CUTTING REMARKS
Now that I have had a first cataract operation, managing in the process to disrupt an entire operating room's musical decor, I think it is high time to broach a serious subject for all audio people: Background music. It is the dominant music of our time by an enormous margin. It is changing the entire meaning and function of the sonic arts.
In many ways, for music lovers, this is a deadly business, though fortunately there are humorous aspects too.
Though I'm a lover of the music we call "classical," I really do not intend to be a spoilsport because of it. Never did like that word, classical, and I like plenty of other music not so rated. So I hope for a merely dispassionate discussion here, though actually I am all too often full of passion and even outrage. What people can do to the sheer sense of the music! It is the kind of thing that should not be perpetrated on a pig. Sheer murder in the second degree, without a thought. Or maybe worse, the first degree, diabolically planned. Chop it up in pieces, any old place-it's only music, after all. Slice it, snip it, put it through the wringer (one of those compressor circuits that makes background music sound as though it were choking). For anyone with any respect for the music itself, this can be agony. I hear it every day, and I feel it exactly as I describe. It is a terrible thing to do. But nine-tenths of us never even notice.
Does that big opera company care whether it smashes up and wrecks its own music in its ads? Not so you'd notice. Just kill off that soprano, she's too loud. Scrunch--she's gone. It's so easy. Right in the middle of a note.
That's a crime, isn't it? Sonic murder is easy, alas, because it is done via the technology of the audio trade. We can't escape any of the blame. It is all ours. Live music is almost never murdered in the middle of a note, unless maybe the tenor bursts a blood vessel, as happened to poor Enrico Caruso on stage, ending his long career. Or the pianist falls dead, or the violinist breaks all four strings simultaneously and is silent. Unlikely events! But not their recorded equivalents. That musical murder, in the name of background music, goes on a million times a day.
Sonic murder is so simple to avoid, with a bit of careful timing beforehand or an extra half-second so the thing can end gracefully at a humane location in the flow of musical sound. To do otherwise with music used as background, whether for a commercial or a highbrow commentary, is cold, crude, and ugly.
I should know, since for a quarter century I myself sliced up classical music into thousands of usable bits of tape-and managed always to put it together with my talk, smoothly, respectfully, and I think musically, so the composer himself might listen without undue shock. It can be done, and better than ever with digital techniques, which are much more accurate and much faster. It is generally very easy to treat music with respect, though there are occasions, of course, when a lot of time and sweat must be expended to make it come out right.
Audio producers and engineers who prepare music for "foreground" release--i.e., to be listened to, to be heard for what it is, on its own terms--generally care and work hard. But too many of their fond efforts end up as background in somebody's living room or disco or restaurant, whether whole or dismembered. And some of it gets straight into the ads, the cheap way.
You ask me whose copyright is being violated, I'll tell you. It is the music's "copyright"--the sense and meaning of the music, sliced up like so much baloney to fit the package.
Perhaps some of you are not clear as to what I mean. We hear this musical mayhem a hundred times every day; in itself, it is mostly just background and not to be noticed, like the everyday clothes most people wear.
Suppose we change media, shifting from music to stage drama and from a recording to live performance. Alone on some exalted Shakespearean stage, before a vast audience, a man in costume begins to orate-one of those famous "solos" that are at the top of Shakespeare's bag of dramatic tricks. "To be or not to be," he begins, "that is the--" CRASH! The curtain bangs down, and he is gone. Somebody with a stopwatch has pushed a button. So many seconds are allowed for that noise of speaking, and no more. Or switch again to the live musical stage: One of the great singers is in recital before a jammed house. Presto, in the middle of an aria, a little man rushes on stage, grabs her throat and throttles her; she slumps to the stage, then silence.
Day in and out, these are the scenes that parade before my inner eyes, vividly, as I listen to what happens to the sense of music when that music is treated as so much background stuff by the yard or the inch or the second.
Haven't you ever noticed it? The sound itself has no nerves for pain, but those who love and understand the sound make up for that, just as I shout an involuntary "Ow!" when my car goes over a cruel bump. It's the car that is hurt, but I feel the pain.
