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Kyle Devine’s 2019 book Decomposed: A Political Ecology of Music is making waves. As Devine explains, the book started as an investigation of the nostalgic return of the vinyl record, a seemingly “backwards” trend in current music consumption. However, the more he looked into the issue, the more he was challenged by the story of the music’s material presence as data in the age of mechanical reproduction. His key takeaway, and stark truth: recording technology, from shellac discs, to vinyl LPs, CDs, mp3s, and contemporary streaming services, comes with environmental impacts. What music is made of matters, and its cost to the natural world is a problem of “political ecology.”
In this final episode of our first season Chris takes us through the book, looking for resonances and intersections with the Sounding History project. As a historian of empire he finds parallels, for instance, between the music industry’s environmental costs and empire’s human toll, up to and including mass enslavement: whether in the sugar slaveocracies of the Caribbean, or the server farms of Iceland, empire’s environmental costs have too often been concealed “just over the horizon.”
Yet despite our enthusiasm for the book, we are not entirely convinced by some portions of Devine’s account. We reflect, for example, upon the price (in deforestation and exploitative labor) of the shellac record, as against the liberation and democratization that easily accessible recording technology brought to subaltern and minoritized musical experiences in the early twentieth century. Shellac records made it possible, wherever musicians and technology could come together, for people (“the people,” even) to tell their stories in sound. Without shellac, we believe, there would have been no blues revolution, no Ma Rainey, no Robert Johnson, even, no jazz.
It turns out that the social-environmental-historical-economic impact of datafied music is not an easy nut to crack.
We thus end the podcast (and our first season!) with a quick glimpse of some work Tom is doing at the Alan Turing Institute, the UK’s national center for data science and AI, where he directs the project “Jazz as Social Machine.” Today machine learning agents drive cars, diagnose disease, play chess, and design buildings–among many other human tasks. Such autonomous systems also improvise jazz. It turns out, though, that jazz improvisation is apparently harder than driving a car! Why? The answer has to do with risk, historical “consciousness,” and the attitudes towards “getting it wrong” that underpin the algorithms of the machine learning revolution.
Key Points
Music objects, Kyle Devine argues in his book Decomposed: A Political Ecology of Music, come with considerable environmental costs, both from their materials (the chemicals used to make vinyl records and CDs, for instance) and the energy required to make them widely available (for example the consumption of electricity to sustain the server farms than underpin music streaming).Of all the many human tasks that are now subject to takeover by machine learning agents, jazz improvisation turns out to be a particularly thorny challenge, perhaps because so much of machine learning depends on the avoidance of risk.Resources
You can learn more about the environmental costs of music in Kyle Devine’s Decomposed: A Political Ecology of MusicHis argument is summarized in an article he wrote in 2015 for the journal Popular Music.You can find out more about Tom’s project “Jazz as Social Machine” on the Alan Turing Institute Website.The Musica project, led by Kelland Thomas and Donya Quick, is at the Stevens Institute of Technology.For more on the technological transformation wrought by shellac records, you can revisit a recommendation from earlier in our Season I, Michael Denning’s Noise Uprising: The Audiopolitics of a World Music Revolution.All of the books mentioned in the episode can be found in our Sounding History Goodreads discussion group. Join the conversation!
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We begin with a famous (and very beautiful) aria from the Abduction from the Seraglio K. 384 by Wolfgang Amadé Mozart (Mozart nerd alert: he never called himself “Amadeus,” ever, and we aren’t going to either). It’s from the beginning of Act 3, as the tenor hero, Belmonte, prepares to rescue his kidnapped bride Konstanze and her companion Blöndchen from the palace of Basha Selim. We are in an obviously sticky–and potentially deadly–situation. The music, beginning with a serene yet at times painfully dissonant introduction in the winds, takes listeners to a different place, where, although time moves at different speed, things sound absolutely familiar.
Much ink has been spilled on Mozart’s relationship to the music of his native Austria’s near neighbours, the Turks. Tom suggests here that, in the late eighteenth century, the sound of the Islamic world was not far away at all, especially not from Vienna, the city in and for which Mozart wrote the Abduction. In fact, while writing the opera Mozart was living right in the middle of an unstable and fluid borderland between the “West” and its Ismamic “others.” The Ottoman Empire was only a few days’ journey away. Today you could cover the distance in a matter of hours.
