Musical Technology Progress: A Blog by Warren Bull

 Image by Karim Manjra on Unsplash

Musical technology Progress: A Blog by Warren Bull

Howard Goodall wrote Big Bangs: Five Musical Revolutions.

https://www.amazon.com/Big-Bangs-Five-Musical-Revolutions-ebook/dp/B005G37S4W/ref=sr_1_2?crid=2FF095QHAOM5I&keywords=Howard+Goodall&qid=1678425066&s=books&sprefix=howard+goodall%2Cstripbooks%2C612&sr=1-2  The book followed a series of five television programs that won the British Academy of Television Huw Weldon Award for The Best Arts Programme or Series and a Peabody Award.

The videos provide a wonderfully clever review of five turning points that took place over a thousand years. He discussed five discoveries that forever changed Western music. The visuals are striking and the stories he shares are funny. 

You don’t need a musical education to understand and appreciate the programs.  The basic issue was how to share music with people not in the immediate area when it is produced.

The answers were immensely creative. 

In this blog I will limit myself to the current day. Just like digital printing, modern technology is vastly better than earlier methods.  Also, like digital printing, the success of our methods of recording and sharing music creates issues that were unimaginable before the methods were invented.  

For example, “click tracks.”  In a studio recording, or sometimes in a live performance, musicians hear a steady beat not audible to the listening audience that keeps everyone in sync and maintains the tempo. In the studio, a song is made up of multiple sections of performances of a single song essentially cut and pasted together to make one flowing steady presentation. 

The Beatles did not use click tracks. Various takes of their songs could be spliced together smoothly because the drummer, Ringo Starr, was incredibly consistent in setting and maintaining a tempo. Their first drummer, Pete Best was not. Ringo was in a better-known group before he joined the Beatles. He took a risk by becoming one of the Fab Four.

So, the recording you hear of Mozart’s Eine Kleine Nachtmusik is a combination of the best pieces of many performances of the work assembled by skilled recording engineers.  It is likely that some of the music produced by some of the softer instruments, like the cello, was enhanced by the engineers.  In a concert what you hear will be less technically correct, and less balanced among the different instruments. 

Will it be closer to what Mozart imagined or intended?  There is no way to know.  

Some artists are no longer making CDs. On sites like Spotify, Apple Music, YouTube Music, MixCloud, and Soundcloud, songs are presented one at a time. You can create a mixtape of your personal favorites, without “B side” songs, which is great. But it limits artists in presenting unified conceptual albums 

https://www.subjectivesounds.com/musicblog/frank-sinatra-in-the-wee-small-hours-album-review#:~:text=Widely%20regarded%20as%20a%20masterpiece,on%20Come%20Fly%20With%20Me. 

Frank Sinatra’s 16 tracks on In The Wee Small hours of the Morning combine and reinforce the mood in ways individual songs alone cannot. The reviewer above noted that the sound is not as warm as it was on the original record. 

Also, some “B side” offerings became more popular than the “A” side tunes.  

Totally subjectively, I enjoy live performances where the audience and performer connect.

In 1988 Garth Brooks had an audition with Capital Records and left the studio without an offer from the executives, Jim Fogelsong and Lynn Shults. A few weeks later he filled in at a concert where the scheduled artist did not show. Sitting in the audience was Lynn Shults who had come to listen to the no-show. After the event, Shults asked Brooks to come back to the office. Capital signed Brooks who became the biggest artist in country music.