975), pp. 65-89. Pitman, Joanna, ‘Orchestral Manoeuvres’, The Times (24 August 1996).

Plant, Sadie, Zeroes and Ones: Digital Women and the New Technoculture (London: Fourth Estate, 1997).

On the Mobile: the Effects of Mobile Telephones on Social and Individual Life (London: Motorola, 2000).

Porcello, Thomas, “Tails Out”: Social Phenomenology and the Ethnographic Representation of Technology in Music-making’, Ethnomusicology 42/3 (1998), pp. 485-510. ¥ ‘Afterword’, in Paul D. Greene and Thomas Porcello (eds.), Wired for Sound:

Engineering and Technologies in Sonic Cultures, (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2005), pp. 269-282.

Porter, Lewis, John Coltrane: his Life and Music (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1998).

Porter, Lewis, Chris DeVito, David Wild, Yasuhiro Fujioka and Wolf Schmaler (eds.), The John Coltrane Reference (New York: Routledge, 2007).

Poyatos, Fernando, Paralanguage: a Linguistic and Interdisciplinary Approach to Interactive Speech and Sound (Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 1993).

Preve, Francis, ‘Mash It Up’, Keyboard, January 2006, www.keyboardmag.com/ story.asp?storyCode=12660 (last accessed 14 June 2009). Raban, Jonathan, Soft City (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1974).

Racy, Ali Jihad, ‘Record Industry and Egyptian Traditional Music’, Ethnomusicology 20/1 (1976), pp. 23-48. Raeburn, Bruce Boyd, ‘Jazz and the Italian Connection’, The Jazz Archivist 6 (1991), pp ls. Randel, Don Michael, “The Canons in the Musicological Toolbox’, in Katherine

Bergeron and Philip V. Bohlman (eds.), Disciplining Music: Musicology and its Canons (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), pp. 10-22. Rasula, Jed, ‘The Media of Memory: the Seductive Menace of Records in Jazz History’, in Krin Gabbard (ed.), Jazz among the Discourses (Durham and

London: Duke University Press, 1995), pp. 134-62. the Read, Oliver, and Walter L. Welch, From Tin Foil to Stereo: the Evolution of 1959). Sams, Phonograph (Indianapolis: Howard W. Repsch, John, The Legendary Joe Meek: the Telstar Man (London: Cherry Red Books, 2000).

347

348

Select bibliography Reynolds, Simon, Generation Ecstasy: into the World of Techno and Rave Culture (New York: Routledge, 1999). Rheingold, Howard, Smart Mobs: the Next Social Revolution (Cambridge, MA: Perseus, 2002).

Ribowsky, Mark, He’s a Rebel (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1989).

Rice, Timothy, ‘Toward a Mediation of Field Methods and Field Experience in Ethnomusicology’, in Gregory F. Barz and Timothy J. Cooley (eds.), Shadows in the Field: New Perspectives for Fieldwork in Ethnomusicology (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), pp. 101-20. Riddle, Ronald, ‘Novelty Piano Music’, in John Edward Hasse (ed.), Ragtime: its

History, Composers and Music (New York: Schirmer Books, 1985), pp. 285-93. Roads, Curtis, The Computer Music Tutorial (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996). Robert, Martial, Pierre Schaeffer. Des transmissions a Orphée (Paris: L’Harmattan, 1999);

Rooley, Anthony, Performance: Revealing the Orpheus Within (Longmead, Dorset: Element Books, 1990). Rosen, Charles, The Classical Style (London: Faber and Faber, 1975).

Rothenbuhler, Eric W., and John Durham Peters, ‘Defining Phonography: an Experiment in Theory’, The Musical Quarterly 81/2 (1997), pp. 242-64. Rudent, Catherine, ‘La voix de fausset dans “Speed King” de Deep Purple. Une virilité paradoxale’, in Cécile Prévost-Thomas, Hyacinthe Ravet and Catherine Rudent (eds.), Le féminin, le masculin et la musique populaire daujourd hui (Paris: Université

de Paris-Sorbonne,

Observatoire

Musical

Frangais, 2005), p. 99-108.

Sachs, Curt, The Wellsprings of Music (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1961). Said, Edward, Musical Elaborations (London: Vintage, 1991).

Samson, Jim, “The Practice of Early-Nineteenth-Century Pianism’, in Michael Talbot (ed.), The Musical Work: Reality or Invention? (Liverpool: Liverpool University

Press, 2000), pp. 110-27.

Sassen, Saskia, The Global City: New York, London, Tokyo (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991). Schade-Poulsen, Marc, Men and Popular Music in Algeria: the Social Significance of Rai (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1999). Schaeffer, Pierre, A la recherche d’une musique concréte (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1952). Traité des objets musicaux (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1966).

Machines 4 communiquer (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1970).

‘De la musique concrete a la musique méme’, in La Revue Musicale 303-5 (1977). This special triple issue of La Revue Musicale has been reissued as a book: Schaeffer, Pierre, De la Musique concréte a la musique méme (Paris: Mémoire du Livre, 2002).

Dix Ans dessais radiophoniques. Du studio au Club d’Essai 1942/1952 (Arles:

Phonurgia Nova/Archives INA, 1989).

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Schaeffer, Pierre and Reibel, Guy, Solfége de l'objet sonore (Paris: INA/GRM, 1998). This book with three CDs of sound examples is a reissue of the first edition from 1967. Scherer, Klaus R., “Expression of Emotion in Voice and Music’ Journal of Voice 9/3 (1995), pp. 235-48.

Schuller, Gunther, Early Jazz: its Roots and Musical Development (New York: Oxford University Press, 1968). The Swing Era: the Development of Jazz 1930-1945 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989).

Schwarz, David, Listening Subjects: Music, Psychoanalysis, Culture (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1997). Scott, Allen John, The Cultural Economy of Cities (Malden, MA: Sage, 2000).

Seckerson, Edward, “You Feel yourself Stretched on some Kind of Psychological Rack’, The Independent (14 October 1995).

‘Revolution in our Living Rooms’, Classic CD (September 1996), p. 7. Seddon, Frederick A., “‘Empathetic Creativity: the Product of Empathetic Attunement’,

in Dorothy

Miell and Karen

Littleton *(eds.), Collaborative

Creativity (London: Free Association Books, 2004), pp. 56-78. Seeger, Anthony, “The Role of Sound Archives in Ethnomusicology Today’, Ethnomusicology 30/2 (1986), pp. 261-76. ‘Ethnomusicologists, Archives, Professional Organizations, and the Shifting Ethics of Intellectual Property’, Yearbook for Traditional Music 28 (1996), pp. 87-105. Why Suyd Sing: a Musical Anthropology of an Amazonian People (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2004 [1987]).

Seeger, Charles, ‘Toward a Universal Music

Sound-Writing for Musicology’,

Journal of the International Folk Music Council 9 (1957), pp. 63-6.

‘Prescriptive and Descriptive Music-Writing’, Musical Quarterly 44/2 (1958), pp. 184-95. ‘World Musics in American Schools: a Challenge to be Met’, in Michael E. Besson (ed.), Music in World Cultures (Washington: Music Educators National Conference, 1972), pp. 91-95. This is a reprint of Music Educators Journal 59/2 (October 1972), pp. 107-11.

Seeger, Pete, The Incompleat Folksinger (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1979). Shapiro, Nat and Hentoff, Nat, Hear me Talkin’ to ya: the Story of Jazz Told by the Men who Made it (New York: Dover, 1955).

Shelemay, Kay Kaufman, ‘Recording Technology, the Record Industry, and Ethnomusicological Scholarship’, in Bruno Nettl and Philip V. Bohlman (eds.), Comparative Musicology and the Anthropology of Music (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), pp. 277-92.

‘Toward an Ethnomusicology of the Early Music Movement: Thoughts on Bridging Disciplines and Musical W orlds’, Ethnomusicology 45 (2001), pp. 1-29.

349

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Shipton, Alyn, A New History of Jazz (London and New York: Continuum, 2007). Shusterman, Richard, Pragmatist Aesthetics: Living Beauty, Rethinking Art (Oxford: Blackwell, 1992).

Performing Live: Aesthetic Alternatives for the Ends of Art (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2000). Simons, David, Studio Stories (San Francisco: Backbeat, 2004).

Sinkowicz, Willhem, ‘Maestro of the Philharmonic: Vintage 2000’, Die Presse (1 August 1996). Skea, Dan, ‘Rudy Van Gelder in Hackensack: Defining the Jazz Sound in the 1950s’, Current Musicology 71-3 (spring 2001-spring 2002), pp. 54-76. Small, Christopher, Music of the Common Tongue (London: John Calder, 1987).

Musicking: the Meanings of Performing and Listening (Hanover: Wesleyan University Press, 1998).

Smalley, Denis, “The Listening Imagination: Listening in the Electroacoustic Era’, in John Paynter, Tim Howell, Richard Orton and Peter Seymour (eds.), Companion to Contemporary Musical Thought (London: Routledge, 1992), vol. I, pp. 514-54. ‘Spectromorphology: Explaining Sound Shapes’, in Organised Sound 2/2 (1997),

pp. 107-126. Solis, Gabriel, ““A Unique Chunk of Jazz Reality”: Authorship, Musical Work Concepts, and Thelonious Monk’s Live Recordings from the Five Spot, 1958’, Ethnomusicology 48/3 (2004), pp. 315-47. Sontag, Susan, Against Interpretation (London: Vintage, 1994 [1966]). Spotts, Frederick, Bayreuth: a History of the Wagner Festival (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1994). Steiner, George, Real Presences (London: Faber and Faber, 1989).

Sterling, Bruce, “A Century of Science Fiction’, Time, 29 March 1999, www.time. com/time/time100/scientist/other/science.html (last accessed 30 July 2009). Stock, Jonathan P.J., “A Reassessment of the Relationship between Text, Speech

Tone, Melody, and Aria Structure in Beijing Opera’, Journal of Musicological Research 18/3 (1999), pp. 183-206. Huju: Traditional Opera in Modern Shanghai (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003).

‘Documenting the Musical Event: Observation, Participation, Representation’, in Eric Clarke and Nicholas Cook (eds.), Empirical Musicology: Aims, Methods, Prospects (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), pp. 15-34. ce Yang's Eight Pieces”: Composing a Musical Set-Piece in a Chinese Local Opera Tradition’, in Michael Tenzer (ed.), Analytical Studies in World Music (Oxford

and New York: Oxford University Press, 2006), pp. 275-302. ‘East Asia/China, Taiwan, Singapore, Overseas Chinese’, in Jeff Todd Titon (ed.),

Worlds of Music (Sth edn, New York: Wadsworth, 2008), pp. 353-414. Stringer, Robin, ‘Simon Rattle’, The Gramophone 56/668 (January 1979), pp. 1271-2. Suchoff, Benjamin (ed.), Béla Bartok Essays (Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 1976).

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Sudhalter, Richard M., Lost Chords: White Musicians and their Contribution to Jazz, 1915-1945 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999).

Summerhayes, Tim, “Combining Live Sound and Studio Engineering Backgrounds to Yield a Prominent Career in Mobile Recording’, Resolution 4/6 (September 2005), pp. 40-5. Summit, Jeffrey A., The Lord’s Song in a Strange Land: Music and Identity in Contemporary Jewish Worship (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2000). 9 Sweeney, Philip, The Virgin Directory of World Music (London: Virgin Books, 1991). Sweeting, Adam, ‘Stompin’ Simon’, Classic FM Magazine (September 2000), pp. 20-4. Symes, Colin, Setting the Record Straight: a Material History of Classical Recording (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2004). Szwed, John, So What: the Life of Miles Davis (London: Heinemann, 2002).

