Remembrance of Events

From the BBC News website:

John Lennon’s death 30 years ago was one of those shocking, poignant “where were you when” moments that fashion collective memories out of historic events.

Many are sudden deaths – that of JFK being the most notable. Outbreaks and conclusions of war, scandalous resignations of heads of state, sporting miracles, and audacious crimes can all become a “where were you when”.

But why do we remember where we were when we heard Princess Diana had died, or Margaret Thatcher resigned? Here some of those who have been influenced by these extraordinary occurrences explain why some stick so vividly in the mind and live on in our imagination.

Full story here.

Recording: Katz’s seven defining traits

For Mark Katz, there are seven traits of sound recording technology that are ‘distinctive and defining’: tangibility, portability, (in)visibility, repeatability, temporality, receptivity, and manipulability (Katz, Capturing Sound, pp. 9-47). Tangibility relates to the way in which, with the onset of recorded sound, music becomes a thing. Recorded sound did not invent music as an object, and it is important to remember previous examples of the attempt to “fix” or “keep” music, such as notation, written description, ballad sheets, sheet music and even the collecting of musical instruments. But the objects associated with recorded sound–from early cylinders through records and on to CDs–could be seen (and felt and heard) to “contain” music with far greater fidelity and far greater proximity to “the thing itself” than earlier, non-sonic objects. As many people have shown, this thing-ness would have considerable implications for the association between music  and commodification (Evan Eisenberg’s The Recording Angel is particularly good on this subject). Again, recordings did not invent the connection between music and capital but they did fundamentally reconstitute the capitalist machinery of what would come to be known as the culture industry. This refiguring of music’s potential as commodity means that this particular form of tangibility has survived the recent decline in the prevalence of the recorded object; the digitalization and virtualisation of culture may have brought about a significant change in what we think of as cultural “objects”, but the relationship between culture and capital seems to be as firm in the present as at any point during the last century.

Katz’s second trait, portability, refers to a quality that becomes ever more apparent in the evolution of music-as-thing. Walter Benjamin’s famous analysis of mechanical reproduction highlights portability as one of the ways in which the ‘aura’ of the original artwork is lost. It was the artwork’s location in a particular time and space that contributed to its aura. The mechanically-reproduced object, however, has no need of such an aura given that a vital part of its raison d’être is the freedom it allows its users to have it wherever and whenever they wish. Recorded music can be disseminated to diverse audiences who are severed from the time and space of the original musical moment. As Katz says, with reference to the travelling picò sound systems of Cartagena, Colombia, ‘while recorded music is often decoupled from its origins in space and time, this “loss” begets a contextual promiscuity that allows music to accrue new, rich, and unexpected meanings’ (Katz, p. 15).

By visibility and invisibility, Katz is highlighting the fact that, with recorded sound, there is no need for performers and audiences to see each other. This means that a certain element of expressive communication is withdrawn as there can no longer be a reliance on facial expression or bodily gesture, factors which are important to performers and audience members alike. Audiences cannot read the musicians for clues, nor can performers gauge the response of their audiences to what they are playing.

Repeatability is perhaps one of the more obvious facets of recorded sound, yet it can be conceptually complex, as a number of philosophical words that have taken repetition as their subject have shown. In terms of what Katz would call ‘phonographic effects’–the changes wrought upon musical performance and consumption inaugurated by recorded sound–repetition comes to the fore in the ways in which listeners come to expect certain things from the music they hear. Repetition brings familiarity and, while this can be of great value–for example, in the possibility of studying a particular piece of music, by which we generally mean, in the phonographic era, a particular recording–it can also lead to a sense of disturbance, such as that experienced when a live performance of a recording with which we are intimately familiar does not seem to live up to its recorded counterpart. What we witness here is a process whereby a previously understood precedence–the precedence of the performance to the recording–is seemingly reversed. Musicians, of course, are listeners too and, as Katz suggests, their listening practices and phonographic awareness, will inevitably affect their performance.

