"I think records were just a little bubble through time and those who made a living from them for a while were lucky. There is no reason why anyone should have made so much money from selling records except that everything was right for this period of time. I always knew it would run out sooner or later. It couldn't last, and now it's running out. I don't particularly care that it is and like the way things are going. The record age was just a blip. It was a bit like if you had a source of whale blubber in the 1840s and it could be used as fuel. Before gas came along, if you traded in whale blubber, you were the richest man on Earth. Then gas came along and you'd be stuck with your whale blubber. Sorry mate – history's moving along. Recorded music equals whale blubber. Eventually, something else will replace it."
It's not going to be generative music, though - sorry Brian!
See, one of the things people like about music (or art or anything) is the definitiveness - this is the way it is, this is the way it will be each time I look at it, hear it, watch it, read it....
This is the way it is, and more than that (as with a novel's plot), this is the way it should be - this is the only way it could ever have been -
People like the idea, or sensation, that something has arrived at its ordained form, the best version of itself
Exactly this organized arrangement of colours and lines, or notes and timbres and beats, or storyline and characters.
That's why there's only ever been a limited ultra-nerd consumer base for alternative takes and demos and prototype versions of e.g. "Strawberry Fields".... or for Director's Cut expansions (like the fairly poor and utterly extraneous additional material in the extended Apocalypse Now) and deleted scenes and so forth... It's why only scholars of literature like to inspect the first drafts of novels and plays...
What about remixes?
Ah but you see - a great remix, a successful remix, achieves its own definitive form.... you want to hear that over and over again, exactly those same perfect decisions made by the remixer....
A remix that remixed itself each time you played it and was majorly or even slightly different - that would be exasperating!
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Ah but you say -
What about jazz improvisation in the live situ?
What about singers interpreting the great American Song Book?
What about conductors and orchestras with their different versions of the classical repertoire?
What about re-staging of plays (modern dress versions etc?)
What about what deejays do in the mix, taking two records and making a third one out of them?
Hmmm.... well see I like listening to jazz records, born of improvisation though they may be, as if they were composed - it's just a different route to definitiveness as far as I'm concerned. I get as bored with the mega-expanded On the Corner / In A Silent Way etc boxes with multiple takes and prototypes as I do the expanded Beatles / etc
The fact that you have to do research to find out which is the best version of the Pastoral Symphony or Carnival of Animals or "Trois Gymnopedies" is annoying to me - the fact that there is a range of opinion on the subject and a bewildering number of options.... I always think, "why can't it be like pop, where's there's only one "Strawberry Fields" that really counts?"
Different readings of "My Funny Valentine" or whatever is slightly more interesting / appealing to me for some reason... it's like different actors playing the same classic part... but I wouldn't want to listen to a whole range of different recordings of Sinatra doing "You Make Feel So Young". I'd want the definitive Sinatra version as captured on Songs for Swingin' Lovers... A live version would only make me contemplate the ways it departs from that definitive and unimprovable rendering in the studio.
Plays - well yes, I suppose so ... but at the end of the day, the script, the dialogue, the characters, the plot, can only be faithfully rendered. The stuff that is at the discretion of the director, costumer, stage designer and the actors themselves is not the essential element.... although it's true that when misjudged and ill-conceived, or badly executed by the players, it can mar that essence, badly vandalize it.
I think deejays and deejaying are overrated. There is a ratio between the magic that a deejay can do and the indistinctness of the records being mixed. The more unique and stand-alone brilliant a particular track is, the harder it is for deejays to do their work.
That's why the really creative deejays like LTJ Bukem or Jeff Mills work with characterless materials, stuff that blends easily or that can be concatenated (DJ tools - unfinished tracks, effectively).
Bukem created a whole label Good Looking / Looking Good and marshalled a stable of admirer-producers to generate Bukem-a-like tunes for him mix seamlessly. Which he did brilliantly - one of the most amazing dj sets I ever saw was Bukem making this amorphous blob-blur of dolphin jungle in a NYC club, where the whole set was like one shimmering track.
The inverted ratio at work here: the creativity of the deejay must be correspondingly absent from the tunes they are working with.
