by David Grubbs (Music 780.904 Gru)
As I’ve mentioned before, we have lots of books in the Polley Music Library that discuss records and the record industry. But here’s an interesting angle: what about music that isn’t well represented through recordings? Now don’t get me wrong: recordings are great for most composers and songwriters. In some circles, they’ve essentially replaced the need for things like sheet music, now that folks can make their own high-quality recordings without needing to put together a million-dollar studio. And they’re great for listeners in many cases, as we can always go back to our favorite recordings and remember how they make us feel, or share in moments together as we listen.
For more traditional classical music and most forms of popular music, this business of recordings representing music works out just fine. But what about jazz? We start getting into a gray area right away: there typically isn’t a “definitive” version of a tune, but instead we love many different versions, even different takes by the same performers at different gigs or different studio sessions. Each improvisation has something new and different to offer us, responding to a different moment in time. In some ways this problem is solved by simply having more recordings, capturing all of those performances and making them available. But it’s still like trying to capture lightning.
Then we can run into even more trouble with recordings in contemporary classical or free improvisation circles. In these kinds of music, we might not have a sense of what a piece is going to sound like at all — every performance could be wildly different. From that perspective, recordings are problematic because they can act as a kind of limiting factor. The debut release of a recording of a piece like this tends to influence subsequent performances, because listeners will now have a preconceived notion of how the piece should sound.
This gets into some nuanced territory, which author and musician David Grubbs covers acrobatically in his book Records Ruin the Landscape: John Cage, the Sixties and Sound Recording, a book you can borrow from Polley. As Grubbs states eloquently in his preface, “My purpose is to consider the distance between experimental music in the 1960s and the ways in which this music is experienced at present through the medium of sound recording.” Elsewhere in his preface, he reveals how he came to discover much of this music in the 1990s through recordings (and so did I), so there are some complexities to all of this.
Grubbs repeats a variation of his intentions in the introduction, reflecting that we have found ourselves in a period where lots of music from the exciting world of the 1960s avant-garde has been released and reissued in the last few decades. While these pieces occasionally receive performances, it’s far easier for the average listener to gain access to them through this large body of recordings. In most circumstances, this would be considered a wonderful thing, because this music and its history continue to be preserved and shared with the world, but there are many things about this music that are missing from the historical record if one is primarily focused on recordings. From the simplest practical perspective, many of the pieces from this era are too long to fit on records or CDs — they either have to be interrupted or edited to a shorter length, which often changes the weight and feel of the pieces. Then there’s the higher concept behind many of the works, which can be quite open-ended musically, with aleatoric or interpretive elements that can result in almost completely different sounds in multiple performances of the same piece.
Sometimes these historical distortions even effect more predicable forms of music. Grubbs uses the work of Henry Flynt as an example: in the 21st Century, many albums of his work have been released, and many sound like compelling examples of 60s protest music with folk and hillbilly overtones. Indeed they were recorded in the 60s, but they were never released back then, and they were mostly solitary experiments. They are fascinating to hear, but a modern listener — especially one using a streaming music service where there are no liner notes to provide historical context — might get a sense that the music they’re hearing had a social and popular significance in its time, which it simply didn’t.
For the rest of the book, Grubbs leans heavily into the work of two artists whose music might be difficult to fully understand through exposure to recordings alone: composer John Cage and non-idiomatic improviser Derek Bailey. Although the issues that affect their music as encountered through records also apply to lots of their contemporaries, they are excellent and better-known examples of the phenomenon. And amusingly enough, they both had serious reservations about recordings which they discussed publicly on occasion, yet they both participated in recording sessions, too. If you’re new to the work of Cage or Bailey, this book is a pretty solid look at their work, at least in the 1960s, which is arguably one of the peak decades for both.
Starting with Cage, author Grubbs leads us through his work in the 60s, with an emphasis on the Cageian focus of incorporating chance elements into the act of composition. Arguably Cage had already hit the peak of welcoming chance into the compositional process all the way back in 1952 with his legendary 4’ 33’’ piece, whose sounds are entirely left to whatever happens in the performance hall, but the composer spent much of the next 20 years composing pieces that incorporated various forms of contemporary technology into his works, and these almost always included chance elements. Grubbs discusses many of the specific LP releases that were made in the 60s featuring Cage compositions, and how different they can be from one another, even if they feature the same pieces. The presentation of his work is again somewhat hampered by the physical limitations of the LP, the dominant media format of the era, and many pieces are only known to the record-buying public in heavily edited form. And others are simply so different with each recording that a listener might not even recognize them as the same piece without being explicitly told so. “Cartridge Music,” for example, composed in 1960 and presented on several LPs throughout the subsequent decade, focuses mostly on the phonographic cartridge as an instrument, and it is “prepared” in a manner conceptually similar to prepared piano. Players create their parts from a series of drawings of irregular shapes and transparencies, and as you might expect, each performance is wildly different. Grubbs observes that many of these records have “the truth-content of a snapshot,” which is a great way of looking at their true significance within a greater compositional context. And he points out that other composers who worked in Cage’s time found themselves having to make one of two choices where recordings were concerned: either their music became even more difficult to represent on recordings and stayed alive in concert halls, or they had to start thinking of recording studios as part of their compositional process and really embrace them.
Then we have the school of free improvisation that flourished in the 60s, represented in the book by guitarist Derek Bailey. Like Cage, Bailey felt that records didn’t represent what he was doing musically, because his work was all about the moment and place of improvisation, but he too not only participated in recording sessions but even ran his own small record label. This ambivalence was common among free improvisers, and to an extent things remain similar today — many such musicians continue to operate small record labels, which help listeners get an idea of what they do, and frankly help to pay the bills. Bailey’s career remains somewhat of a model for free improvisers.
Just as we learned a lot about Cage’s work through his exploration of chance elements, here we learn about Bailey’s definition of “non-idiomatic” improvisation, and how he contrasts it with the more common idiomatic forms of improv. In his classic book “Improvisation,” which you can borrow from Polley, Bailey apparently felt that there were fundamental differences in focus between the two types of improvisation: briefly put, that idiomatic improv was focused on ends, and non-idiomatic on means. But in a later edition he revised his thinking on this, finding that both types of improvisation at their most profound focus on means. I never knew he had so significantly edited his thinking on the matter!
Toward the end of the book, Grubbs shifts the focus from LP and CD recordings to how digital archives of materials can have similar and even more exaggerated effects on the circulation of these kinds of recordings. Through streaming or downloading, all of the problems with these kinds of musical forms being presented through recordings remain, but now they’re compounded by being lower-resolution copies of the original recordings, and usually with incomplete or altogether missing liner notes that further isolate these recordings from their origins and historical contexts. And again, this is a complex area to navigate, because many folks may only discover such music because they stumble across it online, minus those original contextual clues. For art forms that embraced unrepeatability as a “feature,” a kind of inherent repeatability by virtue of old recordings of such pieces is slowly defining the indefinable. Kind of like books!
(If you enjoy this, you may also wish to try Improvisation: Its Nature and Practice in Music by Dereck Bailey, or Everything We Do Is Music: Cross-Curricular Experiments in Sound Based on the Music of John Cage by Russell Bailey.)
( publisher’s official Records Ruin the Landscape web page ) | ( Wikipedia entry for David Grubbs )
Recommended
by Scott S.
Bennett Martin Public Library — Polley Music Library
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