Until the invention of the long-playing disc at the end of the 1940s, listeners were not able to hear more than four and a half minutes of continuous recorded sound. One of the most obvious phonograph effects, then, relates to temporality. Any kind of recording, be it writing, painting, photography or phonography, is a reduction of the complexity of the phenomenal world. As a time-based phenomenon, recorded sound inevitably placed an emphasis on the reduction of musical time to what could be fitted into the grooves of the record. A number of writers have attended to the changes undergone by specific musical forms due to the three-minute limit of 78 rpm recordings (see, for example, Rui Vieira Nery, Para uma História do Fado, p. 204, Gail Holst, Road to Rembetika, p. 54), though it seems safe to conclude that such compromises were necessary for all musical styles and genres. As Katz relates, the three-minute standard came to be associated with the ‘formula’ for successful pop, though it should also be noted that the subsequent ability to record extended works did not discourage such temporal formulas from being maintained in many genres.

The transcriptive nature of most recording up the 1950s was less to with a desire for authenticity than a necessity. The rather cumbersome process of recording during this early period necessitated a large amount of manipulation, from the placing of singers and musicians at various points in relation to the microphone to the elimination of certain instruments and styles and their replacement with more phonograph-friendly alternatives. However, while these factors could be defined in terms of the manipulation necessary to secure good recordings, Katz chooses to categorise them as examples of ‘receptivity’ his least well-defined category. ‘Manipulability’, by contrast, is used to refer to the ability, with the advent of tape recording in the 1940s and digital recording at the end of the 1970s, to manipulate the recorded object itself. This might involve the splicing together of different recordings to create a single recorded ‘text’, such as happened with Teo Macero’s recordings of Mile Davis in the 1960s and George Martin’s of the Beatles in the same decade. Or it might involve the sampling of recordings to use as a background texture or foregrounded, featured element in new recordings, as became the practice in hip-hop and musics influenced by it. The role of producers, studio engineers and, in the case of hip hop and dance music, deejays became far more prominent die to these kinds of sonic manipulation.

Before the ‘turntablism’ of hip hop deejays, playback devices and records had been used as instruments or instrumental textures by a number of artists, including John Cage in his Imaginary Landscape No. 1 (1939). The use and deliberate misuse of recordings and playback technology constitute, for Caleb Kelly, a notable strand of subversive art in the second half of the twentieth century. With reference to the criticisms levelled against recording technology by thinkers such as Theodor Adorno and Jacques Attali, Kelly suggests that practitioners of what he calls ‘cracked media’ challenge the intended uses of technology and substitute alternative forms of labour via subversive acts of misuse and abuse. Korean-born Nam June Paik, for example, modified turntables to allow numerous randomly accessed records to be played on them simultaneously, the end results working as both quirky sculptures and manifestations of sound art. Czech artist Milan Knižak put on ritualistic happenings in the streets of Prague before moving to sound-based work that included the physical alteration and mutilation of vinyl records. Works such as Broken Music applied cut-up techniques to records, cracking, dismantling, and rebuilding them so that they played reconfigured music. Christian Marclay also worked with broken and cut-up records on projects which complemented his work in the visual arts while simultaneously performing as a radical turntablist. Yasunao Tone performed similar mutilations on compact discs, “wounding” them in order to change and distort their data. The German band Oval, meanwhile, was instrumental in turning the sound of CD malfunction into aesthetically pleasing music, using glitch as a texture in pop songs.

There are numerous aspects that Katz does not attend to in the initial presentation of his seven traits. One is the way in which some of them work together. Temporality and repeatability, for example, should be thought of as necessarily connected. Of particular importance to our project are the ways in which time and repetition shape and are shaped by memory acts, whether voluntary or involuntary. Music performs its evocation work by tapping into the ability to render the past in the present to a seemingly infinite degree. Temporality here refers not only to the length of a recording but to the duration of the remembered experience that the recording summons up. Length of recording is still important, however, because one of the many magical qualities of the recording is its very brevity in comparison to the experience it evokes. Michael Pickering and Emily Keightly attend to this issue when they write, ‘It is obvious that one piece of music did not play throughout our memories of high school or university, yet it may only take one piece of music to evoke sensuously the memories or experiences of those times in our lives.’ (Keightley and Pickering, ‘For the Record’, p. 153). There is, then, a synechdocal quality to recording, in which the recorded fragment can stand in for and even substitute phenomenal experience. When this aspect is allied to the Proustian concepts of voluntary and involuntary memory, there is a wealth of useful analysis to be carried out.

Fado book published

Richard’s book Fado and the Place of Longing: Loss, Memory and the City is published by Ashgate today. The Introduction, Contents and Index are available on Ashgate’s site. Samples and extra material are available at The Place of Longing.

