Making Up For Lost
Time: Technology, Digital Musics and Recovering the Past
Jonathan Crane
Associate
Professor, University of North Carolina Charlotte
Introduction: All Things Must Pass
The recording industry is in a state of crisis. This is not
an
abbreviated downturn in sync with the fiscal ills currently hobbling
global, national and regional markets. Well before the Great Recession
began, sales of prerecorded music across world markets began a
precipitous decline (DeGusta, 2011; Haile, 2012; Jones, 2012). The
emergence of new formats and digital networks in lieu of the physical
distribution of pre-recorded compact discs has not brought substantial
relief to the industry (Andrews, 2012; Eijk et al. 2010; Krukowski,
2012; Rosoff, 2012; Sears, 2012). Whenever moribund economies and soft
business sectors eventually rebound, a radically reordered recording
industry is unlikely to exceed or even near previous sales records and
profit levels.
Powerful economic insults along with decisive shifts in the
technologies that enable recording, transmission, distribution and
consumption have regularly impacted the music and recording industries.
The Depression, the scraping of sheet music as the dominant vehicle of
musical transmission, the advent of wireless broadcasting and
consolidation of the radio industry, pod-casting, the dawn and
maturation of FM, the shuttering of Tin Pan Alley, internet streaming,
satellite radio, the transition from shellac 78s to long-playing record
albums and 45s as well as the rise of cassette culture and home taping
in the seventies radically altered the production, distribution and
consumption of popular musics throughout the globe (Garofalo 2010;
Hogan 2010; Hull 2004; Jasen 2003; Kenney 1999; Pettit et al. 2008;
Pollack 2011).
Contemporary audiences continue to consume music, but a substantial
portion of the listening audience, especially the youngest cohort, is
not willing to pay overmuch for the pleasure of satisfying musical
appetites (Imam, 2012; Kafka 2009; Music Industry Blog, 2012; Smith
2009). At present, that portion of the recording industry
still
dedicated to marketing physical and digital product for individual
purchase looks posed to share the slagheap with the ill-fated
manufacturers of typewriter ribbons, carbon paper, 35 mm film and other
terminal media.
Yet, even as a shrinking number of recording industry titans struggle
to make contemporary sound creations fungible, old musics, long
forgotten performers and vanished genres are becoming ever more widely
disseminated,. In making an unexpected return to our time,
very
old records function as evocative artifacts that rework contemporary
listeners’ experience of time past in newly kindled
relationships
with musicians whose voices and instruments are audible once again
after decades or even a century or more of complete, utter silence.
In contrast to accounts of the contemporary moment as a postmodern
period characterized by cultural fragmentation and semiotic exhaustion,
this paper argues that while those descriptors are suitable for some
zones of cultural production and consumption, there are also
significant sectors of cultural praxis, in this instance the recovery
and distribution of old musics, that restore the historical record,
revive the past and return long silenced voices to the present(Connor
1997; Lochhead and Auner 2002; McGuigan 2006; Reynolds 2011).
Postmodernity has long been synonymous with the implosion of history;
in a reversal of time’s arrow, the moment for old, old musics
is
now. And, unlike the post-modern predilection to incorporate bits of
the past into contemporary productions across media through sampling
and other forms of cut-and-mix pastiche, the historic return of old
musics to our day is routinely accomplished without subjecting by-gone
cultural artifacts to the acid bath of ironic quotation and wholesale
symbolic deracination.
Everything Old is
New Again: The Return of Dated Musics
Offered up by a tremendous number of tiny boutique labels and modest
sole proprietorships, dated musics of astonishing diversity are now
available for all who care to listen and possess the minimal
technological wherewithal to seek out such releases. Some
issuing
FLAC files only, others hard CD copies solely and still others
releasing material in a variety of formats across the analog and
digital continuum, including cassette and vinyl, and even 78s, these
minuscule labels, including Trikont, Subliminal Sounds, Old Hat,
Awesome Tapes From Africa, Dust-to-Digital, Soul Jazz, Strut, Numero
Group, Revenant, Lion Productions, Secret Stash, Marston Records,
Tompkins Square, CaseQuarter, Archeophone, West Hill Recorded Archives,
Evangeline, Buda Musique, Analog Africa, Soundway, Reboot Stereophonic,
Sutro Park, Honest Jon’s, Atavistic and countless others,
share a
common interest in taking the long view of recorded music
history. Raiding record company vaults, mining the public
domain
(especially in territories not subject to U.S. copyright law), and
returning private pressings to circulation, these labels are
redistributing old and marginal musics that have been, until now, lost
to time. A substantial portion of the material issued by
these
purveyors never traded under a corporate imprint and was peddled by the
recording artists themselves in highly limited runs of cylinders,
albums, cassettes, and 45s. Some labels release one-off private
recordings never intended for public sale or broadcast.
For example, Marston Records, a label committed to finding, restoring
and reissuing the earliest recordings of classical music has compiled a
multiple disc set of the Julius Block cylinders (Various Artists 2008).
