After something succeeds, more venues of a similar size and shape are built to accommodate more production of the same. After a while the form of the work that predominates in these spaces is taken for granted—of course we mainly hear symphonies in symphony halls.
Next to that is a band performing. B The sound in that club was remarkably good—the amount of crap scattered everywhere, the furniture, the bar, the crooked uneven walls and looming ceiling made for both great sound absorption and uneven acoustic reflections—qualities one might spend a fortune to recreate in a recording studio.
Well, these qualities were great for this particular music. Whatever went on below the waist was generally invisible, obscured by the half-standing, half-sitting audience. Most of the audience would have had no idea that the guy in that photo was rolling around on the stage—he would have simply disappeared from view. Charlie Pride gave Tootsie Bess a hatpin to use on rowdy customers. C Physically, the two clubs are almost identical. The audience behavior was pretty much the same in both places, too.
For the first, and probably the last time! People drink, make new friends, shout, and fall down, so the performers had to play loud enough to be heard above that—and so it was, and is. So I did a little digging to see if other types of music might have also been written to fit their acoustic contexts.
Who would invent, play, or persevere with such rhythms if they sounded terrible? No one. Not for a minute. Some say that the instruments being played in the photoE at the top of the next page were all derived from easily available local materials, and therefore it was convenience with a sly implication of unsophistication that determined the nature of the music.
This assessment implies that these instruments and this music were the best this culture could do given the circumstances. But I would argue that the instruments were carefully fashioned, selected, tailored, and played to best suit the physical, acoustic, and social situation. The music perfectly fits the place where it is heard, sonically and structurally.
It is absolutely ideally suited for this situation—the music, a living thing, evolved to fit the available niche. That same music would turn into sonic mush in a cathedral. F Western music in the Middle Ages was performed in these stone-walled gothic cathedrals, and in architecturally similar monasteries and cloisters.
The reverberation time in those spaces is very long—more than four seconds in most cases—so a note sung a few seconds ago hangs in the air and becomes part of the present sonic landscape. A composition with shifting musical keys would inevitably invite dissonance as notes overlapped and clashed—a real sonic pileup. So what evolved, what sounds best in this kind of space, is modal in structure—often using very long notes.
Slowly evolving melodies that eschew key changes work beautifully and reinforce the otherworldly ambience. Not only does this kind of music work well acoustically, it helps establish what we have come to think of as a spiritual aura. Africans, whose spiritual music is often rhythmically complex, may not associate the music that originates in these spaces with spirituality; they may simply hear it as being blurry and indistinct. Mythologist Joseph Campbell, however, thought that the temple and cathedral are attractive because they spatially and acoustically recreate the cave, where early humans first expressed their spiritual yearnings.
In this context there would be no need or desire to include complex harmonies, as they would have sounded horrible in such spaces. Creatively they did exactly the right thing. It is a myth.
G As you can imagine, there was already an organ there, and the sound was reverberant, though not as much as in the giant gothic cathedrals. The music Bach wrote for such spaces sounded good in there; the space made the single instrument, the pipe organ, sound larger, and it also had the nice effect of softening any mistakes as he doodled up and down the scales, as was his wont.
Modulating into different keys in the innovative way he did was risky business in these venues. Previously, composers for these rooms stayed in the same key, so they could be all washy and droney, and if the room sounded like an empty swimming pool, then it posed no problem.
I recently went to a Balkan music festival in Brooklyn in a hall that was almost identical to the church pictured on the previous page. The brass bands were playing in the middle of the floor, and folks were dancing in circles around them. People could dance to it too. My guess is that in order to be heard above the dancing, clomping feet, and gossiping, one might have had to figure out how to make the music louder, and the only way to do this was to increase the size of the orchestra, which is what happened.
Yu Meanwhile, some folks around that same time were going to hear operas. La Scala was built in ; the original orchestra section comprised a series of booths or stalls, rather than the rows of seats that exist now. Back in the day, people would socialize and holler out to one another during the performances. If they liked a tune, they wanted to hear it again—now! The vibe was more like CBGB than your typical contemporary opera house. La Scala and other opera venues of the time were also fairly compact—more so than the big opera houses that now dominate much of Europe and the United States.
