How Music Works

by David Byrne

  A fashion mutiny understandably began building steam. We switched to Dickies—workwear with matching tops and bottoms, brown or blue or gray. Those looked somewhat like the originally envisioned jumpsuits, but now there was an everyday workwear angle. Some of the outfits got tailored a bit (the shirts got darts so they accentuated the female string players’ figures, for example), but mostly they were right out the box. I often looked like a UPS man, but I thought that in its own way it was quite elegant.N

  The audiences sat and listened quietly at times, but they were usually up and dancing by the end. Best of both worlds. I had loosened up on stage by then, and I began to talk to the audience beyond reciting the names of the songs and saying a quick “Thank you very much” afterward. Often—and this never failed to surprise us—audiences at these shows would stop the show in the middle and engage in a lengthy round of applause. Standing ovations, many times. Sometimes this was after a song or two that might have been somewhat familiar and that really showed what this ensemble could do, but I sensed the audience wasn’t just clapping for specific songs. They realized that they were happy, that they were really, really enjoying what they were seeing and hearing, and they wanted to let us know. I sometimes think the audience was in a funny way also applauding for themselves. Some of them might also have been a little bit nostalgic, applauding our joint legacies as performers and audience. One forgets that part of one’s performance is one’s history—or sometimes the lack of it. You’re playing against what an audience knows, what they expect. This seems to be true of all performers; there’s baggage that gets carried into the venue that we can’t see. The audience wasn’t all aging Talking Heads fans either. There was a healthy percentage of younger folks as well, which was great to see. Maybe keeping the ticket prices affordable helped.

  Photo by Tony Orlando

  In 2008, I did a tour that in some ways harkened back to the Stop Making Sense extravaganza. I had collaborated on a record with Brian Eno that was more electronic folk/gospel in tone than the fierce funky workouts of Remain In Light. I realized that in order to perform this music, I’d need an ensemble similar to that touring band from more than twenty years before—multiple singers, keyboards, bass, drums, and percussion. Conveniently, with this band I could also do some of the songs we’d both been involved in, with Talking Heads and on other projects.

  Once again, I had to think about what sort of a show this could be given the financial means available to me. I wanted to do something visual and theatrical again, since there wouldn’t be lush strings to wash over the audience anymore. Just standing there and playing wouldn’t be enough with this outfit—but what else was feasible? Lots of acts now use elaborate video screens and similar techniques to “make it bigger” on stage. I’d seen a few of these shows. I saw a Super Furry Animals show during which the video was totally in synch with the songs throughout the whole night. Very impressive. I’d seen pictures of U2 and other acts’ arena shows; those bands had massive screens and all the latest technology. They hired teams of creative types to make the videos. I couldn’t compete with any of that. It costs a fortune, and their results were probably better or at least as good as anything I could pull together. And in any case, they’d already done it.

  Then I saw a Sufjan Stevens show at BAM (a piece about the BQE, the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway) during which he brought out dancers who did simple repetitive movements with hula-hoops or other such silliness.O It was charming and effective, moving even, something obviously low-tech that almost anyone could do. I thought to myself, “I’ve never had dancers on stage. Why not?”

  I thought I would go a little further with the idea than Sufjan, who had a million other things going on during that show, like films and costume changes. I worked with my manager on a budget. I had learned over the years that we could predict, based on the size of proposed performance venues, how much we might make on a tour, so we could predict if singers, dancers, choreographers, and the cost of carting all of them around along with the band was feasible. In this case, it was. Money and budgets are as much a determining factor in music and performance as anything else, but that’s for another chapter.

  Hoola Hoope Dancer, Sufjan’s BQE show, by Lawrence Fung

  For the dance elements, I decided to approach “downtown” choreographers rather than the ones who typically do music videos, R&B shows, or Broadway musicals. The dance vocabulary of those shows is emphatic, energetic, and exciting, but everyone has seen that stuff before, so why bother? I thought I’d spread the creative risk to increase my odds, so I approached four choreographers—Noémie Lafrance, Annie-B Parson, and the team of Sonya Robbins and Layla Childs—rather than seeing if just one could do the whole show. This way, if one person’s contribution didn’t work out for some reason, there were still others who could carry the load. (Luckily, that didn’t happen.) Likewise, I suggested that each choreographer initially pick just two songs to work on. (They ended up doing quite a bit more than just six songs.) I provided a proposed set list, and left the choice of what to work on to them. All of the choreographers had worked with untrained dancers before, and often incorporated vernacular movement into their work—moves that weren’t based on ballet or typical modern-dance stuff. That was important for me, too; I didn’t want worlds in collision. I see dance as something anyone can do, though I knew that inevitably the dancers would have some special skills, as we all do.

