Survival in the digital age

From vinyl to the Internet:
Whose music survives in the digital age?

DAN COREN

Here’s what I’ve been listening to lately.

The first clip is from “Thunder on the Mountain,” the first track on Bob Dylan’s new album, “Modern Times.” The second is from “Visage,” a work composed in 1961 by the Italian Luciano Berio, made from electronic sounds and the voice of Berio’s wife, soprano Cathy Berberian. Dylan and Berio are as much vital parts of my personal musical experience as the classical repertory I usually write about in these pages.

Today, the title “Modern Times” is wonderfully ironic when juxtaposed with Berio’s music. If there was ever a piece that seemed to be modern when it was written, it was “Visage.” “Blowin’ in the Wind” came out in April, 1962; it may have been politically hip, but you’d hardly describe Dylan then, or now, as high-tech. Yet it turns out to be Dylan, not Berio, whose career demonstrates how radically differently music and its role in our lives has become over the intervening 40 years.

Berio was born in 1922, one of a cluster of composers born in the 1920s that also included the German Karlheinz Stockhausen (1928), the Frenchman Pierre Boulez (1925), and the Greek Iannis Xenakis (1922). By the time “Visage” was written, they had established themselves as a radical avant-garde and were writing pieces that seemed destined to change the very definition of what constitutes music in Western culture.

The absurd profundity of playing nothing

Boulez and Stockhausen saw themselves as soldiers in the great battle for atonality and serialism that had already consumed the world of classical music for almost 50 years. But the godfather of the 1960s avant-garde was more the American John Cage than it was Arnold Schoenberg. Cage was fooling around with ideas like presenting concert pieces based on randomly tuned radios, and his most famous piece, 4’ 33, in which the pianist David Tudor sat at a keyboard and played nothing for that amount of time, was such a profound philosophical statement about the way we approach concert music that it had already become an absurdist cliché.

Cage’s greatest contribution, perhaps, was that he introduced some whimsical humor into a glum and politically charged musical atmosphere (Follow this link to an article in the New Yorker by Alex Ross to see how bad things had become.) But humor was completely lost on the avant-garde. Supported with jihadistic propaganda , they began using the hi-tech paraphernalia of the day– oscillators, noise generators, and recording tape– to make musical compositions out of material that had previously been thought of as nothing but noise.

Sounds that give me sensual pleasure

I arrived at the Penn music department in 1969, fresh from the Berkeley campus, where I had become enthralled by the electronic music of Stockhausen and Berio. The previous year, Stockhausen had already wreaked havoc at Penn as a visiting professor, so it did not advance my already tottering academic career when I began playing with tape loops in Penn’s new (but completely ignored) Presser Electronic Music Studio and designed my own graduate seminar on Stockhausen’s music. (My colleagues may have looked askance at the enterprise; but to their credit, they didn’t stand in my way, either.)

My reason for teaching the course was simple: I loved the music then, and I still do today. Here’s an excerpt from a work I’ve mentioned before: Stockhausen’s Kontake. These sounds evoke vast outer-space vistas in my mind; the sounds themselves give me visceral, sensuous pleasure, as if I were running my hand over the polished surfaces of massive stainless steel forms. These composers used no computers, no digital tape editors, not even electronic keyboards; Kontake took many months to assemble, and it is, if nothing else, a testament to the virtues of painstaking German craftsmanship.

Detective work, with help from a DJ

It’s astonishing how quickly this early electronic repertory has vanished into the ether. Good luck to you if, after listening to that clip of “Visage” above, you think you’d like to listen to all of it. I had been searching for it myself in vain for a long time– I hadn’t actually heard the piece for about 35 years– and might never have succeeded were it not for the generous assistance of an announcer at WPRB Princeton, 103.3 FM.

This is one terrific music station, one of the best music resources in the Delaware Valley. I can vouch for the station’s mission statement on its “Music at WPRB” page. (If you can’t get their signal, you can listen on the Web.) WPRB announcers (who use only their first names) enjoy communicating with their audience. Recently, one announcer in particular, Anita, had been programming a creative amalgam of contemporary and near-contemporary music. I asked her if “Visage” was available; to my delight, she tracked down a version (no longer in print, apparently) from the Italian company Dischi Ricordi and told me when she was going to play it. A colleague of mine at work captured it on his Mac as an MP3 file and burned me a copy. Voilá! Thanks, Anita. Thanks, Kevin. But you’d think that in this era of Google and iTunes, it shouldn’t be so difficult.