Tagg, Philip, “Towards a Sign Typology of Music’, in Rossana Dalmonte and Mario Baroni (eds.), Secondo convegno europeo di analisi musicale (Trento:

Universita degli studi di Trento, 1992), pp. 369-78. ‘Analysing Popular Music: Theory, Method, and Practice’,in Richard Middleton (ed.), Reading Pop: Approaches to Textual Analysis in Popular Music (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), pp. 71-103. Taruskin, Richard, Text and Act: Essays on Music and Performance (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995).

Taylor, Jennifer, ‘Lilith Fair: a Celebration of Whom? unpublished paper presented to the Society for Ethnomusicology, Niagara Chapter, 2000. Taylor, Timothy D., Strange Sounds: Music, Technology and Culture (New York: Routledge, 2001). Théberge, Paul, Any Sound you can Imagine: Making Music/Consuming Technology (Hanover: Wesleyan University Press, 1997).

“Plugged In”: technology and popular music’, in Simon Frith, Will Straw and John Street (eds.), The Cambridge Companion to Pop and Rock (Cambridge:

Cambridge University Press, 2001), pp. 3-24. Tingen, Paul, Miles Beyond: the Electric Explorations of Miles Davis, 1967-1991 (New York: Billboard Books, 2003).

Titon, Jeff Todd, ‘Knowing Fieldwork’, in Gregory F. Barz & Timothy J. Cooley forFieldwork in Ethnomusicology (eds.), Shadows in the Field: New Perspectives (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), pp. 87-100. Toop, David, Exotica: Fabricated Soundscapes in the Real World (London: Serpent's Tail, 1998).

Ocean of Sound: Aether Talk, Ambient Sound and Imaginary Worlds (London: Serpent’s Tail, 2001). Haunted Weather: Music, Silence and Memory (London: Serpent's Tail, 2004). Topp Fargion, Janet, Out of Cuba: Latin American Music Takes Africa by Storm. Booklet for eponymous CD. (London, Topic Records, 2004), TSCD927.

351

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Tracey, Hugh, ‘Recording African Music in the Field’, African Music 1/2 (1955), ppao— lle

Trager, George Leonard, ‘Paralanguage: a First Approximation’, Studies in Linguistics 13/1-2 (1958), pp. 1-12. Urban, Greg, ‘Ritual Wailing in Amerindian Brazil’, American Anthropologist, 90/2

(June 1988), pp. 385-400. Van Peer, René, “Taking the World for a Spin in Europe: an Insider’s Look at the World Music Recording Business’, Ethnomusicology 43/2 (1999), pp. 374-84. Visconti, Tony, ‘The Master on Musical Standards, the Fear of Commitment and Why Recording is No Great Mystery’, Resolution 4/4 (May/June 2005), pp. 44-8. Wallach, Jeremy, ‘World Beat’, The Garland Encyclopedia of World Music (New York: Garland, 2001), vol. IIL, pp. 337-42.

Walton, Kendall L., Mimesis as Make-Believe: on the Foundations of the Representational Arts (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990). Wansborough, Matthew and Andrea Mageean, “The Role of Urban Design in Cultural Regeneration’, Journal of Urban Design 5/2 (2000), pp. 181-97. Warwick, Kevin, I, Cyborg: The Inside Story of the Experiment to Fuse Artificial with Human Intelligence (London: Century, 2002). Westmoreland,

Kalene,

cae

“Bitch”

and

Lilith

Fair:

Resisting

Anger,

Celebrating

Contradictions’, Popular Music and Society 25/1-2 (2001), pp. 205-20. Whitley, John, “What willthe Music of the New Millennium Sound Like?’, The Daily Telegraph (27 February 1999), p. A7. Williams, Raymond, Culture (London: Fontana, 1981).

Winkler, Peter, “Writing Ghost Notes: the Poetics and Politics of Transcription’, in David Schwarz, Anahid Kassabian and Lawrence Siegel (eds.), Keeping Score: Music, Disciplinarity, Culture (Charlottesville and London: University Press of Virginia, 1997), pp. 169-203. Wishart, Trevor, Audible Design (York: Orpheus the Pantomime Ltd, 1994).

Wynne, Derek, and Justin O’Connor, ‘Consumption and the Postmodern City’, Urban Studies, 35/5-6 (1998), pp. 841-64. Young, Rob, ‘Presents for Future Use’, The Wire, 147 (May 1996) which can be viewed at http://music.hyperreal.org/artists/brian_eno/interviews/wire96b. html (accessed 14 June 2009).

Yung, Bell, Cantonese Opera: Performance as Creative Process (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989). Zak III, Albin J., The Poetics of Rock: Cutting Tracks, Making Records (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001). _ Zemp, Hugo, “The/An Ethnomusicologist and the Record Business’, Yearbook for Traditional Music, 28 (1996), pp. 36-56. Zukin, Sharon, Loft Living: Culture and Capital in Urban Change (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1982).

Select discography

*

Record numbers identify the source used in each case and do not necessarily correspond to the first or latest releases. Afghanistan: The Rubdab of Herat, VDE CD-699, 1993.

Amos, Tori, Strange Little Girls, Atco/Atlantic, 83486, 2001. Arctic Monkeys, The, Whatever People Say I Am, That’s What I’m Not, Domino BOOOBTDMDC, 2006.

Avalanches, The, Since I Left You, XL B00004XN07, 2001. Beach Boys, The, ‘Surfin’ USA’, from the album, Surfin’ USA, Capitol/EMI, X-6094, 1963. ‘Fun, Fun, Fun’, Capitol/EMI, EAP 1-20620, 1964.

‘Do You Wanna Dance With Me?’ from the album The Beach Boys Today!, Capitol/EMI, 1 2269, 1965. ‘Good Vibrations’, Capitol/EMI CL 15475, 1966. Beatles, The, ‘Nowhere Man’, Rubber Soul, Parlophone 1267, 1965. Revolver, Parlophone, 7009 1966. ‘Hello, Goodbye’, Parlophone 5655, 1967. Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, Parlophone, 7027, 1967. The Beatles (1968), re-released Capitol/EMI, SEBX-11841, 1978.

The Beatles Anthology, vol. 2, Capitol, CDP 7243 8 34448 2 3, 1996. Ben Folds Five, The Unauthorized Biography of Reinhold Messner, 550 Music, CD 4933122,,1999.

Bernstein, Leonard, Wonderful Town. Kim Criswell, Audra McDonald, Thomas Hampson, London Voices, Birmingham Contemporary Music Group/Simon Rattle (recorded EMI Abbey Road Studios, June 1998). First release: EMI: CDC 5 556753-2 (CD).

Booker T. and the M.G.s, ‘Green Onions’, Stax 701, 1962. Bowie, David, Pin Ups, RCA, 1973. Remastered CMI, CD 5219030, 1999. ‘Let’s Dance’, Let’s Dance, EMI America SO-17093, 1983. Brathanki, Ano!, Sony International BOOOOS5YJY9, 2000.

Brenston, Jackie, ‘Rocket “88”, Chess 1458, 1951. Britten, Benjamin, War Requiem. Elisabeth Séderstrém, Robert Tear, Thomas Allen, Boys of Christ Church Cathedral, Oxford, City of Birmingham Symphony

Chorus

and

Orchestra/Simon

Rattle

(recorded

Great

Hall,

354

Select discography

Birmingham University, February 1983, March 1983). First release: EMI: SLS 10 77573 (LP: 2 LPs), TC-SLS 10 77579 (tape cassette: 2 tape cassettes). BT (Brian Transeau), ‘BT vs. The Doors’, Tunes Store, 2004.

Coltrane, John, Live at the Village Vanguard, Impulse AS-10, 1962. Coltrane Plays The Blues, Atlantic 8122073743-2, 1962. The Complete 1961 Village Vanguard Recordings, Impulse, IMPD4-232, 1997. Live Trane: the European Tours, Pablo 7PACD-4433-2, 2001 Crow, Sheryl, The Very Best of Sheryl Crow, A&M, Motown, 000152102, 2003. Crystals, ‘He’s a Rebel’, Philles 106, 1962. Dalmais, Camille, Le fil, Virgin/EMI, 563878, 2005.

Davis, Miles, Kind of Blue, Columbia/Legacy CK64935,

1959/1997.

(Original:

CL1355,.CS8163)).

Kind of Blue, Columbia Jazz Masterpieces CK40579, 1986 CD reissue. Birth of the Cool, Capitol, 0777 7 92862 2 5, 1989.

Miles Davis: the Complete Bitches Brew Sessions, Columbia, C4K 65570, 1998. Bitches Brew, Columbia, C2K 065774 2, 1999.

Kind of Blue, Blue vinyl limited edition Classic Records CS 8163 BV, 1959, re-released 2002. Kind of Blue, Dual disc Columbia/Sony CN 90887, 2005. Kind of Blue, 50th Anniversary Edition, Columbia/Legacy 88697 33552 2, 2008.

Doors, The, ‘Break On Through (To the Other Side)’ from the album The Doors, Elektra, EKL 4007 1967. Remix in MP3 format available on iTunes Store, 2004.

Dylan, Bob, The Times They Are a-Changin’, Columbia, CS 32021 1964. ‘All Along the Watchtower’, Columbia, 1967. On the John Wesley Harding album, Columbia, CBS 5 63252, 1968

Eddy, Duane. ‘Rebel Rouser’, Jamie 1104, 1958. Eminem, The Slim Shady LP, Interscope, 90287, 1999. Enigma, MCMXC A.D., Virgin BOOOOO5RST, 1991. Cross of Changes, Virgin BO00002U6E, 1994. Fanshaw, David, African Sanctus, Philips, 6558 001, 1975. Fisher, Toni, “The Big Hurt’, Signet 275, 1959. Freeman, Bobby, ‘Do You Want To Dance? from the album Do You Want to Dance?®, Josie, 45-835, 1958.

Gabriel, Peter, Peter Gabriel-3, aka Melt, Charisma, 9124 054 1980. ‘The Intruder’, Peter Gabriel, Geffen 2035-2, 1980. Up, Geffen, 0694933882, 2002.

Gaye, Marvin, ‘What’s Going On?’, Tamla, TS 310, 1971. Goldie, Saturnzreturn, 2CD FFRR, 8289902, 1999.

Grandmaster Flash, ‘The Message’, Sugar Hill, SHL 117, 1982. Grech, Martin, Open Heart Zoo, Island, CD CID8119, 2002. Gregorian, Masters of Chant, Edel 2002 B00004YZ1G, 1999. Haggard, Merle, Big City, Epic 65947, 1981.

Select discography

Harrison, Donald, Kind of New, Candid, CCD 79768, 2002. Hendrix, Jimi, “All Along the Watchtower’, from the album, Electric Ladyland, Reprise, 2RS 6307, 1968. ‘1983 ... (A Merman I Should Turn to Be), Electric Ladyland, Reprise, 2RS 6307,

1968.

Holly, Buddy, “Peggy Sue’, Coral 61885, 1957. Il Divo, Ancora, Sony BMG BOOOBHEIUK, 2005.

