Day 341: The Piano Shop On the Left Bank

Less than a week later a knock sounded on our door at the appointed time, loud and insistent, as if someone could not be bothered to use the bell. When I opened the door there stood before me an older man of about my height but with fully twice my mass in his upper body. His torso was the size and shape of a bass drum; he seemed to be all chest. Behind him, almost hidden by his bulk, lurked a slender young man with a narrow mustache and a nervous look on his face. The large man addressed me in a gruff voice. “You’re expecting a piano.”

“That’s right.”

“Where do you want me to put it?”

“Please come in and I’ll show you.”

We live on what in France is called the premier étage, one up from ground level. Our front door opens from a small, plant-filled courtyard onto a straight staircase that leads directly up to our apartment. He took this in as we ascended and he grunted approvingly: “No spiral staircase, that’s good.”

I thought of all the tiny twisting staircases that are so common in Paris and wondered what contortions must sometimes be necessary to deliver pianos. When I indicated the corner of the main room where I wanted the piano, he nodded. “No interior doors or hallways; this will be quick.”

“Will you and your crew need anything special for the assembly?” I assumed that there were at least three or four other men in a truck at the curb, waiting with the piano.

“What crew?”

“I mean . . . Well, how will you get the piano up here? Do you put a ramp on the staircase or something?”

“We’ll bring it up the same way we always do. Trust me; we’ve done this before.”

With that, he and the skinny young man marched down the stairs, leaving the front door wide open. Less than two minutes later I heard a chuffing noise out in the courtyard. I looked out the window and saw a huge black mass—our legless piano—making its way across the cobblestones, borne sideways on the shoulder of the barrel-chested man. The assistant trailed behind, his hand on the tail of the piano but apparently bearing none of its enormous weight.

At the open front door they paused and set the back tip of the piano on the doormat. I raced down the stairs, utterly amazed at what I had just seen and unsure how they proposed to come up the staircase. The older man stood before me, the piano strapped to his back with wide brown leather straps blackened and shiny from years of sweat. They ran diagonally over his shoulders and under his arms and looped around the piano so that the side curve of the cabinet hooked across his right shoulder, its snub tail resting on the ground. He was breathing heavily.

“Surely it’s not just the two of you! Can I help somehow?”

“Monsieur,” he stammered as he gasped for air, “I’ll tell you what I tell all our clients. Just stand clear and let us do our work.”

I ran up the stairs, baffled by how such a huge weight and massive bulk could be moved up the staircase by these two. Suddenly from below came a hoarse and rhythmic shout:

“Un, deux, trois: allez!”

The older man leaned into his straps and tilted forward so the full weight of the piano—nearly six hundred pounds—rested once again on his back. He then headed up the stairs, slowly but methodically. I watched, horrified but fascinated, powerless to help. The piano bowed him low and the straps disappeared into his flesh, pressing deep furrows through his shirt into the muscle and bone below. The younger man followed behind, carrying nothing but holding the tip of the piano and pushing it forward. I thought of the dragging tail wheel on an old airplane whose sole function is to stabilize.

About a third of the way up the stairs the man paused and stood partly up from his stoop. There was a precarious wobble as the mass of the piano swayed lightly and I had a vision of a singular disaster on our staircase; if the piano went, this man went, too. He was literally strapped to his load.

He exhaled hugely, like a draft animal at maximum exertion, and straightened a little. Then, with a quick intake of air through his clenched teeth, he leaned back into the straps and continued up the steps. This pause was repeated once more before the top, all the more terrifying for being higher on the staircase. The young man’s position was almost comically dangerous, as in a cartoon; if the piano slipped he would be crushed instantly.

At last the summit was achieved and the tail of the piano set down once again. The man before me had been transfigured into a red-faced mass of sweating muscle and bulging veins. As if to pause too long would break some strange spell that gave him power, after only a few seconds he once again hefted the entire cabinet and crossed the room, each footstep shaking the apartment mightily. He set it down in the corner on its side. At once the younger man attached two of the legs to the exposed underside. Then the older man lifted the piano to the horizontal while his assistant scurried underneath and attached the third leg.

The whole undertaking from the bottom of the stairs had taken perhaps three minutes, but I felt as if we had shared some major life experience. I had just witnessed the single most extraordinary feat of human strength that I could imagine.

~~The Piano Shop On the Left Bank: Discovering a Forgotten Passion In a Paris Atelier -by- Thad Carhart

Day 312: Improvisation, Creativity, and Consciousness

In the fall of 2003, I was a participant in a symposium convened by Harvard University’s Law and Business Schools called Improvisation and Negotiation. Perhaps ironically given the theme, jazz musicians comprised a distinct minority at the event, with the majority consisting of psychologists, sociologists, lawyers, corporate leaders, and colleagues from other fields beyond music in which interest in improvisation as key to optimal performance has been on the rise. I was deeply impressed by the level of dialogue about a process that I, and much of the jazz community, tend to take for granted as unique to our domain. As a jazz musician who teaches at a classically oriented institution, moreover, I greatly appreciated being part of an academic gathering in which my work was not viewed as peripheral but central to the discourse. I commonly stress to my graduate students that the marginalized status of jazz and improvised music in musical academe is not a clear barometer of the rising appreciation for this kind of creativity not only in the broader academic world but also in an increasing number of professional circles. Thus, my students are exposed to their share of commentary similar to this chapter’s epigraph from Maslow in hopes of inspiring them to appreciate the importance of what they do in the broader scope of things. Maslow, indeed, is a treasure trove for such inspiration, as when he further exhorts the need for educational systems to “create a new kind of human being who is comfortable with change, who enjoys change, who is able to improvise, who is able to face with confidence, strength, and courage a situation of which he has absolutely no forewarning.” And nothing tops my all-time favorite: “We must develop a race of improvisers, of here-now creators.”

 From an integral perspective, it might also be argued that we need to develop a race of “peak experiencers,” to invoke another important aspect of Maslow’s thought, this pertaining to the experience of transformed episodes of consciousness in which sense of self, clarity, wholeness, mind-body integration, inner calm and well-being, and a variety of other faculties are heightened. Hence, the interior dimensions of the creativity-consciousness relationship, at which point the New Jazz Studies—championing the creativity component—gives rise to what I propose as Integral Jazz Studies. As previously discussed, jazz musicians report vivid episodes of such heightened states, and it is thus no surprise that the tradition boasts a long legacy of leading artists who have significantly delved into contemplative practices and studies in order to enhance this dimension of their work and lives. And thus in addition to the common acknowledgment of Maslow as the founder of the humanist psychology movement, his work might also be regarded as important to the emergence of the integral jazz movement.