I am not speaking of all background music! Far from it. The slicing up of hunks of classical works for background, mainly in commercials, is of course only a tiny part of the larger background scene, though it happens to hit my musician's soul in an unfortunate way. There's much, much more, as the ads put it, dozens of ways to use what Varese called "organized sound" in some sort of secondary, accompanying sense, or even co-equal with another kind of presentation. Nothing new about combining music with other things. In fact, there is probably more music composed in that way than there is stuff created strictly for listening. Music has always gone along with things, from funerals to banquets, not to mention soft music for seduction, รก la Don Giovanni and Mozart.
But in the past the relationships were precise and well defined and the music written to fit. No mayhem. (Well, there's been some, but not generally approved of.) Supper music was supper music, a march was a march, as a polka was a polka--no matter that these were borrowed for other purposes! Mostly, they were borrowed with understanding and in appropriate adaptations in terms of the musical sense. Not, usually, with murderous intent. Not the way we do it today. In the past, musical sense was able to stand up on its own pretty well, as well as any other form of expression.
For similar reasons, the very best of our own multifarious background music is that which is written to fit. Again, it can be done! Then, you see, the relationship becomes positive, the music and its foreground both making a common sense. Why not? Both, moreover, can be of any sort, even crude, corny, commercial, and still fit together in a solid relationship without murder. It happens, in movies. TV, and at every level up to the highest, as in the more elevated ballet scores and their stage presentations.
The joining of music and its accompanying message can involve often acute hassles behind the scenes and ahead of time-I'll bet there's more agony in the pre-production phase of the average one-minute commercial than in the staging of a whole act of fancy ballet. But forget that for now. The finished product is what counts, at any level whatsoever.
And so I make a very big distinction, myself, between commercials which feature music produced for and fitted to an ad, and those cheaper ads which deal in slices of hacked-off classics, or worse, imitation classics-the lowest of the low, to my mind. Even these are hacked off in the middle of a note. How about giving the music a half-second more? It could have been allowed, if anybody had ever listened. I always listen, to see whether the audio man in charge cuts according to the stopwatch or according to the musical sense, however trite it may be. Even the dopiest music shouldn't have to fight for a merciful ending. Cruelty to dumb music? That's it.
So what happened in that operating room where my cataract was being attended to? Well, you see, I was given some gentle anesthetic which did not kill my aesthetic sense, oddly, though the rest of me seemed to go out cold. I felt nothing, just comfortable and lazy, saw and heard not a thing except one odd sentence, far away: "Mr. Canby, you're in surgery!" Later, I pondered that curious remark, and I asked the doctor what had happened. Had he actually said that? He certainly had. It seems I went into the operating room talking busily and refused to quit; there was background music playing from a radio, rock stuff, and I announced to all and sundry that I wanted classical music. I was quite emphatic, it seems, though this is entirely missing in my memory. As the attendants scurried to the radio, trying to find a classical background station, I got another shot and instantly subsided into loud snores. Then, just before the job was finished, I perversely "woke up" (did I?). announced that I wanted that thing off my eye, and started to reach up at it. Again, all this is blank to me. It was then that the doc said, "Mr. Canby, you're in surgery!" This I faintly heard and do remember.
"Well, where's my classical music?" I asked, no doubt sourly. And again I went to sleep.
I heard no music, nor any of my own words. I was not there at all, as far as my conscious self was concerned. Apparently, the matter of background music goes deep into the subconscious.
And that, I say, is why it is so important.
This ever-present music, then, is the biggest thing in audio. From top to bottom and side to side in all the musical arts we have it with us in the audio profession-on tape, in computers, on discs, everywhere. And consumers of audio are immersed in some form of it for an astonishingly large portion of their lives. So easy to manipulate! So easy to hack into pieces or shake into piteous groans via the variable compressor that keeps it out of the way of the words, the real message.
We've got music to listen to--yes.
But also and more often, music to eat to, music to sleep to, music to dance, talk, play games to, shop to, bank to, get a haircut to, drive a car to. Or even to have an operation to.
(by: EDWARD TATNALL CANBY; adapted from Audio magazine, Apr. 1988)
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