Jay-Z, The Black Album, Roc-A-Fella B00011FXGO, 2003. Jingxi jingdian changgiang dianzangji 4-08 Zhou Xinfang, Taipei, Huang Lung Development Culture Corporation COCD408, 1997 (CD).

Jones, Spike, Spiked: the Music of Spike Jones, Catalyst (BMG) 09026-61982-2, 1994.

King Crimson, In the Court of the Crimson King, Polydor, 2310 516, 1969. Kraftwerk, Trans Europe Express, Capitol/EMI, CL 15917, 1977. Kuo, Ying-Nan, aka Difang, Circle of Life, Rock Records, Japan RCCA 2013, 1998. Leaving Home: An Introduction to 20th-Century Music. City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra/Simon Rattle. First release: EMI: 5 66136-2, 5 66137-2 (CD: 2 CDs). Madonna, Ray of Light, Warner Brothers, 9362468472, 1998. Mahler, Gustav, Symphony No. 2 (Resurrection). Arleen Augér, Janet Baker, City of Birmingham Symphony Chorus and Orchestra/Simon Rattle (recorded Watford Town Hall, April 1991, May 1991, June 1991). First release: EMI:

EX 270598-3 (LP: 2 LPs), EX 270598-5 (tape cassette: 2 tape cassettes), CDS 7 47962-8 (CD: 2 CDs).

Symphony (recorded

No. 7. City of Birmingham The

Maltings,

Snape, June,

Symphony

Orchestra/Simon

1991). First release:

EMI:

Rattle CDC

7

54344-2 (CD).

Symphony No. 10. Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra/Simon Rattle (recorded Guildhall, Southampton, June 1980). First release: EMI: SLS 5206 (LP), TCSLS 5206 (tape cassette).

McCrae, George, ‘Rock your Baby’, RCA Victor, KPBO-1004, 1974. Available on Disco mania, Crimson, CRIMCD839, 1997. Mediaeval Baebes, The, Salva Nos, Nettwerk 30141, 1998. Undrentide, Nettwerk 30156, 2000. The Rose, Nettwerk 30256, 2002. M.LA., Arular, XL Recordings B00021V0JQ, 2005. Morissette, Alanis, Jagged Little Pill, Maverick/Reprise, 45901, 1995.

Moulton, Tom et al. Salsoul Presents: The Definitive 12" Masters, vol. 1. Salsoul, UK. Reissue, SALSACD 006, 2003.

Murad, Jerry and the Harmonicats. ‘Peg O’ My Heart’, Vitacoustic 1, 1947. Original Dixieland Jazz Band, The Creators of Jazz, Avid Records, AMSC 702, 2001. Page, Patti, ‘Confess’, Mercury 5129, 1948. ‘The Tennessee Waltz’, Mercury 5534, 1950.

355

356

Select discography

Paul, Les and Mary Ford, ‘How High the Moon’, Capitol 1451, 1950. ‘Falling in Love with Love’, Love Songs by Les Paul and Mary Ford, Ranwood 8260-2, 1997. First UK release on Les and Mary, Capitol LC 6701, 1955. Petty, Tom, ‘Don’t Come Around Here No More’, Southern Accents, MCA 52496, 1985. Pink Floyd, ‘See Emily Play’, Columbia, DB 8214, 1967. Prentice, Will, Before the Revolution, The British Library, Topic Records, TSCD 921, 2002.

Presley, Elvis, ‘Blue Moon of Kentucky’, Sun 209, 1954. ‘Blue Moon’, Elvis Presley, RCA LPM 1254, 1956. Pretty Things, The, ‘Rosalyn’, Fontana, TF 469, 1964. Queen, ‘Now I’m Here’, Sheer Heart Attack, Elektra 1026, 1974.

Rachmaninov, Sergei, Three Symphonic Dances; Vocalise. City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra/Simon Rattle (Dances recorded at The Maltings, Snape, October 1982; Vocalise recorded at Birmingham University Great Hall, February 1983). First release: EMI: ASD 1436111 (LP), TC-ASD 1436114 (tape cassette).

Ramones, The, ‘Do You Wanna Dance?’, from the album Rocket to Russia, Sire, SR 6042, 1977.

Ray, Johnnie, “The Little White Cloud that Cried’, Okeh 6840, 1951. A Real World Recorded, a Tribute Real World Production in association with BBCTV. 1992, 55 minutes. Rolling Stones, The, Exile on Main St, Decca, COC69100, 1972. Ronettes, The, ‘Be My Baby’, Philles 116, 1963. Sex Pistols, The, Never Mind the Bollocks, Here’s the Sex Pistols, Virgin, CDVX2086,

WOW.

“God Save the Queen’, in the album, Never Mind the Bollocks: Here’s the Sex

Pistols, Warner Brothers, 1977. Re-released 1990. Shepard, Vonda, Songs from Ally McBeal, 550 Music/Sony 69365, 1998. Heart and Soul: New Songs from Ally McBeal Featuring Vonda Shepard, Sony GSIISRLIIS;

Slits, The, The Peel Sessions, Strange Fruit, 1978. Re-released SFPS 021, 1987. Cut, Island, IMCD275/5481862,

1979.

Small Faces, ‘Itchycoo Park’, Immediate 501, 1967. Song Links: a Celebration of English Traditional Songs and their Australian Variants, Fellside Recordings FECD 176D, 2003 (2 CDs).

Springsteen, Bruce, We Shall Overcome: the Seeger Sessions, Columbia 83439, 2006. Stevens, Cat, The Very Best of Cat Stevens, A&M Records, 541387, 2000. Stewart, Rod, ‘Do Ya Think P'm Sexy?’, in the album Blondes Have More Fun, Warner Brothers, BSK 3261, 1978. A Night on the Town, Warner Bros/Wea, 47730, 2000. Strauss, Richard, Tod und Verklérung, Op. 24, Berliner Philharmoniker/Herbert von Karajan, Deutsche Grammophon, 4748892 1983. Sugarhill Gang, The, ‘Rapper’s Delight’, Sugarhill, 1979. Re-released Castle Music, CMRCD

574, 2002.

Select discography

Szymanowski, Karol, King Roger; Symphony No. 4, Op. 60 (Sinfonia concertante). Thomas Hampson, Ryszard Minkiewicz, Elzbieta Szmytka, Philip Langridge, Jadwiga Rappé, Robert Gierlach, Lefi Ove Andsnes, City of Birmingham Symphony Chorus, Youth Chorus and Orchestra/Simon Rattle (recorded Symphony Hall, Birmingham, October 1996 and July 1998). First release: EMI, CDS 5 56823-2 (CD: 2 CDs). Taylor, James, Hourglass, Columbia, COL 487748 2, 1997. Teddy Bears, The, “To Know Him Is to Love Him’, Doré 503, 1958. The Traditional Music of Herat, AUVIDIS/UNESCO D 8266, 1996. Transeau, Brian (BT) see BT.

Tull, Jethro, Songs from the Wood, Chrysalis, CHR 1132, 1977. Vanilla Ice, ‘Ice Ice Baby’, Capitol (vinyl single) BOO0OO8ETDV, 1990. Various artists. Melrose Place: the Music, Warner Brothers 24577, 1994. My Best Friend’s Wedding, Sony 68166, 1997. Melrose Place Jazz: Upstairs at MP, Windham Hill 11275, 1998.

Anywhere but Here, Atlantic 83234, 1999. Never Been Kissed, Capitol 98505, 1999. , Ally McBeal: For Once in My Life Featuring Vonda Shepard, Sony 85195, 2001. Varttina, Oi Dai, Oy Sonet Suomi BOOO04YL6U, 1991.

Kokko, Nonesuch 7559-7949-2, 1997. Vidler, Mark, ‘Ray of Gob’, MP3 format, 2003. See (last accessed 11 November 2006).

‘Ray of Gob’, 20 January 2006. See www.gohomeproductions.co.uk/audio/ ghp_ray_of_gob.mp3. Wagner, Richard, Das Rheingold, Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra/Georg Solti (recorded Sofiensaal, Vienna, 24-26, 29, 30 September, 1--3 and 6-8, October

1958). First release: Decca mono

LXT 5495-7, Decca stereo SXL

2101-3 (LP: 3 LPs). Die Walkiire, Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra/Georg Solti (recorded Sofiensaal, Vienna, 29, 31 October, 2-5 and 12-19 November 1965). First release: Decca mono MET 312-6, Decca stereo SET 312-6 (LP: 5 LPs).

Siegfried, Vienna

Philharmonic

Orchestra/Georg

Solti (recorded

Sofiensaal,

1962). First release: Decca

Vienna, 6-17 May and 21 October-5 November mono MET 242-6, Decca stereo SET 242-6 (LP: 5 LPs).

Gétterddémmerung, Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra/Georg Solti (recorded Sofiensaal, Vienna, 20 May-6 June, 26-31 October, 2-5 and 17-24 November 1964). First release: Decca mono MET 292-76, Decca stereo SET

292-7 (LP: 5 LPs). Who, The, ‘I Can’t Explain’, Brunswick, 05926, 1965. Wonder, Stevie, Innervisions, Motown 8011, 1976.

Young, Paul, ‘Everytime You Go Away’, The Secret of Association, Columbia BFC 39957, 1985.

357

Select webography

General sites

Amazon Retail Site, www.amazon.co.uk Grove Music Online, ed. Laura Macy, www.grovemusic.com Naxos Records, www.naxos.com Wikipedia, www.en.wikipedia.org

Sites for societies, projects and record labels British Phonograph Industry, www.bpi.co.uk (last accessed 26 June 2009).

Composers Desktop Project, www.composersdesktop.com (last accessed 26 June 2009).

Recording Industry Association of America, www.riaa.com (last accessed 26 June 2009).

Research Centre for the History and Analysis of Recorded Music (CHARM), www. charm.rhul.ac.uk/index.html (last accessed 26 June 2009).

Sites for or about artists, groups and record labels Bowie, David, reviews of Pin Ups, www.superseventies.com/bowie3.html

(last

accessed 23 June 2009). Brathanki, www.brathanki.art.pl (last accessed 15 June 2009).

Coltrane, John, email list, information at http://adale.org/Jazz.html (last accessed 28 June 2009)

Fat Wreck Chords, www.fatwreck.com (last accessed 26 June 2009). Gabriel, Peter, www.petergabriel.com/moonclub (last accessed 9 June 2009).

Moulton, Tom, “The Tom Moulton Tribute Page’, www.disco-disco.com/tributes/ tom.shtml (last accessed 14 June 2009).

Schwitters, Kurt, ‘Merz ist Kunst und Nichtkunst’, www.kurt-schwitters.org/ m,1000021,1.html (last accessed 26 June 2009).

Varttina, www.varttina.com (last accessed 15 June 2009).

Wild, David, homepage, http://home.att.net/~dawild 2009).

(last accessed 26 June

Select webography

Articles

Baumann, Max Peter, ‘Yodel’, in Grove Music Online. Bruno, Franklin, ‘Copycats: the Cover Album Makes a Come-back’, www.slate.com/ id/2121216, posted 23 June 2005 (last accessed 14 June 2009).

Campbell, Robert L., Robert Pruter and Tom Kelly, ‘The Vitacoustic Label’, http:// hubcap.clemson.edu/~campber/vitacoustic.html (last accessed 10 June 2009). Dailly, Patrick, “9. Alanis Morissette: “You Oughta Know’, on Jagged Little Pill: Maverick 9362 45901 ‘2’, www. patrickdailly.f9.co.uk/ALANIS.htm (last accessed 9 June 2009).

