Audio, Etc. (Oct. 1974)

AD MUSIC!

Seldom hi-fi, but 100 percent audio. It is surely the one music that every one of us hears the most of, by an enormous margin. On sheer volume, at least, it is music. 95 percent of the total signal. I may be a classical purist and so on, but don't think I keep my ears away from it. How could I? Nor, in case you thought so, am I always distressed by it. Ad music is ad music and not Beethoven--yet. How much can you expect? On the other hand, ad music is alive and kicking and in production-which means that the sky is the (potential) limit. Anything can happen, and might even happen. So I listen to ad music. And either I seethe and curse and groan, or I find myself mildly interested. Depends. So here's a plus. Followed by a minus, next month.

Over the years I've developed a pretty strong feeling that in any productive area--call it art or call it toothpaste-function is what shapes, and function determines value. Is the thing a success in terms of what it is trying to do? That is what matters. Ad music, like film music, exists strictly in this category and any attempt to shape it so it doesn't do what it is supposed to do is disastrous, as some composers have discovered. It must be ad music FIRST (and film music FIRST). Even if Beethoven, or J. S. Bach, were to write it, on a return visit to earth.

A radical reaction on my part, this, against everything I was duly taught about Grrreat Music. Maybe you too, if you took that old course in Music Appreciation they still keep giving.

Great Art, we were told, lies high above all mundane things. It is born of profound inspiration (not to mention perspiration, as crusty old T. A. Edison put it), touched by the Gods. The Artist is Different; he has Soul, he is delicately sensitive, he must not be tampered with and ESPECIALLY in his divine right to write exactly what he pleases! This idea, take it from me, is transitory. It is the very essence of 19th c.

Romanticism. And it dates-when it was new and young as an idea-right back to the later 18th century! The craftsman become artist, the slave of art liberated. Fascinating, and true in history. But now, you see, it leaves classical music somewhere up on a solid gold shelf. Mere commercial music is down there in the mud. Isn't that the way you always thought it was? See-you're indoctrinated too.

The Great Artist

Yes, classical music is my home base (though I avoid the word--it's like talking of "good scenery" or something, covering vast territories). If anybody believes in the stuff, I do. But I know, soberly, that nine-tenths of what we call classical began strictly as practical music-what we now might call commercial. Or even as folk music, out of the uneducated non-cultured substratum. It wasn't until the Enlightenment, the late 18th century in music, that this idea of, so to speak, the musical stratosphere, suddenly popped up. True, for a century or so the music world really acted out the theory-composers grew long hair, acted eccentric and often died of consumption. People (mostly German people) respected the Great Composer and in truth lifted him up into at least a modified stratosphere of Art.

But in the long pull (and we are seeing the long pull in longer perspective every day now), this interesting phase was really short lived. Now-the Foundations are still trying to perpetuate it. Give the Artist his head! No restraints, no restrictions. The poor guy lives either in a total vacuum or, more likely, a professional coterie of his immediate associates and rivals.

Just like the rest of us. Meanwhile--ad music goes on and on, for real.

If ad music generally isn't very important as music, that's because it has a job to do and there isn't much scope, as of the present. Enough, of course, to keep the stuff churning out by the metric ton, primed by that lure of most human endeavor, cash. But not entirely primed by cash. A good many ad composers probably feel a tiny bit of pride, once in awhile, for a job well done. So they try harder the next time. Pry open a tiny, submicroscopic new bit of "scope"-as film music has long since done. I say, the sky is the limit, though the ascent skywards is millimeter by millimeter.

From my point of view, the reconciling of ad and classical music is easy. Just look back and see. The human tendency, here as elsewhere, is double. Most of the practitioners tend to do as little as possible and get away with it safely. Don't we all? But always, always, there are a few who are going to try to do just a bit more than is needed. Can't stop this. You probably get dragged into it yourself, every so often, whatever your work may be.

And so music-any kind of music and any old art or product or line of goods-tends in the large to fill up its own space, then to push out a bit here and there, to perfect its technique more and more, and to go beyond the necessities. Yes--even in ad music! Bound to happen. And it has happened.

