Documentation and Fabrication in Phonography :: Music Essays

credential and Fabrication in PhonographyABSTRACT In most general terms, my account is about the mixture of agendas in the written text industry, where documentation, with its apparently educational implications, becomes embarrassing to distinguish from a range of distinct, even opposed, goalswhich I group under(a) the heading fabrication. After a few historical remarks, I widen the concept of what I call works of phonography (WPs)that is, buy the farm-constructs created by the use of recording machinery. (Examples rap music recordings, electronic compositions for tape machine, sonic pastiches by jump 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 expound 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 sco res.) And they are phono-accessiblethat is, accessible still through playbacks of authentic instances of their record artifacts, e.g., cassette tapes, CDs, etc. I then function to Theodore Gracyks recent study of rock music (in his book Rhythm and Noise), careen 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 similarly 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 fence in that many classic jazz recordings are artifacts of the recording studio, no less(prenominal) than those Gracyk identifies as pure cases of rock music. In the same vein, I grapple that, once recorded, the improvisational music of jazz is deformedindeed, that it acquires features of WPs. This has the further implication that Gracyk cannot keep back his sharp di stinction between rock and jazz records that he wants to maintain.I. homogeneous Evan Eisenberg, who argued that sound recording has unfastened up entirely new kinds of musical experience unknown in the age of mere go away 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 only if 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 showcase of musical work unknown in the age of mere live music.(2)The recording industry has lived mainly by what might be the called transparence perspective, according to which the analogy for a sound recording is a vaporish window pane through which we can view, undistorted, the object of our interest.