2.2: Sound Recording and the Mediation of Music

For listeners, the introduction of sound recording brought with it the means to hear voices or music with no performer present. A live performance offers a special feeling of immediacy; being present in the same space as a performer, or performing oneself, is a vibrant form of human awareness. Listening to music from a recording is a different experience, though it may be no less vivid. A performance is mediated if there is somebody or something between the maker and the listener: any kind of musical recording (like an mp3 file or a long-playing record), a broadcasting organization (like YouTube or a television station), a recommendation service (like Pandora), or a subscription service (like Apple Music). Each of these things that might come between performer and listener is a medium, and in the plural we call them media. We can also say that a recording mediates the musical experience.

When the performer and the listener are in the same place, within earshot, that performance might feel “immediate” (not mediated). Yet all art is mediated. When performer and listener are in the same place, the medium for transmitting musical ideas might be a musical instrument or the human voice. Often multiple media operate at the same time: in a song that has words, the voice is a medium that conveys the words; and the words are a medium that conveys thoughts. Between the composer and the performer there may be (for example) printed sheet music, correspondence instructing the performer how to play, or demonstration recordings, or all of these. Human beings often take no notice of all the levels of mediation at work in their environment: they skillfully negotiate paths through a network of meaningful activity.¹ This awareness gap creates a paradox: even though music is a highly mediated activity, the feeling of immediacy has often been important to how people have perceived music.

Even the written word can mediate music. Some pieces of music, called program music, are meant to be accompanied by poems or titles that spur the listener to imagine the meaning of the music more concretely. Other kinds of Page 96 →verbal information, too, can mediate our listening. A newspaper review of a live concert might change the listener’s opinion of what she heard. If the listener thinks Itzhak Perlman is a superb violinist, and then the next morning reads that Perlman is playing poorly these days, this news may retrospectively color the listener’s memory of the performance. This, too, is a kind of mediation: it comes between the listener and the performer, changing the listener’s perspective, even if it happens after the fact. Sometimes people think of mediation exclusively as a means of transmission, bringing music or messages from one place to another. But mediation is also built into the nature of music, for all music requires some kind of making or performance process.

Nonetheless, the ability to reproduce music by technological means has invited some people to think in new ways about mediation: in the recording era music’s mediated nature has become more noticeable. Even in the early days of recording, the ability to send recorded audio to distant places built global commercial connections and helped individuals living far from their places of origin feel a connection with those places. Recording has changed how communities imagine their past as well as their present: preserving musical performances allows a sense of connection through historical time. Recording technology has also enabled new creative activities. Most popular music today is made directly in the recording studio, as it is being prepared for distribution, so creating art and distributing it are no longer separate processes. Whether it is evident as transmission or as creation, then, mediation is a key component of our artistic lives.

Moving Music: A Global Industry

Commercial recordings and the machines that could play them became available in the United States in the 1890s as cylinders, then around 1910 in the form of discs, with a playing time of about three minutes per side.² Immediately, many recording companies began competing to supply consumers with playback machines and recorded music. From the beginning these companies were globally connected. In a quest for new content and new markets, US and European record companies searched the world to collect music for reproduction on records. In the first decade of the century, the Victor Talking Machine Company sent representatives to Japan, the Philippines, Korea, and China.³ Its competitor, the London-based Gramophone Company, developed large markets in Egypt and China. Gramophone also set up factories for pressing Page 97 →records in India, Russia, Spain, Austria, France, and Germany.⁴ Odeon Records, based in Berlin, Germany, established itself worldwide before World War I, opening a record-pressing plant in Buenos Aires, Argentina; and the French company Pathé Frères developed business connections throughout Asia, North Africa, and the United States.⁵

By the 1930s, people had access to recorded music in many places—in homes, in public venues, or broadcast over developing radio networks.⁶ The existence of these recordings created star performers all over the world. Musicians could now gain popularity not only in the places where they performed in person but also more broadly within their language groups and regions. For some performers, star status changed their lives: in India and China the music of socially stigmatized female performers, such as courtesans and prostitutes, sold well and even became acceptable for listening in homes.⁷ Genres of music that featured brief selections and a sound that was easy to record, like solo song, became more famous. Genres that could not easily be performed in front of the recording horn, like choral music, were recorded less frequently.⁸

Many of these recordings were intended for sale in or near the places where they were recorded: Malayan music to Malayans, and so forth. (Often this meant recording in Malaya, sending the recording to be manufactured in Calcutta, then sending the copies back to Malaya for sale.) As a result of colonial occupation and long-standing trade routes, however, multiethnic settlements existed all over the world. Colonists who lived far from their countries of origin and diasporic people eagerly purchased records from “home.”⁹ In cosmopolitan (internationally connected) cities listeners demanded recorded music in a variety of languages and styles, and international corporations transported records to meet that demand.¹⁰

For example, the Lebanese company Baida Records sold its recordings not only in the Middle East and North Africa but also in the United States to Arab American immigrants.¹¹ Example 4.1, “Raqs Fahala,” is a Baida recording of Arab music, probably made before 1911.¹²

Example 4.1. Mahmoud Al-Rashidi, “Raqs Fahala,” recording of Arab music, probably made before 1911 (Baida Records 272A). YouTube.

Link: https://doi.org/10.3998/mpub.9853855.cmp.47

This music is a raqs—that is, a piece of dance music—attributed to Mahmoud al-Rashidi. You will hear an introduction played in unison (all instruments playing the tune together). This unison section comes back several times throughout the piece. In alternation with the unison section we hear a Page 98 →soloist playing the oud, a lute-like instrument. Every time the oud plays, its music is new and possibly improvised (made up or altered in the moment of performance, not beforehand). These solo sections are accompanied by an ostinato (repeating pattern) played by percussion instruments, and the whole ensemble plays short interjections between the oud’s phrases. In the second half of this short piece a solo violin takes the place of the oud. This is a simple musical form that alternates between a repeated refrain and new material. As early records could include only a few minutes of music per side, this simplicity suited the medium.