In fact if you map the performances of the Abduction in its early years, you see the routes of the traveling troupes who made the opera a hit across Europe heading closer and closer to the Islamic world that lay on Mozart’s doorstep. Thinking about Belmonte’s aria as a musical sign of the “in-between” opens up new historical perspectives on a beloved opera and, potentially, on how sound divides (or links) people who share the occupation of geographical spaces.
The theme of shared space takes us East for our second postcard, to contemporary Singapore. Drawing on recent fieldwork by the Singapore musicologist Tong Soon Lee, Chris explores how the Islamic call to prayer, repeated five times daily across the Muslim world, delineates sonic space in the city-state, which, like the borderlands of Austria two centuries previously, has a long history complicated by empire, commerce, migration and ethnic/religious diversity. The difference is that cities are smaller, tighter, and sonically far more dense than are the sprawling pastures, fields, and forests of agriculture. In the urban cityscape, borders can be perceived between neighborhoods, streets, or even individual people in their houses. Since independence, Singapore’s semi-democratic/semi-authoritarian government has found itself playing the role of sonic referee, seeking to leave room for the city’s Islamic majority population to live their beliefs in public via the Call to Prayer, while preserving a soundscape with uninvaded spaces for everyone.
Referencing Lee, Chris talks us through how the Call to Prayer itself has implicated contested claims to public religious sound in Singapore’s multi-ethnic environment, and the ways that new conceptions of “space,” technology, and privacy yield renewed modes of religious expression. In Singapore, via the direction/redirection of the Call’s loudspeakers (first outward toward the city, and then later inward toward the mosque), and subsequently via the broadcast of the Call, on its five-times-daily schedule, on radio and then television, Muslims can enter shared sonic space–a “virtual mosque” whose religious community is real and renewed. When competing imperial, democratic, or authoritarian soundscapes collide, as Tom suggested and Chris elaborates, there are no easy answers. But some of the solutions, both past and present, offer fascinating clues to how sound makes, unmakes, and reinvents community.
In a fascinating preview of an upcoming episode, Chris and Tom pivot to a related discussion of the power of electronic media–and specifically of radio–to create not only a shared “virtual” environment (for Muslim worship, for example) but even a new national identity. Colonial and postcolonial sounds are a key theme in the podcast, so we chat briefly about the great singer Umm Kulthum (1898-1975), an icon of modernizing Egypt who used powerful Cairo-based radio, and then television and film, to forward a vision of the nation whose political power its second president, Gamal Abdel Nasser (1918-70) himself recognized and exploited. On Thursday nights during her broadcasts, traffic would halt in the streets, and shops would open their doors, as the broadcast voice of Umm Kulthum poured forth across the Arab world, literally sounding a new Egyptian nation into being.
When competing imperial, democratic, or authoritarian soundscapes collide, as Tom suggested and Chris elaborates, the sonic consequences can be complex. But listening carefully to sound as history, both past and present, can offer fascinating clues to how what we can hear makes, unmakes, and reinvents community.
Key Points
It is easy to fall into overly black-and-white categories when thinking about how people define themselves in sound. If you take a closer look, mapping soundworlds across political spaces, sometimes you can come to surprising and historically enlightening conclusions.Mozart’s Abduction from the Seraglio K. 384 (1782) is sometimes thought of as an “East vs. West” kind of piece. We argue that the opera can also be understood to reveal how much the European and Islamic worlds had in common, and–even more significantly–how much they saw themselves as sharing a common geography.Contemporary cities yield complex soundscapes. Attempts to regulate public religious sound, for example the Islamic call to prayer in Singapore, indicate how delicate the politics of a shared soundscape can be.Electronic media has a huge power to make new identities across borders, and disrupt older ones. One great example is the Arab-language singer Umm Kulthum, whose special brand of song and music played an enormous role in the birth of Egypt as a nation after decolonization.Resources
If you are interested in mapping eighteenth century music, run, don’t walk, to the Twitter feed of the music historian Austin Glatthorn (@AJGlatthorn).The work of Tong Soon Lee, who teaches at Lehigh University, is indispensable to understanding the soundscapes of contemporary Singapore.The Guardian UK has a good retrospective biography of Umm Kulthumm, and of her continuing symbolic impact across the East.Charles Hirschkind’s The Ethical Soundscape: Cassette Sermons and Islamic Counterpublics presents a complementary and sophisticated “take” on the use of another modern technology, the audio cassette, as a means of virtual community in the modern world.The go-to book on Mozart’s use of Turkish musical materials is Matthew Head's, Orientalism, Masquerade and Mozart's Turkish Music.You can’t go wrong with the classic 1987 recording of the Abduction from the Seraglio conducted by Georg Solti and featuring stars such as Editha Gruberová, Kathleen Battle, and Hans Zednik. Available on Apple Music and many other services.Speaking of strange and wonderful productions of the Abduction, we highly recommend the Pacific Opera Project’s 2016 Star Trek (!) version.All of the books mentioned in the episode can be found in our Sounding History Goodreads discussion group. Join the conversation!
