Scott Walker and the Late Twentieth Century Phenomenon of Phonographic Auteurism Duncan G

Home , Another Tear Falls, Bish Bosch, Brian Keane, Climate of Hunter, Johnny Franz, John Maus

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Electronic Theses, Treatises and Dissertations The Graduate School

2013 Scott Walker and the Late Twentieth Century Phenomenon of Phonographic Auteurism Duncan G. Hammons

Follow this and additional works at the FSU Digital Library. For more information, please contact [email protected] THE FLORIDA STATE UNIVERSITY

COLLEGE OF MUSIC

SCOTT WALKER

AND

THE LATE TWENTIETH CENTURY

PHENOMENON OF PHONOGRAPHIC AUTEURISM

DUNCAN G. HAMMONS

A Thesis Submitted to the College of Music in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts

Degree Awarded: Spring Semester, 2013 Duncan Hammons defended this thesis on April 4, 2013

The members of the supervisory committee were:

Kimberly VanWeelden

Professor Directing Thesis

Jane Clendinning

Professor Co-Directing Thesis

Frank Gunderson

Committee Member

The Graduate School has verified and approved the above-named committee members, and certifies that the has been approved in accordance with university requirements.

ii Dedicated to my family and friends for their endless encouragements and many stimulating conversations that fostered the growth of my curiosity in this subject, and the memory of my father, Charles Edwin Hammons (November 1, 1941 - April 28, 2012), who taught me the invaluable lesson of consolidating work and play.

iii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I would like to acknowledge the members of my supervisory committee, Dr. Jane P. Clendinning, Dr. Kimberly VanWeelden and Dr. Frank Gunderson for their enthusiasm and generosity in their guidance of this research, and additionally, Dr. Laura Lee and Dr. Barry Faulk for lending their expertise and additional resources to the better development of this work.

iv TABLE OF CONTENTS

List of Figures ...... vii

Abstract ...... viii 1. THE PRIMACY OF THE RECORDED FORMAT IN EURO-AMERICAN POPULAR STYLES ...... 1 1.1 Introduction ...... 1 1.2 Sound Recordings And The Transformation Of How Music Is Heard ...... 4 1.3 Changing Aesthetics of Record Production ...... 6 1.4 The Beatles (and Glenn Gould) Declare: “All You Need Are Our Recordings” ...... 8 1.5 Economic Barriers to the Creation of Works of Art in Commercial Media ...... 10 2. AESTHETIC PREMISES...... 14 2.1 Intentionality and Identity of “The Work”...... 14 2.2 Auteur Theory as a General Model for the Analysis of Autographic Media...... 17 2.3 Literature or Music: The Role of Meaning in Popular Genres ...... 20 2.4 The “Mixing-Desk Pen” as the Phonographic Auteur’s Tool ...... 21 3. EARLY YEARS IN THE COMMERCIAL MUSIC INDUSTRY...... 24 3.1 Scott Engel Demos, L.A. Session Work, and the Walker Brothers’ Formation ...... 24 3.2 Issues of Teen Pop Idolatry and Public Performance ...... 26 3.3 Development of Authorial Voice on Early Solo Releases (1967-1970) ...... 28 3.4 “First Cut” and Issues of Patronage ...... 31 4. EMERGENCE OF MATURE COMPOSITIONAL STYLE (1978-1984) ...... 33 4.1 Circumstances Surrounding Nite Flights’ (1978) Production ...... 33 4.2 Narrative Process in Walker’s Works: “The Electrician” ...... 33 4.3 Replacement of Pop Forms with Mise-en-Scene: “Fat Mama Kick” ...... 38 4.4 Climate of the Hunter and the First Long Silence (1984-1995) ...... 46 5. TILT (1995)...... 50 5.1 “Farmer in the City” and Walker’s Pastoral Orchestral Ballads ...... 50 5.2 Narrative Threads and Movements Through Unseen Scenes: “The Cockfighter” ...... 54 5.3 Music or Sound Design: “Bouncer See Bouncer” ...... 58 5.4 “Patriot (A Single)” As the Inverse Identity of “The Electrician” ...... 61 5.5 The Emergent Tradition of the Naturalistic Farewell Track: “Rosary” ...... 65 6. THE DRIFT (2006)...... 67 6.1 Situationism, Psychogeography and the Principle of “La Derivee” (Drifting) ...... 67 6.2 Analysis: “Jesse” ...... 68 6.3 Analysis: “Jolson and Jones” ...... 73

v 6.4 Analysis: “Cue” ...... 77 6.5 Analysis: “Buzzers” ...... 81 6.6 Return to Public Visibility ...... 83 7. BISCH BOSCH (2012) ...... 85 7.1 Orpheus Resurfaces, One Foot Lingering Below ...... 85 7.2 Analysis: “See You Don’t Bump His Head” ...... 87 7.3 Analysis: “SDSS1416+13B (Zercon, A Flagpole Sitter)” ...... 89 7.4 Analysis: “Epizootics!” ...... 91 7.5 Analysis: “Pilgrim” ...... 95 7.6 Analysis: “The Day the Conducător Died (An X-Mas Song)” ...... 96

CONCLUSIONS ...... 98

REFERENCES ...... 102

BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH ...... 106

vi LIST OF FIGURES

4.1 “The Electrician” Large-Scale Formal Structure ...... 36

4.2 “Fat Mama Kick” Large-Scale Formal Structure ...... 39

5.1 “Farmer in the City” Large-Scale Formal Structure ...... 53

5.2 “The Cockfighter” Intro [0:00 - 1:24] ...... 56

5.3 “The Cockfighter” Transition / Verse 1 [1:25 - 2:55] ...... 57

5.4 “The Cockfighter” Bridge [2:55 - 3:27] / Verse 2 [4:16 - 4:54] / Outro [4:54 - 6:02] ..... 58

5.5 “Bouncer See Bouncer” Structural Diagram ...... 60

5.6 “Patriot (A Single)” Structural Diagrams ...... 64

6.1 “Jesse” Structural Diagrams ...... 72

6.2 “Jolson and Jones” Section A (“Metal Machine Music”) ...... 74

6.3 “Jolson and Jones” Transition [1:26 - 3:25] ...... 75

6.4 “Jolson and Jones” Section B [3:15 - 7: 45] ...... 76

6.5 “Cue” Section A ...... 78

6.6 “Cue” Section B and A’ ...... 80

6.7 “Buzzers” Large-Scale Formal Structure ...... 83

7.1 Symmetric Pattern of Studio Album releases since Nite Fights ...... 86

7.2 “See You Don’t Bump His Head” Large-Scale Formal Structure ...... 88

7.3 “Epizootics!” Large-Scale Formal Structure ...... 94

7.4 “Pilgrim” Large-Scale Ternary Form ...... 96

vii ABSTRACT

The music of Scott Walker (b. Noel Scott Engel, January 9, 1943) continues to influence multiple generations of respected figures in popular music from David Bowie to Radiohead, yet

Walker has not set foot on stage to perform since the 1970s. Instead, the singer-songwriter- producer’s latter-day reputation has instead thrived upon the basis of his recorded works.

Following a radical self re-invention on the Walker Brothers’ farewell album Nite Flights (1978)

Walker has pushed the boundaries of his chosen media to the extent that his recorded tracks belong more to the aesthetic sphere of fixed art forms such as films rather than performance- oriented forms such as music as it is traditionally categorized among the liberal arts. In the same manner that Sergei Eisenstein and Orson Welles abandoned the rules of theatrical formalism to create works native to the cinematic medium itself, Walker has likewise approached his work in recording studios as a Phonographic Auteur. To abstract Walker’s works by discussing them as

“songs” detached from their recorded “track” form would be as detrimental to their analysis as would the discussion of Citizen Kane outside of the form language of the cinema. As deconstructions of the binary opposition between track and song the problems surrounding the analysis of Walker’s post-1978 works are largely those confronting the analysis of Euro- american popular music that arise from its troublesome relationship with the recorded format.

Further, Walker’s career evidences how a number of artists in Euro-american contexts have come to regard the recorded, studio intensive format of music as a solution to the problems they are confronted within the the modern public concert spectacle. In doing so these individuals have given birth to a burgeoning autonomous art form, and by extension, a new model of the composer-listener-performer dynamic.

viii CHAPTER 1

THE PRIMACY OF THE RECORDED FORMAT IN EURO- AMERICAN POPULAR STYLES

1.1 Introduction

The music of Noel Scott Engel (b. January 9, 1943), better known as Scott Walker through his affiliation with the commercially successful 1960s pop group The Walker Brothers, has influenced multiple generations of respected figures in popular music including David

Bowie, Brian Eno, Johnny Marr, and Radiohead. Walker, however, has not set foot on stage to perform since the late 1970s. His reputation as a profoundly innovative figure that straddles the worlds of commercial popular music and high art has instead been sustained entirely through his work in the medium of recorded sound. Following a radical self re-invention on the Walker

Brothers’ farewell album Nite Flights (1978), the singer-songwriter-producer has pushed the boundaries of media and form to the extent that his recorded tracks belong more to the aesthetic sphere of fixed art forms such as films rather than performance-oriented forms such as music as it is traditionally categorized among the liberal arts. With the assistance of long time co-producer

Peter Walsh, Walker has pushed the conventional formal aesthetics of record production to their limits in a series of forward-looking, critically acclaimed art-rock studio albums featuring tracks in which large scale form and function are principally delineated through changes in virtual performance space and the narrative arcs of Walker’s cryptically non-linear texts. In the same manner that D.W. Griffith, Sergei Eisenstein, F.W. Murnau, Leni Riefenstahl, and Orson Welles abandoned the rules of theatrical formalism to create works native to the cinematic medium itself, Walker has likewise approached his work in recording studios in a manner warranting

1 consideration as a Phonographic Auteur. To abstract Walker’s works by discussing them as

“songs” detached from their recorded “track” form would be as detrimental to their analysis as

would the discussion of Citizen Kane or Vertigo outside of the form language of the cinema.1 As

a rare example of track almost entirely preceding song, the problems surrounding the analysis of

Walker’s albums Tilt (1995), The Drift (2006) and Bish Bosch (2012) are largely the issues

confronting the analysis of Euro-American popular music that arise from its troublesome

relationship with the recorded format. Walker’s career in phonographic auteurism evidences how

some artists in that context have across the course of the late 20th century come to regard the

recorded, studio intensive format of music as a solution to the problems they are confronted

within the the modern public concert spectacle. In doing so these individuals have given birth to

a burgeoning autonomous art form, and by extension, a new model of the composer-listener-

performer dynamic.

Unlike western classical concert music where centuries of development and

standardization occurred prior to the invention of sound recordings, the historical meta-narrative

of contemporary Euro-American popular music is largely that of recorded sound itself. As a

peculiarity of this specific context, studio recordings tend to serve as the standard by which live

performances and covers by other artists are judged. Regarding the prioritization of record

production over performance, Amanda Bayley says in the introduction to Recorded Music that

“... the separation between creation and re-creation is dissolved, and the ontological status of

1 This is a re-appropriation of Allan Moore’s dichotomy of Song vs. Track as presented in his article, “The Track” (2010). Likewise, Albin Zak has used the term “Track” since the publication of his text The Poetics of Rock: Cutting Tracks, Making Records (2001) for the purpose of distinguishing between “residual” and “emergent” data in recorded popular music.

2 recording changes from being a product to a process of transformation.”2 As attempts to re- appropriate the aesthetic framework of concert music for the analysis of popular music have proven problematic, the ontological differences between classical and popular styles have come into relief. Evidenced by the growing number of texts being published on popular music analysis that directly engage with the recorded format,3 and the subject’s prominence in the Popular

Music Interest Group discussions during the 2012 Society for Music Theory National

Conference in New Orleans, Louisiana, the establishment of an aesthetic framework for the

analysis of popular recordings is arguably one of the most pressing issues in Popular Music

scholarship. It is in this academic climate that this research has been conducted.

This research is presented in three principal sections. Part I, “Factors Leading to the Rise

of Phonographic Auteurism” is dedicated to the examination of the socio-economic factors

leading to many artists’ consideration of the recorded format as a viable alternative to problems

they had encountered through the standard operating procedures of the mid-20th century

commercial entertainment industry in the United States and Western Europe. The basis of an

appropriate aesthetic framework for the analysis of fixed-media art forms is established in

Chapter 2, emphasizing similarities between the function of the record producer and that of the

film director as the justification for the transposition of auteur theory to the arena of record

production. Part II, “Scott Walker and the Late Twentieth Century Phenomenon of the

Phonographic Auteur,” begins with an overview of Walker’s career within various sectors of the

commercial recording industry, emphasizing in Chapter 3 Walker’s contentious personal

2 Amanda Bayley, ed., Recorded Music: Performance, Culture and Technology (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 9.

3 These texts include: Allan Moore’s Song Means: Analysing and Interpreting Recorded Popular Song (2012), Amanda Bayley’s Recorded Music: Performance, Culture and Technology (2010) and Albin Zak’s Poetics of Rock: Cutting Tracks, Making Records (2001).

3 relationship with public performance practice in the mid 1960s as the basis of his long-term

exclusive association with the acousmatic recorded format of music. The issue of an artist’s right

to self determination is then addressed though consideration of the oppressive creative

restrictions imposed upon Walker’s recordings by his record labels, Phillips and Columbia,

between 1969 and 1978. In Chapter 4 the aforementioned analytical methodology is summoned

to examine Walker’s radical self-reinvention on the Walker Brother’s Nite Flights (1978) as a

figurative Rosetta Stone to facilitate the decryption of the authors latter day works as a full

fledged Phonographc Auteur. Part III, “Analyzing the Work of the Phonographic Auteur,”

dedicates a chapter to the discussion of each of Walker’s post 1995 albums Tilt, The Drift, and

Bish Bosch. To conclude, a brief discussion of the implications of Walker’s recording-centric works with respect to the changing role of public performance as well as the composer- performer-listener dynamic is offered for the reader’s consideration.

1.2 Sound Recordings And The Transformation Of How Music Is Heard

In 1906 John Philip Sousa wrote “The Menace of Mechanical Music,” a short essay in which the composer decried the dangerous social implications he feared would result from the popularization of private sound recording playback technology. Sousa’s impassioned denouncement of “canned music”4 as a threat to the sacred tradition of public performance was astute, as sound recordings and playback technology have indeed transformed many facets of music culture ranging from the way we interact with it in our daily lives to the very means by which it is created. Thanks to recordings and the proliferation of affordable high-fidelity sound

4 Sousa is credited for coining the now commonplace term for the recorded format of music, initially pointing toward it’s cylindrical “canned” physical essence.

4 playback equipment, modern listeners can hear to more of Beethoven’s music than the

composer’s most affluent and dedicated contemporary enthusiast would have been able to in his

or her lifetime in stunning aural detail (possible only at the most favorable vantage point within

the concert hall) in the course of a single week without having to leave the comfort of home.5

As common as solitary listening is today, the practice carried the stigma of socially- deviant behavior at the turn of the twentieth century.6 It is only on occasion that contemporary listeners treat themselves to an outing at the concert hall, pub or other venue of choice. Even in public settings where music has historically been demanded, such as nightclubs or restaurants, it is more likely to find recordings being played back over public address systems than the presence of live musicians. The current primacy of the recorded format, particularly in the context of Euro-American popular genres, is less the result of the economic advantages for venues nor technical incompetence of the players of popular styles, but rather, is indicative of a culture that has demanded an ever greater degree of quality, creativity, and detail in the sound of their music. The long and winding path travelled by recording technology to modern spectacle of hook-infested pop productions began humbly in late 1870s with Thomas Edison’s phonograph, an instrument initially marketed to businesses for use as a dictation tool. Most early applications of sound recording and playback equipment were utilized to capture the once fleeting essence of sound, and thusly tended to be utilized with archival documentary intent by its users. Aside from sheer necessities such as the substitution of certain instruments within ensembles and the uneven frequency response curves of early microphones, the idea that a finished recording should

5 I borrow this scenario from Brian Eno’s 1979 lecture “The Recording Studio as a Compositional Tool.”

6 For an detailed overview of early sound recording technology and its impact on musical culture, refer to Mark Katz’s Wired for Sound (2004), as well as his contributions to Music, Sound, and Technology in America: A Documentary of Early Phonograph, Cinema, and Radio (2012, ed. Taylor, D., Mark Katz, and Tony Grajeda).

5 realistically simulate a performance as it would be heard live by an observer in an unchanging, finite sound environment was the dominant aesthetic principle behind record production well into the mid 1930s.

1.3 Changing Aesthetics of Record Production

Much like the practitioners of the closely related twentieth-century new media, film, it was only gradually that record producers began to exploit the medium’s intrinsic capacities to enhance the listener’s experience. Initially appearing as carnival sideshow novelty attractions in the late 1880s, motion pictures quickly progressed to a large scale industry into the early 1900s when the commercial viability of filming stage plays for international distribution became apparent to potential investors. These early photographic stage plays, much like early sound recordings, were produced with the intent of simulating the experience of a single spectator’s fixed perspective from an ideal point in the theater: the camera was set so that the stage was to be seen at all times in its entirety so the perspective would be unchanging (with the exception of the necessary insertion of inter-titles to compensate for the lack of sound). As early filmmakers gradually ceased restricting themselves to the re-creation of a single audience member’s perspective of a stage play, cinematography was inadvertently elevated to the status of a viable, autonomous art form.

With the advent of echo and reverberation processes in the late 1920s and early 1930s, record producers likewise began to think beyond the concrete limitations of the recording as a totally naturalistic simulation of performance. While filmmakers had discovered the unique properties of film to be those of cinematography and editing, record producers and savvy artists

6 discovered intrinsic properties of record production to be the construction of artificial

performance space applied in conjunction with editing.7 This began simply enough with the

application of echo to recordings to fabricate an imagined, sometimes seemingly unbounded

space in which the performance would be perceived to be occur.8 The generative capacity of the

recording studio was profoundly expanded upon the arrival of multi-track recording equipment,

its potentials first fully realized within jazz guitarist Les Paul’s recordings during the late 1940s

in which overdubbing was used to create complete guitar choirs through layering single

monophonic takes. Though techniques such as Paul’s that challenged the sacrosanctity of

naturalism in record production were initially perceived as gimmickry, naturalism in pop record

production gradually fell out of favor to recordings in which these effects were utilized to

generate a more abstract and disordered sense of space.9 Influential multimedia artist and music

theorist Brian Eno cited the foundation of his entire career in music upon the wonderment he

experienced upon first hearing the echo on the recording of Elvis Presley’s “Heartbreak Hotel” as

a child, explaining “I think the echo on Elvis’s “Heartbreak Hotel” is better than the song itself,

by far. Nobody could tell me what that was, in my family. They didn’t know what to make of that

sound. It turns the studio into a cave ...When I was young, the most overpowering sense of

wonder was inspired in me by music.”10 Likewise, in his 1979 Lecture “The Recording Studio as

a Compositional Tool,” Eno contended that popular music has always been predicated upon

having a uniquely identifiable characteristic of sound. The principle of utilizing recording

7 This echoes the historical meta-narrative presented by Peter Doyle in his text Echo and Reverb (2005).

8 This practice, specifically that surrounding the liberal application of echo would be taken to its logical extreme with Phil Spector’s signature “Wall of Sound” productions in the 1960s.

9 Echo and Reverb presents an in depth history developments in record production practices into the mid twentieth century, contending the process to be one predicated upon the fabrication of “imagined spaces”.

10 Mark Howell, “From a Strangers Evening with Brian Eno,”Another Room (June/July 1981), n. p.

7 equipment to conspicuously fabricate impossible virtual performance space was taken to its

logical extreme in the early 1960s with revolutionary American producer Phil Spector’s

development of his signature “Wall of Sound” style, later to be imitated and expanded upon by

producer Johnny Franz and Scott Walker’s collaborative partnership in the production of the

Walker Brothers’ Baroque-pop records in the later part of the decade.11

1.4 The Beatles (and Glenn Gould) Declare: “All You Need Are Our Recordings”

Despite the increased relevance of the recorded format in popular genres indicated by the

proliferation of new and novel sounds of 1950s rock and roll, it was not until the late 1960s that a

precedent was established for exclusive prioritization of an artist’s work from within the

recording studio. When considering The Beatles’ current status as the gold standard of quality in

popular music as much as the “three B’s” (Bach, Beethoven and Brahms) are to classical genres,

it is difficult to overestimate the influence the band has had upon virtually every aspect of the

commercial recording industry. One of the less immediately recognized long term effects of The

Beatles’ career is that of their relationship with the recorded format during the latter part of the

1960s. By 1966 the band had achieved such success that they were granted virtual carte-blanche

to decide for themselves the course of their career. The Beatles were thus able to retire from

public performance altogether at the height of their staggering popularity, leaving a worldwide

audience sound recordings as the only means through which to interface with their music.

