Spacebubs - this one's NOT for you...
ALEXI LALAS Far From Close 1996
54 seconds ago
Friday, 28 May 2010
Steady Rollin’ Man - A Revolutionary Critique of Robert Johnson
An abiding mystery about Robert Johnson is the rpm conundrum. Is it true, as a Japanese musician told me it is widely held to be in Japan, that Robert Johnson’s records play way too fast? Should he actually sound much more like his great mentor, Son House?
One guitar tutorial book, Country Blues Bottleneck Guitar by James Ferguson and Richard Gellis (Walter Kane Publications, New York, 1976), proposes that Robert Johnson’s ‘Walking Blues’ is played with the guitar tuned to G (i.e. so that the open strings play a chord of G major – D-G-D-G-B-D, from bass to treble) and with a capo on the fourth fret. This means that the opening phrase, played an octave higher than the open strings – i.e. twelve frets down the neck from the capo – has to be played at the sixteenth fret. On the kind of guitar that has the neck joining the body at the fourteenth fret – like the one that Johnson is holding in one of the long-sought-after photographs of him, reproduced above right – this means manoeuvring the slide above the fingerboard a good inch beyond the end of the neck. On a guitar with the neck-body join at the twelfth fret, as in the photograph reproduced above left, it means stretching even further – a most uncomfortable position that would make it hard to play accurately.
There are four other Johnson tunes in the book. One, ‘I Believe I’ll Dust My Broom’, is given in an arrangement by Taj Mahal; the rest follow the original recordings, and all of these are supposed to be capoed at the third fret. The only other piece in the book to be played with a capo on the third is by the Georgia-born Tampa Red. The pieces by the other Mississippi Delta slide players in the book – Bukka White, Bobby Grant, Mississippi Fred McDowell – are all played open or, in one case, with a capo on the first fret.
Now if we turn to the song on which Robert Johnson’s ‘Walking Blues’ is based, namely ‘My Black Mama’ by Son House [Example 1], we find that on his recording of it in 1930, he plays in open G, capo on the first. What happens, then, if we slow Johnson’s record until it is in the same key as the song it’s modelled on [Example 2] – and if we bring the rest of his records down likewise, so that those pieces that sound as though they’re capoed on the third would actually be played in the much more natural way, with open strings? This means lowering the key by three semitones, a quarter of an octave – which means slowing the recordings to 80 per cent of the speed at which they normally play. (I accomplished this by playing my old King of the Delta Blues Singers LPs with the pitch control on the turntable turned as low as it would go and taping them with the pitch control on the cassette deck turned as high as it would go, then turning the pitch control down slightly while I dubbed it to another cassette deck. The end result was the equivalent of a 33-1/3-rpm record playing at 26-2/3-rpm.)
And what comes out of the speakers? A music transformed. The sound of a man, first of all: this dark-toned voice would no longer lend credence to the youth of seventeen or eighteen that Don Law, the only person to record him, thought he might be. Now, especially in the dip of his voice at the end of a line, we can hear the follower of Son House, and the precursor of Muddy Waters. Hear him pronounce his name in ‘Kind Hearted Woman Blues’ [Example 3] – now he sounds like “Mr Johnson”, a man whose words are not half-swallowed, garbled or strangled, but clearly delivered, beautifully modulated; whose performances are not fleeting, harried or fragmented, but paced with the sense of space and drama that drew an audience in until people wept as they stood in the street around him [Example 4]]. (The wordless last lines of ‘Love in Vain’ [Example 5], in this slowed form, are the work of one of the most heartbreaking and delicate of blues singers.) This is a Steady Rolling Man, whose tempos and tonalities are much like those of other Delta bluesmen. Full-speed Johnson always struck me as a disembodied sound – befitting his wraith-like persona, the reticent, drifting youth, barely more than a boy, that Don Law spoke of: the Rimbaud of the blues [Example 6]. Johnson slowed down sounds to me like the person in the recently discovered studio portrait: a big-boned man, self-assured and worldly-wise [Example 7]. It works for me, but listen for yourself.