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Fehlende Folgen?
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Grace Chang (Ge Lan, 葛蘭/葛兰), (born 1933) was a breakthrough star in one of several Golden Ages of Hong Cinema, this one around around 1960. For a comparatively short time between the mid fifties and sixties, Chang was one of the most popular screen stars in the Chinese-speaking world outside of the People’s Republic.
She encapsulated a new female ideal for aspirational audiences on the Western side of the divide in Cold War East Asia: a woman who was young, mobile, pleasure-seeking, and most importantly empowered to play the main role in her own life’s dramas. Her films, comic and dramatic alike, explored themes such as youth culture, urbanization, family breakdown, and sexual emancipation.
And man could she sing.
This episode’s first postcard explores Chang’s 1960 film Wild, Wild Rose (野玫瑰之戀/野玫瑰之恋) directed by Wong Tin-Lam with music by Ryōichi Hattori. We open in an upscale Hong Kong nightclub. Chang, the tragic heroine, is singing a Latin jazz version of the Habanera from Bizet’s Carmen. Yet the fact that she’s singing Bizet – this is a retelling of the Carmen story after all – is not even the most unexpected thing about the performance: what’s even more interesting is how she sings it.
In this version, Chang gets through a wide range through what Chris calls “a spontaneous combustion of dance music,” in a jazz idiom that “refracts” styles from Latin (one of her previous films was Mambo Girl, 1957) to boogie-woogie, all delivered in a one-off vocal growl that actually echoes sounds from Chinese spoken theater.
You’ll have to listen to the episode to hear more of our take on what this brilliant mixture means, but as Tom says, the scene has a “double bottom.” If you look–and listen–underneath its surface, you find layers of context that echo 1920s Japan, wartime Shanghai under Japanese occupation, and 1950s Hong Kong, that last a distant outpost of the collapsing British Empire, now beginning a rapid transformation from poverty towards, outwardly at least, shiny capitalist prosperity.
We finish the first part of the episode by dwelling on Chang’s guitar, a chrome-plated resonator that looks an awful lot like the kind that Hawaiian players like Sol Hoopii and bluesmen like Tampa Red had made famous three decades earlier. They are in fact very similar: as objects of music technology, these unique guitars tie Chang and the “American” players together like nodes in a network.
Unlike Chang, who faded into unjustifiable obscurity after she retired suddenly in 1964, Robert Johnson (1911-1938) lived on after his untimely death as a central figure in the collective mythography of the Delta Blues. But memories can deceive.
Our argument in the second half of the episode is that Johnson’s reputation as a brilliant, naive genius (a “memory” backed up by Son House’s suggestions that he somehow sold his soul to the Devil in return for musical secrets, as implied in Walter Hill’s problematic 1987 film Crossroads) flies in the face of what actually happened. If you peel back the layers of the mythographic onion, in place of a tortured and doomed musical superman, we find a brilliant and intentional musical synthesist with a special genius at making new technologies resonate together.
Visual evidence is key to what we are claiming. It’s easy, Chris explains, to read the famous cover painting of the iconic Columbia Records two-LP gatefold album (see website), which depicts Johnson playing and singing directly into the corner of a San Antonio hotel room, as evidence of man so self-consciously shy, so removed from functional social skills, that he literally could only play to the wall.
But what Johnson was really doing was sculpting sound, using the corner of the room to “corner load” the acoustics of the recording, intentionally and artfully compressing his acoustic Gibson L1’s sound and boosting its signal as Jimi Hendrix would later do via effects pedals with his electric Stratocasters. In pulling everything he could out of new microphone technology and the unique acoustical demands of his art form, Johnson, in other words, was a conscious, expert, and intentional artist: a master engineer of the Delta Blues.
