Listen to This - Alex Ross

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A television commercial of the seventies, starring Ella Fitzgerald, famously asked, “Is it live or is it Memorex?” Compact discs promised “perfect sound forever.”

      Just as inevitably, audiophile happy-talk leads to a backlash among listeners who doubt the rhetoric of fidelity and perfection. Dissenters complain that the latest device is actually inferior to the old—artificial, inauthentic, soulless. Greg Milner has documented this never-ending back-and-forth in his book Perfecting Sound Forever, a smartly skeptical account of the ideology of audio progress. Some enthusiasts of the Edison cylinder felt that no other machine gave such a faithful sensation of the warmth of the human voice. When electrical recording came in, a few stalwarts detected nothing but fakery in the use of microphones to amplify soft sounds and invent a sonic perspective that does not exist for human ears. “I wonder if pure tone will disappear from the earth sometimes,” a British critic wrote in 1928.

      Magnetic tape led to the most crucial shift in the relationship between recordings and musical reality. German engineers perfected the magnetic tape recorder, or Magnetophon, during the Second World War. Late one night, an audio expert turned serviceman named Jack Mullin was monitoring German radio when he noticed that an overnight orchestral broadcast was astonishingly clear: it sounded “live,” yet not even at Hitler’s whim could the orchestra have been playing in the middle of the night. After the war was over, Mullin tracked down a Magnetophon and brought it to America. He demonstrated it to Bing Crosby, who used it to tape his broadcasts in advance. Crosby was a pioneer of perhaps the most famous of all technological effects, the croon. Magnetic tape meant that Bing could practically whisper into the microphone and still be heard across America; a marked drop-off in surface noise meant that vocal murmurs could register as readily as Louis Armstrong’s pealing trumpet.

      The magnetic process also allowed performers to invent their own reality in the studio. Errors could be corrected by splicing together bits of different takes. In the sixties, the Beatles and the Beach Boys, following in the wake of electronic compositions by Cage and Stockhausen, constructed intricate studio soundscapes that could never be replicated onstage; even Glenn Gould would have had trouble executing the mechanically accelerated keyboard solo in “In My Life.” The great rock debate about authenticity began. Were the Beatles pushing the art forward by reinventing it in the studio? Or were they losing touch with the rugged intelligence of folk, blues, and rock traditions? Bob Dylan stood at a craggy opposite extreme, turning out records in a few days’ time and avoiding any vocal overdubs until the seventies. The Dylan scholar Clinton Heylin points out that while the Beatles spent 129 days crafting Sgt. Pepper, Dylan needed only 90 days to make his first fifteen records. Yet frills-free, “lo-fi” recording has no special claim on musical truth; indeed, it easily becomes another effect, the effect of no effect. Today’s neoclassical rock bands pay good money to sound old.

      The advent of digital recording was, for many skeptics, the ultimate outrage. The old machines vibrated in sympathy with their subjects: the hills and valleys on a cylinder or a flat disc followed the contours of the music. Digital technology literally chopped the incoming vibrations into bits—strings of 0’s and 1’s that were encoded onto a compact disc and then reconstituted on a CD player. Traditionalists felt that the end product was a kind of android music. Neil Young, the raw-voiced Canadian singer-songwriter, was especially withering: “Listening to a CD is like looking at the world through a screen window.” Step by step, recordings have become an ever more fictional world, even as they become ever more “real.” The final frontier—for the moment—has been reached with Auto-Tune, Pro Tools, and other forms of digital software, which can readjust out-of-tune playing and generate entire orchestras from nowhere. At the touch of a key, a tone-deaf starlet becomes dulcet and a college rock band turns Wagnerian.