Among the very first projects undertaken by the band following the decision to no longer tour,

11 Though most sources on the Walker-Franz collaborative partnership begin with the Walker Brothers’ signature recording “The Sun Ain’t Gonna Shine Anymore,” it is arguable that the Gothic, Baroque-styled “Archangel,” (1966) constitutes a more accurate “Year-Zero” for the study of Scott Walker as a Phonographic Auteur.

8 “Tomorrow Never Knows,” (1966) began as tape experiment McCartney proposed to the rest of

the band shortly after being introduced to Karlheinz Stockhausen’s recording-studio, tape-editing

intensive Gesang der Junglinge (1955). The finished track as it appears on The Beatles’ seminal

1966 album, Revolver, was the result of the band’s live-at-mixing-desk performance, controlling

the fading and blending of a set of tape loops that the band had compiled over several weeks

prior to the recording session. For the degree to which the track’s meaning depends upon the

mutations of the otherwise familiar sounds, as well as the loose textural relationships resultant of

the material form of the tape loops themselves, “Tomorrow Never Knows” exemplifies the shift

of emphasis in popular genres from the composing of the “song” to the construction of the

“track” that took place during the late 1960s.12 For the degree to which the recording process cannot possibly be extracted from the concept of the work itself, as well as the complete abandonment of aesthetic naturalism, “Tomorrow Never Knows” constitutes a high-water mark in the emergence of the recorded format in popular genres as an autonomous art form. The retreat to the recording studio was less a luxury than it was a necessity, as Beatles concerts had become such overblown spectacles that there simply didn’t exist amplification equipment powerful enough to compete with the sound levels produced by hysterical arena-sized audiences. By treating their recording as the ends as artists, The Beatles arguably established a precedent in popular styles that would transform the culture of listening to music so radically that it would eventually necessitate the aesthetic re-categorization of Euro-American popular styles as non- performance oriented, fixed art. The Beatles, however, were only the most visible among a mass exodus from the stage during that decade that included contemporary artists from both sides of

12 Again, the dichotomy of “Track” vs. “Song” in this context constitutes a re-appropriation of core principles from the work of both Allan Moore and Albin Zak.

9 the pop-classical divide. This group included influential Belgian singer-songwriter Jacques Brel,

and internationally-renowned virtuoso pianist Glenn Gould.

In 1962 Gould wrote “Let’s Ban Applause,” an article for Musical America in which the pianist suggested that the ritual of public concert was historically anachronistic, and further, called into question the very essence of the performer/listener dynamic itself. In the following year Gould gave his final public concert and subsequently dedicated the last two decades of his musical career to exclusive operation within the recording studio. Like the Beatles, Gould viewed his prioritization of the recording studio as a solution to the flaws of the modern concert industry. Gould’s coining of the term “The Artistic Splice” in a later article for High Fidelity,

“The Prospects of Recording,”13 to describe his perspectives of the engineering and editing of a recording as an intellectually demanding creative process is telling of the sea change in the realm of recorded music that was underway. For Gould, The Beatles, and many other artists the sound recording was no longer conceptualized merely as a finished product, but rather, as an ideal, constructive process worthy of their time and energy as well as their audience’s attention.

1.5 Economic Barriers to the Creation of Works of Art in Commercial Media14

"I've become the Orson Welles of the record industry. People want to take me to lunch, but nobody wants to finance the picture...” (Scott Walker, The Independent, April 1995 following the release of Tilt)

As much as the music of The Beatles is currently regarded as unequivocal proof that great

art with can arise out of contexts once considered suspect by mid twentieth century social critics such as Theodor Adorno, Orson Welles is today recognized as proof that his chosen mass

13 Glenn Gould, High Fidelity Magazine, vol. 16, nr. 4, April 1966, pp. 46-63.

14 Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, Dialektik Der Aufklärung: Philosophische Fragmente, Amsterdam: Querido, 1944.

10 medium of cinema could in fact foster lasting works of art. Welles while in his early twenties

mastered the use of three different mediums, progressively conceiving and executing works in

each that had instantly had unprecedented measurably lasting impacts on society at a large

scale.15 Just as Sergei Eisenstein, the progenitor of one of global cinema’s most lasting theoretical principles (montage) had gained his first professional dramatic experience under the auspices of newly created government programs that had been instituted for the purpose of fostering of a national culture of arts in the U.S.S.R. one decade earlier, Welles first made a name

for himself as a stage director with the Negro Theater Unit of the Federal Theatre Project in New

York.16 Welles then used the notoriety to form his own “Mercury Theater” in 1937, using his

newly founded performance collective to cross over into the medium of radio. Welles in 1938

produced a radio play rendition of H.G. Wells “War of the Worlds” that initiated a widespread

public phenomenon in which a notable segment of the population were provoked to consider, at a

level they otherwise may not have upon their own volition, the possibility that humans may

someday interact with sentient beings that originate from distant places in the universe— for

better or worse. Welles’ broadcast made an impact at the level of federal government, a feat

challenging even to elected officials, which lead to the formation of federal laws governing radio

broadcasts.17 The scope of Welles public influence reached its peak in the following year when

he entered the arena of the cinema, producing Citizen Kane (1941), a film that single-handedly

advanced the art form of the film through the new visual language and devices it pioneered.

15 The information regarding Welles’ career in this passage I base upon the 1996 PBS documentary film The Battle Over Citizen Kane.

16 The Federal Theater Project was a component of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Works Progress Administration.

17 The Battle Over Citizen Kane [1996], DVD, Turner Entertainment Company T6565.

11 The very condition by which Welles was able to so profoundly make impacts in

whatever medium or genre he chose traces to his good fortune in finding positions which

allowed him carte blanche to realize uncompromisingly his artistic vision. Welles' contract with

RKO, based upon the fervor he was able to generate with the infamous “War of the Worlds”

broadcast, was unprecedented in the complete artistic control awarded to a first time film

director. Much of Kane’s visual ingenuity came from Welles’ sheer ignorance of its revolutionary

nature, such as his insistence upon extensive use of deep focus— a process that necessitated in

some cases sets be designed in irregular proportions to accommodate the specific vantage point

of the camera.18 It was no secret that the principal subject of the film for which Citizen Kane was

titled was in large part based upon media imperialist William Randolph Hearst. When Hearst

became aware that he was basis of Welles’ upcoming film, he assumed the unfavorable depiction

of the principal character’s relationship with his aspiring yet modestly talented singer-mistress

turned second wife to be based on his own relationship with actress Marion Davies.19 Hearst

subsequently used his monopolistic strong arm over the U.S. media and entertainment industry to

crush the film. As a consequence of the overwhelming scope of the financial impact RKO

incurred as a result of Hearst’s retaliation, Welles’ become widely regarded as a financial liability

throughout the American motion-picture studio system. Subsequently Welles relationship with

his financiers would never be the same, and lost final cut of his second motion picture, The

Magnificent Ambersons (1942).20 RKO, without the consent of Welles cut 40 minutes from the

film’s runtime, and further, re-shot its ending in a manner different from the director’s version.

18 This is what Welles states during a 1974 television interview with Michael Parkinson (https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=VVlukLi32vs).

19 The Battle Over Citizen Kane [1996], DVD, Turner Entertainment Company T6565.

20 Ibid.

12 The film fared poorly with both audiences and critics, and the original cut, never seen by audiences, is believed to have been lost when placed in storage in Brazil. Likewise in Welles near triumphant return to Hollywood almost two decades later with his appointment to direct Touch of

Evil (1958), the studio re-cut the film to Welles and the cast’s protest.21 The film failed to make an impact upon its initial theatrical release, being paired at the undistinguished position of bottom billing in double features and was quickly forgotten. Fortunately, the original negatives of the film remained extant, and upon the basis of Welles 58 page memo to RKO detailing his grievances with the studio’s modifications, the nearest possible approximation of the original director’s cut was finally made available to audiences in 1998, four decades after the original release of the film. The Magnificent Ambersons and Touch of Evil demonstrated in devastating terms that Welles’ films as complete visions of the author necessitated he have final cut of his work. The perception of Welles’ artistic boldness as a financial liability in the eyes of potential

Hollywood financiers, however, meant that very few remained willing to make monetary investments of the scope they had prior in his works. The result was that Welles, to function in the capacity of artistic control his productions necessitated, had to accept smaller projects with less funding, predominantly in Europe. The life and work of Welles has become something of a cautionary tale, proving that while it is possible to achieve works of high art within the context of a commercial industry, any artists decision to work in such a medium runs the risk of falling subject to issues of patronage and right of self determination.

21 Bringing Evil to Life [1998], DVD, Universal Studios Home Entertainment 61103474.

13 CHAPTER 2

AESTHETIC PREMISES

“The twentieth-century threat to musical autonomy is not the rise of mass music... but the development of recording

technology.” 22

-Simon Frith (from “Adam Smith And Music,” 1992)

2.1 Intentionality and Identity of “The Work”

Distinguishing signal from noise is a process common to all types of analyses. In the

qualitative realm of the fine arts, the process is represented by the establishment of a work’s

“identity” —a term that often becomes synonymous with the intentionality or will of the creator.

For example, during a performance of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony it is not so much the

corporeal event taking place on stage as observed by an audience, but rather, the constant and

unchanging instructions left by the composer in the score that establishes whether those actions

on stage are or are not reflective of that specific constellation of aesthetic data. The nuances of

performances such as ensemble balance or collective timbre within the sound environment,

though often relevant with respect to the historic and stylistic contextualization of the work, are

not directly traceable to the intentionality of the creator. As a result, these details cannot be

regarded as integral to the work’s identity. Consequentially, the analysis of Western concert

music is principally restricted to the contents of the notated score instead of the performance, and

quantitative domains such as pitch and duration have historically functioned as the musical

dimensions of principal focus in its analysis. It is this very matter of the discrete separation

between intent and execution upon which traditional concert music has thrived upon for nearly

22 Simon Frith, “Adam Smith and Music” in Taking Popular Music Seriously: Selected Essays, Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007.

14 two millennia. This separation between composition and performance reflects the limitations of

an era in which sound was a temporal and fleeting phenomenon beyond control of the human

will. Artists working in contemporary popular genres as the musical progeny of the era of

recorded sound, however, have been quicker to call into question the necessity of the

hermeneutic relationship between composition and execution.23 As a consequence, the formerly

mutually exclusive processes have, in that context, fused. When utilized in its capacity as a

process of transformation, the recorded medium affords artists to function as author and

executor, sculpting the conduit through which his or her intentionality is to be directed to its end

user.

It is important to note that the capacity to do so does not automatically suggest that all

artists do, and that there does exist a continuum with respect to the degree the work’s most vital

aesthetic information is either found in the domain of the song as an abstraction or within its

material, recorded form. By in large within the context of Euro-American recorded popular

songs, the aesthetic data carried within the recorded format is not absolutely essential to the

identity of the song, allowing in most cases their abstraction as “songs” in Allan Moore’s sense

of the term. Nevertheless, the binary opposition of track and song that characterizes the work in

popular genres is of a contrasting ontological nature from that of the works that classical

analytical methodologies were developed. Until recently, however, the analysis of popular music

has been in large part characterized by attempts to superimpose frameworks intended for the

structural analysis of score-based Western concert musics. The re-appropriation of such

23 As an exception, composers working in electronic music intrinsically exploit the recorded, fixed-format as a direct channel for the execution of their intent. Incidentally this “performance-less-ness” was initially viewed by composers as problematic for its upsetting of the traditional expectations of the composer-listener-performer dynamic of music.

15 methodological frameworks in this particular context is however problematic, if not fundamentally flawed for its lack of consideration of sound recordings as constructions in which every constituent element potentially appears as the result of a conscious intentionality, and thus may constitute aesthetically indispensable information to the work’s reading, and subsequently, its analysis.

The issues that arise with respect to the disparities between the aesthetic frameworks of performance and fixed, recording-centric modes of musical transmission are neatly summarized by Nelson Goodman’s dichotomy of “allographic” and “autographic” art forms. Goodman proposed in his 1968 text, Languages of Art a continuum upon which different art forms could be sorted based upon the form’s propensity to foster a notational scheme in which symbolic diagrams might be created that represent a work in a complete fashion or not. Goodman subsequently terms the extreme ends of his continuum as “allographic” (i.e. concert music, dance and architecture), and those forms that cannot foster such systems (i.e. painting, sculpture, photography, cinema and sound recordings), “autographic.” In short, Goodman’s continuum establishes a basis for the comparison of art-forms based upon whether performance and execution are one in the same, or discrete processes. Upon this clear ground as to the necessity of reading recorded popular music via different methods from those that are useful to concert music, it follows that the processes of analysis and evaluation of one autographic form might inform that of another.

16 2.2 Auteur Theory as a General Model for the Analysis of Autographic Media

“It was the old principles, inapplicable to a new art, which smothered the new principles at birth”24

-Bela Balasz

The current circumstances that convolute the analysis of recording-centric musics are remarkably similar to those that necessitated the first writings in film theory toward the beginning of the previous century. Film, like recorded music, is essentially the mechanical manifestation of a pre-existing allographic tradition, the theater.25 Motion pictures had initially developed through the practice of photographing theatrical performances for the purpose of producing performance surrogates for mass distribution. Pioneering filmmakers during the first two decades of the twentieth century such as D.W. Griffith and Sergei Eisenstein elevated cinematography to the status of an autonomous, principally autographic art form by rejecting the necessity of preserving within a film the rules of theatrical perception, strategically varying camera perspectives within single scenes to create a work truly native to its medium. Creative decisions with the process of visual storytelling become the artistic currency of a director, and ultimately, the way by which the work is critically evaluated. By electing to manipulate the cinematic medium in and of itself through strategic uses of cinematography and film editing, early filmmakers discovered ways to transmit a message using the cinematic medium itself as its content. As a consequence, the finished result was no longer one of a theatrical nature, but rather, one belonging to a new, autonomous form. That which made films an autographic art form is best summed up in the term “mise-en-scène,” which has been defined by Jim Hiller as “the

24 Bela Balasz, The Theory of the Film (North Stratford: Ayer Publishers, 1997), 21.

25 The theater might be considered principally “allographic” for the referential quality of the script and staging instructions as the basis of the work’s identity, to which any performance whose contents are matching is belonging to that specific constellation of aesthetic data that constitutes that work.

17 technique invented by each director to express the idea and establish the specific quality of his

work."26 As something of a twentieth century outcropping of the late nineteenth century

Wagnerian principle of the Gesamkunstwerk, everything present within the camera’s frame down to set design, lighting, staging, in addition to cinematography, editing and sound design are integral. As the intersection between the realms of cinematic and music compositional practices, it is worthwhile to pause and discuss the gradual marriage of film scoring with sound design that occurred during the mid-twentieth century.

Only in the late 1950s had popular approaches to sound design and film scoring begun to change since their first standardization in the previous decade.27 Up to this time, the relationship between sound and image was relatively uncomplicated and quite literal. Sound effects were strictly the consequence of a directly seen (or understood) action, while scoring was frequently applied to help viewers interpret action in accordance with the perspective of the intended narrative. For instances of direct, simultaneous correspondence between scoring an image, the term “Mickey-Mousing” was popularized to describe such cartoonish effects. Subjective, psycho-emotional experience of a narrative’s subjects was most often conveyed through scoring, while sound design (or sound-bed) was more or less confined to elements to the objective reality of the narrative. With the advent of sound synthesis in the mid-twentieth century, filmmakers began to undertake experiments in the overall composition of sound in films, such as The

Forbidden Planet (1956) in which there exists no clear distinction between sound design and scoring. Most importantly, this meant that sound began to be used to convey both natural,

26 Hillier, Jim (1985). Cahiers du Cinema: Volume I: The 1950s. Neo-Realism, Hollywood, New Wave. Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge. pp. 8-9.

27 By this, I am primarily referring to that of American and European films of the 1940s. A much more extensive survey of world cinema will be necessary to fully support this claim.

18 external sound environments as well as subjective inner states of filmic subjects. Sounds, often

assumed to represent the natural environment of the subjects, would take on properties that could

only indicate the subjective emotional experience of the character. The basic relationship was

further advanced by Bernard Herrmannʼs score for Alfred Hitchcockʼs Psycho in 1960 in which

the stabbing motive from the infamous shower sequence signifies the violent gestures occurring

on screen without simply “mickey mousing,” and simultaneously, the terror that specific physical

action was provoking within the victim of the attack as well.

It is upon the basis that “two films in which the story and acting are exactly the same, but

which are differently cut may be the expression of two totally different personalities and present

two totally different images of the world”28 that Alexandre Astruc coined the term camera-pen

(caméra-stylo) to express the notion that a film carries the innate capacity to express a singular authorial voice. Proponents of Astruc’s theory of the Auteur, notably the critics of Cahiers du

Cinéma during the 1950s subsequently evaluated films on the basis of the degree to which a filmmaker did or did not recognize through their work the capacity of the filmic components to work in conjunction to singularly express his or her own vision. These critics coined the term metteurs en scène to label directors whose filmic works whose works were marked by a disuse of medium.29 It is in these implementations of creative solutions to the basic charges of visual storytelling that differentiate films as works of art and films as commodities.

28 Balasz, The Theory of The Film, 31.

29 Alfred Hitchcock, the filmmaker championed by proponents of auteur theory in France during the 1950s such as Francois Truffaut as a quintessential cinematic auteur coined the phrase “pictures of people talking” to criticize the work of such metteurs en scène’s reliance upon dialogue to progress a scene when the same message might be communicated to audiences non-verbally through means native to the medium itself.

19 2.3 Literature or Music: The Role of Meaning in Popular Genres

As Astruc’s term implies, the work of the director in auteur theory is that of an literary, narrative nature. Likewise in the context of popular music, the heightened role of text and meaning is evidenced by the fact that the one of the more extensive writings on analytical engagement with pop’s material form, Allan Moore’s Song Means: Analysing and Interpreting

Recorded Popular Song, are conducted within the realm of interplay between sound and language. Meaning’s relevance in popular styles, however, is problematic for the manner in which it convolutes the style’s ability to be categorized along with music as the term is historically understood. Pierre Schaeffer argued “In Search of a Concrete Music” (1952) that music and literature are distinct from one another on basis of the relevance of meaning to the reading of the work, stating: “Every sound phenomenon (like the words of language) can be taken for its relative meaning or for its own substance. As long as meaning predominates, and is the subject of play, we have literature and not music.”30 Likewise, musicologist Thomas Clifton emphasizes music as a message whose content is that of sounds in and of themselves, defining it as “an ordered arrangement of sounds and silences whose meaning is presentative rather than denotative.”31 For the complications brought about by the relevance of text and meaning in popular music genres, and additionally, the autographic essence of recording centric musics, the re-appropriation of Astruc’s principle of the Camera Pen as the Mixing-Desk Pen in the analysis of some recorded popular music is justified. Specifically, the theory is best suited for instances in

which music can be proven to function in sub-ordinance to text. As Walker has consistently

30 Pierre Schaeffer, A la Recherche d’une Music Concrete (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1952), 276.

31 Thomas Clifton, Music as Heard: A Study in Applied Phenomenology (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1983), 2.

20 stated in interviews since the 1980s that his compositional process has always begun with the

generation of his texts, and later, the development of music that is intended as a reification of that text, his recorded works constitute an ideal subject for the phonographic re-appropriation of cinematic auteur theory.32

2.4 The “Mixing-Desk Pen” as the Phonographic Auteur’s Tool

In phraseology remarkably similar to Balazs’ aforementioned statement regarding the

significance of the director to the uniqueness of a finished cinematic work, multimedia artist and

theorist Brian Eno establishes the analogous role of film director and record producer stating,

“The same song, played by the same band may have a completely differing effect when handled

by a different producer.”33 Producers carefully shape and sculpt the timbre and texture of a recording, treating the musical performance as the stock from which they chisel away, very much akin to the plastic, similarly autographic art of sculpture. A transposition of cinematic auteur theory to the context of popular recorded song would by extension indicate that for the governance of popular genres by the recorded format, and the precedence the format takes in the experience of the artist’s music in the lives of listeners, the measure of an artist’s merit is founded upon his or her competency and literacy and involvement with respect to the creation of works that constructively use the recorded format to the artists expressive ends.34 Voicing similar

32 This is what Walker stated during his 2 February, 2012 radio interview on the “World Cafe” program with David Dye.

33 Brian Eno, “The Recording Studio as a Compositional Resource.” http://music.hyperreal.org/artists/brian_eno/ interviews/downbeat79.htm (accessed 8 February, 2013).