Pages from The Gramophone

The following two extracts are from a review of fado recordings by Rodney Gallop which appeared in The Gramophone in October 1931:

…

The next extract is from a feature on “Strange Music in Spain”, by J.B. Trend, which appeared in The Gramophone in April 1933:

In both cases it is interesting to note the recourse to the music’s authenticity and to the authors’ asserting of an authenticating expertise. This expertise must navigate both a knowledge of the music’s ‘natural’ context and a sense of being able to distinguish recordings which show fidelity to that context. This, when it comes down to it, is still the task of the critic nowadays; what is evident here, however, is the freshness of this practice, exercised as it was by a significant minority.

It is also interesting to note how this period was one in which the discourse around recorded sound attended as much to the playback equipment as to the records themselves. Some examples from the Gramophone:

From The Gramophone, June 1933

Again, it is still the case that there is a dedicated discourse surrounding audio-visual equipment, but it is far more segregated from that surrounding recordings now.

Imagined countries

Robert Cantwell on John Lomax:

Like Heinrich Schliemann, the German archeologist who in 1871 located the site of the ancient city of Troy on the basis of clues laid down in the Homeric poems, Lomax was seeking in folksong the site of that dreamed of pure Republic which always lies where memory and time like the rose and the briar twist around each other out of the grave.

Did he find it? No; but if the songs he gathered in his books and recordings are any indication, we cannot doubt the existence of such a country.

This comes from a review of Nolan Porterfield’s Last Cavalier: The Life and Times of John A. Lomax in The Old-Time Herald, 6/4 (Summer 1998).

It finds echoes in Cantwell’s other work on the folk revival, in particular his account of Harry Smith in When We Were Good. It resounds too in Greil Marcus’s work on Smith and on Bob Dylan. In discussing the mixture of familiarity and unfamiliarity in Dylan and the Band’s Basement Tapes, Marcus suggests:

The music carried an aura of familiarity, of unwritten traditions, and as deep a sense of self-recognition, the recognition of a self—the singer’s? the listener’s?—that was both historical and sui generis. The music was funny and comforting; at the same time it was strange, and somehow incomplete. Out of some odd displacement of art and time, the music seemed both transparent and inexplicable.

(Greil Marcus, Invisible Republic, xv)

Hearing the whole of the tapes, he suggests, is like discovering a map: ‘but if they are a map, what country, what lost mine, is it that they center and fix?’ (xv). Analysing Dylan’s late album Time out of Mind, Paul Williams wrote, ‘It’s like he’s living in a garden built of folksong lyrics’. Discussing the same work, Mikal Gilmore also used a spatial metaphor, suggesting that the album was ‘a trek through the unmapped frontier that lies beyond loss and disillusion’. Elsewhere, I have suggested that, given the impossibility of mapping some areas (I used the labyrinthine Alfama neighbourhood of Lisbon as an example, but Marcus’s ‘old weird America’ is a viable substitute), music as as good a map as we may find anywhere.  Music creates an imaginary place by providing a map that tells us something other printed maps cannot. To use a concept taken from Henri Lefebvre, music acts as a representation of space and, therefore, is part of the complex wider production of space.

Authentic Voices

In her book In Search of the Blues, Marybeth Hamilton highlights a contradiction at the heart of writings about the Delta blues. Although the music is known primarily through recordings, those who have valorised it have tended to either downplay or explicitly negate the mediating effects of technology.

Blues enthusiasts, in the main, have ignored those technological trappings, the phonograph, the disc, the electrical current; only the voices remain, fierce and immediate … What makes the Delta blues singular, and paradoxical, is its magical capacity to transcend that technology, to be conveyed mechanically and yet be perceived as pristinely untouched by the modern world.

(Hamilton, In Search of the Blues, p. 9)

There is also the recurring issue of ‘experts’, be they collectors, folklorists or critics: ‘In an age of mechanical reproduction, they set themselves up as cultural arbiters, connoisseurs whose authority rested on their powers of discernment, their ability to distinguish the ersatz from the real.’ (p. 10) This is an issue I have addressed in the closing chapter of my fado book, where I noted the role of the critic/expert as both informant and authenticator. Hamilton, meanwhile summarises the desire of collectors such as Alan Lomax as follows:

how do you capture the real black voice in the age of mechanical reproduction? Answering that question meant engaging with the very technology whose impact they feared, ferreting out singers with portable phonographs and, eventually, rifling through bins in used-record stores, searching for voices that sounded archaic, willing themselves to hear past the machine.

