{"id":32,"date":"2017-01-18T20:28:13","date_gmt":"2017-01-18T20:28:13","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/tahunt.com\/sandbox\/?page_id=32"},"modified":"2017-01-27T21:13:08","modified_gmt":"2017-01-27T21:13:08","slug":"the-muse-learns-to-tap","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/tahunt.com\/sandbox\/the-muse-learns-to-tap\/","title":{"rendered":"The Muse Learns to Tape"},"content":{"rendered":"[This essay was published originally in\u00a0Reimagining Textuality: Textual Studies in the Late Age of Print<\/em>, edited by Elizabeth Loizeaux and Neil Fraistat (University of Wisconsin Press, 2002).\u00a0 The University of Wisconsin Press holds the copyright on this piece, and it is posted here with the permission of the press.]\n

A PREFACE OF SORTS<\/em><\/strong>:
\nEven for country kids like us attending “Calistoga Joint Union High School” seemed a joke to savor\u2014at least in 1966 with San Francisco in driving range.\u00a0 And on weekends we’d pool our money and head to the ballrooms for the lights and bands, and maybe even dance a little\u2014in spite of our pretty short hair and lack of costume.\u00a0 We heard bluesmen like Jimmie Reed and John Lee Hooker, jazzmen like Yusef Lateef, and an odd array of the soon-to-be-famous and never-to-be-heard-of-again (Cream to Sons of Champlin by way of Aum and Sanpaku)\u2014and yes the Grateful Dead and Jefferson Airplane, and when Jerry Garcia trucked on to that great Fillmore in the sky I found myself thinking that those evenings had something to do with the nature of textuality.<\/p>\n

Mostly we heard the San Francisco bands perform before we heard their records.\u00a0 We assumed\u2014so did the musicians I think\u2014that the performances were the “real” music (and one reason for Bill Graham’s success may have been that his “dance-concerts” felt like louder, more kinetic coffee house readings instead of the rock shows at the armories and gymnasiums where teens came to watch their treasured 45s acted out).\u00a0 So when one of our bands signed that contract that meant they were stars, we were pleased\u2014we thought of the musicians as friends we just hadn’t met. \u00a0But the recordings that followed struck us as lesser than the performances and performing.\u00a0 If they were more disciplined and more realized than what we heard on the weekends, they were also safer and more abstract.\u00a0 We were spared Country Joe McDonald (too ripped to tune his dangling guitar) weeping over the invasion of the DMZ as the Fish swam on waiting for their leader to compose himself enough to continue, but we missed that risk and glee of Marty Balin and Grace Slick spinning multiple choruses of “It’s No Secret,” the high notes bouncing off the Fillmore walls and ceiling but, at least it seemed so then, harmonizing perfectly.<\/p>\n

A music that stressed communal creation and consumption, spontaneity and individualism, the rejection of social and musical conventions, might have a great deal of vitality, even a certain authenticity, but of course record companies had little choice other than to distill what we valued\u2014the fluidity of performance\u2014if they were to construct marketable products, and we were too naive (for all our left-leaning politics) to respond with Gramscian critiques of this commodification of “our” music.\u00a0 We just assumed that music that was packaged to fulfill commercial conventions was somehow lesser and skipped the pleasures of The Beach Boys and Motown acts\u2014the costumes qua uniforms, the choreography, that ability to replicate in performance every note so precisely placed on those wonderfully realized recordings.\u00a0 And while our “taste” then (or lack of it) may say more about our assumptions about race, class, and region than I might like, our reactions also point to a dichotomy between music as performance and music as composition, between music as a process and music as sound constructed into a preservable, reproducible object.\u00a0 And it is here that Garcia and “textuality” begin to bear on each other.<\/p>\n

A few days after his death I saw a clip of a young Jerry describing the bluegrass festivals of his folkie days\u2014family affairs of picking around the pickup tailgates and savoring the locals and a headlining star\u2014the Stanleys, whomever.\u00a0 These festivals-as-occasions-for-community seemed precursors to his own aesthetic, and he noted that the promoters used to put electrical outlets along the stage for fans who wanted to tape the doings (early 1960s tape recorders weren’t as portable as today’s gear).\u00a0 He didn’t mention what Decca Records thought about fans bootlegging Bill Monroe, but he assumes it was square with Bill.\u00a0 To Garcia anyway, the point was to perform for an audience, and he apparently thought the point for the audience was to participate in the music as it happened\u2014each unique performance fully “real” only as it was unfolding.\u00a0 The reel of tape a fan might carry away wasn’t really the music, just a representation of an instance of it.\u00a0 The music was the performance: the being there, the matrix of performer, sound, circumstance, and audience.\u00a0 And the tape a fan might make would increase the desire to attend another performance (that it might reduce the demand for a commercially produced recording of the music was to Garcia, it seems, largely beside the point).<\/p>\n

For Garcia, then, there could be no adequate text of “Dark Star” or even “St. Stephen” if by “text” we mean a pure, final, fully realized, storable and reproducible representation of the “work.”\u00a0 The music is either a possibility (the skills, motifs, and patterns of interaction a set of performers use to enact a “work” by a semi-improvisational blend of creation and recreation), an actual moment of performance, or a memory of an array of performances (some documented, some not), among which one might have favorites but where none is the definitive representation or text of the work.\u00a0 It is hardly surprising, then, that the Dead seem initially to have been unsure how to represent their performing on their records and that the group’s early albums explore different strategies for managing\u2014or resisting\u2014the seeming fixity, the seeming definitiveness, the pressure to distill introduced by the decision to “make” a record as opposed to “playing” music.\u00a0[1]<\/a>)<\/p>\n

THE ALMOST THEORY BLUES<\/em><\/strong>:<\/strong>
\nFor the most part our debates about editorial theory derive from, and reflect, the typical occasion of our practice: works which now have their primary existence in scripted or printed language.\u00a0 Textuality, as we have debated it, is intertwined with writing.\u00a0 Even with such pieces as\u00a0The Iliad<\/em>\u00a0and the\u00a0Bible’s<\/em>\u00a0various \u201cbooks,\u201d we primarily work from (or toward) the moment they were given written shape.\u00a0 For one thing, we have no access to their prior states.\u00a0 For another, their oral “form” was likely a succession of forms, each retelling a semi-improvisational reinvention, only partly captured by writing’s fixity and linearity.\u00a0 A Grimm fairy tale, read from the printed page at bedtime, is not the same thing as the tale reinvented from memory with particular variations in performance for specific children before a particular cottage hearth.[2]<\/a><\/p>\n

Our emphasis on written materials points to an axiom I think most of us share: that a work must be physically embodied to be textual; it must have a preservable form apart from its creator or performer.\u00a0 This storage of the work in a stable medium can take the form of chirographic script, print, or musical notation (representations which can be reproduced and transmitted), or the work can itself be a unique physical object: a carving, a painting, a building (these are also experienced long after their production).\u00a0 But unless the creative process yields some such physically preservable and relatively stable form, the work ceases to be even as it is being performed, since the performance leaves no record.\u00a0 Instead of a “text” or “work,” there is only the potential (in the performers) to generate more or less analogous instances of the particular tradition through new, unique performances from the terms of practice that happen to define the “tradition” at a particular moment.\u00a0 And even this potential survives only while the tradition continues to renew itself through succeeding generations of practitioners and their performances for succeeding generations of audiences.<\/p>\n