DJ, Danger Mouse,

The Grey Album, www.illegal-art.org/audio/grey.html,

29

November 2004 (last accessed 14 June 2009).

Gibson, William, “God’s Little Toys: Confessions of a Cut & Paste Artist’, Wired 13/07 (July 2005), pp. 118-19, www.wired.com/wired/archive/13.07/gibson. html (last accessed 14 June 2009).

Mouton, Todd, ‘Back Talk with Cosimo Matassa’, www.offbeat.com/artman/ publish/article_579.shtml#top (last accessed 10 June 2009). Murray, Noel, ‘Inventory: Six Unlikely Covers Albums By Overqualified HardRockers’, www.avclub.com/content/node/49640 (last accessed 14 June 2009).

Nelson, Steffie, “Tori Amos: Personality Crisis’, 21 October 2001, http://www.mtv. com/bands/a/amos_tori/News_Feature100601/index.jhtml (last accessed 9 June 2009).

Owen, David, ‘The Soundtrack of Your Life: Muzak in the Realm of Retail Theatre’, in The New Yorker, 10 April 2006, www.newyorker.com/fact/content/articles/ 060410fa_fact (last accessed 23 June 2009).

Potter, John, ‘Singing: 7. Popular Singing’, in Grove Music Online. Sterling, Bruce, ‘A Century of Science Fiction’, Time, 29 March 1999, www.time. com/time/time100/scientist/other/science.html (last accessed 30 July 2009).

Sutherland, Allan, ‘John Coltrane Sessionography, 1960-1964’, www.kyushuns.ac. jp/~allan/Documents/JC_S.HTMEL (last accessed 26 June 2009).

Tagg, Philip, ‘Introductory notes to the Semiotics of Music’, www.tagg.org/xpdfs/ semiotug.pdf (last accessed 8 June 2009). Young, Rob, ‘Presents for Future Use’, http://music.hyperreal.org/artists/brian_eno/ interviews/wire96b.html (last accessed 14 June 2009).

309

Index

Abbey Road Studios 93 acculturation see world music acousmatics 111, 274-5, 276-7; see also Schaeffer, Pierre Acoustical Society of America (ASA) 90

acoustics 289; see also performance space ‘A Day in the Life’ (John Lennon) 255, 264

Adderley, Cannonball 97 “Adia’ (Sarah McLachlan) 72 Adorno, Theodor W. 3, 28, 44, 47, 78, 81-2, 169

advertising 6, 47, 65n.1, 72, 112, 120, 255-6 AEG/Telefunken 92; see also technology aesthetics, 37, 45, 100, 289, 307; see also

recording and aesthetics; recording as illusion of jazz 148-9, 153, 157-60

of popular music 307-8 of rock and roll 310, 319 Afghan music 115-17 African music 99, 118, 199

African Music (journal) 114 African Music Society 114 African Sanctus (David Fanshaw) 99 Afrikaa Bambaataa 299

Akai $1000, 55, 60; see also technology: sampling devices Aldeburgh Festival 135 Algerian music 199 Alias, Don 98

‘All Along the Watchtower’ 291; see also Dylan, Bob; Hendrix, Jimi

“All Blues’ (Miles Davis) 97, 177 Allen, Graham 159 Ally McBeal (TV series) 72, 73, 76

Alpert, Herb 262 ambience 2, 90, 92-3, 260, 261, 293, 295, 313, 314-16; see also reverberation Ami (Taiwanese tribe) 59 Amos, Tori 7, 71, 230, 231-7, 239 Ampex 300 series 92, 103n.13; see also

recording process; technology

analysis 24, 26-27, 278, 286, 288 of performance, 7,9, 149-58, 168-9, 221, 228 of popular song 230-45, 257-63, 308-9; sound-box model 258-9, 261 social 68, 69-71 of texture 258, 309 of timbre 225-45, 256, 257-9 of vibrato 26 Ancora (II Divo) 54 Ano! (Brathanki) 54 Anonymous 4 (vocal ensemble) 74

anthropology 211-12, 217

application of, 211-12 Anywhere But Here (film) 71

Apple Computer Inc. see computer; technology Apple, Fiona 71 Arctic Monkeys, The 52 Arhoolie record label 112 Armstrong, Louis 61 Arom, Simha 98 Arona (Senegalese drummer) 118

Arrieu, Claude 273 Asch, Moses 112-13 Atlantic Studios 93, 94 Attali, Jacques 44, 65

audience feedback 6, 40-1, 45, 82, 158, 180-1, 265

“Au port’ (Camille Dalmais) 227

‘aura’ see Benjamin, Walter authenticity 9, 37-48, 83, 111, 114, 122, 125, 136, 140, 153, 160, 168, 169, 176-7, 192,

206-7, 208, 255-6, 312; see also recording: fidelity; performance authority 148, 209; see also copyright authorship 49n.13, 55-61, 63-64, 120, 121, 148, 171, 175, 176, 252-3, 263-4, 291-304; see

also authenticity; recording: fidelity; _ performance automatic double tracking (ADT) 317-18, 320;

see also recording process Auvidis record label 112, 113 Avalanches, 57 avant-garde 54, 64, 177, 309

Index

BaAka pygmies (Central African Republic) 211

Blumlein, Alan 91, 93, 96 BMG record label 59

Badal, James 125, 127, 129, 135, 138,

Bohlman, Philip 100 Bongiovi, Tony, 294-5, 305; see also record producers

206, 208

Baily, John, recording Afghan music 115-17 Baker, Roy Thomas 317; see also record producers Bambaataa, Afrikaa, 299; see also DJ

361

Booker T. and the M.G.’s 313 Botrill, Dave 118, 119; see also recording

Barenreiter UNESCO series 113 Barthes, Roland 159

engineers Boulanger, Nadia 273 Boulez, Pierre 206-7, 208; see also performance

Bartok, Béla 16, 131

Bourdieu, Pierre 80

Basement Jaxx 56

Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra 137 Bovell, Dennis 257; see also record producers

bastard pop 63 Bateson, Gregory 241 Baudrillard, Jean 44-6, 65

Bayle, Francois 287 Bayreuth 40, 136 BBC Radio One 118 BBC Radio Three 54, 122 Beach Boys, The 292, 293-5 Beadle, Jeremy 132

Beatles, The 63, 105n.39, 256, 260, 264, 299, 301, 315, 318, 319-20

bebop 18, 245 Beecham, Sir Thomas 134 Beethoven, Ludwig van 20, 40, 43, 68, 126, 128, 129, 130, 140, 146

Bowen, José A. 68, 159

Bowie, David 56, 295 Bowman, Rob 227-8 Brackett, David 227-8

Brady, Erika 108-9 Brathanki 53-4 ‘Break on Through (To the Other Side)’

*

(The Doors) 299-301

Brendel, Alfred 129; see also performance Brenston, Jackie, and the Delta Kings 316

British Phonograph Industry (BPI) 58 Britten, Benjamin 134

Aspen address 39 Broadbank, Robin 120

beiguan music 188-91, 192-5

Brooks, Harvey 98

Beijing opera 196-8

Brown, James 56

Bell Labs 91 ‘Be My Baby (The Ronettes) 315 Bendall, Haydn 101 Ben Folds Five 261-3 Benjamin, Walter 28, 38, 146 ‘aura’ 38, 42, 43, 44-6, 47, 48, 61

Brown, Lee B. 207, 258

Bennett, Tony 310 Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra 125

Berlin Phonogrammarchiv 109 Berliner, Emile 109 Bernstein, Leonard 132 Billboard (journal) 108, 113, 296 bimusicality see Hood, Mantle Birmingham Contemporary Music Group 132;

see also City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra Birth ofthe Cool (Miles Davis) 170, 173 Bitches Brew (Miles Davis) 98 Black Album, The (Jay-Z) 63, 301 Blacking, John 5, 107, 115-16

blank-tape levy 57

‘Blue Moon of Kentucky’ (Elvis Presley) 317 Blue Note record label 329 blues 170, 172, 176, 177, 263

Bruner, Edward 211 Bruno, Franklin 295-6 Bryan, Alfred 308 Bull, Michael 62 Burgess, Richard 95 Burton, Gary 174 Butterfield, Matthew 147, 158, 168, 170, 1795221

Cage, John 64 Cale, John 74, 75

Cantelli, Guido 127; see also performance Capitol Studios 94 Carewe, John 129

Cars, The 298 Casella, Teresa 74 cassette recorder 29, 116; see also technology Caton, Margaret 25 Caw, Tom 17 Celibidache, Sergiu 127; see also performance Celtic style 76 Central African Republic 98, 211 Chailly, Ricardo 128; see also performance

362

Index

Chambers, Paul 97 Chanan, Michael 3, 42-3, 44, 45, 68 ‘Chasin’ the Trane’ (John Coltrane) 149-58, 160 ‘Chasin’ Another Trane’ (John Coltrane) 152

Cheap Trick (pop artist) 298; see also remix Chester, Andrew 263, 292 Chic 292 Chicago house music 299 Chilton, John 171

Chinese music 187, 188-91, 192-5 Chinese opera 196-8 Chion, Michel 286, 287

Church, Michael 122 Churchyard, Steve 100; see also record producers Circle of Life (Ying-Nan Kuo) 59

City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra (CBSO) 5, 127, 132-40

Ciyun Ensemble 189 Clarke, Arthur C. 304 Clarke, Eric F. 3, 8, 147, 207, 212 Clash, The 298

computer, 53, 55, 301, 325, 326, 327, 328, 331;

see also mash-up; remix; technology Apple Computer Inc., 55-8, 61 games 95, 96, 332 hardware 55, 60, 331 Microsoft 70 as real-time musical instrument 55, 288 software 55, 301, 326, 328

concept album 329 conductors 4, 5, 6, 44, 125-41, 169, 206-7 ‘Confess’ (Patti Page) 310 consumer 15-16, 28-30, 61-3, 68-83, 100-2, 178-82, 325-7, 329-31; see also

advertising; marketing; recording: listening to contemporary music 3, 9, 64, 207, 213-20, 271-89 Cook, Nicholas 29, 64, 68, 100, 159-60, 207, 210, 212

Cooper, Imogen 125 Copper family 200-1 copyright 52, 55, 56, 57-61, 63-4, 65, 116-17,

Classic CD (magazine) 132

121, 152-3, 171, 175, 176, 208, 288,

Classic FM 54

296, 302

classical music 2-6, 19-31, 37-48, 53, 54, 60-1, 64-5, 68-83, 95, 99, 148, 191, 192, 206-21, 265, 293, 298,'311, 329

Copyright and Related Rights Regulations 58 Corea, Chick 98 country music 72, 312

crossover with popular music 54, 74-5 ‘Claudy Banks’ 200-1 close mic ing 92-3, 96, 100-1; see also microphone; recording process; technology club dance music 121 Cobb, Jimmy 97, 176

cover versions 7, 64, 192, 291-6, 303

Cocteau Twins 315

Cretu, Michael 59 Cross of Changes (Enigma) 59 Crow, Sheryl 101 Crystals, The 315

Coleman, Michael 110 Coleman, Ornette 177 Coltrane, John 4, 97, 149-58, 159, 177 and group 149, 153, 158 influence of recording on performance 153-6

