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Is there any escape from the "feedback loop"? Philip, having blamed recordings for a multitude of sins, ends by saying that they might be able to come to the rescue. By studying artifacts from the dawn of the century, musicians might recapture what has gone missing from the perfectionist style. They can rebel against the letter of the score in pursuit of its spirit. But there are enormous psychic barriers in the way of such a shift: performers will have to be unafraid of indulging mannerisms that will sound sloppy to some ears, of committing what will sound like mistakes. They will have to defy the hyper-competitive conservatory culture in which they came of age, and also the hyper-professionalized culture of the ensembles in which they find work. |
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The fact that the Beatles broke up three years after they disappeared into the studio, and the fact that Gould died in strange psychic shape at the age of fifty, may tell us all we need to know about the seductions and sorrows of the art of recording. |
| zmix wrote on Wed, 08 June 2005 08:20 |
THe only minor issue I take with Alex Ross's article is the following passage: "Philip, at the end of his masterly thesis, is left with an uncertainty. No matter how much evidence he accumulates, he can't quite prove that classical playing became standardized because the phonograph demanded it. Records cannot be entirely to blame, he admits: otherwise, similar patterns would surface in popular music, which, whatever its problems, has never lacked for spontaneity." Au contraire! Does he mean to imply that pop music is a pure art form, devoid of reference and without standardization? It's quite obvious that various eras in pop recording had a signature sound, and that this sound was derived largely by referring to other recorded examples, i.e. Allison's invention of the Kepex at Philadelphia's Sigma sound in 1971 (TSOP) and the eagles highly gated tubby drums five years later in LA were certainly the result of cultural migration through recorded example, no? |
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The Beatles also weren't nearly as innovative as the pop-culture pundits would have people believe. They expanded the pallet of what could get radio which was a big deal but this was a product of their unprecedented celebrity rather than of their technology. |
| J.J. Blair wrote on Wed, 08 June 2005 16:13 |
You know, before the phonograph, and even still through much of the first half of the 20th century, if you wanted to hear a hit song, you went out and bought the sheet music. |
| zmix wrote on Thu, 09 June 2005 09:38 |
David Byrne nearly but not quite brings up an interesting point; that context is now a variable in the consumption of music. This is a major change since recorded music emerged, though it was theorised before Sousa by Eric Satie and his concept of "Furniture Music", that is to say music in the home without musicians actually being present and the interaction with them that this would require... The portable music player phenomenon which started in the 1960s with the transistor radio has done much to influence the meaning we give to the music we hear... A summer day on the beach listening to surf music is not the exercise in abstraction that the same music performed in a concert hall at night represents... CZ |
| maxdimario wrote on Fri, 10 June 2005 01:08 |
Classical music is based on the composition, which would be songwriting and arrangement in pop music terms. Bach, for instance sounds convincing on any instrument, and also on a sequencer to the grid, because it is based on the musical notes and not sound. But until you do hear the proper performances you have difficulty in appreciating the complete beauty and meaning of the music. |
| Bob Olhsson wrote on Wed, 08 June 2005 20:01 |
The Beatles also weren't nearly as innovative as the pop-culture pundits would have people believe. They expanded the pallet of what could get radio which was a big deal but this was a product of their unprecedented celebrity rather than of their technology. |
| maxdimario wrote on Thu, 09 June 2005 08:44 |
MTV did degenerate music quite a bit. I wonder what rec companies used to do with the money now spent on videos. |