Key Points
Despite the proliferation of oversimplified expectations, presumptions, and definitions, jazz is not a fixed thing. Like any musical style, jazz–in its sounds, practices, and expressive goals– is what people who make it say it is. The spread of “jazz” to East Asia before and after World War II is a usefully complicated example.The 1960 Hong Kong film Wild, Wild, Rose, starring the breakout star Grace Chang, demonstrates how jazz sounds and associations traveled, and how listening in new ways can deepen understanding of global processes of commerce, politics, and technology.Objects such as musical instruments–in our example Chang’s resonator guitar, which looks an awful lot like those made famous by 1930s Hawaiian and blues players, are like nodes in a network. Although they are “only” objects, those objects–and their meaning to users–can help us make new links and tell new stories.The story of Robert Johnson shows how tempting it is for popular histories to turn into mythical figures. In Johnson’s case his reputation as a tortured, untamed genius has obscured his role as a brilliant and intentional technological and stylistic innovator.Resources
Michael Denning’s Noise Uprising: The Audiopolitics of a World Revolution has really shaped our thinking about how technology can drive musical change across global networks.For a further account of Grace Chang’s brief and remarkable career we highly recommend the chapters on her in Jean Ma, Sounding the Modern Woman: The Songstress in Chinese Cinema.Ryōichi Hattori’s career as a pioneer of jazz in Japan is covered in Tyler Atkins, Blue Nippon: Authenticating Jazz in Japan.The Wild, Wild, Rose is not currently available to stream, but clips from several of its scenes can be found on YouTube.Perry Henzel’s The Harder they Come is available on many streaming services.Walter Hill’s 1987 film Crossroads, which perpetuates myths about Robert Johnson, is available to stream. You can also listen to Ry Cooder’s excellent soundtrack wherever you get your music.Our thanks go to roots music master Ry Cooder for the initial insight about Robert’s corner-loading! "Ry Cooder: Talking Country Blues," by Jas Obrecht, Guitar Player magazine, July 1990.All of the books mentioned in the episode can be found in our Sounding History Goodreads discussion group. Join the conversation!
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Comparing cultural expressions is a risky enterprise: especially, in our case, because too many still perceive Western “classical” art music to be somehow superior to other musics because of its alleged and “universal” values. But we think the challenge can be worthwhile, especially at a deeper level, because it can help us tease out complementary ways rulers use sound to literally underscore their political power. In today’s episode we investigate music and power in the Black Atlantic, where European and African musics collided in history.
Our first example is that of the Italo-French composer Jean-Baptiste Lully (1632-1687), who often features as the father of French opera. We focus on his role as composer of lavish multimedia productions known more formally as tragédies en musique, tragedies set to music and celebrating his patron Louis XIV. These fusions of music, drama, and dance were pure political spectacle, and in Louis’s younger years even involved the king himself as a dancer.
The king was dancing because the purpose of a tragédie en musique was to place the king’s body (which itself represented France, to contemporary ways of thinking) at the center of a complex piece of theatre. The point was not so much to entertain the audience, which often consisted of France’s political elite, but to remind them of the king’s absolute power.
Lully made a career of creating works like these. Tom unpacks Lully’s work, his dismissal by Louis after a sexual scandal (with a digression to the composer’s subsequent death of gangrene as the result of a self-inflicted wound sustained while directing music) and turns, finally, to Louis’s global political ambitions. Had those ambitions been fully realized, the cultural world of the Black Atlantic (and thus our music history) would have been much more French.
Chris’s postcard takes us to the soundworlds of the great empires of sub-Saharan West Africa in the pre-colonial era. He starts with the Empire of Mali, whose first emperor, Sundiata Keita (ruling in the thirteenth century CE) is memorialized in magnificent musical-epic poetry that has been passed down by oral and aural tradition. The bearers of this memory are called jeliat in the languages of West Africa (in French: griot). Chris explains how rulers of empires such as Mali depended on the jeliat, whose memorized epics were key sources of historical, genealogical, and legal knowledge, to tell their stories and legitimize their power.
We then attempt one of those challenging cross-cultural comparisons. Did Lully serve as a kind of praise-singerto Louis XIV? On the face of it certainly.