Columbia 91, 98, 176, 310, 313, 315

definition of 292, 295 Cowan, Rob 125 Cox, Christoph 64 creative practice 7-8, 19, 288, 308, 321, 326, 327,

330, 331; see also experimentation; remix; sampling

“Cuban Love Song, The’ (Lawrence Tibbett) 91

Culshaw, John 39, 47; see also record producers Curly M. C. 59

Columbia HB1A, 90; see also microphone; recording process; technology Colvin, Shawn 71

Dahl, Steve 302

compact disc (CD), 15, 38, 56, 58, 113, 117, 133,

‘Dali’ (Martin Grech) 257, 265

138, 148, 150, 173, 178, 201, 278, 329; see

Dailly, Patrick 239-41 Dalmais, Camille 225, 227, 244

also technology comparative musicology see ethnomusicology

Danger Mouse 63, 65, 301; see also DJ; Grey Album, The

Composers Desktop Project 55, 328

Danielou, Alain 113

composition 7, 8-9, 148, 271, 315, 319-21; see also creative practice; electroacoustic

‘Darkness’ (Peter Gabriel) 241-3

composition

Davis, Miles 4, 97-8, 149, 153, 170, 173-4, 175, 210

Index

Dawson’s Creek (TV series) 72

Day, Ron and Jenny 200-2 death metal 244 Decca Studios 94, 96, 127 Deep Forest 121 Deep Purple 250n.53 de Forest audion vacuum tube 90; see also recording process; technology

363

electroacoustic composition 8, 37, 271, 286,

287-8, 328; see also Schaeffer, Pierre EMI 93, 132-3, 136-8, 139 Eminem 231-3 emo 53

English folk music 187, 200-2; see also folk music Enigma 59-60, 65

DeJohnette, Jack 98

Eno, Brian 64, 299; see also record producers

Der Ring des Nibélungen (Wagner) 136

equalisation (EQ) 293, 310, 318

DeVeaux, Scott 17

‘Eroica’ Symphony 130 ethnography of recording 3, 21, 47, 59, 120,

Devo 298; see also remix Dewey, John 227

Die Presse (newspaper) 140 DiFranco, Ani 71

210-12

ethnomusicology 2, 3, 5, 6-7, 16, 23-4, 28-9, 98, 113, 119, 120, 187-203, 210, 221; see also

Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) 58 Diplo 64; see also DJ; record producers Discman 308; see also technology

world music: definition of dependence on recording 16, 115, 203, 207 ethical issues 16, 119-22, 203 etic/emic distinction 29, 212 field techniques 108-10, 114-16, 188, 190-6,

disco 254, 297, 298, 302

Disney, Walt 96 DJ 56, 63, 64, 331; see also technology as producer/artist 64, 297-302 Dolphy, Eric 149 Domino Records 52 ‘Don’t Change your Plans for Me’ (Ben Folds Five) 261-3

Doors, The 299-301

*

198-203, 218

‘fieldback’ 203 ‘insider/outsider’ debate 211-12 intervention in recordings 201-2

musical effects of recording 207 narrative ethnology 211 playback as research tool 187, 192-6, 198-202, 218

doo-wop 245 Double Exposure 301

recordings as aid to learning performance

Dowd, Tom 94, 95; see also record producers ‘Do Ya Think I’m Sexy?’ (Rod Stewart) 298

recordings as tools for historical research

‘Do You Want To Dance?’ (Bobby Freeman)

recordings of music-related talk 187, 188-91,

292-5

Duchamp, Marcel 296 Duff, Hilary 225 dutar 115-16

187-8, 192-6, 202 105n.34, 188, 196-8, 202

200-2, 218-19

role of transcriptions 16, 24, 109, 116, 197 video recording 187, 191, 202

East, Andy 101; see also record producers

and world music, tensions between 119-22 Evans, Bill 97, 175, 177 Everett, Walter 258 Everist, Mark 64

East European

experimentation 275-6, 283, 297, 308, 320; see

Dylan, Bob 61, 252-4, 255, 265, 291

folk music 53, 54 popular music 53 echo 310, 316-18, 320, 321, 324n.33; see also reverberation; ‘slapback’ echo chamber 313, 315; see also reverberant chamber Eddy, Duane 314 Edison, Thomas 108, 311 Eisenberg, Evan 147, 169, 178, 179, 181

‘Eleanor Rigby’ (The Beatles) 320 Electric Ladyland (Jimi Hendrix) 321

also creative practice; Schaeffer, Pierre; sound manipulation Fairlight computer system 55; see also technology: sampling devices ‘Falling in Love with Love’ (Mary Ford) 317

falsetto 227-8, 229, 237-41, 249n.49 Fanshaw, David 99 Fantasia 96 Fantasound 104n.26

Farfisa organ 294 Farrell, Gerry 22, 110

364

Index

Fatboy Slim 56

Genette, Gérard 159

Featherstone, Mike 80 Feld, Steven 121, 217 Felicity (TV series) 72

Gere, Richard 180

Gennari, John 146-7, 157-8 Gibson, William 325-6, 327, 329, 330

field research see ethnomusicology Filipetti, Frank 100

Gillespie, Dizzy 18 Giulini, Carlo Maria 129 globalisation 52, 53 ‘glocalisation’ 52, 53 Godlovitch, Stan 41, 42

film 2, 47, 54, 71, 80, 93, 94, 96, 117, 180

“God Save the Queen’ (The Sex Pistols) 302

Fink, Robert 81

Gold, Dave 315; see also recording engineers Goldie 254 Gold Star Studios, Los Angeles 293, 312, 314-15 gongche notation system 192-4

female singer-songwriters 71-3, 76-7, 78-9 Ferguson, Bruce 237 Fewkes, Walter J. 108

‘

Finnissy, Michael 208, 209, 213-20 ‘First Cut is the Deepest’ (Cat Stevens) 94, 101

First, David 299; see also remix Fischer, Fred 308 Fisher, Toni 318

‘Good Vibrations’ (The Beach Boys) 294

Flockhart, Calista 72

Gould, Glenn 5; see also performance Gracyk, Theodore 146, 147, 148-9, 258 Grainger, Percy 16 gramophone 4

Flonzaley Quartet 23

Gramophone, The (magazine) 126, 128

folk music 53, 73, 112, 159, 200-2

Gramophone Company, The 109-10, 112 Grandmaster Flash 254-5

‘Flamenco Sketches’ (Miles Davis) 97, 174

dependence on recording 16 Folkways Records 112-13, 117 ‘forced hybridisation’ 121 Ford, Mary 92, 100, 309, 317; see also Paul, Les Formby, George 91 Foster, Hal 68-70 * Foucault, Michel 30 Fox, Aaron A. 217

Franz Ferdinand 52 ‘Freddie’ (Miles Davis) 98

Freeman, Bobby 292-5 Frémaux, Louis 137 Frith, Simon 22, 225, 226, 228 ‘Fun, Fun, Fun’ (The Beach Boys) 294 funk 320

Grech, Martin 257, 264, 265 Green, Lucy 244 Green Day 53 “Green Onions’ (T. Booker and the M.G.’s) 313 Gregorian 60

Gregorian chant 59-60 Gregorian, Frank see Peterson, Frank Grey Album, The (Danger Mouse) 63, 301; see also DJ

Griffiths, Paul 128 Gronow, Pekka 109, 110 Groupe de recherches musicales (GRM) 287; see

also Schaeffer, Pierre Guthrie, Robin 315

Furtwangler, Wilhelm 68, 125, 127, 128, 129 Gabbard, Krin 180 Gabriel, Peter 7, 117-19, 230, 241, 260-1, 315 Gadamer, Hans-Georg 45 Gaisberg, Fred 47, 110; see also record producers Gallo record label 114 garage 297, 304

GarageBand program 55, 328; see also computer: software Garrison, Jimmy 156

Gauguin, Paul 89 Gaye, Marvin 94

Geertz, Clifford 211 Gelder, Rudy van 149; see also recording engineers

Hadanduan music 99 Haitink, Bernard 129; see also performance

Hall, Daryl 298; see also remix Hall, Stuart 32 Hamm, Charles 207, 210 Hammond organ 315 Hancock, Herbie 98, 174 Haraway, Donna 62 Harding, Phil 100 Harmonicats, The 308, 310, 313 Harrison, Bryn 212, 213 Harrison, Donald 177 Harrison, Henry C. 91 Harrison, Jonty 288

Hartley, L. P. 23 Harvey, P.J. 239

Index

365

Haydn, Joseph 132 Hazelwood, Lee 314; see also record producers Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich 45

‘Intruder, The’ (Peter Gabriel) 260-1, 264, 315

‘Hello, Goodbye’ (The Beatles) 315

iPod 61-3, 265, 325; see also technology

‘Helter Skelter’ (The Beatles) 301

Iranian music 25 Irish music 110

Hendrix, Jimi 105n.39, 291, 305n.13, 319, 320-1

promotion of music 52, 55 websites 54, 63-4

‘Itchycoo Park (The Small Faces) 320

Hentoff, Nat 150 Herat (Afghanistan) 115-17 ‘He’s a Rebel’ (THe Crystals) 315

Hess, Myra 27; see also performance high fidelity 311 High Fidelity (magazine) 323n.15 Hill, Peter 4; see also performance hip-hop 56, 82, 245, 299 HMV 41, 112

Jagged Little Pill (Alanis Morissette) 237

Jairazbhoy, Nazir 27 T&M Studio, New Orleans 313 Janaéek, Leos 131

Jay-Z 63, 301; see also rap Jay-Z Construction set 301

jazz 2, 3, 4-5, 7, 9, 25, 26, 71, 146-60, 167-83

aesthetics of 148-9, 153, 157-60

Holland, Dave 98

blues 150, 170, 172, 176, 177

Holly, Buddy 100, 313-14 Holman, Herbert 91 ‘Honky Tonk Woman’ (The Rolling Stones) 299 Hood, Mantle 23 bimusicality 23, 34n.27

‘cool’ aesthetic 173, 181 dependence on recordings 17, 147, 167-70,

Hornbostel, Erich von 109, 112 “How High the Moon’ (Les Paul and Mary Ford) 92, 309

Hurst, Mike 94; see also record producers ‘T Bet You Look Good on the Dancefloor (The

Arctic Monkeys) 52 ‘I Can’t Explain’ (The Who) 295

‘Ice, Ice Baby’ (Vanilla Ice) 56; see also rap IDM (intelligent dance music) 299

Il Divo 54 Tl Be There for You’ (Goldie) 254

Tm only Sleeping’ (The Beatles) 260, 320 ‘Impressions’ (John Coltrane) 152 improvisation 18, 19-20, 22, 146-7, 149, 150-8,

160, 167, 172, 173, 176, 178, 194, 208, 254,

183, 207 a

and ‘hypertextuality’ 159 improvisation 18, 19-20, 146-7, 149, 150-8, 160, 167, 172, 173, 176, 178, 194, 208

influence of recording on 18, 153-7, 167-70, UT LSSS207,

and ‘intertextuality’ 159 Kind ofBlue, as mainstream iconic work 178-82 live recordings of 147, 149-58, 160 as ‘multitextual’ 158-60 musicology 167-70, 173-4, 177, 221 Original Dixieland Jazz Band, The (ODJB) 4, 170-3, 176-82

and potential for seduction 179-80 problems of authorship 171, 175, 176 racial aspects 171, 173, 174-5 record collecting 178-9, 181 recordings and nostalgia 178-9 tensions between live performance and recording 146-9, 160, 167-70, 182-3