34 Further precedent for this position might be found in the degree to which the proliferation of affordable home- recording equipment has afforded artists the opportunity to acquire proficiency and literacy with respect to the engineering and producing their own works.

21 sentiments to Alfred Hichcock’s regarding the dis-use of a medium, Glenn Gould criticized the haphazard use of the recording medium such as its use to capture live performances. Gould asserted that recordings of live performances are “... events which straddle two worlds and are at home in neither.”35 In other terms, the utilization of sound recording technology in its original capacity strictly to capture and document a performance has become outmoded, arguably constituting an equivalent to metteurs en scène. By extension, it is the responsibility of the artist in the Euro-American context to make thoughtful use of the recording studio that allow for their audiences an experience uniquely afforded through that would simply be unavailable in public performance. Though an artist’s decision to approach his or her work in the recording studio naturalistically as a mirror of his or her stage performances does not immediately preclude that artist from relevance, it necessitates that that artist’s works be evaluated through the traditional, principally allographic, performer-listener dynamic. As a consequence such artists subject themselves to the problems of the contemporary concert industry in which music and quality of sound itself will always be ancillary to economic interests of financiers, and further, make significant sacrifices with respect to active participation within the overall system through which contemporary listening audiences predominantly experience music and develop their aesthetic sensibilities in their daily lives.

A principal argument upon which the transposition of auteur theory to the analysis and critical evaluation of recording-centric musics is instantly dismissed is that producer and artist have historically constituted two separate entities. Thanks to the proliferation of affordable high quality digital recording equipment, however, the actual logistics of a record’s production are

35 Glenn Gould, High Fidelity Magazine, vol. 16, nr. 4, April 1966, pp. 46-63.

22 with increasing prevalence no longer exclusively the domain of a separate producer, but rather,

are very much a direct expression of the artist him or herself. While it was remarkable in the

1960s that Brian Wilson was so intimately involved with the production of Beach Boys records,

as was Jimmy Page’s receiving sole producer credits on the entirety of Led Zeppelin’s oeuvre

into the 1980s, the distinguishing mark of commercial entertainer and commercial entertainment

is very much that of their recognition of how their works fit into the greater scheme of the

vertically integrated system of the music industry in which they are participating. As a result,

commercial recordings have increasingly featured a greater prevalence of mise-en-scène that

signifies a unified artistic vision on the behalf of that artist. It is that mise-en-scène that

constitutes the aesthetically indispensable autographic data to the work’s reading, and despite the

likelihood of armies of nameless, faceless studio hands, the data in the finished work traces

directly to the creators intent. As the work of the artist-producer in the recording studio

increasingly mirrors that of the creative responsibilities of film directors, a phenomenon that

might be concisely termed Phonographic Auteurism has come into existence. It is the late

twentieth-century phenomenon of Phonographic Auteurism that Scott Walker, a 1960s teen-pop idol turned elusive avant-garde recording studio pioneer embodies. Walker’s career as a professional musician began as a session player, and record production was always the artist’s principal interest above stardom as a performer.

23 CHAPTER 3

EARLY YEARS IN THE COMMERCIAL MUSIC INDUSTRY

3.1 Scott Engel Demos, L.A. Session Work, and the Walker Brothers’ Formation

Noel Scott Engel, the artist who would become known as Scott Walker, became a

participant in the commercial music industry during the late 1950s. While in his early teens the

bourgeoning performer cut several singles as Scott Engel in the style of his contemporary teen

idols (through circumstances arranged by his mother), and additionally, appeared in a series of

performances on the Eddie Fischer show.36 The first major step toward Engel’s professional

career, however, did not involve his vocal talents, but rather, his proficiency as a bass guitarist.

The low spectrum of sound would later become a signature element of Walker’s style from the

signature baritone croon he would develop as his voice entered maturity to his fascination with

low register instruments such as baritone guitar. Engel’s association with the bass guitar as a

relatively new and novel musical invention whose mass production first commenced during the

late 1950s provided the teenaged musician an open door to Los Angeles recording studios as a

session player.

It was through his association with the L.A. recording scene that Walker met future band

mate John Maus, who had adopted the stage surname Walker several years earlier. Engel too

would adopt the stage surname of Walker in 1963, officially forming the Walker Brothers in the

familial blue-eyed soul prototype established by the Righteous Brothers. Maus was initially

36 The biographical information in this chapter is based upon information from four principal sources: No Regrets: Writings on Scott Walker (2012, ed. Rob Young), Anthony Reynolds’ The Impossible Dream: The Story of Scott Walker and the Walker Brothers (2009), the 2006 documentary film on Walker, 30 Century Man, and Jeremy Reed’s Another Tear Falls: A Study of Scott Walker (1998). All information provided is widely corroborated across these sources.

24 featured as lead vocalist and guitarist, and Engel as second vocalist and bass guitarist. The group was an instant success playing seven nights a week on the sunset strip with drummer Al

Schneider, later to be replaced by Gary Leeds. Upon the basis of his success with The Shondells,

Leeds had been invited to tour the U.K. with P. J. Proby, and while there, had made acquaintances with Brian Jones who advised the drummer to consider relocating to the U.K to exploit “Swinging London.”37 Leeds’ professional relationship with Proby ended abruptly, and upon returning to L.A. he was so impressed with the Walker’s act that he offered to arrange the necessary financing to re-establish them in the U.K.38 Up to the time of the release of the Walker

Brothers’ second single Scott Walker had principally served in the capacity of bass guitarist and second vocalist. “Love Her,” (1965) featured a low tessitura, for which Engel’s baritone was better suited than Maus’s tenor. As a surprise hit, the single led to a shift in Phillps' marketing of

The Walker Brothers in which principal focus was shifted from John to Scott. The Walker

Brothers’ arrival at the top of the U.K. Charts coincided with the public frenzy surrounding

Beatlemania, and as a consequence, the group was subject to comparable hysteria and mob rule behavior at their own concerts. The modern rites of idol worship within the overcrowded, acoustically impoverished venues of Walker Brothers concerts were among the first of many problems of the Euro-American concert industry that would motivate the bourgeoning phonographic auteur to explore the capacities of the recorded format as a viable alternative to public performance.

37 Anthony Reynolds, The Impossible Dream: The Story of Scott Walker and the Walker Brothers (London: Jawbone, 2009), 47-48.

38 Ibid, 50.

25 3.2 I Issues of Teen Pop Idolatry and Public Performance

Though Walker initially embraced the thrills of fame, he quickly tired of the futility of performing unheard against roaring audiences. It wasn’t until concert conditions posed an immediate threat to his physical safety that Walker began to outwardly rebel against the practice of public performance. Following an incident at a concert in Dublin in which the band’s transport was overturned upon its ceiling, nearly crushing the band members as authorities struggled to disperse the crowd, Walker began to view the audience-performer dynamic in commercial music fearfully as a modern rite of idol worship.39 Beyond the problems he experienced during Walker

Brothers concerts, Walker’s personal privacy became compromised to the extent that his 1968 sojourn to Quarr Abbey, an undertaking upon which he had embarked to study chant and early church modes, was curtailed by an incident in which fanatics attempting to forcefully gain entry caused damage to the historic structure.40 Walker would in large part retire from the stage as he embarked upon a career as a solo recording artist in 1967, and completely in the late 1970s.

Walkers sentiments regarding performing amidst the hysteria of the Walker Brother’s mass audiences are distinctly reminiscent of those expressed by Gould in his articles for High Fidelity and Musical America, in which the pianist had concluded that public performance had devolved into a form of glorified bloodsport with non-empathetic audiences. It was at this point that the scope of Walker’s artistic ambitions surpassed those available to artists in the arena of the concert industry, and that his unique talents as a writer and record producer would emerge.

The bourgeoning Phonographic Auteur’s intensely devoted relationship with the recorded format first arose out of basic necessity common to all composers: to write music that would

39 Scott Walker extended interview, Scott Walker: 30 Century Man [2006], DVD, Oscilloscope Laboratories OSC 8.

40 Ibid.

26 work acoustically in the spaces in which the music would be heard. Walker has expressed in

recent interviews that his long term avoidance of performance, which began at this point in his

career, has been sustained principally upon the basis of the problems caused by the prioritization

of economic interests over acoustical quality in the design and layout of commercial music

venues.41 In his recently published text How Music Works David Byrne explains this dialectical relationship between art and physical, social infrastructure suggesting that in the context of certain cultures in which most music making occurs socially in outdoor contexts fostered the development of indigenous musics in which percussion instruments and dense layers of rhythmic counterpoint are extensively utilized, whereas the same music would quite literally fall apart in the grand gothic cathedrals for which European early vocal music is well suited.42 It is the same reason that Richard Wagner demanded the construction of a specific space in which the revolutionary music he envisioned could acoustically be realized.43 Had the controversial twentieth century musical figure been born one hundred years later, it would seem likely that he would be attracted to the prospects of recording for the basic essence of the process to fabricate any performance space one may desire, and subsequently, make music for that space. It is this unique property of the recorded format of music that Walker and many of his contemporary performing artists would discover solutions to the problems of an imperfect industry that had to

41 The sentiments Walker expresses in his February 2013 World Cafe Radio interview February 2, 2013 are comparable to the grievances espoused by Roger Waters of Pink Floyd regarding the overblown concert spectacle of the 1960s and 1970s, particularly in his engagement with the issue in such projects as the “audience-less” Live at Pompeii concert film, and the various semblances (stage production, studio album and film) of The Wall (1979).

It should be noted that Walker continued to perform sporadically until the late 1970s. Records of these performances, predominantly cabaret and “working men’s clubs,” are scant.

42 David Byrne, How Music Works (China: McSweeney’s, 2012), 16-20.

43 Ibid.

27 that time imposed a creative stranglehold upon the better development of popular forms as a

substantial avenue of artistic experimentation themselves.

3.3 Development of Authorial Voice on Early Solo Releases (1967-1970)

Following the release of three commercially successful studio albums, and having secured

his status as the undisputed leader of the Walker Brothers, the bourgeoning songwriter left the

group in 1967 to begin a career as a solo artist. Walker subsequently developed an authorial

voice in his own right across a string of four studio albums between 1967-1970 in which he

made further use of the sophisticated orchestral-pop, Phil Spector influenced “wall of sound”

style of productions he had cultivated during his time as a member of the Walker Brothers.

Mirroring the manner in which the Beatles had turned their collective eye across the Atlantic

toward the emerging American folk-songwriter tradition of Bob Dylan during their development

as “serious” writers, Walker as an American turned to Europe for its traditions of art song,

classical concert music, and cinema as the foundation of his bourgeoning compositional style.44

As evidence of Walker’s newfound Euro-philic identity as a recording artist, one third of the selections that appeared on each of Walker’s first three albums, simply titled Scott (1967), Scott 2

(1968), and Scott 3 (1969) were his renditions of songs by Belgian chansonier Jacques Brel.45

Brel’s material appearing on Walker’s first two albums introduced themes of sadomasochism,

gonorrhea, prostitutes and death that would reflect the dark, gothic, and often grotesque tone and

images of Walker’s original texts to come. Beyond the pervasive European influence upon

44 As further evidence of the suitability of the artist’s description as phonographic auteur, Walker has frequently mentioned Scandinavian filmmaker Ingmar Bergman in the same breath as his musical influences during interviews.

45 Brel like the Beatles and Glenn Gould also retired from public performance in 1966 to become strictly a recording artist, possibly inspiring Walker to do likewise shortly after.

28 Walker evidenced by his endorsement of Brel’s writing, his compositions tend to de-prioritize

rhythm and groove in favor of texture and melody more characteristic of pre-rock era popular

forms.46 A distinctive trait common to all of Walker’s compositions to date is that of the concerted relationship between the singer and the accompaniment. In the case of Walker’s late

1960s orchestral-pop, it is the dynamic relationship between Walker’s voice as the carrier of the text and the lavish, intricate accompaniments generally performed by large ensembles that drive his tracks. This symbolic juxtaposition of text and sound is the very essence of Walker’s compositions that has remained unchanging across wildly contrasting periods of his career.

Though Walker’s formal music training was limited to his participation in choirs as a youth, he had acquired a literacy in the style and works of many major classical composers of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries that enabled him to collaborate with his arrangers in a scope atypical of artists with comparably-limited formal music training.47 As a result, his finished works cohered on the basis of a dynamic relationship between the style of the author’s text and its supporting orchestration. Following the release of his second solo album, Scott 2 in 1968

Walker sought to expand his formal training by spending a period at Quarr Abbey during which

46 In his extended interview for 30 Century Man, Walker provides an account of his awestruck reaction during his first exposure to Brel’s music, and cites Brel’s work as being and extraordinarily influential on his early artistic development.

Walker’s reluctance to produce the rhythm and groove of contemporary popular styles was criticized by Robert Christgau, the self titled “Dean of Rock Critics” who unfavorably criticized Walker’s style saying, “We're talking Anthony Newley without the voice muscles, "MacArthur Park" as light-programme boilerplate, a male Vera Lynn for late bloomers who found Paul McCartney too r&b.” (Robert Christgau, Consumer Guide, http:// www.robertchristgau.com/get_artist.php?name=scott+walker, Accessed 13 February 2013). Walker’s reluctance toward the primal expressions of sexuality synonymous with the rhythms of rock is evidenced in his later writing on the subjects of human animalistic impulse. More will be said about Walker’s own skepticism toward the culture industry and mass media trends during discussions of The Drift in chapter 6.

47 In an interview conducted for the 2006 documentary film on Walker, 30 Century Man Angela Morley (formerly Wally Stott), the arranger of Walker’s solo recordings between 1967-1970 insisted upon Walker’s literacy with respect to major classical concert repertoire and composers, and the degree to which he was able to communicate in detail his desires to her.

29 he studied Gregorian chant and early church modes. Influence of these studies is evidenced

within the opening track from Walker’s first album released following his studies at Quarr, Scott

3 (1969). Seemingly as a deliberate evocation of Bertolt Brecht’s theatric dynamic practice often

referred to as the “Distancing Effect,”48 Walker greeted the album’s listeners with a static string tone cluster/trilling figuration reminiscent of Ligeti or Bartók, that sits conspicuously against the

music’s otherwise relaxed and lounge-like atmosphere.

Walker has frequently stated in interviews that his recent works are at their ideological core

nothing but a continuation of his late 1960s Phillips releases aside from the gradual abstraction

and baring of the sound elements themselves. Considering this comment from the author himself,

the eerily schizophrenic juxtaposition of the discordant string figuration in “It’s Raining Today”

constitutes something of a foreshadowing of his latter day signatures.49 Scott 4, Walker’s first album to contain exclusively original works, was released later that year to warm critical response, yet failed commercially. Walker’s compositions on Scott 4, such as the harp and string driven “Boy Child,” attain a height of aesthetic beauty and emotional warmth rarely sought by the artist in his more abrasive, darker works that would follow. As a consequence of Scott 4’s mysterious failure, Walker ceased recording his own material at the insistence of his management at Phillips, and instead, recorded commercially palatable “middle of the road” (MOR) repertoire

48 John Willett, ed. and trans., Brecht on Theater (New York: Hill and Wang, 1964), 91.

49 This topic will be discussed in greater detail later in this chapter, as well as Part III, Analyzing the Work of the Phonographic Auteur. As a particularly noteworthy returning artistic signature spanning many decades of Walker’s career, this specific disharmonious use of large string ensembles re-appears in slightly varied guises in “The Electrician” on Nite Flights, “Sleepwalker’s Woman” on Climate of the Hunter, “Patriot (A Single)” on Tilt, “Clara,” “Jesse, and “Cue” on The Drift, and both “‘See You Don’t Bump His Head’” and “Corps de Blah” on Bisch Bosch.

30 by other writers.50 Thus began the better part of a decade of creative silence for Walker that

lasted until the release of the Walker Brothers’ final album, Nite Flights, in 1978.

3.4 “First Cut” and Issues of Patronage

Phillips began to scale back their willingness to invest in Walker’s original material

beginning with the Scott 4’s successor, ‘Til The Band Comes In (1970) in which Walker only appeared as a co-author on half the album’s tracks. Walker subsequently embarked upon a string of commercially unsuccessful releases that included The Moviegoer (1972), Any Day Now

(1973), Stretch (1973), and We Had it All (1974) in which he functioned solely as a performer.

Phillips, then Columbia attempted to market Walker on these albums as a middle of the road

(MOR), country-western singer as a means to target the wide pop audience he had drawn in his

early career.51 By Walker’s own account of the period, the lack of control over his career and

image as a recording artist fostered a period of debilitating depression and chemical

dependency.52 Walker’s contentious relationship with his management during the 1970s is

exemplary of the clashing of twentieth century artistic/altruistic idealism and economic

pragmatism that is the artist’s battle for freedom of artistic vision.

Walker, like Orson Welles, had as a young man been afforded tremendous opportunities

by wealthy financiers that placed a certain degree of faith in his vision and capacities as a

50 The commercial failure of Scott 4 is often attributed to Walker’s choice to release the album under his birth name, Engel, rather than his better known stage surname. Walker himself has proposed that the overwhelming presence of triple meter throughout Scott 3 led to his widespread dismissal by an audience that generally sought danceable material.

51 Walker has disowned these albums, preventing their reissue to express the degree to which he disapproves of their quality and style of their content.

52 Simon Hattenstone, "Scott Walker: Brother beyond," The Guardian, n.p.

31 recording artist. Patronage indispensable to Walker’s success began with his mother’s role in kick-starting the young Engel’s lifelong involvement in commercial entertainment via her instigating the production of the “Scott Engel Demos” during the late 1950s, then Gary Leeds’ securing of the requisite capital for Walker Brothers’ commercial launch in the U.K. (a $10,000 loan from his stepfather according to most sources), and finally, the Phillips Record company’s fostering of Walker’s development as a professional record producer. The commercial failure of

Scott 4, Walker’s first album to be comprised in its entirety of original compositions impacted

Walker’s career in a manner much like that of the backlash over Citizen Kane had for Welles, nearly crushing Walker’s reputation as a writer-producer altogether. For the better part of the next decade Walker’s work as a recording artist was tarnished by the revocation of his privilege of final cut, being relegated to the sole function as a performer of others’ material. As a last resort to keep his career afloat, Walker reunited the Walker Brothers and released yet another two albums,

No Regrets (1975) and Lines (1976) that featured no original material. As an indicator of

Walker’s involvement with his old group as a purely pragmatic necessity, he appeared on the cover of No Regrets with a beer in hand and blocking his face from the camera in utter contrast to the smiling warm presentation of Gary and John. It wasn’t until 1978 when GTO Records announced its impending bankruptcy that the suppression of Walker’s original compositions was finally lifted, and Walker resumed authorial activity. Walker's contributions to The Walker

Brothers’ final album, Nite Flights (1978) represent the composer’s first mature works to be liberated from the fetters of commercial considerations or direct industry influence, and it was here for the first time in his career that the phonographic auteur’s avant-garde aspirations became wholly un-obscured.

32 CHAPTER 4

EMERGENCE OF MATURE COMPOSITIONAL STYLE

(1978-1984)

4.1 Circumstances Surrounding Nite Flights’ (1978) Production

With the knowledge that their relationship with GTO was ending regardless of the content

of their “farewell” album they had been asked to produce, the Walker Brothers proceeded to

exploit the opportunity to release exactly the material they wished to without regard to

commercial success or follow-up opportunity. Distinguishing Nite Flights from all other Walker

Brothers albums prior, the album contains entirely self-penned material, featuring a segment of

the album written by each member on which they in turn took lead vocal. Scott’s four songs open

the album, exploiting first-rate studio production and imaginative re-inventions of familiar

popular forms. These four songs, “Shutout,” “Fat Mama Kick,” “Nite Flights,” and “The

Electrician” are characterized by electronic processing that dehumanizes Walker’s signature

baritone vibrato-latent voice and musical backings in which the individual elements often work

in opposition to Walker as well as each other. While his early orchestral pop-chanson works from

Scott - Scott 4 housed pensively placed tone clusters at middle ground layers, Walker’s works on

Nite Flights married the pop song with esoteric twentieth-century avant-garde concert music sensibilities at a perceptible foreground layer.