The Block recordings were inscribed between 1890 and the mid-1920s. An
early adopter, Julius Block was a Russian magnate and music enthusiast
who purchased his phonograph directly from Edison on a visit to the
inventor’s storied East Orange laboratory. Block used the
machine
to record renowned nineteenth-century pianists and other classical
musicians in Russia, Germany and Switzerland. Many of his cylinders
account for the only instance these notables ever recorded and provide
a timeless cache of instrumental and vocal performances from the
earliest moments in the history of recorded sound. Block also recorded
writers and other artists, including Leo Tolstoy, reading aloud and in
conversation with members of their celebrated salons. These recordings,
which Block played for the delectation of his elite social circle,
scientists and members of the public in occasional symposia were never
commercially available, although Block did enlist Edison’s
assistance in trying to ensure his transcriptions were preserved for
future auditors. Their alliance came to naught as the Block
cylinders in Edison’s possession were consumed in a fire
(Maltese
and Maltese 2010).
Also working to reproduce the past, Archeophone Records markets an
extensive run of releases in their Phonographic Yearbook collection.
The series commences with the year 1890 and has reached, to date, the
early nineteen twenties. Each disc comprises the biggest Stateside hits
of the year and promises listeners an orderly break down of mainstream
musical culture from way back. In contrast to most
collections of
oldies, Archeophone releases neither stoke nor sate the nostalgic
impulse to revisit the time of your life. Save for a
dwindling
handful of superannuated seniors, there aren’t any listeners
alive for whom these songs and performances composed the actual musical
backdrop of a halcyon youth. These are virtual oldies that can be
encountered only in historical review. Archeophone recordings
offer proxy anamneses for those with an archival interest in musics
past. Auditors can’t revisit their own seminal musical
favorites
via an Archeophone release, but they do have the opportunity to steep
themselves in a matrix of alien airs that captivated untold numbers of
listeners in a shared musical bond.
Unlike the present, with Nielsen Soundscan, Billboard and other
commercial entities charged with accounting for those artists and
groups who move product, there are no remotely reliable means of
calibrating the top hits from a century past. As Archeophone
releases cannot offer anything close to a precise reckoning for exactly
those songs that mattered most–-these collections approximate
what some people heard in listening posts across the United States and
elsewhere. These are some of the songs middle-class amateurs with a
spinet in the parlor sang and played in intimate gatherings with
friends and family. Anyone with spare change could have
channeled
one of these tunes through a set of gutta percha ear tubes at a coin
operated “automatic phonograph” found wherever the
public
mingled. For those with greater means (by the mid-twenties
almost
sixty percent of American middle-class households owned a record player
and more than twenty percent of working class households had their own
variety of phonograph), these are some of the cylinders or discs that
were spun by music aficionados unwilling or unable to strike up their
own cover versions (Suisman 2009, 249). In fabricating sets
of
chart toppers from the gay nineties forward, Archeophone’s
collections document a sample of the musics that mattered to our
forebears while also presenting the past with a knowing wink, as if
Ryan Seacrest or John Peel were on hand to crank up the Victrola and
dedicate Sophie Tucker’s latest platter to our one true flame.
In the early days of recording there were no fixed, target audiences
for recording companies to service with a consistent diet of
predictable hits. Well-regulated audiences, those
contemporary
market fractions whose every demographic indicator and psychographic
tic is categorized and subject to big data analysis have not yet been
fashioned by commercial agents chasing a share of the public purse.
Inchoate audiences, from an epoch when important coalitions of the mass
media are just coming into organization, are difficult in the extreme
to clearly discern. As Michael Chanan wondered in Repeated Takes: A
Short History of Recording and its Effects on Music: “Who
bought
and played these millions of records? We cannot answer from
contemporary press coverage or reviews. The record industry received
very little attention in the general press at the time”
(1997,
206). Even as the records continue to speak, knowing how and by whom
they were received is a query with no straightforward answer.
Listening to dated recordings calls for contemporary audiences to
interpret not only vanished modes of playing, recording and
transmitting music, but to try and bridge the gulf between ourselves
and anonymous auditors from a time when recorded sounds were fresh.
Even with the proviso that these are oldies for an unknown audience,
any session of concentrated listening with a Phonographic Yearbook
selection or Block cylinder promises a period of empathetic reverie.
Archival recordings allow for a spell of imaginative contemplation that
grants contemporary auditors fleeting access to some archaic scintilla
of phenomenological experience, some evanescent sense of the feelings
sparked by the hits of the day or the magically preserved genius of a
classical savant. Even if our distant predecessors remain
ultimately unfathomable, we can consort in the soundscape formerly
occupied by a large cohort of listeners from another time and place.
Fans and Collectors
Make Sound History
The labor of small labels returning marginal works to print and byte is
mirrored by the actions, oftentimes illegal, of countless individual
collectors and technically savvy music enthusiasts who have digitized
their collections and post long unavailable commercial recordings
on-line. They also upload independent recordings of live
performances for others to recover via filehosts, cyberlockers, blogs
with direct downloads and a vast number of other web locales. Internet
enabled networks are cyber-extensions of the analog tape trading
networks that developed around the Grateful Dead and other rock bands
lionized for the exceptional spontaneity of their live performances
with dedicated fans committed to preserving and sharing special moments
of artless invention.