 It is from the standpoint of the creativity-consciousness relationship and its interior-exterior, integral dimensions that this chapter explores jazz’s journey into the academic world, the arena in which its integral properties, if harnessed, have the capacity to yield considerable impact on the broader educational mission, and by extension, society. In so exploring, we will make full use of our integral delineative and diagnostic faculties. For, as we are about to see, as rich as jazz might be in its inherent integral properties, academic approaches to the discipline have been strongly shaped by the overarching materialist patterns inherited from the broader musical and extramusical academic knowledge base. These will need to be identified and addressed if the field is to uphold the transformational function of which it is capable.

 Overview of Jazz Education

 In order to understand how materialist or self-confining third-person tendencies have taken hold in jazz study, it is first essential to acknowledge how the marginalized status of the idiom in musical academe, at least in part, contributed to them. Jazz not only brought to the academy a vastly different and expanded process spectrum that departed from the norm, it also introduced Afrological musicocultural features to which the prevailing Eurological culture was not receptive. To ignore the issue of race in any assessment of the situation would be a significant oversight. Between what LeRoi Jones reminds us was the “unbelievably cruel” circumstance of slavery dating back several centuries and reminders to what Karlton Hester candidly identifies as a musical “bigotry” still evident well into the twenty-first century, a topic to be explored in some depth, the dynamics of race in the broader society have clearly played out in musical academe. It is thus not surprising that jazz was overtly scorned and at times entirely forbidden, as Bruno Nettl points out, in university music departments. Oliver Lake recounts that this even included extracurricular jam sessions: “They didn’t consider jazz as music, and if they heard you playing jazz, you would be admonished. We would have to wait until all the instructors were gone, and then we would start jamming.” Dave Brubeck, reflecting on the early days of his college circuit performances, recalls “controversies at the institutions as to whether or not we should be allowed to play.” Underscoring entirely uninformed notions that playing jazz is somehow damaging to musical instruments, Brubeck adds that “[s]ometimes I would be led to an old, beat-up piano for the performance when there’d also be a great grand piano backstage that they wouldn’t let me go near.”

 While nowadays it is difficult to imagine a music department or school that forbids its students from curricular or extracurricular jazz activity, ample indicators of continued institutional marginalization may be cited. Perhaps most notable is the fact that, despite the idiom’s rich foundational skills, jazz remains largely excluded from musical academe’s core curriculum. Short units on jazz, which generally do not involve hands-on contact with the music, may be found in core music theory and history sequences, but full semester coursework in jazz improvisation, theory, composition, or arranging are relegated to elective status for all but jazz majors. Because music curricula tend to be filled to the brim with conventional requirements, leaving little time, space, or energy for electives, the result is that the majority of music majors—for whom interpretive performance and analysis of European classical repertory is the focus—continue to graduate with little or no hands-on engagement with jazz. This is most conspicuous in the case of American music students gaining certification to teach music in American public schools. As David Baker points out, “one or two courses in jazz”—which appears to be the best-case scenario, with many teacher certification programs including no jazz training—is not sufficient “to be able to adequately teach this music.”

 ~~Improvisation, Creativity, and Consciousness:Jazz as Integral Template for Music, Education, and Society -by- Edward W. Sarath

Day 306: Noise

One gorgeously warm and sunny August day in 1869, the Scottish-born American naturalist John Muir was wandering among the waterfalls, deep rocky valleys and ancient giant sequoias of the Yosemite National Park in the Californian Sierra Nevada. It was a place he adored. But on this particular day, instead of thoroughly enjoying himself as usual, he was thoroughly distracted, unable to settle or relax. As he explained in his diary the following day, what had troubled him was the way other people who had come to the park had been behaving:

It seems strange that visitors to Yosemite should be so little influenced by its novel grandeur, as if their eyes were bandaged and their ears stopped. Most of those I saw yesterday were looking down as if wholly unconscious of anything going on about them, while the sublime rocks were trembling with the tones of the mighty chanting congregation of waters gathered from all the mountains round about, making music that might draw angels out of heaven.

The birdsong, the ‘wind-music’ of the trees, the ‘joyous hum’ of insects, the ‘glad streams singing their way to the sea’: the sublime wonders of nature were all around, freely available to be seen and heard – perhaps especially to be heard. For as Muir once wrote, so rich in sounds was a park such as Yosemite that ‘even the blind must enjoy these woods’. Yet most visitors – busy catching fish, distracted by each other’s company, driving animals away with their chatter and their mules and horses – simply weren’t able to appreciate them. If only they could be ‘devout, silent, open-eyed, looking and listening with love’, he complained, their lives would surely be so much richer.

John Muir’s call for a ‘devout’ and ‘silent’ form of listening echoed a cry which reverberated right across the nineteenth century: a need for the sublime power of particular sounds to be experienced to their full effect. The pattern was set as the century opened and the Romantics talked up the virtue of listening closely to nature. Samuel Taylor Coleridge wrote of ‘the thunders and howlings of the breaking ice’ one winter’s night on the Lake of Ratzeburg, and how they had convinced him that there were ‘sounds more sublime than any sight can be’. In 1828 William Wordsworth even wrote a whole poem ‘On the Power of Sound’.

In the hands of the Romantics, and in the minds of naturalists such as John Muir, this reverence for close listening usually came across as reasonable, organic, even democratic and liberating, but it also contained the seeds of an attitude to sound that was darker and more authoritarian. In order for the sublime to be appreciated, people everywhere, whether in the countryside or the city, would have to reform their ways. And as the century progressed, it was this darker, controlling side to the art of listening that seemed to take root.

Just a few years after John Muir had written of his experience in California, in Bayreuth in Germany the foundation stones were being laid for the town’s magnificent Festival Theatre opera house. When it was finished in 1876, the Bayreuth theatre established itself as one of the world’s great temples of music and, in particular, as a mecca for those who worshipped the composer Richard Wagner, to whose work it was dedicated. And it really was worship in which they indulged. As Cosima Wagner put it when speaking of her husband’s compositions, ‘Our art – I dare say it – is religion.’ In the nineteenth century, many music aficionados, and not just the Wagnerites, came to regard their art in the same way. Yet, as it turned out, giving music a religious aura came at a price. Its most devoted followers would soon start creating their own dogma about how it should be heard, eventually crushing any behaviour that smacked of heresy. The new art of listening would turn out to be a rather uncomfortable mixture of wonder, politeness and brutal discrimination.

