How Music Works Read online

  First published in Great Britain in 2012 by Canongate Books Ltd, 14 High Street, Edinburgh, EH1 1TE

  www.canongate.tv

  This digital edition first published in 2012 by Canongate Books First published in the USA in 2012 by McSweeney’s San Francisco Copyright © 2012 David Byrne Cover design by Dave Eggers All rights reserved, including right of reproduction in whole or part in any form.

  eISBN: 978 0 85786 251 8

  To Emma and Tom Byrne, who put up with my adolescent musical expressions and even helped out from time to time.

  CONTENTS

  Preface

  Creation in Reverse

  My Life in Performance

  Technology Shapes Music: Analog

  Technology Shapes Music: Digital

  In the Recording Studio

  Collaborations

  Business and Finances

  How to Make a Scene

  Amateurs!

  Harmonia Mundi

  Acknowledgments

  Notes

  Suggested Reading

  Photo Credits

  About the Author

  PREFACE

  I’ve been involved in music all my adult life. I didn’t plan it that way, and it wasn’t even a serious ambition at first, but that’s the way it turned out. A very happy accident, if you ask me. It’s a little strange, though, to realize that a large part of my identity is tied to something that is completely ephemeral. You can’t touch music—it exists only at the moment it is being apprehended—and yet it can profoundly alter how we view the world and our place in it. Music can get us through difficult patches in our lives by changing not only how we feel about ourselves, but also how we feel about everything outside ourselves. It’s powerful stuff.

  Early on, though, I realized that the same music placed in a different context can not only change the way a listener perceives that music, but it can also cause the music itself to take on an entirely new meaning. Depending on where you hear it—in a concert hall or on the street—or what the intention is, the same piece of music could either be an annoying intrusion, abrasive and assaulting, or you could find yourself dancing to it. How music works, or doesn’t work, is determined not just by what it is in isolation (if such a condition can ever be said to exist) but in large part by what surrounds it, where you hear it and when you hear it. How it’s performed, how it’s sold and distributed, how it’s recorded, who performs it, whom you hear it with, and, of course, finally, what it sounds like: these are the things that determine not only if a piece of music works—if it successfully achieves what it sets out to accomplish—but what it is.

  Each chapter in this book focuses on a distinct aspect of music and its context. One asks how technology has affected the way music sounds and the way we think of it. Another considers the influence of the places in which we listen to it. The chapters are not chronological or sequential. You can read them in any order, though I do think the order my editors and I arrived at has a flow to it—it isn’t entirely random.

  This is not an autobiographical account of my life as a singer and musician, but much of my understanding of music has certainly been accrued over many years of recording and performing. In this book I draw on that experience to illustrate changes in technology and in my own thinking about what music and performance are about. Many of my ideas about what it means to go on stage, for instance, have changed completely over the years, and my own history of performance is a way of telling the story of a still-evolving philosophy.

  Others have written insightfully about music’s physiological and neurological effects; scientists have begun to peek under the hood to examine the precise mechanisms by which music works on our emotions and perceptions. But that’s not really my brief here; I have focused on how music might be molded before it gets to us, what determines if it gets to us at all, and what factors external to the music itself can make it resonate for us. Is there a bar near the stage? Can you put it in your pocket? Do girls like it? Is it affordable?

  I have, for the most part, avoided the ideological aspects of music making and production. That music can be made to bolster nationalistic urges or written in the service of rebellion and overthrowing an established culture—whether the motive is political or generational—those are beyond the scope of this book. I’m not much interested in specific styles and genres either, as it seems to me that certain models and modes of behavior often recur across wildly different scenes. I hope that you will find something to enjoy here even if you have no interest in my own music. I’m also uninterested in the swollen egos that drive some artists, although the psychological make-up of musicians and composers shapes music at least as much as any of the phenomena I’m fascinated by. I have rather looked for patterns in how music is written, recorded, distributed, and received—and then asked myself if the forces that fashioned and shaped these patterns have guided my own work… and maybe the work of others as well. One hopes I’m not just talking about myself here! In most cases the answer is yes; I’m no different than anyone else.

  Does asking oneself these questions in an attempt to see how the machine works spoil the enjoyment? It hasn’t for me. Music isn’t fragile. Knowing how the body works doesn’t take away from the pleasure of living. Music has been around as long as people have formed communities. It’s not going to go away, but its uses and meaning evolve. I am moved by more music now than I have ever been. Trying to see it from a wider and deeper perspective only makes it clear that the lake itself is wider and deeper than we thought.