Electronic “sharity” networks are also digital
augmentations of the long-time mail coalitions maintained by hard-core
jazz fanatics who surreptitiously recorded and swapped unauthorized
recordings of bands and performers for decades. Finally,
these
emergent avenues of high-tech exchange are the latest medium of trade
for obsessed disciples of orchestral music and opera.
Classical
music enthusiasts were the pioneer bootleggers (Marshall 2005).
Starting with acoustic recordings, they were the first sound outlaws to
stealthily employ music technology to record snippets of arias,
recitals and operas featuring favored divas, conductors and orchestras
in performance. These treasures were then distributed among a
tight coterie of fellow buffs.
There are also a formidable number of websites, some affiliated with
museums, private and state sponsored educational institutions, and
independent historians who archive and disseminate a vast range of
disparate recordings of old musics. Sharity is not new to music fans
and legitimate authorities dedicated to music preservation and
education, but there has never been a time prior when near the entire
breadth of recorded music is instantly available to those with Internet
access.
Apart from the considerable legal questions in play as new technologies
and new forms of musical appropriation and dissemination conflict with
international and national copyright provisions, new labels and
institutions with a commitment to preservation along with an army of
enthusiasts dedicated to disseminating and archiving their preferred
musics are making an interest in popular and classical musics an
archeological enterprise. New formations of musical distribution work
to arrest cultural amnesia and the planned obsolescence of musical
heritage.
[1] Amounting to more than
just the token opposition,
despite the laughable differences in scale between mammoth
multinationals and kitchen table start-ups, new musical collectives are
successfully resurrecting long-gone musics.
In exploring the significance of the historical zeal with which
collectors and their labels are reclaiming and reordering the audio
past, it is important not to assume that these nascent practices have
surfaced as the direct expression of the inherent teleology of
contemporary recording and dissemination technologies. A preoccupation
with the time and place from which musical formations are born(e) is
not a necessary property of new music and information technologies. The
same technology can simultaneously work to liberate musical
consumption, transmission and production from any niggling concern with
the niceties of historical context and musical provenance.
[2]
The group venture between listeners eager to recover something of the
distant auditory long-ago and under-capitalized start-ups and generous
collectors (if giving away that to which you hold no legal title is
indeed generous and not criminal), strongly parallels what historian
William Howland Kenney identified as one of the primary motives for
listening at the birth of the recording industry. Kenney
contends
that early “recorded musical performance from the past
stimulated
collective memories that helped Americans reenvision themselves
simultaneously in different spheres of their country’s and
their
own past, present and future” (2007, xvii-xviii).
And while
an engagement with memory matters when listening to old recordings,
collective memory is not stirred when returning deep into the nether
reaches of auditory annals. Hearing sounds, voices and melodies from
generations ago is akin to overhearing impossibly advanced elders
reminiscing about what once had been. Listening to old, old, oldies is
an act on par with leafing through yellowed diaries and other
antiquarian ephemera in lieu of revisiting familiar memories cobbled
from personal experience. Listeners are granted access to memories, as
a recording is always a memorial archive, but these are recollections
of a past to which we have no lived connection.
Historians have long documented the raft of popular recordings
predicated on ethnic stereotypes and racial prejudice in the wake of
the minstrel era and periods of national anxiety over immigration from
the wrong shores, but it is bewildering to hear these freshly
remastered sentiments blasting from a car stereo or through a pair of
ear buds (Lott 1995; Strausbaugh 2006). No amount of scholarly
preparation can adequately prepare first-time listeners for an auditory
engagement with vanished forms of exceptionally coarse vocal
disparagement. Another down-tuned ode to Satan or a syncopated barrage
of F-bombs has nothing on brassy “Coon Shouter” May
Irwin’s ebullient 1907 version of the “The
Bully”
(Various Artists 1998). May Irwin sounds like Kate Smith’s
brash,
tippling cousin as she swaggers through lyrics that make her a
confederate of Weezy and Bushwick Bill. Upon hearing “The
Bully” it becomes just possible to imagine Mrs. Miller
teaming up
with The Last Poets and Gil Scott-Heron to lay the groundwork for
future experiments in what it means to sound black.
Harry Smith:
Reanimater and Time Bandit
Old recordings resurrected through new modes of distribution and new
vehicles for sound transmission alter the perceptual experiences of
individual listeners and inspire new modes of collective musical
consumption and new formations of communal listening. Looking
back to previous alterations in the soundscape, it is possible to more
accurately demarcate the specific particulars unique to the present
change in musical reception and Internet-fueled plenitude.
