Mitch Miller and Johnny Ray listening to the taped playback of a recording session.
As the previous post might indicate, my current book-writing-related obsession is tape recording. This is because the advent of tape recording in the late 1940s is one of the many factors that transforms the music industry after World War II. It was, in fact, directly related to the war: Allied troops entering Germany in 1945 discovered that German scientists had advanced magnetic recording technologies far beyond anything in this country. A few of these German machines were semi-legally-smuggled into the US where they became the basis for the Ampex machine popularized by Bing Crosby, and which by 1954 had completely replaced phonographic lathe machines in recording studios. (Although phonographs remained the dominant distribution medium for several decades.)
Surprisingly, the impact of tape recording has not gotten a ton of scholarly attention. There are a few studies here and there, but nothing like the work that has been done on either of the sound packaging systems that bookend magnetic tape, the phonograph and digital audio. But magnetic tape is just as revolutionary. What particularly interests me is the concept that sound could now not only be captured, but edited. Editing sound previously meant going to difficult and cumbersome lengths with record cutting, or in the case of steel wire recording, literal welding. Now, anybody with a pair of scissors and some tape (ideally Scotch Tape No. 41, which did not ooze up around the sides) could do it. Sound was never the same.
Which, unsurprisingly, caused a certain amount of anxiety. A 1954 consumer manual:
Tape recording allows for considerable latitude in corrective re-recording and sound editing. This fact has been a godsend to many recording artists who cannot or will not present a competent beginning-to-end performance of a work of music for recording....This results in a record which is possibly better than any single public performance ever given by the artist. And it is really a synthetic performance. It may sound fine, but is it music? Is it art? Is it high fidelity?
My chapter therefore looks a series of moments in the early 1950s that outline the philosophical issues raised by editing sound: Les Paul's multi-tracking experiments, the controversial 1952 Furtwangler recording of Tristan and Isolde in which a young Elizabeth Schwarzkopf sang the notes an aging Kirsten Flagstad was unable to hit, and the modernist tape compositions of John Cage, Otto Luening, and Vladimir Ussachevsky.
If you're in the Philadelphia area, I'm going to be previewing some of these ideas in a talk at St. Joseph's University on November 8 at 7:00 pm. It's provisionally titled "A Short History of Magnetic Tape in 1952."
Citation: Donald Carl Hoefler, Hi-Fi Manual (Fawcett Books, 1954). Italics in the original. Photo at top from the same volume.
German-American engineer S. Joseph Begun, writing in 1948 on magnetic recording:
In analyzing the particular advantages of the magnetic phonograph, one will first think about its usefulness as a long-playing instrument. While some of the magnetic recordings are now limited to 1/2 or 1-hour recording time, this is not a basic limitation. The playing time, within reason, could be made as long as one desires, for example, as long as the longest symphony ever written, or, if one wants to go to the extreme, even as long as the longest opera ever written...
Classical music, however, constitutes only one type of musical program to which people want to listen in their homes. There are still many more dance records and light musical selections sold than symphonies and operas. True enough, one could have small reels, each of which would accommodate one tune, but in this case the user would have to change the reels after each playing....No doubt, in time to come, some ingenious engineer will think of a construction that will permit loading a magnetic recorder with a number of reels in such a fashion that after one reel is exhausted the mechanism will automatically seize the recording medium of the next reel, thread it through the system, and start to play it.
Particularly when tape is used as the recording medium, editing is simple, and it would not require a major effort on the part of the user to join a number of selections together on a large reel, thus achieving a series of preselected short tunes. This method may be the answer, but it is not believed that the average person using such an instrument will subject himself or herself to such trouble, however small it may be. It is because people are by nature lazy that so many gadgets can be sold today, and only an enthusiastic amateur who is willing to add a personal touch to his equipment will go further and record and edit his reels.
S.J. Begun, Magnetic Recording (New York and Toronto: Murray Hill Books, 1949), 222–23. Picture is of a Tonschreiber Type B, a field version of the Magnetophone used by the Nazis during World War II.
Ever curious about the connection between Nixon's famous "Checkers" speech (Fall 1952) and Patti Page's hit "(How Much is That) Doggie in the Window" (Spring 1953)? Short answer: there isn't one. Longer answer: Read my post over at the IASPM-US blog as part of their curated series "Political Machinations of Popular Music" in honor of the presidential election.
I was intrigued by NY Times critic Zachary Woolfe's account of experiencing Einstein on the Beach live for the first time after many years of knowing only the music. Fresh off of admitting that he doesn't likeBilly Budd all that much, Woolfe proceeds to deftly puncture the NYC music scene's nostalgia for the Downtown heyday of the mid-seventies, when Patti Smiths roamed wild in the streets and Philip Glass made extremely simple diatonicism revolutionary:
I was surprised to discover that for all those years I had been missing so little. The really important component of the opera turns out to be the music, the part that has always been with us, preserved on those recordings. The other, more evanescent elements — the eternally open horizons of Mr. Wilson’s blue-lighted backdrops; his twitchy movement vocabulary; Ms. Childs’s swirling dances — feel, in the final estimation, dazzling yet dispensable...