  CHAPTER ONE

  Creation in Reverse

  I had an extremely slow-dawning insight about creation. That insight is that context largely determines what is written, painted, sculpted, sung, or performed. That doesn’t sound like much of an insight, but it’s actually the opposite of conventional wisdom, which maintains that creation emerges out of some interior emotion, from an upwelling of passion or feeling, and that the creative urge will brook no accommodation, that it simply must find an outlet to be heard, read, or seen. The accepted narrative suggests that a classical composer gets a strange look in his or her eye and begins furiously scribbling a fully realized composition that couldn’t exist in any other form. Or that the rock-and-roll singer is driven by desire and demons, and out bursts this amazing, perfectly shaped song that had to be three minutes and twelve seconds—nothing more, nothing less. This is the romantic notion of how creative work comes to be, but I think the path of creation is almost 180º from this model. I believe that we unconsciously and instinctively make work to fit preexisting formats.

  Of course, passion can still be present. Just because the form that one’s work will take is predetermined and opportunistic (meaning one makes something because the opportunity is there), it doesn’t mean that creation must be cold, mechanical, and heartless. Dark and emotional materials usually find a way in, and the tailoring process—form being tailored to fit a given context—is largely unconscious, instinctive. We usually don’t even notice it. Opportunity and availability are often the mother of invention. The emotional story—“something to get off my chest”—still gets told, but its form is guided by prior contextual restrictions. I’m proposing that this is not entirely the bad thing one might expect it to be. Thank goodness, for example, that we don’t have to reinvent the wheel every time we make something.

  In a sense, we work backward, either consciously or unconsciously, creating work that fits the venue available to us. That holds true for the other arts as well: pictures are created that fit and look good on white walls in galleries just as music is written that sounds good either in a dance club or a symphony hall (but probably not in both). In a sense, the space, the platform, and the software “makes” the art, the music, or whatever. After s
omething succeeds, more venues of a similar size and shape are built to accommodate more production of the same. After a while the form of the work that predominates in these spaces is taken for granted—of course we mainly hear symphonies in symphony halls.

  In the photo below you can see the room at CBGB where some of the music I wrote was first heard.A Try to ignore the lovely décor and think of the size and shape of the space. Next to that is a band performing.B The sound in that club was remarkably good—the amount of crap scattered everywhere, the furniture, the bar, the crooked uneven walls and looming ceiling made for both great sound absorption and uneven acoustic reflections—qualities one might spend a fortune to recreate in a recording studio. Well, these qualities were great for this particular music. Because of the lack of reverberation, one could be fairly certain, for example, that details of one’s music would be heard—and given the size of the place, intimate gestures and expressions would be seen and appreciated as well, at least from the waist up. Whatever went on below the waist was generally invisible, obscured by the half-standing, half-sitting audience. Most of the audience would have had no idea that the guy in that photo was rolling around on the stage—he would have simply disappeared from view.

  CBGB interior by Joseph O. Holmes

  Rancid at CBGB by Justin Borucki

  This New York club was initially meant to be a bluegrass and country venue—like Tootsie’s Orchid Lounge in Nashville. The singer George Jones knew the number of steps from the stage door of the Grand Ole Opry to the back door of Tootsie’s—thirty-seven. Charlie Pride gave Tootsie Bess a hatpin to use on rowdy customers.

  Below is a photo of some performers at Tootsie’s.C Physically, the two clubs are almost identical. The audience behavior was pretty much the same in both places, too.D

  The musical differences between the two venues are less significant than one might think—structurally, the music emanating from them was pretty much identical, even though once upon a time a country music audience at Tootsie’s would have hated punk rock, and vice versa. When Talking Heads first played in Nashville, the announcer declaimed, “Punk rock comes to Nashville! For the first, and probably the last time!”

  Both of these places are bars. People drink, make new friends, shout, and fall down, so the performers had to play loud enough to be heard above that—and so it was, and is. (FYI: the volume in Tootsie’s is much louder than it usually was in CBGB.)

  Tootsies Orchid Lounge “House Band” by Henry Horenstein

  Tootsies Orchid Lounge “Last Call” by Henry Horenstein

  Looking at this scant evidence, I asked myself, to what extent was I writing music specifically, and maybe unconsciously, to fit these places? (I didn’t know about Tootsie’s when I began to write songs.) So I did a little digging to see if other types of music might have also been written to fit their acoustic contexts.

  WE’RE ALL AFRICANS

  Percussive music carries well outdoors, where people might be both dancing and milling about. The extremely intricate and layered rhythms that are typical of this music don’t get sonically mashed together as they would in, say, a school gymnasium. Who would invent, play, or persevere with such rhythms if they sounded terrible? No one. Not for a minute. This music doesn’t need amplification, either—though that did come along later.

  The North American musicologist Alan Lomax argued in his book Folk Song Style and Culture that the structure of this music and others of its type—essentially leaderless ensembles—emanates from and mirrors egalitarian societies, but suffice it to say that’s a whole other level of context.1 I love his theory that music and dance styles are metaphors for the social and sexual mores of the societies they emerge from, but that’s not the story I aim to focus on in this book.

