How Music Works

by David Byrne

  Blue understood the power of recording, that it could travel to places he could not, and be heard by people he would never meet—like the President. The disenfranchised and invisible could be heard with this new machine. Alan Lomax liked the idea that the recorder could be a means by which these invisible people could be given a voice.

  The Lomaxes endeavored to facilitate the spread of this music, though whether they really were helping in the way they thought they were might seem debatable now. Daddy Lomax in particular had disturbing ideas about how best to “help” his subjects. Huddie Ledbetter, better known as Leadbelly, was a singer and guitar player the Lomaxes met in a Southern prison. Leadbelly’s talent was recognized by many who heard recordings of him, however John Lomax in particular had a thing about what he considered to be “authentic.” Leadbelly was an all-around artist who loved to play pop songs, as well as rawer, more folky material. Lomax forbade him to play the pop stuff when he took him up to New York to perform for the sophisticated big-city folks. He wanted to present a “raw Negro,” an authentic primitive, straight from prison, for New Yorkers to gawk at—and appreciate as well. He even had Leadbelly dress in overalls when he performed, as if he had no other clothes to wear. (Huddie actually preferred suits.) While Lomax wanted to make sure to show how good a player Leadbelly was, he didn’t want him to sound too good, too slick. On the Lomax recordings this roughness was a stamp of authenticity. So although these recordings did allow this “hidden” music from Mississippi, Louisiana, and elsewhere to be heard, there was no possibility of objectivity when it was removed from its context. Show business (yes, this “scientific” folklore collecting might be viewed as a fairly peculiar and prescribed form of show business) took over, and simulated authenticity became a common tool of presenters—and sometimes of artists, too—it’s shades of Buffalo Bill and Geronimo and later Bob Dylan, taking on the persona of an innocent yet perceptive country boy. In later years, Alan Lomax in particular was dismayed as the recording world came to be dominated by a few large companies. He saw people being robbed of their voices, and the musical landscape flattened. He was right. Inevitably, recorded music was a branch of proto-globalization—a process that could uncover hidden gems while at the same time flattening them out.

  HOW LONG IS A SONG?

  Katz asserts that the limited running time of 78s (and later of 45s) changed writing styles. Recording discs were limited to fewer than four minutes (more like 3½ minutes for 45s) a side, which prodded songwriters to shorten their compositions. A threeto four-minute song seems a natural length to me—it often seems almost inevitable. I can hardly conceive a time when it might have been otherwise. But maybe, as some suggest, we have all internalized this arbitrary aspect of recorded music and now find the exceptions strange and unusual. I remind myself that even folk and blues songs, some of them centuries old, don’t stretch on endlessly and most don’t have too many verses—that’s how I justify the omnipresent 3½ minute song to myself. Then I realize that some ballads were much, much longer. Epic verse, whether European, Asian, or African, was often delivered in a kind of chant, and a single piece could go on for hours. While shorter forms, like Shakespeare’s sonnets, might be closer to what we now view as songs, 3½ minutes is not a universal song length.

  Perhaps this is a case where the technology and the circumstances of its wide acceptance conveniently happened to fit a pre-existing form like a glove, and that would explain why the technology became so popular. Everyone instinctively knew exactly what to do with it and how to make it part of their lives. Katz says that Adorno didn’t like this time-limiting aspect of recording technology; the grumpy Adorno called it atomized listening. Adorno suggests that our musical attention spans became shorter as a response to the limited length of recordings. A kind of ADD form of listening was ushered in, and we have come to expect everything musical to be broken down—atomized—into threeto four-minute chunks. Even longer pieces now had to advance in bite-sized steps, Adorno claims, because a piece that develops slowly risked losing our interest.

  I can’t disagree with that assessment, but I also sense a counter-tendency afoot, an acceptance of musical works that are exactly the opposite: long and textured, rather than melodic; enveloping and atmospheric as opposed to episodic and hierarchical. I’ll get to those new developments in a later chapter.

