Cognitive scientist, musicologist and former rock musician Daniel J. Levitin describes what happens when a Bell Labs researcher named John R. Pierce, who sounds a little (shall we say?) unworldly, asks Levitan to select a few songs and "explain rock music to him."
Pierce listened and kept asking who these people were, what instruments he was hearing, and how they came to sound the way they did. Mostly, he said he liked the timbres of the music. The songs themselves and the rhythms didn't interest him that much, but he found the timbres to be remarkable -- new, unfamiliar and exciting. ... Timbre was what defined rock for Pierce, and it was a revelation to both of us.Elsewhere Levitan defines timbre ("a kind of tonal color produced in part by overtones from the instrument's vibrations") as everything about the way music sounds that isn't melody, harmony, or rythmn -- in effect, as everything that isn't strictly "musical." Quite an insight. It helps explain why a particular recorded performance of a song becomes definitive in rock in a way that isn't true (or not to the same degree) of jazz or classical pieces. And it helps solidify rock's position as the favorite music of the non-musical.
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Nothing ever goes away.... This made me remember an interview with Brian Eno, which I was able to find through careful Googling. Think Levitan borrowed a bit from this 1993 piece?
(http://music.hyperreal.org/artists/brian_eno/interviews/eno_disc.html)
Eno sez:
"I think what I became conscious of quite early was the idea that sound, in itself, as material had become a major subject of musical composition. If you look at the way classical music is written and thinks about itself, and the way musicologists describe it, they will always talk in terms of structures, melodies, rhythms and harmonies. Timbre is a very small part of the total message, because the timbral possibilities of classical music are quite limited. A clarinet means a quite small palette of sonic possibilities. Therefore, it was possible in a score to say 'clarinet' and for you to know, pretty much, what that would sound like.
"I think what happened in pop music, because of electronics and recording and other cultural factors as well, was that suddenly it became possible to work with all sorts of sounds, to put together things that could never have been put together before. For instance, just the microphone enabling a singer to sing very quietly against a full orchestra. This, in itself, was an incredible revolution in eroticism. Frank Sinatra singing in an off-hand, almost introspective way against a big band, was a fabulous breakthrough which could never have happened in any classical music because it's physically impossible. He would be drowned.
"As I started collecting records I started noticing there were distinct trends in my collection. The biggest trend of all was certainly towards this fascination for things that just had their own sound picture. Like some of the late '50s, early `60s records that I had, like 'The Mountain's High' by Dick and DeeDee. The moment you put it on, it sounds like nothing else that you've ever heard. Within the first second of that song, you're in the place. It's sonically so distinctive. Then, 'Be My Baby' by The Ronettes, where you had this enormous, huge sonic picture with the thinnest voice you've ever heard. The voice is like a little bee inside there. I got more and more interested in that kind of thing and then psychedelic music was an explosion of that kind of material."
Dylan talks several times on TTRH about the importance of improvements of microphone technolgy that made "crooning" possible, singing "very quietly against a full orchestra." he mentioned on guy as the first to do this, none of the obvious ones, and of course I can't remember who it was.
Possibly Rudy Vallee, who initially used a megaphone. Also some guy named Gene Austin, who wrote "When My Sugar Walks Down the Street", and sold 80 million (!) records in the twenties...
Wikipedia:
Vallée became the most prominent and, arguably, the first of a new style of popular singer, the crooner. Previously, popular singers needed strong projecting voices to fill theaters in the days before the electric microphone. Crooners had soft voices that were well suited to the intimacy of the new medium of the radio. Vallée's trombone-like vocal phrasing on "Deep Night" would inspire later crooners such as Bing Crosby, Frank Sinatra, and Perry Como to model their voices on jazz instruments.
Surely you remember "The Mountain's High."
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BJtTUR-qPqc
No recollection of ever hearing it before. Weird, as even at first listen it sound iconic.
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