Bach, The Pragmatist

Do you think old Bach was a classical composer? No such word then. He was a craftsman on salary. Like the caterer who feeds the people at some event, Bach was hired to provide the music for Sunday church (four hours) every week, and to "cook" it too that is, rehearse it. Strictly a practical job, and he was actually not a very good church composer-from my angle. He did too much. His music was too complicated and full of ideas, requiring a lot of attention. For its function, it was perhaps not as useful as his neighbor composer's, he with the name everybody has forgotten, down the road a piece. And don't think Bach didn't get criticized. He was always at war with the authorities, a stiff-necked, uncompromising old bird who would never let an argument go if he could stir it up a bit further.

Moreover--there being a lot on his side in the way of punk working conditions for low salary-he became extremely expert at remaking his old stuff into second-hand new products, recycling. For Bach was one of those harassed deadline men we all know.

How would you enjoy churning out a half hour or an hour of new music every single week, copying it out, rehearsing it hastily maybe once through, some times not at all (they sight read it Sunday morning)-then tossing it into the back closet? One, single performance! And it was dead.

New music for next week. At least the ad music composers get to hear their music more than once, in our technology. Only the "live on TV" composers get so shabbily treated, and not too often.

I know-you'll disagree, you who know the commercial composers. It's the same with them, you say. Churning out stuff, week after week, playing it once, to order, then back to the drawing board for more. That is exactly the point, then. Bach was not a classical composer, any more than an ad composer is today.

But Bach's recycling was so incredibly expert that his recycled music is almost invariably better than its original. Most of his biggest, Grreatest works--the B Minor Mass, and large numbers of weekly Cantatas--are patched together from recycled ideas, lying around in the discard closet.

Bach had absolutely no time, until his last years, to think of Posterity, and Great Music and all that. Not that he was modest-he knew his value. And in those last years he put together his big works, his collections, he wrote his compendia-the Art of the Fugue-to sum up his expertise. Even so, this did not constitute "classical," though it was the beginning. Bach wrote obstinately in his own way, because he was that kind of a man, an unbending, self-righteous personality who couldn't get along with his superiors who hired him. WHAT a familiar story! Value Follows Function

And now-Bach, the classicist. Literally, over his dead body. The thing is, the good craftsman goes beyond the necessities at a big risk, often to his own immediate hurt. You can't be stiff-necked if you write for Hollywood or TV today, nor if you write ad music. The function determines the product's value.

And what determines the product's prestige? Ah, such a question! Bach wasn't fired because music, even his complex music, was so greatly respected in the Lutheran church service that a hiring and firing became a pretty important occasion, and wasn't done in a hurry with no fanfare. That any congregation could sit through a new Bach Cantata every single Sunday, often in an unheated midwinter church, shows you where the musical product stood in general terms.

My idea here is simply to put our own most-heard audio music in perspective. We are at a very preliminary stage, in this particular musical craft. It. has enormous importance because it is everywhere. But the craftsmen who produce the product don't yet swing very much weight. Ask one of them.

If, one of these days, an ad composer gets to thinking he's Frank Sinatra or something and starts pushing the advertising people around, you'll know something big is on the way. If you ever hear about it. More likely he'll depart within seconds. He's no Bach.

What happens to a good functional product, when it is better than the necessities require, is that it tends to live on after the fact. Or to die, and then live again, resurrected. Pepsi-Cola (TM) hits the spot, how many ounces was a lot? That ad music lasted for ages. (It was based on an old English tune, "D'ya Ken John Peel.") Little signs like this are interesting beginnings. Good musical ideas, very functional but also maybe a bit beyond the product. Maybe you remember the music and forget the ad. Horrors-not that! But it can happen. There's a good new music ad trend now

-music which keeps getting rewritten and updated, with a conscious retaining of the older and familiar musical ideas. Allegheny Air Lines, for you Easterners, has an update radio ad music that has gone through numerous model changes over many years and still remains pleasingly recognizable. I enjoy it. Really well done, nicely paced, rhythmic, orchestrated, and treated with respect, as though the music itself were as important as the words that sell. It is! It can be.

And so I think it absolutely possible that some day commercial music composed as an aid to advertising may end up in the "imperishable" category-classical. Great Music! Art! That is, if we can keep the audio engineers from killing the very sound of music via their gadgetry. Which will be the minus side of my thoughts, next time.

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

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