Audio, Etc. (Feb. 1974)

Standing the Strain

THE BUSINESS Of audio is MUSIC, I've been saying all along. Today, it's the music of speech and the music of computers and synthesizers and the music of pure chance, translated into sound-but still, though one man's music is another man's unmentionable, music in this widened area is audio's main concern. I'm a musician, so let's look at music. I leave the 'scope traces and the signal measurements to the rest of you. They make music possible.

I'm a musician, if the often passionate attachment to the sound of music, a feeling of oneness with its audible expression, makes me a musician. I think it does. It's an ear occupation from start to finish for me. Along with a listening mind, an in-tune emotion, plus a bit of accumulated knowledge. That helps.

My specialty, though, isn't any one kind of music; rather, it's a kind of musical sound becoming relatively universal: reproduced sound. I judge my music, relish it, hate it, am bored or shocked or elated by it, primarily in this area. I haven't occupied the best seat in the concert hall for years. (Only the fringe seats, now and then, to keep my ear in.) I spent years of my life going to hundreds of concerts. I loved 'em and still do. But I have other musical business, these days. Not a better business; just different.

Because I insist that recorded/ reproduced music has its own special aesthetic laws, not necessarily those of the concert, I am perhaps distrusted by some people who think that music is an unalterable, inalienable and absolute art, however you may hear it.

Mr. Petrillo's "canned music" of a generation ago came indirectly from that idea, though he had more immediate tactical matters in mind.

Like music, the only good asparagus, I suppose, is fresh asparagus? A loaf in the oven beats ten in the marketplace? Or, to update, no food at all is better than-ugh-frozen food.

Plenty think so. Indeed, the whole back-to-nature kick is an understandable reaction to our synthetic age.

Right! Yes, when it comes to a plain loss of quality. But wrong if one ignores differences-and new advantages.

Music isn't canned merely to preserve it. Better no message at all than a telephone message? Well, hardly.

Better no news than TV news? Perhaps.

Better no travel than auto travel? Ah yes. Get out and walk, boys.

So we won't get far if we stick our obstinate heads into the sands of past time. Got to live today! Got to take advantage of today. Music, today, is reproduced more often than it is original. I'm not sorry, though a musician's life now is necessarily different, if perhaps neither worse nor better than 'way back. As a listener, rather than a producer (and listeners are still reasonably essential to music's existence), I find so may new advantages to the canned sort that I will never stop marveling until I die. They are real! Even in quadraphonic. (Boos from the wings.) New aesthetic dimensions, new experiences unimaginable in the past. That's what we have in our present musical world, with audio as its technology, its communications complex. If there's a shortage of vinyl, or of anything else, we may have to try to "go back to nature"-but can we? Better no symphonies than a symphony in the living room?? Canned music, for me, is a way of life and a way of infinite new listening.

I am all ears. Certainly at a concert, though plenty aren't, I always was.

Now, at home, I find I can listen so much more exhaustively, I can "emote" so much more safely, so to speak, I can choose and pick and eliminate, make my own programs. But more than anything else, I can hear music in a vastly more varied way than would ever be possible in the flesh, for me, or for most people like me. Yeah, I know. Five minutes of real live music is better than five years of the canned product. Yes, definitely. But not absolutely. The canned experience has new values, in new situations. Those values have become far more important than musicians know, they being generally conservative souls! Those values virtually are music today, if music means receiving as well as producing.

As a listener to canned music, I am a positive glutton. Not so much in quantity as in thoroughness. We receive hundreds of new releases for review each year, which is a lot more than I can hope to hear all the way through, as they should be heard. Yet I try. We have a responsibility to the record companies, as well as to you; they depend on reviews not only for publicity but for feedback, negative or positive. As a some-time producer of a handful of discs, myself, I am acutely aware of the time and energy that can go into just one LP record.

I could never skim through a pile of them without this thought. If it were my labor-! I persist in trying to work out rational means to act like a dozen reviewers with two dozen ears, and I could make it--I really could. Budget my time, do so much for each worthy recording, plan a campaign, to ensure the right emphasis on this, and on that, on big and little enterprises, on one type of music and another. But what happens? In the middle of such rationality, I. put on some record or other and in two minutes I'm snagged. Hung up, fascinated, bewitched. Hooked. Stop? How can I? Every system I've ever devised, deadlines, post office times, all go flying out the figurative window and I am stuck with music itself Glued, pinioned, utterly immersed in the stuff! (Well, it's worth a mixed-up metaphor.) So I play the disc once and then I play it again. Reckless expenditure. I have no other recourse.

The music demands it. I am no longer the rational me, I am one large pair of ears and connecting mind, I am wholly emotion, reception, sensing every twist and turn of musical thought, of recording technique, feeling the very presence of the musicians before me, of the recording engineers, of the composer's living personality, unfolding itself, right there in front of me. (And behind.) I am never more wholly alive. Talk about Higher States of Consciousness-who needs 'em! I have 'em. While our Editor fumes and waits. Sorry about that, Gene. (Yeah, me too, Ed. Ed.) That's what listening can be.

And it is why I so profoundly distrust the idea of background music.

Not the principle of it--Mozart wrote gorgeous background music for dining.

