by David Byrne
In 1977, composer Alvin Lucier made a piece using one string—a monochord. By listening and focusing on different parts of it as it vibrated, one could hear a whole range of sounds when these overtones were amplified via microphonic pickups. Like Lucier, composer Ellen Fullman also works with long strung wires as her instruments, turning the entire interior of a building into an instrument by running the “strings” from one side to the other. As with Lucier’s piece, she lets the natural overtones determine what the mode or scale will be.
In 2005, I, too, turned a building into an instrument, by using an old pump organ’s keys essentially as a set of switches that activated machines clamped to various parts of a big old industrial space. Motors would vibrate girders, which would resonate according to their length. Little hammers would strike hollow cast-iron columns, and they’d act like xylophones or gongs. Skinny air tubes would blow into the plumbing, which would become like lovely resonant alto flutes. You’d think it would be noisy and “industrial,” but it was actually quite musical. The general public was invited to play the building via this contraption. Everyone got a chance to sit at the organ and do whatever they wanted.
Was this a piece of music? A composition? Who knows? What was more important to me was that this device democratized music. Given that this wasn’t an instrument on which anyone could be a virtuoso, the playing field was leveled. Kids who played it were technically as good as trained and experienced composers, and even as good as the musicians who sometimes sat at the thing, and knew it, instinctively. The kids’ usual fear and trepidation about playing an unfamiliar instrument in front of others vanished. Like Lucier’s wire and Fullman’s strings, there was no composition involved in the creation of this music— the music was absolutely determined by its environment and by the players. A lot of this cosmic music has no beginning and no end. It’s music that proposes that it exists, like myriad other elements that surround us, as a constant element in the world, rather than as a finite recording or performance.
Last year, I saw a performance by composer John Luther Adams. It took place at the cavernous 67th Street Armory in Manhattan and featured, for more than an hour, at least sixty percussionists playing mallet instruments like xylophones and wind-effect machines. There was a score, of sorts. I looked at one that was resting on a music stand and saw that it consisted of a series of short, unconnected twoor three-note phrases. The idea was to play a phrase, not necessarily in unison with the other players, and then gradually the players would move on to the next phase. One by one the players would begin playing the next group of notes on their charts on whatever instrument it was written for. And so on, until everyone reached the end, which was when everyone had exhausted all the little parts. It took about an hour. The result was textural, a landscape, and not melodic. A wash of one kind of sound would surround you, its nature specific to whatever instruments were being played, and then slowly the sound environment would segue into a new texture, as players here and there decided to move on. The audience was free to wander around, and the players were spread all over—there was no “stage,” and therefore no central focus. I’d compare the experience to watching weather, to seeing clouds build up on the horizon, come closer, and gradually grow darker, take on an ominous texture, and then burst, releasing a torrent of water, and then just as quickly they would move on and the sky would become clear again. It wasn’t like Cage, but it was also a way of sensing and experiencing that the world is music, a composition of sorts, and not a predetermined one.
In the sixties, composer Terry Riley used to give all-night concerts in which he’d create sonic environments by improvising (within strict parameters) to tape loops. The audiences would often bring sleeping bags and doze through parts of the “concert.” (Shades of Bing Muscio and Satie with their ignorable music.) When Riley needed a bathroom break, he’d let the loops continue without him. Rhys Chatham and Glenn Branca created similar soundscapes for massed guitars—wonderful experiences that evoke the thrum of a highway overpass or a steel foundry. In 2006, I saw the band SunnO))), who theatricalized this experience—they played a concert in a former church. Their music consists of monstrously loud drones that swell and roll over the audience while the perfomers stand with their guitars in front of a wall of stacked guitar amps, dressed as a group of hooded Druids. There are no drums and no songs, not as we know them. Ritual was back or maybe it never went away. The sound of SunnO))) is amazing—the beautiful dark side of ambience.
