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(Quietly) Noisy Images: Sonic Landscapes, Audiotape and ‘the New Musicality’

Matilde Nardelli

in Antonioni and the Aesthetics of Impurity: Remaking the Image in the 1960s

This chapter explores the relation between sound and image in Antonioni’s films of the 1960s. It considers how the ostensibly quieter films of the 1960s – in which dialogue becomes sparser and from ... More

This chapter explores the relation between sound and image in Antonioni’s films of the 1960s. It considers how the ostensibly quieter films of the 1960s – in which dialogue becomes sparser and from which extra-diegetic musical soundtrack is all but eliminated – have crucial affinity with contemporaneous transformations in music itself, where the diffusion of new mass media technologies such as audiotape and television, acted as powerful catalysts for experimentation with noise and attention to soundscape. In particular, I trace here a connection with the experimental practices of John Cage, musique concrète, and composers including Luciano Berio, Bruno Maderna and Luigi Nono associated with RAI Studio di fonologia musicale.Less

Rolling Tape: Producing Jazz LPs, 1950–1966

Michael Jarrett

in Pressed for All Time: Producing the Great Jazz Albums from Louis Armstrong and Billie Holiday to Miles Davis and Diana Krall

The A&R man became a record producer with the development of magnetic tape (a spoil of World War II) and the introduction of the vinyl long-playing record by Columbia Records in 1948. Producers could ... More

The A&R man became a record producer with the development of magnetic tape (a spoil of World War II) and the introduction of the vinyl long-playing record by Columbia Records in 1948. Producers could capture on tape—for reproduction and sale on records—jazz that had routinely happened for many years only on various stages. When recording technology caught up with the actual practice of improvising musicians, jazz discovered an ideal form in the "album." George Avakian's visionary work with Duke Ellington, Miles Davis, Erroll Garner, Buck Clayton, and Dave Brubeck realized what could be done with the new format and technology. The productions of Milt Gabler, Bob Weinstock, Esmond Edwards, Don Schlitten Teo Macero, Bob Thiele, Orrin Keepnews, Nesuhi Ertegun, Creed Taylor, Lester Koenig, Nat Hentoff ushered in a golden age for jazz.Less

Laying Down Tracks: Producing Multitrack Recordings, 1967–1990

Michael Jarrett

in Pressed for All Time: Producing the Great Jazz Albums from Louis Armstrong and Billie Holiday to Miles Davis and Diana Krall

Recording jazz onto multitrack tape meant that, while music continued to be captured onto tape in studios, albums could be constructed in postproduction: analogous to the way movies were shot on ... More

Recording jazz onto multitrack tape meant that, while music continued to be captured onto tape in studios, albums could be constructed in postproduction: analogous to the way movies were shot on soundstages and assembled in editing rooms. Some musicians—especially Miles Davis and his jazz fusion bands—directed improvisations in the recording studio and left the task of assembling albums to their producers. Audiences for such albums heard, not studio games of cut 'n' paste, but tracks that resembled the turn-on-a-dime musical performances they heard in concert—performances which imitated techniques devised in postproduction. Enabling the naiveté of this audience is an overarching truth: jazz production almost always uses available technologies to ensure that in-the-moment performances are recorded (and, later, reproduced) as perfectly as possible.Less

Recording to Hard Drive: Producing Digitally, 1991–2013

Michael Jarrett

in Pressed for All Time: Producing the Great Jazz Albums from Louis Armstrong and Billie Holiday to Miles Davis and Diana Krall

When digital audio workstations (DAWs) do not multiply recording options to unthinkable levels of over-choice, they have simplified and automated tasks that were exceedingly difficult and time ... More

When digital audio workstations (DAWs) do not multiply recording options to unthinkable levels of over-choice, they have simplified and automated tasks that were exceedingly difficult and time consuming to execute on analog tape. But they have informed jazz production most profoundly in the smallest sorts of ways. Fixing the little stuff that once marred, otherwise stellar, performances is now very quick and easy. A number of jazz recordings discussed in this chapter were not recorded digitally, and when they were, many of their producers merely treated digital tape and hard drives as the new, perhaps "improved," analog tape. Much of the time, in the world of jazz production a potentially revolutionary technology is just added to—and conceptualized in terms of–what was already available.Less

Cutting Sides: Producing 78-RPM Discs, 1936–1949

Michael Jarrett

in Pressed for All Time: Producing the Great Jazz Albums from Louis Armstrong and Billie Holiday to Miles Davis and Diana Krall

Production before the advent of magnetic tape—in the era of 78-RPM records—emphasized "pre-production." A&R men (short for "artists and repertoire") chose artists to record, and they paired songs ... More