      Yet some audio equivalent of the law of conservation of energy means that these incessant crises have a way of balancing themselves out. Fakers, hucksters, and mediocrities prosper in every age; artists of genius manage to survive, or, at least, to fail memorably. Technology has certainly advanced the careers of nonentities, but it has also lent a hand to those who lacked a foothold in the system. Nowhere is this more evident than in the story of African-American music. Almost from the start, recording permitted black musicians on the margins of the culture—notably, the blues singers of the Mississippi Delta—to speak out with nothing more than a voice and a guitar. Many of these artists were robbed blind by corporate manipulators, but their music got through. Recordings gave Armstrong, Ellington, Chuck Berry, and James Brown the chance to occupy a global platform that Sousa’s idyllic old America, racist to the core, would have denied them. The fact that their records played a crucial role in the advancement of African-American civil rights puts in proper perspective the debate about whether or not technology has been “good” for music.

      Hip-hop, the dominant turn-of-the-century pop form, gives the most electrifying demonstration of technology’s empowering effect. As Jeff Chang recounts, in his book Can’t Stop Won’t Stop: A History of the Hip-Hop Generation, the genre rose up from desperately impoverished high-rise ghettos, where families couldn’t afford to buy instruments for their kids and even the most rudimentary music-making seemed out of reach. But music was made all the same: the phonograph itself became an instrument. In the South Bronx in the 1970s, DJs like Kool Herc, Afrika Bambaataa, and Grandmaster Flash used turntables to create a hurtling collage of effects—loops, breaks, beats, scratches. Later, studio-bound DJs and producers used digital sampling to assemble some of the most densely packed sonic assemblages in musical history: Eric B. and Rakim’s Paid in Full, Public Enemy’s Fear of a Black Planet, Dr. Dre’s The Chronic.

      Sooner or later, every critique of recording gets around to quoting Walter Benjamin’s essay “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility,” written in the late 1930s. The most often cited passage is Benjamin’s discussion of the loss of an “aura” surrounding works of art—the “here and now” of the sacred artistic object, its connection to a well-defined community. This formulation seems to recall the familiar lament, going back to Sousa, that recordings have leeched the life out of music. But when Benjamin spoke of the withering of aura and the rise of reproducible art, lamentation was not his aim. While he stopped short of populism, he voiced a nagging mistrust of the elitist spiel—the automatic privileging of high-art devotion over mass-market consumption. The cult of art for art’s sake, Benjamin noted, was deteriorating into fascist kitsch. The films of Charlie Chaplin, by contrast, mixed comic pratfalls with subversive political messages. In other words, mechanical reproduction is not an inherently cheapening process; an outsider artist may use it to bypass cultural gatekeepers and advance radical ideas. That the thugs of commerce seldom fail to win out in the end does not lessen the glory of the moment.

      Although classical performers and listeners like to picture themselves in a high tower, remote from the electronic melee, they, too, are in thrall to the machines. Some of the most overheated propaganda on behalf of new technologies has come from the classical side, where the illusion of perfect reproduction is particularly alluring. Classical recordings are supposed to deny the fact that they are recordings. That process involves, paradoxically, considerable artifice. Overdubbing, patching, knob-twiddling, and, in recent years, pitch correction have all come into play. The phenomenon of the dummy star, who has a hard time duplicating in the concert hall what he or she purports to do on record, is not unheard of.

      Perhaps there is something unnatural in the very act of making a studio recording, no matter how intelligent the presentation. At the height of the hi-fiera, leading classical producers and executives—Walter Legge, at EMI; Goddard Lieberson, at Columbia Records; and John Culshaw, at Decca, to name three of the best—spent many millions of dollars engaging top-of-the-line orchestras, soloists, and conductors in an effort to create definitive recordings of the peaks of the repertory. They met their goal: any short list of gramophone classics would include Maria Callas’s Tosca, Wilhelm Furtwängler’s Tristan und Isolde, Georg Solti’s Ring, and Glenn Gould’s Goldberg Variations, all recorded or set in motion in the fifties. Yet the excellence of these discs posed a problem for the working musicians who had to play in their wake. Concert presenters began to complain that record collectors had formed a separate audience, one that seldom ventured into the concert hall. Recordings threatened to become a phantasmagoria,

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