Actually, though, I suspect the part of Woolfe's piece that will cause the most heartburn for avant-gardists of a certain age is not his boredom with Wilson's staging, but rather his description at the beginning of how he has been listening to Einstein all these years:
I can’t count the number of times I have sat at my computer, opened YouTube and typed a strange phrase into the search box: “knee 1.”
Ouch! Yes, the nightmare scenario has come to pass: even the Times music critic, the last one standing apparently, consumes music much the way my undergraduates do. Not by carefully cultivating a collection of music, let alone CDs, let alone LPs, but through the vagaries of YouTube. In this music in the age of mechanical reproduction, the experience of Einstein goes something like this:
The first hit is actually a video about knee injuries. The second hit indeed gives us Knee Play 1, uploaded by some guy named "MountGoth." In the video, the 1993 recording is presented (without attribution or any credit to the performers or label) to a static picture of a lake in the mountains.
The second hit gives one a version accompanied by some other random guy's artistic interpretation of vaguely Einsteinian themes. The third hit, a picture of Philip Glass, and then we're back to knee injuries and something about the Battle of Wounded Knee.
As I say, I am aware that this is precisely how my students—currently born in the mid-1990s—consume the music I require them to listen to. Theoretically they are supposed to purchase these CD sets that come with our textbook, but it runs upwards of $150 to buy all three sets, and I completely understand that this seems ridiculous, especially when all they are going to do is rip the CDs into iTunes anyways. For the conscientious-but-thrifty students, I suspect they band together and purchase one set of CDs to be ripped to a dozen computers. For those who are just thrifty, I think most of them go onto YouTube to do their required listenings, a suspicious confirmed when they are deeply confused by issues of orchestration and tempo by the "official" recordings when I play them in class. Personally I am somewhat old-fashioned, and in the classroom I often try to instill in my students at least a small amount of affection for the material objects of sound recording. We pass around Edison cylinders, 78s, 45s, fragments of actual magnetic tape, and nowadays, compact discs. It's not a bad thing that music circulates differently today that it once did, I tell them, but it is indeed very different.
However—and this is a big however after all of the above—I totally appreciate Mr. Woolfe's perspective. Or rather, part of it; I haven't yet seen Einstein on the Beach. I was born four years after the original production, was still only twelve years old for the last one in 1992. I like to think I was a fairly precocious new music kid, but not that much. The Verges/Obennhaus documentary from '84 gives me a sense of the production, enough that I confidently (albeit polemically) tell my students every year that Einstein on the Beach might be the greatest opera in the twentieth century.
But I did by the end of my teenage years discover Philip Glass, first in a new music concert when I was 16 (the same in which I heard 4'33" for the first time, incidentally), and then more systematically in college, where as a freshman I did a class assignment that involved knocking around in the world of 1+1. Then in graduate school I was lucky enough to be immersed in an entire seminar on minimalist theater lead by the indomitable Robert Fink, and although Glass is not a subject I do active research on, it's been a regular part of my classroom ever since. And not that long ago, I saw the Sesame Street video that circulates occasionally on Facebook, in which Philip Glass's music provides the backdrop for a mesmerizing series of geometric abstractions. It first aired on Sesame Street in 1979, the year before I was born. In some ways, Philip Glass has been in my ears for my entire life. And Einstein on the Beach had better not disappoint me.
This, of course, is what Woolfe is speaking to. Those of us too young to have experience the glory days and battles of New Music in the pre-John Adams era can't help but want to experience those thrills for ourselves. Not to sound like Woody Allen in Midnight in Paris, but there is a feeling that surely things were more alive back then. Woolfe:
With “Einstein,” the fantasy is the return to that bohemian, avant-garde New York, so full of excitement and possibility. Both those who were there and those of us who were not want badly, for our different reasons, to conjure an event, a moment, even an entire city that now exists only as a memory. It is Mr. Glass’s music that is more than that, and it remains as close as your computer.
This is an odd sort of nostalgia, but it is nevertheless nostalgia. Nostalgia usually implies personal association with the sentimentalized remembered pass, but it needn't necessarily. And as a form of nostalgia, you have to go the next step and think about what ideologies produce that nostalgia. As Melissa Harris-Perry famously said, "history understands where nostalgia obscures." As I wrote before, I think we need to be more open to nostalgia; it has potential to reveal good in addition to obscuring past evil. The nostalgia for Einstein's radical purity certainly obscures some basic facts of music history. In the multi-racial, liberatory, free-wheeling world of the 60s and 70s avant-garde, it's not an accident that an opera with music written by a straight, white, Juilliard-trained man remains widely-heard four decades later, as does the music of...Steve Reich...John Adams...hmmm. Ask the ghost of Julius Eastman where avant-garde nostalgia has gotten him in the history textbooks.