  Choreographer Noémie Lafrance had recently done a video with Feist that was widely seen. It used mostly untrained dancers, and though I didn’t necessarily require my performers to have no formal dance training, I knew that I didn’t want them to obviously look like dancers. I wanted them to blend in with the rest of us. Noémie had also done a lot of site-specific work in swimming pools and stairwells, so I knew she was interested in getting dance into new venues—like a pop-music concert. Annie-B Parson I’ve known forever. I’m a fan of her company, Big Dance Theater, and she’s worked with musicians like Cynthia Hopkins, so she seemed perfect, too. Sonya Robbins and Layla Childs are a performing/choreography duo whose work I saw in a video at an art gallery. In that piece they wore matching primary-colored off-the-rack outfits and did mostly pedestrian moves in unison. Sometimes they rolled down a gully and sometimes they clambered on rocks. It was often funny and beautiful. I didn’t know if they’d ever choreographed a “show” like this before, so they were the wild card.

  I could afford three dancers and three singers in addition to the band, some of whom I’d worked with on two previous tours: Graham Hawthorne on drums, Mauro Refosco on percussion, and Paul Frazier on bass. Mark De Gli Antoni joined on keyboards. (He was new, though we’d once played together when he was in the band Soul Coughing.) The singers were easy: folks I had crossed paths with or worked with before. They were told that they’d be expected to “do some movement.” I used that phrase rather than “dance” because I didn’t want to give them the fearsome idea that they’d be expected to do Broadway jazz dance. To find appropriate dancers, the choreographers sent out word to dancers and performers they knew personally. We didn’t go the route of taking out an ad, as we’d have been flooded with inappropriate people. Even so, at the beginning of the dance audition there were fifty dancers in the room.

  We had two days to whittle them down to three. Cruel, but, well, fun too. We decided that the dancers would be asked to do three types of things: exercises in which they made up their own movement, short routines which they would be asked to memorize, and bits where they would receive notes and suggestions as to how to improve what they’d just done. Noémie began with an exercise I’ve never forgotten. It consisted of four simple rules:

  1. Improvise moving to the music and come up with an eight-count phrase. (In dance, a phrase is a short series of moves that can be repeated.)

  2. When you find a phrase you like, loop (repeat) it.

  3. When you see someone else with a stronger phrase, copy it.

  4. When everyone is doing the same phr
ase the exercise is over.

  It was like watching evolution on fast-forward, or an emergent lifeform coming into being. At first the room was chaos, writhing bodies everywhere. Then one could see that folks had chosen their phrases, and almost immediately one could see a pocket of dancers who had all adopted the same phrase. The copying had begun already, albeit just in one area. This pocket of copying began to expand, to go viral, while yet another one now emerged on the other side of the room. One clump grew faster than the other, and within four minutes the whole room was filled with dancers moving in perfect unison. Unbelievable! It only took four minutes for this evolutionary process to kick in, and for the “strongest” (unfortunate word, maybe) to dominate. It was one of the most amazing dance performances I’ve ever seen. Too bad it was over so quickly, and that one did have to know the rules that had been laid out to appreciate how such a simple algorithm could generate unity out of chaos.

  After this vigorous athletic experiment, the dancers rested while we compared notes. I noticed a weird and quite loud wind like sound, rushing and pulsing. I didn’t know what it was; it seemed to be coming from everywhere and nowhere. It was like no sound I’d ever heard before. I realized it was the sound of fifty people catching their breath, breathing in and out, in an enclosed room. It then gradually faded away. For me that was part of the piece, too.

  Having learned from the Rei Momo tour, I decided to go back to the white outfits. That way the dancers’s movements would pop against the musicians, risers, and bits of gear. But as with the big Latin tour, I sensed that there was a spiritual aspect to the new songs we were playing, as well as many of the older ones, so white also hinted at associations with gospel, temples, and mosques.P

  We rehearsed for a month. For the first three weeks the band and singers learned the music in one room, while the dancers and choreographers worked in another room two floors below. I’d pop back and forth. In the fourth week we brought the dancers and musicians together. We then did what is called an out-of-town run: a series of shows in smaller towns to get the bugs out, where no one in the press would see what we were up to. Our first show was in Easton, Pennsylvania, in a lovely old restored theater in a little once-industrial town. There were some rough patches, but the big surprise was that the audience—hardly a contemporary-dance crowd—loved it. Well, they didn’t go nuts, but they didn’t balk at the dance stuff. It was going to be okay.

  And it got better. I realized that the dancers, and the singers who sometimes joined them, raised the energy level of the whole show. I joined them when I could, and to do so felt ecstatic, but my interaction was limited by my singing and guitar-playing duties. Even so, they all became part of the whole, not a separate part tacked on. Over the course of the tour we took this idea further: some of the dancers would sing, some would play guitar, and eventually we added bits that blurred the boundaries between dancers, singers, and musicians. A little bit of an ideal world in microcosm.

  The out-of-town tryout part was kind of a bust. That aspect of putting a performance together has been forever altered by cell-phone cameras and YouTube. Barely minutes after our shows were over, someone would announce that some of the numbers were appearing online. In the past, performers would at least try to limit amateur photographers and especially video cameras, but now that idea seemed simply ridiculous—hopeless. We realized there was a silver lining: they liked our show and their postings were functioning as free advertising. The thing we were supposed to be fighting against was actually something we should be encouraging. They were getting the word out, and it wasn’t costing me anything. I began to announce at the beginning of the shows that photography was welcome, but I suggested to please only post shots and videos where we look good.