Only a century before, listening to music – even classical music – had been a surprisingly relaxed affair. This was largely because many people were not actually listening at all. Concerts were often held in restaurants. As Peter Gay has shown, even if musicians performed in the mansions and stately homes of the rich, it was often as ‘an agreeable backdrop for flirting, gossiping, dining’, and if they ever got the chance to perform in an opera house, they would still have faced a restless auditorium. There was no firm etiquette about arriving on time or leaving quietly at the end; instead, there was a constant stream of noisy toing and froing. A handful of music-lovers, clutching their librettos, might be conscientiously following the action on stage, but most of the audience would be chatting away throughout the performance, ‘as liveried servants hawked carafes of wine and oranges’ all around them. In the remote reaches of the upper balconies, prostitutes would also be plying their trade.

One could easily imagine the musicians themselves being in utter despair at this hubbub. Yet so used to it were they that silence unsettled them more. When Mozart performed in Vienna in 1781, he wrote to his father about how pleased he was at the screams of ‘bravo’ coming from the audience as he was playing. Orchestras rarely objected to their final bars being covered with shouting and applause. Indeed, usually neither performer nor composer could bear to wait until the very end of a piece before hearing of their audience’s approval: they would have taken silence as a sign of rejection.
Even in the eighteenth century, however, there were stirrings of change. Instead of offering merely a pleasing background entertainment, music was increasingly thought of as something capable of offering a sublime and deeply personal experience. For Charles Burney, who in the late 1770s was just beginning his epic General History of Music, music was – or at least should be – about being moved. Every listener, he wrote, had this right: ‘a right to give way to his feelings, and be pleased or dissatisfied without knowledge, experience, or the fiat of critics’. The critics, of course, continued to be influential in guiding wider public taste, and for many it was Beethoven who promised listeners the most sublime experience of all. The French writer George Sand, for instance, told Liszt of how she herself responded to the German composer’s music: ‘Beethoven makes you enter once again into the most intimate depths of the self; everything you have felt, experienced, your loves, your suffering, your dreams, all are revived by the breath of his genius and throw you into an infinite reverie.’

What, though, did treating music in this reverential way mean for the ‘ordinary’ music listener? A clue can be found in a painting now hanging at the Museo Revoltella in Trieste but which, right at the end of the nineteenth century, became something of an international sensation, travelling from country to country in the form of popular engravings and copies. Lionello Balestrieri’s Beethoven depicts a pianist and a violinist playing in a small, sparsely furnished room to an audience of five people. None of them, it seems, is making a sound or even engaging with the other four. Two men stare intently in the direction of the musicians – though are looking through them rather than at them, as if they’re hardly there; another man leans against a wall on which Beethoven’s death mask hangs, hands in pockets and looking down at the floor; a fourth sits bent forward, head in hands and eyes covered; a woman leans against one of the men, but ignores him as she stares into space, transfixed. These five people do not just remain silent; they are virtually unconscious of the world about them, swept away to the spiritual realm of the infinite. In other words, they are listening as if it were a sacred task.

‘Worshipful silence’ was being depicted on canvas because it was now the ideal form of listening. To reach a state of ecstasy, one needed to establish a direct and pure relationship with the music, and that meant concentrating. Silence wasn’t the same as passivity. It had an intensity to it. It was work. The listener was engaged in a monumental lifelong task of self-realisation and cultural improvement – what the Germans referred to as Bildung. And this meant, of course, that anyone who shattered the silence would be guilty of destroying the purity of the moment upon which this hard task depended. It was certainly acceptable to weep as you listened; indeed, why on earth would you not, given how beautifully a piece of music would evoke the depths of despair or the heights of love? But you needed to weep quietly, to let a tear roll down your cheek rather than wail out loud.

~~Noise: A Human History of Sound and Listening -by- David Hendy

Day 296: Peak : Secrets From The New Science of Expertise

One of the things that differentiates violin training from training in other areas—soccer, for example, or algebra—is that the set of skills expected of a violinist is quite standardized, as are many of the instruction techniques. Because most violin techniques are decades or even centuries old, the field has had the chance to zero in on the proper or “best” way to hold the violin, to move the hand during vibrato, to move the bow during spiccato, and so on. The various techniques may not be easy to master, but a student can be shown exactly what to do and how to do it.

All this means is that the violin students at the Universität der Künste Berlin offered a near-perfect opportunity to test the role that motivation plays in developing expert performance and, more generally, to identify what differentiates good performers from the very best.

To look for these differences, we interviewed each of the thirty student violinists in our study in great detail. We asked them about their musical histories—when they started studying music, who their teachers were, how many hours a week they spent in solitary practice at each age, what competitions they’d won, and so on. We asked them for their opinions on how important various activities were in improving their performance—practicing alone, practicing in a group, playing alone for fun, playing in a group for fun, performing solo, performing in a group, taking lessons, giving lessons, listening to music, studying music theory, and so on. We asked them how much effort these various activities required and how much immediate pleasure they got while they were doing them. We asked them to estimate how much time they’d spent on each of these activities during the previous week. Finally, because we were interested in how much time they’d spent on practice over the years, we asked them to estimate, for each year since they’d started to practice music, how many hours per week on average they had spent in solitary practice.

The thirty music students were also asked to keep daily diaries for each of the next seven days in which they would detail exactly how they’d spent their time. In the diaries, they recorded their activities in fifteen-minute increments: sleeping, eating, going to class, studying, practicing alone, practicing with others, performing, and so on. When they were done we had a detailed picture of how they’d spent their days as well as a very good idea of their practice histories.

The students from all three groups gave similar answers to most of our questions. The students pretty much all agreed, for instance, that solitary practice was the most important factor in improving their performance, followed by such things as practicing with others, taking lessons, performing (particularly in solo performance), listening to music, and studying music theory. Many of them also said that getting enough sleep was very important to their improvement. Because their practice was so intense, they needed to recharge their batteries with a full night’s sleep—and often an afternoon nap.

One of our most significant findings was that most factors the students had identified as being important to improvement were also seen as labor-intensive and not much fun; the only exceptions were listening to music and sleeping. Everyone from the very top students to the future music teachers agreed: improvement was hard, and they didn’t enjoy the work they did to improve. In short, there were no students who just loved to practice and thus needed less motivation than the others. These students were motivated to practice intensely and with full concentration because they saw such practice as essential to improving their performance.

The other crucial finding was that there was only one major difference among the three groups. This was the total number of hours that the students had devoted to solitary practice.

Using the students’ estimates of how many hours a week they’d practiced alone since they’d begun playing the violin, we calculated the total number of hours they’d spent practicing alone until age eighteen, the age at which they typically entered the music academy. Although memories are not always reliable, dedicated students of this sort generally set aside fixed periods to practice each day on a weekly schedule—and they do this beginning very early on in their music training—so we thought it likely that their retrospective estimates of how much time they had spent practicing at various ages would be relatively accurate.