4.2 Narrative Process in Walker’s Works: “The Electrician”

Having established a basis for the consideration of contemporary Euro-American popular

music as textually-driven autographic medium capable of expressing the message of single artist

33 or artistic body, the question arises as to what the basic nature of its analyses will be. The most

current analyses to engage recordings, such as those by Allan Moore in Song Means (2012) and

Marianne Tatom-Letts in her dissertation turned text Radiohead and the Resistant Concept

Album (2010) place emphasis on the narrative process, making use of qualitative, verbally

intensive descriptions of the tracks’ contents.53 Walker’s compositions, described by the artist himself as outcroppings of his lyrics, have consistently utilized narrative processes and mise-en- scène as the principal delineators of large-scale song form and function.54 Therefore, the analyses

of Walker’s recorded works will be two fold: consideration of how sound is used in relation to

text, and examination of the autographic mise-en-scène in its contribution to the works efficacy.

To accentuate the textually based nature of his works, Walker’s compositions tend to

feature the concerted, sometimes vertiginous poising of Walker’s voice against a sizable

ensemble, such as the large string ensemble in “The Electrician,” the final of Walker’s four

contributions to the Walker Brother’s final album, Nite Flights (1978). “The Electrician” is

arguably the pivotal work in Walker’s transition from mainstream to avant-garde, and most

certainly alienated the audience he had developed as a performer of “middle of the road” cover

material on albums released during the earlier portion of the decade when his own compositions

had been banned. As the middle ground between Walker’s early works during the late 1960s, and

his mature, post-1990 releases, “The Electrician” serves as the logical starting place for the

analysis of Walker’s works and the contextualization of his compositional style. As a deeply

unsettling marriage between horror film atmospheric string scoring, chant, sadism and 1970s

53 This is also reflective of Theodore Gracyk’s assertion that recording-centric popular styles are “ontologically thick” musics in which the qualitative parameters are the principal carriers of aesthetically-pertinent data.

54 During a December 2012 radio Interview on the BBC 6 “Freak Zone” program, Walker explicitly states that he considers the works in his Tilt/The Drift/Bish Bosch album cycle to be exercises in a sort of phonographic mise-en- scène. (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=31t7xwhHzJU).

34 power ballad, “The Electrician” exhibits a mirrored large scale structure that exemplifies the

manner in which Walker’s compositions might be described as a narrative thread that progresses

through a sequence of “scenes” or “shots”. “The Electrician” transitions through two principal

“narrative areas,” each area being distinguished by the affectation and musical style of the given passage, as well as a change of narrative voice within the text. The first area is that of the outer, objective reality of a scene in which statements are being made by the principal subject, presumably the electrician referred to in the title, to an unseen torture victim. The secondary area

is reflective of the subjective, emotional inner experience of the sociopathic electrician being

described through a third-person omniscient perspective.

The track begins with a fade in of a densely-voiced, dissonant orchestral cluster

reminiscent of Walker’s 1969 composition “It’s Raining Today,” underpinned by mournful

synthesized human voices in a low register that ebb and swell ominously with little change.

Bowed cymbals, a now frequently employed device associated with the slasher-film genre, are

used to punctuate the static string texture intermittently. Aside from a violently over plucked

single-note guitar ostinato that irregularly punctuates the anxiety and dread embodied within the

orchestra, this uncomfortably long passage preceding the voice’s first entry is effectively un-

metered rubato. As though he has been present, pacing about the virtual performance space in

anticipation of the right moment to reveal himself, Walker finally breaks the tension at the [1:07]

mark with his first entry, and begins repeating the taunting incantation “Baby it’s slow, when

light’s go low, there’s no help, no” in a manner unmistakably evocative of Gregorian chant.55

Upon close listening it becomes apparent that the vocal line is comprised of two separate,

55 The melodic contour of the phrase is limited to neighboring whole step motions: [ (b7 - 1 - b7 - 1), ( 4 -5 - 4 - 5), (b7 - 1 - b7 - 1)].

35 contrastingly-affected vocal tracks where a calm voice is at the forefront, and the secondary

voice, higher in pitch yet placed at a greater distance from the foreground of the mix, is

seemingly more agitated.56 Walker repeats the phrase twice, and a surprise drum entrance ushers a more typical rock rhythm section into the mix at the [2:03] mark.

It is at this point the track transitions into the secondary narrative area, a third person description of the inner contents of the torturer’s mind. The orchestral backing becomes significantly more tonal and emotionally expressive, and the song takes on the atmosphere of what might be described as an impishly-twisted Andrew Lloyd Webber musical number. It is at this point that the text changes from first person to third person, using direct and threatening lyrics to paint a picture of the romanticized notion with which the subject Walker’s narrative takes pleasure in control. The suddenly lush and vibrato rich string accompaniment through this passage is characterized by a slowly upward reaching stepwise ascent. The orchestration is simultaneously conventional and unsettling, with momentary dissonances returning as the subject of the text becomes more intense. Following the conclusion of the text and the apex of the orchestral ascent in this passage there is a momentary caesura. The pause is then interrupted

Fig. 4.1 - “The Electrician” Large-Scale Formal Structure

56 The contrast between inner and outer worlds of the subject speaking these lines is yet another reflection of the work’s large scale, two-area delineation.

36 by castanets and another orchestral passage, this time un-texted.57 Harp and Spanish guitar are

emphasized, and after a brief fantasia like passage, the strings recede toward a seemingly

peaceful close. The track subsequently seeps back down to the murky underworld of the first

narrative area as Walker repeats the same taunting mantra of the introduction a final time. In a

codetta that follows the conclusion of Walker’s vocal, the strings step upward in unison to voice

yet another dissonant cluster while the sound of a cyclic generator sound throbbing somewhere

becomes present in the background of the mix.

The cumulative effect of mise-en-scène Walker utilizes in “The Electrician,” constitutes a

near phonographic equivalent to Saul Bass’ revolutionary title sequence for Alfred Hitchcock’s

Vertigo. Bass’s sequence begins with the camera in close-up on an unidentified face, panning

about to reveal her terrified reactions to an unseen stimulus, signified by musical interruptions of

sudden densely clustered “Vertigo chord” as signifiers of horror.58 The camera eventually crosses

the threshold of her eye, and a series of swirling geometric figures fly through darkened

“inner space” of the woman’s mind. The sequence then closes as the camera pulls back out of the

woman’s mind, once again in close up of her face. Thus, it becomes clear that Walker’s staging

of the song as a progression through “unseen scenes” is the process by which the track’s large-

scale form is delineated.

57 Walker’s use of castanets and nylon string guitar at this pivotal point in the track is likely for the purpose of elaborating on the South-American context in which his narrative, as implied by the references to “mambos” previously are referring. Walker has described the song as being influenced by international politics of the time during which the CIA was supposedly involved with the use of mercenaries in the region for torture, such as the agency’s supposed involvement in Augusto Pinochet’s overthrow of democratically elected Chilean president Salvador Allende in 1973.

58 Herrmann’s score for Vertigo makes extensive use of a 5-22 sonority, which constitutes the merging of a minor and major triad sharing an enharmonic center pitch. For more on Herrmann’s score for Vertigo, see D. Hammons’ “Symmetries in Bernard Hermann’s Score & The Jungian Superstructure of Hitchcock’s Vertigo (2011).

37 4.3 Replacement of Pop Forms with Mise-en-Scene: “Fat Mama Kick”

Of Walker’s contributions to Nite Flights, “Fat Mama Kick” is most indicative of his transition toward works featuring non-linear texts and subsequent breakdown of the formalism of virtual performance space that had characterized his large-ensemble accompaniments in his first solo albums of the late 1960s that would become the signature features of his post 1978 work.59

“Fat Mama Kick” is a purposefully baffling puzzle of demented pop pastiche. The track begins abruptly with the ensemble in full forward motion, seemingly as if to convey that the listener’s perspective will be that of an observer jumping into a pre-existing environment and series of activities that takes place within. Within this ensemble are several typical components of the pop-rock quartet, such as bass guitar and drum kit, yet aside from these elements the sound medium is rather foreign. A call and response between a synthesizer (or processed bass guitar) and what sounds like either a heavily manipulated baritone sax or simply an odd synthetic imitation constitute a head motive. This “pseudo-saxophone” is simultaneously in tune and out of tune with itself, and is treated with conspicuously large amounts of artificial stereo delay. By this point in the introductory passage, a fully formed aural environment is established.

Upon the second completion of the call and response head motive, the melodic instruments are removed from the mix leaving the rhythm section to plug away at their carefree shuffle pattern, seemingly as if nothing were in the slightest out of the ordinary with the combination. What becomes apparent in the absence of the melodic instruments is an aural component prior to which had been obscured by the leading constituents of the mix: a low rumble which seems to be the wash of overtones from within a piano’s string bed,

59 When asked about the history of his fragmentary approach to lyrics during his radio interview on the World Cafe Program in February 2013, Walker confirmed that he first began experimenting with the method in his compositions for Nite Flights.

38 disproportionately amplified in the mix to the that the resultant sound rumbles ominously like the aftershock of a 55 megaton hydrogen bomb’s detonation in the distance.60 In this aspect of the composition, Walker seems to be borrowing from techniques pioneered by Henry Cowell’s unorthodox work for solo piano, “The Banshee” (1925). Rather than utilizing traditional piano performance techniques, the score of “The Banshee’s” prescribes a series of highly specific instructions as to how the piano’s strings should be scraped by the performer to generate an array of chthonic sounds associated with the mythical creatures’ wails. As a credit to the efficacy of

Cowell’s vision for these techniques’ potential, listeners without access to the visual component of the performance often initially mistake the sound medium to be that of a distant human voice.

Likewise, Walker uses this sonority to add a sense of danger and otherworldliness to the track, the nature of which will be further developed by way of forthcoming lyrics.

INTRO [0:00-0:20]

VERSE 1[0:20-0:41]

CHORUS [0:41-0:58]

VERSE 2 [0:58-1:13

CHORUS [1:13-1:25]

BRIDGE [1:25-1:27]

INSTRUMENTAL / SOLO [1:27-2:03]

VERSE 3 or VERSE 1’ [2:03-2:17]

OUTRO / FADE [2:17-2:52]

Fig. 4.2 - “Fat Mama Kick” Large-Scale Formal Structure

60 Assistant engineer Steve Parker confirms this to be the texture’s source in The Impossible Dream, stating, “That murky ‘wash’ sound is the piano chords left to ring and slowed down,” (p. 325).

39 The entry of Walker’s voice is marked by a rather grotesque slide into pitch, further exaggerated

by the wild artificial delay applied to it. When listening closely it becomes apparent that there are

in fact two voices in the mix. The affectation and treatment of each voice contrasts the other in to schizophrenic, dehumanized effect while at the same time generating diatonic harmony. Walker intones the first stanza:

“Sunfighters Locked in right angle rooms Watch their lovers sleep face down in the yellow lite Keep the balance on a back curve 'till the war with the night is over”

These cryptic lyrics begin to set a few important themes for the work; for example, the binary opposition of night and day. At an archetypal level, this is evokes the presence and absence of energy— perhaps life and death, or good and evil. To be locked in right angle rooms suggests both aspects of human civilization as well as captivity and repression. References to lovers and balancing on back curves perhaps imply sexual depravity. Aside from the bizarre, abstract imagery these lines suggest, it is notable the manner in which each vocal phrase corresponding to a line of text is progressively longer than the previous one. This is further exemplified in the melodic contour, such that upon first listening it is quite difficult for a listener to predict where the melody is directed, or further, whether it has an intentionality or goal-oriented-ness whatsoever. The nine-measure independent phrase terminates one bar behind the quadruple based patterns of the rhythm section’s shuffle pattern (constant since the introduction aside from the drummer’s switch from the bell of his ride cymbal to an open-close hi-hat pattern), and thus, an empty three bars are required to “fix” the discrepancy of phrasing. In between the completion of the first melodic phrase in the voice and the completion of the “patched” 12 bar phrase, small concrete sounds come in and out of the mix while the amorphous chasm implied by the piano

40 continues to flux— all as a means to wordlessly develop a listener’s mental image of the

imagined environment to which they are privy. Walker’s voice then returns, now a fifth up from

where it had been, to state the refrain, “The gods are gone, the air is thick, You cannot risk the fat fat mama kick.” These lines further the “unseen scene” to be that of “some unnamable science fiction sorrow.”61 It is notable that Walker implies a polytheistic context by stating “The gods are

gone,” rather than, “Our/The god is gone,” potentially suggesting that once dominant

monotheistic cultures are truly nothing but a memory (perhaps self-placating luxuries)—

whatever survivors exist have reverted to a condition of pre-modern social order.62 Further, the

emphasis that our heavenly-overseers are gone implies a state of abandonment, rather than a

purely atheistic circumstance. This is comparable to the images evoked by Black Sabbath in their

1970 composition “War Pigs,” in which the forces of heaven reap the ruins of earth mercilessly

due to war mongering which has destroyed the planet. One may only speculate as to the meaning

of the phrase “fat mama kick.” However, it is possible to gather through longstanding cultural the

associations of “mama,” with maternity and nature, “kick” as a archetypal representation of

violent, forceful gestures, and “fat,” being indicative of the gesture’s magnitude. In other words,

the lyrics are cryptically-suggestive that the captive audience best not tempt the wrath of Mother

Nature (or whatever supernatural force implied by the menacing wash from the track’s

mysterious, rumbling backdrop).63

61 Biba Kopf. “Extraordinary Renditions,” from No Regrets: Writings on Scott Walker (ed. Rob Young), 149.

62 Additionally, this could allude to modern Western culture’s most immediate forerunner, the Roman Empire. This allusion would make sense with respect to my forthcoming inferences about post apocalyptic conditions being brought about by warmongering, a condition parallel to that of Rome’s infamously bloody legacy.

63 Rendering whatever dangerous power which lurks in the tracks background ambiguous, further ties the narrative style to many effective horror/sci-fi works such as Alfred Hitchcock’s complete lack of explanation as to the supernatural nature of the attacks in The Birds (1963).

41 As with many other of Walker's compositions from 1978 onward, the lyrics of “Fat Mama

Kick” are opaque and fragmentary, containing little more than snippets of imagery and cultural associations. In this instance, one may clearly see the symbiotic relationship between lyric and music, each providing hints as to the other’s meaning. Brian Eno commented during his interview for 30 Century Man, the 2006 documentary film on Walker, that “Lyrics in most songs are a way of just getting the voice to do something. In Scott’s songs that’s not true at all. [The] lyrics actually draw you further and further into the music, and they’re so rich and full of ambiguity that they actually withstand listening to again again like music does. They don’t spell it out for you, so you haven’t solved the problem in the first two listens.”64 Likewise, David

Bowie comments upon the impenetrability of Walker’s lyrics, “What I really like about his songwriting is the way he can paint a picture with what he says. I have no idea what he’s singing about. I never bother to find out, and I’m not really interested. I’m quite happy to take the songs that he sings and make something of them myself, and I read my own meaning into the images.”65

“Fat Mama Kick” continues with a traditional pop-formal expectation of a second verse and chorus, identical to the first aside from varied lyrics. Walker elaborates:

“Armed angels walk the city lights Wait inside their master corpses Peeled raw, betrayed and fade and fade as the noise goes over and over The gods are gone the search lights lick You cannot risk the fat fat mama kick”

64 Brian Eno extended interview, Scott Walker: 30 Century Man [2006], DVD, Oscilloscope Laboratories OSC 8.

65 David Bowie extended interview, Ibid.

42 These lines further paint images of a post-apocalyptic world. The phrase “armed angels” seems

to suggest the possibility of Biblical prophecies of the end times in which the angels of heaven

and hell once again enter into combat for control of the earth. The suggestion of the betrayed,

peeled, raw corpses over which these “guardian angels” stand guard may be considered further

evidence of the specific circumstance of nuclear holocaust.66 The lyrical content of the refrain

returns nearly unchanged, with the exception of the change from “the air is thick” to “the search

lights lick.” This rather un-obscure image anthropomorphizes searchlights, objects culturally

associated with disaster and peril, by describing their function in grotesque animalistic,

potentially sexual terms. Yet another direct relationship between the musical activity and lyrical

content occurs following the statement “And fade and fade as the noise goes over and over,” in

which yet another concrete sound element is briefly presented with prominence in the mix. The

track then continues with the formal expectation of a bridge and instrumental passage, though the

contents of each are bizarre.

The song’s bridge contains only three repeated words, “Deaf, Dumb, Blind”— perhaps a

play on sensory deprivation, specifically pertaining to the senses contained within the adage,

“See no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil.” In this passage, the musical activity changes radically,

with violent concrete mechanical sounds that enter and exit at seemingly random times and at a

variety of locations within the stereo field, and a sense of the ensemble opening as a result of

session drummer Frank Gibson’s switch back to the ride cymbal in his shuffle pattern.67 Further

66 These lines foreshadow the forthcoming title track, in which Walker seems to be writing from the same nightmarish circumstance: “Its so cold- the dark dug up by dogs, the stitches torn and broke, the raw meat fist you choke has hit the bloodlite.”

67 According to most sources Gary Leeds’ proficiency on the drums was in actuality quite poor (Leeds was more of an in-group manager/promoter than he was actually a drummer), and thus, his actual percussion performance credits on Walker Brothers recordings is limited to “Salt Shaker” on the group’s 1976 single “Lines.”

43 saturating the sound environment, Walker’s voice is drenched in slap-back delay to the extent that it becomes utterly grotesque. It is worthwhile to pause at this moment in order to consider the ways in which the recording simultaneously implies a musical performance, as well as an abstract mental image of narrative activity taking place that is directly related to the content of the text.

The presentation of the voice in "Fat Mama Kick" seems to be less that of depicting the physical act of a human singing before a microphone, but rather, an abstraction such as a third person omnipotent narrative voice (though this voice clearly withholds a great deal of pertinent information from the audience).68 This is indicative of the manner in which Walker’s functions in his later works less as the physical representation of a man singing in a finite physical space, but rather, as an abstracted vehicle for the delivery of his texts within the acousmatic form. This is very much analogous to the function of inter-titles of in silent film. In other terms, Walker’s later works might be read as the inversion of silent film, as a mechanical arrangements of sounds to invite listeners to create their own mental imagery, however abstract that imagery might be.

Just as unexpected as the treatment of the bridge’s elements, the instrumental section confounds traditional expectations of an instrumental/solo section in a pop work. Two new instruments enter the mix, neither of which being in any way foreshadowed. A massive wall of sound generated by a dissonant pipe organ enters, voiced at a semi-functionally dominant role

68 There may be a strong argument for this being a source of inspiration to Radiohead’s equally confounding Kid A, for its many similar emphases upon abstract, post-apocalyptic sci-fi environments and dehumanization as signified in the tracks conspicuous processing and distortions of the human voice. Marianne Tatom-Letts contributes a detailed interpretation of these elements relevance to the formal structure and narrative of the Radiohead album.

44 relative to the stagnant “tonic” pedal sustained by the nearly inaudible bass guitar.69 Atop, a surrealistic soprano sax solo wails and squawks manically in a soloistic passage based principally upon single-reed extended techniques (altissimo tones, overblowing, multiphonics and partially-pitched honks). The playing seems frenzied, and takes place at a level of rhythmic subdivision (sixteenth and thirty-second note) not present elsewhere within the track.70 The track concludes with a final verse stated metrically in a significantly more predictable fashion. The lyrics are predominantly a reprise of verse one, with the exception of two small substitutions:

“Sunfighters locked in right angle rooms Burn the heat off with their lovers in the yellow lite Keep the balance in a mirror flash 'till the war with the night is over”

This time, the removal of several long pauses that took place in the first verse allows the completion of the melodic phrase in agreement with the rhythm section’s duple-based shuffle phrasing, creating a sonata-rondo like sense of reconciliation. To accentuate the slight variations upon the returning lyrical contents an extra layer of quickly-dissipating reverberation is applied to the word “flash,” and the track concludes with a long fade over a return of the opening instrumentation. As "Fat Mama Kick" concludes, clocking in at a tidy two minutes and fifty seconds (the unofficial standard length of a radio-ready pop single), one may begin to infer that

Walker has consciously created a work that is utterly avant-garde while simultaneously pointing to its conventional roots. Walker’s contributions to Nite Flights have proven to be a threshold to the latter day career of Walker as a phonographic auteur. Almost immediately upon the warm

69 The pipe organ happens to be none other than the one housed within London’s Royal Albert Hall. Walker is known for a preference to generate naturalistic sounds rather than synthesize or sample them, much like certain schools of early electronic music in Europe. The introduction of this sound element to the mix exemplifies the manner in which Walker’s recorded works often constitute aural analogs of impossible, paradoxical figures like as Penrose stairs.