This and many other examples demonstrate that the new availability of audio recordings succeeded in moving music among diasporic populations. By the beginning of the 1900s, immigrants from many parts of the world had arrived in the United States. In the first decade of the century US record companies initiated targeted marketing campaigns in many languages to encourage immigrants to purchase records of music from their homelands.¹³ It was often cheaper and more convenient for record companies to make these “ethnic records” in the United States, so the companies also recorded musicians from a variety of immigrant groups.¹⁴ Example 4.2 is a polka, an example of Polish ethnic dance music, recorded in 1927 in Chicago.

Example 4.2. Excerpt from “Polka Wiewórka” (Squirrel Polka), with Stanisław Kosiba, clarinet (Victor 80475, 1927). YouTube.

Link: https://doi.org/10.3998/mpub.9853855.cmp.48

This music features a clarinet playing a jaunty and repetitive tune over a steady “oom-pah, oom-pah” accompaniment played by stringed instruments. This music’s phrases are of regular length, and there are pauses at regular intervals: these features make the music suitable for social dancing.

Because of their broad appeal as entertainment music, these recordings could be sold to immigrants in the United States, in the immigrants’ countries of origin, and in other places that shared a language or musical preferences with them. Thus, the advent of recording enabled a variety of international activities that gave many peoples access to each other’s music. Diasporic populations felt closer to home as the record industry’s activity strengthened musical connections between homelands and their diasporas. Colonizing nation-states also built radio broadcasting systems for their colonies: this investment of state money encouraged the making and sharing of records to be played on the air.¹⁵ People gained new access to music that may have been unfamiliar Page 99 →before; for example, the French musician Darius Milhaud noted in 1930 that recordings from Tunisia, Argentina, and Greece had become available in France.¹⁶ The circulation of recordings also built new connections between urban and rural people. Rural music could now be heard in cities and, to a lesser extent, vice versa.

The ability to amplify and record sound, and to manipulate recorded sound for new effects, has shaped what music can be made and how music can move. In the remainder of this chapter we will consider some of the ways in which people have used sound recording to connect listeners across distance and time, even inspiring imaginative connections that had not existed before.

Archiving Sound

Before they had access to the phonograph, ethnographers who studied folk music tried to write down the music using music notation as they listened. This procedure was cumbersome and inaccurate. Sometimes the ethnographers even stopped the musicians in the middle of a performance so they could scribble down what they heard. In contrast, the phonograph allowed the ethnographer to record a complete performance all at once and then listen again and write down the music later.

This method was sometimes still awkward. Percy Grainger (1882–1961), an Australian-born musician who collected folk songs in Great Britain, reported a performer’s complaint that singing into the recording horn was like “singin’ with a muzzle on.” Since high notes would sound distorted if they were sung close to the horn, Grainger moved the singers’ bodies around as they were singing (fig. 4.1). In his view, “having their heads guided nearer to, or further from, the recording trumpet” was still less disruptive than stopping the performance to write.¹⁷ Grainger hoped that, eventually, recording would replace the need to write down the songs at all, for the written version could never capture all the nuances of the performance.¹⁸

Figure 4.2 shows Grainger’s written version of a song he collected, sung by Joseph Taylor (b. 1832, death date unknown). We see in this image that Grainger tried hard to capture some of Taylor’s special vocal effects. Grainger noted the singer’s “slide” between notes, and he placed accent marks (>) over notes that received extra stress. He pointed out variations in loudness even within a single note: these are marked with the symbols < for growing louder, > for growing softer, as over the words try and Page 100 →round. The written version also served the scholarly purpose of comparison: Grainger put asterisks (*) over notes that were sung differently on different recordings, or he wrote the alternative versions underneath. Yet listening closely to the recording Grainger made, a listener may notice other effects he could not capture in writing. Whereas the written version provides a way to compare performances in detail and could even be used as instructions on how to perform the song, the recording captures the performance in a way that preserves the distinctive sound of the singer’s voice. Audio example 4.3 is an excerpt of the song Grainger collected, which was sung by Joseph Taylor.

Example 4.3. Excerpt from “The White Hare,” sung by Joseph Taylor. Recorded by Grainger on July 9, 1908. Voice of the People, vol. 18 (Topic Records, 1998).

Link: https://doi.org/10.3998/mpub.9853855.cmp.51

Fig. 4.1. Postcard photograph of Percy Grainger and Evald Tang Kristensen recording Danish folk singer Jens Christian Jensen, 1922. Photographer unknown. Grainger Museum Collection, University of Melbourne, 2017/41-1/34. Reproduced by kind permission of the Estate of George Percy Grainger.

By archiving audio, people understood tradition and heritage in a new way. Recording allowed collectors to imagine that they could gather up all the musical traditions of the world and preserve them. (One British collector audaciously declared in the 1930s that he and his colleagues had recorded every British folk song; he thought all that remained to be done was to study small variations in performance.)¹⁹ The social conditions of the time encouraged this interest. At the beginning of the 20th century many people were thinking Page 102 →about what it meant to be modern. Over the past few generations ways of life in urban areas had changed quickly as a result of the Industrial Revolution. Once recordings became a prominent medium for listening, some observers imagined that different groups of people would make more and more similar music over time, losing the special traits that made them distinct from one another.²⁰ Collectors such as Grainger and Béla Bartók began collecting rural music in order to document it before it died out amid the pressures of modern life. They worried that rural people, exposed to popular music, would give up their old ways of making music. Once these recordings were made, scholars and artists often used them to discuss or define a heritage as a fixed and stable thing (reifying it).