It pains me to acknowledge it, but the obvious reason for the disappearance of “Visage” and works like it is that not enough people liked it then or care about it now. After all, Berio and his colleagues wrote plenty of instrumental music that is also ignored today. But even if “Visage” and its ilk enjoyed a sudden resurgence of interest, it would be very difficult to retrieve these pieces from the brink of extinction. Here’s why.

A thousand years, from Machaut to Mahler

Traditional musical notation— the abstract code the that was invented under the aegis of the Catholic Church for the transmission of musical information— is essentially a symbolic computer language. Musicians are the interpreters that translate the symbols into physical actions, which produce a final product that reaches our ears as vibrations. We call the process music-making.

It’s ironic that at the same time early electronic music was coming into being, two generations of musical scholars had just finished recovering and preserving the complete encoded record of Western music. We take it for granted today, but modern concert life wouldn’t be possible without this monumental achievement. Nearly a thousand years of music, from Machaut to Mahler, had been preserved in libraries all over Europe and America on the only medium that has yet stood the test of time over centuries– ink and paper.

The problem with the electronic music of the 1960s is that there was no way to express it abstractly—to create a source code for it. It may have been produced with leading-edge technology of its time, but in the absence of an abstract encoding system, it has had a purely physical and extremely fragile existence, either as magnetized particles on mylar tape or, only slightly more securely, little pits on coated discs. When the last disc wears out or becomes obsolete, the music will be irretrievably gone.

Giving Dylan his due

As wonderful as musical notation is, though, it has unavoidably left us in ignorance of what the original really sounded like or what the original composers were really like as human beings. What wouldn’t we give for a DVD of Beethoven improvising at one of Baron Gottfried van Swieten’s soirées?

Well, we do have Bob Dylan. Perhaps he won’t stand up to history’s judgment a century from now, but the fact is that Dylan today has exerted as powerful an effect on American musical life as Beethoven did on the Viennese musical scene during his, and has achieved the same god-like stature. I can respect anyone who can’t bear to hear Dylan sing. But give the man his due.

The arc of Dylan’s career has been completely chronicled as we progressed from vinyl to the internet: There are all his recordings, of course, but also innumerable interviews, DVDs, a sardonic, self-parodying full-length movie, Masked and Anonymous, the first volume of what has been advertised as a three-part autobiographical memoir, and, most recently (or so I’ve heard), an excellent didactic show on XM satellite radio.

There is, of course, a real, live Bob Dylan; you can pay an obscene amount of money to enter his actual physical presence at the Wachovia Center on November 18th. Is this Bob Dylan any more "real" than the one who exists in the electronic world of modern entertainment media? That's hard to say. On Martin Scorsese's documentary DVD, No Direction Home, you can watch a poignantly baby-faced Dylan premiere "Mister Tambourine Man" and feel like you are present at the birth of modern times. Technology has given not just a record of Dylan's music and lyrics, but of the whole package"“ his enigmatic, difficult personality; his place in our culture; and, most of all, that damn voice! Love it or hate it, there's never been another one quite like it.

We live in an age of miracles, an age when music time travel ( as I've written elsewhere) is possible. And yet … and yet … the jury is still out about the virtues of this new paradigm for transmitting musical knowledge to the future.

I write software for a living— work that's very similar to composing music. But as satisfying as it is, it provides a daily lesson on the failures of human reason and it has given me a deep distrust of computer-based technology. When I get home from a vacation, I don't regard our hundreds of digital photographs as real until I can see them on paper in an album. I will never, ever, pay my bills electronically. So I'm acutely aware that if we ever reach the point where the power grid fails for good"“ do you think that can't happen?"“ the Bob Dylan I've written about here will vanish with it. (That would, of course, be among the least of our problems.) In fact, Dylan vanishes every time there's a good thunderstorm. When that happens, I can always light a candle, open up my beautifully bound and printed Henle edition of the Well-Tempered Clavier and, reading ink printed on paper, play a Bach prelude.