Printed by permission of the author.
When pianist Franz Liszt, a superstar of the age, toured Europe in the 19th century, he had to stay in one place for a pretty long time in order for many people thereabouts to hear him. Embedded in the grooves of a shellac or vinyl recording, or captured on tape or CD, any one of his performances could have been scattered to audiences across an indefinite span of space and time. Would Liszt have grabbed the chance to be recorded? Very likely. The legendary New Orleans trumpet player Freddie Keppard didn’t take the chance when, in 1915, the Victor Talking Machine Company offered him the opportunity to be the first to record jazz. He said he didn’t want people “stealing his stuff.” And so this new music was kept secret from the larger world until two years later when, ironically, a white band kicked off the jazz age by recording “Livery Stable Blues.” Three decades later, blues singer Muddy Waters wasn’t worrying about people stealing his stuff. Instead of staying in Clarksdale, Mississippi, playing front porches and juke joints, Waters went to Chicago to get into “the big record field.” As a result, his music would be transformed, from live to canned, from mere popularity to mass arthood. It wasn’t long before Brian Jones was mailing away to get Waters’ albums, which became a basic influence on the music of the Rolling Stones. Ignoring Keppard’s concerns, recording technology did institutionalize stealing other people’s stuff—and on a massive scale.
Of course, documentation—the preservation of music performance—has always been an official rationale for phonography. (“Phonography” is Evan Eisenberg’s fine term for the technology that nowadays includes the whole field of canned music—records, tapes, CDs, as well as music file-shared or downloaded onto iPods.) The other is convenience. You can listen to Mahler’s Symphony of a Thousand at dawn, or at dusk, as you wish. And, you can do so a thousand times, if you like.
But many music lovers are phonophobic, although not for Keppard’s reasons. From the earliest days in its history, recording technology was often regarded as a diabolical machine that would kill the soul of any music. Naturally, phonophobes tend to be vivaphiles, that is, lovers of live music. Jazz writer Scott DeVeaux has declared recordings to be at best a mere advertisement for the living thing. Phonophiles see things differently. The editors of a recent anthology on the topic assert confidently that “recorded [music] has all but displaced the live event as primary,” a situation the writers happily embrace.
If phonography is a mere document of a live event, what bothers the phonophobe? What are documents but windows onto the past? The analogy of phonography to a transparent window has always been deeply entrenched in the industry’s self-advertisements. The philosopher, Theodore Gracyk, agrees, with respect to most music recordings. A recording, he says, stands between the audience and the music like “the sheet of glass that protects a painting from the audience in the art museum.” The “ideal,” he says, is “transparency.”
According to the transparency model, the transparent window may need a spritz of Windex now and then, but we can usually manage to “see” through it pretty well. Sometimes, writers reverse the metaphor of looking back onto a past moment. Eisenberg describes certain early “icons of phonography,” like jazz trumpeter Louis Armstrong or operatic tenor Enrico Caruso, as especially suited to reaching out to us from the past. Just as a singer on stage tries to reach the uppermost balcony, Caruso knew how to reach those in the remotest balcony of all—your living room, almost a century after his death.
In fact, however, the recording industry’s boasts about its own fidelity make amusing reading: Each technical break-through, from acoustic cylinders to electric platters, from shellac to vinyl LPs, from mono to stereo, from analog to digital, was described in the same glowing terms as the one that had been described exactly the same way a few years before—as finally yielding perfect documentary fidelity.
The technical argument about phonographic fidelity is, in fact, a strange one. On the one hand, the phonophile will help himself to idealized versions of home music systems that are possible only in science fiction. At the same time, the phonophobe conjures up exaggerated idealizations of the live music setting. In spite of its lack of resolution, the issue burns with a degree of intensity that is hard to explain were the issue a mere technical one. It is hard not to regard the debate as symptomatic of membership in communities that tend more and more to be mutually exclusive. The listener who lives in the world of canned music doesn’t like hearing that she is missing something. The phonophobe has converse communal loyalties.