This axiom points to textuality’s power and importance: unless practices and performances can be given a physically preservable form and thus be brought within what might be termed the textual horizon, they fade from the cultural record.\u00a0 And much of the vernacular art of the past has, quite clearly, been irretrievably lost because it was never given a textual form.\u00a0 However, as the example of the Grimm tale suggests, giving non-textual materials textual form alters them in significant ways.\u00a0 At least with writing (historically the most powerful and pervasive textual medium), using it to preserve oral materials transforms the materials even as they are preserved.\u00a0 Textualizing extends the circulation of oral traditions and practices; it prolongs their cultural life; but it also converts them from a set of elements, procedures, and occasions for performing a “work” (or rather enacting an occasion) into a single, fixed example of what those elements, procedures, and occasions might have produced.\u00a0 Valuable, even necessary, this textual recording and recasting replaces what was a cultural process or praxis with a cultural “artifact.”[3]<\/a><\/p>\n

In general we recognize that the conditions of textuality have changed across time.\u00a0 The textual modes of Homer’s\u00a0Iliad<\/em>, of sixteenth century manuscript culture, and of our own world of print are not the same, and (reasonably enough) we approach the editing of ancient epics, poems circulated in manuscript, and late 19th<\/sup>\u00a0century novels differently.\u00a0 We recognize, that is, that textuality is historically conditioned and that its terms and processes are intertwined with both social and technological factors.\u00a0 But at times we seem to forget (or at least take for granted) that textuality is “historical” in another sense as well.\u00a0 Most of the works we study and their textual representations were produced within and for textualized traditions or textualized so long ago that it is difficult to imagine them as anything other than textual.\u00a0 Moreover we are deeply enmeshed in the literacy that makes our textual practice possible.\u00a0 Both training and habit conspire to obscure not only how fundamentally the textual dynamic changes what it preserves but also to obscure that textuality is itself an historical development\u2014that there was a time (pre or post lapsarian) prior to textuality.<\/p>\n

To textual scholars, this pre-textual condition is seemingly beside the point, but its existence (even if now past) poses a question: to what extent is textuality’s transformational impact inherent in the nature of textuality itself and to what extent does it change with (and reflect) particular textual media?\u00a0 Until recently we might not have asked this question\u2014at least in this form.\u00a0 But two factors bring it into view and offer ways of exploring it.<\/p>\n

The first (implicit in much of what I’ve said) is the exploration\u2014initiated by the Homeric scholar Millman Parry and since extended by Eric Havelock, Walter Ong, and others\u2014of orality and literacy as counterpointed cultural modes.\u00a0 This research indicates that oral and literate cultures not only evolve different procedures for inventing and conserving verbal works but that “orality” and “literacy” encourage different modes of logic and support differing styles of cognition.\u00a0 The oral performer (whether of something as grand as epic or humble as African American folk blues) relates to his materials and shapes his “work” in a fundamentally different manner than the literate creator (whether John Milton or Barry Manilow).<\/p>\n

The second is the development of new modes of storage\u2014film, audio tape, video tape, and (more recently) various digitized media.\u00a0 Like written language, these can be used to store, multiply, and circulate cultural products.\u00a0 They are, that is, “textual” (the boom, first, in VCR movie rentals and, now, DVD rentals and downloads shows that they are used as such).\u00a0 These media, though, more nearly capture the actual texture and process of performance than writing; they offer a degree of transparency, a neutrality, that writing cannot manage.\u00a0 Recording a work in these new media, that is, requires less abstraction than writing does or musical notation.\u00a0 Reading the score of an opera is not the same as listening to a recording of it is not the same as watching a film of it (and none of these is quite a front row seat at the Met).\u00a0 Or perhaps more to the point: a videotape of a Homeric performance would bring us significantly closer to the dynamic of oral creation and the reality of that practice than the recovery of even the earliest manuscript of\u00a0The Iliad<\/em>.<\/p>\n

The greater transparency of these new textual modes highlights writing’s transformational power; it also moves us closer to being able to give non-textual works (folk and vernacular performances of various sorts) textual form while yet preserving something of their original, pre-textual dynamic.\u00a0 If so, the impact (if any) of these new textual modes on the performances and performance traditions they preserve should help clarify the extent to which textuality itself (not just written textuality) is transformational\u2014and perhaps something of the\u00a0way<\/em>\u00a0it is transformational as well.\u00a0 The nature and process of these newer textual modes might even have some relevance for the ongoing debate over the meaning of “work” and “text” and their relationship to each other, since these are terms that we have tended to address within the historical and technological context of writing without really doing much to determine the general validity of this specific and contingent textual mode.\u00a0 At least within the textuality of recording (whether audio or video), the categories of “work,” “text,” and “performance” appear to be not simply interdependent but also relative; they seem to take their meaning from the specific structures and dynamics within which pieces are produced and consumed; they seem, that is, elements that both enact and derive from what might be termed a “textual rhetoric” (of which our models for written productions are specific instances).<\/p>\n

2:19 BLUES:<\/em><\/strong>
\nRecorded music offers numerous illustrations of the contrast between music as a textual practice (where we assume either that a particular notated score or a particular construction of sound preserved on tape or vinyl is the musical work) and music as a tradition of performance.\u00a0 And it may be that Lennon and McCartney, Dylan, Garcia, Jagger and Richards, and some others owe their relative creative longevity, something of their staying power, and much of their ability to catalyze other performers to their having early on sensed this dialectic (each probably in different terms) and chosen to exploit it.\u00a0 Their work\/working can be “read,” that is, partly as an ongoing exploration of the collision between the pre-textual and the textual, between the flux of the oral and the stability of the constructed object, between the dynamics of folk practice and those of pop art.\u00a0 But rich as these examples are, they reflect what happens when performers whose heritage is primarily textual encounter practices that are essentially not textual and then try to accommodate to these new (actually old) possibilities\u2014the first generation of British rockers collecting the 1950s blues 78s of Muddy Waters, Howlin Wolf, Slim Harpo, and others; Dylan, Garcia, and others cutting their eye teeth and molars on the compilations of 1920s 78s of rural white and black southern performers (from Dock Boggs and Uncle Dave Macon to Mississippi John Hurt and Blind Lemon Jefferson).[4]<\/a>\u00a0For clarifying the dynamic of textuality per se, the more significant question is what happens when performers whose practice is primarily oral have their music “textualized” by recording without themselves necessarily having had to master a textual technology\u2014what happens, that is, when textuality, it might be said, overtakes a performance tradition.\u00a0 And for this, the early history of jazz offers a particularly suggestive set of examples.<\/p>\n

Histories of jazz typically note that it is a hybrid music that amalgamates African American and Western European materials and performance practices, and they often rehearse the probable terms of exchange in the century’s first decades between those African American musicians in New Orleans who were musically literate (i.e. could read music, had some knowledge of harmony, and had some training in how to play their instruments) and those who were musically illiterate (i.e. could not read music, whose instrumental technique was developed by trial and error, and whose approach to performing derived from the orality of African American folk musical practices).\u00a0 The politics and sociologies of this interaction are rich and complex, and have been debated at length.\u00a0 The point I would like to develop here is that this was a collision not only between the aesthetics of two different African American communities (one more middle class, one lower on the socio-economic ladder), between two different musical traditions, but also between an art that was fully textual (composed, preserved, and transmitted in musical script) and one that was non-textual (oral and performative).\u00a0 It is also important that initially, at least, the non-textual dynamic seems to have been the force driving this transformation, and since this re-oralizing of the compositional elements occurred prior to this music and performance tradition being recorded (and performances were neither fully nor easily notatable in conventional script), the amalgam that resulted had to depend\u2014initially\u2014for its preservation and transmission on the resources that typify oral folk practice\u2014memory, apprenticeship, and semi-improvisational recreation.<\/p>\n