As for why and how it could have come about, I’ve no idea. But if all the recordings should really play at 80 per cent of their current speed, that wouldn’t make them exceptionally long. The sixteen cuts of the first Robert Johnson LP, King of the Delta Blues Singers, have an average duration of two minutes 38 seconds. This is noticeably shorter than, for example, the sixteen cuts on an LP collection of Leroy Carr’s blues from 1932 to 1934, which average just over three minutes; or of the twelve cuts on a collection of Blind Willie McTell’s blues from 1935 (about 80 per cent of the length, in fact). On the other hand, it matches, almost to the second, the average duration of sixteen tracks recorded in May 1937 by Sonny Boy Williamson and Big Joe Williams – a month before “poor Bob’s” last session. But this is up-tempo, good-time blues, as suggested by the title of this Williamson/Williams LP – Throw a Boogie Woogie. Two of the songs in this compilation became rocking Blues Boom standards in the 1960s – ‘Good Morning School Girl’ and ‘Please Don’t Go’.
Similarly, on a two-CD set that collects all of the 42 masters cut by the rugged Delta musician Tommy McClennan between 1939 and 1942, the average length is only a wee bit longer than Johnson’s, around two minutes fifty – but McClennan is another purveyor of the boogie, a much simpler artist than our “Robert chile”. When he was recommended for his first recording session by the duke of pre-war Chicago blues, Big Bill Broonzy, it was surely because, despite the rude country style, McClennan’s ever-driving beat and bragging personality could still cut it with the juke-joint dancers – something that ‘Love In Vain’ and ‘Come On In My Kitchen’ weren’t likely to do.
If the theory I’ve advanced is not completely crazy, a possible motive for speeding up Johnson’s records might have been to try to make them more exciting for an age in which the Delta tradition he came out of was already a thing of the past.
Perhaps there are scientific tests that could be applied to the sound that might establish its original frequencies – to the qualities of the voice, for example, like the vibrato, which at full speed sounds to me like an alien nasal flutter but at slower speeds like a proper musical ornament; or perhaps to the decay time of the guitar notes.
Robert Johnson’s records occupy a place of unique esteem in the heritage of 20th-century popular music. In addition to their innate artistic excellence, they exerted a huge influence on the subsequent development of the blues, and on the other forms, like rock, that drew on the blues. They are universally acclaimed by critics: Greil Marcus, for example, the dean of rock writers, while he might not be so blunt as to tag the first Robert Johnson LP as The Greatest Album Of All Time, certainly regards it as An Album Than Which None Better Has Been Made. This cultural prestige is reflected in the continuing demand for Johnson’s music: the 1990 CD box-set of The Complete Recordings, with an expected sale of about twenty thousand, sold half a million. If the records are, in fact, distinctly inaccurate, perhaps we should be told.
Postscript
The ideas outlined above are presented to stimulate further debate and investigation. It’s quite possible, for example, that my detuning of Johnson’s records by a tone and a half is too extreme. Perhaps he did not habitually play with open strings, as I have assumed, but favoured the use of a capo most of the time. Observant readers will have noticed that in one of the two photos at the top of the page, his guitar has a capo on the second fret. Johnson is known to have travelled widely and appears to have absorbed many other styles in addition to the Mississippi Delta blues which provided the original matrix for his music. His practices, therefore, can’t be ascertained solely by those of his Delta models, mentors and contemporaries. I’d be glad to hear the thoughts of you blues aficionados and appreciators out there: johngibbens@touched.co.uk
Now if we turn to the song on which Robert Johnson’s ‘Walking Blues’ is based, namely ‘My Black Mama’ by Son House [Example 1], we find that on his recording of it in 1930, he plays in open G, capo on the first. What happens, then, if we slow Johnson’s record until it is in the same key as the song it’s modelled on [Example 2] – and if we bring the rest of his records down likewise, so that those pieces that sound as though they’re capoed on the third would actually be played in the much more natural way, with open strings? This means lowering the key by three semitones, a quarter of an octave – which means slowing the recordings to 80 per cent of the speed at which they normally play. (I accomplished this by playing my old King of the Delta Blues Singers LPs with the pitch control on the turntable turned as low as it would go and taping them with the pitch control on the cassette deck turned as high as it would go, then turning the pitch control down slightly while I dubbed it to another cassette deck. The end result was the equivalent of a 33-1/3-rpm record playing at 26-2/3-rpm.)