Yet historical comparisons are never simple or neutral. Just look at where we would be likely to encounter Lully’s music today: in “classical” opera houses or in other formats popular with elites in the “global north,” who are often culturally conditioned to value “timeless classics,” not political messages. In contrast the musical aesthetics and outputs of the oral-aural epics of West Africa, which are still performed by musicians who claim direct lineage to their predecessors at the court of Sundiata, are more likely to pop up on playlists of “traditional” or “world” music. Both are “old” music, so why is one “classical” and the other “traditional”?
The answer is the Western colonization of Africa, the flows of labor, energy, and data that made it possible, and--in turn--the influence of the jelat tradition on the vernacular musics of the Black Atlantic, which underpin nearly so many pop music genres today, from the Delta Blues to hip-hop. Music, it seems to us, is never unmoored from political and economic realities.
Key Points
In different ways around the world, political power and music mix.The prestigious genre of French “tragedy in music” formed in the late seventeenth century in lavish spectacles that told stories about the political power of Louis XIV, the “Sun King”The great poetic epics of the West African Empires, such as the Sundiata Epic from the court of the Empire of Mali, functioned similarly.Lully’s operas live on, often stripped of their political meaning, in Western “classical” music. The West African epics live on too, as African “traditional music.” Some of their ethos informs the popular genres today that stem from the collision of European and African cultures in the era of the Black Atlantic, with its trade in goods and enslaved people.Resources
We are fans of Gérard Corbiau’s 2000 film costume drama Le roi danse (even if it’s somewhat over the top!). Excerpts are available widely on YouTube and other platforms. The soundtrack is available on CD or download from Deutsche Grammophon, and the streaming services Apple Music and Spotify.Timothy Blanning’s book The Culture of Power and the Power of Culture: Old Regime Europe 1660-1789 is an excellent introduction to the use of cultural spectacle to underpin political power.Eric Charry's Mande Music: Traditional and Modern Music of the Maninka and Mandinka of Western Africa is a masterful situation of “traditional” music as part of contemporary West Africa aesthetics and politics.Christopher Waterman’s Juju: A Social History and Ethnography of an African Popular Music places the proverb-rich Yoruba contemporary vocal/instrumental music juju in contemporary West African context.All of the books mentioned in the episode can be found in our Sounding History Goodreads discussion group. Join the conversation!
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This episode is about what happens when sounds and people meet and mix. A lot of what we talk about takes place away from North America and Europe, but we end up circling back to a primary question in this season of the podcast: how did Westerners use the sounds of others to perceive the world, “The West,” and themselves?
Our first example is one of those historical stories that is so, well, weird you have to wonder if it is actually fiction. In the early years of the seventeenth century Chinese officials discovered a thousand year-old stone pillar (or “steele”) near the city of Xi’an in Western China, along the old east-west trade route known as “the Silk Road.” It was inscribed both in Chinese and Syriac, a form of Aramiac in which many early Christian texts are transmitted. Recently arrived Jesuit missionaries were quick to pick up on this find, because it supported their claim that Christianity had a long history in China. They also transmitted the news back to Rome.
Then the fun starts. The great Jesuit scholar Athanasius Kircher, famous among other things for his collection of interesting objects and texts from around the world, used what he read about the stone to speculate about the intonation of the Chinese language (and China’s relationship to ancient Egypt!). A few decades later a minor German clergyman in then very provincial Berlin read Kircher’s account and proposed the idea that in China people sang all the time (as if they were in an opera) instead of speaking. Our point is that conclusions about far-away places don’t have to be true to be interesting.
Our second postcard was inspired by a TikTok meme. At the time we recorded the show, sea shanties were everywhere on the internet, thanks mainly to the music-video sharing app ability to amplify strange (we would say interesting!) sound objects: the app can act as a kind of digital version of Kircher’s collection of curiosities. This got us thinking about where sea shanties, and other seafaring songs come from.
And so we found ourselves talking about whaling ships. As Chris points out, whalers, which were really floating factories, were a kind of Silk Road on the water, thanks to their global routes and diverse crews. They also remind us that music history, economic history, exploration, and extraction often run along the same tracks. The sea shanty meme was good fun (for most listeners!). But sea shanties, and other songs from the riches of maritime history, are more than just curiosities. They offer vital sonic clues about big processes, fascinating moments, and human experience in global history.
