Capturing Sound

How Technology Has Changed Music

Mark Katz

Several years ago a friend asked me to explain the subject of this book, then in its early stages of development. Opting for a dramatic approach, I pulled a CD at random from a nearby shelf and brandished it in front of me. "This," I declared, "has changed the way we listen to, perform, and compose music." My friend squinted at the CD, gave me a quizzical look, and asked, That did?" "Yes!" I answered with gusto. Seeming unconvinced, he clarified his question. Van Halen changed the way we listen to, perform, and compose music?"

Maybe, but that was not my point. My claim was that the technology of sound recording, writ large, has profoundly transformed modern musical life. At its broadest, that is the thesis of Capturing Sound.

This thesis may at first seem counterintuitive. After all, the function of recording, or so it might seem, is to record music, not to change it. Indeed, for more than a century, what I would call a discourse of realism has reinforced the idea of recorded sound as the mirror of sonic reality, while at the same time obscuring the true impact of the technology. Consider the series of television and print ads from the 1970s and 1980s in which the voice of jazz great Ella Fitzgerald was shown shattering glass. While a feat in itself, more remarkable was that it was Fitzgerald's recorded voice that had such awesome power. Though the purpose of the ad campaign was to sell cassettes, it espoused the ideal of realism. "Is it live, or is it Memorex?" consumers were asked. The implicit answer was that the two were indistinguishable.

Memorex was not the first to make such a claim. Turn-of-the-century advertisements touted recordings as "lifelike," "a true mirror of sound," "natural," and "the real thing."¹ In the 1910s and 1920s the Victor Talking Machine Company ran ads that would make an ontologist's head spin: beneath illustrations of famous artists standing next to their records, captions proclaimed: "Both are Caruso," or "Heifetz is actually Heifetz."² Like Memorex, Victor and its competitors were in the business of selling sound, and it behooved the industry to convince consumers that the tiny grooves incised in the black discs could somehow capture the essence of their flesh-and-blood musical idols. As Oscar Wilde once remarked in a very different context, "What a fuss people make about fidelity!"³

The discourse of realism is not limited to marketing campaigns. Musicians and scholars, too, have long testified to the objectivity of recordings. Igor Stravinsky averred that "a recording is valuable chiefly as a mirror," one that allowed him to "walk away from subjective experience and look at it."⁴ Jaap Kunst, one of the pioneers of ethnomusicology, argued that his discipline "could never have grown into an independent science if the gramophone had not been invented. ... Only then," he claimed, "was it possible to record the musical expressions of foreign peoples objectively."⁵ Similarly, Robert Philip, author of the important study Early Recordings and Musical Style, argued that "we do not have to conjecture about how Elgar or Rachmaninoff or Stravinsky or Bartók performed their own works," for through recordings "we know how they performed them."⁶ Unlike in the advertising slogans, no ulterior motives seem to lurk behind these statements. Certainly, we cannot dismiss the documentary value of recordings, for they tell us a great deal about the musical practices of the past. But such language ignores a crucial point: that recorded sound is mediated sound. It is sound mediated through a technology that requires its users to adapt their musical practices and habits in a variety of ways.

I should say that I am hardly the first to realize that recording does more than record.⁷ What I am offering here is to expand the discussion by focusing on how and why recording influences musical life. I do this through the concept of the phonograph effect.⁸

Simply put, phonograph effects are the manifestations of sound recording's influence. Consider a straightforward example. When Igor Stravinsky composed his Serenade for Piano in 1925, he wrote the work so that each of the four movements would fit the roughly three-minute limit of a ten-inch, 78-rpm record side. "In America I had arranged with a gramophone firm to make records of some of my music," he explained in his autobiography. "This suggested the idea that I should compose something whose length should be determined by the capacity of the record. And that is how my Sérénade en LA pour Piano came to be written."⁹ Stravinsky was not alone. Many composers of classical and especially popular music followed a similar compositional approach. (Today's three-minute pop song is a remnant of this practice.) Stravinsky's decision to tailor his Serenade to the length of the record side is a clear manifestation of recording's influence. It is just one of countless phonograph effects, ranging from the obvious—a pop star harmonizing with herself on disc, jogging while listening to Wagner on a Walkman—to the more subtle changes in the way we speak and think about music in an age of recording technology.

Though I say that recording influences musical activity, I am not espousing technological determinism, particularly what some scholars refer to as hard determinism.¹⁰ This is the idea that tools, machines, and other artifacts of human invention have unavoidable, irresistible consequences for users and for society in general. The idea pervades the way we talk about technology. In their book on the subject, Leo Marx and Merritt Roe Smith cite several common examples: "'The automobile created suburbia.' 'The robots put the riveters out of work.' 'The Pill produced a sexual revolution.'"¹¹ Further examples come quickly to mind: "TV has restructured the daily life of the family," "Photography has altered the way we look at the world," or more grandly, "The computer has changed everything."