Page 101 →

Fig. 4.2. Grainger’s detailed transcription of “The White Hare,” sung by Joseph Taylor. From “Songs Collected by Percy Grainger,” Journal of the Folk-Song Society 3, no. 12 (May 1908): 189–90.

The desire to create and maintain a definable heritage had some strange effects. Some collectors interfered with the traditions they studied: they urged the people they recorded to sing “the old way” and instructed them not to change their music. Some even altered the songs they collected to “restore” them to hypothetical original versions, erasing the individual variations in hopes of finding the authentic “original.”²¹ Here we might recall the idea of authenticity as a perception of closeness to an original source: the relationship of these collectors to folk song is like that of some fans to the blues. The collectors’ idea of the music was rooted in their own values. When they examined the music, they were hoping to find a particular history, and they were even willing to change the music they found in the present to make it fit their idea of what their past should be like.

For some collectors the archival collection became more important than the live performing tradition: whereas the live performance was ephemeral and changed every time, the archive seemed authoritative and unchanging. Having a tangible collection of recordings allowed people to experience heritage as a fixed entity, provable and permanent. Many collectors were inspired by nationalist feelings: they were interested in distinguishing their national musics from others’ and in developing hierarchies of value to demonstrate their music’s excellence. The British Folk Song Society, of which Grainger was a part, used folk songs to define and mediate a particular idea of British music. The society’s work inspired an outpouring of distinctly British concert music compositions based on those songs.²²

Yet composers and nation-states also used audio archives to purposefully change or invent traditions. Amid a large-scale modernization effort in the 1920s and 1930s the Turkish government instituted a program of folk-song collection with the goal of making music more compatible with European Page 103 →traditions. (Turkey’s admiration for Europe and disdain for “the East” during this period has sometimes been called occidentalism, as a mirror image of Western Europe’s orientalism.)²³ As the Turkish poet and activist Ziya Gökalp explained, “Our folk music has given us many melodies. If we collect these and harmonize them in the Western manner, we shall have both a national and a European music.”²⁴ Thousands of songs were recorded by phonograph, then written down in European-style notation and classified into categories.

Turkish radio personnel then selected particular songs that fit into their new vision of modern music—and altered those songs as they thought necessary. They “corrected” features they believed reflected the individual styles of folk singers rather than a group identity. They arranged the songs so that they could be performed by a chorus, which would not have happened in the countryside.²⁵ Example 4.4 is a song belonging to this new genre, known as Turkish Folk Music. This kind of song was recorded and broadcast on the radio as a demonstration of both heritage and modernization.

Example 4.4. “Genç Osman” (“Young Osman”), performed by the Ankara Radio Folk Music Group. Folk and Traditional Music of Turkey (Folkways FE 4404, 1953).

Link: https://doi.org/10.3998/mpub.9853855.cmp.52

State and radio officials asserted that the new music was truly Turkish because it was based on their archived recordings, but of course the state was not obligated to reproduce the music exactly as it had been archived.

The Turkish and British reworkings of folk-song practices are invented traditions: the collectors designed their collecting and publication activities for the needs of their present day, but they used music that seemed old to make their activities seem valid and authoritative.²⁶ In other words, they were making heritage: building a virtual version of the past. Although these activities depended on a belief that the sound recording was a faithful or “authentic” representation of the music “as it really was,” when the makers and users of recordings moved music from rural to urban settings, they added new meanings and enabled new uses of these musical sounds.

Taking and Giving Back Sounds

In many cases the archiving of folkloric sound on recordings has promoted cultural appropriation. (Indeed, the Turkish example discussed above is an example of a nation-state’s appropriation of folk music.) Countries that have Page 104 →sponsored song-collection projects have tended to be those that have colonized other peoples—typically wealthy countries with strong institutional support for the arts—or those seeking to become more powerful. By contrast, peoples whose songs are collected tend to be those that were colonized.²⁷ In their eagerness to learn about music from other places, collectors have sometimes taken music of less powerful people in ways that do harm to those people.²⁸ Often the collector earned royalties by publishing the recordings or by publishing observations about the music-makers, while the music-makers themselves earned nothing. Sometimes the musicians who were recorded were compelled to sing under embarrassing or humiliating conditions, or the recording was made without the performer’s consent.²⁹

Scholars and archivists have long considered how to make this situation more fair. One option is to repatriate recordings—that is, return them to the peoples or places of origin. Like cultural appropriation itself, repatriation raises sticky questions. If the original performer is deceased, to whom should the music be repatriated? To the direct descendants of the performer or to members of their ethnic group? Since people move, this choice might mean sending the recording to a place where the music was never heard at the time of its recording. Or should the recording be repatriated to people now living in the place where the music was made? They might have no connection to that music. If a recording was made without permission or under coercive circumstances, should it be heard today at all?³⁰

The problem of ownership further complicates these questions. Under US law, only writing or music set down in a “fixed form” is entitled to copyright protection. Songs passed down from person to person, but not recorded, have not been regarded as “authored” works but rather as a product of community life. (The legal tradition of copyright, which originated in Great Britain, certainly favors European means of conveying artistic traditions. It will be discussed further in chapter 7.) This practice entitles the folk-song collector who writes down the music and publishes it to payment for that publication and any recordings of the written song. Meanwhile, the person who originally sang the song likely receives nothing. Furthermore, if the recording is published far away from its point of origin, the original performer and community might not even have access to the recorded version of their own music.

