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Inside This Issue: Inside This Issue Jungle Jive: Race, Jazz, and Cartoons by Daniel Goldmark Taking Henry Flynt Seriously by Benjamin Piekut Hearing Hip-Hop’s Jamaican Accent by Wayne Marshall Capturing Sound and Making Beats: Review by Joseph Auner Ives's 129 Songs: Review by Gayle Sherwood Magee American Popular Music: Review by Daniel Sonenberg |
Capturing Sound and Making Beats by Joseph Auner
New
York DJs Photo by Henry Chalfant Writings on
the intersections of music and technology represent a significant new growth industry
in musicology, as amply demonstrated by two recent publications, Mark
Katz’s Capturing Sound: How Technology has Changed Music
(University of California Press, 2005; $19.95) and Joseph G. Schloss’s Making
Beats: The Art of Sample-Based Hip-Hop (Wesleyan University Press,
2004; $24.95). Katz’s Capturing
Sound represents an emerging musicology that is equally at home with the
popular and the classical, with art and its institutions as well with music
of everyday life, and with both traditional musicological approaches and the
methods of ethnomusicology and cultural studies. The book concisely covers an astonishing
range of topics linked to the rise of recording technology over the last
century, including violin technique, the phonograph and American musical
life, jazz improvisation, Grammophonmusik during the years of the Weimar
Republic, turntablism and DJ battles, the techniques and ethics of digital
sampling, and the complexities of copyright in the age of the internet. Some chapters are focused discussions of a
single topic, such as the carefully documented study of vibrato, while others
are structured more as collections of
case studies, such as the chapter on sampling, in which Public Enemy, Fatboy
Slim, and Paul Lansky rub shoulders. Unifying the diversity of topics is a set of seven
interrelated concepts connected to the rise of sound recording technology
that together comprise what Katz calls the “phonograph effect”:
tangibility, portability, invisibility, repeatability, temporality,
receptivity, and manipulability.
Perhaps most significant is the degree to which we have become
acculturated to all these so that they no longer strike us as strange. For
example, Katz’s category of “invisibility” refers to the
fact that much listening—even in the age of DVDs and MTV—is to
disembodied voices. He traces how
musicians have compensated for this loss with examples ranging from Milli
Vanilli’s lip-syncing scandal to the rise of violin vibrato, that among
other functions “could offer a greater sense of the performer’s
presence on record, conveying to unseeing listeners what body language and
facial expressions would have communicated in concert” (p. 93). Katz’s approach is primarily historical, drawing on
an impressive array of documentation from recording archives, advertising,
and literary sources, but there are ethnographic elements, especially in the
chapter on DJ battles. Throughout the text, Katz displays an admirable
concern for the different perspectives of the composer, performer, and the
listener. He thus considers the
unexpected ways people use technology, including the do-it-yourself
phonograph letters sent at the turn of the century, the impact of recording
on music education, the rituals of home listening, and the gendered context of
the hi-fi aficionado. With its vivid and engaging writing style, the wide
range of topics, and the accompanying CD with recorded examples for many
chapters, the book will be an ideal text for
courses on music and technology. Particularly useful are the clear
explanations of gear and technologies, including sampling, MP3 compression,
as well as the best analysis I have read of a DJ battle routine. Also excellent for class use will be his
discussion of issues of race, gender, and economics in connection with the
vocal sample by Camille Yarbrough in Fatboy Slim’s “Praise
You” (both tracks are included on the CD). While the book invites a general
readership, there is considerable depth to the discussion, and every scholar
will find much that is new here, supported by an extensive and up-to-date
bibliography. The idea of “manipulability” which Katz
explores from the perspectives of turntablism, Grammophonmusik, and what he
calls “the art of transformation” (p. 156) in sampled-based
music, is the central topic in Joseph Schloss’s Making Beats. This book is the first extended study of
sampling techniques from the perspective of those hip-hop
“producers” who create music primarily from loops and layers of
short digital samples of previously recorded music. His approach is
ethnographic based on participant observations with a considerable number of
producers, starting in Seattle and then branching out to urban centers
throughout the U.S. Much of the text
consists of transcriptions of Schloss’s interviews with the producers,
conducted between 1998 and 2003. Schloss makes clear his deep involvement
with, and loyalty to, the community of producers, writing “the core of
this book is concerned with the aesthetic, moral, and social standards that
sample-based hip-hop producers have articulated with regard to the music they
produce” (p. 12). Perhaps the most striking feature of the book, in
contrast to much popular music scholarship, is Schloss’s emphasis on
the producers’ aesthetic values. He challenges approaches to hip-hop
that have seen it is as a product of general social and cultural forces of
oppression and resistance, stressing instead the individual agency of the
deejays and producers who created it. The main contribution of the book is