And what comes out of the speakers? A music transformed. The sound of a man, first of all: this dark-toned voice would no longer lend credence to the youth of seventeen or eighteen that Don Law, the only person to record him, thought he might be. Now, especially in the dip of his voice at the end of a line, we can hear the follower of Son House, and the precursor of Muddy Waters. Hear him pronounce his name in ‘Kind Hearted Woman Blues’ [Example 3] – now he sounds like “Mr Johnson”, a man whose words are not half-swallowed, garbled or strangled, but clearly delivered, beautifully modulated; whose performances are not fleeting, harried or fragmented, but paced with the sense of space and drama that drew an audience in until people wept as they stood in the street around him [Example 4]]. (The wordless last lines of ‘Love in Vain’ [Example 5], in this slowed form, are the work of one of the most heartbreaking and delicate of blues singers.) This is a Steady Rolling Man, whose tempos and tonalities are much like those of other Delta bluesmen. Full-speed Johnson always struck me as a disembodied sound – befitting his wraith-like persona, the reticent, drifting youth, barely more than a boy, that Don Law spoke of: the Rimbaud of the blues [Example 6]. Johnson slowed down sounds to me like the person in the recently discovered studio portrait: a big-boned man, self-assured and worldly-wise [Example 7]. It works for me, but listen for yourself.
As for why and how it could have come about, I’ve no idea. But if all the recordings should really play at 80 per cent of their current speed, that wouldn’t make them exceptionally long. The sixteen cuts of the first Robert Johnson LP, King of the Delta Blues Singers, have an average duration of two minutes 38 seconds. This is noticeably shorter than, for example, the sixteen cuts on an LP collection of Leroy Carr’s blues from 1932 to 1934, which average just over three minutes; or of the twelve cuts on a collection of Blind Willie McTell’s blues from 1935 (about 80 per cent of the length, in fact). On the other hand, it matches, almost to the second, the average duration of sixteen tracks recorded in May 1937 by Sonny Boy Williamson and Big Joe Williams – a month before “poor Bob’s” last session. But this is up-tempo, good-time blues, as suggested by the title of this Williamson/Williams LP – Throw a Boogie Woogie. Two of the songs in this compilation became rocking Blues Boom standards in the 1960s – ‘Good Morning School Girl’ and ‘Please Don’t Go’.
Similarly, on a two-CD set that collects all of the 42 masters cut by the rugged Delta musician Tommy McClennan between 1939 and 1942, the average length is only a wee bit longer than Johnson’s, around two minutes fifty – but McClennan is another purveyor of the boogie, a much simpler artist than our “Robert chile”. When he was recommended for his first recording session by the duke of pre-war Chicago blues, Big Bill Broonzy, it was surely because, despite the rude country style, McClennan’s ever-driving beat and bragging personality could still cut it with the juke-joint dancers – something that ‘Love In Vain’ and ‘Come On In My Kitchen’ weren’t likely to do.
If the theory I’ve advanced is not completely crazy, a possible motive for speeding up Johnson’s records might have been to try to make them more exciting for an age in which the Delta tradition he came out of was already a thing of the past.
Perhaps there are scientific tests that could be applied to the sound that might establish its original frequencies – to the qualities of the voice, for example, like the vibrato, which at full speed sounds to me like an alien nasal flutter but at slower speeds like a proper musical ornament; or perhaps to the decay time of the guitar notes.