In the case of a unique art object or other artifact, the decision to return the object to its original owners or their descendants would mean that the archives or museum cannot keep it. Because recorded music can be duplicated as many times as necessary, this constraint might not apply. Still, most libraries Page 105 →and archives have strict policies against duplicating recorded material.³¹ When a collector deposits material in an archive, the archive and the collector typically agree to a binding set of conditions for the use of that material. It is difficult for the library to do anything other than what was specified at that time. Native American peoples whose folklore was recorded have sometimes asked not only for a copy of their music but also for all copies (including the master), because ethnographers made recordings of rituals that are considered private or suitable for hearing by only one gender.³² Many archives have resisted such claims, as they mean the loss of access to that material. Yet, increasingly, repatriation projects are taking these concerns into account and entering negotiations with the peoples whose music was recorded.

The relationship between the recorder and the musician is not always combative, however. The anthropologist Aaron Fox has described a meaningful and revealing case of repatriation.³³ In 1946 a music collector, Laura Boulton (1899–1980), visited the town of Barrow, in northern Alaska, to collect Iñupiat (Eskimo) music. Boulton made recordings of dance songs and children’s music, and she wrote down her interpretations of this music, despite her lack of knowledge of Iñupiat language or musical practices. Joseph Sikvayugak (1898–1979), a community leader, sang on most of the recordings (fig. 4.3). He assisted Boulton throughout her time in Barrow, though she gave him little credit in her subsequent writings. Boulton earned a considerable amount of money from royalties from her recordings, which were deposited at Columbia University in New York, inaccessible to the Iñupiat. Ten years after Boulton’s visit, Sikvayugak purchased a reel-to-reel tape recorder and continued to make documentary recordings of his community’s music.

A researcher, Chie Sakakibara, traveled to Barrow in 2004, carrying copies of Boulton’s recordings and a letter from Fox, the director of the archives at Columbia University, expressing willingness to share the recordings. Over a few years Iñupiat communities, which share close kinship ties, spread the word and requested further copies of the recordings. As a result of hearing these recordings, Sikvayugak’s grandchildren, the brothers Riley and Vernon Sikvayugak and Vernon’s spouse, Isabell, formed a group to begin performing these songs again.

Present-day Iñupiat people see that their heritage and traditions have been disrupted; indeed, this disruption was already apparent during Boulton’s visit. In 1946 the US government was building a naval research laboratory in Barrow, changing the character of the community and its means of livelihood. Iñupiat people faced pressure to assimilate. Missionaries discouraged their ritualPage 106 → music; and as there were no local schooling options, young people were sent to boarding school, where they were separated from the traditions of their community. At these schools teachers shamed Native American students who spoke their native languages or sang the songs they had learned at home. According to Fox, Joseph Sikvayugak believed, as Laura Boulton did, that recording could capture and preserve a tradition at a time of great cultural change. His grandchildren, hearing his recorded voice, are reviving that tradition because it is meaningful to them.³⁴ This recreation is not identical to the original, nor is it meant to be: it is a collaborative process to make something valuable in and for the present day.³⁵

Fig. 4.3. The Sikvayugak brothers perform as Laura Boulton makes a recording. Courtesy of the Archives of Traditional Music at Indiana University.

Authenticity and the Hyperreal

When audio recording was first invented, its primary use was to capture sound as evidence of what had really happened. For example, recording two people making a verbal agreement allowed later listeners to verify the sound of the Page 107 →individuals’ voices. The feeling of authenticity that people attached to folk-song recordings reflected that belief: if it was recorded, it must really have happened in precisely that way.

Early versions of the recording equipment allowed the user to record or play back sound from a disc or cylinder but offered no way to modify the recording. Technologies for modifying sound after it was recorded came considerably later. One of the first ways to manipulate the sounds on a recording was overdubbing. Musicians would make a recording, then replay that recording and play their instruments along with it at the same time to create a composite recording, then replay that composite and play instruments along with it again, until they had all the parts they wanted. When musicians began overdubbing in the 1940s, the process was extremely cumbersome. The tracks the musicians recorded first would come out sounding weaker and less distinct when they were recorded from playback over and over.³⁶

Not only was this kind of technical manipulation difficult, but many people also criticized it as inferior because of the persistent ideal of authenticity. When the jazz clarinetist and saxophonist Sidney Bechet (1897–1959) used overdubbing to play all the parts on a recording of “The Sheik of Araby” by himself in 1941, the record was denounced by other jazz musicians as a kind of parlor trick. In example 4.5 you hear Bechet playing soprano and tenor saxophones, clarinet, piano, bass, and drums. This recording was marketed as a novelty record, “Sidney Bechet’s One-Man Band.”

Example 4.5. Excerpt from “The Sheik of Araby,” performed by Sidney Bechet’s One Man Band (Victor 27485-A, 1941). YouTube.

Link: https://doi.org/10.3998/mpub.9853855.cmp.54

A fellow jazz musician, Mezz Mezzrow, complained that the recording was “neurotic and bestial,” with no community spirit.³⁷ Mezzrow could not trust a recording that represented a fictional performance that never really happened: it seemed profoundly strange and inauthentic.

Recording on magnetic media, in which people captured sounds on long pieces of wire or metal-coated tape, became more widely available in the mid-1940s. These technologies afforded composers further possibilities to create sounds that corresponded to no real-world performance. In 1944 an Egyptian composer, Halim El-Dabh (1921–2017), recorded a women’s healing ceremony outside Cairo on a wire recorder; he then manipulated the sound using the resources of a local radio station. In an overdubbing process like Sidney Bechet’s, El-Dabh played the recording in an echo chamber, then re-recorded Page 108 →the resulting sound several times. He also edited out the consonants that defined the women’s sung words and the initial attacks of drum sounds but kept the resonant quality of voices and the decaying drum sound.³⁸ The resulting music, audible in example 4.6, is strange and ghostly: it sounds recognizably human but distant and disembodied. Like Bechet, El-Dabh made recordings that did not just preserve “real-world” events: they used recorded media for artistic as well as practical purposes.

