Cap­tur­ing Sound How Tech­nol­ogy Has Changed Music (Roth Fam­ily Foun­da­tion Music in Amer­ica Book)Mark Katz
Uni­ver­sity of Cal­i­for­nia Press 2004World­Cat • Library­Thing • Google Books • Book­Finder 

The many var­ied forms of sound record­ing and play­back tech­nolo­gies, begin­ning with Edison’s inven­tion of the phono­graph in the 1870s, have undoubt­edly changed the ways in which we lis­ten to and dis­sem­i­nate music. Mark Katz argues that beyond this, record­ing has in many ways altered music itself: it has changed per­form­ers’ approach to play­ing music, com­posers’ approach to writ­ing music, and has has even spawned com­pletely new musi­cal gen­res. In Cap­tur­ing Sound, Katz pro­vides a num­ber of case stud­ies, each explor­ing one of these “phono­graph effecs,” as he calls them. His dis­cus­sions encom­pass a vari­ety of musics, rang­ing from clas­si­cal and jazz to hip-hop and techno.

Katz begins by out­lin­ing what he sees as the seven most impor­tant char­ac­ter­is­tics of sound record­ing tech­nol­ogy (e.g. tan­gi­bil­ity, repeata­bil­ity, and manip­u­la­bil­ity). It is these traits, singly and in com­bi­na­tion, that give rise to the var­i­ous phono­graph effects Katz addresses in the remain­der of the book. He then pro­ceeds to give a short his­tory of not of early record­ing tech­nol­ogy, but of the var­i­ous ways in which early record­ing and (espe­cially) play­back equip­ment found its way into Amer­i­can culture.

The first real phono­graph effect Katz tack­les is the dis­sem­i­na­tion and rapidly grow­ing pop­u­lar­ity of jazz in the 1910s and 1920s. Jazz was really the first genre to ben­e­fit dur­ing its for­ma­tive years from the porta­bil­ity and repeata­bil­ity of sound record­ings. Katz pro­vides a pretty good sum­mary of this phe­nom­e­non, but I’m not sure he really adds any­thing to what pre­vi­ous writ­ers have done. With his next topic, though, Katz enters what seems to be new ground.

Vio­lin­ists, on the whole, increased their use of vibrato around the begin­ning of the twen­ti­eth cen­tury. This fact seems to be widely rec­og­nized, but lit­tle time has been devoted to deter­min­ing the impe­tus for the change. Katz, as you might guess, makes a case for record­ing tech­nol­ogy being respon­si­ble: vio­lin­ists dis­cov­ered that using more vibrato could com­pen­sate for some of the lim­i­ta­tions of early acoustic record­ings. The record­ings they pro­duced were then emu­lated by aspir­ing play­ers, lead­ing to a styl­is­tic shift. This seems a good place to men­tion the CD that accom­pa­nies the book. It con­tains thir­teen musi­cal exam­ples, of which five serve to illus­trate the change in vibrato aes­thetic. It’s quite help­ful to have these; prose descrip­tions of sound are often insufficient.

Katz next dis­cusses the rel­a­tively short-lived idea of Gram­mophon­musik — music in which the phono­graph was used as a tool for com­po­si­tion. This might be done by alter­ing exist­ing record­ings, or by actu­ally attempt­ing to engrave sound forms by hand onto a blank phono­graph disc. The genre was mostly spec­u­la­tive, but a few exam­ples cre­ated by Paul Hin­demith survive.

The remain­ing chap­ters of Cap­tur­ing Sound deal with pop­u­lar music, and mainly with elec­tronic and/or dig­i­tal sound tech­nolo­gies. Katz gives a short his­tory of DJing and turntab­lism, and then out­lines his own field­work in the study of DJ bat­tles or com­pe­ti­tions. He devotes a chap­ter to the “art and pol­i­tics” of sam­pling, look­ing at exam­ples drawn from hip-hop, pop, rock, techno, and art music. Katz’s last chap­ter explores how MP3s (and other dig­i­tal audio files) and peer-to-peer file-sharing net­works are chang­ing the expe­ri­ences of lis­ten­ing to, dis­cov­er­ing, and con­sum­ing music. While these var­i­ous sub­jects have been treated else­where, they have gen­er­ally not been done so with a schol­arly approach.

Over­all, I enjoyed Cap­tur­ing Sound. Katz’s top­ics are inter­est­ing, and his writ­ing style is clear and engag­ing. I found the book as a whole to be a lit­tle uneven, though. Some chap­ters (like those about vio­lin vibrato and DJ bat­tles) involve a great deal of Katz’s own orig­i­nal research, while oth­ers (such as those about Gram­mophon­musik and the rise of jazz) do not. Katz acknowl­edges that his var­i­ous top­ics are “con­nected per­haps by noth­ing save record­ing.” Thus it is per­haps bet­ter to approach Cap­tur­ing Sound as a col­lec­tion of essays rather than as a cohe­sive book. I hope, as does Katz, that his writ­ing will inspire oth­ers to pro­duce work in a sim­i­lar vein — I imag­ine there’s a lot more to be said about technology’s influ­ence on music.

