terribly

Recording technology and music

Orts

Nov 192010

Mark Katz. Capturing Sound: How Technology Has Changed Music. (University of California Press). The “most approachable” of the three texts.

Colin Symes. Setting the Record Straight: A Material History of Classical Recording. (Weslayan).

Robert Philip. Performing Music in the Age of Recording. (Yale).

See fine review article by Alex Ross “The Record Effect: How technology has transformed the sound of music” in The New Yorker, June 6, 2005.

Selected quotes from the article:

John Philip Sousa: “The time is coming when no one will be ready to submit himself to the ennobling discipline of learning music. Everyone will have their ready made or ready pirated music in their cupboards.”

“Technology reflects whatever musical culture is exploiting it. The machine is a mirror of our needs and fears.” (attributed to Katz).

The phonograph was not invented by Edison with music in mind but as a means to aid business communication – to replace stenography and improve archiving. To “annihilate time and space, and bottle up for posterity the mere utterance of man.” (Edison in 1878 essay).

By the 1890s entrepreneurs were installing phonographs in penny arcades for customers to listen to favorite songs.

The first great star was Enrico Caruso. “From the start, the phonograph favored brassy singing, knife-edged winds and brass, the thump of percussion – whatever could best puncture surface noise.”

“The phonograph was never a mere recorder of events: it changed how people sang and played.” These changes are called “phonograph effects” (according to Katz). One example used by Katz is the change in violin technique in the 20th century and the particular increase in the use of vibrato (which allowed the violin to by picked up more easily in recordings) and the way it allowed players to cover inaccuracies in intonation.

Stravinsky: “Oversaturated with sounds, blase even before combinations of the utmost variety, listeners fall into a kind of torpor which deprives them of all powers of discrimination.”

The arrival of magnetic tape reduced the level of surface noise and meant that a greater range of sounds could be recorded. It also allowed performers to create a reality by allowing editing of the sound.

“Recording hs the unsettling power to transform any kind of music, nomatter how unruly or how sublime, into a collectible object, which becomes decor for the lonely modern soul.” (Alex Ross)

“In music, as in everything, the disappearing moment of experience is the firmest reality.” (Benjamin Boretz, American composer)

“The paradox of recording is that it can preserve forever those disappearing moments of sound but never the spark of humanity that generates them. This is a paradox common to technological existence: everything gets a little easier and a little less real.” (Alex Ross)

Notes on Photography

Orts

Nov 192010

Susan Sontag. Regarding the Pain of Others. (Hamish Hamilton, 2003). 0241142075.

Review: Jeremy Harding “Humanitarian Art”. LRB 2003.08.21

Photographs are accessories to the act of remembering. “What is called collective memory is not a remembering but a stipulating: that this is important… with the pictures that lock the story in out minds.”

“To designate a hell is not … to tell us anything about how to extract people from that hell…Still, it seems a good in itself to acknowledge, to have enlarged, one’s sense of how much suffering caused by human wickedness there is in the world we share with others.” To look at a photograph is to pay attention. And attention, however compromised, is better than indifference or ignorance.

“Someone who is perennially surprised that depravity exists, who continues to feel disillusioned (even incredulous) when confronted with evidence of what humans are capable of inflicting in the way of gruesome, hands on cruelties upon other humans, has not reached moral or psychological adulthood… No one after a certain age has the right to this kind of innocence, of superficiality, to this degree of ignorance, or amnesia.”

“Let the atrocious images haunt us. Even if they are only tokens and cannot possibly encompass all the reality of a people’s agony, they still perform an immensely positive function. The images says: keep these events in your memory.”

“To make peace is to forget. To reconcile, it is necessary that memory be faulty and limited.”

[Harding] “To universalize is both desirable and dangerous, then. Desirable because it is a way of unpacking atrocities committed in the name of this and that, in order to insist that they are first and foremost atrocities. Dangerous because it disguises or obfuscates problems of power.”

