The Triumph of Music by Tim Blanning

Author:Tim Blanning [Blanning, Tim]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History, Europe, Western, Music, History & Criticism, United States, General
ISBN: 9780674057098
Google: z5LZRAAACAAJ
Publisher: Harvard University Press
Published: 2010-11-15T04:55:08+00:00

A discotheque on Ibiza, the clubbing cap ital of Europe.

Fatboy Slim’s creations stand in a long tradition of synthetic music. It was first made possible when tape recorders were developed by the Germans before and during the Second World War. Captured by the Americans, these machines were soon put to good commercial use. Among the early patrons was Bing Crosby, who was looking for a way to record his radio programmes in advance so that all the risks of live performances could be eliminated.166 Also to the fore was the guitarist Les Paul, who in 1948 introduced a fourth recording head to allow tracks to be added to existing material, a practice that came to be known as multi-tracking.167 Further advances transformed the studio technician from being essentially a passive recorder of a musician’s performance into an active creator of the final product.168 Instead of turning up with a complete album well rehearsed and ready to record, bands in the 1960s and later spent days, weeks, even months in the studio experimenting with combinations of recorded sounds.

Not the least original aspect of The Beatles’ Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band of 1966 was the time it took to record—129 days.169 So the key figure was not the leader of the band but the producer. Glyn John, who produced Desperado for The Eagles in 1973, claimed: ‘So, when everyone’s gone home, you take what you recorded and completely change it’.170 Rather less brutal was the observation by Brian Eno, one of the most imaginative and successful of British record producers, who could play no instrument when he joined Roxy Music as ‘technical consultant’ but quickly turned himself into a master of the synthesizer: ‘The technologies we now use have tended to make creative jobs do-able by many different people: new technologies have the tendency to replace skills with judgment—it’s not what you can do that counts, but what you choose to do, and this invites everyone to start crossing boundaries’.171

The very name of Eno’s chosen instrument exemplifies its artificial, manufactured character. Invented by Robert Moog in 1964, ‘the synthesizer is the only innovation that can stand alongside the electric guitar as a great new instrument of the age of electricity’, as his biographers reasonably claimed.172 At its heart were two discoveries: that the pitch of an oscillator can be varied by raising or lowering the voltage, and that an electrical instrument can be created by putting together a number of discrete modules (oscillators, amplifiers, envelope generators and filters).173 So began a continuing process of innovation that has put the synthesizer in every recording studio.

Although its first popular success was Wendy Carlos’ Switched-On Bach—the first classical album ever to sell more than half-a-million copies—the introduction in 1970 of a Minimoog, a portable version that could be played from a built-in keyboard, expanded its empire to embrace most rock and pop groups.174 What appealed so much to musicians unconstrained by classical scores was the synthesizer’s flexibility, its range limited only by the user’s imagination.

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