Take a look at Bayreuth, the opera house Wagner had built for his own music in the s. Not very much bigger than La Scala. It was the orchestral accommodations themselves that were enlarged. He needed larger orchestras to conjure the requisite bombast. He had new and larger brass instruments created too, and he also called for a larger bass section, to create big orchestral effects. Granted, he was mainly pushing the boundaries of preexisting opera architecture, not inventing something from scratch.
Once he built this place, he more or less wrote for it and its particular acoustic qualities. As time passed, symphonic music came to be performed in larger and larger halls. That musical format, originally conceived for rooms in palaces and the more modest-sized opera halls, was now somewhat unfairly being asked to accommodate more reverberant spaces.
Subsequent classical composers therefore wrote music for those new halls, with their new sound, and it was music that emphasized texture, and sometimes employed audio shock and awe in order to reach the back row that was now farther away. They needed to adapt, and adapt they did. The music of Mahler and other later symphonic composers works well in spaces like Carnegie Hall. L Groove music, percussive music featuring drums—like what I do, for example—has a very hard time here.
In the early part of the last century, jazz developed alongside later classical music. This popular music was originally played in bars, at funerals, and in whorehouses and joints where dancing was going on. The musicians learned to stretch out and extend whatever section of the tune was deemed popular.
These improvisations and elongations evolved out of necessity, and a new kind of music came into being. Its roots are spiritual dance music. Yes, this is one kind of spiritual music that would sound terrible in most cathedrals. The instrumentation of jazz was also modified so that the music could be heard over the sound of the dancers and the bar racket. Banjos were louder than acoustic guitars, and trumpets were nice and loud, too.
Until amplification and microphones came into common use, the instruments written for and played were adapted to fit the situation. The makeup of the bands, as well as the parts the composers wrote, evolved to be heard. Likewise, country music, blues, Latin music, and rock and roll were all originally music to dance to, and they too had to be loud enough to be heard above the chatter.
Recorded music and amplification changed all that, but when these forms jelled, such factors were just beginning to be felt. Around , according to music writer Alex Ross, classical audiences were no longer allowed to shout, eat, and chat during a performance.
Ross hints that this was a way of keeping the hoi polloi out of the new symphony halls and opera houses. I guess it was assumed that the lower classes were inherently noisy. Music that in many instances used to be for all was now exclusively for the elite. This exclusionary policy affected the music being written, too—since no one was talking, eating, or dancing anymore, the music could have extreme dynamics.
Harmonically complex passages could be appreciated as well. Much of twentieth-century classical music could only work in and was written for these socially and acoustically restrictive spaces. Although the quietest harmonic and dynamic details and complexities could now be heard, performing in these larger more reverberant halls meant that rhythmically things got less distinct and much fuzzier—less African, one might say.
Even the jazz now played in these rooms became a kind of chamber music. The smaller jazz clubs followed suit; no one dances anymore at the Blue Note or Village Vanguard, though liquor is very quietly served. One might conclude that removing the funky relaxed vibe from refined American concert music was not accidental. Not that any kind of music is aimed exclusively at either the body or head—that absolute demarcation is somewhat of an intellectual and social construct. Serious music, in this way of thinking, is only absorbed and consumed above the neck.
The regions below the neck are socially and morally suspect. The fact that it was wildly innovative and at the same time very danceable created, for twentieth-century sophisticates, a kind of cognitive dissonance. Music now had to serve two very different needs simultaneously. The phonograph box in the parlor became a new venue; for many people, it replaced the concert hall or the club.
By the thirties, most people were listening to music either on radio or on home phonographs. N People probably heard a greater quantity of music, and a greater variety, on these devices than they would ever hear in person in their lifetimes. Music could now be completely free from any live context, or, more properly, the context in which it was heard became the living room and the jukebox—parallel alternatives to still-popular ballrooms and concert halls. The performing musician was now expected to write and create for two very different spaces: the live venue, and the device that could play a recording or receive a transmission.
Socially and acoustically, these spaces were worlds apart. But the compositions were expected to be the same! An audience who heard and loved a song on the radio naturally wanted to hear that same song at the club or the concert hall.
These two demands seem unfair to me. The performing skills, not to mention the writing needs, the instrumentation, and the acoustic properties for each venue are completely different. Performers adapted to this new technology. The microphones that recorded singers changed the way they sang and the way their instruments were played. O Singers no longer had to have great lungs to be successful. It might not seem that radical now, but crooning was a new kind of singing back then.