Example 4.6. Halim El-Dabh, “Ta’bir al-Zar” (“The Expression of Zar”). Excerpt under the title “Wire Recorder Piece” on Crossing into the Electric Magnetic (Halim El-Dabh Records, LLC, 2001). Reproduced by kind permission of Deborah El-Dabh.

Link: https://doi.org/10.3998/mpub.9853855.cmp.55

A few years later, the French radio technician Pierre Schaeffer (1910–95) made “noise music” by painstakingly editing together miscellaneous sounds from the environment that had been recorded on discs: trains, singing, coughing, a harmonica performance, pots and pans, and so forth. By carving a groove into the disc that formed a closed circle instead of a spiral, Schaeffer could make sounds repeat (or “loop”) as the disc spun around and around in the same groove, then record that repetitive loop on a second phonograph. In one of Schaeffer’s “noise studies,” called “Étude pathétique” (Study in pathos; example 4.7), we first hear pot lids and plates being dropped and spun on a kitchen floor; then, without warning or pause, we hear a train passing close by. Not only does this music refuse to reflect a single musical performance; it also purposefully violates any kind of logical listening. Schaeffer disorients listeners by allowing them to imagine the sounds being made in a certain place and then making those listeners rethink what they have heard by changing the imagined setting or the action unpredictably.

Example 4.7. Excerpt from Pierre Schaeffer, “Étude pathétique” (Study in pathos) from Études de bruit (Noise Studies). Panorama of Musique Concrète (1948–55) (London: Ducretet-Thomson Records, 1955). YouTube.

Link: https://doi.org/10.3998/mpub.9853855.cmp.56

Schaeffer used recording as a way to divorce music from real-life experience: what we hear in these works cannot be mapped onto a clear mental image of human or mechanical activity.³⁹ The idea of recording music had become detached from the idea of recording reality or performance as it really happened: the audio recording itself became a way of making music. It is not that the Page 109 →artifice of recording became invisible; rather, musicians embraced the artifice as one of the valid tools for making music.⁴⁰

Over time, methods for editing recorded sound have become more and more sophisticated. Magnetic tape could be cut apart and spliced together or run backward, but digital sound files can be manipulated or combined in many more ways, and individual sounds can now be altered or created digitally. As the archive of recorded sound has grown over the past 140 years, more and more music from the past has become available for reuse by museums, nation-states, and individuals. The person making a recording today can access a dazzling array of raw material: enormous amounts of recorded music from past and present, recordings of ambient sound, and newly created sounds. In effect, the sound editor has a “god’s-eye view” of the sonic landscape. These technologies allow the creation of virtual worlds—immersive experiences that may seem “more real than the real”—sometimes called hyperreal.⁴¹

The ethnomusicologist Steven Feld, who spent years doing research in Papua New Guinea, made a recording that exemplifies the hyperreal. From the 1970s to the 1990s Feld spent time with the Kaluli people, learned about their lives, and recorded their music. Feld deplored corporate oil exploration, logging in the rainforests, and the arrival of evangelical missionaries, for he believed these changes placed the Kaluli under the domination of outsiders who controlled travel, education, and jobs.⁴² To draw attention to the situation and raise funds for rainforest preservation, Feld made a recording that documented Kaluli life—not as it was when he was there but as he imagined it might have been at some time in the past, before the encroachment of technological modernity. This recording was marketed as “endangered music” in the 1990s, at the height of consumer interest in “world music.”

Feld spent a lot of time recording the ambient sounds of the rainforest—birds, insects, and water noises—and carefully edited out the sounds of helicopters, airplanes, and the bells of the missionaries’ churches. In the editing process, he layered the natural sounds with recordings of Kaluli musical performances to place the listener inside the recreated rainforest scene, hearing ambient sounds and human music together. The resulting recording, released in 1991, mimics the progress of a 24-hour day, with the insects and frogs of night giving way in the daytime to human work, play, and ceremonial activities—all accompanied by natural background sounds—and then nightfall.⁴³

Page 110 →Example 4.8 is called “Making Sago.” We hear a group of women singing and talking as they complete the morning chore of beating and scraping sago, the starchy core of a palm tree, a common food in the Pacific Islands. The sounds of their work are audible, as are the bird and insect sounds of the surrounding rainforest. Human whistling that imitates birdsong is a remarkable characteristic of Kaluli music.

Example 4.8. Ulahi, “Making Sago,” recorded by Steven Feld. Voices of the Rainforest (Rykodisc RCD 10173, 1991; Smithsonian Folkways HRT15009, 2011).

Link: https://doi.org/10.3998/mpub.9853855.cmp.57

Feld’s recording is a carefully developed fictional world: a created soundscape that places the listener in the pristine rainforest as it no longer exists in Papua New Guinea.

Feld recognized the irony. He, a scholar committed to truthful representation, had produced a fictional soundscape. Most listeners who encounter “Voices of the Rainforest” cannot tell by listening how much of it is true-to-life or what has been edited out. Indeed, this recording only succeeds if it feels real to the listener. Even if the listener has read Feld’s notes and knows how this soundscape was constructed, the recording encourages the suspension of disbelief, for the voices and sounds of the rainforest are close by, right in our ears.⁴⁴ The power to create such a vivid illusion relies on the feeling of authenticity that was present in early uses of sound recording: the evidence of our senses can make the experience feel real even if the ascertainable facts tell us it is not.