I myself write of recording's influence on human activity and of phonograph effects, both of which impute causal powers to technology. Although we often respond to technology within a context of limited options not of our own making, we must remember that in the end, recording's influence manifests itself in human actions. Put another way, it is not simply the technology but the relationship between the technology and its users that determines the impact of recording. It is important to add, too, that the influence I describe does not flow in one direction only, from technology to user. As we will see throughout this book, users themselves transform recording to meet their needs, desires, and goals, and in doing so continually influence the technology that influences them.¹²

If the impact of recording manifests itself in the actions of its users, what exactly are they responding to? The answer leads to a central premise of this book: all phonograph effects are ultimately responses to differences between live and recorded music. It is not enough to compare the two solely in value-laden terms, as is often the case. While some say that CDs sound better or are more aesthetically satisfying than live concerts, and others insist exactly the opposite, such arguments tell us little about the impact of the technology. Instead of asking which is better, the more revealing question is this: How are live and recorded music different?

To answer this question we must realize that any broadly used technology is intimately connected to another existing technology, system, or activity. The automobile, for example, serves transportation—obviously, an existing human activity—and must be understood in relation to other means of transportation, such as the bicycle or the horse. Conversely, an utterly novel technology—one that does not relate to any existing way of doing things—would be useless. A device to prevent time-travel sickness would (at least at the moment) have little impact on human life. Essentially, then, the impact of any new technology, whether the "horseless carriage" or sound recording, arises from the differences between it and that which it supersedes, improves upon, or extends and—crucially—the way users respond to those differences. For example, one difference between the horse and the car is that the car (at least by a certain point in its development) could travel faster and farther than the horse. Particularly in the United States, this difference allowed car owners to work in cities while residing in the country. It would not be a stretch, therefore—however odd this may sound—to see the growth of American suburbia in the 1940s and 1950s in part as a large-scale response of the middle class to an attribute of the automobile not shared by the horse.¹³

This model of technological influence applies equally well to recording. We may thus understand the Stravinsky example as a response to an aspect of recording technology (the limited playing time of 78s) that distinguished it from traditional musical activity (live performance, in which there is no similar time limitation). Of course, when one recording technology coexists with or supersedes another, users may respond to differences between the two systems. The concept of the phonograph effect is equally applicable here, for we simply shift our focus to a comparison of the two technologies. Indeed, later in this book we will see how the impact of the cassette tape on the one hand, and MP3 on the other, can be traced to their respective differences with LPs and CDs.

Several key differences between live and recorded music come up over and again. When performed live, musical sound is fleeting, evanescent. Recordings, however, capture these fugitive sounds, tangibly preserving them on physical media, whether wax cylinders or plastic CDs. Once musical sound is reified—made into a thing—it becomes transportable, salable, collectable, and manipulable in ways that had never before been possible. And like Billy Pilgrim in Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse-Five, recorded sound comes unstuck in time. No longer temporally rooted, recorded music can be heard after it was originally performed and repeated more or less indefinitely. The dead can speak to the living; the march of time can be halted. As I will explain throughout the book, the distinctive aspects of recorded sound have encouraged new ways of listening to music, led performers to change their practices, and allowed entirely new musical genres to come into existence.

To define phonograph effects in terms of technological traits and users' actions, however, is not to dismiss the influence of other, less easily isolated factors. The way users respond to recording is also shaped by personal, aesthetic, economic, and cultural forces. To return to the Stravinsky example, we should see that his actions might also have been shaped by his penchant for self-imposed limitations. In the first of his Three Pieces for String Quartet (1914), for example, the first violin plays only four different pitches, yet the result is impressively complex; his piano piece The Five Fingers (1921) is comparably constrained. Stravinsky imposed a similar challenge when he decided to keep each movement of his Serenade under three minutes. Business considerations also helped shape the work. The even number of movements was in part dictated by the fact that record companies were loath to issue a set of 78s with a blank side, since they could not charge as much for such a set. Thus, while phonograph effects arise from the ways in which users interact with recording as a distinctive medium, this interaction is itself shaped by both broader and narrower considerations, whether social forces or personal concerns.

While Stravinsky's compositional approach to his Serenade is a clear and well-documented example of a phonograph effect, it can hardly communicate the full scope of recording's influence since the late nineteenth century. Thus this book has been conceived as broadly as possible, ranging across time, space, and genre. It also engages a broad spectrum of users. Although I have called on Stravinsky to introduce my thesis, I am no fan of the "great man" approach to history. For every Armstrong, Copland, and Heifetz in this book, there is a schoolteacher, amateur DJ, or teenaged MP3 junkie whose response to recording technology is just as interesting and just as important to our understanding of phonograph effects.

