Documentation and Fabrication in Phonography :: Music Essays

supporting and Fabrication in PhonographyABSTRACT In most general terms, my radical is about the mixture of agendas in the arrangement industry, where documentation, with its apparently educational implications, becomes grueling to distinguish from a range of distinct, even opposed, goalswhich I group low the heading fabrication. After a few historical remarks, I go the concept of what I call works of phonography (WPs)that is, withstand-constructs created by the use of recording machinery. (Examples rap music recordings, electronic compositions for tape machine, sonic pastiches by take up groups such as Art of Noise.) I detail their ontological characteristics, as contrasted the features of ordinary musical theater works. WPs areI claimreplete. (Their finest sonic dilate are constitutive of them.) They are autographic. (Authenticity of their instances is not tested by the allographic criteria we associate with ordinary musical works, namely, compliance with scores.) And the y are phono-accessiblethat is, accessible completely when through playbacks of authentic instances of their record artifacts, e.g., cassette tapes, CDs, etc. I then construction to Theodore Gracyks recent study of rock music (in his book Rhythm and Noise), leaning that his account is formally similar to my account of WPs. This raises the question of whether there be counter-examples to Gracyks accountparticularly of the sort that show his view to be excessively broad. I bring this to a focus finally by a comparison of rock recordings with jazz recordingstwo classes that Gracyk tries to keep ontologically distinct. I suggest that many classic jazz recordings are artifacts of the recording studio, no little than those Gracyk identifies as pure cases of rock music. In the same vein, I plead that, once recorded, the improvisational music of jazz is deformedindeed, that it acquires features of WPs. This has the further implication that Gracyk cannot maintain his sharp distinctio n between rock and jazz records that he wants to maintain.I. like Evan Eisenberg, who argued that sound recording has exposed up entirely new kinds of musical experience unknown in the age of mere live performance,(1) Ted Gracyk has opened his ears to what Walter Benjamin had to say about mechanical reproduction. Both see sound recording not as a mere convenience plainly as fraught with broader implications. In his recent book, Gracyk has brilliantly described, not only the phenomenology of rock sound, but how the technology has made possible a fount of musical work unknown in the age of mere live music.(2)The recording industry has lived mainly by what might be the called unmingledness perspective, according to which the analogy for a sound recording is a transparent window pane through which we can view, undistorted, the object of our interest.