Consider the profound effects, both immediate and long-term, that Harry
Smith’s Anthology of American Folk Music (Various Artists
1997)
had on individual auditors and the wider culture when first issued by
Folkway Records in 1952. The impact of Smith’s work provides
an
ideal case for exploring how the convergence of sound technology and
archaic musical practices transform the individual experience of
listening as well as altering the broader musical horizon that
individuals share as a collective.
[3]
The Anthology appeared just four years after the introduction of the 33
and 1/3 rpm long-playing record album. Initially, the new recording
format had an immediate influence upon the reception of classical
music. The LP made it feasible to offer complete, uncut performances of
long movements on one side of a recording. Previously, long
movements had been scattered across multiple records in cumbersome
omnibus packages. Not only could classical enthusiasts access
performances as they unfolded in real time, absent jarring breaks, LPs
also made it easy to return again and again to a rapidly expanding
canon of recordings to study the direction of the conductor and the
skilled labor, individual and collective, of the assembled musicians
(Elborough 2009; Katz 2004).
In contrast to the good standing of the masterworks collected across
long-playing classical releases, Smith’s collection was a
weird
and rowdy gathering played by the untutored and unwashed. This deeply
idiosyncratic anthology had a transformative effect on American musical
culture through the recovery and circulation of performances that had
slipped from time (but not from copyright –- it is not
insignificant that this pirated production was once wholly
illegal). Smith’s six album gathering, a motley
selection
of crackling relics from his legendary personal collection of 78s,
assembled black and white country singers and bands, blues artists,
Cajun combos and cowboy singers recorded early in the twentieth
century. And while the compilation gave listeners aural entree to a
mysterious past, Smith engineered his production in such a way that not
all historical forces were allowed to return full force. For
instance, the Anthology leaves the color-line unstipulated in otherwise
detailed liner notes, as Smith never identifies the race of the singer
or accompanying musicians on each track. It was an individual call
which singers and pickers were black, who was white and who may well
have had a foot either side of the color line. In this regard,
Smith’s telling omission of the racial identity of the
collected
musicians offers a sharp contrast to the typical postmodern
appropriation. Smith’s calculated absence does not cleanse
the
work of historical nuance, instead the erasure quietly underscores the
function of race in the creation and apprehension of sound recordings.
The arch patriarch of the mix-tape, Smith arranged his collection
thematically with songs sorted into the general categories of ballads,
social music and songs, but each selection, as with any carefully
considered soundtrack, comments on and is, in turn, in dialogue with
neighboring cuts. Depending on the edition, the records came in color
coordinated sleeves and boxes festooned with mystic and musical arcana.
The collection also housed an extensive set of annotated notes for each
track. The booklet of letter-pressed notes were themselves part of a
larger collage which melded photographs, snippets of advertisements for
musical instruments and the original 78s, alchemical arcana, an
idiosyncratic index and other visual and literary ephemera. No matter
what sense anyone might make of the set, it was a unique assortment of
singular riches. Every subsequent box set larded with
exhaustive
liner notes, unpublished photos and all the ups and extras that
acquisitive musos find tantalizing owes a debt to Smith’s
total
design. The package was a highly personal construction, no
one
but an obsessed auto-didact like Smith could have produced anything
remotely like it. At the same time it was not so decidedly
eccentric, so exclusively hermitic, that listeners immersed in
Smith’s extraordinary appropriation were barred from working
up
personal interpretations for what the songs meant as part of their
particular soundscape (Cantwell 1996; Marcus 1997). And, like
today’s small labels, educational institutes, and individual
collectors, Smith had the technology to do the work that heavily
capitalized majors refused to entertain.
The Anthology of Folk Music was a cardinal point of reference for the
American folk revival of the fifties and sixties. The record
led
a pantheon of now iconic performers, including John Cohen, Bob Dylan,
Peter Stampfel, Ralph Rinzler, Dave Van Ronk, Mike Seeger, Tom Paley,
Al Wilson, Henry Vestine and John Fahey, among scores of notables, to
incorporate Smith’s selections into their respective
repertoires
and to become newly fired archivists and disseminators.
Smith’s records contained a total of just eighty-four tracks,
but
together those selections led to the restoration of thousands of
antique tunes to the shared corpus swapped between folk musicians
looking to enlarge their stock of authentic numbers and audience
members searching for old/new tunes to play on no instrument other than
a turntable.
Smith’s record also inspired collectors to search for the
actual
men and women whose voices were captured on junked 78s. (Calt 2008;
Schmidt and Rooney 1994). In this quest, Furry Lewis, Dock
Boggs,
Son House, Elizabeth Cotten, Skip James, Mississippi John Hurt,
Victoria Spivey, Bukka White, Clarence Ashley and a great many more
musicians were returned to the stage and recording studio. A
Field of Dreams (1989) for the folkie, beloved ghosts from beyond were
magically returned to public life in a secular act of reincarnation.