Feld framed his intervention as an effort to make known the beauty of Kaluli customs and of the rainforest—erasing intrusive sounds to remind listeners of the possibility of living and making music together with nature rather than against it.⁴⁵ Yet Feld’s advocacy does not represent the viewpoints of Kaluli people. He acknowledged that many on the island would not care about this reconstruction of their “lost world” because their economic interests are now tied to logging and oil. Feld’s representation of the Kaluli sound-world does not address the Kaluli at all: it was an attempt to attract North American listeners’ attention and cultivate an emotional attachment in hopes of stimulating action to preserve the rainforest. Moving these sounds was an intervention, meant to alter the beliefs and emotions of people at a distance.

Page 111 →Mixes and Mashups

The examples discussed above show that new music can be made partly or entirely out of other recorded music. Another influential example is turntablism, a technique that black, Caribbean American, and Latinx hip-hop musicians developed in 1970s New York City. From the 1970s to the present day, turntablism has traditionally relied on old technology—the turntables used to spin recorded discs for playback—as well as a mixing board and a large personal collection of vinyl long-playing records (LPs). The turntable artist creates a new live performance by playing selections from LPs on two turntables, using the mixing board to play the sound from one turntable or the other, or even both at once.⁴⁶ Once a practice local to New York, turntablism is now practiced in many places—yet another example of widespread appropriation of an appealing technique.

This form of creative expression can create new sounds—like, for instance, the distinctive scratch heard when the disc jockey (DJ) pulls the record backward to replay the same bit of music again. The expert turntablist moves quickly, creating entrancing rhythms and blends of sounds by combining and repeating many sounds from multiple records. This video of the Japanese turntablist DJ Kentaro (example 4.9) demonstrates his technical and artistic virtuosity. Kentaro has marked the discs so that he can access precisely the excerpts he wants and spin them from the desired spot each time. He has also altered the discs by adding tape and letting the stylus drag on the label of a disc to create a rhythmic hissing sound. His choice of source LPs places his performance in the African American tradition: this performance makes reference to the African American tradition of rap (spoken-word music), including the classic Run-DMC song “You Be Illin’,” as well as the dance beats of 1970s funk.

Example 4.9. DJ Kentaro, performance recorded at the DMC World DJ Final, 2001. Published on YouTube by DMC World Championships, 2012.

Link: https://doi.org/10.3998/mpub.9853855.cmp.58

Turntablism is only one of many kinds of music that use other recorded music as a source. The disco, funk, and R&B that turntablists often borrow can also be sampled digitally. Digital sampling is a logical outgrowth of turntablism: instead of playing excerpts from vinyl LPs, brief selections of music are digitally copied from recordings of music or other sound and placed into Page 112 →new musical contexts through editing. While turntabling is a live, in-person performance, digital sampling happens in the recording studio.⁴⁷ Sometimes the sample functions as a recognizable quotation from another piece of music. Part of the appeal of music that is based on sampling is the pleasure of recognizing those quotations. At other times the quoted material is so transformed that it is hardly recognizable. It might be a hidden part of the musical texture or go by in an instant as a sound effect.

Rhythmic repetition has been fundamental to much of the dance music that has developed since the 1970s, and technologies of recorded sound have enabled musicians to make musical forms based on mechanical repetition. Looping, or repeating a short excerpt of music again and again to form a continuous pattern, is a very basic kind of sound editing. Electronic dance music relies on the manipulation of prerecorded music through looping and turntablism. In live performance the DJ makes a loop repeat, as a foundation for a longer passage of music, while also adding other layers of musical elements that change over time. These elements may come from vinyl records, but they are more typically digital samples from an enormous variety of recordings. The excerpts vary widely in style, but they are selected so that they can conform to the dance beat the DJ has chosen.

The virtuosity of the DJ, like that of the hip-hop turntablist, consists in selecting these changing elements, sequencing them, and making artful transitions from one to the next. The transitions from one passage of music to the next can be smooth and gradual or surprising, even witty. Listeners judge a DJ by the musical taste of her or his selections—they value musical samples that are unknown or rare—and by the DJ’s technical prowess of combining them in the moment while keeping the dance beat going.⁴⁸ Marea Stamper (1977–), who works under the name “the Black Madonna,” is a Chicago-based DJ whose music embodies these kinds of virtuosity. Her May 2017 set at the Lente Festival in the Netherlands lasted almost two hours and included music from many sources, including funk, disco, pop, rock-jazz fusion, Latin music, and the work of other DJs.⁴⁹

More than an hour into this set, we hear a synthesizer play a “ramping up” gesture, and we hear women’s voices chiming in repeatedly on the syllable “oh” (this excerpt is example 4.10). Here Stamper reuses a mix from a group called Metro Area.⁵⁰ Soon we start to hear flourishes of stringed instruments that sound like the background interjections of a disco recording. The disco elements become more audible, and then the disco song emerges with its vocal part intact. This is a 1981 song called “I Hear Music in the Street,” by a now-forgottenPage 113 → band called Unlimited Touch; Black Madonna speeds up the song to match the beat of the preceding music.

Example 4.10. Excerpt from The Black Madonna’s set at Lente Kabinet Festival, 2017. Soundcloud.

Link: https://doi.org/10.3998/mpub.9853855.cmp.59

Two minutes later, yet another song fades in. Throughout her performances Black Madonna raises and lowers the amount of bass to control the energy in the room.