We found that the best violin students had, on average, spent significantly more time than the better violin students had spent, and that the top two groups—better and best—had spent much more time on solitary practice than the music-education students. Specifically, the music-education students had practiced an average of 3,420 hours on the violin by the time they were eighteen, the better violin students had practiced an average of 5,301 hours, and the best violin students had practiced an average of 7,410 hours. Nobody had been slacking—even the least accomplished of the students had put in thousands of hours of practice, far more than anyone would have who played the violin just for fun—but these were clearly major differences in practice time.

Looking more closely, we found that the largest differences in practice time among the three groups of students had come in the preteen and teenage years. This is a particularly challenging time for young people to keep up their music practice because of the many interests that compete for their time—studying, shopping, hanging out with friends, partying, and so on. Our results indicated that those preteens and teens who could maintain and even increase their heavy practice schedule during these years ended up in the top group of violinists at the academy.

We also calculated estimated practice times for the middle-aged violinists working at the Berlin Philharmonic and the Radio-Symphonie-Orchester Berlin, and we found that the time they had spent practicing before the age of eighteen—an average of 7,336 hours—was almost identical to what the best violin students in the music academy had reported.

There were a number of factors we did not include in our study that could have influenced—and indeed probably did influence—the skill levels of the violinists in the different groups. For instance, students who were lucky enough to have worked with exceptional teachers would likely have progressed more quickly than those with teachers who were just okay.

But two things were strikingly clear from the study: First, to become an excellent violinist requires several thousand hours of practice. We found no shortcuts and no “prodigies” who reached an expert level with relatively little practice. And, second, even among these gifted musicians—all of whom had been admitted to the best music academy in Germany—the violinists who had spent significantly more hours practicing their craft were on average more accomplished than those who had spent less time practicing.

~~Peak : Secrets From The New Science of Expertise -by- Anders Ericsson and Robert Pool

Day 275: Drumming for the Gods

I met Felipe García Villamil, a master Afro-Cuban drummer and craftsman, in 1992, several years after I began to do research on the music of the Afro-Cuban religious traditions, especially Santería. During my research, I frequently heard Felipe's name mentioned by drummers and students in the Afro-Cuban dance class I was attending at the Boys Harbor in New York. At that time I was struggling with the constraints and problems posed by research into a corpus of music linked to Santería, where the tradition of secrecy is still an imperative that many practitioners adhere to, and where musical knowledge is transmitted through long periods of apprenticeship and through a series of networks that are not easily accessed, especially by women. I thought that identifying a knowledgeable teacher who would agree to work with me was the best way to further my research. In January 1992, I went for the first time to Felipe's house in the Bronx to receive a chekeré lesson. This marked the beginning of weekly trips to the Bronx that lasted, but for a few breaks, until the end of 1994.

After a month of chekeré lessons, I decided to concentrate on collecting religious chants and to make this repertoire the focus of my dissertation. I explained to Felipe the nature of my work and asked him if he had any reservations. At that time Felipe's activities as a ritual drummer were limited; lacking connections with the network through which batá drummers customarily get hired to perform at religious rituals, he was quite isolated and had concentrated his musical activities on teaching. His aim was to train a group of drummers in the Matanzas style of batá drumming, a style almost unknown in New York, where all the batá drummers were familiar with the style from Havana. Teaching had also become for him a way to struggle against forgetfulness, a way to remember. He viewed our work together as an opportunity to ‘‘let people know the way things were done in Matanzas and back there in Cuba.”

Felipe and I conceived these sessions as classes and followed the etiquette of the student-teacher relationship. At the beginning of each session I would turn the tape recorder on, and Felipe would begin to sing. He gradually began to teach me the large body of chants used to praise or address the Santería deities—the orichas—in ritual. When he began to sing for a particular oricha, he would tell me some of the myths or legends—patakís—that narrate events of the lives of the orichas and tell of their idiosyncrasies, personalities, and demeanors. However, the chants and the music would always bring memories of Cuba back to Felipe, and he would then tell me stories about his family and his life “back there.” Sometimes he got so carried away that we would end up not working on the chants, and he spent most of the time reminiscing. He would then apologize and promise to organize “the lesson” better for the next meeting, making sure we went over a large number of chants. Most of the time I would let the train of his thought unwind without interrupting him. However, on some occasions, moved by concern that I would never “get my work done,” I would take advantage of a pause between stories to try to bring him back to the chants by asking him politely to sing for me a chant for this or that oricha.

As my work with the chants progressed, my relationship with Felipe and his family—Valeria, his wife, and his children Ajamu, Miguel, Atoyebi, and Tomasa—grew closer. My lessons in some way became part of the family life and were interrupted and enriched according to the unpredictable and sometimes hectic rhythms of Felipe's everyday routines. After several months of working in the repertory of chants, Felipe, who knew of my desire to learn to play batá drums, invited me to join the lessons he was giving to a woman drummer, Nanette García. He had already explained to me his position with respect to the prohibition that bans women from playing sacred batá drums. He believed that women should never be allowed to play a consecrated set of drums; yet, he saw no harm in teaching to women the music, the rhythms that are played for each oricha, as long as these were performed on unconsecrated drums or on congas. This marked the beginning of my involvement with the drums, which lasted until November 1994, the last time Nanette, Felipe, and I played batá drums together.

The stories that Felipe used to interpolate between chants or after having taught us a batá rhythm constitute the basis for my dissertation and for this book, and they cover Felipe's activities as a musician until 1994. Music carried powerful associations for Felipe, and it was music that triggered his reminiscences. Thus, even after I had decided to use his stories as the main focus of my dissertation, I eschewed formal interviews and limited my questions to clarifying the stories or arguments that arose out of a musical experience, be it a chant, a rhythm, or a performing technique. Yet aside from music, another stimulus would launch Felipe into long monologues and explanations. This happened typically after Valeria read to him from some of the books that began to be published and circulated in New York about the traditions and the music of the Afro-Cuban religions, or after he had an encounter with someone who had in any way questioned his knowledge or his credentials. Aware of the nature of my project, he wanted to explain to me his view about a particular issue, taking this as an opportunity to “set the record straight.”