256; see also jazz Ina Silent Way (Miles Davis) 98 Indian music 22, 110

Je est une autre’ (Tori Amos) 231-7 Jewish music, North American 203

‘Instant Hit’ (The Slits) 257

Jolly, James 128, 132

Institut du Monde Arabe record label 122 Institute for Comparative Music Studies and Documentation, Berlin 113 intellectual property 52; see also copyright International Congress of Folklore 17 International Library of African Music 114

Jones, Elvin 149, 156

International Music Council 113

Kahn, Ashley 173-4, 175, 176, 177, 179

internet 52, 57, 208; see also technology: digital increase in new genres and audiences 53-4 preservation of cultural differences 53 production of music 55

Kapelle Antiqua 59

Jones, Quincy 309; see also record producers Jordan, Fred 200-1

Jost, Ekkehard 158 Julien, Jacques 244

Karajan, Herbert von 125, 126, 127; see also

performance Kassabian, Anahid 30, 81

366

Index

Katz, Mark 68, 96

KaZaa 58; see also peer-to-peer (P2P) networks Keener, Andrew 47, 126, 127; see also record

producers Keithley, Elizabeth 231 Kenyon, Nicholas 127, 128, 129, 131, 138, 139 Kerman, Joseph 30 ‘ Kihn, Greg 298; see also remix Kind of Blue (Miles Davis) 97-8, 170, 173-4, 175-83

London Philharmonic Orchestra 134 Longhurst, Brian 299 long-playing and 78-rpm records 15, 93, 110-14, 152, 178, 180, 256-7, 277, 329; see

also technology sleeve imagery 29, 43, 112, 113, 173, 186n.62, 198, 329

Lord of the Rings, The (musical version) 53 Lorie (Laure Pester) 225 Lortat-Jacob, Bernard 202

King Crimson 6, 256

Lutostawski, Witold 208, 209 Lydon, John 253-4; see also Sex Pistols, The Lyrichord record label 113

King Oliver’s Jazz Band 169 King Roger (Szymanowski) 132

Macero, Teo 98

as mainstream iconic work 178, 179-83 Kind of New (Donald Harrison) 177

Kingsbury, Henry 192 Kisliuk, Michelle 211, 212, 220, 223n.20

Klemperer, Otto 129 Kodaly, Zoltan 16

Kofsky, Frank 154 Kokko (Varttina) 53 Kontakte (Stockhausen) 288 Korsyn, Kevin 159 Kraftwerk 299 Kreutzer Quartet, 209, 213-20

Kuo, Hsiu-Chu 59

Kupferberg, Herbert 133 Kurzweil, Ray 62

Madonna 302 Mageean, Andrea 80 Magical Mystery Tour 320 magnetic tape see technology Mahler, Gustav 125, 128, 129, 131, 132, 35; 139 Mambo Musik (publishers) 60 Mann, Aimee 71

Manuel, Peter 29 marketing 43, 72, 52-4, 307, 107, 138-9, 307-8, 312-13, 307, 312; see also consumer; recording industry Marley, Bob 297

Marshall stack 295, 305n.13; see also technology Lacasse, Serge, 159 Lai, Mr 194 Laico, Frank 310; see also recording engineers Ldandler 73 LaRocca, Nick 171, 172, 176 Lash, Scott 70

Martin; George 94, 95, 256, 319-20; see also record producers Marx, Karl 77, 78, 82-3 “Mary Had a Little Lamb’ (Thomas Edison) 311

“Mary, Mary’ (The Monkees) 299 mash-up 7, 292, 296, 301-3

Laver, John 226

creative aspects 288, 303-4

Leech-Wilkinson, Daniel 17, 26

cultural aspects of 302-3 technology 301-3

Le fil (Camille Dalmais) 227

Legge, Walter 42, 47; see also record producers Lennon, John 6, 255, 256, 264

Masters of Chant (Gregorian) 60

Levan, Larry 297; see also remix Levine, Larry 318; see also recording engineers

Matassa, Cosimo 312; see also recording engineers

Lieb, Marshall 314

Mathis, Johnny 310

Ligeti, Gyorgy 209, 288

Maupin, Benny 98 McBeal, Ally see Ally McBeal McCartney, Paul 229, 315, 318 McCrae, George 254

Lilith Fair 73, 74 Lillywhite, Steve 260; see also record producers listening see recorded music: listening to

Massive Attack 56

‘Little White Cloud that Cried, The’ (Johnny Ray) 313

McLachlan, Sarah 72-6

Live at the Village Vanguard (John Coltrane) 149

MCMXC A.D. (Enigma) 59

‘Livery Stable Blues’ (The Original Dixieland

Mediaeval Baebes, The 74-6, 77

Jazz Band (ODJB)) 170, 172, 176, 177; see

also jazz

McLaughlin, John 98

Meek, Joe 95, 103n.9; see also record

producers

Index

Mellers, Wilfrid 255, 258 Melody Maker (magazine) 178 melograph 24-6 Melrose Place (TV series) 71-2

Memphis Recording Service 316 Mengelberg, Willem 128; see also performance Mercury record label 310 “Message, The’ (Grandmaster Flash) 254-5

Metallica 58 f M.LA. 63; see also remix microphone 90-4, 96-7, 99-101, 115-17, 120, 242, 293; see also recording process; technology close mic’ing 92-3, 96, 100-1 influence of 307 placement 96, 97, 310 Microsoft 70, 116, 117, 293; see also computer; technology Middleton, Richard 227, 228 “Miles Runs the Voodoo Down’ (Miles Davis) 98

Miller, Mitch 310; see also record producers; ‘sonic halo’ Miranda Sex Garden 74 mixing desk 325, 326, 331 mobile phone, 57, 62, 326, 328-9 and personal identity 62-3 ringtones 54

Moles, Abraham 278 Monet, Claude 89 Monk, Thelonious 162n.33, 208, 209 Monkees, The 299 Moore, Allan 226, 227-8, 229 Moore, Michael 80 Morissette, Alanis 7, 71, 72, 237-41 Morrison, Jim 300 Motown 298

Moulton, Tom 297-8, 301; see also remix Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus 129, 263 MP3 15, 58, 325; see also technology MP3 player 57, 61-3, 265; see also technology Multicultural Media (music mail order company) 120 Munrow, David 77

Murad, Jerry and the Harmonicats 308 Murray, David 128, 134-5; see also record producers ‘musemes’ 263 Music of the Earth collection 120 Music of the Earth record label 113

Music of the World record label 113 musicians’ unions 56

367

musicology 21-4, 30-1, 64-5, 68, 100, 159-60, 206, 210, 217, 220, 228, 260, 272; see also

jazz musicology; phonomusicology recent developments in 210, 221, 244, 255, 257-9 Musik des Orients (Hornbostel, ed.) 112

musique concrete 275-89; see also recorded sound; Schaeffer, Pierre Musiques du Monde record label 113 Mussorgsky, Modest 127 Muzak 47, 79

My Best Friend’s Wedding (film) 71

“My Favorite Things’ (John Coltrane) 152 Napster 58, 301; see also computer software Native American culture 108-9 Naxos 43, 54, 80

Negus, Keith 28 Nettl, Bruno 16, 107

Nettwerk record label 74 Never Been Kissed (film) 71 New Orleans 54, 171, 172, 174-5, 176, 178

New Orleans Rhythm Kings 172 New York 6, 79, 111

niatiti lyre 118 Nimbus record label 120 1983 ... (A Merman I Should Turn to Be)’ (Jimi Hendrix) 321 “99 Problems’ (DJ Danger Mouse) 294 °97 Bonnie and Clyde’ (Tori Amos) 231-7

Nipper the Dog 41 Nonesuch record label 299 Northern Sinfonia 137 notation see score

‘Now I’m Here’ (Queen) 317 ‘Nowhere Man’ (Paul McCartney) 318 ‘Numbers’ (Kraftwerk) 299 Nyman, Michael 64

Oates, John 298; see also remix Ocasek, Ric 298; see also remix

O'Connor, Sinead 239 Ocora record label 113, 122

Ogada, Ayub 118, 119 Oi Dai (Varttina) 53-4

‘Omnes gentes plaudite’ (The Mediaeval Babes) 75 Online Piracy website 64 opera 197-8, 244, 265

oral traditions see ethnomusicology; jazz; popular music Original Dixieland Jazz Band, The (ODJB) 4, 170-3, 176-82

368

Index

overdubbing 118, 309-10, 320; see also recording process Owens, Thomas 26 Padgham, Hugh 260; see also record producers Page, Patti 310 paralinguistics 7, 225-45 classification of paralanguage 228-9, 230, 237 distinctive delivery of song 229, 253-4 examples of paralinguistic analysis 230-43

phonomusicology 17 definition of 15-16, 32 ‘folk phonomusicology 17-18 status as anti-discipline 31-2 status as a discipline 15, 18, 24, 25, 26, 28, 30, 31=2

Pian, Rulan Chao 197; see also Beijing opera Pictures from an Exhibition (Mussorgsky) 127 Pink Floyd 295 Pink Panther, The (theme) 299

Pin Ups (David Bowie) 295

Poyatos, Fernando 228-35

‘Planet Rock’ (Afrikaa Bambaataa) 299

and recording process 233, 241-3 spectrogram analysis 231-41 voice 226-45, 252

Platt, Tony 101 Plaut, Fred 92; see also recording engineers; record producers

Parker, Charlie 18, 26 Parsons, Alan 100; see also record producers Passamaquoddy 108 Paul, Les 91, 92, 100, 309-10, 316, 317; see also record producers Peel, John 257 peer-to-peer (P2P) networks 58, 301; see also

computer software “Peg o my Heart’ (Jerry Murad and the Harmonicats) 308-9, 313

‘Peggy Sue’ (Buddy Holly) 313 Peignot, Jér6me 274 performance 1, 2, 4, 6, 7, 8, 9, 19, 39-42, 78, 125, 126, 135-6, 146, 149-58, 160, 168, 187-8, 189-90, 192-6, 197, 208, 209, 212, 219, 221,

264, 307; see also Rattle, Sir Simon in relation to recording 1, 4, 5, 6, 21-2, 38-48, 125-41, 146-60, 167-70, 177, 182-3, 206, 207, 210, 214, 256, 263-5, 307-8, 310-12

space 307, 311 vocal 307, 317

Perry, Lee, 297; see also record producers personal stereo 57, 62, 265, 308, 327; see also technology Pester, Laure (Lorie) 225

Peters, John Durham 17 Peterson, Frank 59, 60 Pet Sounds (The Beach Boys) 293

Petty, Norman 100; see also record producers

playback devices 57, 61, 62, 93, 265, 283, 308,

325, 327, 328-9; see also technology Pneumonia Due to Drowning, II (Andres Serrano) 237 Polfus, Lester see Paul, Les

Polydor record label 59 popular music 2, 6, 7, 9, 19, 22, 23, 62, 64, 100, LOTS I22) 148 MSSMMON, 192, 217, 230-45,

293, 295, 298, 311; see also recording process and aesthetics 307, 310 crossover with classical 54, 74-5 East European 53

everyday speech 226-37, 241, 243, 245, 253-4 market appeal 307

study of 22, 226-8 vocal performance 307, 317

vocal style 310, 314 vocal training 244-5 Porcello, Thomas 19, 21, 217 ‘techoustemology 21 Portishead 56, 71 Potter, John 245 Poyatos, Fernando 228-35; see also

paralinguistics Presley, Elvis 148, 317 Pretty Things, The 295 Programme de la recherche musicale (PROGREMU) see Schaeffer, Pierre

