A Column Questioning the Assumptions of Popular Music
Last month I found myself in Traverse City, Mich., at the Music House Museum. The museum started as a collection of pre-1930s music-making machines stored in a farmer’s barn amid the area’s omnipresent orchards. The farmer and his local collector pals eventually decided to spruce up the barn and throw open the doors to the public.
In the early decades of the 20th century, there was a craze for such gizmos. Records weren’t popular yet, so taverns would install a player piano in the corner to perform the function later handled by jukeboxes. People with more money than musical talent would install one in their parlors to impress their friends. Public parks were filled with such machines, ranging from shopping-cart-sized hand-cranked organs to van-sized or even school-bus-sized machines that combined several instruments into one mechanism. The most complicated, simulating the most instruments, were called orchestrions.
People were fascinated by technology that made music with little or no human intervention: piano keys that went up and down by themselves or giant cabinets that pushed air through organ pipes and triggered mallets to strike drums and xylophones. It was as if an invisible ghost inhabited these machines. And the effect was heightened by the visuals: the stained glass and gold gilt on the player pianos, the paintings and palatial architecture of the wagon organs.
Of course, I was struck by the parallels to the early decades of our own century, when there is a renewed fascination with machines that make music with little or no human intervention. Once again, further dazzle is added by visuals, though in this century by smoke and lights rather than carving and paint. Once again there is a delight in technology that can save us from physical labor, so we can concentrate on the mental concept. If we can figure out how a piece of music is supposed to go, the thought seems to be, why should we go to the bother of playing it over and over? Why should we have to strike the drums and keys ourselves? Why can’t the machines do it?
It all depends, I guess, on what you want from music. If you want technical perfection, the machines can’t be bettered. If you want a dance beat so precise, so powerful that it takes over your body, if you want a keyboard line so fast and so tricky that it boggles your mind, you want a pre-programmed box. If, on the other hand, you want a connection with a human personality, flaws and all, you need a flesh-and-blood person being making character-revealing decisions in real time. Most of us, I suspect, want some of each, though we may argue about the proper ratio.
My own tastes run more to string bands than DJs, though I enjoy a good hip-hop show and I was delighted by the Music House Museum. Not only was the old barn full of beautiful objects—some of the organs looked like birthday cakes designed for the King of Austria—but our guide turned most of them on to play for us. Some played paper scrolls; some giant gold-plated steel discs, and some cardboard tablets connected at alternating ends and folded atop each other like old computer paper. Each of these was perforated with holes that controlled the notes, tempo and dynamics.
This Michigan treasure chest was a smaller, folksier version of the self-described “most cheerful museum in the Netherlands,” which I had visited in 2009. It’s an accurate description, for Utrecht’s National Museum van Speelklok tot Pierement, which translates as the National Collection of Everything from Musical Clocks to Street Organs, devotes two full floors in two attached buildings to music-making machines of the same vintage as Michigan’s. Here too were extravagantly carved and painted boxes whose innards pumped and whizzed to simulate a small band—or, in the gargantuan orchestrions, a big band.
Like today, most of the machine-made music then was rousing, uptempo dance music—polkas, marches and waltzes instead of dub, house and trance—but the idea was the same. Whether a barroom buys a player piano or hires a DJ, whether a crowd gathers around a monkey atop an organ or a skinny guy behind a laptop, the sounds should be party music. If you want to hear sadder, slower or more personal music, you don’t go to machines in public places.
The museum’s gift shop sold CDs of its machines, but why would you want to listen to a recording of a pre-programmed organ wagon in the privacy of your bedroom? More than half the fun is watching the machine in action. Similarly, why would anyone buy a CD of a DJ?
Most of us have a love-hate relationship with technology, and we long to sort out our conflicted feelings. Few things shed more light on that interaction than the moments when a pre-programmed machine and an improvising human are playing music together. How can the improviser create something personal and alive while playing with the machine rather than fighting or ignoring it? How can we do something similar in our own lives?
Earlier this month I saw Pat Metheny’s Unity Band at the Rams Head Tavern in Annapolis. It’s an all-star jazz quartet with the guitarist/leader joined by saxophonist Chris Potter, drummer Antonio Sanchez and bassist Ben Williams. For most of the show, the four musicians interacted with one another, creating statements and responses in an evolving conversation as only a great jazz band can. Most of the compositions came from the quartet’s new Unity Band album, but the live performances were very different because they were truly inventing as they played.
Two-thirds of the way through the show, though, the stage crew came out and pulled the black-cloth coverings on the boxes that had loomed mysteriously over the stage all evening. Inside one box was a xylophone surrounded by a snare drum, tambourine and other percussion instruments, each menaced by hovering mallets. Another box contained a marimba; a piano accordion sat atop the bass amp, and two pairs of castanets sat atop the guitar amp.
This was a scaled-down version of Metheny’s Orchestrion album and tour of 2010. Metheny had reproduced the insides of an early-20th-century music machine so he could trigger them all with his guitar and foot pedals. This blurred the line between human-made and machine-made music, for every sound was triggered by Metheny’s pick hitting a guitar string, even if some sounds were then sampled and looped.
In 2010, it had seemed a one-time-only experiment, but Metheny clearly means to incorporate the orchestrion into his ongoing music-making. On the current tour, little white lights lit up on each machine as it was triggered by the guitarist or his bandmates. The quartet suddenly sounded like an octet as the human musicians fed ideas to the mechanical musicians. The machines repeated the ideas, and the humans responded with new twists on the first ideas. Here the goal wasn’t precision and power but theme and variation. It was the perfect metaphor for the way we create technology and are in turn re-created by it.
Back at the museum in Michigan I had been more impressed by the machines than by the music they were making. The bright, tinkling, oom-pah-pah music was as forgettable as it was fun. The one exception was an Aeolian player piano that played George Gershwin’s “Rhapsody in Blue.” This was more than a mechanical approximation of music; this was piano playing with nuance and subtlety. There was a reason for this, the guide explained, for Gershwin himself had recorded the piece himself on a machine that captured not just the notes but also the pianist’s phrasing and touch on the perforated paper scroll.
As the keys went up and down in rippling patterns, it almost seemed as if Gershwin himself was in the old Michigan barn. It was eerie; it was edifying. It was proof that if the conditions are just right we humans can breathe our personalities into an apparatus and trust it to exhale the same personality on command.