Robert Johnson’s records occupy a place of unique esteem in the heritage of 20th-century popular music. In addition to their innate artistic excellence, they exerted a huge influence on the subsequent development of the blues, and on the other forms, like rock, that drew on the blues. They are universally acclaimed by critics: Greil Marcus, for example, the dean of rock writers, while he might not be so blunt as to tag the first Robert Johnson LP as The Greatest Album Of All Time, certainly regards it as An Album Than Which None Better Has Been Made. This cultural prestige is reflected in the continuing demand for Johnson’s music: the 1990 CD box-set of The Complete Recordings, with an expected sale of about twenty thousand, sold half a million. If the records are, in fact, distinctly inaccurate, perhaps we should be told.
Postscript
The ideas outlined above are presented to stimulate further debate and investigation. It’s quite possible, for example, that my detuning of Johnson’s records by a tone and a half is too extreme. Perhaps he did not habitually play with open strings, as I have assumed, but favoured the use of a capo most of the time. Observant readers will have noticed that in one of the two photos at the top of the page, his guitar has a capo on the second fret. Johnson is known to have travelled widely and appears to have absorbed many other styles in addition to the Mississippi Delta blues which provided the original matrix for his music. His practices, therefore, can’t be ascertained solely by those of his Delta models, mentors and contemporaries. I’d be glad to hear the thoughts of you blues aficionados and appreciators out there: johngibbens@touched.co.uk
1. Son House, My Black Mama Part I (1930), last verse (file size: 116KB)
2. Robert Johnson, Walking Blues, last verse, slowed down (132KB)
3. Robert Johnson, Kindhearted Woman Blues, excerpt, slowed down (144KB)
4. Robert Johnson, Come On In My Kitchen, excerpt, slowed down (204KB)
5. Robert Johnson, Love in Vain, last verse, slowed down (176KB)
6. Robert Johnson, Crossroads Blues, as officially released (80KB)
7. Robert Johnson, Crossroads Blues, slowed down (204KB)
Thanx to PaulO'S! Who linked to this article
John Gibbens @'touched'
There is a CD containing 24 tracks of slowed-down Robert Johnson, which you can buy for £4 in the UK, £5 overseas (including P&P). Click on the cover below to order:
Iran Protesters' Twitter Revolution On Display In Paris
Dancers at the 59 Rivoli gallery in Paris perform in front of TVs displaying mobile phone videos. The "Action 1" exhibit features images captured by ordinary Iranians during huge protests against last year's re-election of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.
An exhibit in Paris brings together some of the thousands of mobile phone videos shot by anti-government protesters after last June's disputed presidential election.
Tehran largely banned international and Iranian media from freely covering the massive wave of protests over alleged fraud in the re-election of President Mahmoud Ahmedinejad.
But Iranians overcame the reporting ban by using their cell phones and social-networking and image-sharing websites such as Twitter, Facebook and YouTube.
The Paris exhibit, "Action 1," gives visitors a firsthand look at the demonstrations and the crackdown that seem to have changed the lives of millions of Iranians.
'Solidarity Beyond Imagination'
The exhibit's organizers viewed thousands of Internet videos before making the selection to display in 59 Rivoli, a gallery off Paris' busy rue de Rivoli. The group calls itself the Green Ribbon, after the symbol of Iran's opposition movement. It is made up of Iranians living in France as well as some French artists who came together after last year's election to support Iranian artists.
Orash, one of the Green Ribbon's leaders, came to Paris from Iran a year and a half ago. He doesn't want to give his last name in case he returns — and out of solidarity with the exhibit's anonymous video artists. Orash says last year's demonstrations ended the isolation of millions of Iranians.
"Personally ... I thought that I don't want this regime, but I am the only one. It's no good to shout, it's no good to write, to create. But after these events, I saw that millions and millions of [people] are thinking the same way. So it gave new hope for Iranians all over the world, and it has created a solidarity beyond imagination," Orash says.
