Generally, debating and analyzing the affects recorded music has had on society is left to avant-garde musicians and academics, but the release of several books detailing the history of recorded music has changed this. The consequences of Edison’s development of the phonograph has, as of late, gained a larger interest in the public eye. Unfortunately, the interest, although being informative and thought-provoking, is significantly flawed.
Two of the most widely read and extensive accounts of our ability to record music are articles that review these recently published books. The first is “The Record Effect: How Technology Has Transformed the Sound of Music,” by Alex Ross and appearing in The New Yorker. Ross critically reviews: Mark Katz’ Capturing Sound: How Technology Has Changed Music (University of California Press; $19.95), Colin Symes’ Setting the Record Straight: A Material History of Classical Recording (Wesleyan University Press; $39.95), and Robert Philip’s Performing Music in the Age of Recording (Yale University Press, $35). The second article is Charles Rosen’s “Playing Music: The Lost Freedom,” which appeared in The New York Review of Books, and reviews Philip’s book.
To be clear, I haven’t read these books, so my response is limited to and more of a reaction of Ross’ and Rosen’s digestion of those books. Responding to arguments initially presented in longer, more thorough, and detailed book form through review essays is problematic, however, I–like Ross and Rosen–take on the larger ideas.
Two of the largest ideas the authors seem to agree upon is that the advent of recorded music has mortally wounded live performances, both their quality and attendance, and constrained music in various ways. Ross captures these major themes when he writes:
Yet, for most of us, music is no longer something we do ourselves, or even watch other people doing in front of us. It has become a radically virtual medium, an art without a face….Zombified listeners will shuffle through the archives of the past, and new music will consist of rearrangements of the old.
The problem with this diagnosis, despite the authors’ claims, is that it is actually a diagnosis of the state of classical music. And even this is done in a non-critical way that is unwilling to examine the foundations of the dead, white, man music the authors prefer. This may read harsh, but just like past history texts have failed to examine the role and life of minorities and common people, these musical histories fail to examine the birth, evolution, and state of other forms of music. And as social histories have eclipsed traditional historical narratives, so to has social music eclipsed classical music.
The analogy with classical historical narratives is not a stretch. Consider Ross’ dismissal of both non-classical music and entire groups of the population:
But, honestly, a lot of us don’t go to hear live music that often. Work leaves us depleted. Tickets are too expensive. Concert halls are stultifying. Rock clubs are full of kids who make us feel ancient. It’s just so much easier to curl up in the comfy chair with a Beethoven quartet or Billie Holiday. But would Beethoven or Billie ever have existed if people had always listened to music the way we listen now?
Ross exclusion of young people from the population that matters through the “us”/”kids” distinction is not all that different from the exclusion of women and minorities in the “great” histories of civilization. A closer look at both marginalized groups (e.g., kids and minorities) reveals important ideas, trends, and behavior, which demonstrates that the picture (positive in terms of macro-histories and troubling in terms of the music histories) isn’t accurate.
Why does the attendance of rock clubs not matter? Why is the participation rate of “kids who make us feel ancient” irrelevant? There are no answers to these questions because both matter. The exclusion of certain venues, types of music, and groups creates a biased, and in this case false, portrayal of music’s condition. If such a portrayal weren’t so disturbing, we might be amused at Ross’ use of both Beethoven and Holiday in the same sentence. After all, without the groups Ross is comfortable excluding (e.g., the youth, and in this case black youth) popularizing Holiday, she would never have been included in the accepted musical cannon of white America, even today.
Taking a more “social” perspective of music’s evolution and current condition would have not only shown the authors they were making something out of nothing (i.e., music is not negatively affected by recording technology), but that their arguments were full of contradictions. For example, Ross writes that tickets are too expensive but then suggests that the only people with enough energy (and money?) to go to shows are kids. I’ve never been to a show where ticket prices were determined by age, so it’s perplexing that young people can better afford live music than the privileged class to which Ross undoubtedly belongs.
Not only would stepping outside of the mainstream and classical music worlds improve Ross’, and the others’, analysis, but he’d also find a plethora of high-quality, live, and affordable shows to attend. If you’re lazy and unwilling to look beyond what is handed to you on the silver platter that is radio or hand-me-down classical pieces, then you’ll have to pay the price–in both dollars and quality.
But the authors of these texts are unwilling to do so and, therefore, they set up the disastrous condition they find music to be in, all so they can attack it. For example, Rosen seems to think that if pianos aren’t being played in the home, then neither is music:
By the twenty-first century, all this has changed. Both private and public music are being displaced by recordings. Few people make music themselves at home anymore. Because of more cramped living space, it is now inconvenient to house a piano, a once indispensable piece of furniture for any household with even modest pretensions to culture and the instrument that for more than a century was the mainstay of classical music. Outside the big cities, live public music is disappearing as well. Most of the smaller towns that used to have a classical concert series have lost that, and if they are too insignificant to sponsor a popular rock group event, their public music must be confined to clubs.