According to the ethnomusicologist Luis-Manuel Garcia, some of the pleasure of electronic dance music comes from this process of transformation over time. As they dance, people experience both the consistency of the persistent beat and the transitions and transformations of the other musical elements. Long stretches of music create an immersive and absorbing experience. Like Feld’s “Voices of the Rainforest,” the Black Madonna’s creations build a sonic world that feels like a distinct reality. Garcia found that participants in dance parties in Chicago, Paris, and Berlin tend to regard these parties as an entirely separate space from the rest of their lives, a “temporary dismantling of the everyday.”⁵¹ Participants aim to conceal their social class and some other markers of identity in order to lose themselves in the dance party.⁵² The Black Madonna reports that “I am at my most in-tune—my best self—when the music lifts the whole room together, and all the separations between us dissolve for a little while.”⁵³

Electronic dance music travels. Not only do these remixes circulate on recordings and across the internet, but the musicians and the dancers also circulate from place to place. At any given event the crowd may consist of locals, immigrants, and tourists, and some tourists may have flown in specifically for this event. From one cosmopolitan city to the next the parties are not identical, but they can share similar musical practices and social expectations. This network is not evenly “global,” but it does create loose ties among partygoers within and sometimes even between world regions.⁵⁴ Thus, the DJ and producer Fernanda Arrau, based in Santiago, Chile, plays at clubs and festivals throughout Latin America and internationally.⁵⁵ The Afghan producer Shuja Rabbani, based in Dubai, is seeking to make this kind of music more widely known throughout the Middle East, particularly in places where it has been denounced or suppressed by Islamist authorities.⁵⁶ This global appeal is not surprising. Because electronic dance music is based on the reuse of previously Page 114 →recorded music, its content is flexible: one can represent one’s own heritage, someone else’s, a “neutral” electronic sound, or any blend of elements. These musical compilations then recirculate as recordings that can be sampled again, yielding a vast wash of music-about-music.

In the 1980s, alongside the development of turntablism and the mixing and remixing of dance music, yet another kind of mixing became popular. Music from different parts of the world became a fad in the international music industry, supported by consumer enthusiasm for diversity and by large record companies with a wide reach. Some recordings marketed under the category world music (or world beat) came from a single tradition that seemed novel to listeners in North America and Europe. Others were made by Western recording artists who mimicked music from afar. Still others were international collaborations that blended traditions. As Western popular music styles came to be practiced in many places, there was more common ground for such collaborations, like the one between popular musician and promoter Peter Gabriel and the Senegalese pop star Youssou N’Dour.⁵⁷ These world beat projects were not the earliest recordings to involve blending of this sort, but they were notable for their number and especially for the peculiarity of the blends. (Although this kind of music is most commonly called world music, I will refer to the genre as world beat, because the phrase “world music” inappropriately appears to represent the whole world of music.)⁵⁸

There are several words for blends of this sort. The creator of a mashup edits recordings together to make a purposeful combination of musics that are perceived to be very different in origin or style. That perception of difference is important because it gives the mashup a feeling of whimsical improbability. A more general category that includes mashups is a mix—music that is created by combining two or more different source musics. (In a mix the musics need not be extremely or comically different.) Sometimes people use the biological term hybrid for this process. The idea of a “hybrid” implies that the source music can easily be divided into separate species that have clear boundaries.

As we saw in the case of electronic dance music, not all mixes maintain the illusion of clearly separate sources. The world beat mixes of the 1980s, in contrast, used source music that had already been marketed to consumers as distinct species, carefully labeled with backstories that located the music in specific times and places of origin. One such species was the women’s choir called Mystère des Voix Bulgares (Mystery of the Bulgarian Voices), which sold many records in the 1980s. Journalists discussed the singers using the language of Page 115 →exoticism: one critic referred to their “hypnotizingly foreign beauty.” But their publicity materials also gave lavish descriptions of their authenticity. To North American audiences, the recording seemed to present a genuine East European folk music that had been hidden from the West but was now being revealed. Example 4.11 presents Mystery of the Bulgarian Voices singing a song called “Guro Is Looking for a Bride.”

Example 4.11. Excerpt from Krassimir Kyurktchijski, “Guro is Looking for a Bride,” performed by Mystère des Voix Bulgares/Angelite. A Cathedral Concert (Verve World 314 510 794-4, 1988). YouTube.

Link: https://doi.org/10.3998/mpub.9853855.cmp.60

This music is notable especially for its dissonance (the clashing of one note against another). This is a difficult effect to achieve in choral singing, and it is very different from the choral singing styles that had been familiar to Western listeners.

The Mystery choir’s artistic impression relied on cultivating the belief that they were folk musicians from the countryside. The women wore folk costumes, spoke no English on camera, and demonstrated a carefully cultivated modesty of appearance and demeanor. Despite the impression given to the media, however, this music only loosely reflected Bulgarian folk practice. For comparison listen to example 4.12, a recording of folk singing from Bulgaria.

Example 4.12. “Gel Yano,” performed by the Bistritsa Grannies and their Grand-Daughters, Bistritsa, Bulgaria.

Link: https://doi.org/10.3998/mpub.9853855.cmp.61

Compared to the Mystery choir’s polished choral performance, this singing excerpt has a rougher edge. The excerpt begins with vigorous whoops, and the singing women repeatedly maximize the clash between notes by modifying the pitch of the note up and down repeatedly.