~~Drumming for the Gods : The Life and Times of Felipe García Villamil -by- María Teresa Vélez

Day 269: From Afro-Cuban Rhythms to Latin Jazz

Mongo Santamaría can be credited with making the Cuban drum known as the conga (or tumbadora) into an integral part of U.S. music,
whether jazz, rock-and-roll, soul, reggae, or other modern genres. No other percussionist achieved greater impact on the diffusion of Afro-Cuban folkloric music or recognition within mainstream jazz as well as through his own unique mixture of Cuban, jazz, and soul music. Following in the footsteps of Chano Pozo, Mongo’s labor, along with that of other percussionists such as Armando Peraza, Patato Valdés, Francisco Aguabella, and Cándido Camero, brought about a transformation in the traditional sound of jazz, rock, and R&B drumming. Today the conga is everywhere, either as lead instrument or as fundamental accompaniment to all kinds of music, from U.S. pop to Mexican norteña, from Latin jazz to Las Vegas show orchestras.

The musical biography of Mongo Santamaría reveals a constant back-and-forth between two styles of performance and recording. On the one hand, he distinguished himself as a performer of Cuban music in very traditional forms: folkloric rumbas, mambos, pachangas, and so forth. On the other hand, he developed his own style of fusion by combining jazz, Cuban-origin rhythms, and the sounds of soul music. Despite this ambidextrous career, Mongo was, in the end, a Cuban sonero, pure and simple. On several occasions he stated his commitment to maintaining the traditional styles of Cuban music and indeed helped preserve and develop Afro-Cuban drumming styles. His criticisms of salsa, which he considered an imitation of Cuban music, did not make him many friends. Yet he clearly admired and promoted the native sounds of all of the countries of the Caribbean basin.

Ramón “Mongo” Santamaría was born in the Jesús María barrio of Havana on April 17, 1917, the son of Ramón and Felicia. His father worked as a carpenter and mason and participated in the neighborhood activities of a national political party. His mother sold coffee, cigarettes, and candy in a street-corner stand.1 Mongo scarcely knew his African-born paternal grandfather, who had arrived in Cuba in a contraband slave-trading ship in the second half of the nineteenth century. But his maternal grandmother often cooked for bembés of the Santería religion, where Mongo began his drumming apprenticeship.


Growing up in Jesús María, a barrio famous for its drummers and the popular street carnival comparsa (band) La Jardinera, he was exposed from an early age to a rich musical environment. The year of Mongo’s birth coincided with the year the first Cuban son was recorded, the beginning of an era that it is still going strong with the Buena Vista Social Club, Cuarteto Patria, and many other groups. He witnessed firsthand the evolution of the son groups, from the original trios and quartets to the expanded sextetos and septetos, which added a trumpet and substituted the acoustic bass for the folkloric marímbula. Mongo was influenced musically by his maternal uncle, José Rodríguez (“Macho”), who led a neighborhood trio and played maracas with the Conjunto Jiguaní. Mongo’s mother wanted her son to learn to play the violin. But after a few lessons, the youngster decided that percussion was his calling. He played maracas and sang with neighborhood groups, La Lira Infantil first and, later, La Lira Juvenil. There were other important sources of inspiration. A cousin on his father’s side, Luis Santamaría, was a distinguished akpwón (singer) in Lucumí religious events. (He eventually became a founding member of Cuba’s national folkloric ensemble.) Mongo decided to take up the bongos after watching the amazing bongosero Clemente Piquero (“Chicho”)— who later played in Beny Moré’s orchestra—perform feats of dexterity on that double-headed Cuban drum.

Mongo was still in his teens when he became a professional musician. He played bongos for a group led by Alfredo Boloña and Marcelino Guerra—the latter the composer of many Cuban and salsa standards such as “Pare cochero” and “Me voy p’al pueblo.” Mongo’s first gig was at a well-known Havana nightspot, the Eden Concert club. In rapid succession, he went on to play with the most notable son groups of the 1930s. He played with the Alfredo León sexteto with pianist Silvio Contreras, composer of the catchy danzón “Masacre,” and bassist Cristóbal Dobal, who later would join the famed Conjunto Casino of the 1950s. Mongo also played with the Carabina de Ases sexteto. He recorded for the first time in the late 1930s with the show orchestra Lecuona Cuban Boys and with the veteran sonero vocalist Antonio Machín.

For many aspiring youngsters like Mongo, the dream of becoming a professional musician was nearly impossible given the realities of Cuban social conditions. The musicians’ ability to produce music was simply one more commodity in a capitalist market, and as such, it was subject to the tendency toward overproduction characteristic of capitalism. Simply put, there were too many musicians for the jobs available. Cuba’s sugarcane monoculture economy, dependent as it was on the United States, translated into structural unemployment in all branches of production. The local economy, built on a weak base, became further dislocated by the severe crisis of the 1930s. Within the vast mass of the unemployed, there was a musical reserve army of musicians desperately seeking opportunities.

~~From Afro-Cuban Rhythms to Latin Jazz -by- Raul A. Fernandez

Day 243: Broken Harmony

In this chapter I consider Shakespeare’s exploration of musical harmony as a means of political representation. Elyot’s treatise illustrates how smoothly the allegorizing rhetoric of musica speculativa moves from the classroom to the public sphere, where it presumes to explain the “ordre of astates and degrees.” As we saw in the last chapter, this rhetoric functions by obscuring the distinction between words about music and musical sound, so that music is made to seem naturally representative of an authorized narrative—of mathematics, cosmology, government, or anything else. In Neoplatonic writings, in particular, the postulation of secret or hidden meanings in music works to mystify—and therefore facilitate—the connection between the physical (“natural”) world and universalizing ideologies of order. It is perhaps for this reason that, in Renaissance England, Neoplatonic formulations of music sometimes seem to be more prevalent in political contexts than in academic ones. Likewise, in Shakespeare’s plays, Neoplatonic ideas of harmony are frequently invoked during moments when political actors attempt to legitimize or mythologize their power, even more so than in the scenes of instruction discussed in the last chapter. In this way, Shakespeare suggests that the ideological work performed by the rhetoric of musica speculativa, while useful in the classroom, is indispensable in the political arena.