To a listener, these guys are whispering like a lover, right into your ear, getting completely inside your head. Music had never been experienced that way before. Technology had turned the living room or any small bar with a jukebox into a concert hallP— and often there was dancing. Besides changing the acoustic context, recorded music also allowed music venues to come into existence without stages and often without any live musicians at all. DJs could play at high school dances, folks could shove quarters into jukeboxes and dance in the middle of the bar, and in living rooms the music came out of furniture.
Eventually venues evolved that were purposefully built to play only this kind of performerless music—discos. It feels stupid to listen to club music at its intended volume at home, though people do it. Once again the dancers were changing the context, urging the music in new directions. R In the sixties the most successful pop music began to be performed in basketball arenas and stadiums, which tend to have terrible acoustics—only a narrow range of music works at all in such environments.
Steady-state music music with a consistent volume, more or less unchanging textures, and fairly simple pulsing rhythms works best, and even then rarely. Industrial music for industrial spaces.
Stately chord progressions might survive, but funk, for example, bounced off the walls and floors and became chaotic. The groove got killed, though some funky acts persevered because these concerts were social gatherings, bonding opportunities, and rituals as much as music events. Mostly the arenas were filled with white kids— and the music was usually Wagnerian. The gathered masses in sports arenas and stadiums demanded that the music perform a different function—not only sonically but socially—than what it had been asked to do on a record or in a club.
The music those bands ended up writing in response—arena rock—is written with that in mind: rousing, stately anthems. Well, there is the interior of your car. The massive volume seems to be more about sharing your music with everyone, gratis!
The music is bass heavy, but with a strong and precise high end as well. In earlier pop music, the keyboards or guitars or even violins often occupied much of this middle territory, and without those things, the vocals rushed to fill the vacuum. Hip-hop is unlike anything one could produce with acoustic instruments. That umbilical cord has been cut. The connection between the recorded music and the live musician and performer is now a thing of the past.
People do dance in their cars, or they try to. As big SUVs become less practical I foresee this music changing as well. Photo by Eric W. Beasman Photo by Olaf Mooij One other new music venue has arrived.
Private listening really took off in , with the popularity of the Walkman portable cassette player. You, and only you, the audience of one, can hear a million tiny details, even with the compression that MP3 technology adds to recordings.
That said, extreme and sudden dynamic changes can be painful on a personal music player. If there has been a compositional response to MP3s and the era of private listening, I have yet to hear it. One would expect music that is essentially a soothing flood of ambient moods as a way to relax and decompress, or maybe dense and complex compositions that reward repeated playing and attentive listening, maybe intimate or rudely erotic vocals that would be inappropriate to blast in public but that you could enjoy privately.
If any of this is happening, I am unaware of it. African music sounds the way it does because it was meant to be played out in the open a form of steady-state music loud enough to be heard outdoors above dancing and singing but it turns out to also work well in the most intimate of spaces—our inner ears.
Yes, people do listen to Bach and Wagner on iPods, but not too many people are writing new music like that, except for film scores, where Wagnerian bombast works really well. The symphony hall is now a movie theater for the ears. It extends into the natural world as well. David Attenborough and others have claimed that birdcalls have evolved to fit the environment. Water birds have calls that, unsurprisingly, cut through the ambient sounds of water, and birds that live in the plains and grasslands, like the Savannah Sparrow, have buzzing calls that can traverse long distances.
Eyal Shy of Wayne State University says that birdsongs vary even within the same species. V And birds of the same species adjust their singing as their habitat changes too. Birds in San Francisco were found to have raised the pitch of their songs over forty years in order to be better heard above the noises of the increased traffic.
In the waters around New Zealand, whale calls have adapted to the increase in shipping noise over the last few decades—the hum of engines and thrash of propellers. Whales need to signal over huge distances to survive, and one hopes that they continue to adapt to this audio pollution.
So musical evolution and adaptation is an interspecies phenomenon. And presumably, as some claim, birds enjoy singing, even though they, like us, change their tunes over time.
The joy of making music will find a way, regardless of the context and the form that emerges to best fit it. But I have a feeling that this somewhat reversed view of creation—that it is more pragmatic and adaptive than some might think—happens a lot, and in very different areas. It seems that creativity, whether birdsong, painting, or songwriting, is as adaptive as anything else.
Genius—the emergence of a truly remarkable and memorable work—seems to appear when a thing is perfectly suited to its context. When something works, it strikes us as not just being a clever adaptation, but as emotionally resonant as well. When the right thing is in the right place, we are moved.