70 It is most likely being played at an increased speed from what it was originally performed.

45 reception of his portion of the album Walker was afforded the opportunity to enter contractual

relationships with record labels that restored his right to the final cut on his works once again.

4.4 Climate of the Hunter and the First Long Silence (1984-1995)

Though Walker had successfully navigated his way to the end of his oppressive contractual obligations with Columbia, the next thirty years of his career would be marked by a pronounced intermittency of studio album releases. Unlike the early days of his career in which he produced albums as often as twice per year (i.e. Scott 3 and Scott 4, both in 1969), Walker, beginning with Nite Flights, would spend increasingly long periods of public silence.71 Though

Walker signed to Virgin records in 1979, new material would not surface until the late months of

1983. According to Walker during a 1984 radio interview with Alan Bangs, the album’s contents

were authored in a two month period during late 1983. He has explained the large gaps,

beginning with this one on Climate of the Hunter, as integral to finding a creative space in which

his ideas flow freely without force upon his part. Climate of the Hunter, Walker’s first solo release to feature original material since Scott 4 in 1969, was in large part a more user-friendly continuation of his work on the final Walker Brothers album featuring several of the same session players. Climate of the Hunter features relatively recognizable pop structures beneath

Walker’s increasingly-fragmented, stream of consciousness lyrics.

Though Walker has stated that he considers the album’s three follow-ups to be related as a trilogy, Climate of the Hunter constitutes a referential starting place from which the

71 The large gaps between Walker’s releases, as well as his low visibility in the public eye warrant comparison to the working methods of filmmakers Terrence Malick and Stanley Kubrick.

46 forthcoming album cycle would disembark, and subsequently set a return trajectory.72 Climate of the Hunter is stylized in a distinctly mid-1980s veneer, placing emphasis on Peter Van Hooke’s expansive drum grooves (aurally enhanced via the recent invention of gated reverb), Mo’

Foster’s electronically-colored bass guitar, and microcosmically-detailed layers of shimmering digital synthesizer textures that collectively contribute to the album’s impressionistic-pop ambiance. An equally notable aspect of the album’s production is that Climate of the Hunter’s recording sessions constituted Walker’s first collaboration wit Peter Walsh, who would serve as co-producer on all of Walker’s subsequent album releases. Climate of the Hunter introduces several studio-generated stylistic motifs that would essentially return in slightly varied guises on subsequent Walker-Walsh collaborations yet to come. “Track Three,”73 the album’s lead single is representative of Walker’s capacity to generate accessible, catchy pop work when he so chooses.

The song features a driving uptempo groove, catchy melody, soulful vocal underpinnings from singer Billy Ocean, and glossy layered guitar textures that evoke the then contemporary work of guitarist Andy Summers of The Police.74 The most immediately apparent departure from standard pop aesthetics within these tracks might be found in relative harmonic stagnancy in some cases, and in others, wildly non-functional patterns such as those on the opening track

“Rawhide.”

72 The scope of these ideologically linked works warrants comparison to Wagner’s operatic cycle Der Ring des Nibelungen.

73 Conspicuously absent from the several of Climate of the Hunter’s tracks were proper titles, named for their place in order of the track listing such as “Track Three,” “Track Five,” “Track Six,” and “Track Seven.”

74 Also of note are the affective similarities between the pairing of Walker and Ocean’s voices as unmistakably evocative of the dynamic between Mick Jagger and Merry Clayton on The Rolling Stones’ “Gimme Shelter” (1968).

47 Possibly the track most indicative of Walker’s forthcoming works in the 1990s and

beyond was “Track Six,” featuring improvisational saxophonist Evan Parker. “Track Six” opens

with a dirge-like, fractured-sounding drum and bass groove that underpins a multi-tracked

texture of airy, pianissimo soprano saxophone sostenutos that is nearly inaudible on some

speakers. During the first half of the track, Walker’s voice sounds conspicuously naked in the

mix, and is latent with unusual, almost perverse enunciations and inflections. The track seems to wander aimlessly with a total absence of harmonic development until a second layer of soprano saxophone figuration is introduced to the mix at the [1:17] mark, described by Walker as a

Ligeti-inspired “Cloud of Saxophone.”75 The change in instrumentation and overall dynamic of the track is further marked by a series of sounds resembling blades being sharpened that occasionally punctuate the ends of phrases. Walker’s text is distinctly evocative of the image of a scene, “and the ceiling are rising and falling, the ceiling are shining and slow, peeling tongues from the ice humans and letting it go.”76 Aside from its metered regularity and basic pop-rock

rhythm section instrumentation, Walker essentially eschews traditional pop formal structures in

“Track Six,” and relies on the tracks unusual aural staging and musical stagnancy to invite

listeners to build their own mental imagery.

75 This texture is the product of layering take after take of manic ad-libbing on a chromatic cluster of pitches within a range of a minor third. This hyperactive saxophone texture points to the solo section of “Fat Mama Kick” six years earlier. In his interview for 30 Century Man Parker says that Walker used the term “clouds of saxophone,” and made reference to Ligeti to describe the texture he desired.

76 The intertextuality of these fragmentary images of “peeling” and “ice humans” point toward earlier lyrics by Walker on Nite Flights, including “armed angels in the city lines wait inside their master corpses peeled raw and fade and fade as the noise goes over and over,” from “Shutout.” as well as “there is crouching and wailing on stones down here we must freeze off this ratmosphere” from “Shutout.” This points to the increasing degree to which Walker’s texts “evolve no so much associatively as experientially. To understand a line, one must move on to the next line, or to put it in the language of CK Ogden... what is required in order to understand a Walker lyric is that ‘it form[s] a context with further experiences.” (“The Significant Other” by Brian Morton, published in No Regrets: Writings on Scott Walker, 2012)

48 Brian Eno, noting the aesthetic similarities and experimental tendencies of Walker’s latest

work with that of his and David Bowie’s comparably-experimental, spaced out pop of Low

(1977) and “Heroes” (1977) immediately offered to produce Walker’s next work, yet the project fell to the wayside shortly after.77 In the eleven years between Climate of the Hunter and his next album, Tilt, rumors proliferated regarding Walker’s activity and leanings toward seclusion. Very much as Climate of the Hunter had demanded a vast amount of time and space to organically reveal itself to Walker, the myth surrounding his identity that would arise from his long silence would significantly contribute to the aura surrounding Tilt’s release. The journey from Climate of the Hunter to Tilt would initiate a cycle in which Walker would take the aesthetics of pop recordings to their breaking point, and remain there for over a decade.

77 Bowie has cited Walker as a major influence/rival during his career as a bourgeoning singer-songwriter in the late 1960s, and further, happens to share a birthday contiguous with that of Walker (January 8 and 9 respectively). There are a number of remarkable similarities between the contents of Walker’s “Nite Flights” and elements of Bowie’s works during his Berlin era. These include a strikingly similar descending synthesizer pattern that opens both “Speed of Life” (Bowie’s first instrumental cut of his career) and that of the opening figuration in “Nite Flights,” so similar that Walker’s use of the gesture may be considered an intentional allusion to Bowie’s work. Further, the lyrical content of “Nite Flights,” in its emphasis upon a romantic struggle amidst a chaotic, ugly world that largely parallels that of Bowie’s “Heroes.” Bowie himself would later cover “Nite Flights,” and would serve as executive producer of the 2006 documentary film on Walker, 30 Century Man.

49 CHAPTER 5

TILT (1995)

5.1 “Farmer in the City” and Walker’s Pastoral Orchestral Ballads

A basic form favored by Walker that has re-appeared under various guises is that of the pastoral orchestral ballad in the lineage of “Boy Child” from Scott 4. While Walker’s use of the

format in “Boy Child” resulted in some of the warmest atmospherics of his entire career, it has

re-appeared in darker and generally more ambiguous guises since.78 In the case of Tilt, Walker

re-uses the form as an overture, preparing the audience for the bleak and funereal European

landscape that the album inhabits. Though “Farmer in the City” is principally rooted in formal

music tradition, Walker exploits the studio’s capacity to generate mise-en-scène that is

indispensable to the tracks meaning and emotional efficacy. The track features two main sections

through which it cycles, one of which featuring Walker’s setting of “Uno dei Tanti

Epiloghi" ("One of the Many Epilogs"), a poem written by yet another of his cinematic

influences, Pier Pasolini.79 Pasolini was a controversial figure in life, and had met an untimely

end in 1975 when under mysterious circumstances he was run over by his own car multiple

times. In addition to Pasolini’s being outspoken on his unpopular political stances, such as his

support for the police over the relatively-privileged university students during autonomist

uprisings in Rome in 1969 and his sympathies for various European Marxist politics, Pasolini

was controversial for being openly gay in mid-twentieth century conservative Roman Catholic

78 As such an example, “Sleepwalker’s Woman” on Climate of the Hunter employs this same sound medium and style, albeit in a moodier and generally more ambiguous fashion than “Boy Child.”

79 In certain cases the song has been subtitled “Remembering Pasolini.”

50 Italy.80 Pasolini, known as a poet in addition to his work in film, had written the poem for his

protégé, actor and lover Ninetto Davoli.

The track’s reliance upon mise-en-scène is relatively subtle in comparison to other works

on the album, and constitutes a rare instance of a frequently-covered late era Scott Walker song

due to its regular 32 bar song structure with regular harmonic rhythm, phrasing, and fairly

conventional progressions and retrogressions. That which contributes the most to the meaning of

the song in its autographic studio properties is the implied “staging” of the virtual performance

space. A small idiophone breaks the short silence at the beginning of the track at the [0:03]

mark, possibly as an allusion to the cowbell introduction of Walker’s previous album

(“Rawhide”).81 The opening section introduces a chant-like auctioneer’s incantation “Do I hear

21, 21, 21? I’ll give you 21, 21, 21.”82 It is the cycling back and forth between this chant section

in which Walker’s voice clearly sounds as if it is reverberating alone within a large room with

hard stone walls, and the passages in which the orchestra takes a more active role that most

clearly mark the manner in which the track relies on manipulations and fabrications of virtual

performance space in subservience to the narrative content of the text.

Gustav Holst had found a similar challenge in realizing his vision for “Neptune” from his

famous orchestral suite, The Planets, describing the effect in terms of the women’s choir "to be

80 European marxist politics is a returning topic frequently appearing throughout Walker’s oeuvre, such as “The Old Man is Back Again (Dedicated to the Neo-Stalinist Regime),” on Scott 4.

81 A very brief ornamental figure is then “mis-played” on an oboe at a level that is nearly inaudible without proper headphones. For its singularity and conspicuous disparity with the remainder of the track’s constituent elements, this figures placement might be read as a foreshadowing of “The Cockfighter,” in which the instrument is used in a similar manner at great length.

82 Walker’s emphasis on the number twenty one has widely been speculated to refer to either Davoli’s age when he was drafted into the Italian army and subsequently deserted, or the number of times Pasolini was run over.

51 placed in an adjoining room, the door of which is to be left open until the last bar of the piece,

when it is to be slowly and silently closed, and that the final bar (scored for choruses alone) is to

be repeated until the sound is lost in the distance."83 The aural staging of the simulated stone wall echo of the chant-like passages actively contributes to the tone of the piece, lending to a reading as if the passage is something of a soliloquy or aside, taking place on a different narrative or existential plane. As the low voices of the orchestra stoically sustain a battleship-grey pedal “E,”

Walker’s chant is delivered in rubato, much like the opening passages of the more dissonant opening passage of “The Electrician.” What else is notable in this passage is Walker’s decision to underpin his vocals with lightly-strummed arpeggios on a chittaroni, an eighteenth-century

Italian instrument belonging to the lute family, as textural means to evoke a sense of another time or era.84 The chant-like overtones, and emergent signifiers of distant vantage points of time, lend a sense of a separate, introspective narrative space that contrasts the outwardly-spoken lines of the forthcoming full orchestral passages. Through these full-scale orchestral passages in which

Walker sets portions of Pasolini’s text, the narrative voice is much more outwardly-directed. The full-scale orchestral passages reach fortissimo climaxes that are underpinned by low-pitched percussion, neatly placed in juxtaposition in a manner that would be impossible to re-create in a live sound environment as Walker increasingly emotes the lines “And I used to be a citizen, and I never felt the pressure...”85 After reaching a dramatic emotional apex the track recedes into the

inner-looking secondary area as Walker had done in “The Electrician,” to repeat his mantra “Do I

83 "The Planets" (full orchestral score): Goodwin & Tabb, Ltd., London, 1921.

84 Elizabeth Kenny is credited in the album’s liner notes on this track as the player of this “Chittaroni.”

85 These percussive lines are reminiscent of the “symphonic drumming” provided by Ringo Starr on the concluding track of The Beatles’ landmark album, Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band (1967), “A Day In The Life.”

52 hear 21...” a final time. It is at this point that the orchestra recedes until a later point in the album’s track listing.

Fig 5.1 - “Farmer in the City” Large-Scale Formal Structure

53 5.2 Narrative Threads and Movements Through Unseen Scenes: “The Cockfighter”

Following the emotional roller-coaster of “Farmer in the City,” Tilt rapidly descends into a dark and unsettling netherworld. “The Cockfighter” exemplifies both Walker’s authorial style of using the narrative process of progressing through contrasting scenes, linked by a single conceptual thread. Walker has explained in interviews that the song is intended to deal with the atrocities of the Holocaust and the dark recesses of animalistic violence that humans are capable of fostering. In the creation of the bulk of the song’s lyrics Walker chose to juxtapose the courtroom transcriptions from two contrasting cases separated by a full century— the trial of

Nazi war-criminal Heinrich Eichmann (1906-1962), and that of Queen Caroline’s (1768-1821) investigation for rumored infidelities.86 In promotional interviews for Tilt Walker explained that

the choice to juxtapose these specific trials was principally to dampen Eichmann’s trial by

separating question from answer. He further explained that the selection of Caroline’s trial had

little significance aside from its featuring detached courtroom discussions of the monarch’s

rumored, and ultimately unsubstantiated erotic affairs. The pairing of basic human instincts of

sex drive and violence resultant of this juxtaposition points to the double-entendre of the song’s

title. What is particularly notable about the track is the manner in which Walker blurs the lines

between music composition and cinematic sound design. Of these “scenes” through which Tilt’s

second track would progress, its opening (from [0:00] to the [1:24] mark) has received virtually

no substantial examination, yet constitutes one of the most detailed instances of Walker’s

86 Walker gave this explanation in a promotional interview for Tilt in 1995. Eichmann was tried and executed in Israel in 1962 for his responsibility in organizing the logistics of mass deportations to concentration camps, referred to in the line “You were responsible for the rolling stock.”

54 obscuring of the boundaries between music and cinematic sound design— an extremely

important facet of his output from this point in his career forward.

“The Cockfighter’s” introductory passage contains elements that suggest a musical

performance, including a grotesquely-overblown oboe ostinato figure, celeste and Walker’s

largely unintelligible Sprechstimme vocal. In a 1995 promotional interview the author explained

that the introduction to the song is intended to represent the subject of the text’s narrative

experiencing a nightmare. In addition, the passage features prominent scratching sounds that

seem to suggest the movement of the clawed feet of a chicken in a cage.87 Walker’s enunciation

renders the lyrics nearly indecipherable in moments, but between emaciated moans, fragmentary

anatomically-intensive images such as “Not my heart,” “Not the wrist,” and “See the hairline”

can be made out.88 Passages such as these demonstrate the necessity that Walker’s works be

beard on high quality headphones, particularly for the non-static aspect of the stereo field

throughout. The oboe’s placement, as well as other constituents of the mix are dynamically-

shifted throughout the stereo field in a manner that evokes a sense of movement of the sound

sources, and therefore, a sense of physical activity that is taking place, unseen, in a specific

sound environment. Throughout this passage, Walker’s text seems to be that of a subject within

that sound environment. With the allusions to the cruel practice of cockfighting, and the bizarre

manner in which Walker enunciates, that we are hearing the thoughts of a caged fighting animal.

The basic elements of voice, low wind like rumble, oboe and celeste remain present until the

87 Rob Young Walker explains in No Regrets that Walker instructed his long-term collaborator, percussionist Alasdair Malloy, to create impression of a chicken attempting to escape from its egg (p. 19).

88 As evidence of Walker’s interest in post-WWII avant garde classical composers, the muttered indecipherability of his vocals in this passage are distinctly reminiscent of Luciano Berio’s Sequenza III for woman’s voice, in which the performer is instructed to wander onto stage delivering the opening portions of the text in a muttered, unintelligible fashion.

55 Fig. 5.2 - “The Cockfighter” Intro [0:00 - 1:24]

scratching sound is dropped from the mix [1:11], marking the beginning of the transition into the

next principal section.

Walker wispers “clickity click, clickity... click” and is violently interrupted by the

entrance of a completely contrasting body of sound. As hearing the opening passage in full detail

requires most media players to be turned to near full volume, the sudden and violent contrast

marked by the entrance of a massive wall of interlocking percussion instruments might be read

as yet another case of Walker’s tendency to shake listeners out of their complacency and become

consciously critical observers. The percussive texture in this passage is distinctly reminiscent of

Balinese belaganjur, a genre in which large ensembles of hand cymbals (“ceng-ceng”) are played

in interlocking fashion such that the total effect is of a constant rapid pulse.89 Likewise, the percussion in this track reduces to a sixteenth-note subdivision that might be performed on a hi- hat in the context of a more traditional drum groove. In the left speaker an extremely high pitched raking sound appears at irregular intervals, seemingly to evoke the gesture of a rooster in

89 Further indicating the degree to which Walker’s backing arrangement embodies the text’s exploration of the capacities of humans toward unspeakable evil, and further, the manner in which the track shifts through spiritual netherworlds and middle-grounds of human life, Beleganjur music is by Balinese legend believed to have originated from the sub-world of demons and malevolent spirits, and subsequently, carries the capacity to frighten the forces of evil. For more information on Beleganjur see Michael Bakan’s Music of Death and New Creation: Experiences in the World of Balinese Gamelan Beleganjur (1999).

56 Fig 5.3 - “The Cockfighter” Transition / Verse 1 [1:25 - 2:55]

combat.90 The overall style of this passage lends to description as industrial rock, pointing

toward the contemporary work of Trent Reznor as Nine Inch Nails. Walker’s vocal in this

passage is treated in a manner similar to “Fat Mama Kick,” where grotesque slides into pitch are

exaggerated through pronounced layers of un-natural echo. The track continues to slide from one

sound medium to the next, replacing the percussively intensive passage with a far more

traditional sound medium of pop-rock quartet as Walker delivers the courtroom dialogue in a

recitative style.91 The track concludes with a return of the interlocking percussion, this time without vocals.

90 Again pointing to the necessity of quality playback equipment, specifically headphones; this sound, though integral to the reading of the work, is likely to go unnoticed otherwise.

91 In particular the sound of this passage, with droning digital synthesizer, points to the sound of Climate of the Hunter.

57 Fig 5.4 - “The Cockfighter” Bridge [2:55 - 3:27] / Verse 2 [4:16 - 4:54] / Outro [4:54 - 6:02]

5.3 Music or Sound Design: “Bouncer See Bouncer”

Fellow L.A. sunset strip peers of the Walker Brothers, The Doors were infamously

banned from the Whiskey-a-Go-Go as the result of an incident in which Jim Morrison

improvised a monologue that boldly painted a violently archetypal scene of Oedipal impulse

during a free-form jam.92 Like his contemporary baritone crooner of the macabre, Jim Morrison,

Walker would expand upon the taboo realm that had simultaneously ended The Doors’

professional career with the most popular live music venue in L.A. while spurning their being

signed to Decca records the very same evening. “Bouncer See Bouncer,” featuring one of

92 The gist improvisation would later be recorded as “The End,” the closing track on their eponymous debut album. The song itself would have something of a history in in cinema, playing over the iconic opening and closing sequences of fellow UCLA alumni Francis Ford Coppola’s adaptation of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, Apocalypse Now (1979).

58 Walker’s most shaved-down backing arrangements prior to The Drift, marries the existential nausea of Walker’s text with its many references to imagery from the Biblical book of

Revelations. For the detailed construction that goes into the timbre and texture, it evidences the indispensability of such qualitative aesthetic data to the work’s identity. The track features virtually no function within the boundaries of traditional musical parameters, and instead, relies upon the staging of sound objects to contribute to a general ambiance of horror and disgust.