In characteristic fashion, however, Shakespeare demonstrates the power of heard music to disrupt Neoplatonic models of harmony. Musical sound in the plays frequently grates against its rhetorical representation, exposing the political representation of harmony as a highly intricate shell game. Jacques Attali, the prolific French economist and former adviser to President Mitterand, famously claimed that “listening to music is listening to all noise, realizing that its appropriation and control is a reflection of power, that it is essentially political.” In plays from Julius Caesar to The Tempest, Shakespeare restores to music the “noisiness” that Attali sees as instrumental to its demystification. In this way, Shakespeare allows his audience to witness the political appropriation of music and compare it to their own listening experience, even, as we will see, at the risk of exposing his own plays as artificial constructions. Rather than make use of music’s interpretive promiscuity to create a sense of dramatic unity, Shakespeare’s plays often highlight the incongruence between language and musical sound—an incongruence that is always a possibility when someone attempts to describe an actual musical performance. As the teaching of music in early modern England makes clear, universalizing ideas about music are most persuasive when they are seen and read. They are constantly in danger of being unraveled by acoustic experience, and Shakespeare’s political plays frequently exploit this vulnerability. In each case, the point is clear: we may all agree on the meaning of music, until we are forced to hear it.
 ...
Perhaps the most explicit example in Shakespeare’s plays of musica speculativa being put into the service of political ideology occurs in Troilus and Cressida, when Ulysses famously scolds Agammemnon and the other Greek soldiers for their failure to observe political authority:

 The heavens themselves, the planets, and this centre
 Observe degree, priority, and place,
 Infixture, course, proportion, season, form,
 Office and custom, in all line of order.
 And therefore is the glorious planet Sol
 In noble eminence enthroned and sphered
 Amidst the other, whose med’cinable eye
 Corrects the ill aspects of planets evil
 And posts like the commandment of a king,
 Sans check, to good and bad. But when the planets
 In evil mixture to disorder wander,
 What plagues and what portents, what mutiny?
 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Take but degree away, untune that string,
 And hark what discord follows.
 (1.3.85–110)

 In this rhetorical tour de force, Ulysses sets up perfectly the traditional argument for musical harmony by articulating a model of cosmology founded on universal principles of proportion and form. The idea of the “untuned string” is a fitting analogy for dysfunctional government, but it is also presented as a real, physical manifestation of the universal principles of order that Ulysses cites as his ultimate authority. This double sense of the musical example replays the slippage between metaphor and sound that we find so often in writings about speculative music. Ulysses’ appropriation of this rhetoric is also fitting insofar as his speech reflects a larger cultural project, in which Rome—and by extension, its imagined origins in Troy—is constantly mythologized as the antecedent of a nascent British empire. As Heather James has noted, literary representations of Troy in this period, such as Chapman’s translation of the Iliad, “revitalized and politicized the epic ethos, however neoplatonized, in the Elizabethan consciousness of Troy.” While Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida repeatedly discredits this project, as James persuasively argues, it does not do so in the scene with Ulysses. For one thing, Ovid is conspicuously absent here; in a play suffused with literary contamination, the ambivalent version of Ulysses in book 13 of the Metamorphoses notably does not encroach. (There is a reason why the passage is so easily excerpted.) Rather, the scene adheres faithfully, more or less, to a Neoplatonic ethos, and the traditional image of musical harmony, much like the image of the harp in Peacham’s Minerva Brittana, functions neatly as a sign and guarantor of the naturalness of political authority.

Like the early modern pedagogical works on music, Ulysses’ speech in Troilus and Cressida demonstrates how a “politics of interpretation” precedes and enables the politicization of music. If the “untuned string” that Ulysses invokes is a convenient emblem for his political ideology, part of the reason is that the experience of musical sound has become subordinate to its inscription in rhetoric. There is, after all, no music heard in this scene. Ulysses’ injunction to his audience to “hark” does not actually implore them to listen with their ears. Rather, it forms part of a familiar rhetorical formula in which the imagined sound is already interpreted and understood before it is played, if at all: “And hark what discord follows.” At the same time, the political appropriation of music is extremely simplifying, even more so than the allegorical representations of music in works on musica speculativa. In its political guise, “music” is reduced to “harmony” or “proportion,” the mathematical ratios that describe only the most consonant intervals on the musical scale. All other aspects of music—melody, chromaticism, dissonance—are relegated to the “evil mixture [that] to disorder wander[s].” Defined in this way, music is a powerfully conservative force, and in this context an encomium of music can sound much like its opposite. Ulysses’ speech on harmony, for example, follows nearly point for point Gosson’s critique of theatricality in Playes Confuted: “In a commonweale, if privat men be suffered to forsake theire calling because they desire to walke gentleman like in sattine & velvet, with a buckler at theire heeles, proportion is so broken, beutie dissolved, harmony confounded, & the whole body must be dismembred and the prince or the heade can not chuse but sicken.” Gosson’s image of a “dismembred” commonwealth recalls his image of Musicke’s “dismembered” body in his earlier tract, The Schoole of Abuse. In Playes Confuted, however, the abuses performed on music are now made to represent, not merely be a symptom of, the widespread decay of social order. Bad musicians are not just unruly subjects; they are bad leaders.

~~Broken Harmony: Shakespeare And The politics of Music -by- Joseph M. Ortiz

Day 242: The Poetics of Rock

Bob Dylan’s original recording of “All Along the Watchtower,” like the rest of John Wesley Harding (1967), is an austere affair. Against the contemporary trends in recording, which tended in varying degrees towards the sonic opulence exemplified by Sgt. Pepper’s, and in contrast even to the “thin wild mercury sound” of Dylan’s own Blonde on Blonde album, it strips things down to an elemental level—bass, drums, acoustic guitar, voice, harmonica, three chords, and no obvious sonic manipulations. In this unadorned state the song’s themes of alienation and dread come across with an air of stark resignation.

By contrast, Jimi Hendrix’s recording of the song presents, from its powerful opening flourish, a dramatic narrative that imparts a very different meaning. Hendrix’s rendition has a heroic defiance about it. If the two approaching riders in the song’s lyrics represent uncertainty, if the wind and the wildcat represent danger, if the businessmen are the world’s agents of betrayal, and if claustrophobic confusion threatens to undermine the will of the protagonist, in this version of the song he is willing to pit his musical power against it all.

Hendrix uses various kinds of dramatic strategies in the course of the track to accomplish his transformation of Dylan’s song. In the series of guitar solos that come with each refrain, for example, he superimposes a long-range musical line—which unfolds in a steady ascent across the span of the entire piece—on top of the relentlessly repeating three-chord cycle. He also sharpens the narrative delineation of the track by way of extreme textural contrasts between verses and refrains. The significance of these gestures emerges over the course of the track. But at the beginning it is the sheer sound, the way it “leaps off the record and goes into your ear,” that lets us know we are in for something altogether different from the original version.