This Is Your Brain on Music The Sci­ence of a Human Obses­sionDaniel J. Lev­itin
Plume 2007World­Cat • Library­Thing • Google Books • Book­Finder 

In this book, neu­ro­sci­en­tist Daniel Lev­itin elu­ci­dates the var­i­ous neu­ro­bi­o­log­i­cal processes involved in lis­ten­ing to music. He details the ways in which the human brain accom­plishes tasks, such as meter extrac­tion, that seem straight­for­ward (espe­cially to trained musi­cians) but in actu­al­ity demand very sophis­ti­cated neural pro­cess­ing. He also demon­strates how adept our brains are, even those of peo­ple with no musi­cal train­ing, at doing things like mem­o­riz­ing pitches and tem­pos, iden­ti­fy­ing wrong notes, and hear­ing and pre­dict­ing musi­cal forms.

Although some of this is cer­tainly a prod­uct of the struc­ture and func­tion of the brain, Lev­itin also attrib­utes much of it to expe­ri­ence. He makes a con­vinc­ing argu­ment that because of the ubiq­uity of music, most peo­ple qual­ify as expert lis­ten­ers, whether or not they can dis­cuss music in a tech­ni­cal man­ner. Lev­itin spends much of his time on these processes of lis­ten­ing, but he also addresses the ways the brain is involved in the per­for­mance of music, neu­ro­bi­o­log­i­cal foun­da­tions of musi­cal taste, and var­i­ous ideas about how and why humans evolved to be innately musical.

Lev­itin is now a sci­en­tist at McGill Uni­ver­sity, but he began his career as a rock musi­cian and record pro­ducer. Per­haps because of this breadth of expe­ri­ence, he does a pretty good job of writ­ing for a wide audi­ence — he dis­cusses many com­plex con­cepts, but always explains them in rel­a­tively sim­ple terms. This isn’t to say his writ­ing is sim­plis­tic; I found the chap­ter on musi­cal fun­da­men­tals fairly inter­est­ing, even though it’s stuff in which I am well versed.

Through­out the book, Lev­itin pro­vides a good bal­ance between sci­en­tific stud­ies and anec­do­tal evi­dence, while also includ­ing a good bit of his­tor­i­cal and sci­en­tific con­text. I’d rec­om­mend This Is Your Brain on Music to musi­cians and music lovers alike. It pro­vides a fas­ci­nat­ing look at what’s going on inside our heads when we play or lis­ten to music.

Satchmo Blows Up the World Jazz Ambas­sadors Play the Cold WarPenny M. Von Eschen
Har­vard Uni­ver­sity Press 2004World­Cat • Library­Thing • Google Books • Book­Finder 

In this book, Penny Von Eschen chron­i­cles the U.S. State Department’s spon­sor­ship of jazz musi­cians as cul­tural emis­saries between 1956 and 1978. These pro­grams were ini­ti­ated by Pres­i­dent Eisen­hower as a follow-up to a four-year government-sponsored tour of Porgy and Bess that had met with great suc­cess in Europe, South Amer­ica, and the Mid­dle East. The selec­tion of Gershwin’s opera for offi­cial cul­tural export was no acci­dent — the focus on African-American char­ac­ters and per­form­ers was cal­cu­lated to com­bat Soviet cri­tiques of Amer­i­can racial pol­icy. The same impe­tus lay behind the idea to send jazz musi­cians — espe­cially racially inte­grated groups — abroad.

In addi­tion to Porgy and Bess, Louis Armstrong’s 1955 com­mer­cial tour of Europe attracted the Eisen­hower administration’s inter­est. Armstrong’s recep­tion in Switzer­land led a New York Times cor­re­spon­dent to dub him America’s “most effec­tive ambas­sador,” and ask why the U.S. gov­ern­ment wasn’t export­ing jazz along with its other demo­c­ra­tic pro­pa­ganda. Later that year, Arm­strong became the first jazz musi­cian approved for a State Department-sponsored tour. He refused, how­ever, to rep­re­sent an admin­is­tra­tion that at the time did not sup­port desegregation.

Dizzy Gille­spie led a 22-piece band on the first State Department-sponsored jazz tour in 1956. The group — assem­bled for the tour and much larger than would have been finan­cially sol­vent in the U.S. at the time — per­formed in the Mid­dle East, Pak­istan, and Brazil. From the begin­ning, there were clashes between the desires of the gov­ern­ment and those of the musi­cians. Gille­spie resisted attempts to con­trol his por­trayal of the United States, espe­cially in regard to its racial poli­cies; the band was racially inte­grated, but he refused to pro­mote the idea that this was an accu­rate rep­re­sen­ta­tion of the coun­try. The com­po­si­tion of the band was, in fact, hid­den as much as pos­si­ble from Amer­i­can con­ser­v­a­tives — fur­ther evi­dence that the gov­ern­ment wished to por­tray race rela­tions as bet­ter than they actu­ally were. The musi­cians were also dis­mayed by the makeup of their audi­ences. Rather than play­ing for the gen­eral pop­u­lace, as they’d thought, they often played for only the elite mem­bers of soci­ety. Thus, the musi­cians used every oppor­tu­nity to stage infor­mal jam ses­sions with local musi­cians, play­ing for local audiences.

