BOWDLERIZING BEETHOVEN
I do not want to hear another radio ad-ever. But I probably will. How can we avoid what is our own civilization, so irrevocably us? I passed up the ads here last month.
I needed time. After all my talk about our not listening to audio music, imagine a project where I forced myself to pay my most assiduous and direct attention to this particular form of audible music! Fun for a while--a very short while. Then I began to feel trapped, engulfed, overwhelmed in utter mediocrity, and in the end, bored silly. Talk about wastelands.
Yes, I continued to take notes, aimed at this worthy column. But my tolerance as a direct listener went down at appalling speed. The fact is that out of a thousand typical ads, maybe five or six have anything audibly notable of any sort of all. The rest are just mass-production advertising wallpaper, dismal clones each one of all the others. And this both in words and music. "Hurry, hurry!" I would hear every 8 1/2 minutes.
"Now, more than ever"-one of the world's greatest examples of saying nothing at all-is said in one ad or another every two minutes, 24 hours a day. "The Best has just got Better!" somebody thought that one up around 1877, or maybe 1492. Or 1066? As for the music, right now 90 percent of it is unintelligible sonic mush and the rest is okay stuff, or even high classic, but mangled literally beyond recognition.
How could I go on this way? Over the years, this department has been highly notable for its optimism. Per haps I was over-enthusiastic when the LP came along, and when the CD first was proposed-so many years back.
I've gasped breathlessly at such marvels as photonics-signals conveyed by channeled light-years ago, when the application was strictly for telephone; I hopdd, with gusto, that some day the light-wave signal might get into audio. It did. I even enthused over quadraphonic (that word again?) in spite of the dismal imperfections and the even more discouraging inter-sys tem rows that resulted in its "total" failure. Not really total, as we now can see in a revived "surround sound." But how, tell me how, can I be enthusiastic about audio in ads, notably those that are all audio, without the aid of pictures, whether video or in print . . .? And so I reverted to a much safer, more logical research technique. I let the ads play loud and clear on my table radio (instead of turning them down so wouldn't have to listen). And then I put my mind firmly, resolutely, elsewhere. I stopped direct listening! Instead, I studiously paid no attention at all. I could help myself nobly in this by all sorts of distractions--reading Spinoza or Shakespeare, or Audio; imbibing a beer, taking in steak with mushrooms and asparagus. Anything to divert my mind, and that's a pun.
It worked! For, after all, advertising depends on marginal listening (and subsequent buying). Subliminal is the fancy word for the process. Non-listening is the way the ads make their sales.
You aren't supposed to listen, and you mostly don't. You hear-but you do not listen, which implies direct attention.
Billions of $$$ of biz has been successfully based on this idea--so how could I presume to listen directly? So I ceased and desisted. And felt a lot better. As I have said, anything in music that is the least bit noticeable, good or bad, gets through to me directly without any effort on my part.
These items present themselves to my ear automatically, if perhaps not to yours, and so I need merely to note them down for future reference, and go on with my Spinoza or beefsteak. This has indeed slowed down my project but at least it enabled me to survive it.
That seemed to be important.
Do I hafta tell you all about those individual ads? My pile of notes, couple of inches thick, is at hand. But first (another ad cliché)--a bit of background.
There's nothing basically wrong with a combination of speaking voice and music. It's an idea very much older than radio. These two categories of sound are so intrinsically different that the ears, given half a chance, can listen to both at once and hear the two quite independently. Even on the stage, without audio's aid, it has often been tried. But real practicality had to wait for the loudspeaker, however tiny in a pocket radio or headphones, to remove the distractions of the live presence and bring both sounds together and in equality. For a quarter-
century, this was my own technique in my talks on music via radio, fitting my speech carefully to the shape of the music about which I talked, contouring it to fill the quiet spots, allowing loud music to come "up" in its own fashion.
If I may say so, I treated music, even the fanciest, with absolute respect for its own meaning-which, of course, was what I was talking about. It's a good technique when done right and it does not interfere with music's sense, if you know what you are doing.
Early radio advertising was good at it. Music was treated as music, a real part of the commercial pitch which gave the whole a then-new and interesting vitality, as compared with mere speech by itself. This discovery added a freshness to radio selling that some of us still remember. That is of course where I got the idea for my radio pro gram on strictly classical music. It could be done there too! I'd do it all over again, with pleasure.
Just to remind you, I think the famous historical example from that epoch was the longtime ad for a well known soft drink, combining a wonder fully catchy tune and a catchy rhymed message, the first line of which told us that the drink "hit the spot"--a term that has stuck in the language ever since. The second line (definitely not used by the company today) was something about 12 full ounces being a lot. Which it certainly was, for a nickel. Truth in advertising.
