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YOU’VE GOT TO BE MODERNISTIC (Further thoughts on sound recording, photography, Ives, Kronos, and so on)

Tuesdays are usually child care days for me. Today the baby boy got two of his electronic gizmo rhythm-and-tune generating toys together and played them simultaneously. An Ivesian moment.

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One of the tunes on my son’s toys is “Mary Had a Little Lamb.” Coincidentally, the very first song ever recorded, by Thomas Edison himself.

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When my beloved spouse and I got married in 2001 (a marriage odyssey, said our friend Slim), she owned an ‘82 Datsun and a bike, and I owned a bike. Shortly before the baby was born we bought a new Subaru wagon. The baby’s car. All the new cars come with CD players now. No objection here. In some respects the nicest stereo we have.

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Listened to a lot of “Nuevo,” the recent CD by Kronos Quartet, in the car while running errands. Heard details I’d missed before, like the “psychedelic” stereo effects on the tune by the ‘60s Mexican lounge-kitsch-hi-fi composer Esquivel. Was digging that, until the end of the tune when I heard one of the Kronosians say something about “blow your mind, man,” an unamusing ‘60s-esque sarcasm. To reply in ‘90s - ‘00s sarcasm, “Whatever.” If you think the music is lame kitsch, Kronosians, don’t play it. I thought it was a catchy tune with some rhythmic spice and first-rate arrangement and lively production effects.

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The idea behind my post two days ago about the effect of sound recording -- or phonography -- on the course of music history came to me while reading a blog post by Kyle Gann at his blog “PostClassic” (link on this page) about computer notation programs. I wrote to Kyle and sent him my post, telling him I was a fan of his writing. He kindly wrote back. Among other things, he said, “Recording has certainly had the effect of homogenizing classical performance since the 1940s, but that's a relatively recent development.” His comment crystalized for me a thought that had hovered at the edge of my mind while posting the other night. Namely, that at first, the quality of recording wasn’t very good, and that it took even longer for people to develop recording-playback formats that would accomodate more than a four minutes at a time.

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By contrast, very early in its history, photography looked impressive. Though limited to black-and-white for many decades.

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I forgot to mention in my post yesterday that Kyle Gann is also a composer. I’ve never heard his music. Thinking about this, I realized I’ve never heard any music by Charles Ives performed live. Same is true for most 20th century composers I love. I should make more of an effort. If I were to take every possible opportunity to hear live performances of music by Ives, Cage, Riley, and Reich in my home city Seattle (and lets just stop with four for now), I bet it would take years before I heard music by all four of them. Unless maybe I got on some university music school concert mailing lists. Painful confession: I lack motivation to do this! Thus, my sole acquaintance with the music of these composers will likely remain through recordings, at least for the foreseeable future.

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If I were to go hear Kronos, I’d probably hear a lot of pre-recorded music broadcast along with their live sawing. Most of their records feature guest musicians, and I read that their sound technicians have to know their scores inside and out in order to know when to plug in the samples. I’ve got nothing against samples, but if you’re going to have someone generating them, put them on-stage with the rest of the band. And -- if the samples are really a fifth (and sixth and seventh and so on) musician adding more parts, well, that’s lame. I don’t know if that’s what Kronos does, but that’s what it sounds like from what I read.

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I once, several years ago, at the New York apartment of a friend of a friend of a friend, heard a cylinder player. My recollection is that the sound was thin. The same F.O.A.F.O.A.F also had a hand-crank 78 player with a horn for a speaker. No electricity involved, just crank the machine up and put the needle on the record. It sounded beautiful. Warm and woody.

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I have a CD of Yehudi Menuhin playing violin concertos by Mozart and Paganini with l’Orchestre Symphonique de Paris, conducted by Pierre Monteux, recorded in 1934. One of the movements is twenty-one and a half minutes long. If 78 rpm records could only accomodate 3 or 4 minutes of music on a side, how was this recording preserved? I have no idea. Anybody reading this who can answer this, please do! Thanks!

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Old recordings often sound beautiful to me. L’Orchestre Symphonique de Paris sounds muffled and warm on this CD.

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The cover of the Menuhin CD has a photo of the conductor, Monteux, who gets top billing. I’ve never heard of him, but maybe he’s famous in France -- the CD was made in France. It’s a studio portrait of Monteux, with a paragraph-long inscription to someone named Piers Coppola signed by Monteux. Studio portraits used to be pricier, more of a big deal, than they have been for several decades.

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I remember reading a review of a biography of Duke Ellington that dissed Ellington for being conceited because he inscribed photos of himself to his parents and sister. Dude biographer didn’t know that it was common practice until -- when -- the ‘40s?

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In a Gershwin biography is a photo of Fred and Adele Astaire, inscribed with fond compliments to their great friend George Gershwin.

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The other day I wrote enthusiastically of Kronos breaking down barriers between pop and classical music. Today I don’t care. It’s all music, and if I had to classify, I’d call them a pop back-up band that plays with all sorts of cool musicians and also plays 20th and sometimes 19th century classical music. “Nuevo” is a great pop record with only two tunes with any sort of “classical” provenance. (One of them is one of the best things on the album.) Nothing wrong with being a pop band -- except that they get all sorts of grant money from public and private institutions, which just ain’t available to other pop bands. Well, good for them. Just make sure to pay your guest soloists, OK?

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Even though recording quality has improved dramatically, listening to records (including CDs) is nothing like live. Example: “Bolero” by Ravel. Starts with a solo oboe (I think) and ends with a full wailing symphony orchestra. If you turn up your stereo loud enough so that the oboe will register, by the end of the piece you’re blowing out your speakers. Or, at least, I am, and I’d bet it would be true for most people.

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If you never listen to classical music, you won’t have this problem, because no other genre allows its recordings to have much dynamic range. There’s a whole complicated technology and psychology involved in creating the illusion of dynamic range in pop (including rock) records. It’s pretty cool, but I don’t feel like talking about it now. Kronos albums, including “Nuevo,” have wide dynamic ranges -- so maybe they are classical after all.

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When I lived in Ann Arbor in the early and mid ‘80s, a local bohemian named Arwulf Arwulf hosted a show on the campus station called “You’ve Got to Be Modernistic.” As I recall, the show featured music of the 1920s. It wasn’t until years later that I learned that he got the title for his show from a tune by James P. Johnson, the great stride pianist and composer of the “Charleston.” Johnson was a friend of and big influence on Duke Ellington and Fats Waller. I’ve never heard the tune.