And yet, Hilton Als reminds us in his fascinating New Yorker piece on Einstein that Robert Wilson's contribution, precisely what Woolfe did not care for, is by far the most critical and challenging part of the opera. Wilson's work confronts those very social issues that Glass tends to portray in abstraction. That abstraction is the source of Glass's longevity, it's why Glass's music works equally well circulating in mainstream movie soundtracks as it does when you're knocking out additive patterns on an amplified tabletop. But my own personal nostalgia is that it will be Wilson's vision that might reveal something about the avant-garde past that might be worth remembering, even in the gauzy, soft-focus light of nostalgia.
I've got tickets for the very last show, Sunday's matinee. Here's to hoping.
Factoid of the day: Richard Nixon liked to work while listening to Richard Rodgers' (and Robert Russell Bennet') score for the early 50s television series Victory at Sea.
As I write in my chapter on performances that remembered the Pacific Front, Senator McCarthy was also fond of dressing up and playing soldier, a role he called "Tailgunner Joe." He even received a belated Distinguished Flying Cross in 1952, largely on the basis of falsified records. His famous war injury was actually, biographers believe, the result of a hazing ritual.
There's a lot to read about McCarthyism. When I was finishing my dissertation proposal circa 2006, I felt reasonably sure I'd read most everything out there, from old-fashioned catalogues of misdeeds like David Caute's The Great Fear to many studies on specific industries like Hollywood or academia or even the discipline of anthropology, to rigorous analyses of institutions like that of Ellen Schrecker, whose work is still the gold standard in my opinion. And there's the pro-McCarthy stuff, like M. Stanton Evan's revisionist biography of the man, or Ann Coulter's Treason. Of course, more stuff is always coming out at a rate that's hard to keep up with. In the "currently-on-my-bedside-table-waiting-to-be-finished" list there's Haynes Johnson's history that attempts to connect McCarthyism with the War on Terror, and David Everitt's very promising looking account of blacklisting in the broadcasting industry. I'm also trying to track down a copy of Richard Power's history of anticommunism, which I gather from reviews is sympathetic to the McCarthy cause.
What most of these works lack, however, is intelligent analysis of the big picture. The trend has definitely been to look at the small details, examining how blacklisting worked in particular contexts. That's fine as far as it goes, but it seems that many scholars have given up trying to explain why McCarthyism as a phenomenon happened the way it did, and when it did.
Perhaps part of the reason is that the early phase of McCarthy historiography dwelt a bit too heavily on the big picture, at the expense of reality. As early as 1954, a group of left-leaning (at the time; many would drift into neoconservatism) scholars convened a faculty seminar at Columbia to try to explain McCarthyism. Their responses were published in a book edited by Daniel Bell, The New American Right. Largely, their focus was on psychology, asking what it was about the psyche of the American people that lead to McCarthyism. In essence, they decided it was a combination of authoritarian personalities (borrowing from Adorno) and status anxiety on the part of newly-emboldened middle-class ethnics, revolting against the old WASP elite. In their telling, the old agrarian radical populist tradition was fundamentally transformed into a right-wing movement. The New American Right makes for juicy reading, and its authors went on to great prominence in political and academic worlds, but it's hard to take their analyses seriously today, especially after a critique launched at the book by the then-young scholar, the now-late Michael Rogin.
Rogin's doctoral dissertation, later published as Intellectuals and McCarthy: The Radical Spectre was a full-throated takedown of the New York intellectuals work, crucially coming from a leftist perspective. Rather than admit McCarthyism's success as a social movement, he showed (in painstaking empirical detail) that there was no continuity between previous radical populist traditions and McCarthy, nor was there genuine mass-based support. Rather, McCarthyism was pushed by the same right-wing elites who have always existed, aided both by a timid liberal press and a Republican Party savvy enough to use McCarthyism to win the 1952 election, and then dump it as soon as he encroached upon conservative elite institutions such as the Army and the Executive branch. In other words, McCarthyism was not a genuine social movement, but rather a manipulation upon the part of conservative elites to create the impression of one. The New American Right authors took McCarthyism as an excuse to reject overheated populism, and started their slide towards Humphrey-Nixonism; Rogin showed that it wasn't democracy that was the problem, but its perversion by center-right and center-left.