“If photographs of devastation in Spain ‘could only stimulate the repudiation of was in the mind of one observer, in another ‘surely they could foster greater militancy on behalf of the Republic.'”

“All photographs wait to be explained or falsified by their captions.”

“The photograph is itself neutral, neither for nor against any political position; a statement of witness, about what people do to each other.”

“The frustration of not being able to do anything about what the images show may be translated into an accusation of the indecency of regarding such images.” But in Sontag’s view this is to charge the photographs with crimes they have not committed.

According to David Levi Strauss’ perspective “photographs can get the viewer started on all kinds of work – visual, intellectual and intuitive – and that a lot of it is richer than the term ‘moral’ can encompass, at least in first draft. But photographs have a way of dragging what is said of them into the moral register, especially when it comes to politics.”

Dylan Thomas

Poems

Nov 192010

Lament

When I was a windy boy and a bit
And the black spit of the chapel fold,
(Sighed the old ram rod, dying of women),
I tiptoed shy in the gooseberry wood,
The rude owl cried like a tell-tale tit,
I skipped in a blush as the big girls rolled
Nine-pin down on donkey’s common,
And on seesaw sunday nights I wooed
Whoever I would with my wicked eyes,
The whole of the moon I could love and leave
All the green leaved little weddings’ wives
In the coal black bush and let them grieve.

When I was a gusty man and a half
And the black beast of the beetles’ pews
(Sighed the old ram rod, dying of bitches),
Not a boy and a bit in the wick-
Dipping moon and drunk as a new dropped calf,
I whistled all night in the twisted flues,
Midwives grew in the midnight ditches,
And the sizzling sheets of the town cried, Quick!-
Whenever I dove in a breast high shoal,
Wherever I ramped in the clover quilts,
Whatsoever I did in the coal-
Black night, I left my quivering prints.

When I was a man you could call a man
And the black cross of the holy house,
(Sighed the old ram rod, dying of welcome),
Brandy and ripe in my bright, bass prime,
No springtailed tom in the red hot town
With every simmering woman his mouse
But a hillocky bull in the swelter
Of summer come in his great good time
To the sultry, biding herds, I said,
Oh, time enough when the blood runs cold,
And I lie down but to sleep in bed,
For my sulking, skulking, coal black soul!

When I was half the man I was
And serve me right as the preachers warn,
(Sighed the old ram rod, dying of downfall),
No flailing calf or cat in a flame
Or hickory bull in milky grass
But a black sheep with a crumpled horn,
At last the soul from its foul mousehole
Slunk pouting out when the limp time came;
And I gave my soul a blind, slashed eye,
Gristle and rind, and a roarers’ life,
And I shoved it into the coal black sky
To find a woman’s soul for a wife.

Now I am a man no more no more
And a black reward for a roaring life,
(Sighed the old ram rod, dying of strangers),
Tidy and cursed in my dove cooed room
I lie down thin and hear the good bells jaw–
For, oh, my soul found a sunday wife
In the coal black sky and she bore angels!
Harpies around me out of her womb!
Chastity prays for me, piety sings,
Innocence sweetens my last black breath,
Modesty hides my thighs in her wings,
And all the deadly virtues plague my death!

Vikram Seth

Poems

Nov 192010

three poems inspired by George Herbert
TLS 2007.01.11

Host

I heard it was for sale and thought I’d go
     To see the old house where
He lived three years, and died. How could I know
     Its stones, its trees, its air,
The stream, the small church, the dark rain would say:
     “You’ve come; you’ve seen; now stay.”

“A guest?” I asked. “Yes, as you are on earth.”
     “The means?” “… will come, don’t fear.”
“What of the risk?” “Our lives are that from birth.”
     “His ghost?” “His soul is here.”
“He’ll change my style.” “Well, but you could do worse
     Than rent his rooms of verse.”