  IMPROVISATION BECOMES COMPOSITION

  Recording technology had a huge influence on both jazz and classical players. While performing, jazzers would stretch out a tune or theme as long as they or their audience felt like, or, more practically, as long as the dancers were encouraging them. Soloing for thirty-two choruses was not unheard of (basically, jamming on a song thirty-two times in a row), but that would be way too long on a record, so they edited themselves. The recorded versions of their compositions became more concise, and what was previously largely improvised music began to become more “composed.” The “tightened” versions of their solos were soon what they played more often. Sections that used to sound different every time now always sounded pretty much the same. I’d argue that for some jazz musicians this was not a bad thing—forced brevity became a restriction that encouraged rigor, focus, creative editing, and structuring. In recording, the dynamic differences between loud and soft sections also needed to be minimized. Such restrictions had the side effect of once again splitting musical creation in two; what worked best for a live performance and what worked best for recordings was not always the same thing.

  Music was getting smoothed out, not always for the worse, I’d say, and there would be periodic reactions against this tendency. It’s no wonder that many came to believe that roughness and inaccuracy were positive values; they came to represent authenticity and a resistance to the commercial steamroller of smoothness.

  Though classical pieces still tended to be longer than what recordings could accommodate at the time, even those composers began to adjust to the new technology: they would write transitions that corresponded to the moment one was supposed to flip over the 78. Stravinsky’s “Serenade for Piano” had four movements, which he wrote so that they would each fit onto one side of a record. Decrescendos (a sort of fade out) were incorporated into the music that would occur at the end of one side, and then a crescendo would ramp up on the flip side, so that there would be a smooth transition after you turned the record over. Some composers were criticized for writing graceless transitions, when actually they were merely guilty of not compromising their creativity to better fit the new medium. Ellington began to write “suites” whose sections cleverly accommodated the length of a threeor four-minute recording. This didn’t work for everyone. Jazz teacher and author of Remembering Bix, Ralph Berton, describes how jazz cornetist and composer Bix Beiderbecke hated making records: “For a musician with a lot to say it was like telling Dostoevsky to do the Brothers Karamazov as a short story.”10

  THE NEW WORLD

  Records were fairly cheap for much of the twentieth century—cheaper than a concert ticket. And as they became more widely available, people in small towns, farmers, and kids in school could now hear giant orchestras, the most famous singers of the day, or music from their distant homeland— even if they’d never have the opportunity to hear any of those things live. Not only could recordings bring distant musical cultures in touch with one another, they also had the effect of disseminating the work and performances of singers, orchestras, and performers within a culture. As I suspect has happened to all of us at some point, hearing a new and strange piece of music for the first time often opens a door that you didn’t even know was there. I remember as a tween hearing “Mr. Tambourine Man” by the Byrds and, as would happen again and again over the years, it was as if a previously hidden part of the world had been suddenly revealed. This music not only sounded different, it was socially different. It implied that there was a whole world of people out there who lived different lives and had different values than the people I knew in Arbutus, Maryland. The world was suddenly a bi
gger, more mysterious, and more exciting place—all because I’d stumbled onto some recording.

  Music tells us things—social things, psychological things, physical things about how we feel and perceive our bodies—in a way that other art forms can’t. It’s sometimes in the words, but just as often the content comes from a combination of sounds, rhythms, and vocal textures that communicate, as has been said by others, in ways that bypass the reasoning centers of the brain and go straight to our emotions. Music, and I’m not even talking about the lyrics here, tells us how other people view the world—people we have never met, sometimes people who are no longer alive—and it tells it in a non-descriptive way. Music embodies the way those people think and feel: we enter into new worlds—their worlds—and though our perception of those worlds might not be 100 percent accurate, encountering them can be completely transformative.