‘Pharaoh’s Dance’ (Miles Davis) 98

Prokofiev, Sergei 131

Philharmonia Orchestra 132, 134, 137 Philips recording label 99

punk 53, 253-4, 302

Philip, Robert 23

Phillips, Sam 95, 316-17; see also record producers

punk rock, American hardcore 53 Putnam, Bill 308, 309; see also recording engineers; record producers Pythagoras 274

phonograph 1, 3, 15, 17, 108-9, 110-11, 328; see

also technology ‘phonography’ 258

Queen 56, 317

Queen’s University, Belfast 107, 115

Index

queercore 53

369

as authentic or perfect performance see

‘Qi cun lian’ 192-5; see also beiguan music

authenticity autonomy of 9, 46-8, 78

Racy, Ali Jihad 110-11

as compositional resource 148, 319; see also

radio 2, 15, 272-6, 312; see also acousmatics;

Schaeffer, Pierre; sound manipulation and consumerism see consumer

Schaeffer, Pierre; technology radiophonics 273; see also acousmatics; Schaeffer, Pierre Raeburn, Bruce Boyd 174

engineers 92, 118, 119, 149, 259-63, 307-10,

raga 22, 110

fidelity, issues of 101, 122, 148, 311-14; see

312, 315, 318, 320, 325-6, 298

ethnography of 3, 21, 47, 59, 210-12

4

also authenticity

Rahman, A. R. 53 Ramazan concerts 116, 117

field 59-60, 107-122, 187-203

Ramco Audio Recorders (Phoenix) 314; see also

functions of 4, 6; see also ethnomusicology; jazz; popular music

recording studio Ramones, The 292, 294-5

historical 1, 128-30, 153, 170, 173, 209

rap 56, 73, 230-43, 254-5, 292, 299

history of 90-102, 108-13, 114-15, 328-9, 321

‘Rapper's Delight’ (The Sugarhill Gang) 292

as illusion 37-48, 310 and immigrant communities 110, 111 ‘in-context’ 5, 116

Rasula, Jed 146, 147, 153, 167-8, 169, 170, 171

Rattle, Sir Simon, 4, 5, 125-41

and benefits of recording 136, 138-41 and Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra 125

and Birmingham Contemporary Music Group 132

and City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra (CBSO) 127, 132-40

early influence of recordings on 127 and EMI recording company 132-3, 136-8, 139 and Mahler’s symphonies 125, 128, 131, 132, 135, 139

and recording process 134-7, 139 and repertoire 130-4 ‘Towards the Millennium’ concerts 132, 133, 138

use of rehearsal 127, 134, 135-6, 139

Ray, Johnny 313 ‘Ray of Gob’ (Mark Vidler) 301-2 ‘Ray of Light’ (Madonna) 302

RCA record label 298, 313 Real World record label 113, 117-19 Real World Recorded, A (BBC film) 117 Real World Studio 117, 118 Real World Week 117-19 criticisms of 118-19 ‘Rebel Rouser’ (Duane Eddy) 314

recontextualisation 296-7, 303

record collecting 178-9, 181 record companies 41, 132-3, 136-8, 139, 310, 312, 313, 315; see also recording studio;

record labels

recording and aesthetics 37-48, 114, 147-9, i153, 157-60, 209, 227, 255-7, 260, 272, 307-8, 310, 319

industry 3, 6, 8, 42, 43, 52, 56, 57, 60, 64, *

69-71, 78, 80, 81, 82, 101, 108, 109, 110-11, 113, 121, 126, 131, 132, 133, 134, 135-8, 139-40, 169, 171-2, 173, 176, 178, 206, 208, 217, 255, 263, 300, 303

influence on composition and musical style 120-21, 308, 317, 321

influence on creativity see creative process; experimentation; remix; sampling

influence on performance and musical activity 136, 138, 140-1, 157, 192-6

and internet see technology and issues of cultural identity 54, 61-3, 69-74, 75, 76

listening to 1-2, 3, 4, 5, 7, 8, 9, 37-43, 47-8, 96, 100-1, 102, 127-30, 169, 193-6, 199-203, 209-10, 226, 259, 264-5, 272, 274, 276-7, 310, 321; see also acousmatics

multiple takes 135, 150, 152-3, 175, 208-10 ‘out-of-context’ (‘test’) 5, 116

playback as research tool 187, 188, 198-202, 207, 218 process 5, 7, 9, 19, 22, 39, 40-1, 46, 89-102,

114-18, 120, 134-6, 139, 148-9, 175-6,

206, 208-9, 227, 233, 241-3, 255, 277, 292-5,

297-302, 308-21; see also reverberation and rehearsing 127, 134, 135-6, 139, 209, 211, 216-18

in relation to performance 1, 4, 5, 6, 21-2, 38, 114-19, 125-41, 146-60, 167-70, 177, 182-3, 206, 207, 210, 214, 255-7, 263-5,

308-9

social context of 2, 3, 6, 8, 18, 21-2, 28-9, 68-73, 169-70, 209, 325

370

Index

recording (cont.)

as social practice 21 studio 7, 91-8, 117-21, 148, 176, 293,

308-321, 325-6; see also studio recording techniques see recording process; sound manipulation as text 2, 4, 5, 29, 153, 158-60, 188-91, 209, 210 as tool 2, 3-4, 17-18, 109, 128-30, 187-203

and urban culture 70-7, 79-81 recorded sound, use of 271-2, 275-7, 287, 288

and new musical languages 272 perception of 100, 111, 180-2, 209, 210 Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) 58

vs Verizon Internet Services 58

recordist 115, 323; see also recording engineers; record producers

Rhythm Club 178 Rice, Timothy 211-12 Riles, Jim ‘Jumma Santos’ 98 Roberts, Julia 180 rock 52-4, 108, 148, 292, 293, 298, 300

rock and roll 311, 312, 318, 319 ‘Rocket “88” (Jackie Brenston and the Delta Kings) 316

‘Rock your Baby’ (George McCrae) 254 Rodriguez, José 298; see also recording engineers Roger and Me (film) 80

Rolling Stones, The 264, 299 Ronettes, The 315

Rooley, Anthony 40 roots music 53

‘Rosalyn’ (The Pretty Things) 295 Rose, The (The Mediaeval Baebes) 74

126, 127, 128, 129, 134-5, 256, 257, 258,

Ross, Stan 312, 315; see also recording engineers Rosselson, Leon 227 Rothenbuler, Eric W. 17 Rounder record label 112 Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra, Amsterdam 128 Royal Philharmonic Orchestra 134 Rubab ofHerat, The 117

259-63, 293-5, 297, 299, 302, 305, 307,

Runaway Bride (film) 180

record labels 41, 43, 52, 54, 59, 63, 72, 74, 80, 91, 935,96; 98, 99,110; 112213, 114, 117=19; 120, 122, 127, 132-3, 136-8, 139, 176, 298, 31093125 313;314, 315, 329

record producers 5, 7, 9, 39, 40, 41, 42, 47, 64, 95, 96, 97, 98, 100, 101-2, 114, 119-20,

308, 309, 310, 312, 314, 315, 316-17, 318,

319-20; see also recording engineers

Sachs, Curt 203

record production 5, 95-6, 97

‘Sadeness’ (Enigma) 59, 60

record shops 108, 177 Reddock, Osbourne (“King Tubby’) 297; see also

Salonen, Esa-Pekka 131

remix

reggae 257

Reibel, Guy 287 Reinhold Messner ‘Ben Folds Five’ 261-3 remix 7, 56, 63-4, 292, 303

audience 298-9 definition 296-301 history of 297-9 re-edits 297, 301 ‘Return to Innocence’ (Enigma) 59; see also

Taiwanese music

reverberant chamber 310, 314, 315 reverberation 115, 308-9, 310, 313-16, 324, 330 artistic use of 308-9, 313, 314, 315, 321 as distinctive stylistic signature 314 techniques 315-16 thematic role of 309, 313-14; see also Spector, Phil; ‘wall of sound’ Revolver (The Beatles) 320

rhythm 24, 68 and blues 312

Salva Nos (The Mediaeval Babes) 74

sama 100

sampling 53, 121, 283, 288; see also creative practice; sound manipulation devices 55, 60, 64, 283, 288; see also technology legal and ethical issues 56, 57-61, 99, 288 Samuels, David 217 ‘Sanctuary (Miles Davis) 98

Sanderling, Kurt 129 Sardinian polyphonic singing 202 Sargent, Sir Malcolm 93; see also performance

Schade-Poulsen, Marc 199 Schaeffer, Pierre 8-9, 271-89 application of theories 287-9 creation of ‘generalised’ theory 271-2 écoute réduite (reduced listening) 272

objets sonores (sound objects) 271 Programme de la recherche musicale (PROGREMU) 278-89 and radio 272-3, 274, 276 and symbolism 273

Index

Schenker, Heinrich 68 Schoenberg, Arnold 131, 146 Schuller, Gunther 146, 157, 158, 167, 171, 172, IW A ios IAs

Schwarz, David 260-1, 263, 265 Schwitters, Kurt 293

and disco music 254 pivotal position of Bob Dylan’s “The Times They are A-changin” 252, 253 shift from ‘song’ to ‘track’ 256-7, 260, 261, 263-5 in Western culture 252, 253-4

146, 190, 192-4, 206, 214-15, 216,

‘sonic halo’ 308-11 sonic landscape 308, 315

2LON293

sonic structure 309

score (notation) 19-20, 23, 24, 28, 29,

Seckerson, Edward 130, 140, 296 ‘See Emily Play’ (Pink Floyd) 295 Seeger, Anthony. 112, 191, 199 Seeger, Charles 24, 27, 107 Seeger, Pete 78, 112

Sontag, Susan 48

Sony Record Company 53, 65, 72; see also technology Sony (hardware/software) 57, 115, 116, 301,

Seinfeld (American sitcom) 72

331; see also technology SoHo district, New York 79

“Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band’ (The

sound see recorded sound

Beatles) 299

Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band (The Beatles) 320

Serial Copy Management System (SCMS) 58; see also technology Serrano, Andres 237 Sex and the City (TV series) 76

Syil

sound-box (model) see analysis

sound design 330 sound engineer see recording engineers; recordist; record producers s6und-file 329-30; see also technology: internet sound manipulation 7, 92, 308, 310-11, 313, 316-18, 319, 320, 321; see also creative

Sex Pistols, The 253-4, 302 Shanklin, Wayne 318; see also record producers shellac disc, 43, 49, 271, 277, 329; see also technology Shepard, Vonda 72, 73 Sheppard Skeerved, Peter 218 Shilong, Wu 193-4

practice; experimentation; reverberation sound-on-sound recording 91-2, 98 South Bank Show, The 129

Shocked, Michelle 71 Shorter, Wayne 98

Spector, Phil 95, 293-5, 314, 315

Sibelius, Jean 53

sign typology of music 262 Sinatra, Frank 94 Since I Left You (The Avalanches) 57

