Photo by Anne Billingsley
In political speeches—and I don’t think there’ll be any argument that they are in fact performances—the hair, the clothes, and the gestures are all carefully thought out. Bush II had a team that did nothing but sort out the backgrounds behind the places where he would appear, the mission accomplished banner being their most well-known bit of stagecraft. Same goes for public announcements of all kinds: it’s all show biz, and that’s not a criticism. My favorite term for a certain new kind of performance is “security theater.” In this genre, we watch as ritualized inspections and patdowns create the illusion of security. It’s a form that has become common since 9/11, and even the government agencies that participate in this activity acknowledge, off the record, that it is indeed a species of theater.
Performance is ephemeral. Some of my own shows have been filmed or have appeared on TV and as a result they have found audiences that never saw the original performances, which is great, but most of the time you simply have to be there. That’s part of the excitement; it’s happening in front of you, and in a couple of hours it won’t be there anymore. You can’t press a button and experience it again. In a hundred years it will be a faint memory, if that.
There’s something special about the communal nature of an audience at a live performance, the shared experience with other bodies in a room going through the same thing at the same time, that isn’t analogous to music heard through headphones. Often the very fact of a massive assembly of fans defines the experience as much as whatever it is they have come to see. It’s a social event, an affirmation of a community, and it’s also, in some small way, the surrender of the isolated individual to the feeling of belonging to a larger tribe. Many musicians make music influenced by this social aspect of performance; what we write is, in part, based on what the live experience of it might be. And the performing experience for the folks on stage is absolutely as moving as it is for the audience, so we’re writing in the anxious hope of generating a moment for ourselves as much as for the listener—it’s a two-way street. I love singing the songs I’ve written, especially in more recent performances, and part of the reason I decide to go out and play them live is to have that experience again. Evolutionary biologist Richard Prum proposes that birds don’t just sing to attract mates and to define their territory; they sometimes sing for the sheer joy of it. Like them, I have that pleasurable experience, and I seek out opportunities for it. I don’t want to have it happen only once, in the recording studio, and then have that moment get packed away, as a memory. I want to relive it, as one can on stage, over and over. It’s kind of glorious and surprising that the catharsis happens reliably, repeatedly, but it does.
There’s an obvious narcissistic pleasure in being on stage, the center of attention. (Though some of us sing even when there’s no one there.) In musical performances one can sense that the person on stage is having a good time even if they’re singing a song about breaking up or being in a bad way. For an actor this would be anathema, it would destroy the illusion, but with singing one can have it both ways. As a singer, you can be transparent and reveal yourself on stage, in that moment, and at the same time be the person whose story is being told in the song. Not too many other kinds of performance allow that.
CHAPTER THREE
Technology Shapes Music
Part One: Analog
The first sound recording was made in 1878. Since then, music has been amplified, broadcast, broken down into bits, miked and recorded, and the technologies behind those innovations have changed the nature of what gets created. Just as photography changed the way we see, recording technology changed the way we hear. Before recorded music became ubiquitous, music was, for most people, something we did. Many people had pianos in their homes, sang at religious services, or experienced music as part of a live audience. All those experiences were ephemeral—nothing lingered, nothing remained except for your memory (or your friends’ memories) of what you heard and felt. Your recollection could very well have been faulty, or it could have been influenced by extra-musical factors. A friend could have told you the orchestra or ensemble sucked, and under social pressure you might have been tempted to revise your memory of the experience. A host of factors contribute to making the experience of live music a far from objective phenomenon. You couldn’t hold it in your hand. Truth be told, you still can’t.
As Walter Murch, the sound editor and film director, said, “Music was the main poetic metaphor for that which could not be preserved.”1 Some say that this evanescence helps focus our attention. They claim that we listen more closely when we know we only have one chance, one fleeting opportunity to grasp something, and as a result our enjoyment is deepened. Imagine, as composer Milton Babbitt did, that you could only experience a book by going to a reading, or by reading the text off a screen that displayed it only briefly before disappearing. I suspect that if that were the way we received literature, then writers (and readers) would work harder to hold our attention. They would avoid getting too complicated, and they would strive mightily to create a memorable experience. Music did not get more compositionally sophisticated when it started being recorded, but I would argue that it did get texturally more complex. Perhaps written literature changed, too, as it became widespread—maybe it too evolved to be more textural (more about mood, technical virtuosity, and intellectual complexity than merely about telling a story).
Recording is far from an objective acoustic mirror, but it pretends to be like magic—a perfectly faithful and unbiased representation of the sonic act that occurred out there in the world. It claims to capture exactly what we hear—though our hearing isn’t faithful or objective either. A recording is also repeatable. So, to its promoters, it is a mirror that shows you how you looked at a particular moment, over and over, again and again. Creepy. However, such claims are not only based on faulty assumptions, they are also untrue.
The first Edison cylinder recorders weren’t very reliable, and the recording quality wasn’t very good. Edison never suggested that they be used to record music. Rather, they were thought of as dictation machines, something that could, for example, preserve the great speeches of the day. The New York Times predicted that we might collect speeches: “Whether a man has or has not a wine cellar he will certainly, if he wishes to be regarded as a man of taste, have a well-stocked oratorical cellar.”2 Please, try this fine Bernard Shaw or a rare Kaiser Wilhelm II.
These machines were entirely mechanical. There was no electrical power involved in either the recording or the playback, so they weren’t very loud compared to what we know today. To impress sound onto the wax, the voice or instrument being recorded would get as close as possible to the wide end of the horn—a large cone that funneled the sound toward the diaphragm and then to the inscribing needle. The sound waves would be concentrated and the vibrating diaphragm would move the needle, which incised a groove into a rotating wax cylinder. Playback simply reversed the process. It’s amazing that it worked at all. As Murch points out, the ancient Greeks or Romans could have invented such a device; the technology wasn’t beyond them. For all we know, someone at that time actually may have invented something similar and then abandoned it. Odd how technology and inventions come into being and fail to flourish for all sorts of reasons that have nothing to do with the skill, materials, or technology available at the time. Technological progress, if one can call it that, is full of dead ends and cul-de-sacs—roads not taken which could have led to who knows what alternate history. Or maybe the meandering paths, with their secret trajectories, would eventually and inevitably converge, and we’d all end up exactly where we are.
The wax cylinders that contained the recordings couldn’t be easily massproduced, so making lots of “copies” of these early recordings was an insane process. To “mass produce” these items, one had to set up an array