The epistemological issues about phonography are complicated by the phenomenon of phonographic manipulation, which, in fact, has always been built into the technology. For example, the industry would “roll off” high frequencies or boost bass ones in order to create a “living room” sound. Indeed, different companies used different formulas for doing so. In the era of magnetic tape, manipulation went further and opened up a vast territory of totally constructed sound. The most notable early highbrow use of tape recorder yielded the musique concrète projects of the 1940s, which used the new technology to convert various sounds into a new kind of scoreless music. One might call such music “phonoart.” It’s a category of music that is completely new under the sun, since it depends on the advent of recording technology. Works of phonoart cannot be performed, but only played back, from stretches of tape, hunks of vinyl, or CDs loaded into appropriate equipment. And, if Gracyk is right about rock music in his groundbreaking study of the topic, maybe that music too belongs to the category of phonoart. True, someone could have sung a tune that became an ingredient in Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. But, if you think about it, the work itself could not have been sung, or played.
These sonic constructs have been more elaborately exploited outside the sphere of high culture than within. In earlier days, they were created by cutting and splicing tapes, or by multitracking them. Nowadays, digital is the technology of choice. Thanks to the use of pitch-shifting equipment, phonoart isn’t restricted to mixing and matching conventional musical sounds, as exemplified by David Bowie’s 1977 album Low. Or listen to Brian Eno’s “Deep Blue,” on which no musical instrument in the traditional sense plays any role. The possibilities increase by sampling sounds and embedding them in another recorded context, as in hip-hop and acid jazz. In light of these developments, Keppard’s worry seems at once very real but also naïve.
A natural inclination would be to exclude full-fledged recordings of jazz performances from the category of phonoart, given the standard expectation that a jazz recording is a reflection of an actual performance event, where musicians do play and react to each other with some degree of spontaneity in real time. In other words, jazz recordings might lie within the sphere of what philosopher Noël Carroll calls “unvarnished” documentary recordings, that is, recordings that are unmanipulated. But, as already noted, this handy divide between phonoart and unvarnished phonographic documents is problematic, given the amount of electronic manipulation that goes with the production of all music recordings. Much recorded music that sounds documentary isn’t. The apparent conversational interplay with Liza Minnelli on Frank Sinatra’s late “duets” recording, for instance, was completely fake. (Liza called in her part by fiber-optic link—the telephone, in other words.) Or consider Natalie Cole who, thanks to technology, recorded duets with her dead father, Nat.
You might think that no such fakery goes on with mainstream jazz recordings. But Miles Davis’s producer, Teo Macero, admits that he often ran tape for hours and later constructed Davis’s recorded songs from bits and pieces of those sessions. Eisenberg analogizes these constructs with a “composite photograph of a minotaur,” a photograph of something utterly unreal, in other words, but made of bits and pieces of the real thing. The description sounds cynical. But maybe we can avoid the cynicism by treating many of these examples, not as constructs, but as simulations. As Stephen Davies uses the term, the performance on a simulated recording could have been performed live. The problem, however, is that technological developments have a way of outrunning such attempts to tidy things up this way. With typical “smooth jazz,” for instance, a lead track by a melody-playing instrument is laid over a backdrop, which consists of music samples and “pads,” that is, programmed rhythms and soft barely perceptible timbres of choirs, strings, and so on. The music is not so much performed as laminated together according to a plan.
Further, all phonography involves a form of manipulation that is so basic to all recording that we barely notice it, namely, the effect of repetition itself. The German author, Lessing, in his classic essay on representational art, The Laocoön, posed an interesting question, namely, how any visual representation in painting or sculpture could catch the living, moving substance of human activity. For example, he describes a certain nobleman who commissioned a portrait of himself intended to show him as a jolly fellow. The result, however, was grotesque. You can imagine the effect if you think of photos you have taken of people catching them in the middle of sneezing or chewing food. Such a photo may embed information that is technically accurate. But it is information about an artificially isolated slice of what was normally an unfolding action.