  This process of unexpected inspiration flows in multiple directions—out from a musical source to a composer, and then sometimes back to that source again. The European composer Darius Milhaud treasured his collection of “black jazz” recordings. No one would confuse the music Milhaud wrote with that of the jazz players he was listening to, but I’m guessing that the music unlocked something in him that allowed a new direction to be realized in his own work. I wouldn’t be surprised at all if Milhaud’s compositions found their way to the ears of later jazz composers, effectively making a complete loop. Early British rockers were all inspired by recordings of (mostly black) American musicians and singers. Many of those American singers would never have been able to perform in Liverpool or Manchester (though a few did tour the UK), but their recordings went where they could not. To some extent, those British musicians did initially mimic their American idols; some of them tried to sing like black men from the South or from Chicago. If US radio and concerts hadn’t been as segregated as they were (and still are, to a large extent), there would have been no space for these Brits to squeeze through. To their credit, they eventually abandoned the mimicry and found their own voices, and many paid tribute to the musicians who influenced them, which brought them attention that they’d never had before. Another loop of influence and inspiration occurred when African musicians imitated the imported Cuban recordings they heard—which were themselves a mutation of African music. The African guitar-based rhumba that resulted was something new and wonderful, and most folks hearing it wouldn’t think it was a poor imitation of Cuban music at all. When I heard some of those African bands, I had no idea that Cuban music had been their inspiration. What they were doing sounded completely original to me, and I was naturally inspired, just as they had been. The process never stops. Contemporary European DJs were blown away when they heard Detroit techno. This process of influence and inspiration wasn’t the result of corporate marketing or promotion, it was musicians themselves who usually stumbled upon what were often obscure recordings that opened their ears.

  Recordings aren’t time sensitive. You can hear the music you want whether it’s morning, noon, or the middle of the night. You can “get into” clubs virtually, “sit” in concert halls you can’t afford to visit, go to places that are too far away, or hear people sing about things you don’t understand, about lives that are alien, sad, or wonderful. Recorded music can be ripped free from its context, for better and worse. It becomes its own context.

  The jazz soloing that had evolved in response to those dancers in juke joints could now be heard rattling the teacups in distant living rooms and parlors. It was as if, as the result of watching television, we eventually came to expect ordinary conversation to be as witty and snappy as sitcom banter. As if that reality supplanted our lived reality. Had recordings done the same thing to music? Everyone knows sitcom dialogue isn’t how people talk, don’t they? Don’t people know that recordings aren’t “real” either?

  TECHNO UTOPIANISM PART 1

  In 1927, The Jazz Singer, the film which Al Jolson sung in synch with the picture for some scenes, changed the idea of sound in movies. All the studios wanted sound now. In 1926, AT&T created a new division, Electrical Research Products Inc (ERPI), to soundify theaters, not just in North America, but around the world.

  An essay by Emily Thompson called “Wiring the World” tells the story of this relatively short-lived organization. Thompson says that the technicians and engineers of ERPI saw their goal as more than just a technical accomplishment; they attached an ideological, cultural, and even moral aspect to their mission. To prepare themselves, the ERPI team was first given “aural training,” which meant some lessons in theater acoustics, sound reinforcement, and learning how to keep the sound of streetcars and subways out of the theaters. ERPI’s newsletter, The Erpigram, painted a vivid picture: “Each man has been equipped with a large fibre knapsack in which to carry his equipment… the kit also contained a cap pistol to ‘hunt out reverberation, and his echoes, and banish him from the theater’”11

  I prefer to imagine this aural training as something more esoteric, an intensive course in listening, learning to hear, and practicing focusing one’s ears. I can picture a group of uniformed men, heads slightly forward, brows furrowed, listening intently, communicating with each other through hand signals in perfect silence. The skills they were developing were, in my version, almost mystical, in that they might have been training themselves to be able to hear things the rest of us would miss or to become aware of sounds that we would hear only subconsciously. Like some acoustic Sherlock Holmes, they could survey a room with their ears and be able to tell you things about it, even what was going on outside of it—things that ordinary mortals without their special powers would miss. But, as with Holmes’s explanations, it would all seem obvious once it was revealed to us by the ERPI master. While the listening training may have been important, in truth much of what they were assigned to do was pretty prosaic: wiring and hanging drapes to muffle echoes and help with soundproofing.