SELF-ORGANIZING MUSIC
Maybe there’s a logical end to the path I’m going down here. If music is inherent in all things and places, then why not let music play itself? The composer, in the traditional sense, might no longer be necessary. Let the planets and spheres spin. Musician Bernie Krause has just come out with a book about “biophony”—the world of music and sounds made by animals, insects, and the nonhuman environment. Music made by self-organizing systems means that anyone or anything can make it, and anyone can walk away from it. Cage said the contemporary composer “resembles the maker of a camera who allows someone else to take the picture.”12 That’s sort of the elimination of authorship, at least in the accepted sense. He felt that traditional music, with its scores that instruct which note should be played and when, are not reflections of the processes and algorithms that activate and create the world around us. The world indeed offers us restricted possibilities and opportunities, but there are always options, and more than one way for things to turn out. He and others wondered if maybe music might partake of this emergent process.
A small device made in China takes this idea one step further. The Buddha Machine is a music player that uses random algorithms to organize a series of soothing tones and thereby create never-ending, non-repeating melodies. The programmer who made the device and organized its sounds replaces the composer, effectively leaving no performer. The composer, the instrument, and the performer are all one machine. These are not very sophisticated devices, though one can envision a day when all types of music might be machine-generated. The basic, commonly used patterns that occur in various genres could become the algorithms that guide the manufacture of sounds. One might view much of corporate pop and hip-hop as being machine-made—their formulas are well established, and one need only choose from a variety of available hooks and beats, and an endless recombinant stream of radio-friendly music emerges. Though this industrial approach is often frowned on, its machine-made nature could just as well be a compliment—it returns musical authorship to the ether. All these developments imply that we’ve come full circle: we’ve returned to the idea that our universe might be permeated with music.
I welcome the liberation of music from the prison of melody, rigid structure, and harmony. Why not? But I also listen to music that does adhere to those guidelines. Listening to the Music of the Spheres might be glorious, but I crave a concise song now and then, a narrative or a snapshot more than a whole universe. I can enjoy a movie or read a book in which nothing much happens, but I’m deeply conservative as well—if a song establishes itself within the pop genre, then I listen with certain expectations. I can become bored more easily by a pop song that doesn’t play by its own rules than by a contemporary composition that is repetitive and static. I like a good story and I also like staring at the sea—do I have to choose between the two?
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Many years ago, while on tour, I sent Dave Eggers some journal entries from the road for his amusement—from Eastern Europe, I believe it was. They were possibly sent by fax; it was that long ago. Dave thought they shed light on what a touring musician’s life was really like—a peek into a world he felt hadn’t been revealed previously. This was encouraging and exciting feedback, but it was also before the era of blogging, so my missives remained unpublished, though a few anecdotes managed to sneak into my previous book about bikes and cities. Dave’s enthusiasm planted a seed that I might write about music someday. But I had many trepidations about going down that road—the “aging r
ocker bio” is a crowded shelf—and I resisted for a long time, but it seems the day is here. I think I managed to give a sense that the world of music is wider than my personal experience, but my experience figures in here too.
Scott Moyers, who is now at Penguin Press, did the first rough edit and helped restructure this thing. Then it moved on to the McSweeney’s team: Ethan Nosowsky has been the principal editor. Adam Krefman, Dave Eggers (cover design), Chelsea Hogue, and Walter Green all helped with content, design (Walter did most of the interior layout), and the time-consuming image licensing. My own office, Todomundo, has kept this project on track over quite a few years—LeeAnn Rossi has been involved in overall coordination, and Frank Hendler helped with the music business research in chapter seven, as did my manager, David Whitehead. My business managers, Lia Sweet, Nan Lanigan, and Illene Bashinsky, were also hugely helpful in our attempts to decode and present the finances of musicians and to explain as clearly as possible a transparent accounting history of a couple of my own projects.
My literary agent, Andrew Wylie, was understanding when I explained that this book was going to be neither an autobiography nor a series of think pieces—but a little bit of both. Now that it’s done, it’s a little easier to explain.
Thanks to Sally Singer for insisting I go through it one more time. Thanks too to the folks who have allowed use of their photos, quotations, and diagrams, and to the rights holders of the music snippets included in the ebook.
NOTES
Chapter One: Creation in Reverse
1 Folk Song Style and Culture, by Alan Lomax, Transaction Publishers, 1978.
2 “Why So Serious?” by Alex Ross, The New Yorker, September 8, 2008.