While the two tracks share the same song, their material elements are developed in quite different ways. In Hendrix’s version both the instrumental and the vocal performances have an intense urgency about them in their aggressive articulation and rhythmic drive. Throughout the track the timbres are more varied in color and affective significance and fill far more of the frequency spectrum than in Dylan’s version. From the highs of the cymbals and tambourines to the lows of the bass guitar and bass drum, the frequency space is put in play in a way that both animates the musical surface and delineates the track’s structural design. The Hendrix track also presents the ear with striking uses of echo and ambience, which play on our sonic consciousness like impressionistic reflections of the song’s lyrics. The echoes that trail behind their sources as they move across the stereo space resonate with the swirling confusion and untamed defiance of the song’s protagonist. And among the track’s many ambient images, that of the wood block stands out immediately; it casts a prominent shadow that disappears into the depths of the track, a sonic allusion to the “cold distance” from which the two mysterious riders approach. These are among the elements woven together to form the textural tapestry whose interaction with the song imparts the full sense of Hendrix’s recomposition.

The elements that I’ve sketched out fall into five broad categories that represent all of the sound phenomena found on records: 1) musical performance, 2) timbre, 3) echo, 4) ambience (reverberation), and 5) texture. It is the configuration of relationships among these elements that gives the Hendrix track, or any other track, its full meaning and its unique identity. In addition to their phenomenal aspect, these categories include the activities and processes that shape the sounds. Timbre, for example, may be affected by electronic processes such as filtering and compression. Ambient images may be tailored using a variety of ambience simulation techniques. Although these five categories are interdependent, in this chapter each will be explored as a discrete aspect of the compositional project. While this is partly for the sake of analytic discussion, it also reflects something of the compositional process. For in practice the compositional focus continually shifts between isolated elements, various groupings of elements, and the piece as a whole.

~~The Poetics of Rock: Cutting Tracks, Making Records -by- Albin J. Zak III

Day 176: Book Excerpt: How Music Got Free

Although he was one of their best customers, for the longest time Dell Glover couldn’t figure out how the smugglers were getting the compact discs out of the plant. Under Van Buren, Universal’s security regime was watertight. In addition to the randomized search gauntlet, employees were now required to pass their bags on a conveyor belt through an X-ray machine. The plant had no windows and the emergency exits set off a loud alarm. Laptop computers were forbidden anywhere on the premises, as were stereos, portable players, boom boxes, or anything else that might accept and read a compact disc.

On the production line, the pressing machines were digitally controlled, and they generated error-proof records of their input and output. The finished shrink-wrapped discs were immediately logged into inventory with an automated bar code scanner. Management generated an automated report for every run, tracking what had been printed and what had actually shipped, and any difference had to be accounted for. For a popular album, the plant might now press over a half million copies in a single 24-hour period, but advanced digital record keeping permitted the bosses to track their inventory at the level of the individual disc.

Once a wrapped disc exited the production line, it was not touched again by human hands until it made it to the store. The boxed discs were glued shut, then put on shipping pallets by robots. Automated laser-guided vehicles then drove those pallets to the warehouse, where employee access was strictly controlled. Only the loading dock workers were permitted to handle the boxes past this point.

And then there was the gauntlet. On an average shift, one out of every five employees was selected, and Van Buren’s randomized search regime had already nabbed several would-be thieves. Occasionally even this was not enough. Every once in a while a marquee release would come through the plant—The Eminem Show, say, or Country Grammar. These desiderata arrived in a limousine with tinted windows, carried from the production studio in a briefcase by a courier who never let the master tape out of his sight. After the glass production mold was sourced from the master, the courier put the tape back in the briefcase and left as mysteriously as he had arrived. When one of these anticipated albums was pressed, Van Buren would order wandings for every employee in the plant, from the plant manager on down.

And yet somehow even the high-value discs were making their way out. Glover could usually have them in his hands within a couple of days. What was going on? Had someone bribed a guard? Had someone disabled the alarm on an emergency exit, or managed to slip the discs through a crack in the doors? Was someone perhaps standing outside in a blind spot between the cameras and tossing the discs like Frisbees over the fence?

Glover began to think about how he would do it. First, he would have to get the discs out of inventory control. In this respect his position on the packaging line was perfect. Further down the line and the discs would be bar-coded and shrink-wrapped and logged in inventory. Further up and he wouldn’t have access to the final product. The packaging line was the only place in the entire plant where employees made physical contact with the finished discs.

Even better, work on the packaging line was becoming time-consuming and complex. This was one of the early side effects of the mp3, which was sonically equivalent to the compact disc but in any number of other ways superior. The files weren’t just smaller and cheaper than compact disc audio, they were also infinitely reproducible and utterly indestructible. Compact discs got scratched and cracked and stolen at parties, but an mp3 was forever. The only advantage the compact disc offered, therefore, was the tactile satisfaction of physical ownership. At Universal, packaging was all they were really selling.

When Glover had started in 1994, the job had been mindless. All he’d had to do was put on his surgical gloves and run the jewel case through the shrink-wrapper—that was it. Now album art was becoming ornate. The discs themselves were gold or fluorescent, the jewel cases were colorized in opaque blue or purple, and the album sleeves were thick booklets printed on high-quality paper stock with complex folding instructions. At every step along the way, the increased complexity introduced opportunities for error, and there were now dozens, sometimes hundreds, of extra discs printed for every run. These discs were deliberate overstock, to be used as replacements in case anything was damaged or smudged during the packaging process.

At the end of each shift, protocol instructed that Glover bring the overstock discs to a plastics grinder, where they were destroyed. The grinder was a simple device: a refrigerator-sized machine painted Heavy Industry Blue with a feed slot in the front leading to a serrated metal cylinder. The discs were dumped in the slot, and the cylinder crushed them to shards. For years, Glover had stood and watched as thousands of perfectly good compact discs were destroyed in the gears of the machine. And, over time, he came to realize that he was staring into a black hole in the Universal security regime. The grinder was efficient, but it was far too simple. The machine had no memory and generated no records. It existed outside of the plant’s digital inventory management process. If you were instructed to destroy 24 overstock discs and only 23 actually made it into the feed slot, no one in accounting would ever know.

So what Glover could do was take off his surgical glove while holding an overstock disc on his way from the conveyor belt to the grinder. Then, in one surreptitious motion, he could wrap the glove around the disc and tie it off. Then, pretending to prime the grinder, he could open up its control panel or its waste repository or its fuse box. Following a quick look around to make sure he was alone, he could secrete the gloved disc into a cranny in the machine, and grind everything else. At the end of his shift he could return to the machine and, while shutting it down for the day, grab the disc from its hiding spot.