My feelings are pretty similar - with jazz in particular, I view what the performer is doing at that particular moment in time as its own kind of definitive, in that it's being set in stone at that moment, and can't be detached from it. There's ways you can mess with material after the fact - see the great dub engineers, or Teo Macero's electric Miles edits (he was very much against the kind of 'every take' box sets you describe, for that reason), but what's done is done, and has to first be respected in that context even if you're remixing it.
ReplyDeleteSimilarly I'm more forgiving towards artists finding different depths in different performances/versions, even if I have my favorite(s), but I have absolutely no interest in the Eno infinitely-iterative model
I feel the same way, but isn’t this a bit of a late 20th century suburban music consumer's view of thing?
ReplyDeleteRecorded music created this sense of exactness in listeners. In the sheet music-only era of popular music, people had a 'script' to play from, but plenty of room for variation and improvisation. And before mass-produced sheet music, even greater freedom.
Regarding the analogy with theatre. For out of copyright material, there is literally NO requirement to 'stick to the text'. You can do want what you want with it. In the 18th and 19th century, productions of Shakespeare routinely ditched whole scenes they thought were boring/too long/old-fashioned - no one seems to have minded.
Or think of the way Hollywood has turned literary classics into mythic archetypes that bear little relation to the original novels and plays. Try telling people that Wuthering Heights isn't a love story, or that Jane Austen was a conservative Christian moralist!
In a funny way, I think streaming does support Eno’s view. Long term users of Spotify know that it has a very frustrating attitude to its inventory: constantly removing versions and replacing them with different ones, allowing a lot of duplicates and so on. Long-term, it will end up undermining the authority of the definitive version.
I just recently read Wuthering Heights for the first time, finally, expressly so that I could be annoyed by the new film version from a richer and deeply informed basis. I disliked Saltburn and expectantly await an utter travesty of the Bronte vision.
DeleteWhich is astonishingly bleak and cruel and pitiless - as you say, not romantic fiction.
It makes sense that Kate Bush never read the book but based her song on seeing the very tamed and toned down Hollywood film.
I think some of Eno's other observations made during his career of thinking in public suggest the opposite re. streaming. He would go on about how in pop the sound is all important, timbre and vibe. How you catch a song on the radio and in less than a second, you can recognise it by the band-feel and by the specific recording ambience. So all these duplicates and odd versions on Spotify etc - these interfere with that. Like when a band trying to wrest back its publishing monies, re-records their famous songs (Def Leppard did this). They try to get it exactly right but it's subtly not right - at least to a late 20th Century ear.
A mid-century ear though would probably be happy, because the song is paramount, not the recorded version. That's why those albums of cover versions of hits done by session musicians and faceless singers could sell - people weren't so hung up on the definitive recorded iteration.
Haha I had the same idea of reading Wuthering Heights (re-reading in my case) to sharpen my attack on the movie. Then I saw the trailer and decided it wasn’t even worth a hate-watch.
DeleteRe: Wuthering Heights. There is the possibility that all post-80s adaptions are really adaptions of KB's song and not the book.
DeleteYour point about film is an interesting one. Is it because film is the ultimate multi-media narrative experience, and it is just too immersive and involving to use the Eno techniques?
Slightly different, but I don't know if you have seen the shot-by-shot remake of Psycho? It is a strangely pointless experience. Not like watching a covers band at all, more like watching someone photocopy a painting.
I haven't heard the re-recorded Def Leppard tracks but if they even came close to the originals it would be some kind of miracle. The recent book about The Cars has a lengthy section describing Mutt Lange's modus operandi, which paints a picture of a persnicketty producer par excellence, an inventor of adjectives like "previous" to describe out-of-tune (to his ears) drum machines.
DeleteYes I think that's right. The definitive form of a piece of music depends on the genre. For Rock, it's the recording. Barring a few exceptional cases, live performances are attempts to replicate the effects achieved in the studio.
ReplyDeleteFor Classical music, it is the score. The reason you find so many different opinions about the best recordings of Classical pieces is that there can be no definitive answer. Different versions will be the best for different people at different times and in different places. Searching for the perfect recording is a fruitless quest.
For Folk, the essential form is the lyrics and melody, which are both subject to infinite variation in performance. Again, there's no such thing as a definitive recorded version.