Audible Ghosts:
Mechanical Reproduction and the Sound of Immortality
The dream of full recovery continues to animate the act of listening
and collecting for many music fans and even for those whose consumption
of music is something less than certifiably compulsive. The
apotheosis of high-fidelity, wherein the spirits haunting magnetic
tape, vinyl grooves and encrypted bytes are restored to life is one of
the magical features of all music technology. Every time a major
recording star dies, their catalog sales explode and, as with the
passing of Whitney Houston, Michael Jackson, Amy Winehouse, Lisa
“Left-Eye” Lopes, Elvis Presley and Tupac Shakur,
fans seek
to commune with the departed through the purchase of discs, tapes and
files bearing a voice that can be resurrected at will.
This is not a novel observation, critics and inventors have long
asserted that technologies of reproduction render recording angels
immortal. Otis Ferguson, writing in 1940, testified that a fatal chill
never took Bix Biederbecke:
He got pneumonia out of it, of
course, and died of that a few days
later. That is, they buried the body. For those who had been around and
for those to come after there was something, grown in this country out
of the Iowa dirt, that didn’t die and could not be buried so
long
as there should be a record left in the world, and a turntable to spin
it on. (Chamberlain and Wilson 1982, 31-32)
Bix lives and so too does everybody else caught on tape, groove, or
byte.
Not every encounter with recorded music comes larded with theosophical
baggage; sometimes we turn to music solely for distraction. But there
are occasions when technologies of musical fidelity are deployed to do
more than provide temporary relief from the pressures of the workaday
world. In an intentional act of occult negation, for the duration of a
recording death is not the end.
When we desire the presence of those musicians who matter most, the
mediating record, disc or corruptible file must typically suffice. We
can summon the voice, but the body remains out of reach. It was a gift
of providence that the close period between the time when
Smith’s
legacy records were initially released and then reissued for a newly
receptive audience was short enough to ensure that some aural
apparitions had not yet departed this plane. Had a little
more
time elapsed, no survivors would make their return from oblivion and
audiences would have been left with nothing more than immaterial voices
emanating from spinning circles of black vinyl. Tantalizing indexical
tokens, moving voices could then invoke animated ghosts only and not
fully present human referents. Yet, no matter how old the records, no
matter how much time has passed since their original issue, the
yearning to have a lived encounter with beguiling voices endures
(Sconce 2000).
This is an elemental desire that wants from mediated communication the
same deep union available to believers through communion and other
divine rites of transubstantiation. Following John Durham Peters:
Eros seeks to span the miles,
reach into the grave, and bridge all the
chasms. It is the principle that seeks to transcend the limitations of
our normal modes of contact with each other in the word and in the
flesh. New media, by smashing old barriers to intercourse, often
enlarges eros’s empire and distort its traditional shape.
(1999,
137)
In allowing us to overcome the limits of face to face exchange and seek
out partners with whom we are not physically and chronologically
proximate, communication media cater to and spur fantastic
desires.
The distortion of eros to which Peters refers arises from a long-time
concern with the appropriate limits of longing and communication.
Should we chase after those with whom no physical connection is
possible and from whom any return of recognition is unattainable? And
from whom, as with Socrates’ complaint about the recorded
word,
we are presented with the same unaltered message ad
infinitum. If
the possibility of genuine dialogue subtends all meaningful
relationships, then what does it mean to take pleasure in repetitive
communication with spectral voices?
If earlier we had invoked Lazarus to designate the allure of sound
reproduction, as inert recordings do manifest electric signs of life
when we play them, it might be more appropriate to think of Narcissus
when assessing the relationship between listeners and the voices they
love to reanimate. What we hear in these aural exchanges may
be
no more than the amplified reflection of our own plangent desires
echoing ceaselessly through speakers and headphones. Yes, a voice is
reborn each time we hit play, but it reverberates in a never-ending
echo. Unlike real voices, the mediated voice is an inhuman marker for
irretrievable loss. Returning time and time again to the same
recording, fetishistic listening may be an abject exercise in futility.
For those not counted among the Socratic faithful, there is something
about a rich voice transported through time that is substantially more
than an illusory figment of the embodied being who gave life to a
recording. This intense desire to return the author of the voice to the
soundstage (and not just a convincing replication of the voice itself),
was understood early on by both manufacturers of recording and playback
equipment and the audiences who bought cylinders and the machines to
play them. Agents of the Edison Company promoted Diamond cylinders with
comparison tests in which (shades of the much later “Is it
live,
or is it Memorex?” campaign featuring the weaponized voice of
Ella Fitzgerald shattering a crystal goblet), listeners were challenged
to distinguish between a recording and actual musicians singing and
playing in the flesh. Eyewitness accounts suggest that audiences could
not positively distinguish between the real thing and the recorded.
Celebrating the uncertainly as to the counterfeit and the genuine,
Edison’s pitchmen declared their recordings triumphs of
fidelity--a signal feat for audio pioneers (Milner 2009). In light of
this conviction, Edison could claim more for fidelity in recording than
just accurate sound reproduction. Absolute fidelity in reproduction
bonds listeners and musicians in a transcendent coalition as the rift
that separates listeners from distant interlocutors is closed. High
fidelity brings us together.
In making it difficult for listeners to distinguish between the real
and its simulation, recordings present confounding metaphysical
challenges that are both epistemological and
ontological.