At the turn of the century when ensemble jazz first developed in New Orleans, its explicit musical elements were the melodies and voicings of brass band marches, ragtime, and blues as these were borrowed and synthesized by amateur and semi-professional musicians whose small ensembles provided functional music for neighborhood dances and picnics, funeral processions, and the like.\u00a0 Some bands were as much social clubs as musical enterprises, and the musicians were essentially folk artists who evolved their practice through an improvisational give and take.\u00a0 Initially, that is, jazz seems to have been a performance tradition, a practice, learned by imitation, in which no two performances would have been the same.\u00a0 It was not a textual art, and the fact that the ragtime and march strands used in much early jazz had a written basis does not really contradict this, if we consider how these elements probably entered the vocabulary of these (for the most part) never recorded musicians: the way early jazz performers apparently recast these materials suggest they learned them aurally rather than from notated arrangements and that they circulated them aurally as well; these musically literate materials, that is, were functionally no different than the blues strands (oral material having no basis in written tradition) with which they mixed in practice.<\/p>\n

Ironically, the musically literate jazz pianist Jelly Roll Morton (initially piano players were an all but separate tradition to the small brass and woodwind ensembles that played the parades) offers one of the clearer demonstrations of what might be termed the “oralizing” of written musical material.\u00a0 In his 1938 Library of Congress interviews, he talks about both his development as a musician and the way jazz coalesced from, and out of, various performance traditions.[5]<\/a>\u00a0Although his tendency to mythologize his own centrality (at times it seems he’d have us think that his history and jazz history are one and the same) partly compromises his validity as a witness to early jazz, the musical demonstrations he offers with his tales still seem to convey something of the process by which he and others created the music.<\/p>\n

Morton could read and write music, had been exposed to both opera and non-vocal classical music, and could handle the written popular piano pieces that were a mainstay in polite white and black, pre-Victrola middle class parlors.\u00a0 He was also, though, a “professor” (i.e. a brothel piano player), a pimp, hustler, and gambler as occasion dictated.\u00a0 Operatic airs were not the musical currency of this realm; Chopin’s harmonic intricacy was in less demand than the rhythmic drive of the rural piano stylings being developed in the barrelhouse joints by self-taught musicians who were adapting rural folk blues to the piano.\u00a0 At the Library of Congress sessions Morton both recalled and demonstrated these two competing musical worlds\u2014one written and polite; the other oral, improvisational.\u00a0 And his key example was ragtime.<\/p>\n

As elaborated by Scott Joplin and others, ragtime is a composed music with clearly defined sections, multiple melodic themes, and precise counterpoint.\u00a0 Its chief innovation was using a mild syncopation (borrowed from the folk practice) as an element in written compositions that still foregrounded melody, harmony, and counterpoint.\u00a0 Ragtime, that is, formalized (and popularized) an aspect of the folk practice, and the compositions\u2014published as sheet music\u2014could be found next to such pieces as “Nola” and “After the Ball Is Over” on the pianos in those polite parlors.\u00a0 In the Library of Congress recordings, Morton plays Joplin’s “Maple Leaf Rag” twice: first (in a close approximation of the score) as he claims Joplin performed it, then as he used to play it in the brothels and bars.\u00a0 Playing the piece \u00e1 la Joplin, Morton articulates the melodic strands and counterpoint; he also carefully subordinates the syncopation to the melody and counterpoint.\u00a0 In this approach the harmonic features are clearly ordinate, the rhythmic feature subordinate, and the piece seems primarily something to listen to and appreciate for its formal, yet sprightly elegance.\u00a0 In offering the piece \u00e1 la Morton, though, Morton abstracts the melodic themes to their basic intervals and mostly ignores the counterpoint.\u00a0 He slights, that is, the elements that distinguish “Maple Leaf Rag” as composed music.\u00a0 Yet he isn’t just reducing the composition.\u00a0 His “Maple Leaf” has a rhythmic drive and variation that Joplin’s lacks, not simply because he emphasizes the syncopations but because he plays with them and because he uses his simplifications of the themes as occasions for both melodic and rhythmic improvisation; Morton replaces\u00a0 the intricacies of Joplin’s harmonic counterpoint with an equally intricate “rhythmic counterpoint.”<\/p>\n

If we equate sophistication with European art music and its foregrounding (at least until recently) of melody and harmony, ragtime as Joplin composed it and according to Morton performed it is a more sophisticated form than its jazzed interpretations (even when played by someone as sophisticated as Morton).\u00a0 Yet it’s no surprise that the oral (i.e. unwritten) blues stylings continued to flourish in the bars and brothels and that composed ragtime (even though it borrowed from this oral tradition) had to be subsumed back into the dynamic of oral practice in order to have a role outside the parlors and concert halls.\u00a0 There are several clear and important reasons for this beyond the technical limitations (for playing notated art music) of some of the musically illiterate bar and brothel pianists.\u00a0 One is rhythmic.\u00a0 In spite of its syncopations, composed ragtime is relatively static rhythmically, at least for the kinds of dancing in houses of ill repute.\u00a0 But there is also a fundamental “rhetorical” issue:\u00a0 With composed ragtime, the performer’s job is to render the text, and that text, that composition, that work, is the point.\u00a0 For a whorehouse tickler the composition (when there is one) is a means to an end rather than an end in itself; his job is to use his musical skills to interact with his audience and support their interactions with each other (dancing and so on).\u00a0 His musical materials and mode of performance have to support a certain improvisational freedom if he is to play to and for his patrons (even something as basic as duration is an issue here: when playing a text, the piece is over when it’s over, but in deploying materials improvisationally or semi-improvisationally, the piece can continue as long as there’s a need).<\/p>\n

Whether we prefer Joplin’s composition or Morton’s improvisational treatment of it (or neither or both) is a matter of taste, but it seems clear that Morton, while able to render Joplin’s text, was finally aiming at something else.\u00a0 His focus was less the composition as fixed and final text than how its elements could be redeployed and elaborated in the give and take of specific performance situations and for specific occasions.\u00a0 In his approach text and work were not one and the same; the written material was raw material from which to generate a series of performances (some more \u201craw,\u201d others less so), each distinct and different because specific to occasion, yet each related to the other.\u00a0 It might be said that for Morton each performance is\u00a0a<\/em>\u00a0work, while none of the performances is\u00a0the<\/em>\u00a0work.\u00a0 Morton’s interest was the fluidity of performance, not the fixity of texts.\u00a0 For him, Joplin’s ragtime was only useful if he could free it from the page and recast its themes and phrases (which he did).\u00a0 For all that he was himself a “composer” of a string of important jazz pieces, “King Porter Stomp,” “The Pearls,” etc. (some printed before he began recording) and an “arranger” of his music when he assembled small ensembles to record it, the pieces he wrote and the materials he borrowed (whether learned by eye or ear) were to be elaborated in performances that weren’t strictly limited to what was notated or fully represented by what was notated.\u00a0 They were occasions for improvisational expression and what was being expressed was not solely the text.<\/p>\n

