Avant Rock by Bill Martin

Author:Bill Martin
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780812699395
Publisher: Open Court
Published: 2015-11-27T00:00:00+00:00

Mom, can I take turntable lessons? or, Nobody here but me and my sampler

Someone who sets out to organize a closet arranges the things in it. If you are told not to organize the shoes or shirts, but the closet itself, you would be bewildered.

—Donald Davidson

I was reminded of this amusing passage from Davidson’s essay, “On the Very Idea of a Conceptual Scheme,” when I thought about the moment when it became widely accepted that a musician might not just play something on the turntable, but indeed she or he might play the turntable itself. When I wrote my book on progressive rock, Listening to the future, I knew that I was setting myself up for at least a few critical lashings in the conclusion, when I discussed music in these postmodern times. I referred to what we quaintly used to call “musical instruments,” and I had a few questions about music made with turntables and samplers. John Cage and others—perhaps most of all Christian Marclay—had been using the turntable as an instrument for many decades by the time DJ Qbert came along, but they had not dedicated themselves to perfecting an instrumental technique with it.

Two basic questions occurred to me, to be specific, and the questions have to do not only with turntables, but also samplers and other ways of making music electronically or with computers.

The first question has to do with what sort of instrument a turntable or sampler might make. Although I have not undertaken a thorough study of this question (it might be worthwhile to do so), I have discussed it with a good many people, and there seems to be a fundamental divide between musicians who are open to new ways of making music, instrumentally speaking, but who came up playing a more traditional musical instrument, and, on the other side, those whose only experience of making music is with turntables or samplers. Now, of course, in the realm of rock music, this sounds like a very retrograde distinction to make—after all, Andres Segovia had nothing good to say about the electric guitar, so a master of the Stratocaster such as Jimi Hendrix did not even count as a musician in his narrow conception. Whether the electric guitar is capable of the subtleties of the classical instrument, or whether a seemingly bastard and marginal instrument such as the electric bass guitar is capable of the subtleties of whatever “traditional” instruments it is most like (part of its marginality is that it is like at least three other instruments in some respects, the guitar, the double bass, and the cello), is in itself an interesting question. Still, the Les Paul, Stratocaster, Rickenbacker 4001, or Fender Jazz Bass have in common with their more traditional cousins that the player has to touch them in certain ways, the player has to acquire a certain familiarity with the feel of the instrument. Most of all, there is a certain intimacy and element of eros involved in playing a more

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