These ide­o­log­i­cal con­flicts per­vaded the State Depart­ment tours. The issues of race and rep­re­sen­ta­tion became more and more crit­i­cal as the Civil Rights Move­ment expanded in the 1960s, and with the rise of the Black Power Move­ment. Most black musi­cians on the tours rec­og­nized that they were being used to project an ide­al­is­tic view of Amer­i­can, and fol­lowed Gillespie’s lead in advanc­ing their own racial agen­das. Sim­i­larly most musi­cians, regard­less of racial back­ground, took it upon them­selves to make con­nec­tions with local musi­cians and jazz fans wher­ever they played. Much to the cha­grin of their U.S. gov­ern­ment han­dlers, late-night jam ses­sions often led to missed offi­cial func­tions the fol­low­ing day.

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How Equal Tem­pera­ment Ruined Har­mony (and Why You Should Care) Ross W. Duf­fin
W. W. Nor­ton 2006World­Cat • Library­Thing • Google Books • Book­Finder 

In his pre­lude, Duf­fin men­tions a recent book about the his­tory of equal tem­pera­ment. The book to which he refers is Stu­art Isacoff’s Tem­pera­ment (reviewed here), although Duf­fin only iden­ti­fies it in his end­notes. He takes issue with Isacoff’s treat­ment of the sub­ject, say­ing that Isacoff “con­cluded that Rameau dis­cov­ered equal tem­pera­ment (ET) in 1737, and basi­cally we all lived hap­pily ever after.” Duf­fin sees this as more or less the party line amongst present-day musi­cians; he relates an anec­dote about the con­duc­tor Christoph von Dohnányi as an exam­ple of this.

As one might guess from the book’s title, Duf­fin does not agree with the view of equal tem­pera­ment as the be-all and end-all, the Holy Grail of tun­ing sys­tems. He crit­i­cizes authors like Isacoff and Mur­ray Bar­bour (whose 1951 book Tun­ing and Tem­pera­ment is the stan­dard schol­arly study of the issue) for approach­ing the his­tory of tun­ing with an extreme bias towards equal tem­pera­ment. Duf­fin asks how Bar­bour, who admit­ted that he had never heard any­thing other than equal tem­pera­ment, could pos­si­bly dis­miss all other tun­ing sys­tems as infe­rior and unusable.

Thus, Duf­fin sets out to write a bal­anced his­tory of tun­ing sys­tems, one that does not take the supremacy of equal tem­pera­ment as a given. In doing this, he goes beyond the stan­dard his­tor­i­cal writ­ings. He exam­ines instru­men­tal meth­ods, the writ­ings of lesser-known musi­cians, and even musi­cal pas­sages (such as in the cello part of Haydn’s String Quar­tet op. 77, no. 2, where the com­poser spec­i­fies at one point that an E-flat and an adja­cent D-sharp should be played as the same note, indi­cat­ing that he prob­a­bly didn’t expect this else­where). Duf­fin also delves into more recent his­tory, exam­in­ing the prac­tices of nineteenth-century piano tuners and ana­lyz­ing early sound record­ings made by promi­nent artists such as vio­lin­ist Joseph Joachim.

Duf­fin brings all these dis­parate sources together to argue not only that the cur­rent pre­dom­i­nance of equal tem­pera­ment devel­oped later and more spo­rad­i­cally than is gen­er­ally accepted, but also that prior to about 1917, so-called “equal” tem­pera­ments were often not so equal at all.

Duf­fin writes con­vinc­ingly on his topic, and does so with pas­sion and a sharp wit. His intended audi­ence is more schol­arly — or at least more musi­cally trained — than that of Stu­art Isacoff, but his prose is still delight­fully read­able. There are quite a few side­bars through­out the books, mostly devoted to short biogra­phies of per­sons men­tioned in the text. It’s nice not to have to refer to Grove or Baker’s to get some back­ground infor­ma­tion on some of the more obscure per­son­ages, but these side­bars often inter­rupt the text in awk­ward places. There are also a hand­ful of car­toons scat­tered through the text. These sort of set the tone of the book, but even the best are only smirk– or groan-worthy. I’d rec­om­mend that any­one with more than a pass­ing inter­est in the sub­ject of tem­pera­ment read both Isacoff’s and Duffin’s books in order to get two very dif­fer­ent per­spec­tives on the matter.