But there are more instruments than just the piano, and the number of guitars, drum sets, and keyboards that have been sold surely outnumber, even on a per capita basis, the number of full pianos during the pre-recorded period.
They are also unwilling to accept that changing tastes and better access to markets by minorities (i.e., groups who aren’t historically connected to the cultural reproduction mechanisms of classical music) have contributed to a decline in the popularity and economic feasibility of classical music. Instead, they blame recording equipment. For instance, Rosen writes:
Even live symphony and opera broadcasts have been largely eliminated. At home today we play records. Classical and pop radio stations play records. And often ballet companies and theatrical productions play records in place of hiring musicians.
Their unrelenting flogging of the recorded music mule leads Ross to write, and the authors to agree, that recordings have caused the extinction of less-than-popular music:
Recording broke down barriers between cultures, but it also placed more archaic musical forms in danger of extinction. In the early years of the century, Béla Bartók, Zoltán Kodály, and Percy Grainger used phonographs to preserve the voices of elderly folksingers whose timeless ways were being stamped out by the advance of modern life. And what was helping to stamp them out? The phonograph, with its international hit tunes and standardized popular dances.
As an aside, this may stem from their odd notion that classical music is unusual; Ross writes:
[Glenn Gould] took it for granted that the taste for Buxtehude motets or for surprising new approaches to Bach could survive the death of the concert—that somehow new electronic avenues could be found to spread the word about old and unusual music. Gould’s thesis is annulled by cold statistics: classical-record sales have plunged, while concert attendance is anxiously holding steady.
Returning to the earlier point, yes, recorded music has led the lazy to converge to a common notion of what is good among a given culture (i.e., pop music is now truly pop(ular) rather than localized flavors). But even pop music is significantly different between cultures. Just think of J-Pop, K-Pop, Britpop, West Coast rap, East Coast Rap, and the Dirty South (rap).
And underneath the currents of pop music exists an incredible amount of diversity and transcultural and trans-temporal movement. How else can you explain the popularity of rap in the Midwest, the success of Afro-Cuban jazz in the United States and nu-jazz‘ dominance in Japan? Even migration patterns would be hard pressed to do a better job. And in the genre that is perhaps the least “live” of all, electronica, you have an amazing array of local flavors (e.g., Chicago House, Detroit Techno, New York House, and French House).
These authors’ nostalgia for a period they never experienced leads them to conjure up an idealized form of music, assign negative connotations to most musical innovation and evolution, and blame recordings for those changes. At the same time, they largely forget the absurdities at which western European experiences, musical or otherwise, has excelled. The performances these authors hold up as containing the most freedom and contributing to a period of community mindedness is actually a period where only the rich, who were also the only ones not “depleted” from work, could afford, and welcomed, to attend classical music performances.
My response is neither labeling these authors’ accounts as explicitly racist or classist, nor does it ignore the fact that many groups had access to and created their own live music, but these were not of the classical music variety and they were highly evolving. Rather, it is important to examine the entire social music scene or else we will be left with an uneven account and analysis. However, I’m also willing to wager that live music is both more accessible and better attended today than it was during the pre-recorded era.
It is only a few steps away before you reach their second major point of criticism these essays and books levy at recording technology: It’s not-so-gradually eliminated the freedom performing music once had because of efforts to record and perform perfect renditions. Ross writes:
All those lost tics and traits—swaying on either side of the beat, sliding between notes, breaking chords into arpeggios, members of a quartet going every which way—are alike in bringing out the distinct voices of the players, not to mention the mere fact that they are fallible humans. Philip writes, ‘If you hear the Royal Albert Hall Orchestra sliding, you may or may not like it, but you cannot be unaware of the physical process of playing.’ Most modern performance tends to erase all evidence of the work that goes into playing: virtuosity is defined as effortlessness. One often-quoted ideal is to ‘disappear behind the music.’ But when precision is divorced from emotion it can become anti-musical, inhuman, repulsive.
Throughout the authors’ arguments, there is a not-so-implicit epistemological position, which I consider to be a major flaw, that certain preferences are inherently or absolutely better than others. For example, it is assumed that live musical performances are better than home listening. Why? It is never explained. Similarly, here, the authors assume that a certain character to the reproduction of music is better than another. Why?