Epistemologically, recordings proffer, as in the descriptor
“high
fidelity,” a true account of the voice and instruments that
author captured sound. Yet, no matter how life-like the reproduction,
audiophiles know that reproductions are always missing some part of the
original. Still, what remains in the soundstage can make for an
extraordinarily convincing illusion. The visceral truth of
what
listeners hear in a recording becomes apparent when feet tap, fingers
snap and bodies sway in time with musical rhythms. The body
responds with equal fervor to live and recorded sounds making no
distinction between reproductions and originals.
Ontologically, listeners are confronted with semblant sounds that are
emanations from a living source. The air that is displaced as speaker
cones vibrate is a motivated referent for the breath that passes from
the mouth of the singer, vibrating violin strings or pneumatic
saxophone honk. Those who relish being overcome by loud music
know hearing an orchestra reach a fortissimo climax or bouncing along
with a thumping sub-woofer is an incandescent pleasure that is not less
keenly felt when music is channeled through an inanimate sound system.
All venerable historical artifacts furnish a material connection with
the past, they all possess some hint of an “aura,”
some
ragged end of the real, but old recordings resonate with greater
intensity than many other types of historic artifact because they bear
such an intimate relation to both the source of the signal and the
recipient of sound. As Walter Ong recognized when comparing sound with
other forms of sense data:
Sound cannot be sounding without the use of power. A hunter can see a
buffalo, smell, taste and touch a buffalo when the buffalo is
completely inert, even dead, but if he hears a buffalo, he had better
watch out: something is going on. In this sense, all sound, and
especially oral utterance, which comes from inside living organisms, is
`dynamic.’ (2002, 32)
This power multiplies as recordings age and the distance between the
present day and the time of the original transcription grows. The
longer the span for which singers and musicians have been silenced, the
more miraculous the power of the vibrant sounding.
Dated recordings allow listeners leave to join those outside their
immediate compass, a vast cohort that includes ever-growing armies of
the long dead. In fostering this uncanny alliance, old
recordings
also confound any ordered grasp of concrete experience as certain
knowledge and fantastic illusion merge when Real and Memorex intertwine
in a heterodox body of numinous sound. The result of this vertiginous
blend is the creation of resonant “spaces for ecstatic
regression” (Daniel Lopatin as cited in Reynolds 2011, 83).
With
reference to one of the oldest definitions for communication, archival
records transport listeners.
Recordings Play
Havoc with Time
Compounding the extent of this disordering of the senses, sound
archives place auditors in a perplexing relation to one of the
fundamental coordinates of existence: time. As Jonathan Sterne
observes, recordings are created and listened to within “a
three-fold sense of time that is: at once (1) linear, progressive,
historical time, (2) the internally consistent time on a record and . .
.the almost geologic time of the physical recording itself “
(2003, 310). Time is one of the primary mechanisms by which we order
our daily lives, but time is also experienced as part of a musical
composition, as in a hook-rich single that ends far too quickly or a
longer piece that unfolds across leisurely movements stretching well
beyond the limit of a three-minute single.
It is also the passage of time which accounts for the presence or
absence of historical patina that listeners handily apprehend in new
and old recordings. Listening to discs waxed in Baghdad just after the
award of the British Mandate of Mesopotamia as opposed to hearing
Gorillaz’ tracks laid down a couple of weeks back has an
undeniable impact on the comprehension of recorded music.
Newly
recorded sounds come bundled in daily background noise, while old
recordings are, to borrow Gary Gumpert’s phrase,
“talking
tombstones” (as cited in Sterne 2003, 309). One is
just
another enjoyable bit of the aural commons, as with the welcome lift
delivered by a favorite hit on the jukebox, while ancient recordings
have an oracular cast by virtue of eclipsing impossible stretches of
the past.
No wonder we can find ourselves “lost” in an old
recording
as we are caught in the animated cascade of a musical performance that
entwines our time, the here and now of the listening context, and the
immediate and anticipated time of the performance (that delicious
experience of time unfolding as a musician is about to bend a searing
blue note, hit a killer riff or return to the tonic), and our knowledge
of the original date of the artifact. Such a mess of times wrecks havoc
with any straightforward comprehension of a regular and orderly
division of life’s predictable rhythms and leaves listeners
enveloped in a “whirlpool of historical
contingency”
(Storey 2009, 47). Adrift in horological chaos, listeners are unmoored
from any time standard and free to lose themselves in temporal
multiplicity.
The experience of context is also disrupted by old recordings. New
recordings typically come to us as part of the perpetual now with no
distinguishing sense of time and circumstance beyond belonging to the
contemporary world market. Many old records are closely tied to local
vernacular and folk traditions extinct for generations. Etched in the
groove, these traditions regain currency whenever a old recording is
played anew. Conversely, works informed by market imperatives not part
of storied folk traditions, such as recordings of vaudeville
entertainers, dance orchestras, marching bands and minstrel performers
also carry perceptible traces of vanished social milieu. While the old
recording plays, expiry dates are temporarily void and even
ridiculously outmoded prescriptions for authentic performance are once
more in full force.