  I talked with the dancers and choreographers as the show began to gel, and we all agreed that contemporary dance, a rarified world where the audiences are usually very small, was indeed, as this show proved, accessible to some part of the general public. It wasn’t the movement or choreography itself that was keeping the audiences small for this stuff, but the context. The exact same choreography in a dance venue, without a live pop band? This audience in Easton, Pennsylvania would never go see it in a million years. But here, in this context, they seemed to like it. The way one sees things, and the expectations one brings to a performance, or any art form, really, is completely determined by the venue. Poetry is a tough sell, but with a beat it’s rap, which is wildly successful. Okay, it’s not exactly the same, but you get the idea. I once saw a theater piece that had a lot of music in it; it sort of failed as a theater piece, but I told the producer, “If you position it as an imaginatively staged concert, it’s incredibly successful.”

  It’s not as if one can shift music, visual art, dance, or spoken word like pieces in a Tetris game until each art form plops into its perfect place, but it does give one the idea that some juggling of contexts might not hurt either.

  I also realized that there were lots of unacknowledged theater forms going on all around. Our lives are filled with performances that have been so woven into our daily routine that the artificial and performative aspect has slipped into invisibility. PowerPoint presentations are a kind of theater, a kind of augmented stand-up. Too often it’s a boring and tedious genre, and audiences are subjected to the bad as well as the good. Failing to acknowledge that these are performances is to assume that anyone could and should be able to do it. You wouldn’t expect anyone who can simply sing to get up on stage, so why expect everyone with a laptop to be competent in this new theatrical form? Performers try harder.

  Photo by Anne Billingsley

  In political speeches—and I don’t think there’ll be any argument that they are in fact performances—the hair, the clothes, and the gestures are all carefully thought out. Bush II had a team that did nothing but sort out the backgrounds behind the places where he would appear, the mission accomplished banner being their most well-known bit of stagecraft. Same goes for public announcements of all kinds: it’s all show biz, and that’s not a criticism. My favorite term for a certain new kind of performance is “security theater.” In this genre, we watch as ritualized inspections and patdowns create the illusion of security. It’s a form that has become common since 9/11, and even the government agencies that participate in this activity acknowledge, off the record, that it is indeed a species of theater.

  Performance is ephemeral. Some of my own shows have been filmed or have appeared on TV and as a result they have found audiences that never saw the original performances, which is great, but most of the time you simply have to be there. That’s part of the excitement; it’s happening in front of you, and in a couple of hours it won’t be there anymore. You can’t press a button and experience it again. In a hundred years it will be a faint memory, if that.

  There’s something special about the communal nature of an audience at a live performance, the shared experience with other bodies in a room going through the same thing at the same time, that isn’t analogous to music heard through headphones. Often the very fact of a massive assembly of fans defines the experience as much as whatever it is they have come to see. It’s a social event, an affirmation of a community, and it’s also, in some small way, the surrender of the isolated individual to the feeling of belonging to a larger tribe. Many musicians make music influenced by this social aspect of performance; what we write is, in part, based on what the live experience of it might be. And the performing experience for the folks on stage is absolutely as moving as it is for the audience, so we’re writing in the anxious hope of generating a moment for ourselves as much as for the listener—it’s a two-way street. I love singing the songs I’ve written, especially in more recent performances, and part of the reason I decide to go out and play them live is to have that experience again. Evolutionary biologist Richard Prum proposes that birds don’t just sing to attract mates and to define their territory; they sometimes sing for the sheer joy of it. Like them, I have that pleasurable experience, and I s
eek out opportunities for it. I don’t want to have it happen only once, in the recording studio, and then have that moment get packed away, as a memory. I want to relive it, as one can on stage, over and over. It’s kind of glorious and surprising that the catharsis happens reliably, repeatedly, but it does.

  There’s an obvious narcissistic pleasure in being on stage, the center of attention. (Though some of us sing even when there’s no one there.) In musical performances one can sense that the person on stage is having a good time even if they’re singing a song about breaking up or being in a bad way. For an actor this would be anathema, it would destroy the illusion, but with singing one can have it both ways. As a singer, you can be transparent and reveal yourself on stage, in that moment, and at the same time be the person whose story is being told in the song. Not too many other kinds of performance allow that.

  CHAPTER THREE

  Technology Shapes Music

  Part One: Analog

  The first sound recording was made in 1878. Since then, music has been amplified, broadcast, broken down into bits, miked and recorded, and the technologies behind those innovations have changed the nature of what gets created. Just as photography changed the way we see, recording technology changed the way we hear. Before recorded music became ubiquitous, music was, for most people, something we did. Many people had pianos in their homes, sang at religious services, or experienced music as part of a live audience. All those experiences were ephemeral—nothing lingered, nothing remained except for your memory (or your friends’ memories) of what you heard and felt. Your recollection could very well have been faulty, or it could have been influenced by extra-musical factors. A friend could have told you the orchestra or ensemble sucked, and under social pressure you might have been tempted to revise your memory of the experience. A host of factors contribute to making the experience of live music a far from objective phenomenon. You couldn’t hold it in your hand. Truth be told, you still can’t.