In arguing that many of these imperfections or tools of emphasis have fallen from the musical repertoire, the authors seem to be writing that these techniques are gone and no longer usable. Rosen, who has used some of the specific techniques the authors refer to in his own recordings, seems to contradict his own experiences by writing:
The string players’ old-fashioned device of sliding from one note to another, or portamento, has, as Philip remarks, a double purpose: ‘for deliberate effect and as a routine manner of changing position.’ The loss of an expressive device, above all one inherent in a musical style, is always regrettable.
But musicians are always free to use those tools. While the authors prefer imposing a certain playing style upon the performers, what makes them the musicians and us the audience is the fact they are making the decisions of what, when, how, and why to play what they play. Curiously, there is a glimpse that the authors recognize this, even if they don’t use it as a guiding light to correct their arguments. As Ross writes:
But the more dynamic Renaissance and Baroque specialists—Andrew Manze, the Venice Baroque Orchestra, Il Giardino Armonico, William Christie’s Les Arts Florissants—are exercising all the freedoms that Philip misses in modern performance: they execute some notes cleanly and others roughly, they weave around the beat instead of staying right on top of it, they slide from note to note when they are so moved. As a result, the music feels liberated, and audiences tend to respond in kind, with yelps of joy.
It is not surprising, though, that they reject the manipulation of sound in the studio. As Ross writes:
Recordings were supposed to deny the fact that they were recordings. That process involved, paradoxically, considerable artifice. Overdubbing, patching, knob-twiddling, and even digital effects such as ‘pitch correction’ are as common in the classical studio as in pop. The phenomenon of the dummy star, who has a hard time replicating onstage what he or she purports to do on record, is not unheard of.
Why should it not be a part of classical music? Why should any musician not be free to decide to use studio music equipment just as they are free to decide which music equipment, more traditionally conceived, to use? And why is someone who is a virtuoso at production and the use of studio equipment spurred as a “dummy star”? Are not all instruments merely tools to control sound?
In fact, it’s the ability to manipulate audio in various manners that shows the strengths of recording equipment. Not only would music forms such as rap and electronica not exist, but being able to go beyond the capabilities of an orchestra or band opens a wide door of musical freedoms and opportunities unavailable to earlier musicians. This provides new forms of expression and maintains the ability of musicians to control tempo or other music characteristics with which Philip is so concerned.
Here, as elsewhere, an occasional line of thought that breaks through the near-lusting after of classical music appears. In this case, it’s the fact that recording equipment may not be to blame after all; as Ross writes:
The urge toward precision was already well under way in the late nineteenth century, when Hans von Bülow’s Meiningen orchestra was celebrated as the best-rehearsed of its time, and when the big new orchestras of America, the Boston Symphony first and foremost, astonished European visitors like Richard Strauss and Gustav Mahler with the discipline of their playing. Other technologies that preceded the phonograph also changed how people played and listened. Those who got to know music on a well-tuned piano began to expect the same from an orchestra. The sonic wonders of Boston’s Symphony Hall—the first hall whose acoustics were scientifically designed—placed a golden frame around the music, and the orchestra had to measure up. Most of all, classical music in America suffered from being a reproduction itself, an immaculate copy of European tradition.
Like other times when the authors appear to catch themselves, they move on quickly and fail to consider the larger implications of the small point they stumbled upon. Had they thought longer about the move toward precision before recording equipment made its debut, they would have realized that it is not the technology that put music on the path that it is today, but classical music’s cultural underpinnings–the western European tradition, which has enjoyed an unrivaled hegemonic position for the past 200-plus years.
Audio recording equipment is not particularly special or new. It’s one more way in which we record information. Other forms include the video camera and pencil and paper. The written record precedes audio recording by just a little bit and has had a much larger role in standardizing music and leading to the increasing perfection of music performances. After all, without the written record, music, like knowledge more generally, would be difficult to duplicate and build upon in any form, which is probably why the very masters these authors hold up on high accepted and used the written method in creating and distributing their works.
Even if Bach and Beethoven had chosen the spoken word or some other method to create their music, it is unlikely that audiences beyond those located in their areas and during their time period would have ever been exposed to their music. Just as we know little about the people who lived before writing debuted, we would know little about music of any period if it weren’t for some type of recording method, whether it is pencil and paper or DAT. To criticize audio recording equipment without casting a critical eye at the written method is missing a much larger part of the historical, cultural, social, and musical landscape.
Although these works should be applauded for their attempt to stimulate a discussion about recording technologies, they do little to develop a better sense of what the actual consequences have been. Without a deeper (e.g., sociological) and wider (e.g., beyond classical music) study, little is gained and much is lost, including crucial race and class dynamics that both affected and were affected by recorded music. In this sense, not only have the authors missed an important piece of our past and present, but so have we.