The track’s general makeup is fairly simple. First, a bed of chittering “locust” sounds, is gradually accumulated from a “chirp” to an swarming sound-bed spanning both sides of the stereo field [0:00-0:17].93 Next, an anxious metallic scraping sound is introduced to the mix at front and center, and the stereo field gradually takes on an active ebb and flow through meticulous wide panning of the plenum of non-pitched sound objects. As the sound bed becomes more and more active a constant percussive pulse resembling an agitated heart’s palpitations is faded into the mix beginning at the [0:32] mark, and at the [0:42] mark a pipe organ makes its first appearance of several across the album, performing a drone in which an open fifth is sustained at a nearly subliminal level of the mix.94 The organ plays a particularly important role in the context of the text’s many Biblical allusions, as Walker has explained in multiple interviews that he typically uses the instrument as a signifier of the oppressive/repressive forces of Christianity. Aside from a very brief transformation of the virtual performance space and ensemble in the middle of the track, there is no development in the concrete sound elements

93 “Sound Bed” is a term often used to refer to a backing portion of sound design in film production.

94 A hint as to the source of these scraping, scratching sounds might be found in Tilt’s sixth track, “Bolivia ’95,” in which similar sounds can be heard to be produced in between an electric guitar’s articulations. It would seem that these sounds are alternately produced by left hand technique in which the guitarist presses to firmly against the fingerboard to create a scratching sound against the wood, and scrapes of the pick against the rough-edged wound guitar string.

59 underpinning Walker’s voice. The principle of a “refrain” exists in the returning line “Don’t play

that song for me, you won’t play that song for me!” It could be concluded that the unpleasant

twitching and scraping sounds of the backing sound bed are reflective of the narrator’s un-willful

subjection to an unwanted stimulus.95 The repeated lines “Mama danced four feet away, Papa danced, four feet away, in the rubbing and fusing the sealing and pivoting, I gotta dance four feet away” in conjunction with the title, which seems to be a childish phrase as a child referring to itself as “bouncer,” seeing something else bouncing, lend to the suggestion that the topic at hand is that of a toddler witnessing his parents in the act of intercourse. This would by extension suggest that the metallic scrapes and wiggling sounds and throbbing heart like bass drum are suggestive of the unseen images.

Fig. 5.5 - “Bouncer See Bouncer” Structural Diagram

95 Likewise in “Clara” from Tilt’s successor in the album trilogy, The Drift, Walker paints a picture of a traumatic childhood experience of viewing newsreel footage in a cinema that depicted Benito Mussolini and mistress Clara Petacci’s corpses being beaten by an angry mob as they dangled upside-down at the ends of long ropes.

60 5.4 “Patriot (A Single)” As the Inverse Identity of “The Electrician”

Perhaps no other Scott Walker track traces as directly to his sadistic masterpiece, “The

Electrician” than Tilt’s “Patriot (A Single).” Like its swan-song era Walker Brothers’ forerunner

“Patriot (A Single)” features large-scale formal delineations formed about a set of principal narrative areas outlined within Walker’s text. Both works share similar subject matter, focusing upon torture in the hands of violent political regimes. While “The Electrician” was principally told in alternating intervals by the torturer and a third-person omniscient narrative voice, “Patriot

(A Single)” focuses more upon the suffering of the victim. Utilizing a similar sound medium to that of “The Electrician,” the opening narrative area features a large scale orchestral accompaniment behind Walker’s voice, constituting something of a re-emergence of the contents of “Farmer in the City.” Following a short statement “ja ’91, see how they run,” which seems to be a very brief “inter-title” type statement to set the scene, the first stanza is spoken from a first person limited point of view, presumably initially speaking to the patriot referenced in the title.

Walker repeats the line “I brought nylons from New York, some had butterflies had specks” twice, followed by the transitional statement “The good news you cannot refuse, the bad news is there is no news” as the orchestra makes its first harmonic motions in a sudden crescendo and warming of affect achieved through dolce vibrato. A dramatic entry of a regular drum set groove marks a transition that coincides with the text’s being directed now to the audience, rather than another character within the narrative as it had directed been previously. Similarly to “The

Electrician,” the orchestral accompaniment is lush and romantic, only slightly undercut by dissonances in the uppermost voices. The soaring affectation of an orchestral power-ballad disintegrates into a passage that might again be described in terms of cinematic sound design,

61 leaving the uppermost orchestral dissonances similar in texture to those created by Evan Parker

on “Track Six,” to linger on briefly. Akin to the first narrative area of “The Electrician,” in which

a scene is presented with text being spoken by a subject in that scene, the track descends into a

fully non-functional sound environment.

As yet another example of acousmatic mise-en-scène, an analog wall clock’s hands can be

heard ticking at a distance (a reminder of the slow, laborious passage of time experienced while

incarcerated), and hard resonances of concrete walls give listeners hints as to the unseen. In the

style of postwar avant-garde vocal works Walker maligns his voice into something utterly

subhuman, moaning and wailing desperately from within some cavernous space: “Oh the

Luzerner Zeitung, The Luzerner Zeitung... Never sold out... Never sold out.” The only traditional

means of musical function occurs between vocal pauses, consisting of a brief dialogic sequence

between a piccolo, a pair of hand cymbals and large, mounted orchestral bass drum.96 A low

mechanical hum and sounds of an analog clock ticking further bring into relief the walls of

implied cavernous space, and subsequently serve to evoke phenomenological experience. In

other words, the composer is utilizing the recording as a means of building an aural environment

intended to evoke specific aspects of a narrative by insisting that the audience actively infer what

is happening, rather than as a means to simulate musical performance. This is very much like the

cognitive experience of reading literature in which the the reader must synthesize the symbolic

abstractions of printed language within his or her mind’s eye.

96 These patterns seem mocking to comparable effect of the repeated mocking figure from Charles Ives’ The Unanswered Question. Further, these items have military connotations, particularly that of the American Revolutionary War- a historical event most directly linked to the idea of patriotism and treason. One may suspect that these issues are of personal significance to Walker as an American who has lived in Europe the bulk of his adult life, and even champions European Art Song tradition to those indigenous to his homeland.

62 One reading of these passages is that Walker’s aim was to paint a mental image of a

suffering prisoner’s soliloquy: his dying wishes sung out to nobody as he comforts himself in the

face of impending death (or more torture) in utter isolation from the rest of humanity.97

Considering the two ideas stated in the lyrics, one may infer that a tortured, barely living human being is fantasizing that his plight might be known to others by way of being published in the successful German newspaper (Luzerner Zeitung), in gross juxtaposition to the idealism of patriotic loyalty suggested in the surrounding orchestral power ballad passages. Walker has stated that he often seeks to transition between two separate frames of reference in his works, linked by a basic abstract idea. In this case, these are the ideas of those of idealization of patriotic acts, and the actuality of what it means to die for nationalistic purposes.98

97 The consideration of these moments as soliloquies, asides to the audience, further make sense with respect to the stylistically contrasting nature of these sections to the others.

98 Torture in political contexts is a theme introduced by Walker’s final contribution to Nite Flights, in which a great deal of time is dedicated to creating the phenomenological experience of a victim’s powerless anxiety at the hands of a sadistic (government sanctioned) torturer.

63 A [0:00 - 2:20] “VERSE / CHORUS” STRUCTURES

VERSE 1 [0:00 - 1:25]

[0:00 - 0:14] “Moment of Silence” [0:14] Voice & Strings (D-min) abruptly mixed in (“Ja, 91...”) [0:30] Bass Guitar Enters (“I Brought nylons”) [0:40] Distant tick of clock in cavernous space- inaudible without headphones

CHORUS [1:45 - 2:20]

[1:45] Entrance of drum kit, Addition of upper layer of “Clouds of Trumpets,” Forte Dynamic

B [2:20 - 3:36] “UNSEEN SCENE”

“DYING PRISONER OF WAR’S SOLILOQUY”

{2:20 - 2:28] Fade in of low rumbling as “Clouds of Trumpet” disperse [2:28] Sound of Clock Ticking / Reverberating against hard stone walls [2:34] Sprechstimme Vocal Begins (“Oh, the Leuzner Zeitung...”) [2:39 - 2:47] Piccolo / Military Bass Drum / Cymbals Cue [2:47 - 2:51] Room Sounds [2:51 - 2:56} Vocal Resumes [2:56 - 3:05] Piccolo / Military Bass Drum / Cymbals Cue [3:05 - 3:24] Vocal Resumes [3:24 - 3:30] Piccolo / Military Bass Drum / Cymbals Cue [3:30 - 3:36] Room Sounds

FORMAL SEQUENCE

A B A B A VERSE 1 / UNSEEN VERSE 2 / UNSEEN VERSE 3 OR CHORUS SCENE CHORUS SCENE CODA [0:00 - 2:20] [2:20 - 3:36] [3:36 - 5:39] [5:39 - 6:53] [6:53 - 8:28]

Fig 5.6 - “Patriot (A Single)” Structural Diagrams

64 5.5 The Emergent Tradition of the Naturalistic Farewell Track: “Rosary”

Though Walker does not cite Climate of the Hunter as being directly related to the sequence of albums that followed, with “Blanket Roll Blues” he did initiate a pattern of closing his albums with a single naturalistic guitar and voice work that would become a returning feature on all of his albums since. While “Blanket Roll Blues” was a Tennessee Williams cover, idiomatically rooted in American folk tradition, “Rosary” is in large part un-categorizable.

Walker’s fingerpicked electric guitar accompaniment maintains a constant eighth-note pulse, generally containing open, harmonically neutral intervals of perfect fifths. The stark, pre- functional harmony evokes something of a sense of early music and electrified troubadour song.

“Rosary” is structurally an instance of a traditional verse-chorus pop song, with a final coda section in which a melody contrasting with those of the first two verses brings the song to a close. There is little to be said about the recording studio stylization of the track, and effectively captures, in a naturalistic sense, a live performance. If there is to be any reading of mise-en-scène to “Rosary,” it would seem that Walker as the figurative man behind the album’s curtain is stepping out beyond the proscenium arch, alone and relatively unmasked for a final farewell.

Therefore, Walker’s “disuse” of the medium to present a live-in studio performance is actually justified at a large-scale level when read as the album’s curtain call. The final tracks on Walker’s next two albums (“A Lover Loves” on The Drift and “The Day the Conducător Died (An X-Mas

Song)” on Bish Bosch) would likewise feature relatively naturalistic guitar driven songs in which

Walker figuratively steps out into plain view for a final farewell.

Tilt contributed significantly to bringing Walker back into the public’s attention, yet he again would not complete a studio album for another eleven years. In comparison to his previous

65 ten years of relative obscurity and invisibility, Walker would maintain an active working

schedule during the next ten years, sought out to contribute to other musicians projects in a

producer’s capacity, and would receive commissions to compose instrumental music for film

scores and dance.99 In addition to his re-emergence as an active musical figure in behind the scenes roles of the works of other artists, Walker was the subject of a 2006 documentary film, 30

Century Man, which in addition to promoting his upcoming album The Drift, once again

widened his audience to a level he had not had access to for many years, now artistically on his

own terms.

99 Though Walker didn’t produce a studio album in this period, he did remain relatively active otherwise. His work in this period includes: two covers for film soundtracks (Bob Dylan’s “I Threw It All Away” for To Have and to Hold in 1996, and Only Myself to Blame by David Arnold for The World Is Not Enough in 1998), authoring and producing two songs for Ute Lemper (1999), composing the instrumental music score for the Leos Carax film Pola X (1999), curating the 2000 London South Bank Centre Annual Meltdown Festival, and producing British indie-rock band Pulp’s 2001 album We Love Life.

66 CHAPTER 6

THE DRIFT (2006)

6.1 Situationism, Psychogeography and the Principle of “La Derivee” (Drifting)

“In a dérive [Drift] one or more persons during a certain period drop their usual motives for movement and action, their relations, their work and leisure activities, and let themselves be drawn by the attractions of the terrain and the encounters they find there… But the dérive includes both this letting go and its necessary contradiction: the domination of psychogeographical variations by the knowledge and calculation of their possibilities.”100

-Guy Deboard

While Tilt led to Walker’s association with European politics that had only been hinted at

within his late 1960s works, the title to his follow up album, yet another eleven years in the

making, would seem to point to yet another European-Marxist phenomenon of the late twentieth

century: the Situationist movement. Situationism arose from a criticism of the degraded quality

of life and general lack of human fulfillment in advanced capitalist societies, and was

particularly critical of the culture industry and the modern spectacle of large-scale public

performance. As a result, situationists sought to remedy the problems of life in modern society

through the staging of “situations,” such as the principle of psycho-geographic explorations

termed “Las Derives,” or “Drifts.” Guy Deboard, the author of the text most associated with the

situationist movement, The Society of the Spectacle, describes “Drifts” as “a mode of

experimental behavior linked to the conditions of urban society: a technique of rapid passage

through varied ambiances."101 In his emphasis upon varied ambiances, Deboard’s definition points to the terms relationship to Walker’s 2006 album. While Deboard’s used the term

“ambiences” to describe the various environments of an urban landscape, Walker’s drifts occur

100 Ken Knabb, ed. Situationist International Anthology (Berkley: Bureau of Public Secrets, 1995), 50.

101 Guy Deboard, Definitions. Internationale Situationniste #1 (Paris, June 1958). Translated by Ken Knabb.

67 by way of the acousmatic mise-en-scène and subsequent shifting through artificial sound environments in his recordings. In Society of the Spectacle, Deboard contends that “spectacles,” such as those of the Walker Brothers at the height of their fame during the mid 1960s, were ritualistic contrivances purposefully intended to mask the degradation of human life. With these connections to Walker’s contentious relationship with the concert industry and public performance in general, as well as his propensity to use his tracks as a phonographic auteur to traverse inner landscapes of the remote nether-regions of the human psyche, the title for his 2006 album would seem to give name to the abstract, narrative process driven progression of acousmatic “scenes” he had first experimented with eleven years earlier. Walker’s willful refusal to participate in anything cheap or trendy, such as his frequent resistance of in-vogue pop trends, indicates the degree to which he seeks to create works that are un-compromised by the demands of the shallower facets of the commercial entertainment industry. While Walker has not indicated the source of his title to be related to Situationism, there exists a substantial correlation between its founders’ sated principles and Walker’s troubled relationship with the mainstream Euro-

American concert industry.

6.2 Analysis: “Jesse”

For its distinctive concerted juxtaposition of voice against a large ensemble, and the integral role played by the subject of dead children in its text “Jesse” points directly to Romantic era European art song in the tradition of Gustav Mahler’s Kindertotenlieder symphonic song cycle. This large string ensemble that appears on the bulk of The Drift’s songs made its first appearance in the preceding track, “Clara,” which has already been the subject of a great deal of public attention for Walker’s now infamous use of a side of meat being punched by long-time

68 collaborator Alasdair Malloy as a featured percussive sound object. Walker’s summoning of the

large string section throughout the album is evocative of the horror film genre, especially

Bernard Herrmann’s all-string score for Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho (1960). There are two principal subjects that Walker weaves within his text that are tied by the thematic thread of survivor’s guilt— the twin brother of Elvis Aaron Presley (stillborn Jesse Garon Presley), and the

Twin Towers of the World Trade Center.

As another case of aural staging being substituted for traditional musical function, “Jesse” is characterized by a sound bed that is intended to support and reify Walker’s lyrics. Walker’s vocal performance is characterized by a grave tempo rubato over a static non-functional tone cluster sustained in a low register by a large string ensemble. The orchestral texture that functions as the harmonic underpinning for these passages might be described in terms of festering and a quiet boil. Though there is no harmonic motion, the ensemble seems to ebb and swell in a sort of mass Klangfarbenmelodie, and would seem to signify the sound of distant jet engines approaching. Walker in a number of interviews has described the The Drift as a complete shaving down of the style he had established on Tilt, stating in a 2006 promotional interview,

“Each album I’ve cut down more and more and more. This album has no beautiful string

arrangements or anything like that. It’s about big blocks of sound.”102 It is in this quality of album’s style that the album’s overall ambience can be summed up in oxymoronic terms of sound-mass pop. While there is little surface layer activity as a whole, the ensemble’s playing is saturated with quiet dread and restrained horror. Walker’s first onomatopoeic line, a gently whispered “Pow, Pow,” is panned so that each word appears on extreme opposites ends of the

102 Rob Young, “Singing is a Great Terror”, in No Regrets: Writings on Scott Walker, ed. Rob Young (London: WIRE, 2012), 247.

69 stereo field. A plausible reading of this frequently returning feature of the track is that it

constitutes an allusion to the planes crashing into the twin towers of the World Trade Center. It is from this experience of watching one tower left, falling shortly after the other, that Walker begins to weave the thread of Elvis and his stillborn twin Jesse. This passage continues for an uncomfortably long time in a manner comparable to the extended introduction to “The

Electrician,” allowing the atmosphere to develop as a pulsated, single pitch guitar texture, referred to in the liner notes as “mosquito guitar,” adding a sense of urgency to the otherwise stagnant accompaniment.

Akin to Walker’s use of guitar ostinatos to punctuate the end of phrases in “The

Electrician,” a discordant baritone guitar is strummed in what may be described as a de-tuned, metamorphosed rendition of the half-step upward-sliding guitar riff from “Jailhouse Rock.” The grotesque rendering of the familiar material directly parallels the manner in which Walker’s text paints the alternate universe of Jesse Presley as antithetical to the world of his surviving brother.

Despite Presley’s stance as a staunch opponent of illegal narcotics, documented in a oval office meeting with president Nixon during which the entertainer was given the title “Honorary DEA

Agent,” Elvis is known today for his late-life downfall that stemmed from addictions to prescription pharmaceutical substances. In a mirrored inverse of Elvis Aaron’s world, Walker begins to paint his picture of the alternate universe of Jesse Garon, “Nose holes caked with black cocaine.” Walker further permeates his text with this analogy through the juxtaposition of vertical images and horizontal images, “Famine is a tall tall tower, a building in the night,” as well as the final verse in which Walker describes a dream in which he is “Smoothing out the prairie.”

70 The most significant feature of aural staging in “Jesse” takes place in the song’s coda,

when all of the backing elements are removed leaving Walker’s voice palpably alone in the

expanse of the now vacant, vast performance space. The nakedness of Walker’s voice in this final

passage traces as the logical progression from the “Luzerner Zeitung” passage in “Patriot (A

Single)” from his previous album. Walker then weaves the narratives of the attacks on the twin

towers and the Presley twins, repeating “Alive, I’m the only one left alive.” On proper listening

equipment, a nearly imperceptible layer of delayed repetitions of Walker’s singing can be heard

in his pauses between lines.103 It is in this final piece of text that the thematic thread is revealed to be that of survivor’s guilt. While the contents arguably stand more capable of realization in live contexts, it is again the studio-generated mise-en-scène that defines the work, and lends indispensable clues as to the work’s meaning.

103 As another notable instance of this type of near-subliminal phenomenon, Walker’s 1969 track “The Old Man is Back Again (Dedicated to the Neo-Stalinist Regime),” from Scott 4, a track already notable as possibly one of the few recorded Scott Walker bass guitar performances, features similar echoed repetitions of vocal phrases mixed at virtually imperceptible layers within the mix throughout.

71 - 6:28]

Fig. 6.1 - “Jesse” Structural Diagrams

72 6.3 Analysis: “Jolson and Jones”

In 1975 Lou Reed termed his double album of guitar feedback Metal Machine Music, yet the phrase might be suited to describe the opening passage of Walker’s “Jolson and Jones.” The sound element at the forefront of the mix is that of a seemingly large piece of industrial machinery. The sound source’s two-stroke regular pulsation provides the nearest hints of metric subdivision of any of the track’s constituents. While it is possible to derive a rough triple meter based on the snare drum pattern, a consistent “rest - hit - hit” at the quarter note level, the metric relationship between the components is chaotic to the point of total ambiguity. Aside from

Walker’s voice, the pitched sound elements include bass guitar and Walker’s frequently returning

“signature” instrument, pipe organ.104 The bass guitar sits beneath the texture of the machinery providing scale degree 1-5 motions, never with the same rhythm twice while the pipe organ violently sounds a dense tone cluster at irregular intervals. The overall sense is that each sounding of the organ and snare drum constitutes something of an unexpected, violent attack.