Capturing Sound is divided into eight chapters. Chapter 1 stands apart from the rest; focusing on causes, it explores the nature of sound recording and the distinctive qualities that make the phonographic experience unique. The remaining chapters investigate specific phonograph effects, comprising seven case studies that progress more or less chronologically from the early twentieth century to the early twenty-first. Chapter 2 tells of how the phonograph became a central figure in the movement to elevate American musical life (and improve life more generally) in the early 1900s through the dissemination of recorded classical music. We stay in the United States for chapter 3 as well, which explores how both the possibilities and limitations of early recording technology shaped nearly every aspect of jazz performance and composition. Jazz musicians were not the only ones who responded to the demands of recording, however; in chapter 4 I argue that classical violinists in the early twentieth century responded to similar technological demands by intensifying and expanding their use of vibrato. Classical composers are the focus of chapter 5, which revisits the avant-garde musical scene of the 1920s and 1930s in Europe to uncover a forgotten fascination with the phonograph as a compositional tool. The final three chapters bring us to the turn of the twenty-first century. Chapter 6 is the result of fieldwork in the world of hip-hop DJ battles, competitions in which musicians display their virtuosity not with traditional instruments but on turntables. Chapter 7 delves into a compositional practice that simply could not have existed without sound recording—digital sampling—and addresses some of the aesthetic and ethical issues that arise from this new form of musical borrowing. Finally, chapter 8 provides a modern counterpart to chapter 2 and examines another technology freighted with utopian hopes—the Internet—and its impact on the modern musical listener.

The study of sound recording and its influence does not converge on a single work, figure, or musical activity. Rather, the technology is a hub from which the varied manifestations of its influence radiate. What do Paul Hindemith's Grammophonmusik and Public Enemy's "Fight the Power" have in common? Fritz Kreisler's violin playing and Bix Beiderbecke's trumpet playing? The musical memory contests of the 1920s and the Napster phenomenon of the 1990s? Collectively, their only point of intersection is recording. The broad scope of this work, then, permits the idea of the phonograph effect to be applied as widely as possible. Yet this book does not aim to be exhaustive. Of necessity, I have been selective in my choice of case studies, and the fact that this book engages mostly (though by no means exclusively) Western popular and classical music reflects my expertise, not the idea that little else merits study. In fact, there is a whole world of phonograph effects waiting to be studied. My hope is that this book will encourage further exploration of the technology's impact on musical life and become part of a rich and continuing discussion.

Notes

Epigraph sources are cited in the notes to the Conclusion.

Introduction

1.Advertisements for Berliner Gramophone, Cosmopolitan 21 (1896): advertising section; Edison-Bettini Micro-Phonograph, 1898, clipping in George H. Clark Collection, Archives Center, National Museum of American History, Washington, DC; Gramophone Zon-o-phone, Harper's 97 (1898): advertising section, 68; Columbia Home Grand Graphophone, 1899, clipping in Clark Collection; and Columbia Disc Graphophone, McClure's 20 (1902-3): advertising section, 69.

2.Collier's 52 (8 November 1913): back cover; concert program, 1927, Jascha Heifetz Collection, Library of Congress, Washington, DC.

3.Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890; New York: Random House, 1992), 33.

4.Igor Stravinsky and Robert Craft, Dialogues and a Diary (London: Faber & Faber, 1968), 120.

5.Quoted in Anthony Seeger, "The Role of Sound Archives in Ethnomusicology Today," Ethnomusicology 30 (spring-summer 1986): 261. For an earlier, concurring view of recordings, see Carl Stumpf, quoted in Edgar Stillman Kelley, "A Library of Living Melody," Outlook 99 (30 September 1911): 283-87.

6.Robert Philip, Early Recordings and Musical Style: Changing Tastes in Instrumental Performance, 1900-1950 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 1.

7.See, for example, Michael Chanan, Repeated Takes: A Short History of Recording and Its Effects on Music (London: Verso, 1995); Timothy Day, A Century of Recorded Music: Listening to Musical History (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000); Evan Eisenberg, The Recording Angel: Explorations in Phonography (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1987); and Glenn Gould, "Music and Technology" and "The Prospects of Recording," both in The Glenn Gould Reader, ed. Tim Page (New York: Knopf, 1984), 353-68 and 331-53, respectively.

8.I have chosen to name this concept after the phonograph (as opposed to a newer technology) because it is the original mechanism for sound recording and reproduction and, having survived for more than a dozen decades, will be remembered long after others have faded into obscurity.

9.Igor Stravinsky, An Autobiography (New York: Norton, 1962), 123-24.

10.For a cogent discussion of the ramifications of technological determinism on musical life, see Timothy D. Taylor, Strange Sounds: Music, Technology, and Culture (New York: Routledge, 2001), 26-38. For a variety of views on technological determinism, see Merritt Roe Smith and Leo Marx, eds., Does Technology Drive History? The Dilemma of Technological Determinism (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1994).

11.Smith and Marx, eds., Does Technology Drive History?, xi.

12.Here I am in general sympathy with historians who espouse the view known as the social construction of technology (SCOT), which examines technology from the standpoint of users and explores their role in technological change. For a fascinating case study on the automobile, which also surveys and refines SCOT, see Ronald Kline and Trevor Pinch, "Users as Agents of Technological Change: The Social Construction of the Automobile in the Rural United States," Technology and Culture 37 (1996): 763-95.

13.The connection between the car and the American suburb has long been observed in histories of the automobile and in writings on technology in general. See, for example, Ruth Schwartz Cowan, A Social History of American Technology (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 237-38.