Scenes of violence play out on TV screens all over the gallery as black-clad Basiji militia beat people and chase crowds of young people through the streets. French subtitles translate some of the conversation of those filming. "They look just like the Gestapo," says one witness.
Generation Gap
Scottish visitor Stephen Riley said he was seeing the footage for the first time.
"The contrast between the physical arms of the militia and the communication arms of the protesters, which seems to amount to mobile phones and cameras, is quite a striking paradox," Riley says.
Riley came to the exhibit with his friend, a 50-year-old Iranian who calls herself Aryan H., because she also fears giving her last name. Aryan H. has lived in Paris for 20 years. In 1979, she demonstrated to overthrow the shah and bring Ayatollah Khomeini to power. She says many young people still blame her generation for that.
"My generation, we [were] very ashamed, because it was our fault what's happened to them," she says, adding that the latest demonstrations have helped bring the two generations back together.
A Gathering Point
The exhibit has become a gathering point for Paris' Iranian community. Expats converse in Farsi on the sidewalk in front of the gallery.
Giant reproductions of some of the Twitter messages sent during the protests hang in the gallery's tall windows. "It's getting harder to log on to the Net," reads one. "Our phone line was cut and we lost Internet," says another.
The gallery's top floor is pitch dark, except for some tiny electric candles placed around the floor. The room is filled with the sound of people chanting "Allahu akbar," or "God is great," from the rooftops of Tehran.
Another Green Ribbon member, Azam, 27, says this chanting went on every night for more than six months after the June 12 election, turning what was once a mantra of the Islamic revolution into a call for protest. She says the nightly ritual brought people closer.
"They went to the top of their house or behind their window, and they say 'Allahu akbar,' and in front of your house there's another house, and there's someone there who says 'Allahu akbar,' and they know each other after one month. And it's so kind," Azam says.
These young Iranians say they believe it is only a matter of time before the movement that began last summer leads to real change in Iran.
Audio download also available
Eleanor Beardsley @'npr'
M.I.A. Takes Revenge on New York Times Writer Lynn Hirschberg
Yesterday, The New York Times published an in-depth profile of M.I.A. written by Times staffer Lynn Hirschberg. The lengthy read followed M.I.A. through the making and promoting of her new album / \ / \ / \ Y / \. In examining many of the contradictions that make up M.I.A.'s persona, it wasn't totally complimentary, and contained un-flattering quotes from several people in M.I.A.'s camp (including Diplo and "Born Free" director Romain Gavras), not to mention M.I.A. herself.Well, it seems that M.I.A. wasn't too happy with the piece. She just Tweeted "CALL ME IF YOU WANNA TALK TO ME ABOUT THE N Y T TRUTH ISSUE, ill b taking calls all day bitches ;)", accompanied by a phone number. We just called the phone number... and it seems to be Lynn Hirschberg's phone number. And now her voicemail is full.
Ouch.
UPDATE: She just Tweeted: NEWS IS AN OPINION! UNEDITED VERSION OF THE INTERVIEW WILL BE ON neetrecordings THIS MEMORIAL WEEKEND!!! >>>>
Ouch.
UPDATE: She just Tweeted: NEWS IS AN OPINION! UNEDITED VERSION OF THE INTERVIEW WILL BE ON neetrecordings THIS MEMORIAL WEEKEND!!! >>>>
The History of the Typewriter recited by Michael Winslow
“The History of the Typewriter recited by Michael Winslow” is a 21 minutes long film made by Ignacio Uriarte.
First he recorded the original sounds of 62 typewriters of different times, countries and technologies. Then, the actor Michael Winslow reproduced a selection of these sounds in chronolgical order, tracing a temporary journey through almost 100 years of history and creating this way an homage to the sound qualities of the typewriter and its former presence in the office.
It sounds amazing, you can see the quicktime version here. I bet he can do those modem dial-in sounds too. Remember those?