(Hamilton, p. 10)

It would also be interesting to compare this willed hearing-past with that undertaken in Britain by Ewan MacColl and Charles Parker in the production of the Radio Ballads, a series of attempts to capture authentic British folklore via sophisticated recording and tape-editing.

Greg Milner, in Perfecting Sound Forever, claims that John Lomax ‘wanted authenticity, but he was not above engineering it’. In contrast, Moses Asch, founder of the Folkways label, insisted on sticking to one microphone and trying to capture the sound in as unmediated a manner as possible, thus ‘simplifying the effects of historical memory’. However, the studio process entailed a fencing-off as distorting as anything perpetrated by the Lomaxes in the field. ‘The studio was sacred for Asch. It shut out all parts of the outside world – symbolized by the invisible hand of the marketplace, changing the context as surely as John [Lomax] did when he made trapped convicts sound like they were free outdoors – and allowed in only “the music”.’ (all quotes from p. 98 of Milner’s book)

Asch’s first self-titled record label began by recording Jewish cantors, a move that mirrors Harry Smith’s move from compiling the Anthology of American Folk Music to recording Jewish liturgical music (Smith produced 15 albums’ worth of material, two of which were released by Folkways). One of Asch’s prinicple artists, Cantor Liebele Waldman, was influenced by Cantor Rosenblatt, who had recorded in the 1920s. Yiddish language music was seen in that period as a market similar to hillbilly and race records, though interest died away during the Depression.

Asch moved from these Jewish sides to recording Leadbelly, then Wallace House’s Folk Songs of the United Nations , then on to Burl Ives. Asch’s second label Disc focussed on jazz and folk. Folk, as Peter Goldsmith points out, was categorised as ‘music deliberately lacking in commercial pretensions’ (Goldsmith, Making People’s Music, 175) and was now seen as political for this reason above and beyond any explicit messages that might be conveyed by the lyrics. Woody Guthrie used his releases of the time to rail against commercial music in a manner comparable to Theodor Adorno:

Hollywood songs don’t last. Broadway songs are sprayed with a hundred thousand dollars to get them going, and they last … A few months at most. The Monopoly on Music pays a few pet writers to go screwy trying to write and re-write the same old notes under the same old formulas and the same old patterns. Every band on the radio sounds exactly alike … Hitler declared war on the world and several million good people walked into their graves to keep the world a Union World, but do the gals and the bands play or sing a single note about it?

(Woody Guthrie, liner notes to Folksay (Asch 432, 1944), quoted in Goldsmith, 147.)

This folk/commercial divide would be an ongoing issue for Asch through various colourations of the debate in different contexts. But, as Goldsmith points out, the commercial success of a few of Asch’s jazz recordings helped to finance his more esoteric work (p. 177). As for his role in mediating the “authenctic” music of others, Asch said of Woody Guthrie:  ‘He was using me like a pen, to make a book. I was working the machinery, but he was using it for himself.’  (Quoted in Gene Bluestein, ‘Moses Asch, Documentor’, American Music, Vol. 5, No. 3 (Autumn 1987), pp. 291-304, p. 302.) Guthrie would use the recording process to work out the best version for a new song. The medium of recording thus became a vital tool in the construction of his work, adding a mediating level that more romantic accounts of his performance practice (his own included) tend to neglect.

Ethnomimesis

It is one of the paradoxes of folklore that though we can discover it, and test its authenticity, and even incorporate it into our own cultural life, our literature, music, and art – though we can transmit it and even revive it by these agencies, like carriers of a gene, we cannot deliberately create it, any more than we can create the chromosomes whose existence and nature we detect by their manifestations.

Robert Cantwell, Ethnomimesis, p. 16.

Discussing Shakespeare’s representation of Tom O’Bedlam in  King Lear, Cantwell claims, ‘It is not folklife itself, but its epiphanies – in elite cultural forms that are not its own and of which literature is, of course, but one – that render it perceptible to us.’ As with Shakespeare’s play, so with the numerous manifestations of ritual and remembrance in the recorded music of the twentieth century.