Rogin on McCarthyism is not as fun and sexy as his later work, but it's still quite relevant today, especially since the right wing in this country has very successfully claimed the mantle of agrarian populism: in the conservative evangelical movements of the 70s and 80s, in the red state-blue state binary of the 2000s, and in the Tea Party today. One of the depressing things about reading early Rogin, however, is how much has changed since he wrote the book in the early 1960s. As much as we talk about astro-turfing in the Tea Party today, I don't know of many who would say that right-wing populism isn't a real thing, a genuine social movement. A wrong-headed and dangerous one, but one that has a considerable amount of staying-power and traction amongst a large chunk of this country's population. I think Rogin was very right that McCarthyism did not fall into that category, but, depressingly, I do think that by the 1970s the conservative elite had their way, and a right-wing mass-based social movement was born, and, so far, here to stay.
[yeah yeah yeah, apologies for long blog absence, grovel grovel grovel]
Other projects have kept me away from my book this past year, but as the summer comes to an end I'm finally turning back to it. Large chunks are written, and with a slightly less trying teaching schedule this year, I think if I can focus (always difficult for me!) and buckle down, having a complete draft by the end of next summer is not unreasonable. So as I try to think of ways in which this blog space might be useful for me, it seems like rather than providing an outlet for procastination, it could actually help me narrow and focus my writerly energies a bit. So, blog readers (if any be left), keep me honest: I'm going to post regular updates on my writing progress, and keep the content focused on the subject of my book: music and the cultural politics of McCarthyism. If I write anything here about music after 1954, slap me in the face, electronically or literally depending on your geographic distance. Okay? Alright.
So let me start off with my current task: re-writing the introduction. In addition to doing the usual literary maneuvers of an introduction--a snappy beginning, a discussion of theoretical apparatus, an overview of the chapters, etc.--one of the things my introduction needs to do is talk about "actual" music and McCarthyism. The scare quotes are there because not a whole lot of my work is actually about McCarthyism, per se, in the sense of discussing blacklisting of composers, or musical representations of McCarthyism, or heck, Joseph McCarthy's own personal musical taste. (I've never found any biographical discussion of the last point, but boy would I like to know more.) I'm not going to go into the lengthy discussion in this space of why that is (short version: it's not very interesting), but I do feel a bit obligated to cover some of that stuff in the intro. I talk a little bit about blacklisting in popular music, but also about this amazing artifact:
There is very, very little music that is literally "about" McCarthyism, in the way that the film and theater world very quickly responded to the situation. But here is one! To a point--it is actually a radio play, although it does have an original score. It was written by Reuben Ship, a leftie writer from Canada who was deported out of the US in the early 50s for working to unionize the television industry. His response was The Investigator, a very thinly-veiled portrait of McCarthy, broadcast by the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation in 1954. Although never broadcast in the US at the time, an LP was released, and I bought a copy on eBay.
For more, including the complete recording, see Gerald Gross's short article, or this very thorough Wikipedia entry. Or, read my book someday!
CLIFTON, N.J. — The end is near for Ronnie I’s Clifton Music after 40 years on Main Avenue — yet another victim of the Internet, the economy, and changing tastes in music and shopping. But this time it is not just a store that is dying, four years after its founder did, but perhaps a whole genre of music as well. For the aging fans of the group harmony of the Harptones and the Heartbeats, the Orioles and the Ravens, the Five Keys and the Five Satins, the passing of Clifton Music is a reminder that rock ’n’ roll may never die, but one hyperbolic sect, the fading kingdom of doo-wop, just might.
The closing of this store really is the end of an era. There are few musical scenes that have had as devoted a following as doo-wop; you could make a strong argument that doo-wop fans in the 1950s invented the pop music connoisseurship many of us practice today. As best as I know (and I would love to stand corrected!), that history began with the first "oldies" compilation album of early doo-wop tracks, released in 1959, and the concurrent growth of stores like Ronnie's and especially the Slim Rose subway arcade shop in New York City. As I recall Phil Ford once saying in a paper, there have been few decades as strikingly and immediately self-reflexive as the "Fifties."
These early fans of retro doo-wop were mostly white, and yet largely listened to music produced by African American youth and distributed through the pre-rock and roll R&B independent labels. But as I've argued elsewhere, this is not the cliché story of white theft of black music. It is a reminder of an era in the northeast when segregation occurred block by block rather than city by city, and when radio stations like New York's WOV played, I'm told, both R&B and traditional Italian music side by side. There was never much money in this scene; for the most part the transformation of African American R&B vocal harmony into Italian American doo-wop was the result of love, not theft.
But anyways, the real reminder in this Times story is that connoisseurship and nostalgia have a history, and thus not only a beginning but an end. This is a bit of a sequel to what I once said about authenticity. These things have histories, and like many scholars these days I'm thinking a lot about the limits of those histories. Unlike Melissa-Perry-Harris I don't think nostalgia is always a malignant force, but she is right that nostalgia, like connoisseurship and authenticity, are cultural tropes that we need to come to terms with in a more critical way.