This is a stylistic element that distinguishes the works featured in The Drift from Walker’s previous work, as tracks like “The Cockfighter” and “The Electrician” short of direct suggestion of actual physical danger. Walker’s melodic vocal figuration lilts above the chaos of the instrumental portion of the track, and seemingly could have been placed in virtually any temporal alignment to the same effect.

While this opening passage features the principle elements of a musical work such as harmony, melodic figuration and pulse, its coherence takes place more at the level of the staging of the sound elements, and their relationship to the horror expressed in the repeated “...the

104 The irregularity of the bass guitar’s 1-5 motions might heard as an imitation of the “Eee-awww” of a donkey’s wail, a central thematic element of the text to surface in later portions of the track.

73 VERSE 1 [0:00 - 0:36]

Loose 3/4 Meter: Voice, motoric pulsation, pipe organ, snare drum and bass guitar

CHORUS [0:36 - 0:43]

Abject replacement of sound medium with pulsated white noise, “Curare, curare...”

VERSE 2 [0:43 - 1:26]

Accompaniment is identical to Verse 1 / Slight alterations of text

Fig. 6.2 - “Jolson and Jones” Section A (“Metal Machine Music”) grossness of spring.” A chorus-like section is marked by a drop of the instrumental sound bed, and its sudden replacement with a pulsed white noise texture from [0:36 - 0:53] against which

Walker exclaims, “Curare, curare, brogue cried from the street!” Two important themes are contained in this statement. The reference to “Curare,” a poison that causes death by asphyxiation, ties to the song’s exploration of the commercial entertainment industry as a destructive force in the lives of the singers referred to by the work’s title. The use of the word

“brogue” serves a dual purpose: the Merriam-Webster dictionary explains that the word, meaning

"a hold (on the tongue)" or “speech impediment” derives from the Irish word "barróg," and thus reinforces the thematic thread of the maligning of the voice while foreshadowing later references throughout the text to the narrative’s setting in the West Irish town of Galway.

The “machine music” staging returns for a second, shorter verse prior to a notable stylistic transition at the [1:31] mark at which point it becomes evident that the violent mechanical sounds are intended to signify the mechanical failure of the respiratory system caused by the aforementioned Curare. Evidencing the text as the principal designator of the work’s large-scale form, the style of Walker’s text shifts toward the description of detailed visual

74 “THE SCENE OF THE CRIME”

“Metal Machine Music” ensemble is replaced with keyboard generated static and wind sounds, Text shifts to the descriptions of small details of a seedy hotel room. Short, thin layers of string ostinato punctuate the ends of lines of text. Two electric guitar chords ([1:56] and [2:01]) indicate forthcoming transition.

“THE CONTEXT OF THE CRIME”

String figuration becomes more lyrical, and less fragmented as text changes to describing larger context of Las Vegas (“The splendor of tigers turning to gold in the desert, pale meadows of stranded pyramids”)

Fig. 6.3 - “Jolson and Jones” Transition [1:26 - 3:25]

aspects and happenings within a room. The passage is marked by pregnant silences, and anxious

string ostinato figures reminiscent of Bernard Herrmann’s string ostinato patterns in his all string

score for Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho. Walker’s text paints a picture of a seedy hotel room, describing tiny features that indicate a crime scene (i.e. “The prints of my fingers dusted from doorknobs”). Again Walker’s text seems to serve the same purpose to the acousmatic medium as would title cards in silent cinema. As a result, his voice in the staging of the mix would seem to be less intended as as signifier of a man in a room, but rather, as a vehicle for narrative data. A transitional section starting at the [2:38] mark further pushes the use of concrete, un-orthodox sound sources, featuring the agonized wail of a donkey as Walker sings “Sonny Boy, such a sonny boy...” The subject of donkeys returns in a later passage (beginning at the [6:16] mark in which Walker repeats in call and response with himself (multi-tracked) “I’ll punch a donkey in the streets of Galway!” These references to donkeys throughout the track are presumably in

75 relation to singer Allan Jones’ well-known recording of “The Donkey Serenade.” Likewise, the repeated “Sonny boy, such a sonny boy...” in the previous passage point to Al Jolson’s signature recording “Sonny Boy.” Following the conclusion of the donkey-latent transitional passage, the track enters its secondary, principal narrative area, marked by the continuous sound of footsteps descending a staircase. The footsteps underpin a long narrative passage of text; Walker paints a picture of a man leaving the previously mentioned room, descending stairs, entering the streets, and having a brief exchange with another man there in which the aforementioned “I’ll punch a donkey...” call and response takes place. The footsteps continue beyond the conclusion of the vocal and other musical material for nearly thirty seconds before the track’s conclusion.

“MAN DESCENDING STAIRS”

[3:15] Abject replacement of sound medium, Drop of Dynamic to Mezzo Piano, Keyboard generated static texture and echo-latent footsteps take over in mix. Melody/lyrics from V1 reprised.

[4:00] Text switches to description of a man leaving the previously described room, descending a staircase, entering the street, and having an exchange with an acquaintance in the street. Solo “Viol” ostinato enters.

[4:38] “Viol” ostinato ads droning pitch, transposed up by a minor third

[4:55] “Viol” dropped from mix, dialogue between subject and another man on street begins “Good afternoon.”

[4:18] Large string ensemble enters, performing new sextuplet ostinato pattern

[6:15] Concert bass drum enters, “I’ll punch a donkey...” multi-tracked call and response begins

[6:39] Large string ensemble sextuplet ostinato dropped / “Sonny Boy...” text and melody from “Donkey Serenade” passage is merged with Chorus “Curare...” from Section A [7:02 - 7:45] Keyboard generated static cluster gradually faded as footsteps sustain into the distance.

Fig. 6.4 - “Jolson and Jones” Section B [3:15 - 7: 45]

76 6.4 Analysis: “Cue”

As a further indication of The Drift being a figurative shaving down of Walker’s signature compositional style, the returning feature of the pastoral orchestral ballad in this context is reduced to the level of functioning as little more than sound masses. Walker has cited “Cue” as the song that took the longest to complete (nine years) of all the works featured on the album.105

“Cue,” like many of Walker’s compositions features a large-scale ternary form in which the A and B-sections might be described as contrasting narrative areas. The orchestral textures within the “A-Sections” are unmistakably stylistically reminiscent of Gyorgi Ligeti’s “Atmospheres,” a work Walker would have likely been aware of as a cinema buff for its being featured as the overture to Stanley Kubrick’s 1968 film 2001: A Space Odyssey.106 To represent the chaotic, mysterious origins of the universe, Kubrick allows the groundbreaking work of micro-polyphony to play against a completely blank screen. “Cue” likewise utilizes a densely scored orchestral texture to symbolize the microcosmic world of pathogens within the track’s principal narrative areas. The song’s title would seem to be in reference to a returning flugelhorn motif that punctuates the beginning and ends of Walker’s vocal phrases throughout the A-Sections. As a further signifier of the microscopic world of disease, the flugelhorn motifs featured throughout seem to symbolize microscopic sequential data, such as viruses.

A pair of acoustic baritone guitars, played by regular collaborator Hugh Burns and

Walker himself provide an unrelenting two eighth-note ostinato, which provides the principal sense of pulse in the work and forward motion, and further, point toward the song’s ancestry with

105 Graham Reid. “Loneliness Is A Cloak You Wear,” Elsewhere.co.nz, September 16, 2008, (http:// www.elsewhere.co.nz/absoluteelsewhere/392/scott-walker-interviewed-2006-loneliness-is-a-cloak-you-wear/).

106 The work also might be described as a darker rendering of Debussy’s texturally intensive music such as “Nuages,” which would be equally suitable as a setting for the subject of airborne disease.

77 the similarly arranged “It’s Raining Today.” The string arrangements are virtually static for long passages, sometimes over thirty seconds, and Walker’s melodic content is loosely placed atop the ensemble in his usual free rubato style. Despite the dense packing of the orchestral sonorities it is possible to find rough centers of pitch to these sonorities (emphasizing F, C, Ab, Bb, and once,

Gb). Melodic content is also provided by the intermittent comment from a solo flugelhorn, whose punctuations between lines of Walker’s text is unmistakably reminiscent of George Ives’

“The Unanswered Question.” The first hint that a major transition is impending is suggested by

Walker singing the onomatopoeic line “Bam, Bam, Bam Bam,” matching the ascending pitches of the Flugelhorn cue (G-Ab-Bb-Cb). Immediately following Walker’s statement a new,

Fig. 6.5 - “Cue” Section A

78 tremendous sounding percussion instrument matches Walker’s rhythmic phrasing [3:08]. In 30

Century Man it is revealed that this sound, as well as sounds featured on the later track

“Psioratic” were achieved using a large wooden box structure that was constructed in the studio for the album’s sessions. The magnitude of the low resonance of the box being beaten, with microphone inside, could be read as symbolizing the sound of a coffin being nailed shut. Further ties to themes of fatalism and the inescapability of death might be found in its similarity to

Gustav Mahler’s percussive cues in the final movement of his Symphony No. 6 (Tragic), in which the score dictates that some large, dull percussion instrument be struck three times to

signify the hammer blows of fate.

A brief transitional passage commences at the [4:06] mark upon the line “And stops,” at

which point the string texture and acoustic baritone guitar ostinatos are dropped from the mix

and replaced with a microscopically thin texture of guitar delay, pitched at “D.” Walker delivers

a series of lines that suggest he, as a virus, is picturing the mode of his transmission (“Suppose I

will follow the aerosol patterns”). In addition to drum kit and bass guitar, the strings abruptly re-

enter at the mix at the [4:47] mark at a triple-forte, performing scream-like descending glissandi

gestures. Sound mass composition in the style of Krzysztof Penderecki’s works from the late

1950s and 1960s have become inextricably associated with the horror film genre through the use

of “Threnody for the Victims of Hiroshima,” and “The Vision of Jakob” prominently throughout

Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining (1980); Walker unmistakably evokes their cultural resonance

within this central “bridge” section within the tracks large-scale ternary form. The text in this

passage shifts to the descriptions of the mass horrors of the human experience of plagues, with

the repeated refrain, “Immunity!” The opening Ligeti-esque orchestral figuration and baritone

79 guitar ostinatos resume at the [6:48] mark, following stylistically similar harmonic patterns to the opening section. The melodic contour reaches its apex on the line “And his tune rises,” reaching

Eb in a high tenor’s register in which Walker is palpably stretching beyond his natural vocal range. The track subsequently settles back into the void from which it commenced.

Fig. 6.6 - “Cue” Section B and A’

80 6.5 Analysis: “Buzzers”

By introducing the track with the sound of a radio being scanned, passing through several

radio stations before coming to a rest on what presumably is to be read as the middle of a news

reel regarding the Yugoslav Wars (1991-1999), Walker returns yet again to the subjects of the

media, controversial European politics and war crimes. Though what is heard is not an actual

news broadcast being recorded in real-time, Walker has commented that the lines delivered by

Beverly Foster (credited in the album’s liner notes) are based upon an actual magazine article.107

The commentary includes a reference to Caligula’s horse Incitatus, who the infamous Roman

leader was reputed to treat as a senator, and serves as the basis for the intertwining of text related

to the ten year Baltic region conflict and its infamous instances of genocide with the evolutionary

lengthening of horses faces as they ceased to eat from the ground rather than trees.108

Affectively, the verses of “Buzzers” constitute rare moments of relative calm within

album. Unlike the densely packed texts of most of Walker’s works, the lyrics to “Buzzers” are

sparse. While the text’s repeated mantra, “Polish the fork and stick the fork in him,” cannot be

regarded as pleasant, the tracks overall affectation is one of repose. In the signature Walker

chorus-less, bridged song form, the principle area features a delicate, sparse texture of rather

mysterious origin. A small idiophone played at a constant eighth note pulse gradually rises and

falls within the range of F an F#, while what may functionally analogous to a 4-3 suspension is

performed on a glassy, processed electric guitar every four measures.109 A pedal tone played on a

107 Rob Young, “Singing is a Great Terror”, in No Regrets: Writings on Scott Walker, ed. Rob Young (London: WIRE, 2012), 249-250.

108 Ibid.

109 As a bonus feature on the 30 Century Man DVD, video from the recording sessions for “Buzzers” shows the sound was achieved by hanging a single xylophone key from a string, and then gently submerging it and raising it out of a small bucket of water.

81 heavily-processed bass guitar intermittently enters and exits the mix at a pianissimo dynamic, seemingly detached from the remainder of the ensemble. The processing of the bass alters the instrument’s timbre to the extent that it resembles a sawtooth wave type of synthesizer texture.

As a large-scale rondo, the first “chorus” section feature a contrasting sound medium, in which shakers, un-processed bass guitar, and acoustic baritone guitar. are emphasized. The second verse is completely identical to the first with the sole exception of the addition of the whispered words

“Kad tad,” a Serbian phrase loosely translating as “One day.”

Following the second verse a contrasting, pseudo-bridge section commences in which a sustained string augmented triad serves as a backdrop to Walker’s disorienting, vertiginous whole-tone scale derived melody. Walker’s phrasing and wide melodic leaps during this passage harken back to “Dealer” from Climate of the Hunter, in which Walker’s voice seems to freely run across bar lines, hovering in loose metric relation to the accompaniment. An explanation as to the loose temporal relationship between the melody and accompaniment might be found in Walker’s explanation of his use of the metaphor of horse’s anatomical evolution in this passage: “The horses faces lengthen, so it’s more about longing for the time a spiritual face can stay with us...

So it isn’t actually about the lengthening in that sense, it’s about lengthening of time, that you can hold that. Most of my stuff is about frustration, of being unable to hold on to a spiritual moment.”110 The aqueously immersed xylophone key returns intermittently throughout the “faces of the grass” section, but only at the end of four bar phrases, and mixed with a great deal of echo indicating that the single strikes (with exaggerated, almost violent sweeps of pitch) are taking place at a great distance. Thus, it might be argued that the use of the constantly metamorphosing

110 Rob Young, “Singing is a Great Terror”, in No Regrets: Writings on Scott Walker, ed. Rob Young (London: WIRE, 2012), 250.

82 xylophone key throughout functions as the principal signifier of an unwilling transformation of one’s physical, psychological, spiritual or ethnic essence.

Fig. 6.7 - “Buzzers” Large-Scale Formal Structure

6.6 Return to Public Visibility

Thanks to the heightened visibility Walker had benefited from the release of 30 Century

Man, The Drift was his first album to chart outside of the U.K. At this time Walker notably became more open to the press, appearing for extended video interviews for the first time since the 1980s, seeming generally more comfortable and at ease with media attention. Walker’s newfound candor would prove to be indicative of the resurfacing of traditional popular forms in

83 is compositions that would characterize his next studio album, Bisch Bosch. In mid 2010 it was announced on his new record label, 4AD’s website that Walker had actively commenced recording sessions for his next album, and full album details were published in September of

2012, three months prior to release.

84 CHAPTER 7

BISCH BOSCH (2012)

7.1 Orpheus Resurfaces, One Foot Lingering Below

Following the release of The Drift Walker commented in an interview that he was becoming interested in the prospects of writing material that could be performed in concert, commenting: “I'm taking a little break and then I'm starting another record and hopefully do something I can go out and tour with because I couldn't do it with the last two, because they are too epic and financially it is impossible. I always start optimistically, but then my imagination takes over and suddenly the whole string sections are in! [Laughs]”111 Six years later at the time

of the release of Bish Bosch in December 2012 he granted a series of interviews in which he

described the album as the final installment of an informal trilogy that had begun with Tilt in

1995. Though the artist has not elaborated upon his reasoning as to why he considered the works

to be related as a trilogy, a number of inferences may be made with respect to a gradual cycling

away from and back to to traditional pop songwriting. If Walker’s general deliberateness might

be considered as evidence that little in his professional career has been left to chance, the

symmetric pattern of intervals of time between his releases of his mature, post-1978 period (fig.

7.1) is no accident there is overwhelming evidence to support a reading of Bisch Bosch as a

return to Walker’s earlier, more concrete post-1978 works such as Climate of the Hunter from

which he had moved away.

111 Graham Reid. “Loneliness Is A Cloak You Wear,” Elsewhere.co.nz, September 16, 2008, http:// www.elsewhere.co.nz/absoluteelsewhere/392/scott-walker-interviewed-2006-loneliness-is-a-cloak-you-wear/ (accessed March 1, 2013).

85 Nite Flights (1978) - > Climate of the Hunter (1984) = 6 Yr

Climate of the Hunter (1978) - > Tilt (1995) = 11 Yr

Tilt (1995) - > The Drift (2006) = 11 Yr

The Drift (2006) - > Bish Bosch (2012) 6 Yr

Fig. 7.1 - Symmetric Pattern of Studio Album releases since Nite Fights

Bish Bosch, while sometimes dark and bleak, is without a doubt Walker’s most

humorous, lighthearted original work since ‘Til the Band Comes in (1970), featuring a track in which (presumably human) flatulence is featured in passing (“Corps De Blah”). In essence, Bish

Bosch is a synthesis of Walker’s most boundary-pushing works on Tilt and The Drift, with the traditional popular song forms underlying Nite Flights and Climate of the Hunter. Its tracks

feature a marked return to clear pop forms and structures, constituting the most “performable”

work he has produced since the mid-1980s. Prior to Scott’s departure from the Walkers in 1967

he authored “Orpheus,” a song that foreshadowed the style he was to develop in his first four

solo albums for Phillips. The myth of the songsmith who ventured into the depths of Hades is a

suitable metaphor for the path through dark, frightening territories Walker has explored since

1978, and thus Bish Bosch might be said to constitute a figurative resurfacing of Orpheus with

one foot lingering below.112 At the conclusion of Walker’s album cycle it is apparent that he has

exorcised the demons of his lost creative years as a middle of the road puppet during the bulk of

the 1970s, while contributing vastly to the exploration of the capacities of his preferred medium.

112 The comparison of Walker’s experimental works to the journey of Orpheus is posited in the opening narration of 30 Century Man, six years prior to Bisch Bosch’s release.

86 7.2 Analysis: “See You Don’t Bump His Head”

As yet another instance of cinematic allusions arising in Walker’s choice of subjects, the title of the album’s opening track is a line delivered by Montgomery Clift that was cut from the

1953 film From Here to Eternity.113 114 As perhaps the most consistently dark work on the album

Walker’s text features the often repeated refrain “While plucking feathers from a swan song,” to open and close stanzas. Leaving little ambiguity, the statement would seem to be made in reference to the anxiety of an aging composer, who with the awareness of his own slow working pace at the age of 70 might be seriously contemplating this album as the figurative swan song of his career. Many of the lyrics point toward regrets and life opportunities missed, such as “While plucking feathers from a swan song, a cobweb melts within a womb.” The track’s composition is relatively simple, featuring at the fore of the mix a repeated electronic percussion loop in a nearly swung pulsation highly reminiscent of “Bouncer See Bouncer’s” heart-like palpitations.

Slight layers of distortion and noise are occasionally layered into the loop throughout the mix in a crescendoing fasion, but the pulse is otherwise unchanging. The melodic feedback of an electric guitar, which enters and exits the mix sporadically, points to his long-term fascination with extended technique that first appeared in the outro of “Shutout” from Nite Flights. In a sudden and shocking fashion, a large scale string texture is brought into the mix at the [0:27] mark, which arguably constitutes a highly agitated version of the same texture he first introduced on Scott 3’s opening track, “It’s Raining Today” over forty years earlier. Walker’s voice finally makes its entry, bathed in the same dehumanizing delay that had become a signature since “Fat

113 Scott Walker, Liner Notes from Bisch Bosch, 4AD Records, B009CXLRZ8, 3 December 2012, LP.

114 Clift had delivered the line as a dead soldier played by Frank Sinatra was placed in an ambulance by a fellow soldier.

87 Mama Kick.” Walker proceeds to incant a series of stanzas bookended by the line “While plucking feathers from a swan song.” It is immediately apparent that the track is much more capable of being read as a tangible depiction of a performance taking place in room, and the in- studio staging is not indispensable to the meaning or identity of the work. One may almost picture a youthful Walker of the era of his short-lived television program seated on a stool beside the orchestra, with his signature appearance of eyes covered with sunglasses, and neck adorned in a scarf as he recites his gothic post-beat poetry.

