The Production of Silence

At the beginning of this month I attended the latest UK and Ireland IASPM conference, which took place at the University of Huddersfield. I spoke about silent records, a subject I’ve toyed with since 2012. In that year, the Hayward Gallery put on a show of ‘Invisible Art’ in which they displayed blank canvasses and empty plinths. Invisible art is obviously akin to silent music. The Hayward’s director, Ralph Ruggoff, nevertheless argued that fine art presents a richer field. Publicising his show, he declared that ‘in music you only have one piece of silent music but somehow in art, artists keep coming back to the subject’.

            This made me think, ‘hold on!’ There is clearly a dominant silent composition within art music, John Cage’s 4’33”. However, while this composition has cornered the market in notated muteness, there are many recorded silences. What is more, these recorded silences have diverse stories to tell. Some of them nod towards Cage, but others speak silently about censorship, another tranche offers memorial silence, there are silences that reveal the specificities of recording formats, and there are silences that comment upon the economics of record production.

            My first response to Rugoff was to draw up a top ten of silent recordings for the New Statesman. More recently, I published a chapter detailing ‘Six Types of Silence’ in the collection Critical Approaches to the Production of Music and Sound. My talk at Huddersfield offered an abbreviated version of this work. You can read it here.

Radishes

‘It’s an exciting time for radishes’, says Anthony Gardiner. ‘It could be the new avocado.’ Gardiner monitors food sales for Kantar Worldpanel. Radishes are up by 30% in the past three months. 900,000 UK households have added them to their shopping lists in the past 12 weeks.

            There are various reasons why. It’s already been a long, hot summer in the UK, and people are in search of new ways to spice up their salads. Radishes are healthy and they fit in with a trend for spicier food. Another reason is because they look good. They are ‘Instagram-friendly’. People are taking photos of their salads and posting them to their friends.

            This might sound ultra-modern and slightly absurd, but we have always consumed things because they look good. And there are blatant cases in music as well as in food. Most obviously we are drawn towards performers who we find attractive. I would argue that this remains true for adults as well as being a driver for kids’ musical tastes. It also applies to our favourite male and female artists, regardless of our own sexuality.

            More interesting, though, are those synesthesiastic cases where the dynamics of sound and vision become blurred. We don’t know if we’re hearing images or seeing sounds. It is even more interesting when these processes have been worked out. In this respect, Stock, Aitken and Waterman were most canny. During the mid-1980s, when their music was being targeted at a gay, nightclubbing audience, they created records with lighting in mind. Most gay clubs had disco lights that were activated by the sounds emanating from the records being played. The production trio worked out which aspects of music made the lights go wild. According to Pete Waterman,

It was all done with handclaps and cowbells. We put in sharp sounds that cut through – bits of percussion, with a lot of top – and played them frequently and fast, triplets and things like that. If you got it right, you could make the lights go crazy. We cut the bass frequencies down and put what the bass guitar was playing into a higher frequency range. That gave our records more volume too. When one of our records came on, it was louder than the previous one, and the lights would go off like fireworks.

They were the radishes of their time.

You’re Only Singing When You’re Blowing Bubbles

The song ‘Guantanamera’ achieved popularity rapidly and it has spread far and wide. On a more modest scale, the same thing is happening with some thoughts I raised about the numerous versions of the song that are sung by football fans. In September I pointed towards an article written by Katia Chornik for the Spanish BBC website that drew upon comments that I made in an email conversation thread and which also formed a blog entry. Yesterday, Katia had another article published about the song. This one appears in the Economist and it too features some of my thoughts.

            My basic thesis about why some songs become and remain football chants remains the same: ‘Songs must have a great tune that has captured the public’s imagination and that they lend themselves to public singing. What is also important is how songs lend themselves to lyrics. The ones that achieve traction tend to be adaptable to short phrases’.

            However, what is true about adaptive football chants – the songs that are used by fans of numerous teams – is less true about club theme songs. These can have more extensive and less pliable lyrics. Think of ‘You’ll Never Walk Alone’, which is sung by Liverpool fans fairly straight. The team that I support, West Bromwich Albion, has a slightly adapted version of Psalm 23 as its theme. Legend has it that it was adopted at a Sunday fixture in the 1970s (when games played on a Sunday were not the norm) and a hymn sheet was found on the terraces. West Brom fans always sing the words in the same way and they are not taken up and adapted by fans of other teams.