The tune that went with those words was a dilly, top-rank and memorable.
In no time everybody knew it. No matter that, aside from minor fitting to the new words, it was identical to an old English/Scottish song, vaguely 18th-century and more ballad than folk, called "Do You Ken John Peel" (with his coat so red), a hunting tune about those colorful gentry who rode to the chase. Only the last line of this tune was changed, giving it an appropriate little jazzy twist at the end. After hearing this ad, any huntsman or huntslady, even today, would be glad for those 12 ounces of refreshment! But it was the great American public that heard the tune and enjoyed the product.
In radio, a convention soon grew up that was quite strict for a while. An ad started with a tune, "theme" music, then faded it "under," or down, for the spoken pitch, and then back "up" again for a musical repeat, ABA. On the whole, not bad, and there was extensive musical identification with the product, simply by the ad association.
Can't complain! This was legitimate and the music played its useful part in its own way, cooperatively. Thank heavens we still have a good many such old-fashioned ads around today, after so many years.
Out of this, as I see it, grew the present convention, in billions of examples, that music "under" or behind, be low, a voice indicates "advertisement." We discover these shortcuts in most of the media and of course they are useful, getting info over instantaneously and effortlessly. (My favorite zany ex ample at the moment, not in radio, is the marking of traffic lanes with huge letters saying ONLY. Only what? Sometimes I really can't figure these out.) On radio, the background of mu sic "under" was a quick, easy way to tell the casual listener (not paying any attention) that an ad was going on.
Conversely, the very absence of mu sic, the speaking voice alone, came to mean that the content was news or some other non-ad material. Of course, the advertising voice very soon took on its own special sound (see last month!) as opposed to the straight information voice; even so, it was quicker to put music behind the ad material, for then you didn't have to listen to find out what was going on-you knew. Your wonderfully absent or subliminal mind automatically tuned to its non-listening mode. Whereas, say, the news, minus music, switched you to a slightly more conscious kind of listening. It all happens by itself, like the Pavlov salivating dog of psychological fame. Fascinating, right? It's a wonderful world.
Unfortunately, not that wonderful in the present instance. The system worked only too well. The more music was relegated to the background as an indicator, the more it lost its own meaning in musical terms. This has been the slow disaster that has turned useful radio music, gradually but implacably, into so much noise. Any old musical noise, whether a quickie on the synthesizer or a grand concerto by a great composer. And what followed inevitably was that as useful noise, music any music-could be conveniently tailored to fit, sometimes gracefully (it can be done, with a bit of effort), much more often carelessly, even brutally.
Now, you see, I have to return to the negative. Nothing could make me enthuse over this treatment! It is uncompromisingly awful. And it gets worse every day.
The ultimate disaster, the inevitable one, is the compression circuitry which is heard everywhere a million times a day in present ads that have, er, music (that vague muttering and heaving sound) in the background. I do pity those people who write down, synthesize, or play the minimal music that is right for most ads, only to have even that minimum chewed up and destroyed. But when it comes to our old friend Beethoven and his numerous colleagues, I really get mad. Not that it will do much good.
The hacking up of classics in music for mere advertising convenience is a desecration that is intolerable. I mean, the destruction of the sense of the music, not only the compression until un recognizable (though my musical ear often catches it) but the arbitrary slicing, the instant cut or fade-out regard less of where the music is in its own words, if you see what I mean. It is awful, this, and nobody can make me say less.
But worst of all-to finish off this dismal subject for the time being-is the use of precisely this sort of hatchet technique by all sorts of worthy cultural organizations. The opera houses, the big symphony orchestras, for instance:
The very people who produce the mu sic they are advertising! And all of this, to return to my very first and biggest point, is contributing everyday to our loss of musical under standing and awareness. The technique of destruction becomes a symptom of our increasing deafness to wards much of the present musical language in all its diversity. Definitely, in this situation, audio does not have its best foot forward.
Well, folks, what I need at this point is to pump up my rechargeables, those mental storage batteries that keep my enthusiasm. I'm not going to give you any ads yet. I mean, comment on the same. But with time to recycle (to shift my electrical analogy), I think I can amuse you with a few of them-later.
Some were funny, some really good, and a few were plain zanyl couldn't even figure what they were advertising.
It happens. And then there's the March of Time. I haven't told that story for decades. Sometimes I think the March of Time started the whole thing, back when the talkies were still new.
(by: EDWARD TATNALL CANBY; adapted from Audio magazine, Jun. 1990)
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