Scarlet Tanager by Joe Thompson In my experience, the emotionally charged content always lies there, hidden, waiting to be tapped, and although musicians tailor and mold their work to how and where it will be best heard or seen, the agony and the ecstasy can be relied on to fill whatever shape is available.
We do express our emotions, our reactions to events, breakups and infatuations, but the way we do that—the art of it—is in putting them into prescribed forms or squeezing them into new forms that perfectly fit some emerging context.
For some composers, music is created via notation, the written system of markings that some percentage of musicians share as a common language. Even if an instrument traditionally a piano is used as an aid in composition, this kind of music emerges as a written entity.
Changes in the score might be made at a later date by performing musicians or by the composer, but the writing is largely done without input from actual players. More recently, music began to be created mechanically or digitally, by an accretion and layering of sounds, samples, notes, and bits dragged and thrown together either physically or in the virtual world of a computer.
Though much of my own music may initially have been composed in isolation, it only approached its final shape as a result of being performed live. As with jazz and folk musicians, everything was expected to be thrown into the crucible of a gig, to see if it sank, floated, or maybe even flew. After some time rethinking things and learning more songs written by others in my bedroom, I began to frequent the coffee house at the local university and realized that the folk scene represented there was insular and needed refreshing.
This was the late sixties, and I was still in high school, but anyone could see and hear that the purism of folk was being blown away by the need of rock, soul, and pop to absorb everything in their path. I seem to recall that it worked; they had somehow never heard these songs! Because I performed them more energetically than the standard folk artist might present his own material, people listened, or maybe they were just stunned at the audacity of a precocious teenager.
I played Chuck Berry and Eddie Cochran on ukulele, shifting the context of those songs even further afield. I was incredibly shy at the time and remained so for many years, so one might ask and people did what in the world a withdrawn introvert was doing making a spectacle of himself on stage.
Performing must have seemed like my only option. There was also the remote possibility that I would briefly be the hero and reap some social and personal rewards in other areas beyond mere communication, though I doubt I would have admitted that to myself. Poor Susan Boyle; I can identify. Despite all this, Desperate Dave did not have ambitions to be a professional musician— that seemed wholly unrealistic.
Leaping up in public to do something wildly expressive and then quickly retreating back into my shell seemed, well, sort of normal to me. Maybe normal is the wrong word, but it worked. Maybe some problem of some sort can at least get the ball in play.
But I have come to believe that you can escape your demons and still tap the well. When I was at art school in the early seventies, I began to perform with a classmate, Mark Kehoe, who played accordion.
I dropped the acoustic guitar and focused on the ukulele and my hand-me-down violin, which now had decals of bathing beauties stuck on it. We played at bars and art openings, and together we traveled cross-country and ended up playing on Telegraph Avenue in Berkeley. By this point we had a look, too—a variation on Old World immigrant, I guess is how you would describe it.
Mark adopted a more Eastern European look, and I gravitated to old suits and fedoras. We played mainly standards. One might say that the reviews of a street performance were instant—people either stopped, watched, and maybe gave money, or they moved on. I think I also realized then that it was possible to mix ironic humor with sincerity in performance.
Seeming opposites could coexist. Keeping these two in balance was a bit of a tightrope act, but it could be done. In high school around Baltimore, one could attend what were called Teen Centers, which were school gymnasiums where local bands would be brought in to play on weekends.
One act was a choreographed Motown-style revue, and at one point they donned gloves that glowed in the dark when they switched to UV lights. It was a spectacular effect, though a little corny. Another act did a Sgt. Pepper—type revue, and to my young ears they sounded just like the records. Being a cover band, even a really good one, was limiting. There were also rock bands, some of which had virtuosic musicians. Most would jam endlessly and aimlessly on a blues song, but one D. These displays of technique and imagination were humbling.
My own guitar playing was so rudimentary that it was hard to imagine we were playing the same instrument. I caught one big outdoor rock festival back then—in Bath, a town a few hours east of London. Exhausted after hours of listening to music, I fell asleep on the damp ground. In the middle of the night I woke up and realized that Led Zeppelin was playing. I think they were the biggest act on the bill, but I went back to sleep.