It's just the wallpaper approach that I can't take. Nothing-music, for non listeners. Tailored and sliced to fit, regardless of musical sense. Turn it on and off. Walk into an elevator and pick up the middle of a tune, slice it off as you get out. Does it ever occur to you to wait until the tune comes to a musical end? Even the ads that chop off their sleazy music in the middle of a note hurt me. An insult to the art. Even bad music should be allowed to have its say in its own terms.

To my horror, lately, there are certain ads for eelymosonary (urfhow do you spell that?) or charitable concerts of "great music" which use that very music as their sonic wallpaper, brutally sliced up to fit. Outrageous. Have we no longer any musical standards? I don't mean quality standards. I mean simply standards of respect for the musical expression itself. Yes, we do make music collages, I'll admit, sliced up in the contemporary fashion, and I have often done this myself in taped productions. But this is conscious, with an aesthetic, dramatic intent. It is NOT the wallpaper approach. Not always, anyhow.

The trouble with large numbers of us is that we take our music the way we take, maybe, pleasant weather.

Nice to have around. Even worth seeking out. Just as soon have it, when convenient. Or leave it. The interest is skin deep. Since music is almost everywhere these days and background music is useful because on the air it means "this is a commercial," we develop the non-listen syndrome only too easily. Can't really blame us. But it's BAD, nevertheless. Because it destroys one of life's real experiences-listening in depth, in total concentration, out of knowledge, to sounds that are worthy of that concentration. That is what music has been, and still is, thanks to audio. But the going is tough. It's an uphill fight.

Let me tell you, the finest, most persuasive reason for quadraphonic sound in MY book is that inherently it demands and gets attention. It forces you to listen. You can't avoid the message, loud and clear. Wow--is that dynamite.

It seems to me that the classical musicians should be the very first to acclaim it. Where else is their salvation? People listen less and less to more and more, which surely spells the doom of "serious"--that is, contentful music. Unless people are persuaded to listen, really listen.

Of course quadraphonic is merely a physical medium with no inherent artistic quality in itself, other than technical. (Don't think that audio isn't an art, too-I am aware of this.

The art of fine engineering.) But it does provide new facilities, new sonic values that point, even urge, towards real listening. You can't avoid it.

Quadraphonic wallpaper, frankly, is a contradiction of sense. Why give music more impact, more push, why provide it with more detail, with greater message-carrying ability, with more "handles" for the ears, if you aren't going to listen? You'll have to fight not to listen. Splendid thought.

Wow-just imagine quadraphonic in that elevator. Don't forget that the four-way medium is at its best in a small room space, where the built-in space clues of the recording are immediately at hand and unconfused.

I've heard superb quadraphonic in a room not much larger than an elevator. Huge hall, all around me. Is that what we want in our elevators, when the doors close? I begin to wonder.

And so, in the very middle of a vast spate of catch-up work on record reviews, I go and get hooked on one recording, and can't stop. I'm proud of it, though the Editor may groan and probably will. Yesterday, to my intense surprise, it was Paul Simon (There Goes Rhymin' Simon). I can be fascinated by gentle sounds like his, surround sounds, in SQ. Simon is such a stylist, so ingeniously twisting his music in unexpected directions. Have you discovered that his American Tune (side 2) is built straight out of the Passion Chorale, the famed ancient Lutheran hymn tune that appears in Bach's St. Matthew and St. John Passions and a thousand other places, before and since? Not a word on the record. It doesn't say so. I heard so. Why? Ask Paul! I played the whole record through twice--and I can't even review it. Naughty, naughty, Canby. Play the right records. Ration your ears. (But I can't and won't.)

Then there was Haydn. I had assembled a good batch of Haydn and Mozart recordings with the thought of an interesting group of related reviews. Fine idea. Until I got to London's STS 15249/54, six discs stereo. No review! It was the Complete Symphonies of Haydn, Volume Six, Nos. 36 to 48, and the instant that music began, I was lost. (And I had been so anxious, too, to get London's music represented in our pages--maybe this will help.) Stuck again, in total bliss. Haydn is one of my top consciousness-raising composers when he is rightly performed. This is one of the finest sets of Haydn symphonies I ever hope to hear, 'way ahead of all others. Right in the middle of the album is my all-time favorite, No. 45. Plus its immediate neighbors, mostly brand new to me. I've been waiting quite literally a lifetime for this. So do I just skim the 12 sides? (Would you really imagine I could do that?)

Nope. I spent all afternoon, and most of an evening, absolutely immersed (as I say), striding around my quadraphonic enclosure, reading Robbins Landon's immense booklet of notes-anything so long as that music didn't stop. (Landon is a kindred soul! He knows what I know about one of the great musical minds.) I was, and am, unhinged. My schedule is shot. Haydn drips from my ears; that's why I quit, to write this. But do you think I'm not going back to that album, when the drip ceases? You bet I am. Lucky they didn't send the other five volumes. Yep, I'm a real musician.

Should I give up, then, and like some monk turn over my life to London and to Haydn, assuming they complete the approximately 55 LPs contemplated? I could! I'd need the time. But no. For tomorrow I'll accidentally get stuck on something else. It's a great idea, listening to music. If you can stand the strain.

(Audio magazine, Feb. 1974; Edward Tatnall Canby)

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