3 “Bird Songs,” by Gareth Huw Davies, in David Attenborough’s program, The Life of Birds, PBS. www.pbs.org/lifeofbirds/songs/index.html.
4 “The relation of geographical variation in song to habitat characteristics and body size in North American Tanagers,” by Eyal Shy, Behavioral Ecology and Sociobiology vol. 12, Number 1, 71–76.
5 “How City Noise Is Reshaping Birdsong,” by David Biello, Scientific American, October 22, 2009.
Chapter Two: My Life in Performance
1 “Creativity and psychopathology: A study of 291 world-famous men,” by Felix Post, The British Journal of Psychiatry (1994) 165: 22–24. The British Journal of Psychiatry (1994) 165: 22–24.
Chapter Three: Technology Shapes Music: Analog
1 “The Heleocentric Pantheon: An Interview with Walter Murch,” by Geoff Manaugh, BLDG Blog, April 2007. http://bldgblog.blogspot.com/2007/04/heliocentric-pantheoninterview-with.html.
2 Capturing Sound: How Technology Has Changed Music, by Mark Katz, University of California Press, 2010, p. 13.
3 Perfecting Sound Forever: An Aural History of Recorded Music, by Greg Milner, Faber & Faber, 2010, p. 14.
4 Capturing Sound: How Technology Has Changed Music, by Mark Katz, University of California Press, 2010, p.60.
5 “The Menace of Mechanical Music,” by John Philip Sousa, originally published in Appleton’s Magazine vol. 8, 1906, p. 278. www.phonozoic.net/n0155.htm.
6 Perfecting Sound Forever: An Aural History of Recorded Music, by Greg Milner, Faber & Faber, 2010, p. 78.
7 Ibid.
8 Si sos brujo: A Tango Story, Caroline Neal, Cinemateca, 2005. DVD.
9 Perfecting Sound Forever: An Aural History of Recorded Music, by Greg Milner, Faber & Faber, 2010.
10 Capturing Sound: How Technology Has Changed Music, by Mark Katz, Faber & Faber, 2010, p. 83.
11 “Wiring the World: Acoustical Engineers and the Empire of Sound in the Motion Picture Industry, 1927–1930,” by Emily Thompson, in Hearing Cultures: Essays on Sound, Listening and Modernity, Veir Erlmann, ed., Berg Publishers, p. 202.
12 Ibid, p. 198.
13 Ibid, p. 202.
14 “The Prospects of Recording,” by Glenn Gould, in High Fidelity vol. 16, no. 4, April 1966, p. 46–63.
15 “Thanks for the Memorex,” by Hua Hsu, ArtForum, February 2011.
16 Capturing Sound: How Technology Has Changed Music, by Mark Katz, University of California Press, 2010, p. 12.
Chapter Four: Technology Shapes Music: Digital
1 Perfecting Sound Forever: An Aural History of Recorded Music, by Greg Milner, Faber & Faber, 2010.
2 Ibid.
3 Ibid.
4 “Thinking About Sound, Proximity, and Distance in Western Experience: The Case of Odysseus’s Walkman,” by Michael Bull, in Hearing Cultures: Essays on Sound, Listening and Modernity, Veir Erlmann, ed., Berg Publishers, p. 174.
5 Ibid.
Chapter Five: In The Recording Studio
1 “The Prospects of Recording,” by Glenn Gould, in High Fidelity vol. 16, no. 4, April 1966.
Chapter Six: Collaborations
1 “N.A.S.A: The Spirit of Apollo” by Tom Breihan, Pitchfork, February 18, 2009. www.pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/12686-the-spirit-of-apollo.
Chapter Seven: Business and Finances
1 “The Artistry Is Apparent, So Where’s the Audience?” by Stephen Holden, The New York Times, February 6, 2011.
2 “Musical Survivor Hustles for a Second Chance,” by Ben Sisario, The New York Times, February 8, 2011.
3 “U2 Signs 12-Year Deal with Live Nation,” Billboard. www.billboard.com/news/article_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1003782687#/news/article_display.jsp?vnu_content_ id=1003782687.
4 “Live Nation’s $120 Million Bet: Breaking Down Madonna Deal,” by Peter Kafka, Business Insider, October 10, 2007. http://articles.businessinsider.com/2007-10-10/tech/30040635_1_madonna-deal-live-nation-material-girl.