For example, it is difficult to resist the woeful charm of a diffident
race man contesting racial torts when listening to America’s
first Black superstar: Bert Williams. Cylinders from
Williams’
initial success on Broadway (at the turn of the 20th Century), to his
last recordings made while the sole Black performer in the otherwise
segregated Zeigfield Follies, grant him leave to join us while he
remains immured in a vanished social formation. Prejudice
endures, but Williams’ signature song
“Nobody”
(Williams 2004) unites contemporary listeners with a Negro sad sack
nobly battling particularly odious torments that, at least in part,
have long been superseded. The social sphere of Williams’
records
is not ours, but his recordings allow contemporary listeners the right
of return and free association with a self-effacing champion of color.
Conclusion: Keeping Up with the Dead
Archives of old music drive listeners to establish a full-throated
connection with the past. Sometimes this compulsion leads to
the
gold standard for communication, the face-to-face-encounter, as
Smith’s anthology propelled legions of collectors to
reconnect
with the living treasures responsible for making old-time
musics.
In our time, archival music-makers are dead; we can’t bring
anyone back for a set-down. All the while ever enlarging musical
archives amplify the compulsion to close the breach between ourselves,
the music makers and the men and women who listened in social settings
that are no
more.
Steve Roden’s recent compilation “. . . i
listen to
the wind that obliterates my name,” (Various Artists 2011)
offers
an object lesson for addressing the profligate return of old sounds
absent the power to physically resurrect the dead. Roden, a well-known
painter and sound installation artist is also a 78 authority and
collector of flea market photos of old-time musicians and the first
generation of music listeners to enter the world of recorded sound.
Roden combines elements of these two collections, photographs and
digitized 78s in a book/CD album that documents old modes of playing
and listening, while simultaneously conveying how easy and difficult it
is for contemporary auditors to try and imagine themselves among old
souls and their pastime musics. As the title of the
collection
suggests, listening is a temporal act that ends with extinction. Songs
finish, compositions resolve, sounds fade away, and all that remains
are fugitive recollections of musicians at work producing sounds that
can no longer be heard. Whether the image is cached in memory or
captured by a fly-blown photo unearthed at a jumble sale, sounds and
voices carry just so long and so far before silence rules. Yet, in an
historic act of unreasonable perseverance, recorded archives belie the
plain truth that the past is finished.
As most all of the 150 photos assembled in the chronicle are presented
with no supporting documentation, readers of the work are placed in an
elaborate sequence of complex encounters with musicians and music
lovers that encourage current listeners to manufacture back stories for
the one armed guitarist, duos and trios brandishing banjos and pistols,
endearing family ensembles and on. Also part of the photo
miscellany are pictures of devotees sitting with their Victrolas and
other players at home and outdoors in tandem with companion shots of
music aficionados and their cherished preserves of cylinders and disks.
Finally the compilation includes photographs of instruments in a rich
variety of contexts—including surreal prints of pianos ripped
from snug parlors by cyclones and dumped far from home. In sympathy
with the photographs of windswept keys, Roden’s entire
project
collects its varied subjects and carries them far from their native
soil. Keepsakes from the past, mementoes dear to the dead are now held
by the future.
The still images allow the living to witness people and playthings in
compelling depictions drawn from a vanquished world, while the
digitized 78s resonate in a dizzy nexus that includes antique sound
effects, home-made acetates from the inception of amateur recording,
parlor ballads, novelty hokum, gospel pleas, and much more. We can see
and hear people at work and leisure, feel the varied rhythms they
create, and find ourselves awash in sense data from another time and
place. Yet, in the last instance, contemporary auditors must entertain
dead envoys and their spirited culture across a formidable expanse of
time.
Save for one slight morsel of deep background, Roden’s
decision
not to include any biographical data or musicological analysis in his
collection, even when some of the musicians are not unknown, is in
keeping with the general effect of so much old sound data returning in
our time. The avalanche of newly available recordings outruns
any
attempt at musicological annotation and historical interpretation. Even
uncommonly catholic scholars and knowledgeable fans will find
themselves in unfamiliar territory given the inundation of old
recordings once more in circulation.
This boundless torrent leads to an absurd dilemma. Archive
fever,
Derrida’s (1996) diagnosis for the drive to attain the
complete,
authoritative record, leaves fixated collectors with the daunting task
of recalling spectral peoples through vehicles which cannot
satisfactorily reclaim what has been left behind. No matter how large
the archive, there is always more to collect, more to hear, and the
constant imperative to enlarge the holdings is an admission that,
indeed, the historical record is forever lacking. Unable to
fully
recuperate the past, collections are, quite literally, monumental
failures. Scarce and non-existent artifacts ensure that any archive is
wanting; while the larger the archive, the more trouble and expense
that have gone into amassing a superb collection, the less useful the
store becomes. Infinitely large returns, or what may as well be
considered infinite (no human can listen and appreciate all that has
been delivered), ensure that as archives grow, and sound preserves
multiply, they become progressively more daunting and less useful.