its documentation of the producers’ drive for innovation within a
carefully transmitted and continually reconstructed tradition, and their
encyclopedic knowledge of—and ideally ownership of—the essential
discography. Indeed he points out the close connection of
“hip-hop’s celebration of the solitary genius,” often
working alone in his home studio, to the notion of the classical composer. He
compares the epicurean pleasure producers get from a good sample to that of
“a wine connoisseur savoring a fine vintage” (p. 144). Schloss is clearly aware that not all readers will
welcome an approach that would seem to return to the explicit and implicit
values of the “old
musicology,” and he acknowledges the gendered framework of the largely
male club of producers and even the competing tendencies toward hipness and
nerdishness (p. 16) inherent in many of the activities that define a deejay,
in particular the obsessive record collecting. The resemblance to the “great
man” approach is balanced by his insistence of placing aesthetic
concerns in the context of a study of the ethical and moral code of the
producers. Many of the rules, such as the prohibition of sampling other
hip-hop records or something that has already been sampled (except in cases
of self-conscious homage, parody, or extensive reworking), have to do with
avoiding practices that would make it too easy, and thus undercut the
elements of skill, technique, and knowledge that are most valued in the
community. Despite the book’s subtitle, Schloss does not
discuss individual compositions in detail, and while he describes the basic
technique of building up a composition from the addition and subtraction of
layers, his real interest is the factors that go into making the basic
“beat.” Though he does employ graphic means of illustrating techniques
of chopping up a sample, he rejects the use of transcriptions on the grounds
that they may potentially violate producers’ secrecy about sources, and
because of their deficiency in capturing the sonic qualities of most interest to producers (p. 13). A
unifying theme in many of the chapters is the central importance to producers
of the aesthetic quality of the sample, thus leading Schloss to challenge
interpretations of sampling in terms of postmodern pastiche. He also questions those that would read
ironic intention into the use of samples from unlikely sources such as Hall
and Oates or Grand Funk Railroad, writing “producers are not
particularly concerned with using samples to make social, political, or
historical points” (p. 146). Because the book is largely about sound, a CD with sample
tracks or a companion web page would have been very useful since much of the
music discussed will not be readily available to readers. While he does discuss some details of the
actual gear producers use, as well as the ramifications of effects such as
rhythmic “quantization,” it would also have been helpful to have
included a more extensive exploration of the actual characteristics of the
hardware and software and the ways in which these capabilities and limitations
have helped to create the aesthetic of sample-based hip-hop. He describes the creation of beats
from samples as “serving to ‘Africanize’ musical material
by reorganizing melodic material in accordance with specific African
preferences such as cyclic motion, call and response, repetition and
variation, and ‘groove’” (p. 138). The notion of an African
American “compositional aesthetic” (p. 33) or “cultural outlook” (p. 200) is a central, if
undertheorized, aspect of Schloss’s argument, particularly in the
context of the degree to which he argues that the community of producers is
“race blind.” In his
interview transcriptions, he intentionally does not identify the race of the
speaker, arguing that the “rules of hip-hop are African American but
one need not be African American to understand or follow them” (p. 10),
and even more strongly, “all other producers—regardless of
race—make African American hip-hop” (p. 9). In the introduction, Schloss confronts the issue of race by describing his own background as a white Jewish
American (p. 9ff.), and at several points in the book he does try to
establish what he means by “African American expressive styles”
from the perspective of signifying (p. 159ff.), the groove (p. 138ff.), and
the work of pioneering deejays (p. 31ff.).
But such definitions do not fully answer questions about how the
limits of hip-hop are determined.
While he does establish that being “race blind” is a
feature of the community of producers he studies, there are obviously major
issues that need to be further pursued about the implications of these
attitudes in a society where not all members have the same options of
adopting cultural personae. He also
justifies not dealing with race by arguing against the existence of a
“white or Latino style of hip-hop production” (p. 9), but as the
growing literature on hip-hop around the world suggests, the genre does seem
to have the capacity of developing many different dialects. As these books by Katz and Schloss demonstrate, a focus
on technological and scientific innovations can be a powerful tool for
understanding the interrelationships of music to its social and cultural
contexts. Recent publications by Paul Thebérge, Timothy Taylor, and Georgina
Born, along with an explosion of related literature in fields, are showing
how much we are shaped by the tools we use, just as we are finding ever new
ways to use them. —Joseph Auner Stony Brook University ISAM home Who we
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