As it happens, Morton’s responsiveness to the “oral” and performative in spite of his command of the written and textual can be heard in his December 16, 1939 performance of “Mamie’s Blues” for General Records.\u00a0 While he plays a simple blues figure, Morton comments,<\/p>\n

This is the first blues I no doubt heard in my life.\u00a0 Mamie Desdumes, this was her favorite blues.\u00a0 She hardly could play anything else more, but she could really play this number.\u00a0 Of course to get in on it, to try to learn it, I made myself the can rusher.[6]<\/a><\/p>\n

A notated transcription of this piece would offer no more than a simple and basic figure coupled with a few relatively standard blues verses, but as Morton savors the figures\u2014both the ones he plays and sings\u2014he not only infuses the piece with his own presence but projects something of what must have compelled him originally\u2014not Desdumes’ “composition” nor the text she probably could not have written, but her ability to use these few elements to perform her moods.\u00a0 What Morton seems to have learned from Desdumes and other figures who were\u2014at least musically\u2014of the folk world, was their stance, a stance that was part of his ability to co-opt and transform the written texts of Joplin and others and part of his ability to make something as formally threadbare as “Mamie’s Blues” seem emotionally and musically resonant.<\/p>\n

I THOUGHT I HEARD BUDDY BOLDEN SAY:<\/em><\/strong>
\nMorton’s ability to read and write music means he is a somewhat tainted example for these issues.\u00a0 More compelling would be, say, a turn of the century recording of Mamie Desdumes herself playing her blues or trying out one of “Maple Leaf Rag’s” strands by memory and ear (if she could).\u00a0 Unfortunately, we have little direct evidence for how the earliest jazz musicians approached their materials in performance.\u00a0 Such legendary figures as trumpeter Buddy Bolden did not write the pieces (as Morton sometimes did) that he and his small band played at dances and probably couldn’t write music in any case.\u00a0 Nor were these earliest performers recorded.\u00a0 When Bolden’s group was the rage, cylinders and 78s were for more “polite” musics.\u00a0 African American musicians playing crude dance music in New Orleans weren’t candidates to record, and we “know” their work mostly through the descriptions of those who heard it and the recordings of slightly later figures (King Oliver, Bunk Johnson) who were influenced by it.\u00a0 (A couple of Bolden’s near contemporaries, Freddie Keppard for one, did record a few sides but were well past their prime when they did so, and by that time the newer styles of Armstrong’s and others had already somewhat altered the way jazz was played.)\u00a0 Like Homer, Bolden is beyond the textual horizon\u2014legendary, foundational, and only partly knowable.<\/p>\n

What we do know, though, suggests that early jazz was a music where the performers drew on a stock of figures (for the most part learned by ear or so transformed when gleaned from the written text that they quickly became part of the memorized pool of materials with an existence both separate and different from their original textual form) and that the performers elaborated this stock of figures in a collective and semi-improvisational manner as they responded to each other and their audience (usually an audience of dancers).\u00a0 It seems, that is, to have been a music where the process of the performance (and one’s participation in it whether as player, dancer, or listener) was primary; the songs and structures were scaffoldings for the real “work” which was performing and the participation it enabled.\u00a0 Although this early jazz was first and foremost an ensemble music, the logic of it somewhat parallels the practice of pre-literate oral poets whose art also seems to have been their ability to select elements from a learned stock in the flow of performance and embellish them in response to a specific occasion and audience (jazz riffs as Homeric epithets?).\u00a0 And the logic of this early jazz practice (even though it is inferred and necessarily generalized) is enough to allow us to begin to identify the impact of recording on jazz\u2014the effect, that is, of bringing the oral practice of early jazz within the textual horizon.<\/p>\n

When record companies first began recording jazz extensively around 1923, the musicians were, it seems, primarily attempting to play in the studio as they would have performed for an actual audience.\u00a0 For one thing, a group like King Oliver’s Creole Jazz Band would have had no reason to think of the recording process as anything other than a way to represent what they played live, since that had been their only experience of playing to that point.\u00a0 Yet no one has ever mistaken these early 78s for full and transparent representations of what Oliver’s group played at dances.\u00a0 For one thing, before the introduction of the “electric” microphone, jazz drummers could not play as they normally would without popping the needle out of the wax platter that was the actual recording medium.\u00a0 Also, the size of the platter limited performances to about four minutes, and the sound captured by the horn into which the musicians played was thin.\u00a0 But even with these limitations and distortions, those first 78s of King Oliver’s music are an infinitely richer record than we have of Bolden’s.<\/p>\n

Moreover recording introduced a fundamentally new way to textualize a musical performance.\u00a0 Instead of having to represent the performing by abstracting it into some variety of code (either by describing it in written language or translating it into musical notation), a performer could inscribe the music directly on the wax (later the acetate, then the tape) as he played.\u00a0 King Oliver did not have to translate his performances into musical notation to produce textualized instances of “Dipper Mouth Blues,” “Snake Rag,” and “Alligator Hop”; he wrote them with his trumpet, and this simultaneity of the performing and the inscribing minimizes the difference between performance and the representation of performance in a way that differs qualitatively from earlier textual modes.<\/p>\n

This dynamic, this blurring between the act of performing and the act of encoding a representation of the performing, seems to suggest that jazz recordings would become an increasingly full and faithful representation of what musicians actually created in live performances as the fidelity of the recordings improved.\u00a0 In one sense this is what happened.\u00a0 By the late 1920s, 78s could store a fuller image of the actual sound of the instruments.\u00a0 By the late 1930s amateur recordings were being made of groups playing for actual audiences (one a complete 1940 dance the Ellington Orchestra played in Fargo, North Dakota).\u00a0 And today’s tape and CD world can leave us wondering whether it’s Ella or Memorex.\u00a0 We have, it seems, reached the point where recording reproduces performance so fully that a music like jazz could remain fully a praxis, a process, yet attain (or be given) the permanence and reproducibility of a textual artifact.<\/p>\n

But this isn’t quite where we’ve ended up.\u00a0 Ironically, as recording technology improved and made it more possible to capture and transmit jazz as a practice, composition also became a more central feature; the music itself gradually became more of an artifact (and not just with such self-conscious efforts as Paul Whiteman’s to legitimize jazz as a concert music).\u00a0 First, the collective improvisation of Oliver’s generation gave way to the practice of the individual musicians soloing in a predetermined order over a more or less composed accompaniment largely determined before the performance.\u00a0 Then as ensembles grew in size (and more jazz musicians could read), written arrangements became common.\u00a0 By the late 1930s (only fifteen years after jazz recordings became common) jazz had developed from being essentially a folk practice (a process for generating performance) into a popular art (a commodity where each performance of a piece by a musician or group was expected to closely resemble a previous performance of the piece) and in some instances (Ellington, for example) even a composed art music.<\/p>\n