Nevertheless, brimming annals surely have some measure of utility and
despite falling far short of an undiminished recovery of the past,
digital musical archives and their attendant technologies of storage,
dissemination and reproduction make do as serviceable time machines. In
returning bits of time past to consciousness, old musics resurface as
mysterious audio constellations akin to startling recovered memories.
Unlike routine recollections, summoned up as part of orderly cognitive
searches that come with a strong sense of the original context from
which they originate, dated musical mementos come from places and times
we cannot recall. They are rent from their birthplace and miraculously
reconstituted in our time and our lives. For this reason, when Greil
Marcus refers to the world conjured up by old-time musics from the
States, he calls it “the old, weird America” (1997,
87). Every historical recording is, in this sense, wholly
alien,
and yet, as pure sensory experience, instantly accessible.
Archaic recordings bring us to people and places we cannot readily
recognize even as we have the compelling gift of appreciating their
undiminished musical talents in the here and now. No matter how far
gone, they abide. As Charles Babbage, one of the pioneers of analog
computing, postulated in a reflection on the absolute permanence of
sound and other sense data:
In fact, there is a great album of Babel. . . for all we know to the
contrary, other worlds may be peopled and conducted with the images of
personas and transactions thrown off from this and from each other; the
whole universal nature being nothing more than phonetic and photegenic
structures. (as cited in Gleick 2011, 377)
In accord with so many other inventors, critics and fans, Babbage
asserts that recording engineers immortality. Going further than most,
Babbage argues that the universe itself is a celestial archive that
keeps us all in play forever(not just demi-gods like Bix, Left-Eye and
Elvis). At this extreme, archives may not only provide glad access to
human simulations, they may also replicate the enduring nature of
all-encompassing creation in cataloging existence.
Following Babbage’s lead in likening great archives to
towering
Babel, our growing surplus of recorded transactions leaves us one with
the Babylonians in a sea of cacophonous voices that cannot be mastered.
We too are confronted with voices and sounds that are audible but not
wholly comprehensible. Even when the singers employ our tongue, they do
so in a fashion that is oftentimes utterly foreign. Unlike the
Babylonians who are sentenced to struggle for purchase in a shattered
world, where all are divided by incommensurable speech, sonic time
machines present us with a significantly more harmonious prospect. In
numbers that continue to multiply as collectors, laptop entrepreneurs
and institutional archives return ever more musics to circulation; the
multitude of ghosts that haunt us are appreciably more welcome than the
audible misery visited upon the Babylonians. These sounds
don’t
separate us one from the other, instead they expand and repopulate our
world with an unearthly number of sound encounters. In lieu
of
division, they offer diversity. Recognizing you don’t need to
speak the language like a native to visit foreign realms, we can
inhabit multiple worlds and in so doing cast off the musical
constraints marshalling the contemporary soundscape.
Countermanding the general thrust of postmodern aesthetic practice to
eviscerate history, as past, present and future blur in an enervating
slurry of circulating signifiers (time’s rich pageant now
contempo dust devil), archivists disseminate musical exports that
maintain their inherent alterity and historic singularity. Digital
archives house ghosts who sing of what was, so that we need not be
imprisoned in our time. Old recordings are not time capsules for the
ancients; they are interchanges that spirit present-day listeners from
the iron keep of the present. In the slipstream of distant sound
alternatives, the noisy dead tender passage from home.
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Notes
[1] See Brooks(2005) survey of
reissues of U.S recordings commissioned
by the Library of Congress and the National Preservation Board. Brooks
found that most music held under U.S. copyright law has not been
reissued and that rights holders “ignore earlier periods, no
matter how historically important recordings for those periods may be.
It is difficult for third parties to reissue such material
legally.” (8) Historical interest is musics past obliges most
all
listeners and digital archivists to break the law.
[2] Mash-ups, for instance, are
iconoclastic sound creations made by
combining seemingly incompatible works, say the songs of The Beatles
and the raps of Jay-Z, into surreal amalgamations. See Gunkel(2008) and
Shiga(2007) for the metaphysics of mash-ups. Hear Girl Talk(2010) by DJ
wunderkind Gregg Gillis for the get-together. Appropriately, the album
is available as a free download from Illegal Art.
[3] Revolutions are fomented by groups
acting in concert and Smith did
not engineer a nationwide interest in native music by himself(Skinner
2006; Street 2000). Countless folklorists, performers, promoters and
other agents, including John Lomax and his son Alan made essential, if
controversial, contributions to the return of old-time musics. Efforts
to preserve traditional song and publicize gifted performers, most
especially Leadbelly, along with other forms of public outreach were of
inestimable value in preparing the ground for and furthering the
American folk revival (Szwed 2010; Wolfe and Lornell 1992).
Many thanks to my friend and colleague Dan Grano for expert editorial
assistance along with Erik Steinskog and the anonymous reviewers for
their apt suggestions.