Via vvork
iSteel drums
A strange thing, but growing up we had a set of oil drums in the garage. My dad had been out to the West Indies a lot while he was in the merchant navy!
Wish I still had them...
BP wants Twitter to shut down fake account mocking the oil company. Twitter wants BP to shut down the leak that’s ruining the sea #BPGlobalPR
The Politics of the Soundtrack
When film soundtracks take the form of an iPod on shuffle or a non-stop brass crescendo, do they make alienating cinema more human or alienated lives more cinematic? This month's Mute Music Columnist Nina Power risks removing her earmuffs
Was there a golden age of the film soundtrack? One might reach for Ennio Morricone (at least until the late 1980s) or the ’70s and ’80s records Popul Vuh made for Werner Herzog’s most memorable films, Aguirre, Nosferatu and Cobra Verde. Even if much of the concept has gone out of ‘conceptual’ film-making and the soundtracks that accompany them, there are nevertheless highlights here and there. We could point to David Lynch, John Carpenter or Howard Shore's brittle and claustrophobic music for Cronenberg's Crash (1997), or Ed Tomney's tense and millennial compositions for Todd Haynes’ Safe (1995) as proof that film and sound can be more than whatever bland indie love-songs the studio’s marketing manager has been listening to on his iPod. The soundtrack to Andrea Arnold’s recent Fish Tank does something interesting with the diegetic, with its muffled sounds and tinny music players - indeed, much of the film is about recorded music and its playback, from the tiny speakers that Mia dances to in an empty room to the CD player leading her to her doom in the strip-club.
Image: Stellar soundtrack. Still from Stanley Kubrik's 2001: A Space Odyssey, 1968
If we expand our cinematic categories a little, we can point to complex figures like Walter Murch, a ‘sound designer’ among other things, rather than a simple composer or hit song provider for the charts (film soundtracks are often simply understood as ‘secondary usage’, providing producers with additional sources of income). In early silent cinema, pianists were hired to drown out the mechanical whirring of the projectors and ramp up emotion; Murch revisits the noise of the machine in the famous scene in Apocalypse Now where helicopter blades become indiscernible from ceiling fans.1
But, for the most part, an ‘original soundtrack’ is the misnomer it always was, being neither the composite track of the film (the dialogue, the sound effects, the music) nor original, being comprised of whichever three-minute songs the studio/record label partnership wishes to promote. The apex, or really nadir, of this trend, which stretches all the way back to the beginning of the marketing of film soundtracks in the late ’40s and ’50s, was reached in Michael Winterbottom’s 9 Songs (2004) in which a boring couple have boring (but real!) sex to boring (but real!) songs by Elbow and Franz Ferdinand. The pop song as unifying revelation of a shared humanity features in Magnolia (1999), as the main characters coincidentally start singing Aimee Mann’s ‘Wise Up’, an inverse tribute of sorts to R.E.M’s video for ‘Everybody Hurts’, in which the song is a backdrop to the inner thoughts of bored car passengers, who ultimately get out of their vehicles and unite in a kind of mawkish tribute to collective misery. Music unifies, levels: it is essentially human. If there was ever a different time when the machine instead was integrated and posed as a question for cinematic sound, it could well have been the ’80s, in films like Assault on Precinct 13, The Running Man and Terminator, dystopian visions in which the future sounded as synthetic as the threats that might yet come to menace it.