Fig. 7.2 - “See You Don’t Bump His Head” Large-Scale Formal Structure

88 7.3 Analysis: “SDSS1416+13B (Zercon, A Flagpole Sitter)”

Three months prior to the album’s early December street date a press release regarding the style and content of Bish Bosh likened the work to the immensely detailed triptychs of the

fifteenth-century painter Hieronymus Bosch. Unlike the promotional materials surrounding the

release of Walker’s previous works (which are scant to none in his late period), the press release

goes to great lengths to explain the basis of the album’s style and content. The author of the press

release, Rob Young, who also served as the editor of No Regrets: Writings on Scott Walker earlier

that year, concludes the official 4AD press release that “Bish Bosch is big enough to contain

heaven and hell,” to indicate that the album works on both macrocosmic and microcosmic scales.

Nowhere is this principle of Bish Bosch’s macrocosmically sprawling essence more evident than

the album’s twenty-one minute and forty-two second long centerpiece, “SDSS14+13B (Zercon,

A Flagpole Sitter). Longer than the combined sum of the four tracks authored by Walker on Nite

Flights by over five minutes, “Zercon” (as it the title is generally abbreviated in print, and

referred to by the author in interviews) is a work of epic proportions, unprecedented in his career.

This track progresses through a long series of narrative scenarios as the title character

imagines himself progressing through different times and eras. The obscure titling of the work is

explained in Rob Young’s extensive press release on the album, citing that, “The title contains

two brown dwarves: one, the coldest sub-stellar body in the universe discovered so far; the other,

Zercon, was a real-life Moorish jester at the fifth century court of Attila the Hun.”115 Walker

subsequently explains the narrative trajectory of Zercon, “I was interested in this thing about

someone trying to escape his situation— in this case Attila’s wooden palace, which he regards as

115 Rob Young, Bisch Bosch Press Release. http://www.bishbosch.com/biog/ (accessed 1 March 2013).

89 an immense toilet – and achieve a kind of spiritual sovereignty, and a height beyond calculation.

As the song moves forward he imagines himself at different stages of height: he imagines first that he escapes and finds himself surrounded by eagles; then there’s the mention of St Simon on his pillar; then he jumps to 1930s America where it’s become a flagpole-sitter… Flagpole-sitting

— trying to spend several days alone on a platform at the top of a pole – achieved a brief craze status in the 30s. At the end of the song he eventually becomes a Brown Dwarf, known as

SDSS1416. As with the majority of my songs, it ends in failure, like a brown dwarf, he freezes to death.”116

The track proceeds through a plethora of scenes and scenarios in which transitions are sudden and seemingly haphazard. The various passages of Zercon’s ascent through time and space are distinguished less by a sense of musical continuity, but rather, their relationship to the progression of Walker’s Narrative. Though a complete discussion of the work would take up an entire chapter, the opening passage is demonstrative of the work’s style and tone. Picking up where “Jesse” left off on his previous album, the first “vignette” features Walker’s (spoken, not sung) voice unaccompanied other than a thick layer of room echo. The lines of text presented throughout this passage are of a crude, insulting nature, and are punctuated by long, pregnant silences. Walker explains the basis of this passage being that Zercon, the principal subject of the track, was something of an equivalent to our modern concept of a stand-up comedian as a court jester. and the silences between Zercon’s spoken statements signify his being heckled by silence

— the indifferent audience that is the universe itself.117 At the [1:53] mark, the first hint of a

116 Scott Walker, Ibid.

117 Scott Walker and David Dye, World Cafe Radio Interview, 2 February 2013, http://www.youtube.com/watch? v=YGEdGg92p84 (accessed 9 January 2013).

90 change becomes evident in the sound of fingers sliding down the wound strings of an electric guitar. The ensuing lines of text are a series of Roman numerals, which Walker explains as following with the expectation that a toilet, as Attila’s wooden palace has become to him, would often have phone numbers written on walls. As a humorous gesture, Walker recites these numbers in the system that would have existed during Zercon’s time, Roman numerals. In

“Zercon,” the principles of Walker’s narratively-driven, acousmatic cinema are realized in their closest potential to yet again crossing the borders of media into the territory of radio play. The sound medium used throughout the work is relatively un-abstract, and its non-performability is less due to its particularities of spatialization and arrangement in the stereo field, but rather, the sheer number of musicians represented by all of the tiny vignettes throughout. Though it is apparent Walker has tried in earnest to create a work that he could conceive of presenting in a performance, it remains recording-centric for the cost-prohibitive nature of staging such a production in real time.

7.4 Analysis: “Epizootics!”

In his extended interview for 30 Century Man, Walker stated that he had stopped making

“groove records” many years ago. Breaking this stated ban on “getting down while on record,” the lead single to Bish Bosch (released two months prior to the album itself) is possibly the most danceable work since his mutant-disco “Shutout” on Nite Flights over three decades earlier.

Unlike Tilt and The Drift, which might be characterized as occupying unfamiliar spaces without memory, Walker points to atmosphere of cyclic return that embodies the album by releasing a lead single in which the principal instrument is an overt allusion to a pre-existing work.

91 “Epizootics!” commences with a solo ostinato figure that bears a remarkable similarity to the sonority performing the introductory hook on “Fat Mama Kick.” The album’s liner notes indicate that the instrument that was used to generate this obscure sound was a “tubax,” a modified version of a contrabass saxophone with more windings to make the instrument less cumbersome.

The resultant processing, however, lends the finished sound to more closely resemble a sawtooth synthesizer texture.

When considering Walker’s explanation of the album’s title as a reference to a “giant, mythical, all encompassing woman artist,”118 the question naturally arises as to whether or not

Bish Bosch stems from very same omnipotence suggested by this track’s Nite Flights predecessor. Aside from the buoyant rhythmic interplay of the groove, which features a call and response kick drum and hand clap pattern, the track closely resembles the Nite Flights track. The long introduction features a conspicuously similar a low rumble of indiscernible origin, much like “Fat Mama Kick,” and features an almost comical-sounding electric guitar texture in which the player seems to intentionally over-bend and play out of tune. Pointing to the numerous references to Hawaiian images throughout the lyrics, a ukulele enters and exits the mix at an interval of roughly every four bars. Adhering to a far more conventional pop verse-chorus song structure than his the works of his previous two albums, Walker presents an unexpectedly melodic chorus. Though Walker’s melodic content is unusually catchy, he experiments with a bizarre sound medium to accompany it. As the track transitions into a swing-like shuffle, a group of three trumpets repeat an equally catchy ostinato. The uniquely washy sound of the ride cymbal is an effect achieved by having six percussionists perform the exact same shuffle rhythm in one

118 Rob Young. Bisch Bosch Press Release. http://www.bishbosch.com/biog/ (accessed 1 March 2013).

92 room at once. While the track unmistakably points to its origins in pop forms, it goes about

achieving the expectations of those forms in idiosyncratic manners. The track continues to

progress through swing rhythms featuring densely-quadrupled snare drum figures as an

extension of the lyrics extensive plays on 1940s hipster slang.

The only truly abstract portion of the track occurs within the song’s middle section

between [4:26-6:40], when the sound medium is reduced to a whirring stereophonic synthesizer

texture that might be described as a calmer, aesthetically more beautiful version of the sound bed for “Bouncer See Bouncer.” Through the passage Walker sings a series of echo-latent modal melodic phrases that eventually give way to a sinister ambiance at [5:55], resembling the

“Luzener Zeitung” passage from “Patriot (A Single) and the introduction to “The Cockfighter.”

A series of chthonic moans and wails echo against hard stone walls as Walker’s vocal gestures become markedly more chant-like.The atmospheric middle portion is interrupted by a sudden return of the layered-swing ride cymbal ensemble, at which point the swing-rhythm intensive, hipster-slang texted portions are repeated without much variation. A brief new passage arrives at

[8:04] when the ensemble is dropped from the mix, and Walker, breaking the fourth wall speaks directly to the audience in recitative, delivering a series of humorous lines containing absurd, nonsensical images “Pardon the apple, let’s just shift you over here.” A final chorus returns, transposing the trumpet figures up by a fifth. Suddenly, the ensemble is dropped again, and it would seem that another brooding atmospheric passage like the middle section is about to begin.

Walker, however, is clearly toying with the audience, and after a few tense moments of silence, he sings a gently lilting cadential melodic figure as the song fades out with a charming strummed ukulele, again pointing to the Hawaiian imagery of the song’s non-returning opening materials

93 and text. While the song by no means is conventional, it is clearly definable outside of the realm of the recorded format, further indicating Walker’s trajectory back to the stage after years of studio-intensive experimentation.

Fig. 7.3 - “Epizootics!” Large-Scale Formal Structure

94 7.5 Analysis: “Pilgrim”

Bish Bosch, as an album of extreme range contains not only Walker’s longest work to

date, but one of his shortest as well. At a mere two minutes and twenty six seconds, “Pilgrim”

points most toward the total abstraction of sound medium introduced in Tilt’s “Bouncer See

Bouncer.” The fragmentary essence of Walker’s text, comprised by a short set of single repeated lines, seems to function in the more abstract function of acousmatic inter-titles, providing hints as to the physical essence of the unseen scene Walker paints with sound. The track features a densely layered sound bed of many small, thinly skinned hand percussion instruments. As a sort of rhythmically-intensive klangfarbenmelodie, the un-pitched sound bed matches Walker’s

repetition “Room full of mice,” with thousands of tiny feet causing a wooden floor to creak.

Aside from the use of percussion instruments to generate the densely layered sound-bed, the

work purely functions at the level of its staging relative to Walker’s whispered, un-sung vocal.

As a miniaturized version of the author’s favored “chorus-less,” ternary form, a second,

contrastingly staged scene replaces the percussion with a dense layer of several layers of bowed

double bass playing an agitated tremolo figure. The treatment of Walker’s voice changes as well

to match the horrified affectation of his vocal, drenching it conspicuously with seemingly

excessive amounts of echo very much like the “Deaf, Dumb, Blind” bridge of “Fat Mama Kick.”

The bridge contains only two lines of dialogue, “Blowing up bull frogs with a straw,” and

“staring into their eyes just before they burst.” The passage is comprised by a single independent

phrase, and lasts a matter of only fifteen seconds. A notable attribute of this section is the manner

in which the removal of the string texture between the lines of text reveals a four second decay

95 time of Walker’s voice [1:00-1:04].119 Silences are many throughout the course of Bish Bosch,

yet the miniaturized scale of “Pilgrim” brings into relief the degree to which the album operates

in incredibly detailed ways at both microcosmic and macrocosmic levels.

Fig. 7.4 - “Pilgrim” Large-Scale Ternary Form

7.6 Analysis: “The Day the Conducător Died (An X-Mas Song)”

Continuing with the expectation of a naturalistic, guitar-based closing track as established by each of his albums since Climate of the Hunter, Walker concludes Bish Bosch with a black- humor latent ballad about former head of the Romanian Communist Party (or “Conducător” as

he referred to himself) from 1967 to 1989, Nicolae Ceaușescu. Ceaușescu, along with the other

dictators that appear as subjects of Walker’s songs such as Benito Mussolini (“Clara,” The Drift),

was met his end being executed at the hand of an outraged public. His regime had become

notoriously oppressive, and when he was placed before a firing squad following the fall of the

Romanian Communist Regime on Christmas Day, 1989, the firing squad reputedly proceeded to

fire before the order was ever given. Pointing to the overwhelming disgust of the citizens of

119 The manner in which the decay of the vocal becomes a momentary focal point of the mix is comparable to a memorable moment within The Beach Boys’ “Good Vibrations.” The sunshine-pop group’s studio masterpiece features a church-tinged, organ-based middle section that climaxes with the removal of the sound elements to reveal an enormous decay of the vocal harmonies immediately prior to the song’s final recapitulative passage.

96 Romania over the excesses of Ceaușescu’s brutal, Stalinist regime, the song features a refrain

“And nobody waited for fire” as a double entendre, also referring to the shocked reaction of the

dictator that his people gave up on his leadership. The song’s text is written in the form of the

dictator reading questions from a fictitious personality survey. This is clearly demarcated in the

album’s liner notes, with small check boxes next to each possible response to the question (i.e. “I

am nurturant, compassionate, caring. () Not So Much. () Very Much.”). These questions are

loaded in a manner to clearly indicate all of the man’s personality deficits that led to his

egomania and brutality as a leader.

Further following with the style of “Rosary” and “A Lover Loves,” Walker accompanies

himself with a simplistic, dissonant guitar part. Unique to Bisch Bosh, however, is the gradual

accumulative layering of percussion across the course of the track, principally sleigh bells.120 As

signifiers of Christmas time, the choice of instrumentation points to the Christmas day execution

of the infamous Romanian Conducător. As an ironic farewell gesture, the track fades out with a single melodic statement of “Jingle Bells” played on a small set of bells (also credited to Walker in the liner notes). The fact that Walker chose to close the album on a darkly comic note indicates a heaviness of heart receding that seems to characterize the conclusion of his seventeen-year process of building his epic album cycle.121

120 Walker’s use of sleigh bells is also something of a signature device, tracing to the “Scott Walker Year-Zero” composition “Archangel,” a B-Side to the Walker Brothers’ single “Deadlier than the Male” in 1966.

121 It is also noteworthy that Radiohead, a group Walker has frequently cited to be among his favorite contemporary groups in recent interviews, closed their seminal 1997 album OK Computer with a single note played by Jonny Greenwood on a comparable bell-like instrument. Further, OK Computer’s opening track, “Airbag” makes prominent use of sleigh bells in a comparably menacing fashion.

97 CONCLUSIONS

The spark of this research traces to an invaluable exchange I shared with a visiting guest lecturer-performer as an undergraduate. The guest lecturer had travelled to Appalachian State

University to present research that he had conducted on all of the available data regarding the various performative interpretations of a single J.S. Bach Prelude and Fugue. Systematically comparing the nuances of over thirty performances through direct personal observation, and in other cases, by way of recorded documents of the work’s performances the lecturer had come to his own conclusions regarding his own ideal interpretation of that work that he was to perform himself later that week. Following the conclusion of his presentation a casual question and answer session ensued in which the topic of popular genres arose. When asked about his own thoughts about popular genres the lecturer qualified his reticence based upon the stranglehold recordings place upon performative re-interpretation, citing the tendency for recorded versions in the context of Euro-American contemporary popular music culture tend to function as definitive versions. In other words, the different roles played by recordings and the recording process did not allow room, in his perspective, for the process in which his livelihood was so deeply invested. The lecturer’s response was the single event that provoked my realization that there existed art forms characterized by performative re-interpretation, and there also existed art forms of indisputable substance that are by nature fixed. Acknowledging that Euro-American commercial popular music is predicated upon the creation and mass distributions of sound recordings, and further, is predominantly experienced as recordings, and is therefore a form more belonging to the category of fixed arts liberates recording-centric musics the immense problems

98 that arise from attempting to critically evaluate such musics by way of the same terms and

methodology as classical concert musics.

The recorded format has the distinct potential to transform the process of experiencing

music by changing it from a social, outwardly-focused one into a more personal, introspective

one. Glenn Gould’s decision to focus upon a performer-listener dynamic that shunned the

necessity of the precedents surrounding the social ritual that is “Musicking,”122 might be

reflected in his statement “I believe that the justification of art is the internal combustion it

ignites in the hearts of men and not its shallow, externalized, public manifestations. The purpose

of art is not the release of a momentary ejection of adrenaline but is, rather, the gradual, lifelong

construction of a state of wonder and serenity.”123 While the breakdown of the composer-listener-

performer dynamic was perceived as a problem to electronic music composers in the mid

twentieth century who first encountered the issue regarding the genre’s “performance-less-ness,”

Walker, like Gould has embraced this transformation as a natural step in the evolution of the

function of music in society. Returning to Simon Frith’s assertion that, “...the threat to musical

autonomy in the twentieth century is not the rise of a mass music, but recording technology,”124 it

is difficult to imagine how thousands of years of precedent might be open to re-evaluation upon

the basic change in our relationship as a species with our sense of hearing little over a century

into the era of recorded sound. It is a natural human response to fear what is not understood, yet

fear surrounding recording technology as a threat to musical autonomy, or the tradition of public

performance in the case of Sousa is as logical as the fear that the motion picture camera would

122 I am referring to Christopher Small’s text in which the author argues that music making is in essence a social ritual.

123 Gould, Glenn, “Lets Ban Applause,” Musical America, 1962.

124 Simon Frith, ‘Adam Smith and Music’, 1992.

99 signify the death of the art of theatrical performance. We are a century into the history of the cinematic arts, yet the theater remains socially-relevant in its own right. The emergences of new art forms as technology have expanded the means available to externalize the awesome potentials of the human imagination have been a natural, evolutionary constant throughout the course of human history. It is an ongoing process of sociological evolution that is self-regulating and organic as much as biological evolution.

In the thirty years since Walker last set foot on the stage it has become apparent that his most extreme exercises in phonographic auteurism arose from a mixture of external pressures of an artistically-problematic territory for creative activity upon a singular imagination whose vision was unencumbered by the illusions of precedent. A logical question to ask given Walker’s now apparent return trajectory toward more conventional modes of artistic creation is whether or not those exercises were worthwhile. Is there any aesthetic necessity for his works to most fully embody the principles of phonographic auteurism? And lastly, what is to be made of Walker as an artist himself? With respect to Walker’s aesthetic taste, willful obscurantism has always been a problematic facet of his output. It is the same reason that respectable, well-informed music critics like Robert Christgau dismiss Walker, as Christgau’s system of evaluating artists is based upon judging whether that music has the potential to compel a wide audience. Walker’s works are the antithesis of easy listening, or “middle of the road” as it was termed during his creative nadir in the early 1970s, and is instead intensely challenging. Walker himself admits that he does not seek to compel the wide audience that most commercial artists would target, and has explicitly stated that he expects for his audience to find challenges with the process of listening to his recordings. In a revealing exchange with Simon Hattenstone during an interview appearing

100 in The Guardian in 2012 Hattenstone praised Bisch Bosch, but admitted that he wouldn’t want to listen to it for hours on end, to which Walker revealingly replied “"No! No! You'll end up dead if you do that!"125

As Milton Babbitt once defended the necessity of esoteric, experimentally-bold works in the context of classical genres through his infamous 1958 essay, “Who Cares If You Listen?,” the accessibility of the artist’s works need not factor into the bigger picture with respect to the viability or artistic legitimacy of the compositional approach. What is important is that Walker’s more experimental works open inroads to new working methods that very well might become more widely utilized, in less abrasive and challenging ways. Walker should be considered a significant artistic figure of the twentieth century for his prominent role in demonstrating that the recorded format as an autographic medium may host the working methods of any other autographic art— treating the stereo space to stage and arrange sounds as would a film director, regardless of whether his aesthetic sensibilities and preferences toward obscure topics is appealing. His resultant exercises in phonographic auteurism are remarkable for the manner in which they constitute a deconstruction of the binary opposition between track and song. Beyond the innovative merit of his recordings, Walker continues to express a sincere desire to create works that will have an emotional resonance with whatever audience is willing to give his music the requisite patience. Consequentially, an appropriate alternative title for this research might have been “Scott Walker Cares If You Listen.”

125 Scott Walker: Brother Beyond, The Guardian, http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/2012/nov/23/scott-walker- interview (accessed February 21, 2013).

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105 BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH

Duncan Hammons (born July 4, 1985 in Oak Ridge, Tennessee) grew up in the midst of a perennially distinguished scientific community fostered by his East Tennessee hometown’s being the site of three government laboratories, the construction of which was commissioned during the height of the Manhattan Project in the 1940s. As an intellectually-progressive environment well suited for nurturing a child’s imagination, Hammons developed an intense curiosity toward all things that interested him that would later lead him through a circuitous educational path through the hard sciences into the arts. After graduating Magna Cum Laude from Oak Ridge

High School in 2003 with distinction as the only student to simultaneously participate in both

Band and Orchestra programs during his tenure in the Oak Ridge School system Hammons initially studied Applied Math and Physics at North Carolina State University. Three semesters later, after finding himself toying with newly learned modern algebra concepts to music theoretical ends rather than paying attention to his lecturers, Hammons chose to change directions and pursue his music studies full time. In 2006 Hammons was admitted to

Appalachian State University’s Music Industry Studies (M.I.S.) program where he concentrated upon the theory of Popular Music Styles, and in 2010, was the first student from the bourgeoning M.I.S. program to serve as an intern with the Naxos record label in Franklin, TN.

Outside of his academic activities Hammons maintains an active schedule as an in-demand multi-instrumentalist and director of media for several musical projects including Thunderloaf,

Total Lobotomy, The Unified Theory of Cheese, and the longstanding improvisational collective,

Asshole Jazz Club.

106