The various socio-economic and biographical elements jazz histories cite to explain these developments were certainly factors.\u00a0 But so was the dynamic of textuality that recording added to jazz, and it is all the more telling that this seems to have happened even though this textual technology enforced less abstraction than writing.\u00a0 Recording did more, that is, than just make it possible to store actual jazz performances (albeit in imperfect form) and thus allow them to be reproduced and transmitted.\u00a0 Recording\u2014by making an artifact of performance out of actual performance\u2014fundamentally shifted the performer’s relationship to his materials and audience and thus to his practice.\u00a0 With the advent of recording, performance could be understood not only as a means and end in itself but also be a means to a specific end (the distillation of the recording) or it could take the form of a self-conscious recasting of a previously recorded performance that both performer and audience might already hold in mind as a model for what the piece was supposed to be.<\/p>\n

Recording’s impact is apparent as early as Louis Armstrong.\u00a0 There were few (any?) jazz musicians in the late 1920s who did not spin his Hot Fives and Hot Sevens over and over, and his bravura flights were carefully analyzed and imitated (they could be precisely because they were recorded), and this mode of learning was quite different from standing next to the bandstand trying to catch and remember the details of a live performance or later talking over the performance (even with the performers).\u00a0 Textualizing the music, even with a medium as neutral and transparent as analogue recording, thus helped create, then enforce and accelerate, the move in jazz toward working from composed materials, toward more fully elaborated compositions, and toward the adoption of musically more and more complex and abstract materials.\u00a0 And this shift is analogous to the shift that Ong and others (as noted above) contend occurred with the transition from orality to literacy, a transition that (like jazz’s transition to textuality) inclines us to become more committed to the distillation of “finished” aesthetic objects than the participation of praxis.<\/p>\n

The analyses Ong and others offer of literacy help explain why this might be so.\u00a0 The key element in the development of literacy (the intertwined technologies of writing and reading) is the capacity it provides to store verbal performance in a medium other than individual memory (and the complementary capacity to derive an image of the performance by processing the stored visual marks), and this capacity encourages a progressively greater awareness of our verbal performances as things in themselves rather than transitory (if powerful) gestures.\u00a0 Verbal performances become potentially created objects that have a fixity beyond the dynamic of performance.\u00a0 And like the shift to literacy, the shift to textuality encourages the sense that the records of our various performative acts can be scrutinized, revised, manipulated, perfected.\u00a0 It provides a necessary basis, and in part the impetus, for a folk art to evolve from a process or practice into a self-conscious art tradition that preserves the aesthetic objects produced within it.<\/p>\n

If this is so, it suggests that two factors drive textuality’s transformational capacity: one is the greater (as with writing) or lesser (as with tape recording) abstraction of the storage medium, which can gradually drop from view (both for the practitioner and consumer) as the practitioners learn to think primarily in terms of creating specifically for the medium or as the medium becomes increasingly able to capture actual performance without diminishing its texture or resorting to abstract encoding.\u00a0 But there is also the way textuality itself (of whatever sort) changes the practitioner’s relationship to past gestures within the tradition by “storing” and foregrounding a particular array of works\u2014by encouraging, that is, the view that the “art” is more a product than a process and that these products can be copied or be an occasion for further refinement or extrapolation.\u00a0 The example of jazz suggests that this transformational dynamic is even more fundamental than the greater or lesser abstraction enforced by the particular medium of storage.\u00a0 Textuality seems, that is, to encourage (and certainly enables) a self-conscious mixing of styles and gestures that have been learned through the study of more or less stable artifacts, and practitioners of textualized arts thereby stand in a different relationship to their materials, their audience, and their tradition than do practitioners of arts that are not textual.<\/p>\n

DEAD HEADS\/DEAD ENDS:<\/em><\/strong>
\nThe apparent impact of the capacity for textuality on the development of jazz suggests that textuality enforces a gradually greater hegemony of the compositional and that this progressively eclipses the performative.\u00a0 If the focus here were literary we might be inclined to consider such pieces as\u00a0The Waste Land<\/em>\u00a0and\u00a0The Cantos<\/em>\u00a0as projects where (triumphantly to some) a textually supported aesthetic of composition and construction nearly effaces the personality of performance.[7]<\/a>\u00a0But just as the aggressively performative “Howl” demonstrated that the high modernist aesthetic was not the end of the story, part of the significance of jazz (for this study anyway) is the way its performative origins (its orality) exist in a still unresolved dialectic with the compositional capacity that the textuality of recording encourages but does not enforce entirely, and this dialectic between the impulse to value improvisation and the personal expression of performance yet move toward the distillation of recorded composition is potentially not only a way to clarify the evolution of jazz as a music but may even be a key element of what jazz expresses, since the jazz creator often seems to be negotiating a liminal space between the performative and the textual and seeking out strategies that will either express both or (in some way and if only temporarily) resolve their potential dissonance\u2014a space evoked by the old jazz joke about the musician who interviews for a job with a big band and is asked can he dot (i.e. read the dots of a musical score) and answers “Yes, but not enough to hurt.”\u00a0 And this same bifurcation between the oral and compositional can be found in the practice of the quite real and modern John Coltrane who\u2014when handed a transcription of his famous solo on “Giant Steps” and asked to play it\u2014replied that he couldn’t play what was notated because it was too hard (and this in spite of his ability to sight read and play intricate and demanding written exercises on his tenor).[8]<\/a><\/p>\n

Jazz, that is, in both its history and current array of practices seems not only to help clarify the nature of textuality (in the sense of encoded storage and reproducibility) and to argue that textuality’s impact is fundamental and unavoidable once introduced, but jazz also suggests that the tendency toward construction and composition that textuality encourages does not (even over time) eliminate the emphasis on performance on which oral practices necessarily build but instead leads to a situation where the performative and compositional interact in varying ratios in the work of different individuals and traditions.\u00a0 And these ratios, along with the interacting dynamics of different modalities of storage, transmission, and consumption might be said to define specific, distinctive rhetorics of textuality.<\/p>\n

BATTLE OF THE BANDS: ANTHEM OF THE SUN meets SOMEBODY TO LOVE:<\/em><\/strong>
\nUntil fairly recently the textual rhetoric of most jazz recordings has actually been relatively simple.\u00a0 A Coltrane album is supposed to allow us to feel that we are participating in the spontaneity of an actual performance to an actual audience (minus the cigarette smoke, clinking glasses, and the boor at the next table who thinks he’s suave but is only loud and pretentious).\u00a0 At times this requires at least some distillation (studio performances tend to be shorter than those for a physically present audience), and at times what one hears on record has actually been honed in the studio across various takes.\u00a0 But even so, much of the recorded jazz legacy has involved musicians recording performances and then choosing which ones to release in a process that echoes King Oliver “waxing” his notes.\u00a0 The reason for this is partly economic.\u00a0 Jazz records sell modestly compared to pop music; studio time costs money, and jazz records have typically had to be produced cheaply to be commercially viable (the studio constructions of Miles Davis and Teo Macero after Davis began experimenting with fusion and became something of a pop star stand as the exception that proves the rule).\u00a0 That both jazz musicians and patrons have wanted to continue to believe that the music’s significance is that it is at root performative (expressive, improvisational) is also a factor; no matter how many times we might play Armstrong’s “West End Blues” or Coleman’s “Lonely Woman,” we still want to believe the lines are being invented right then for us as we listen.\u00a0 These factors may explain why textuality’s impact on jazz has tended to be more on how the music is performed and what is written for performance (with recording as transparent as the technology permits) than on experimenting with the ways recording can itself be used to construct compositions.\u00a0 (Even when the technology of tape recording matured to the point that it allowed for multi-tracking and building a “performance” from pieces spliced from different takes and partial takes, the jazz recordings actually released continued to be typically integral performances with here and there a chorus or two snipped out for reasons of length or structure or, when units from several different takes were spliced together, were carefully managed to convey the illusion of an integral performance.)[9]<\/a><\/p>\n

