David Byrne on recorded music

Read an article in The New Yorker about how recording has transformed music over the last 100 years. It’s written by a classical music guy (Alex Ross) so it comes from that POV, but he does widen his discussion to include John Cage and Chuck D.

The writer says John Phillip Sousa thought that recording would be the death of music. Well, of live performance was what Sousa meant. To some extent I think he was right, but not entirely. He was right in that people now often think of music as something you buy, that you possess and consume — rather than something you experience and possibly even make yourself. Even live shows are sometimes thought of as something you consume — certainly they are something done by professionals. To a large extent what is desired in a live shows is weighed against recordings, not just the recordings of that material, but recordings in general. Audiences have come to expect that a live performance will be a reproduction of a recording they are familiar with, but with a kind of visual enhancement. And a bit louder that your home stereo, too.

Much of the article is about aesthetic changes that recording brought about — the increased use of vibrato by singers and strings (it hides pitch issues and records “better”,) increased and obsessive precision (performances used to be sloppier, more haphazard — more real?) and new vocal techniques (Bing Crosby’s whole intimate singing style was based on using a microphone, the writer claims, and all singers have followed his example to some degree.) He also mentions something that is often forgotten, that most recordings have labored long and hard to create the illusion that the orchestra or band were playing together, that the music was not created in a studio, but was a live performance, merely captured. This fake fidelity is obvious in classical recordings where maintaining the integrity of this illusion is paramount, but it applies to a lot of pop music too.

Of course, famously The Beatles and others at that time (the Grateful Dead album Anthem of The Sun was completely created in editing,) and now all of Electro, Electronic, Hip Hop and other genres have all abandoned the need to create this illusion — the sounds are, obviously to my ears, clearly not “played”, not by any known instrument, and are virtually impossible to reproduce live (though bands still try.) Drums on contemporary tunes are mutated squawks, samples and electronic sounds all mixed together, and the “instruments” occupy a host of imaginary spaces (you can tell they were not played at the same time in the same room) and often everything is in your face, sharp, clear, hard-edged. There’s nothing naturalistic about it. Hasn’t been for years. In fact, sometimes there’s an obvious pride in creating something that is profoundly un-naturalistic, completely artificial sounding.

Sometimes the recording medium itself becomes the instrument. Paul Hindemith, the German composer, did performances using phonographs as instruments in 1927! That predates John Cage by a few decades and DJs by even more. But as an instrument vinyl is limited, there are a few amazing virtuosos, but sampling has made that virtuosity irrelevant — anyone with a laptop can loop a beat now, perfectly, and then layer other sounds on top and add a vocal. In one sense this created over the years a disconnect between playing an instrument and the results, but in another sense it makes everyone a potential composer — not merely a player — anyone can now hear their composition “played”, without having to have had music lessons or hiring expensive players.

What does that mean for music?

For one thing it means there’s a lot more of it.

Music is now everywhere. It’s not a special event to hear music as it once was. It’s a constant background, sometimes anyway, like air. Sometimes smelly, sometimes hot, sometimes fresh and clean. You like it, maybe you need it, but you also can’t escape it.

One can not only hear the music one chooses all the time if one wants, which seems like a good thing, but one can also seek out music from far-flung places, scenes and from times very different than one's own. At least in recorded form it’s more or less all out there.

I find this overwhelming. Probably as a musician I find music either one or the other — completely invisible, inaudible — even sometimes when it’s playing loud — or completely intrusive — impossible to ignore. As a musician there are times when even quiet background music in a bar or restaurant is completely distracting and impossible to ignore. It’s like the effect of having a TV on in room is for most people — it tends to demand attention. All conversation either stops or has to deal with the TV program. Music is like that for musicians.

In this way the easy access to and ubiquity of music is oppressive. It often feels like a passive aggressive assault. I’d pay extra for silence.

I don’t think fewer people go to live shows as Sousa and others have suggested. Not where I live. Not significantly anyway. The social and communal aspect of listening to music outweighs any negative aspects of the poor sound and imperfect reproduction at most live shows. It’s about being with other people, relaxing, feeling a common bond. Of course we all try and do our best as performers to overcome sound reproduction problems and make the music sounds good, it is a constant issue, but maybe it’s not as important as we think it is.