5 “Bandcamp Powers Online Sales, Aims to Fill Myspace ‘Vacuum’,” by John Tozzi, Bloomberg, November 01, 2011. www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-11-01/bandcamp-powersonline-sales-aims-to-fill-myspace-vacuum-.html.
Chapter Eight: How to Make a Scene
1 Toward a Poor Theater, by Jerzy Grotowski, Routledge, 2002, p. 255.
Chapter Nine: Amateurs!
1 Capturing Sound: How Technology Has Changed Music, by Mark Katz, University of California Press, 2010.
2 What Good Are the Arts? by John Carey, Faber & Faber, 2005, p. 34–6.
3 “The Menace of Mechanical Music,” by John Philip Sousa, originally published in Appleton’s Magazine vol. 8, 1906.
4 Capturing Sound: How Technology Has Changed Music, by Mark Katz, University of California Press, 2010.
5 “What’s Wrong with Classical Music?” by Colin Eatock, 3 Quarks Daily, October 4, 2010. www.3quarksdaily.com/3quarksdaily/2010/10/whats-wrong-with-classical-music.html.
6 Ibid.
7 Ibid.
8 What Good Are the Arts?, by John Carey, Faber & Faber, 2005, p. 97.
9 Ibid, p. 97–99.
10 Ibid, p. 101.
11 The Blockbuster attendance figures can be found here: http://blogs.artinfo.com/realcleararts/2011/08/08/wait-a-minute-further-thoughts-on-two-blockbuster-shows.
12 What Good Are the Arts? by John Carey, Faber & Faber, 2005, p. 20–32.
13 Ibid, p. 25.
14 Criticisms on Art, by William Hazlitt, Nabu Press, 2011, p. 110.
15 Patronizing the Arts, by Marjorie Garber, Princeton University Press, 2008, p. 52.
16 Ibid, p. 54.
17 “Design for Living,” by Paul Goldberger, The New Yorker, April 4, 2011.
18 Perfecting Sound Forever: An Aural History of Recorded Music, by Greg Milner, Faber & Faber, 2010, p. 119.
19 “A Metropolitan Opera High Note, as Donations Hit $182 Million,” by Daniel J. Wakin, The New York Times, October 10, 2011. www.nytimes.com/2011/10/11/arts/music/metropolitan-operas-donations-hit-a-record-182-million.html?pagewanted=all.
20 “L.A. Opera’s ‘Ring’ cycle may be in the red,” by Mike Boehm, Los Angeles Times, May 29, 2010. http://articles.latimes.com/2010/may/29/entertainment/la-et-ringtickets-20100529.
21 “A Metropolitan Opera High Note, as Donations Hit $182 Million,” by Da
niel J. Wakin, The New York Times, October 10, 2011. www.nytimes.com/2011/10/11/arts/music/metropolitan-operas-donations-hit-a-record-182-million.html?pagewanted=all.
22 “Reader Response: Orchestras Are Overextended,” by Daniel J. Wakin, The New York Times, April 22, 2011. http://artsbeat.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/04/22/reader-responseorchestras-are-over-extended.
23 “Los galeones en el siglo XXI. El Roxy, un ejemplo de art deco tapatio,” in Replicant vol. 3, No. 12, Summer 2007.
24 What Good Are the Arts? by John Carey, Faber & Faber, 2005, p. 40.
25 “Beyond Baby Mozart: Students Who Rock,” by David Bornstein, The New York Times, September 8, 2011. http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/09/08/beyond-babymozart-students-who-rock.
26 “Rock Is Not the Enemy,” by David Bornstein, The New York Times, September 13, 2011. http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/09/13/rock-is-not-the-enemy.
27 “Strings Attached: What the Venezuelans Are Doing for British Kids,” by Ed Vulliamy, The Observer, October 3, 2010.
28 Ibid.
29 Ibid.
30 “Let’s Get Serious About Cultivating Creativity,” by Steven J. Tepper & Georde D. Kuh, The Chronicle of Higher Education, September 4, 2011. www.chronicle.com/article/Lets-Get-Serious-About/128843.