The Mystery choir’s imitation of this style standardized the pitch and removed those in-the-moment pitch modifications so that each performance is the same, and they used this kind of harmony with tuneful dance songs that could seem catchy to Western ears. Most record-buyers did not know that the Mystery choir’s highly polished “folk style” was made by professional musicians. In Eastern Europe and in communist parts of Asia from the 1950s to the 1980s, many nation-states founded national folk ensembles that modified traditional folk practices into stage performances, especially useful for export. This music was meant to give the impression of being folk music, without Page 116 →calling attention to its nature as an invented tradition. The women of the Mystery choir appeared in folk costume on their album covers; the presence of a gun pointed at the women on the cover of their album “From Bulgaria with Love” (1992) underscored that they had come from Cold War Eastern Europe, which was perceived in the West as mysterious and dangerous (fig. 4.4). Consumers in the West did not seem to care that this music was professionally arranged; it was easy to avoid thinking about this factor, as the marketing emphasized authenticity. That feeling of authenticity greatly enhanced consumers’ appreciation for the music.⁵⁹

Fig. 4.4. Album cover of From Bulgaria with Love, by Mystère des Voix Bulgares. The folk costumes are a ubiquitous part of the choir’s presentation; the gun indicates their origin in a Communist country, which would have been regarded as unsafe and unfree by Western European and US audiences.

Page 117 →The Mystery choir’s dissonant choral sound was novel for a while, but American and European record-buyers did not demonstrate a deep interest in the details of Bulgarian choral singing. Once the Bulgarian women had completely saturated the limited market for their records, they began to collaborate with other groups to provide more novelty. One noteworthy collaboration is the pairing of the Bulgarian women (singing under the updated name “Angelite” [an-ge-LEE-tay]) and the Central Asian “throat-singers” of Tuva.

Tuva is a remote province on the Siberian/Mongolian border where the primary historical livelihood is sheepherding. Throat-singing is a technique that excites more resonant frequencies than do usual uses of the voice. This technique produces rich low notes and flute-like overtones high above. In keeping with the traditional outdoor occupations of Tuvan people, the overtones can be made to imitate natural phenomena, such as the singing of birds.⁶⁰ Example 4.13 is Anatoly Kulaar, singing “Borbangnadyr with Stream Water.” First we hear the sound of a stream; then Kulaar’s voice comes in, vibrating to imitate the rushing of the stream. Audible at timepoint 0:47 and again at 1:24 are the whistle-like overtones, which are produced by the voice itself (not a whistle).

Example 4.13. Anatoly Kulaar, “Borbangnadyr with Stream Water.” Tuva, Among the Spirits (Smithsonian Folkways SFW CD 40452, 1999).

Link: https://doi.org/10.3998/mpub.9853855.cmp.63

Recordings of Tuvan throat-singing became popular as a novelty among world beat listeners in the early 1990s. Like the Bulgarians, some throat-singers embarked on worldwide tours and made television appearances. They encountered the same problem as did the Bulgarians: once a Western listener has heard some throat-singing, the novelty fades. To keep people buying new recordings, the Tuvans and the Bulgarians discovered that mixes could renew the novelty of their singing. They also toured together.

Example 4.14 comes from a track called “Legend” that the Bulgarians and Tuvans recorded together. As collaborations go, the match between the Tuvans and the Bulgarian women’s choir is inventive: both groups feature unusual vocal styles. Although Tuvan throat-singers do not traditionally sing in groups, they do sing together on concert tours in the West, as they do here. This piece of music begins with the Tuvan singers. At timepoint 1:17 the Bulgarian choir enters with a chant-like melody, which sounds like a separate layer of music. The two groups stay quite distinct from each other in this recording; they sing Page 118 →in different registers (low and high), and each retains its own characteristic style of singing.

Example 4.14. Excerpt from Angelite with Huun Huur Tu and the Moscow Art Trio, “Legend.” Fly, Fly, My Sadness (Jaro Records, 1997). YouTube.

Link: https://doi.org/10.3998/mpub.9853855.cmp.64

Though in “Legend” the constituent musics in the mix are not fully integrated, another song, “Lonely Bird,” integrates them much more closely. “Lonely Bird,” excerpted in example 4.15, includes less of the signature sound of either group.

Example 4.15. Excerpt from Angelite with Huun Huur Tu and the Moscow Art Trio, “Lonely Bird.” Fly, Fly, My Sadness (Jaro Records, 1997). YouTube.

Link: https://doi.org/10.3998/mpub.9853855.cmp.65

Rather, the two choirs sing together as background for a soloist, using syllables like ah and doo rather than words from either of their languages. Some of the promotional material for this CD suggests a secret, ancient connection between the Bulgarian and Tuvan peoples, as if they are long-lost cousins who are now coming together to make music. No historical evidence supports this improbability. Rather, the suggestion is just intended to cultivate the listener’s belief that the music is authentic.

This phase of the marketing of world beat coincided with the 1980s and 1990s, when many people expressed optimism about globalization. During this period, mixes of distant, completely unrelated music became commonplace. The world beat fad made a great deal of music from around the world commercially accessible, yet almost all of this music had a short shelf life, just like other kinds of popular music. The public that purchased this genre of commercial music demanded musical novelty that reflected exotic difference but also suggested global connectedness. Once the consumer was familiar with isolated examples of music from many ethnicities, marketers sought to hold their attention through improbable combinations of styles and sounds. The more improbable the combination, the more consumers marveled.

This business of mixing musics—making music about music—is curious. This kind of music-making transparently relies on editing technology to create mixes of sound that never existed as live performance. The pleasure of the blended music, however, rests on our beliefs about authenticity and hybridity: we are pleased when we recognize the original “ingredients,” but the artfulness Page 119 →of combining these ingredients often takes center stage. The existence of mixed musics has not eclipsed the old-fashioned experience of authenticity. Rather, it playfully engages that experience, letting us experience both difference and assimilation at the same time. As listeners, we do not have trouble accepting these musics-about-music as real: they are just part of our mix.