Southern Rag 178 “So What’ (Miles Davis) 97, 153, 177

‘Spanish Key’ (Miles Davis) 98 Spears, Britney 225 spectogram 231-41, 248n.34

and ‘wall of sound’ 292, 315 spectrum analysis 26-7 speed metal 244 Springsteen, Bruce 78 stereo recording 38, 93, 134, 258, 320-1

single 12/’ 298 ‘slapback’ 316-17; see also echo; reverberation Slits, The 252-3

Stereo Review 133 Stevens, Cat 94, 101

Smalley, Denis 288

‘Still 'm Sad’ (Gregorian) 60

Small Faces, The 320

Stock, Jonathan P. J. 218

Smith, Ed 127, 136-7, 139

Stockhausen, Karlheinz 132, 288 Stokowski, Leopold 96 Stollery, Peter 288

Smithsonian Institution 112 Snape Maltings 127, 135 sociolinguistics 217 Solis, Gabriel 4, 208, 209, 210, 211, 219 Solti, Sir Georg 136

song; see also female singer-songwriters changing status of song in Western culture 253-5, 265

and dance 254, 255

Stewart, Martha 69 Stewart, Rod 94, 101, 298

Strange Little Girls (Tori Amos) 231

Strauss, Richard 132, 294 Stravinsky, Igor 209 Stringer, Robin 131 Stroh violin 90 studio craft 307, 309, 310; see also creative process; sound manipulation

32,

Index

studio recording 1, 4, 5-6, 8, 119, 121, 325, 327; see also recording studio vs live recording 1, 4, 319 Sugarhill gang, The 292 Summit, Jeffrey 203 Sun Studios, Memphis 148

personal stereo 57, 62, 265, 308, 327 phonograph 1, 3, 15, 17, 108-9, 110-11 radio-cassette machine 117 relationship with creativity 245, 298,

suona (shawm) 194 g ‘Surfin’ USA’ (The Beach Boys) 294

shellac disc, 37, 43, 271, 272, 329

surround-sound 96 Suyé Indians (Amazon rainforest) 199

301-4

sampling devices 55, 60, 64, 283, 288

single 12” 298 tape-recorder 29, 92, 99, 115, 317, 318 walkman 57, 62, 265, 308

Swedien, Bruce 309; see also recording engineers Symes, Colin, 29 Synclavier 55; see also sampling devices

‘techoustemology’ 21; see also Porcello, Thomas

Szwed, John 210

Telefunken 92; see also technology Teletronix LA-2A, 309; see also technology television series 71-3, 76 ‘Tennessee Waltz, The’ (Patti Page) 310 Tennstedt, Klaus 129

Szymanowski, Karol 132

Tagg, Philip 262, 263 Taiwanese music 59, 187, 188-91 tape-recorder see technology Tatum, Art 178

Taylor, Timothy 59, 303 techno 245 technology 2, 5, 7, 8, 9, 44, 55, 60, 81, 89-95, 115, 126, 191, 220, 227, 245, 265, 275, 277, 287, 288, 291, 292, 296, 298, 302-3, 307-8, 309, 325; see also computer; microphone; recording process; sampling

artists’ materials compared with recorded music 89-90

cassette recorder 29, 116 changes in 1,5, 7,9, 91, 271, 311, 326, 327-32 compact disc (CD), 15, 38, 55, 56, 57, 58, 113,

117, 133, 138, 148, 150, 168, 178, 187, 274, 329

digital 8, 15, 26-7, 52, 91, 148, 170, 178, 254, 315=L6"3i75320

Discman 308

internet 8, 52, 264, 326 iPod 61-3, 265, 308, 325 long-playing and 78-rpm records 15, 91, 110-14, 147, 178, 180, 256-7, 277, 329

magnetic tape 92-4, 309-10, 98-9, 101, 114, S27

Marshall stack 293, 305 minidisc recorder 195 mobile phone, 54, 57, 62, 326, 328 MP3 15, 58, 64, 91-2, 98-9, 107, 271, 308, 325

MP3 player 57, 61-3, 265 multitrack 93-5, 99, 102n.4, 120, 293, 296, 297 and performance practice 19-21, 37, 63, 64-5, 89-90, 307

Teddy Bears, The 314

‘Ten Percent’ (Double Exposure) 301

‘test’ recordings see recording ‘out-of-context’ texture 315, 316-18; see also analysis ‘Thank U’ (Alanis Morissette) 72

Théberge, Paul 148 ‘The Big Hurt’ (Toni Fisher) 318, 319 “The Times They are A-changin” (Bob Dylan) 252-4

30th Street Studio, The 97, 310 Thomas, Chris 302; see also record producers Thomas, Philip 212 Three Tenors, The 54 Tibbett, Lawrence 91 “Tiger Rag’ 178 timbre 6, 7, 24, 217, 225-45, 256, 257-9, 284-5,

288, 310, 316-18, 320-1; see also Schaeffer, Pierre; sound manipulation Titon, Jeff Todd 211

‘To Know Him Is to Love Him’ (The Teddy Bears) 314, 315 Toop, David 64 Toscanini, Arturo 44, 127

Towards the Millennium concerts 132, 133, 138

Townsend, Irving 97-8; see also record producers Townsend, Ken 320; see also recording engineers

Tracey, Hugh 114-15, 116, 119 Traditional Music of Herat, The 117 transcriptions 7, 24, 109, 116; see also ethnomusicology; jazz; score (notation)

automatic 24-8

transculturation 121; see also world music Transeau, Brian 299-301; see also remix

Index

‘Trans Europe Express’ (Kraftwerk) 299 trip-hop 56, 71 Trudgill, Peter 226 ‘Tumbling Dice’ (The Rolling Stones) 264 Tyner, McCoy 149, 152 Typewriter and Gramophone Company

(‘T&G’) 41

373

Waller, Bob 97

Wallinger, Karl 118 ‘wall of sound’ (Phil Spector) 292, 293-4, 315;

see also reverberation Walter, Bruno 127, 128 waltz 73

Wansborough, Matthew 80 Warner, Daniel 64

U2 263

War Requiem (Benjamin Britten) 134

Ugandan music 99, 118 Uher 115; see also technology

Watersons, The 201 Weill, Kurt 255 Welch, Gillian 71 Western art music see classical music; contemporary music Western CT (condenser transmitter) 90; see also

“Under Pressure’ (David Bowie) 56 Undrentide (The Mediaeval Baebes), 75

UNESCO Collection of Traditional Music 13; U7

Universal Recording Studio, Chicago 308

microphones; technology

Up (Peter Gabriel) 241

Western Electric 394-W, 90; see also

Upsetters, The 297 Urban, Greg 235, 239

Western Electric 618A, 90; see also

microphones; technology

Urry, John 70

microphones; technology West Side Story 132 ‘What’s Going On?’ (Marvin Gaye) 94

van Gogh, Vincent 89 Vanilla Ice 56; see also rap Variety (publication) 298

White, Lenny 98

Urei 1176LN, 309; see also technology

White Album, The (The Beatles) 63, 301

Venture (record distributor) 74

Who, The 295 Willan, John 128, 129, 134; see also record producers Williams, Tony 98 Wilson, Brian, 104n.16, 293-4, 319; see also record producers Wishart, Trevor 328

Verizon Internet Services 58

Womex (WOrld Music EXpo, Berlin)

Varttina 53-4

Vega, Suzanne 71 Velvet Underground, The 74 Venda 116; see also African music “Vengo Anch’io’ (Enzo Jannacci) 291

vibrato 26-7, 68, 75, 229, 233, 241, 246n.17, 283, 285, 286

108-9

Wonderful Town (Bernstein) 132

‘victim-songs’ 239-41 Victor record label 110, 112

Woods, Alyssa 231, 233, 234

video-recordings 72, 218, 220, 329; see also ethnomusicology

Workman, Reggie 149, 156

Vidler, Mark 301-2 Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra 140 Village Vanguard Club, The, New York 149

Virgin record label 59, 74 Visconti, Tony 319; see also record producers voice see paralinguistics; performance; popular

work, identity of 153, 307 world beat 108 World of Music, Art and Dance Festival (WOMAD)

117, 119

world music 5, 6, 99, 107-22 acculturation 121 case studies 114-19

and ethnomusicology, tensions between 119-22

Wagner, Richard 40, 129, 136

history of 107-13 local effects of 107-13 overcommercialisation of 121-2

Wailers, The, 297

recent developments 120

music; song

Wainwright, Rufus 229

as a term 107-8

walkman 57, 62, 265, 308; see also technology

transculturation 121

Wallace, Andy 259, 260, 261-3; see also record producers

World Music, The Rough Guide 108 World Network record label 113

374

Index

World Party 118

Young, John 288

Wrecking Crew, The 293; see also Phil Spector

Young, Larry 98

Wright, Robert 298

‘Your House’ (Alanis Morissette)

237-41

Xijin, You 188-91 Xinfang, Zhou (‘Jo Hsin-farng’) 197-8

XL Recordings label 63

Zawinul, Joe 98 ’

Ying-Nan, Kuo 59, 249n.49 yodelling 239-41, 249n.49

Zak, Albin III 258-61, 263-4

Zeppelin, Led 105n.39 “Zoo Station’ (U2) 263 Zukin, Sharon 79

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Amanda Bayley is Reader in Performing Arts at the University of Wolverhampton. She is editor of The Cambridge Companion to Bartok (2001) and

has published on twentieth-century string quartets and Berio’s Sequenza VI for viola. She was awarded a Visiting Edison Fellowship at the British Library Sound Archive (2000-1) and was President ofthe

Society for Music Analysis (2004-8). In addition to analysing recordings, her research interests include issues of performance and analysis, ethnomusicology, and exploring the relationship between composer and performer. She is currently

leading a British Academy-funded research project with the Kreutzer Quartet and Michael Finnissy.

Jacket illustrations from left to right (front): John Coltrane,

Cannonball Adderley and Miles Davis recording Kind of Blue at 30th Street Studio in 1959 — reproduced with kind permission from Don Hunstein / Sony Music Photo Archives; Tori

Amos — photography © Matthew Booy, reproduced with kind permission; George Robey recording with Violet Lorraine and Alfred Lester — photograph reproduced with kind permission from EMI Music Ltd; field recording of the Abasaasi, a music

group functioning at the Bamunanika Palace (the country palace of the present Kabaka Ronald Mutebi), 1987, as semiofficial ‘royal’ musicians — photograph reproduced with kind permission from Peter Cooke; Benjamin Britten at the Decca

recording session (June 1967) for his work The Burning, Fiery Furnace —Brian Seed / Lebrecht Music & Arts.

WITHDRAWN

AVID U. MCKAY LIBRARY BYU-IDAHO

Jacket designed by Hart McLeod -

- PRINTED

IN

THE

UNITED

KINGDOM

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. hrded ~ Music Research in the area of recorded music is becoming ~ increasingly diverse. Drawn together here are contributions from a variety of fields, including music performance,

composition and production, cultural studies and philosophy, bringing contrasting perspectives to a range of music genres.

Discourses in jazz, ethnomusicology and popular music — whose histories and practices have evolved principally from recordings — are presented alongside those of Western classical music, where analysis of recordings is a relatively recent

development. Different methodologies have evolved in each of these subdisciplines where recordings have been contextualised - variously as tools, texts or processes, reflective of social practices. This book promotes the sharing of such differences of approach. Attitudes of performers are considered alongside

social contexts, developments in technology and changing listening practices, to explore the ways in which recordings influence the study of music performance and the nature of — ~ musical experience.

ISBN 978-0-521-86309-4

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