The famous sculpture that gives Lessing’s essay its name depicts the priest Laocoön and his sons ensnarled by serpents, as divine punishment for attempting to warn the Trojans against taking in the fabled horse. Since the sight of a screaming man in the actual grip of a huge snake might look awful, the sculptor, says Lessing, softened the figure’s expression into something more like a sigh than a shriek.
But Lessing didn’t know about moving pictures, which don’t need to freeze people in time in order to represent their actions. Likewise, sound recording would seem to move right along in time with the living performance it captures. So, in phonography are medium and subject matter not a perfect fit?
But phonographic effects can be subtle. In a notable jazz concert—by tenor sax star Sonny Rollins, October 7, 1994, in Columbus, Ohio—Rollins’ solos were at once logical and full of thrilling surprises. Since they were improvised, I couldn’t have planned to hear the exact notes Rollins played. I had to be there, with him, at that time, while he played, in order to hear those sounds. What I was hearing was the result of on-the-spot decisions by Rollins about the course of the music he was creating as I listened. But what if it had been recorded?
If you go to where it hangs in the Museum of Modern Art, you can scrutinize the details of Van Gogh’s painting Starry Night as long as you like. Now, a music performance, like that of Rollins, is not laid out in space, but rather unfolds in time. But so is the recording of it. But, unlike Rollins’ in-the-moment performance, a recording of it can be played again, and again—and yet again. On the one hand, this allows us to examine what has been recorded in minute detail, just as we can with Starry Night, if we are in front of it. But there is a curious difference between the two kinds of cases.
In the movie Casablanca, the pianist Sam can play “As Time Goes By” again, and yet again. With phonography, too, we can hear a music performance again and again, and yet again, but in exactly the same way. In fact, tape was rolling at that Rollins concert, thanks to a friend with a cassette recorder. Even on my second playback of the recording, I began to lose the sense of the unexpected twists and turns in the live performance. I was soon able to anticipate the details each time they came around. They gradually became as fixed as the features of a composed work, indeed more so. A live performance of a composed work always allows some details that depend on specific choices of the performer. But one cannot interpret a recording. One can only play back the exact detail that has been put into it. This phonographic effect—of embalming a music performance, so to say—seems particularly conspicuous in the case of improvised music. But if you think that this problem might affect all recorded music performance, the classical music composer Roger Sessions agrees with you. Consider a performance of a Chopin piece by Vladimir Horowitz. Does a recording of it not have a similarly calcifying effect?
So, what is one to make of the fact that intelligent, thinking phonophiles aren’t moved by these concerns? Perhaps the explanation is that an ever-growing community of listeners lives its musical life mainly within the sphere of canned music, and therefore does not register the effect just described. Passionate vivaphiles, devoted to the in-the-moment character of live performance, however, do feel the difference. My suspicion that there may be this kind of dualism within the listening world can be illustrated by a certain kind of conversational impasse that I have noted.
I tell my friend Mark about what was played, who soloed, and so on, at a recent Mingus Big Band concert. But Mark asks me, “Which album?” (Or, he tells me which album a song is on, since I don’t seem to know.) I describe the spectacle of Frank Lacy, with his wild staring eyes, as he stands up to play a huge stuttering glissando on his trombone. But Mark, who has no idea what Frank Lacy looks like, is still trying to remember on which track, or on which CD, Mingus performances can be found. The conversation begins to droop, and we drift back into our different musical communities.
But members of each community ought to feel troubled. The jazz phonophile does not like to think that she is shut off from authentic music performance. And the jazz phonophobe has to realize that her situation is ironic. Precisely because jazz is not a thoroughgoing compositional form, and because it essentially depends on improvisational spontaneity, then detailed discourse about it, other than in the ephemera of anecdotes and journalism, depends upon the very medium that is at the same time the music’s ossifying enemy, namely, phonography. There is no other practical database. For classic performances of this music to be enjoyed more than once, let alone be analyzed, they have to be precisely repeatable. And to be repeatable, they have to be recordable.