For Jazz it's a bit trickier. Many people will tell you it's all about improvised live performance. But for music that involves a lot of studio intervention, such as the Davis / Macero albums, I do agree that it seems a lot more like Rock, where the recording is definitive.
I think a lot of it is context-dependent, too. Hearing a live Jazz performance in a club, when it actually is live, is different from hearing the recording of it years or decades later.
Is it the score, though, these days? There's a huge economy of classical music recordings, radio station that play portions from the great works.
DeleteThere was a time when classical music buffs would sit and read a score, prior to ever hearing it instantiated. But that was always a minority thing and a long time ago kind of thing too.
At any rate, while there's interpretative scope for conductors and players, it's a long, long way from generative music. There's a start and a finish - and a prescribed set of instrumentation.
I agree that this is a particular form of desire that has been molded by recording - but also by cinema. I wouldn't want to watch a version of Les Enfants Terrible or The Dream Life of Angels or Blow Up that was different each time. Not only in the sense of the body blow denouement in each case, but the precise succession of images and events - that IS the art, in this case. As it is with recorded music and quite a few other art forms.
ReplyDeleteI never saw the Eno doc that is different each time - his putting into practice the theory job. I think I'd find it irritating, because I would always wonder what I might have missed from any of the infinite possibility of iterations, or sequencing. Whether it's non-fiction or fiction modes, you want the editing - which is the elimination of other alternatives, the non-inclusion of other materials - to have taken place already. And then as a viewer/reader/listener, you react and respond to THAT.
One of the revelations that led me to this viewpoint was some years ago sitting and listening to the box set of The Stooges's Fun House that my nutty friend had bought. It was something like 10 discs of alternative takes. What was amazing to me was that almost every take of "Loose" was nearly the same. Same with all the songs. The Stooges had a definitive execution in mind and they kept shooting for it and finally nailed it to their satisfaction. But being a super-tight disciplined unit, each attempt was remarkably close to the others.
ReplyDeleteYou would think, from the sort of historical image of the Stooges, that they would be all chaos and abandon, and onstage for sure, Iggy brought that element - but in the studio, judging by the evidence, they like a military unit, drilled and precise.
Something similar but slightly different is described in Greil Marcus's book on Dylan, where he listens to all the takes of "Like A Rolling Stone" in the sequence they were done. And then finally, it clicks, the feel that Dylan is looking for is achieved - "Roling Stone" arrives at itself, the Definitive Version that it will be for all time. And just like with all the early drafts of a poem or a play or novel, for most people that's the only version that matters. Only a scholar - in this case Marcus - is interested in hearing all the stages leading up to the Definitive Version.
Then again, contra that, Dylan's whole later endless touring career is based around doing his famous songs differently, messing with them, changing lyrics, intonation, etc etc... the intrigue of what will he do his own American Songbook that night
DeleteI'm so uncompromising on this point that I won't even listen to remastered albums.
ReplyDeleteShould be said though that a lot of artists aren't always satisfied with their records due to having limited time in the studio, not getting on with the producer, accidents etc. I remember reading somewhere that the master tapes of "For Each...." by ACR were processed incorrectly during mastering, which compressed the dynamic range, thus the resulting tinny sound. So the realised form is not always the intended one.
Sure, true, agreed - but here I'm talking about re-editing rather than different audio mixes - remastered, mono versus stereo, and all that kind of stuff.
DeleteAfter all, given that we're all listening on different playback systems, in different rooms, sometimes on headphones sometimes not.... we all listen to something slightly different.
But here I am talking about a song (or film - a documentary in the Eno case) that is never the same again - each time you listen to it, it's a different sequence, a different organisation of the materials.
And I don't think there is really an appetite for that, not to the extent that Eno imagines anyway. He has been talking up generative music as the future of culture and saying that in a century, people will be puzzled that people ever listened / watched something that wasn't different the next time they listened-etc to it, wasn't different each and every time they listened-etc to it. Works will be created to be open spaces of flux and mutability.
But... for example, I'm reading Moby Dick right now. If I ever lived long enough to be able to reread it, I wouldn't want it to be different. I'd want to read the exact definitive text - and then find or notice things in it that I had not noticed before.
That is the "generative" aspect of any great artwork, whether musical or cinematic or literary or visual - it remains inviolate, fixed, but you watch-hear-read-see it from a subtly different angle.