PMO - Charlie Ford: Music, Technology and Assessment

Music, Technology and Assessment
Charlie Ford

Technology is commonly understood today as implying some degree of mechanical alienation, but music can sometimes exemplify older dictionary definitions of technology as pertaining to artistic revelation.

Component parts of Muddy Waters' 'Late in the evenin'', which he recorded in 1949, have a direct lineage back to the Delta blues of the late 1920s. Muddy Waters dramatises every tiny detail of attack, timbre and dynamic in both voice and bottleneck guitar within a very tight, although often implicit, rhythmic sense. The close recording allows us to hear all the expressive 'dirt' thrown up by the slides and quiverings of the bottleneck, like that of Chinese ch'in zither music. The extended 6/4 bar before the first chord change is unmistakably Delta in origin, as is the ambiguous 5/4 bar at the end of the verse. When the guitar introduction returns intact after the two vocal verses, though a little quicker, and certainly more intense (notice the sitar-like swoop on the bass string in the second phrase), we realise how formal the Delta blues had become by this time.

By 1946 Muddy Waters' electric bands had begun to sacrifice all such sophistication to a highly amplified 'hard core' (meaning maximum commitment, minimum technique) wall of sound shaped by the bass below and the harmonica's wails above. '(I'm your) hoochie coochie man' comes from 1954 after the time that Muddy Waters had stopped playing the guitar, which would have looked too 'Downhome' for his modern macho act. Black audiences in Chicago wanted to hear the blues sounds that they had brought with them from the South, but now these sounds needed to be those, not of the individual on the front porch, but those of the string bands in the juke joints, electrified for large urban dancehalls. Like many post-war electric blues, this piece brings together traditional 12-bar blues form with periods of repeated, elementary riffs. The song seems to depend for its interest on the silences between these riffs, the general coming together of the band for each upbeat into chord IV, and the combination of various instruments playing more-or-less the same thing, bending notes in more-or-less the same way, which can sometimes sound wonderfully dissonant. Then of course there's the words, which speak of the egoistic machismo of the singer and the old voodoo ways of the deep south.

Fourteen years later to be heard as 'Downhome' became authentic for a youth sub-culture that found an atavistic, pre-commercial 'authenticity'again, in the music of Robert Johnson and other country blues singers from the 1920s and 1930s. Just as The Who complained about having been '...born with a plastic spoon in my mouth', so too did the hippies reduce money, at least theoretically, to a means of mere sustenance - 'bread' - and reject every stitch of nylon as 'unnatural'. Now massive amplification and an array of filters, could magnify those same, supposedly pre-civilised, minimal Delta guitar gestures into celebrations of psychedelic Otherness. Jimmy Hendrix 'Voodoo chile'(1968) again concerns the old Voodoo ways of the Deep South, and the singing is similar in style. To reveal a style is not necessarily to be complex, but to produce something which is in a style in some sense, but which also transcends that style. 'Voodoo chile' uses technology, from that very first awful guitar trill, to reveal, to remind us of the Delta blues, but also of our distance from it.

All performance of music, apart from singing involves technology, hi- or -low. Some, like the bottleneck, we do not know as such, because, unlike an amplifier, it does not seem to come between the performer and the sound-source. Jason Toynbee made a similar point this morning concerning the way that microphones distance the singer from their own sound. But when amplification magnifies the Delta blues guitar style in this way the original meaning of technology, as pertaining to artistic revelation, replaces its more familiar association with mechanical alienation. I am inclined to think this way of my own hi-fi equpipment, when friends, enthralled by my recordings of blackbirds and thrushes coming from the loudspeakers, have confesssed to never having really listened to birdsong before. I find it far more difficult to ask them to simply listen outside with me! My two terms - mechanical alienation and artistic revelation - could provide extreme points on an evaluative axis for studies of the shifting relations between musical style change and technological development. We might ask, 'To what extent has technology blocked, concealed, allowed or revealed a style?'

Phil Brissenden's paper yesterday ended by asking us to consider hi-tech teaching strategies. I took this as a call, first, to think about the assesment of electronically generated compositions. How, for instance, do we assess students' uses of a pre-set rhythm on a synth without simply asking how much labour has gone into the process? Now, with this model in mind, we might ask instead, 'Does this piece use technology to reveal a style, or has the technology effectively concealed it, by producing a mere example of its mechanical possibilities?' Furthermore, if we restore to technology its older meaning as that with which we engage with our techniques, then the assessment of hi-tech pieces should draw from criteria that relate to those we use for performance as much as from those we use for low-tech composition. With this in mind we arrive at one last question: 'How good is the student's technique with respect to the relations between technology and style?'

Bibliography

Heidegger, M. (1971) 'The Origin of the Work of Art' in Poetry, Language Thought, tr. Albert Hofstadter. New York: Harper Colophon Books.

Heidegger, M. (1977) 'The Question Concerning Technology' in The Essential Martin Heidegger, ed. D. F. Krell. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.

Oxford English Dictionary (1971): 'Technique', 'Technology', Oxford University Press.

Discography

Muddy Waters 'Late in the evenin' (1949), from the first of Paul Oliver's 6-part BBC Radio Series entitled Before the Blues (1996).

Muddy Waters ''(I'm your) hoochie coochie man' (1954) on The Blues vol.1 (1989 Chess Sampler), Roots SPA 3002.

The Jimmy Hendrix Experience 'Voodoo chile' on Electric Ladyland (1968), Polydor 823 360-2.

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