Production before the advent of magnetic tape—in the era of 78-RPM records—emphasized "pre-production." A&R men (short for "artists and repertoire") chose artists to record, and they paired songs from the publishing firms of Tin Pan Alley with artists. The A&R work of Milt Gabler (at Commodore and Decca Records) and John Hammond and George Avakian (at Columbia) is exemplary. Gabler organized a series of jam sessions, which he recorded. Avakian produced Chicago Jazz (1940), the first jazz "album" of original material. As part of their popular music divisions the major labels—Columbia, Decca, and RCA Victor—record and market jazz. A number of specialty labels emerge: Commodore, Prestige, Contemporary, Verve, Blue Note, Atlantic, Riverside, and Savoy. Though dependent on pressing plants owned by the majors, they reflect the production philosophies of the connoisseurs who founded and owned them.Less

Cadenza: Don Schlitten on Producing Jazz Records

Michael Jarrett

in Pressed for All Time: Producing the Great Jazz Albums from Louis Armstrong and Billie Holiday to Miles Davis and Diana Krall

An interview with record producer Don Schlitten, serving as an overview (and survey) of jazz record production. It contrasts the recording of jazz with other types of popular music.

Overview of Greek Music in America¹

Tina Bucuvalas and Stavros K. Frangos

in Greek Music in America

Members of the diaspora brought with them to America a taste for all the extrapolations of music in Greece. During the early twentieth century, a flood of immigration combined with commercial record ... More

Members of the diaspora brought with them to America a taste for all the extrapolations of music in Greece. During the early twentieth century, a flood of immigration combined with commercial record production generated unparalleled documentation of ethnic music. Ethnic recordings are invaluable documents of community musical practices and preferences in America. They also represented the daily lives of Greek immigrants and the perils that afflicted them. This chapter examines the major events and social issues affecting Greeks in America within the context of various time periods (1880-1918, 1918-1933, 1933-1945, 1945-1960, 1960-1975, 1975-1990, 1990-2015), as well as the major trends in musical genre, style, venues, artists, and technology.Less

Interdisciplinary Teaching and Learning: Two Heads Might Actually Be Better than One

Gena R. Greher and Jesse M. Heines

in Computational Thinking in Sound: Teaching the Art and Science of Music and Technology

In this interconnected, socially networked, 24/7, multidimensional, media-centric culture, your students are doing just fine creating, performing, and making things without your help. Thanks to the ... More

In this interconnected, socially networked, 24/7, multidimensional, media-centric culture, your students are doing just fine creating, performing, and making things without your help. Thanks to the proliferation of user-friendly, intuitive software applications to create, capture, and perform music, as well as websites that allow easy showing and sharing of these creations, your students can lead very productive, creative, and expressive lives without the baggage of learning traditional music notation and computer code. This realization sends shudders through some of our fellow professors, but nonetheless it is a reality of our times. You can choose to fight these trends and hold fast to the traditions of an educational system designed for another era and different priorities, or you can meet your students where they are. Much of education has been about the transmission of subject-specific content with a focus on the individual. This fosters competition for the teacher’s attention and top grades. Hierarchical classrooms perpetuate the notion of teachers as authority figures and decision makers while supplicant students wait for the teacher’s knowledge to be bestowed upon them. Socialization is rarely encouraged inside the classroom. On the other hand, the modern workplace is flattening its hierarchical structure and becoming ever more dependent upon critical thinking skills, collaboration, teamwork, and shared decision making. In fact, many corporate offices are being designed physically to foster collaboration through shared offices and informal small lounges where workers can gather to brainstorm. Learning to work with others is a lifelong endeavor. These skill sets don’t develop in a vacuum. They need to be nurtured through modeling and experience. As suggested by John-Steiner, students need to be socialized into the culture of collaborative work and the kinds of creative and critical thinking the new workplace requires. As you will discover, collaborative work yields processes and results that are far richer than any that a single person’s expertise can produce. Less

Versions of Neutrality: Denis Johnston’s War Reports

Ian Whittington

in Writing the Radio War: Literature, Politics and the BBC, 1939-1945

As his job with the BBC News Division took him from the deserts of Egypt, through Italy, to the gates of Buchenwald, Irish playwright Denis Johnston struggled with a multiply determined neutrality ... More

As his job with the BBC News Division took him from the deserts of Egypt, through Italy, to the gates of Buchenwald, Irish playwright Denis Johnston struggled with a multiply determined neutrality which inhered partly in his role of war correspondent, and partly in circumstances specific to his own life. In particular, Johnston sought to balance the ideal of journalistic objectivity with the need to convey the emotional horrors of the struggle, all while serving as a politically neutral Protestant Irishman within a semi-autonomous British broadcaster. Johnston’s position as a neutral mediator was intensified by the development of newly compact recording technologies which allowed him to record actuality broadcasts, commentary, and interviews in the field—in a sense, to allow the war to speak for itself. For all these traces of immediacy, after the war Johnston would frame his experience in a heavily embellished and fantastical memoir, Nine Rivers from Jordan (1953). By weaving together Johnston’s war broadcasts, his journals, and his memoir, this chapter illustrates how journalistic objectivity and literary experiment existed in productive tension during the war; at the same time, Johnston’s postwar response to the atrocities of the holocaust reveal a journalist shaken by the moral vacuum revealed in wartime Europe.Less