  Thompson writes about an ERPI team in Canton, Ohio, who heard a roaring sound coming from somewhere near the screen, and of course they had to track it down, find its source, and eliminate the offending noise. After “considerable time spent tracking the noise through the circuit,” they looked behind the screen to find six caged lions belonging to the circus.

  ERPI was more than a little evangelical. Much like our present-day techno-utopians, they believed that there would be all kinds of profound repercussions and knock-on effects (many of them completely unrelated to sound) around the world as theaters were converted to sound. In the early days of cinema, America was the primary source of films, so it was imagined that along with movies, American values—democracy, capitalism, free speech, and all the rest—would go along for the ride. Talkies would bring “civilization” to the rest of the world! (“Civilization” being defined rather parochially, as it often is. One hears the same claims today being made for Facebook and all the other new technologies—that they will “bring democracy to the world.” Hell, they haven’t brought democracy to the USA!) Interesting that “mere” film sound technology was presumed to carry so much of this baggage.

  The Erpigram published a poem expressing their hopes and aspirations:

  The Chinaman rejects his jos

  The Jap his hari kiri

  Mahomet’s stocks are wearing thin

  For ERPI is established in

  The Lands of Rice and Curry!

  Quite soon among the Eskimos

  The fetish will be known

  While mid-equator cannibals

  Leave their cooking pots and Anabelles

  To hear the white sheet groan!

  Where nations lack a common bond

  And hate grows like a cancer

  Who’ll banish ignorance and strife

  And give the world new lease on life?

  Why ERPI—is the answer!12

  Thompson writes, “The [evangelical] language became military, and a little sexual—the engineers were referred to as the American Expeditionary Force…and as shock troops�
� also as American Experts… The headline as a theater in Cairo was being equipped for sound was ‘Africa Falls Under ERPI’s Advance.’”13

  This techno-crusade assumed that influence would essentially flow one way, from the United States to all the other nations of the world, which would naturally become willing and happy consumers of superior American products. And that’s precisely what happened at first, because few countries had native film industries, and none of those had sound technology. In India they were treated to “Melody of Love” and in Fiji to “Abie’s Irish Rose”; folks in Shanghai got “Rio Rita” and “Hollywood Revue.” Only the very best in American culture.

  This state of affairs didn’t last long. The French, unsurprisingly, took offense at English blasting out of their cinemas, and they destroyed a theater. Aspiring Indian filmmakers quickly learned how to use sound technology, and began making their own movies. Before long, India was the largest movie-producing country in the world. Movie studios equipped for sound also opened in Germany and Brazil, where a factory producing lightweight musicals churned out films for decades. As with most missionary initiatives, the final result was not exactly what had been intended. Instead of global hegemony and standardization, sound in films allowed hundreds of cultures to find their own cinematic voices. In fact, some argue that it was the homegrown Indian cinema that forced that country’s citizens to learn a common language, which may have helped Indians find national identity as much as the efforts of Gandhi did. And that common language eventually enabled the unity that led to the ouster of the British Empire.

  BEYOND PERFORMANCE: TAPE RECORDING

  Milner tells the curious history of the advent of recording tape—the next medium on which sound would be captured. The sequence of events that led to the adoption of tape is so accidental and convoluted that its invention and adoption were far from inevitable.

  Just before WWII, Jack Mullin, an engineer from California, tried recording onto various mediums other than discs, but with limited fidelity or success. When he was stationed overseas during the war, he sometimes heard broadcasts of radio programs featuring German symphonies. Nothing unusual about that: lots of radio stations had their own orchestras that played live in large studios or theaters, and those performances were primarily broadcast live. The odd thing was, these “performances” were happening in the wee hours of the morning, and Mullin heard them when he was working late. So unless Hitler was commanding orchestras to perform in the middle of the night, Mullin’s only conclusion was that the Germans somehow had developed machines that could record orchestras with such fidelity that on playback they sounded live.