That still left the security guards and their wands. Glover didn’t dare play the odds; although Universal calmly ensured him that the screenings were random, he knew that packaging line employees were especially likely to be targeted. He himself had been selected for “random” screenings hundreds of times. But as the guards had been watching Glover, he had been watching them too, and one day, almost by accident, he learned something interesting. Glover typically wore sneakers to work, but on this day he was wearing steel-toed work boots. When he was tapped for a screening, the guard scanned his feet and the wand let off a querulous whine. The guard asked Glover if the boots had steel toes, and Glover confirmed that they did. And then, without further inspection, the guard just waved him through.

They hadn’t made him take off his boots. They hadn’t patted him down or asked him any difficult questions. He had set off the wand, and there were no consequences. At that moment, Glover realized that the wandings were performatory. This wasn’t security, but security theater, a pantomime intended to intimidate would-be thieves rather than catch actual smugglers. And the low-wage security guards who ran the daily showings were just as bored of them as everybody else. If Glover could somehow fit the compact discs inside of his boots, he could finally get them out on his own.

But they wouldn’t fit. The discs were just a little bit too big. Still, the seed of the idea was planted, and over the next few months, as he patiently waited in line each day to leave the plant at the end of his shift, he gradually came to see it: belt buckles. They were the signature fashion accessories of small-town North Carolina. Everyone at the plant wore them. The white guys wore big oval medallions with the stars and bars painted on. The black guys wore gilt-leaf plates embroidered with fake diamonds that spelled out the word “BOSS.” The Hispanic guys wore Western-themed cowboy buckles with longhorn skulls and ornate gold trim. Even the women wore them. The buckles always set off the wand, but the guards never asked you to take them off.
Hide the disc inside the glove; hide the glove inside the grinder; retrieve the glove and tuck it in your waistband; cinch your belt so tight it hurt your bladder; position your oversized belt buckle just in front of the disc; cross your fingers as you shuffle toward the turnstile; and, if you get flagged, play it very cool when you set off the wand. Glover finally saw it. This was how the smuggling was done.

From 2000 onward Glover was the world’s leading leaker of prerelease music. At Universal he was well positioned—the orgy of consolidation in the corporate boardroom had led to an astonishing stream of hits on the factory floor. Weeks before anyone else, Glover had the hottest albums of the year literally at his fingertips. Kali acted as his controller, spending hours each week online tracking the confusing schedule of signings, acquisitions, divestitures, and pressing agreements that determined what disc would be pressed where, when. When Kali saw something that he wanted under the Universal umbrella, he tipped Glover, and the two had weekly phone calls to schedule the timing of the leaks.

~~How Music Got Free: The End of An Industry.. -by- Stephen Witt

Day 38: Book Excerpt: The Unwanted Sound of Everything we Want

One of my favorite depictions of noise comes from Kiran Desai’s 2006 novel, The Inheritance of Loss. Desai is a master of description who can create an unforgettable image with just a sentence or two; in her hands the graffiti inside a gum-studded Manhattan phone booth becomes “the sick sweet roting mulch of the human heart.” When her character Biju, a young Indian immigrant, encounters New York taxicabs, she writes,

    They harassed Biju with such blows from their horns as could split the world into whey and solids: paaaaaawww!

Obviously Desai does not require typographical gimmicks to create vivid impressions. Having those taxi horns “split the world into whey and solids” is impressive enough. Nevertheless, she chooses to break up the uniformity of her typeface and to have one nonword stand out amid scores of carefully wrought sentences, outrageously demanding our attention, because that is exactly what noise does.

Of course, noise does not have to be loud to have that effect. Harold Pinter’s darkly comic play The Homecoming contains a passage about the ticking of a clock during a sleepless night. Says his character Lenny:

 “All sorts of objects, which, in the day, you wouldn’t call anything but commonplace. They give you no trouble. But in the night any given one of a number of them is liable to start letting out a bit of a tick.” It’s possible Lenny suffers from hyperacusis, a condition in which certain sounds are perceived as painfully loud, though he has other troubles to keep him on edge. It’s also possible that someone else would be reassured by the ticking. In a song by rock group Death Cab for Cutie, comfort comes from the sound of a leaky faucet.

Noise does not even have to originate from an acoustical source. If Lenny was one of the millions of people who suffer from tinnitus (50 million in the United States alone, of whom at least 12 million have symptoms serious enough to require medical intervention), he might hear a ringing or buzzing in his ears, or a sound like crickets, a constant hiss, or an unceasing roar. He might hear it even if he were deaf.
…
Some people are not satisfied with calling noise “unwanted sound.”

One of them is Les Blomberg, founder and director of the Noise Pollution Clearinghouse in Montpelier, Vermont. Out of his small two-person office, to which he travels each day by bike, Blomberg maintains what is probably the largest accessible noise-related database in the world. For Blomberg noise is best defined by the name of his organization: It’s a pollutant. “Do we define air pollution as ‘unwanted particulates’?” he once asked me. On another occasion, he said that if he could go back and name his organization all over again, he’d get rid of the word noise.

With degrees in both physics and philosophy, Les Blomberg is the first person who helped me to understand noise as more than an annoyance. Though Blomberg’s interest in noise began when he was awakened by garbage trucks emptying dumpsters in his neighborhood at 4:00 in the morning, he claims not to be among the 12 to 15 percent of the general population who are acutely noise sensitive. For him noise is not “personal” the way it is for many anti-noise activists, but it is serious—too serious to be defined as “unwanted sound.”

Defining noise in this way is relatively new, Blomberg told me. It dates from the early decades of the twentieth century, when scientists and engineers were developing the electronic communication devices that would determine so much of our modern acoustic environment. (For a history of this period he referred me to Emily Thompson’s fascinating The Soundscape of Modernity 1900-1933.) To these experts, noise was primarily interference, static. It was a technical problem rather than a health issue or a social injustice. Ironically, this highly technical agenda gave us what Blomberg regards as an overly subjective definition. “Do we really want desire in science?”

To make his point, Blomberg gave the illustration of a kid who loses some of his hearing at a rock concert, something people have been doing in spite of repeated warnings for well over a generation. Rock concerts can reach sound levels in excess of 120 decibels, the equivalent of a jet at takeoff. (By way of comparison, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration requires that hearing protection be worn by workers with prolonged exposure to sounds exceeding 85 dB.) Most of us would say that the kid in Blomberg’s example was partially deafened by noise. But can we say that he was deafened by “unwanted sound” when he wanted to go to the concert, paid a lot of money to go, and may also have wanted it to be loud?

Probably he wants his MP3 player to be loud as well, a preference that has been blamed for contributing to the hearing losses of some 5 million children in the United States. As of now, one American child in eight has noise-induced hearing loss. Effects like these are trivialized, in Blomberg’s view, when we define noise in terms of desire.

~~The Unwanted Sound of Everything we Want -by- Garret Keizer