Key Takeaways
Historical misunderstandings can be interesting in their own right: take the story of how the discovery of an ancient monument in China led one European to speculate that Chinese people sang all the time as if they were in an opera. Behind this odd idea is a story of someone struggling to make sense of new historical evidence.Whaling ships and other workhorses of the maritime trade were both “floating factories” and fascinating soundscapes. The music passed down from them (including the recent TikTok sea shanty craze) offer clues about these soundscapes, and the ways that music history and the histories of economics (especially the history of working people) travel on the same tracks.Resources
Daniel Chua and Alexander Rehding’s Alien Listening: Voyager's Golden Record and Music from Earth got us thinking about how it can be illuminating to speculate about how other people--OK, they’re talking about space aliens--make sense of sound.Bathsheba Demuth’s Floating Coast: An Environmental History of the Bering Strait is a must read on the entanglements of ecology and economy. The author is a former dog-sled musher.We’re very inspired by Peter Linbaugh and Markus Rediker’s The Many-Headed Hydra: Sailors, Slaves, Commoners, and the Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic, which profoundly shapes our thinking about labor and maritime trade.Check out the podcast Time to Eat the Dogs for thought-provoking stories about science, exploration, and “life at the extreme” presented by the historian Michael Robinson.All of the books mentioned in the episode can be found in our Sounding History Goodreads discussion group. Join the conversation!
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The machines that make the biggest difference are the ones that make things move and bring people together. This week, our postcards take us to critical moments in the history of technology: the completion of the Erie Canal from the Hudson River to Lake Erie across northern New York state, and the development of the first civilian computers just after the Second World War. In both stories there is a surprising amount at stake for music history.
Just clearing a path for and then digging the Erie Canal (mile by mile, by hand) required an immense and dangerous effort. There were not enough workers available, so migrants, many from Britain and Ireland, but also free and enslaved people of color, were brought in to do the job. When the work was done the canal accelerated travel and communication, connecting the metropolis of New York to an immense hinterland to the west. The canal gave the new nation a vastly different sense of its borders and identity. Those who had given their labor (and in some cases their lives) to make it forged soundworlds for this new space. In the evenings and on rare days off they sang and danced together, making new kinds of music. What they did–a kind of synthesis travelling back and forth on the wonder they had built--would go on to underpin what we recognize as “American music” today.
After 1945 Alan Turing, who had spent the war working in secret developing the electronic computers that helped break “unbreakable” German codes, helped set up a civilian computer lab at the University of Manchester. Turing was by all accounts not a particularly musical man, but there were good ears on his team. One night, for fun (!), one of Turing’s junior colleagues, Christopher Strachey, used an alarm signal already built into a prototype computer to make a basic synthesizer, with hilarious-sounding but in the long run profound results. Thanks to recently discovered archival recordings we can hear its honky efforts, and the sleep-deprived giggles of Turing’s young colleagues when they heard what they had done. The members of Turing’s lab might not have known it, but what they did eventually opened up a wholly new chapter in the datafication of music. Like the workers on the Erie Canal two centuries ago, we suddenly find that our musical borders have shifted dramatically. Unlike them we ask ourselves where music “is” if it now only lives in digital code.
Key Points
The construction of the Erie canal brought labor and technology together to make new kinds of music, and the connections it made forged a new sense of American identity, also in sound.Alan Turing was involved in efforts to develop the first civilian computers in Britain after World War Two. Although they didn’t set out to do so, members of his team found that they could synthesize musical sound, inadvertently setting the stage for the cultures of digital music we now live in.Resources
Chris Smith’s The Creolization of American Culture: William Sydney Mount and the Roots of Blackface Minstrelsy explores how working people came together before the Civil War to make a new kind of “American” culture.In Decomposed: The Political Ecology of Music Kyle Devine explores the idea that digital music is just as material music on other media (such as shellac, vinyl, and plastic), and just as bad for the environment.The IEEE (Institute of Electronic and Electronics Engineers) website has a detailed and engaging description of early computing and music-making in Alan Turing’s postwar Manchester lab.You can read more about Alan Turing in B. Jack Copeland, Alan Turing: Pioneer of the Information Age.All of the books mentioned in the episode can be found in our Sounding History Goodreads discussion group. Join the conversation!
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Colonialism reconfigured the world economy around the extraction of natural resources and the exploitation of humans to provide the labor for that extraction. A by-product was profound change to how people made, heard, and paid for music.
