Documentation and Fabrication in Phonography :: Music Essays

Documentation and Fabrication in PhonographyABSTRACT In most general terms, my paper is around the mixture of agendas in the recording industry, where documentation, with its app arently educational implications, becomes difficult to distinguish from a range of distinct, even opposed, goalswhich I group under the heading fabrication. later a few historical remarks, I develop the concept of what I call works of phonography (WPs)that is, sound-constructs created by the use of recording machinery. (Examples rap melody recordings, electronic compositions for tape machine, sonic pastiches by pop groups such as Art of Noise.) I detail their ontological characteristics, as contrasted the features of ordinary musical works. WPs areI claimreplete. (Their finest sonic details 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 scores.) And they are phono- accessiblethat is, accessible only through playbacks of authentic instances of their record artifacts, e.g., cassette tapes, CDs, etc. I then turn to Theodore Gracyks recent study of rock music (in his book wheel and Noise), arguing 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 in addition 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 argue that some classic jazz recordings are artifacts of the recording studio, no less than those Gracyk identifies as pure cases of rock music. In the same vein, I argue that, once recorded, the improvisational music of jazz is deformedindeed, that it acquires features of WPs. This has the further implication that Gracyk cannot preserve his sharp distinction between rock and jazz records that he wa nts to maintain.I. Like Evan Eisenberg, who argued that sound recording has undefended up entirely new kinds of musical experience unknown in the age of continent live performance,(1) Ted Gracyk has opened his ears to what Walter Benjamin had to say about machinelike reproduction. Both see sound recording not as a mere convenience but 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 type of musical work unknown in the age of mere live music.(2)The recording industry has lived mainly by what might be the called transparency perspective, according to which the analogy for a sound recording is a unmingled window pane through which we can view, undistorted, the object of our interest.