On another level I am aware that I am always walking a tightrope when performing — referring to a known recording in the way in which a song is played, but I don’t obsess over it too much. And whenever possible I try to take that internalized version, the recorded version in our heads, merely as a starting point. But I’m comfortable with all that because I’ve always been a performer. Others, especially those who created their music on a laptop or in a studio and have never stepped on a stage before, seem to feel a weird obligation to perform, and though some of them may be great at it, others should never try. In fact, for some performing does more harm than good — they’d be better off staying in the studio making more music. Sometimes their recorded music is so good and innovative you wonder why they think they have to be a performer too. They don’t. Maybe their record companies tell them they have to get out there and promote their record and that’s the way to do it. For some it’s not.

That’s one way music has changed. There are some styles that purely exist as recordings, that IS the music. These recordings are not a performance of something written, in fact most often there never was anything written. It is not a version, one possible interpretation out of many, of a song or composition, it is the ONLY possible version of that particular piece of music. Most dance club music is like that, as is hip hop. Other pop and even classical music is actually like that too, but it pretends not to be.

That is a new way of making music that Sousa could never have imagined. A new branch has been added to the tree. But he might be right that playing an instrument yourself, for your own enjoyment or maybe for that of a small group of friends, is disappearing. This branch is withering, but it still thrives in Brazil, among Texas songwriters, flamenco musicians, gypsies and even in the mutated form of karaoke bars. Most people expect pre-recorded music or a DJ at a house party. On special occasions someone might hire a band, but few think of actually doing it themselves, except in the abovementioned cases. It wouldn’t be “good enough.”

Well, that depends on your point of view.

Record collectors and consumers often view music as something that is inseparable from the object on which it resides. But if the digital world has taught us anything, it is that the musical information on CDs is anything but inseparable. The two things come apart quite easily, making the value of the delivery object fairly questionable.

So when music as a product, as a consumable object, is subverted and undermined by technology and by its own success, then maybe we have come full circle. Maybe if music is no longer seen as an object, but as pure information, data, sound waves, then the object becomes at best a mere delivery device, and we’re back to viewing music as an experience, albeit still one that other people produce.

What then becomes valuable in many cases is what music means to people — beyond the actual recording. Part of this meaning is in the song (or whatever) — and not necessarily in the specific recording of it. What it expresses, how it moves people, the worldview and ethos it embodies. Many of these qualities can be in the composition and exist apart from the recording and interpretation of that composition. People like "The Rite Of Spring" but are not everyone is super fussy about which recording they are hearing. Well, some are, but you get my point.

The other part of what music means is embodied in the singer, the band or the composer. It’s not even in the music and can’t be recorded, at some of it can’t. For some of this music the actual musical and lyrical content is almost irrelevant. For some pieces of music what it’s about is the relationship, the connection to, the singer, with their style, attitude, behavior, beliefs and looks more so than with the music, which is more or less relegated in this case to being the soundtrack to the lifestyle and philosophy. At best the music and everything else surrounding it — the videos, the gossip, the reputation, present a common front, a gesamtkunstwerk type piece that embodies what matters to a person.

Both of these meanings and identities are pretty had to brand and to market, though companies try. Marketing a band or a singer as a brand is common, but it’s time consuming, labor intensive, expensive and risky. If the talent betrays their fans the deal is off and the music becomes worthless. People get older, they change, they die. The talent and the audience. So the star system can simplifies things, making branding and marketing easy, but the available resources are limited — until cloning, that is.

With classical music we identify with the composition more than with a specific recording, at least most of the time. And with pop standards this has more or less become true too. There are so many versions of some standard pop songs that everyone has their own favorite interpretation, and no one recording is THE version. But that was before recording and music making abandoned the abovementioned idea of faking ambience and performance. Hard to imagine a different version of a Missy Elliot song, other than a remix.

So Sousa was right, in some respects — people making music for themselves and their friends is now rare, at least for most people. People are now timid and afraid to make it, or at least to play it themselves. They can’t compare to the recorded sounds and mixes that everyone has become used to. But I suspect that will change. The social aspect will lead to new forms — to troubadours and poets who aren’t afraid of sounding occasionally unprofessional, to more ergonomic interfaces with laptops, and to the unheard and untrained meeting with high-tech virtuosity.

LINK