In this episode we talk about what sound has to do with the Anthropocene, explore how profits from the slave trade had a direct impact on European musical life in the eighteenth century, and immerse ourselves in the soundscape, full of colliding cultural experiences, of a Jamaican dance hall at the turn of the 19th century.
We begin by grappling with the Anthropocene, the era of human-caused climate change. There are solid arguments that it was sparked by European colonialism. Together we explain how empire, as early as 1600 CE, contributed to a “Little Ice Age,” before industrialization--and the intensive use of fossil fuels such as peat, wood, coal, steam, and petrochemicals--set temperatures rising again.
Individual people paid the price. To find out more we look at the origins of the “triangular trade” of wind-borne commerce between Africa, the Americas, and Europe. We then turn to some pretty famous names from the history of Western Art Music, to discover the impact of the lucrative profits of this commerce, in particular the trafficking of enslaved people from Africa, had on their careers.
Hearing the names of Handel, Mozart, and Haydn in association with the murderous trade in enslaved people may come as a shock, so we take some time to understand music-makers and consumers as actors in music history, unpacking connections between high art and the global economy of the early Anthropocene. Or to put it more bluntly, between “then and them,” and “now and us.”
Our next stop is early nineteenth-century Jamaica. We take a look (and a listen) to that island’s fraught colonial history, by “entering” Abraham James’s painting, “A Grand Jamaica Ball,” moving from its two dimensions to an imaginary sonic three.
Pictures don’t make noise, it’s true, but if you take time with them, they can reveal a lot about the human experience of sound. We’ll be doing this frequently in the podcast: looking across times and places for unexpected sonic clues about how people lived their lives. Especially in the pre-electrical era paintings, sculpture, prose, and other objects are key materials in our sonic-historic workshop.
Key Points
Global history took a new turn around 1500 with the beginning of Western colonial expansion and the rise of a new global economy based on resource extraction and long-distance trade. This new turn had a direct and measurable impact on Earth’s environment: many historians now place the beginning of the Anthropocene (the era of human-made climate change) around 1600.One fundamental impact of Western expansion and empire included the large-scale eradication of Indigenous people through disease and violence. Another was the enslavement of Africans and their transport to the Americas, a process marked by unspeakable mass violence. Both catastrophes changed global soundworlds in many ways.Historical honesty compels us to recognize that heroes of Western Art Music such as Haydn, Handel and Mozart were all connected to the new global economy. None of them could have had the careers they did without money from patrons whose money came from trade in resources like sugar, which in turn depended on enslavement and the exploitation of human suffering.Resources
Gary Tomlinson’s ground-breaking work on the deep history of music includes A Million Years of Music: The Emergence of Human Modernity.Simon L. Lewis and Mark A. Maslin’s exploration of the long history of human impacts on climate, which includes their take on the “Orbis spike”: The Human Planet: How We Created the AnthropoceneDavid Hunter’s discussion of evidence of Handel’s investments in the slave economy, on Will Robin’s Sound Expertise PodcastFor cutting-edge musicological work on sound, music history, and the Anthropocene, check out @prof_ajchung on TwitterAll of the books mentioned in the episode can be found in our Sounding History Goodreads discussion group. Join the conversation!
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Every collaboration has a backstory. Ours goes back nearly 30 years, when Chris (the older one, jazz musician, former line-cook and nightclub bouncer, some tattoos) and Tom (the slightly younger one, classical musician, serial migrant, no tattoos) worked together at WFIU, Indiana University Public Radio. Both of us were in grad school at Indiana at the time, Chris in jazz and musicology and Tom in music performance.
In radio those were the old days. We worked with reel-to-reel tape and rudimentary hard-wired networks on the studio computers, pulling shifts late nights and early mornings for a listening audience scattered through the southern Indiana hills. And then we went our separate ways: Chris to start his academic career in Texas, Tom to Germany to work as a musician before returning to the US for a PhD in musicology at Cornell.
Fast forward fifteen years: we are both in academia, two American scholars on divergent paths. Chris is at Texas Tech building a Vernacular Music Center and much else besides. Tom has landed in Southampton in the UK, beginning to move from pretty old-fashioned art music (ask him about Mozart and he’ll tell you a lot of things you didn’t know people even knew) to global music history.