With pop music, though, the sense that recording was actually a way to construct a product rather than to preserve and circulate a performance more broadly took hold more quickly and completely\u2014at least with the producers and executives pitching 45s to the teen market and looking for a hit.\u00a0 These producers were not simply constructing pieces of music to sell but constructing the performers into marketable commodities as well.\u00a0 As Bill Parsons (aka Bobby Bare) has it in “All American Boy” (a ditty cut right after Elvis got drafted): “Come here cat, I’m gonna make you a star,” and our tendency to see Phil Spector as the star of the 45s he produced (not the ostensible performers) is not only because he had the ego to claim he was a musical genius.\u00a0 The textual rhetoric of the pop 45, then, is about as straightforward as the one governing most mainstream jazz recordings\u2014but happens to be its opposite.<\/p>\n

Yet as the example of The Grateful Dead (to round at last toward the beginning) suggests, not all textual rhetorics are as direct as those of mainstream jazz and 1950s rock and roll.\u00a0 Of the 1960s San Francisco bands, The Dead proved not only the longest-lived but also the most committed to the improvisation and experiment of live performance, and their allegiance to praxis, their decision to emphasize the participatory give and take of the moment, meant that each dance concert could (and did) involve substantially different renderings of the musical skeletons on which they wove their performances.\u00a0 Those of us who trekked to the ballrooms for the group’s amplified amalgam of jug band, blues, and bluegrass came to accept that the price of what seemed at times stunning and revelatory flights were other times when the music was (to be kind) amorphous and meandering (the band that lives by the risk of a collective semi-free-for-all dies by the risk of a collective semi-free-for-all, amen, so be it).\u00a0 At issue here, though, is not so much what The Grateful Dead was like in its early years for the Fillmorites and Avaloners but rather what happened when the band came to record\u2014when its emphasis on praxis collided with Warner Brothers’ goal of recasting that praxis as the product of salable records.<\/p>\n

When Warner Brothers signed The Grateful Dead (in part because the media had proclaimed that a “San Francisco Sound” might be the next market trend) AM radio was the main way record companies marketed their product (FM “underground” radio wasn’t yet a factor much beyond San Francisco).\u00a0 Radio listeners bought the 45s that caught their ear (and sometimes albums that included these songs), and radio programmers expected songs to be no more than about three minutes (longer songs left too little time for commercials).\u00a0 It’s thus not a surprise that\u00a0The Grateful Dead\u00a0<\/em>(1967),[10]<\/a>\u00a0recorded in three days, has six songs less than three minutes long, and that only the ninth and final track, the ten-minute “Viola Lee Blues,” is long enough for the improvisational elaboration that typified the group’s performances (another track, “Good Morning, Little School Girl,” fades precisely just as the band begins to modulate from the basic song into improvisational territory).\u00a0 Producer Dave Hassinger’s goal seems to have been (not surprisingly) to pull some brisk pieces from the band’s repertoire and distill them into something that would have some chance of radio play\u2014and thereby create a market for the album.\u00a0 But though brief and upbeat, the track released from the album as a single for radio play, “The Golden Road (to Unlimited Devotion),” was too strange, ragged, and swirlingly kinetic to pass as a pop object.\u00a0 It wasn’t “Good Vibrations” or “Mickey’s Monkey” (each in their different way perfectly constructed AM pop); it wasn’t even “White Rabbit” or “Somebody to Love” (the two instances where a 1960s bay area band successfully constructed something for the pop marketplace).\u00a0 The only region where either “The Golden Road” or\u00a0The Grateful Dead<\/em>\u00a0sold even modestly when first released was, not surprisingly, San Francisco.<\/p>\n

In the months after this first encounter with the recording industry, the group (if anything) became even less of a marketable rock and roll band.\u00a0 Expanding the group to include a second drummer added complex polyrhythms to their performances and rendered the songs themselves even more secondary, and the commitment to improvisation increased with pieces stretching out until a single improvisation at times might fill an entire several hour set.\u00a0 The Dead had, that is, become even less recordable\u2014at least if by \u201crecordable\u201d we mean constructing recorded product for either the market of AM radio or the market of record stores, and at one point the band declared that its first album would be its only one and that it would henceforth focus exclusively on performing.\u00a0 Yet in 1968 the band (and Warner Brothers) released\u00a0Anthem of the Sun<\/em>.[11]<\/a><\/p>\n

On the first album, the group’s improvisational performing had been secondary (if that) to the company’s agenda of recasting the band’s “songs” as AM product.\u00a0\u00a0Anthem of the Sun<\/em>, however, was constructed as if the AM market didn’t exist (or had been dismissed as simply irrelevant).\u00a0 Instead of short pieces, it presents what are essentially two compositions, each taking a whole side of the album (one a medley of three “songs,” the other of two) and fashioned by splicing and layering units recorded in concert (the cover lists the fourteen performances as sources) with units generated in the studio (including pieces of “Electronic Tape” influenced by the experiments in electronic music and electronically manipulated sound then current in classical music).\u00a0 The way these discrete units have been amalgamated resembles the way a film maker might use film stock generated at different points under different circumstances to fashion the illusion of a continuous action from the various bits and thus construct a scene or even an entire movie.\u00a0 Ironically, the result of all this assemblage is an album that more fully evokes the band’s improvisational performing practice in this period than the first album and actually projects something of its sound at full rumble\u2014even as one registers the electronic effects and the splices where pieces from different taped performances butt against each other (in fact\u00a0Anthem of the Sun’s<\/em>\u00a0manipulated material probably sounds more like the band in concert than the unmanipulated concert recordings of the band’s fourth album,\u00a0Live Dead<\/em>).<\/p>\n

Anthem of the Sun’s<\/em>\u00a0two sides are, that is, meticulously constructed yet seem to unfold as performances; they are\u2014paradoxically\u2014compositional representations of the group’s improvisational aesthetic, and as such they reflect an intriguing attempt to use the long playing album to mediate the compositional and performative and to fuse them.\u00a0\u00a0Anthem of the Sun<\/em>\u00a0derives from concert material, evokes a concert, but is not a concert.\u00a0 It mimes the band’s performance practice in the way it incrementally modulates and elaborates the rudimentary materials of the “songs” but has a compositional density, a kind of architecture, and a clearer sense of form than an actual performance.\u00a0 In performance, the music is invented in real time as played and is meant to be heard\/experienced once; on the album the music has been chosen, shaped, revised, and reconsidered and is meant to be listened to over and over.\u00a0 For all that the album conveys the spontaneity of improvisation, it neither rambles nor detours.\u00a0 The album might be termed a “composed performance” (as opposed to a performed composition), and it is this textual hybridity that is finally significant (and no, this is not been an attempt to canonize\u00a0Anthem of the Sun<\/em>\u00a0as a crucial post World War II musical episode).<\/p>\n