I spoke earlier of mass art. In his study of the topic (A Philosophy of Mass Art), Carroll explains it this way: A mass artwork is one that is produced and distributed to a multitude of reception points by a mass technology and which is designed to provide easy accessibility to huge numbers of relatively untutored consumers. Whether mass art is a cultural tsunami or not, Carroll does not say. But you might fret over the fact that the recording industry seems to tilt all music toward the condition of mass art. Carroll himself doesn’t go that far, for two reasons. But I’m not sure either is convincing.
First, as noted, he believes in the possibility of “unvarnished” phonographic documents of performances. Now a mere document of art is not art itself, mass or otherwise. The problem though is that even if pure phonographic documents were technically possible, this may simply become irrelevant. How many people nowadays really worry about whether any music that interests them, whether it be rock, or smooth jazz, techno, or hip-hop, is a mere document of art, rather than art in its own right? A very small number of listeners might continue to care about the matter. But surely their interests would be swamped by those of consumers in general and the industry that serves them.
Carroll balks at the assimilation of all music recording to mass art for a second reason, namely that some of the content is not easily accessible. Examples would include recordings of highly abstruse atonal or serial music—by Arnold Schonberg or Alban Berg, for instance. But, if the industrial aim of digital technology is to reach as many reception sites as possible, it seems hard to expect this agenda not to have a leveling effect, even allowing for diverse cultural styles and modes of consumption. What is the point of the industry’s project of producing such a commodity if it fails to transmit material that, however variously used, is accessible? It fits that the audience for not only abstruse classical music, but for recorded classical music in general is in steady decline.
In his analysis, Carroll invokes a distinction between types and tokens. For example, a specific piece of cloth on the Alamo flagstaff is not the American flag in general, but only an individual token of that general type. Mass artists create types—Danielle Steele’s novel, Coming Out, for example—while its consumers interact with tokens of the type, that is, specific objects that you see on airport bookshop shelves, for instance. To see the point of the classification, compare art that is not disseminated in mass art fashion—one-of-a-kind paintings or sculptures, for instance. In the case of Starry Night, for instance, the type-token model does not apply. In that kind of case, we acknowledge “originals,” by comparison with which reproductions are understood not to be the real thing. Starry Night can only be identified as that specifically locatable thing—the unique object hanging in the Museum of Modern Art in New York City. If it is destroyed, it ceases to exist in spite of the continued possibility of printing postcard reproductions of it. By contrast, even if all existing copies of Coming Out were destroyed, the novel continues to exist as long as token instances of it can still be executed by printing presses.
This leaves us with a nice question: Could improvised music become grist for the mass art mill? This time, Carroll gives a positive answer. Since the music originating from classic improvised jazz performances could be either memorized or notated, and then played again or taped, token instances of the resulting acoustic streams could easily be executed for CD playback or iPod downloading. In short, even with the improvisational music of jazz, we don’t ultimately depend on originals, any more than with Friends or Coming Out.
A jazz vivaphile who’s reflected on the matter philosophically might object that with genuinely improvised performances, we do have originals. To be in the presence of Starry Night, you have to stand in front of it. By the same token, an improvisation by Sonny Rollins or Herbie Hancock can only be identified as a specific datable event. You had to be there then to hear that performance. The problem is that mass art music industries can simply override this subtlety by treating all music sources as fodder to mix and match, without regard to their original status or the niceties of the process by which they were originally created. The attention of consumers can easily follow suit.
In this essay, I have kept my eye particularly on improvised music performance, the living status of which seems particularly relevant. However, the forecast I have given might apply quite generally. Perhaps all music performance may become grist for the mass art mill. The technological medium may already have worked its way so deeply into the message that recordings may no longer function as documents of music performances but as works of mass art in their own right. Indeed, can we not envision a future in which all music would be mass art?—but in which case we’d have masses and masses of it, of course.