Joy came, and grief; love came, and loss; three years –
     Tiles down; moles up; drought; flood.
Though far in time and faith, I share his tears,
     His hearth, his ground, his mud;
Yet my host stands just out of mind and sight,
     That I may sit and write.

Flash

Bright bird, whose swift blue wings gleam out
As on the stream you dip and rise,
You, as you scan for parr and trout,
Flash past my eyes.

Bright trout, who glints in fin and scale,
Whose whim is grubs, whose dream is flies,
You, with one whisk of your quick tail,
Flick past my eyes.

Bright stream, home to bright fish and birds,
A gold glow as the gold sun dies,
You too, too fast for these poor words,
Flow past my eyes.

But such drab words, ah, sad to say,
When all that’s bright has fled and gone,
Praised by dull folk, dressed all in grey,
Live on and on.

This

Hearts-ease, hearts-bane; a balm that chafes one raw;
   The soul in splints; graph with no grid or gauge;
   A fort, a house on stilts, a hut of straw;
A tic, a weal, the flu, the plague, the rage;
Bug swept in through the net; moth with a sting;
   Two planes in fog jammed blind; a mailed kid glove;
   A dance on coals that makes us yelp and sing;
A rook or roc or swan or goose or dove;
A beast of light; a blaze to quench or stoke;
   Bread burst and burnt; sweet wind-fall; storm-cloud-milk;
   Hope raised and razed; skin-ploy; sleep-foil; steel-silk;
Hands held in lieu of breath; our genes’ sick joke;
   The sea to drink or sink in; the gods’ sty;
   What we must have or die; or have and die.

McLuhanisms

Quotes

Nov 192010

The story of modern America begins With the discovery of the white man by The Indians.

Only puny secrets need protection. Big discoveries are protected by public incredulity.

Whereas convictions depend on speed-ups, justice requires delay.

The nature of people demands that most of them be engaged in the most frivolous possible activities—like making money.

With telephone and TV it is not so much the message as the sender that is “sent.”

Money is the poor man’s credit card.

We look at the present through a rear-view mirror. We march backwards into the future.

Spaceship earth is still operated by railway conductors, just as NASA is managed by men with Newtonian goals.

Invention is the mother of necessities.

You mean my whole fallacy’s wrong ?

Mud sometimes gives the illusion of depth.

The car has become the carapace, the protective and aggressive shell, of urban and suburban man.

Why is it so easy to acquire the solutions of past problems and so difficult to solve current ones?

The trouble with a cheap, specialized education is that you never stop paying for it.

People don’t actually read newspapers. They step into them every morning like a hot bath.

The road is our major architectural form.

Today each of us lives several hundred years in a decade.

Today the business of business is becoming the constant invention of new business.

The price of eternal vigilance is indifference.

News , far more than art, is artifact.

When you are on the phone or on the air, you have no body.

Tomorrow is our permanent address.

All advertising advertises advertising.

The answers are always inside the problem, not outside.

“Camp” is popular because it gives people a sense of reality to see a replay of their lives.

This information is top security. When you have read it, destroy yourself.

The specialist is one who never makes small mistakes while moving toward the grand fallacy.

One of the nicest things about being big is the luxury of thinking little.

Politics offers yesterday’s answers to today’s questions.

The missing link created far more interest than all the chains and explanations of being.

In big industry new ideas are invited to rear their heads so they can be clobbered at once. The idea department of a big firm is a sort of lab for isolating dangerous viruses.

When a thing is current, it creates currency.

Food for the mind is like food for the body: the inputs are never the same as the outputs.

Men on frontiers , whether of time or space, abandon their previous identities. Neighborhood gives identity. Frontiers snatch it away.

The future of the book is the blurb.

The ignorance of how to use new knowledge stockpiles exponentially.

A road is a flattened-out wheel , rolled up in the belly of an airplane.

At the speed of light , policies and political parties yield place to charismatic images.

I may be wrong , but I’m never in doubt.