Without textuality, we have only performance.\u00a0 When textual media entail considerable abstraction (as do both the alphabetic representation of spoken language in writing and the notation of music as dots and lines on a page when they recast transitory sound as more permanent visual codes), textuality seems to encourage an emphasis on construction and composition.\u00a0 More transparent textual technologies (such as tape recording), however, tend to promote a blurring of these two capacities by promoting a compositional consciousness in oral performers and a fascination with the oral mode among at least some whose primary reference has been the compositional realm that abstract notation supports and helps enforce (it would perhaps be worthwhile in this context to consider as well the quite different experimental agendae of such composers as Partch, Cage, Feldman, Harrison, Crumb, and more recently the minimalists, perhaps especially Terry Riley).<\/p>\n

A CODA OF SORTS (ONE MAN’S CEILING IS ANOTHER MAN’S FLOOR or HAVE YOU EVER BEEN TO ELECTRIC TEXTLAND:<\/em><\/strong>
\nIn spite of some fine Garcia solos and stirring kazoo cadenzas, The Grateful Dead’s attempt to be both live and “memorex” on\u00a0Anthem of the Sun<\/em>\u00a0was a commercial flop, which may be one reason why the group never tried this hybrid mode again.\u00a0 Its later albums either use the studio to render songs\u2014Aoxomoxoa<\/em>,\u00a0Working Man’s Dead<\/em>, etc.\u2014or are compilations of recordings of live performances\u2014\u00a0Live Dead<\/em>,\u00a0Europe ’72<\/em>, etc.\u00a0 For The Dead, that is, the solution to the polarity of pop artifact and oral performance was, finally, to treat the polarity as a given and explore its two possibilities separately.\u00a0 Its communal aesthetic, a sort of tie-dyed update on those bluegrass festivals Garcia fondly remembered, may have encouraged it to see recording and the marketing of recordings as a complement to performing.\u00a0 One made music because one enjoyed the process of making music and enjoyed drawing in those who came to listen\u2014to participate.\u00a0 Recordings were another outlet for the music, but they weren’t the music.\u00a0 Recordings could be treated as secondary.<\/p>\n

In part, The Dead’s resolution to the polarity depended on the willingness of those in the group not to be pop stars (that Garcia had become a kind of folk icon even before his death complicates but doesn’t contradict this) and to work out their own (eventually highly successful) sub-economy on the margins of the pop music industry.\u00a0 For a figure like Jimi Hendrix whose ambition was to be a pop star, the challenge, though, was to confront the polarity between pop artifact and oral performance, do so within the context of commercial music, and do so in such a way that one somehow altered or mastered it if one was to be fully an “artist” (as opposed to being one’s self a pop product).\u00a0 And for all his experience as a blues, rhythm and blues, and rock performer; his flamboyance as a performer; and his improvisational energy, Hendrix seems to have sensed that this synthesis had to be through, by, and of the recording studio.<\/p>\n

A radio documentary on Hendrix (later marketed as a set of CDs) offers a gloss on this that can stand as a sort of coda to this blurring of composition and performance and of work and text.\u00a0 At the end of the second disc Eddie Kramer, a recording engineer who worked with Hendrix on\u00a0Electric Ladyland<\/em>, describes the mixing of “1983…(A Merman I Should Turn to Be)”:<\/p>\n

It [Electric Ladyland<\/em>] was a double album and Jimi had much more time to develop his ideas.\u00a0 One of the songs that sticks out in my mind would be “1984 a Mermaid I Should Be” [sic] which I worked on with him for about 18 hours straight.\u00a0 And we mixed the entire thing\u2014the entire side of the record\u2014in one go with no interruptions, so it was a complete piece.\u00a0 It was like a performance, and Jimi and I mixed it together, where he would grab his vocals and some of his guitar effects and I would do the drums and his other guitar effects and generally hold on to the whole thing so it didn’t fall apart.\u00a0 And we’d be flying around the board like lost flies.\u00a0 It was wonderful.\u00a0 It was the creation of a piece of music in addition to what had already been recorded.[12]<\/a><\/p>\n

The “board” is the mixing board through which Hendrix and Kramer could simultaneously play the different taped pieces of vocals, rhythm tracks, guitar solos, and sound effects that had previously been recorded for the piece.<\/p>\n

Unlike\u00a0Anthem of the Sun<\/em>, none of the taped material for “1983” derives from an actual performance for an audience (though the strands have been created by the musicians), and this suggests that “1983” is primarily and inherently compositional: Hendrix started with an idea of what he wanted to construct; he and his colleagues generated “tracks” of tape toward this end; and he and his engineer then selected the tracks to mix into the final recording and (as the final compositional step) mixed them.\u00a0 But in describing this final step, Kramer stresses that they mixed the piece “with no interruptions” in what seemed “like a performance.”\u00a0 To Kramer, it seemed that he and Hendrix were actually performing a piece of music using the mixing board and taped tracks as their shared instrument.\u00a0 Their decisions (as each chose which tracks to bring in and the level and tonal qualities of these tracks) were responses to the unfolding piece in response to each other and what they were discovering as they went; these were real time reactions made without stopping to deliberate and plan.\u00a0 The notes to the CD derived from the documentary identify the version of “1983” that follows Kramer’s comment as “an alternate mix of a song that appeared on\u00a0Electric Ladyland<\/em>” and characterize it as “one of a series of experimental mixes\u2014each totally unique…”<\/p>\n

With a piece like “1983…(A Merman I Should Turn to Be)” the studio becomes both an instrument for performing (albeit to an absent audience) and a tool for \u201ccomposing\u201d a record, and the process of producing this piece involves, finally, a different logic than the process for\u00a0Anthem of the Sun<\/em>.\u00a0 With “1983” Hendrix and Kramer\u2014having previously created the material to be used\u2014”performed” a series of mixes, of compositions, then chose one for the album.\u00a0 The sides of\u00a0Anthem<\/em>, though, seem each to have been composed and constructed as a single mix; the mix was, that is, deliberated step by step.\u00a0 The difference is like the difference between performing a sketch and constructing a collage.\u00a0 The mixes of “1983” are a series of closely related sketches; each side of\u00a0Anthem<\/em>\u00a0is a collage.\u00a0 In The Dead’s experiment, acts of performance become the themes and elements of the composition, and the results might be termed a composed improvisation (the raw tracks\u2014both those derived from concert performances and those constructed or played in the studio\u2014have been used to represent a performance that never occurred and would never occur in quite this fashion).\u00a0 However, with “1983” and Hendrix the distinction between performance and composition blurs even more and is even more problematic.\u00a0 The mixes of “1983” are both our only record (in the sense of textual representation and textual object) of the “composition” (a “composition” that exists as a series of realized, stored, reproducible, and transmittable “texts”); and they are performances of it (one of which Hendrix and Kramer have privileged over the others by choosing it for the album).\u00a0 The track on the album represents neither a possible performance of “1983” nor a composition called “1983” which others might perform; it is simply “1983” (in much the way a painting is simply itself, though in the case of \u201c1983\u201d there is no possible distinction between the \u201coriginal\u201d and \u201ccopies\u201d as there would be with a painting and reproductions of it)\u2014Or as Paul Simon might have sung it (but didn’t): “one man’s composition is another man’s performance” (and vice versa), and both and neither may be texts.<\/p>\n