  Some say that the instruments being played in the photoE at the top of the next page were all derived from easily available local materials, and therefore it was convenience (with a sly implication of unsophistication) that determined the nature of the music. This assessment implies that these instruments and this music were the best this culture could do given the circumstances. But I would argue that the instruments were carefully fashioned, selected, tailored, and played to best suit the physical, acoustic, and social situation. The music perfectly fits the place where it is heard, sonically and structurally. It is absolutely ideally suited for this situation—the music, a living thing, evolved to fit the available niche.

  That same music would turn into sonic mush in a cathedral.F Western music in the Middle Ages was performed in these stone-walled gothic cathedrals, and in architecturally similar monasteries and cloisters. The reverberation time in those spaces is very long—more than four seconds in most cases—so a note sung a few seconds ago hangs in the air and becomes part of the present sonic landscape. A composition with shifting musical keys would inevitably invite dissonance as notes overlapped and clashed—a real sonic pileup. So what evolved, what sounds best in this kind of space, is modal in structure—often using very long notes. Slowly evolving melodies that eschew key changes work beautifully and reinforce the otherworldly ambience. Not only does this kind of music work well acoustically, it helps establish what we have come to think of as a spiritual aura. Africans, whose spiritual music is often rhythmically complex, may not associate the music that originates in these spaces with spirituality; they may simply hear it as being blurry and indistinct. Mythologist Joseph Campbell, however, thought that the temple and cathedral are attractive because they spatially and acoustically recreate the cave, where early humans first expressed their spiritual yearnings. Or at least that’s where we think they primarily expressed these feelings, as almost all traces of such activities have disappeared.

  Photo by Eric Ashford, courtesy of Ethnomusicology Review

  Ely Cathedral by Walt Bistline, 2010

  Arnstadt Church by Piet Bron

  It’s usually assumed that much Western medieval music was harmonically “simple” (having few key changes) because composers hadn’t yet evolved the use of complex harmonies. In this context there would be no need or desire to include complex harmonies, as they would have sounded horrible in such spaces. Creatively they did exactly the right thing. Presuming that there F is such a thing as “progress” when it comes to music, and that music is “better” now than it used to be, is typical of the high self-regard of those who live in the present. It is a myth. Creativity doesn’t “improve.”

  Bach did a lot of his playing and writing in the early 1700’s in a church that was smaller than a gothic cathedral.G As you can imagine, there was already an organ there, and the sound was reverberant, though not as much as in the giant gothic cathedrals.

  The music Bach wrote for such spaces sounded good in there; the space made the single instrument, the pipe organ, sound larger, and it also had the nice effect of softening any mistakes as he doodled up and down the scales, as was his wont. Modulating into different keys in the innovative way he did was risky business in these venues. Previously, composers for these rooms stayed in the same key, so they could be all washy and droney, and if the room sounded like an empty swimming pool, then it posed no problem.

  I recently went to a Balkan music festival in Brooklyn in a hall that was almost identical to the church pictured on the previous page. The brass bands were playing in the middle of the floor, and folks were dancing in circles around them. The sound was pretty reverberant—not ideal for the complicated rhythms of Balkan music, but then again, that music didn’t develop in rooms like the one I was in.

  In the late 1700s, Mozart would perform his compositions at events in his patrons’ palaces in grand, but not gigantic rooms.H, I At least initially, he didn’t write expecting his music to be heard in symphony halls, which is where they’re often performed today, but rather in these smaller, more intimate venues. Rooms like these would be filled with people whose bodies and elaborate dress would deaden the sound, and that, combined with the frilly décor and their modest size (when compared to cathedr
als and even ordinary churches) meant that his similarly frilly music could be heard clearly in all its intricate detail.

  People could dance to it too. My guess is that in order to be heard above the dancing, clomping feet, and gossiping, one might have had to figure out how to make the music louder, and the only way to do this was to increase the size of the orchestra, which is what happened.

  Hall of Mirrors by Christiaan van der Blij

  Hall of Mirrors by Jenson Z. Yu

  Meanwhile, some folks around that same time were going to hear operas. La Scala was built in 1776; the original orchestra section comprised a series of booths or stalls, rather than the rows of seats that exist now.J People would eat, drink, talk, and socialize during the performances—audience behavior, a big part of music’s context, was very different back then. Back in the day, people would socialize and holler out to one another during the performances. They’d holler at the stage, too, for encores of the popular arias. If they liked a tune, they wanted to hear it again—now! The vibe was more like CBGB than your typical contemporary opera house.

  La Scala and other opera venues of the time were also fairly compact—more so than the big opera houses that now dominate much of Europe and the United States. The depth of La Scala and many other opera houses of that period is maybe like the Highline Ballroom or Irving Plaza in New York, but La Scala is taller, with a larger stage. The sound in these opera houses is pretty tight, too (unlike today’s larger halls). I’ve performed in some of these old opera venues, and if you don’t crank the volume too high, it works surprisingly well for certain kinds of contemporary pop music.