Fast forward another ten years to the summer of 2018. Chris has just finished the second of two books about American vernaculars, and Tom is wrapping up a book about European experiences of Chinese music around 1800 and starting a new project about jazz and AI. Over the years we’d seen each other at conferences in strange airless hotels. You could count on us (the big guy with the tattoos and the bookish Mozart scholar living as a migrant in Britain) to regale anyone who would listen with stories about small-town radio in the good old days, where you knew your audience because some of them would call you on the control room phone just to talk, and the reel-to-reel machines sometimes did terrible things to you on air.
And, curiously enough, we realize that our paths are beginning to align: Chris is working on “history from below,” in music and dance soundscapes across the Americas, and Tom is working in material and social history using soundscapes of global imperial encounter and modern technology.
Chris has an idea. Why don’t we two surprise people (because despite our shared history, from the outside we seem an unlikely duo in academia, where everyone is trapped in narrow specialties) and do a thing. We’re both all-in on global history and empire, on music and what it means in the world. We feel like we need to say something in times of environmental and political crisis. So...an essay collection? Maybe a symposium? You could feel our enthusiasm waning even as one of us suggested these. As energizing as it can be to spend time in a room full of really cool colleagues, neither of us wanted the thing to be that.
Instead, after decades in academia, both of us were looking for something more immediate, the kind of experience we know from the classroom and yes, from the old days on the radio. We talk it over some, and agree to meet in England next time Chris is traveling in Europe. You’ll have to listen to the episode to get the rest of the story.
It didn’t take long for us to settle on an ambitious project: a music history book for non-academic readers. And a podcast, a medium Tom and Chris, Old Radio Guys, were just beginning to discover. A few emails later we had found our producer, Tom’s sister Tatiana Irvine, and her production company, Seedpod Sound. And here we are.
Key Points
How we came to be writing a book together nearly 30 years after first working at the same public radio station in small-town Indiana (or “How a global history of imperial encounter, across five centuries, was born in the studios of a small public radio station in southern Indiana, 30 years ago”)What it’s like to come up with an ambitious joint project in a business that favors lone working (or “Getting our brains, and those of our colleagues and managers, around the idea of an international collaboration across time zones and disciplines--in the midst of a global pandemic.”)What excites us about podcasting as a medium: its immediacy and the possibility of two-way communication with the audience (or “How podcasting engages and unites us through shared personal and scholarly goals: radio skills, expertise in sound as both meaning and technology, a sense of history, and an urgent desire to contribute to global efforts to fight environmental destruction”)How we want to structure the podcast around three themes: labor, energy and data (or “Why ‘labor’; why ‘energy’; why ‘data’? What are the human, ecological, cultural, and historical stories that brought us to this moment?”)Why we want to tell bold new stories about voices most music historians miss (or “The untold stories, the silenced voices, the unseen or unrecognized encounters between people, places, eras, and experience--between labor, energy, and data--for which we seek to create new spaces for encounter and understanding.”)Resources
Tom Irvine’s Listening to China: Sound and the Sino-Western Encounter, 1770-1839 is about the shifting responses of Western travellers, musicians, philosophers, and diplomats to China and its soundscapes around 1800, and how these responses shaped their sense of what it meant to be “Western.”Dreams of Germany: Musical Imaginaries from the Concert Hall to the Dance Floor, edited by Tom Irvine and the Southampton historian Neil Gregor, explores how Germans reacted in music to the most significant developments of the twentieth century, including technological advances, fascism, and war on an unprecedented scale, and how the world responded to German music in return. The introduction and Tom’s chapter on how ideas of “Germanness” shaped the British composer Hubert Parry’s heavily racialized approach to music history are available for free on the Berghan Books website.Chris Smith’s The Creolization of American Culture: William Sydney Mount and the Roots of Blackface Minstrelsy uses the artworks of painter and musician William Sidney Mount (born in Setauket, Long Island in 1807) as a lens through which to recover the earliest roots of the Black-white cultural exchange that gave birth to the street musics that were the roots of the “Creole Synthesis” of African and Anglo-Celtic sound and movement that lies at the heart of American music.Chris Smith’s Dancing Revolution: Bodies, Space, and Sound in American Cultural History is a study of 400 years of movement and noise--street dance and "rough music"--as tools by which minoritized peoples, across many moments in the history of the Americas, have sought to create freedom “from below.”All of the books mentioned in the episode can be found in our Sounding History Goodreads discussion group. Join the conversation!