While neither Garcia nor Hendrix (or Buddy Bolden, for that matter) saw themselves as textual theorists, the encounters with the dynamic of analogue recording that their examples help highlight suggest that recording (especially audio tape and its attendant technologies) has a capacity to fuse performance, composition, and text into a single phenomenon in a way that the code of written language does not.\u00a0 If so, the models of textual rhetoric we will need to guide the textual analysis and editing of recorded material will be different than the ones we have developed from and in response to written and printed material.\u00a0 And if this is the case, it at least raises the possibility that “text,” “work,” and “performance” are more fluid phenomena than we may have realized and that these terms are less names for stable categories and qualities than markers whose meaning is historically contingent (and shaped as well by the differing dynamics of the various textual media).\u00a0 And while this isn’t the place or time to launch a deconstructive reading of the famous “Is It Live or Is It Memorex” Ella Fitzgerald commercial, that could be a worthwhile effort to which the answer might also be “both” and “neither”.<\/p>\n

\n

[1]<\/a>\u00a0See\u00a0The Grateful Dead<\/em>, Warner Brothers (WS 1689), n.d.;\u00a0Anthem of the Sun<\/em>, Warner Brothers (WS 1749), n.d.;\u00a0Aoxomoxoa<\/em>, Warner Brothers (WS 1790), n.d.; and\u00a0Live\/Dead<\/em>, Warner Brothers (2WS 1830), n.d.\u00a0 Also, see below for a discussion of these issues in the first two of these albums.<\/p>\n

[2]<\/a>\u00a0For a systematic survey of these issues and summaries of relevant research, see Walter J. Ong’s\u00a0Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word<\/em>\u00a0(New York: Methuen, 1982).<\/p>\n

[3]<\/a>\u00a0Eric Havelock’s recasting and extension of the work of Millman Parry and Albert B. Lord provides a sustained examination of this process and its cultural and social impact in the context of Homeric and Classical Greece.\u00a0\u00a0His The Muse Learns to Write<\/em>\u00a0(New Haven: Yale University Press, 1986) both summarizes and extends the analyses he developed in such studies as\u00a0Preface to Plato<\/em>\u00a0and\u00a0The Greek Concept of Justice: From Its Shadow in Homer to Its Substance in Plato<\/em>.<\/p>\n

[4]<\/a>\u00a0The British rockers frequently note their interest in the blues and rhythm and blues of the 1950s and early 1960s in various interviews and fanzine stories.\u00a0 In the notes to the recent CD compilation,\u00a0Dave Van Ronk, The Folkways Years: 1959-61<\/em>\u00a0(Smithsonian\/Folkways SF 40041: 1991) Van Ronk recalls the impact of Harry Smith’s\u00a0Anthology of American Folk Music<\/em>\u00a0(three double record sets from the early 1950s that gathered some of the key blues and country 78 recordings of the 1920s and 1930s):<\/p>\n

The scope of this collection [Smith’s anthology] was panoramic: Uncle Dave Macon, Mississippi John Hurt, Blind Willie Johnson, Buell Kazee, Lemon Jefferson, the list goes on and on.\u00a0\u00a0The Anthology<\/em>\u00a0was our bible.\u00a0 We [the performers of the urban folk revival] knew every word of every song on it, including the ones we hated.\u00a0 They say that in the 19th century British Parliament, when a member would begin to quote a classical author in Latin the entire House would rise in a body and finish the quote along with him.\u00a0 It was like that.<\/p>\n

[5]<\/a>\u00a0Morton’s spring 1938 Library of Congress sessions have been released commercially several times and are currently available on CD.\u00a0 His illustrations of “Maple Leaf Rag” are part of the selection “Discourse on Jazz,”\u00a0Jelly Roll Morton: The Library of Congress Recordings, Volume Eight<\/em>, Swaggie Records (S1318), n.d.<\/p>\n

[6]<\/a>\u00a0Morton’s sides for General were later acquired by Commodore Records and have been reissued several times and are currently available on CD.\u00a0 Jelly Roll Morton,\u00a0New Orleans Memories Plus Two<\/em>, Commodore Records (XFL 14942), 1979.<\/p>\n

[7]<\/a>\u00a0It is certainly true that these poems can be read aloud (and both Eliot and Pound “performed” them for audiences), but Eliot’s insistence on the impersonality of art and his various strategies for suppressing narrative and deflecting any identification of the poem’s language with a stable “voice” (especially his own) suggests the extent to which his “performances” were distinctly secondary to the poem’s status as composed and fixed artifact.\u00a0 Similarly, Pound’s role in helping Eliot distill “The Waste Land” and his decision to discard the so-called “ur-Cantos” (which feature the sort of narrative voice, a persona in which we are invited to take a dramatic interest) suggest his rejection of the oral and performative (in spite of his fascination with pre-technological culture).<\/p>\n

[8]<\/a>\u00a0Somewhere in my years of reading album liner notes, articles in\u00a0Down Beat<\/em>\u00a0and the like, and books on jazz I ran across this anecdote but do not at this point know its source.<\/p>\n

[9]<\/a>\u00a0Some of the tracks on Charles Mingus’s\u00a0Mingus Ah Um<\/em>\u00a0(Columbia CL 1370) have had, for instance, material deleted (a solo or two here, a bridge or chorus there), and it isn’t clear who decided to snip these pieces out or why (because of length? to improve structure? something else?).\u00a0 What is clear is that the listener is expected to listen to this processed performance as if it were simply an unprocessed performance (unedited versions of these tunes were released after Mingus’s death in\u00a0Nostalgia on Times Square<\/em>, Columbia JG35717).\u00a0 The pieces on Miles Davis’s\u00a0Miles Ahead<\/em>\u00a0(Columbia CL 1041) are the result of even more radical manipulation, yet here too for the listener, these constructions (a complex pastiche of spliced takes and overdubs) play as if they are integral performances.\u00a0 Phil Schaap’s painstaking analysis of the construction of these tracks is included in the booklet to the Mosaic Records LP version (MQ11-164) of the just released Sony\/Columbia CD set,\u00a0Miles Davis\/Gil Evans: The Complete Columbia Studio Recordings<\/em>.<\/p>\n

[10]<\/a>\u00a0The Grateful Dead<\/em>, Warner Brothers (WS 1689). n.d.<\/p>\n

[11]<\/a>\u00a0Anthem of the Sun<\/em>, Warner Brothers (WS 1749), n.d.<\/p>\n

[12]<\/a>\u00a0Lifelines: The Jimi Hendrix Story<\/em>, Reprise (9 26435-2), 1990.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

[This essay was published originally in\u00a0Reimagining Textuality: Textual Studies in the Late Age of Print, edited by Elizabeth Loizeaux and Neil Fraistat (University of Wisconsin Press, 2002).\u00a0 The University of Wisconsin Press holds the copyright on this piece, and it is posted here with the permission of the press.] A PREFACE OF SORTS: Even for … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2326,"featured_media":0,"parent":0,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"generate_page_header":"","footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-32","page","type-page","status-publish"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/tahunt.com\/sandbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/32","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/tahunt.com\/sandbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/tahunt.com\/sandbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tahunt.com\/sandbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2326"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tahunt.com\/sandbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=32"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/tahunt.com\/sandbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/32\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":76,"href":"https:\/\/tahunt.com\/sandbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/32\/revisions\/76"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/tahunt.com\/sandbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=32"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}