            Earlier this year I came across another inviolate theme song. West Brom were playing away at the Olympic Stadium in London. As I walked around the ground I found some curiously downbeat words inscribed on the entry doors. First up was the phrase ‘Fortune’s always hiding’. The next doors had ‘Then like my dreams they fade and die’. After reading this, I felt confident that my team would beat the home side, West Ham. It was only with the next words’ ‘They fly so high, nearly reach the sky’ that I realized I was reading ‘I’m Forever Blowing Bubbles’, the club’s theme, backwards. That said, the song isn’t any more positive the right way around. When heard at matches, however, its lilting communal refrain disguises the pessimism of the verse. Moreover, as it is a song that has not been adopted by other clubs, most outsiders only know the title lines anyway, which can appear to be about childish wonder rather than perishable dreams. Still, it says something about the realism of West Ham that they don’t shy away from its true sentiment.

            The club’s fans have been singing ‘I’m Forever Blowing Bubbles’ since the 1920s. It was first adopted in honour of their player Billy J. ‘Bubbles’ Murray, who bore a resemblance to the famous Pears’ Soap advert of the time. The World Cup started yesterday. How many dreams will have faded and died by the end?

He Don’t Hang Around with the Gang No More

In 1949 I went to the cinema about three times a week, a compulsion which had little to do with the merits of the films I saw; Rank cinemas at that time, showed a healthy profit. In the late fifties, as my attendance at the cinema declined, I became aware that my thoughtless change of habit had created a crisis in the film industry, not only Rank losing money but I had even caused severe cuts in production at major Hollywood studios. (Richard Hamilton)

Richard Hamilton is right to point this out: we’re not only slaves to consumer trends; the market follows us. I should know. Just as Hamilton triggered economic shifts in the film industry mid-20^th century, I bear a responsibility for music consumption today.

            There has been a turn away from bands towards solo artists. Adele and Ed Sheeran are prospering (they are numbers one and two in the latest Sunday Times list of the UK’s richest musicians under 30), while the group-oriented genres of rock and indie music are in decline (the Arctic Monkeys have recently been described as being ‘virtually the last indie band standing’). This change has, of course, been driven by record companies, as well as by artists themselves. It simply makes more sense to be a solo act. From the record companies’ perspective, solo artists are easier to market. Today’s industry is focused on social media and brands; it requires global stars. This situation does not favour locale-based groups who are cultivating underground notions of ‘cool’. From the artists’ perspective, it is obviously more prosperous to go it alone. In today’s climate there are fewer royalties to spread around. So why spread them around at all.

            This policy would not be effective, however, unless there was public demand for solo performers. And this is where I come in. I hardly ever buy music by groups any more. I don’t consume music by Ed Sheeran either (I’m one of the multitude who remain mystified by his appeal), but I do relate to the questing music of St Vincent, John Grant and James Blake, and I enjoy the big personalities of Beyoncé and Taylor Swift. It is solo acts that suit me now.

I think I know why. To become a fan of a band is to take on the ethos of their gang. You buy into the group’s notions of comradeship. The older I get, the more unsuitable this feels. I don’t hang around with gangs any more. Consequently, I can’t imagine what would prompt me to have any interest in the latest guitar group. And I’m not alone in being more alone. The popular music audience is ageing. There are large swathes of us who are no longer out on the streets, running with the pack. We haven’t given up on our music, though. We’re isolated in our homes, listening to solo performers.

Shiraz: A Romance of India

The BFI recently issued a DVD/Blu-ray edition of Franz Osten’s classic 1929 film Shiraz: A Romance of India. The film tells the love story that lies behind the creation of the Taj Mahal and is accompanied by a new score by Anoushka Shankar, the daughter of Ravi Shankar and half-sister of Norah Jones.

            Included within the release are the short films Musical Instruments of India (1944), which was directed by Modhu Boses, and Temples of India (1938), directed by Hans M Nieter. I’m responsible for the sleevenotes for these two films, which are drawn from articles that I contributed to the Colonial Film project nearly ten years ago. My sleevenotes can be found here and here.