As we move into a period we could characterise by ‘a revenge of the visual’, with 3D films increasingly regarded as the only thing that will entice people from their mini-cinemas at home, cinema music is increasingly modelled on one of two forms: the pop song iPod playlist or sub-John Williams gloopy orchestral oozing (Williams recently composed a short orchestral piece ‘Air and Simple Gifts’, referencing Aaron Copland, for Barack Obama’s inauguration). If every big-budget soundtrack starts to sound like Jurassic Park or Wagner without the quiet bits, that’s probably because it is. Adorno once perceptively claimed that most films ‘are advertisements for themselves’. Trailers are thus the truth of the film for which the film is the advert. Length becomes a secondary question. It comes as no surprise then to learn that trailers often use music from previous hit films as their soundtrack to create a pre-existing sense of familiarly.2 When Adorno in ‘Commodity Music Analysed’ (1934-40), speaks of ‘archetypal cinema music’ (‘The birth of the Wurlitzer from the spirit of Faust’ as he puts it), he argues that it is this need for familiarity that characterises much music for cinema.3 The musical means for covering over the sounds of the whirring projector were prepared by a pre-existing proclivity for a certain mix of sentiment and innovation:
It is doubtless true that towards the close of the nineteenth century the music that swept people off their feet did so because it combined drastic ideas with conventionality. In so doing it satisfied the demands of the cinema before cinema was invented.4
Commercial cinema’s desire to block out the machine, to smother the jolts and gaps between movement means that music is often seen as a kind of empathetic patch, a device to pretend that the frames and hyper-technicality are always put in the service of larger, smoother, humanitarian wholes. ‘Mickey-Mousing’, the practice of exactly matching music to image, may be something we associate with animation from half a century ago, but this often comic self-consciousness of the relation between the sound and image is far more radical than the surreptitious manipulation of familiar emotions that much of today’s cinematic music pursues.5 But mainstream cinema remains one of the few places where sounds and music could potentially afford to be brave: the tracks that Kubrick used for 2001: A Space Odysessy originally as a temporary placeholder for the real score, placed Ligeti in more homes than a thousand Radio 3 retrospectives would ever have done. Similarly, as Alex Ross notes:
On the weekend of February 19th, and for some weeks thereafter, millions of Americans will enjoy a program of Giacinto Scelsi, John Cage, Lou Harrison, György Ligeti, Morton Feldman, Krzysztof Penderecki, Alfred Schnittke, Nam June Paik, Ingram Marshall, and John Adams. This fairly bold lineup of composers, which would cause the average orchestra subscriber to flee in terror, appears on the soundtrack to Martin Scorsese’s film Shutter Island.6
Academic terminology has taken something of a strange optical turn in recent years with ‘visual culture’ and ‘visual theory’ becoming catch-all disciplines that cover elements of cultural studies, art theory and critical theory. This is not to say that there aren’t people working within this areas on sound, music or sonics, however. Take for example Susan Schuppli’s work on media machines that investigates, among other things ‘the missing or "silent" erasure of 18-½ minutes in Watergate Tape No. 342’ or Steve Goodman’s work on sonic warfare.7 But we have to wonder why this stealthy academic privileging of the visual over other senses has come about.
It is a little as if the ‘attempt to interpose a human coating between the reeled-off pictures and the spectators’ that Adorno and Eisler recognised was the purpose of most film music, has infected the entire study of cinematic culture.8 The tacked-on role of the composer for cinema that Adorno and Eisler deplored, a kind of last-minute annoyance from the standpoint of the budget, has become the occlusion of the sonic in the contemporary understanding of culture in general - the reactionary stereoscopic tendency, a kind of re-visting of the 1950s in the 2010s, proving those covers of Debord’s Society of the Spectacle correct. The photo, J. R. Eyerman’s ‘3D glasses’ taken in 1952 for Life, was captured at the screening of ‘Bwana Devil’, the first full length colour 3-D motion picture, a film about British railway workers in Kenya being eaten by lions. Its tagline was ‘A lion in your lap! A lover in your arms!’ As Cameron’s Avatar demonstrates, the closer you get to a pure celebration of vision, the less the music and the script matter; a comparison of the first 3D film and the biggest most recent version may well be worthwhile less for their technical similarities but for the similarity of their colonial content. James Horner’s soundtrack for Avatar - a mix of dramatic timpani rolls, ambient environmental lift-music and belligerent folderol (from ‘Pure Spirits Of the Forest’ to ‘Gathering All The Na’vi Clans For Battle’), plus Leona Lewis - is aural soup for muddy and dubious narration to drown in. Where once the music may have covered over the whirring of new and frightening mechanisms, now the soundtrack disguises little more than the banality of the script - plots which nevertheless seek to assure us of our fundamental intentional human goodness, even if everything we do is actually wrong and vicious.
