Tag Archives: music

(Y)Our Senses

Reconceptualizing ourselves and our environment interests me from both a social science perspective (e.g., constructivism) and a musical perspective (e.g., noise and field recordings). A recent All Things Considered on NPR reported on composer Brent Michael Davids’ Tinnitus Quartet, which replicates the sound Davids hears as a result of his tinnitus.

Davids’ idea is to communicate what he and other people with tinnitus hear to those who do not have the condition, and the radio segment approaches the music in this way. A more interesting approach, however, would have been to use the different ways in which we (in this case, people with and people without tinnitus) hear to question our conceptualization of sound and hearing (or, more generally, the senses). More specific, it demonstrates the personal/individual character of our senses and breaks apart the uniformity (among people) with which we treat/understand each sense. Unfortunately, neither the reporter, Jeffrey Freymann-Weyr, nor Davids does so directly.

Based on the snippets of the piece in the segment, I would certainly like to hear the full version, which is an 18 minute piece of a constant high-pitched tone with violin-created grasshopper chirping noises that eventually fall away to silence.

Rock ‘n’ Roll And Property

Ben pointed out this Marketplace clip by Ian Svenonious, who DC hipsters will know as the lead singer in the bands The Make-Up and Weird War.

In it, Svenonious explores property’s relationship to music, particularly contrasting rock ‘n’ roll with electroclash and what he calls the “semi-acoustic psychedelic folk revival.” He begins by arguing that Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan’s policy of low, low interest rates caused property prices to dramatically appreciate and, therefore, push low-income people into cramped quarters. To deal with constraints imposed by space and neighbors, the noisiness and size of bands (compared to rock ‘n’ roll) declined significantly. Musicians turned to electronic drums to replace drum kits, which are too big for apartments, and bands evolved into groups of one or two only. This downsizing of the rock ‘n’ roll sound can be found, Svenonious argues, in electroclash and the folk revival.
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Re: Attacking Recording Technology

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:
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