In the early morning I was awake again and caught Dr. John, who closed the festival. He was in full Night Tripper mode, and I loved that record, so I was excited to see him. He came out in carnival drag, playing his funky voodoo jive, and the UK audience pelted him with beer cans. I was confused. Here was the most original act of the whole festival, dumped into the worst slot, and he was completely unappreciated by this crowd.
It was depressing. But authentic blues played by white English guys? It made no sense. He had sexy go-go dancers who just danced the whole show, and though it was exciting as hell, this too put any thoughts of being a professional musician out of my head—these folks were in the stratosphere, and we were just amateurs.
No way. I was musically curious, and sometimes I would check out performers whose music I was only slightly aware of. I saw Rahsaan Roland Kirk, the jazz saxophonist, at the Famous Ballroom in Baltimore, a downtown venue with glitter cutouts of rocket ships on the walls. It was about musicianship, sure, but it was also about entertainment.
Kirk sometimes played two or three horns at once, which seemed like the musical equivalent of playing the guitar with your teeth or behind your back or even smashing it—a stage gimmick. After having played on the streets of Berkeley, back on the East Coast Mark and I opened for a wonderful local band called the Motels at the art-school auditorium. I shaved off my scraggly beard on stage while Mark played accordion and his girlfriend held up cue cards written in Russian.
In retrospect, it seems I was saying goodbye to the old immigrant guy in the dark suit. I was ready to embrace rock and roll again. He moved from instrument to instrument.
At one point there was a bizarre solo on a Moog synthesizer, an instrument not often associated with jazz. Here was electronic noise suddenly reimagined as entertainment!
As if to prove to skeptics that he and the band really could play, that they really had chops no matter how far out they sometimes got, they would occasionally do a traditional big band tune. Then it would be back to outer space. There was a slide show projected on the wall behind the band, commemorating their visit to the pyramids in Egypt, and much of the time Sun Ra was wearing spectacles that had no glass in them.
In its own cosmic way, this was all show business too. In my friend Chris Frantz, who was about to graduate from the painting department of the Rhode Island School of Design, suggested that we put together a band.
We did, and he proposed we call ourselves the Artistics. Being more social and gregarious than I was, Chris pulled in some other musicians.
We began by doing cover songs at loft parties in Providence. I still had no ambitions to become a pop star; writing was purely and simply a creative outlet for me. Not many came back completed. I imagined that this serial killer fancied himself as a grand and visionary sophisticate in the model of either Napoleon or some Romantic lunatic. Another guitar player in that band, David Anderson, was probably even less socially adept than I was, and he was a great and somewhat unconventional performer.
The Lyrics: to the Present Vol. BMF Mara Shalhoup. The Heroin Diaries Nikki Sixx. Popular eBooks. The Becoming Nora Roberts. Fear No Evil James Patterson. Flying Angels Danielle Steel. Mercy David Baldacci. Cytonic Brandon Sanderson. The Awakening Nora Roberts. Innovation keeps industry alive, but Capitalism itself appears to thrive when very little innovation is present. Consumption is the needed human posture.
As technology appears to broaden the opportunities for making music, innovation and consumption appear to be seeking a new balance.! How does music function? What are its physics and how have human beings made meaning with the same? If you are a music fan, you will find this book intellectually stimulating, humorous, and inspiring.
If you are interested in broadening your understanding of institutional forms of meaning-making beyond religious life, this book is for you, too. Byrne has much timely wisdom to share.! Tripp Hudgins is a PhD student at Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley, California; a preaching pastor, Baptist cantor, liturgiologist, ecumenist, writer of articles, ethnomusicologist hon. He blogs at anglobaptist.
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Download PDF. This is especially true on the page, where he is adrift. His prose seems to have been translated from the Chinese. Published on Dec 11,. Your email address will not be published. Home and book the book how book books for novel for pdf pdf download read pdf the pdf best books pdf book pdf book free book and pdf edition pdf pdf free download.
May 02, ISBN Utilizing his incomparable career and inspired collaborations with Talking Heads, Brian Eno, and many others, Byrne taps deeply into his lifetime of knowledge to explore the panoptic elements of music, how it shapes the human experience, and reveals the impetus behind how we create, consume, distribute, and enjoy the songs, symphonies, and rhythms that provide the backbeat of life.
A cofounder of the musical group Talking Heads, David Byrne has also released several solo albums in addition to collaborating with such noted artists as Twyla Tharp, Robert Wilson, and Brian Eno. His art includes photography and installation works and… More about David Byrne.
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