As Esther Leslie puts the relation between music and image in Adorno’s conception of cinematic music:
Adorno wrote of how in film, music lends the cinematic vision a veneer of humanity, a semblance of liveliness, by masking the whir of the projector in the background, the proof that we exist under the sway of mechanization. Without it, we are blankly exposed to our counterparts, the two-dimensional shadows that cavort on screen.9
Increasingly film music seeks to lend humanity itself a veneer of the cinematic, an eco-friendly soundtrack to dampen the fears of the antagonisms and asymmetries of everyday existence. Coupled with the painful loudness of Dolby surround sound and the brutal atonality of sounds of cinematic violence - explosions, car crashes, gun shots - the modern cinematic ear is trained for nothing less than the sickening, yet omnipresent, combination of cruelty and fake humanism that characterises contemporary life.
Nina Power lectures in Philosophy at Roehampton University and is the author of One-Dimensional Woman (Zer0 Books). She also writes a blog, infinite th0ught http://www.cinestatic.com/INFINITETHOUGHT/
Footnotes
1 ‘As soon as movies lasted more than a couple of minutes, owners of nickelodeons hired pianists to drown the noise of the hand-cranked projectors and give an extra emotional dimension to the celluloid product.’ Philip French, ‘From the Sound of Silents to Hollywood’s Golden Composers’, http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/2001/aug/12/features.philipfrench
2 See here for a list of frequently used tracks across films: http://www.soundtrack.net/trailers/frequent/. Thanks to Daniel Trilling for this point, and for his comments on the piece more generally.
3 Theodor Adorno, ‘Commodity Music Analysed’, Quasi una Fantasia, trans. by Rodney Livingstone London: Verso, 1992, p. 37
4 Ibid., p. 42.
5 See the rather smart parody of both Avatar and Mickey Mouse in a recent episode of the Simpsons (2115), when Bart and Homer see a 3D version of an Itchy and Scratchy film called: ‘Koyaanis-Scraachy: Death out of Balance’.
6 Alex Ross, ‘Lo and Behold!’, New Yorker, http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/alexross/2010/02/lo-and-behold.html
7 For more on Susan Schuppli, see, http://www.uwo.ca/visarts/faculty_staff/susanschuppli.html . For more on sonic warfare, see Steven Goodman, Sonic Warfare: Sound, Affect and the Ecology of Fear, London: MIT, 2009. There is a description at http://mitpress.mit.edu/catalog/item/default.asp?ttype=2&tid=11890
8 Theodor Adorno and Hanns Eisler, Composing for the Films, London: Contium, 2005, p.59.
9 Esther Leslie, ‘From Stillness to Movement and Back: Cartoon Theory Today’, Radical Philosophy, May/June 2006.
Nina Power @'Mute'
The Mescaline Experiment
Humphry Osmond was the British psychiatrist who coined the term "psychedelic". This short video documents an experiment in 1955 in which he administered mescaline to Christopher Mayhew, a member of parliament. Mayhew ingested 400mg of mescaline hydrochloride and recorded his experience on camera.
The footage was originally supposed to be broadcast on BBC.
Mayhew himself maintains that it was a genuine mystical experience which "took place outside time" and wanted it to be shown. However, an "expert" committee of psychiatrists, philosophers, and theologians reviewed the footage and reached a unanimous verdict that Mayhew's experience was not a valid mystical experience. So it was never broadcast.
The footage was originally supposed to be broadcast on BBC.
Mayhew himself maintains that it was a genuine mystical experience which "took place outside time" and wanted it to be shown. However, an "expert" committee of psychiatrists, philosophers, and theologians reviewed the footage and reached a unanimous verdict that Mayhew's experience was not a valid mystical experience. So it was never broadcast.
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