Variations #6

Curatorial > VARIATIONS VARIATIONS #6 With this section, RWM continues a line of programmes devoted to exploring the complex map of sound art from The Library different points of view organised in curatorial series. We encounter the establishment of sound libraries, collections explicitly curated 'Variation' is the formal term for a musical composition based for further use: sound objects presented as authorless, unfinished ingredients. on a previous musical work, and many of those traditional Though some libraries contain newly commissioned generic sounds, specifically methods (changing the key, meter, rhythm, harmonies or designed for maximum flexibility, the most widely used sounds are often sourced tempi of a piece) are used in much the same manner today from commercial recordings, freed from their original context to propagate across by sampling musicians. But the practice of sampling is more dozens to hundreds of songs. From presets for digital samplers to data CD-ROMs than a simple modernization or expansion of the number of to hip-hop battle records, sounds increasingly detach from their sources, used options available to those who seek their inspiration in the less as references to any original moment, and more as objects in a continuous refinement of previous composition. The history of this music public domain. traces nearly as far back as the advent of recording, and its As hip-hop undergoes a conservative retrenchment in the wake of the early emergence and development mirrors the increasingly self- nineties sampling lawsuits, a widening variety of composers and groups expand conscious relationship of society to its experience of music. the practice of appropriative audio collage as a formal discipline. The aesthetic of Starting with the precedents achieved by Charles Ives and the sound libraries gives rise to recombinant genres like drum and bass, the use John Cage, VARIATIONS will present an overview of the major of sampling as romanticized representation leads to the first quadruple platinum landmarks in Sampling Music, following examples in world music collage, and we encounter a novelty single that quietly heralds a twentieth century composition, folk art and commercial musical form that would soon become known as the mashup. media through to the meeting of all those threads in the present day. 01. Transcript Curated by Jon Leidecker. Hello. This is Jon Leidecker, and welcome to the sixth episode of VARIATIONS, tracing the history of appropriative collage in music. Or, more precisely, PDF Contents: appropriative collage as practiced during the age of recorded music, or else we'd 01. Transcript have to go all the way back to the beginning. Before we'd become conscious of 02. Acknowledgments any difference between music and language. And we can't go back that far. In 03. Copyright note fact we find it difficult enough to imagine apart from concepts like 'author' and 'owner'. The UK Guardian recently wrote a small story about the practice of remixing Jon Leidecker was born in 1970 in Washington D.C. to two which began by reassuring its readers with this sentence: 'The rewriting of works physicists. Since 1990 he has performed appropriative by other composers is a venerable tradition, going back to at least the time of collage music under the psuedonym Wobbly, aiming for Josquin.' Of course the fifteenth century was hardly the first time that someone extended narratives spun from spontaneous yet coherent had used a previously existing piece in his own work. What was actually still multi-sample polyphony. Selected recent works are freely somewhat new was the concept of the composer itself, someone claiming sole available online. http://detritus.net/wobbly/ authorship of a work. The concept of the composer was enabled by the emergence of written notation in the ninenth century. Originally a way for the church to document existing plainchant melodies, it soon became a generative tool in its own right. Slowly the transcribers became composers, creating works by borrowing a pre-existing sacred melody, the cantus firmus: almost all works were variations on the known tradition. And so most early works were left unsigned; we only have the names of polyphonic masters Leónin and Perótin thanks to the anonymous historian who named their works as the best of their age. But by the fourteenth century, notation had became less a tool than the master of musical progress. As notation conferred immortality to generations of composers, the men once seen as simple craftsmen following innate laws of harmony slowly gained in authority. By the Romantic nineteenth century, they were gifted geniuses, inventors of their own rules, their music the apparent product of unbounded self- expression. In some ways, the arrival of sound recordings challenged this growing authority by offering this same immortality to improvising musicians. Records documented music more accurately as a social practice. But recordings also consolidated the redefinition of music begun by the previous literary medium. Now, more than ever, music was an object, a property. Something not just experienced, but owned. And increasingly, something a consumer must own in order to experience. So these final associations with property are actually very recent developments, definitions gone invisible. The concept of the individual composer remains largely alien to cultures outside of the West, where music, developed as part of an oral http://rwm.macba.cat culture, can have innovators, but can not have owners. Which brings us back to our history of appropriative collage, which only seems to us to be a revolutionary new practice. More accurately, this podcast is the story of how the technology of recorded music is naturally leading the West back towards core musical practices of mimesis, variation and social collaboration. Practices which were discouraged by the previous medium of notation because it was incapable of documenting them. And even though most of us intuitively recognize these practices to be at the core of what music actually is, our culture has made such a fetish of the author, of property, of the individual, that this new music seems somehow threatening. The law suggests that it is illegal to sell this music, even illegal to give it away. From our current perspective, sampling raises unanswerable questions, all of which have nothing to do with what the music is actually trying to tell us. The music is trying to answer the next set of questions, and it's left to us to figure out what those questions actually are. [Public Enemy 'Pollywanacraka / Who Stole the Soul', 1990] [John Oswald 'Plexure: Massive', 1993] For a few years around 1990, the differences between art and popular music collage became slightly harder to hear. That first track was Public Enemy from their 1990 album Fear of a Black Planet , followed by John Oswald's Plexure [John Oswald Plexure , 1993] from 1992. The former sold one million copies the first week of its release; the second was an import-only CD on John Zorn's Japanese record label. Plexure is a 20 minute collage sampling approximately one thousand pop songs, all sourced from those previous ten years, the first decade of the compact disc. What seems at first to be endless variation is in fact a piece strictly organized by tempo, slowly ascending from 80 to 140 beats per minute and beyond, one long accelerando with all of pop's song structures and repetitions spliced away. Only the sounds themselves are left, the production styles holding an entire genre of pop music together. If Plexure represented the avant-garde horizon on its release, the practice of sampling seemed to intrinsically lead hip-hop artists away from traditional songwriting forms as well. There are still verses and choruses on Ice Cube's 'Jackin' for Beats', even though the music itself changes completely every eight bars. Notably, Ice Cube's lyrics directly liken the practice of sampling to theft. And if the liner notes do give shout outs to the six rap groups this song samples, it doesn't mention the songs those groups were sampling from. By 1991 we are already layers deep. [Ice Cube 'Jackin' for Beats', 1990] Huh, and even if you're down with my crew I jack them too And then we'll freak it Kick that bass, and look what we did Fade the grade, played, and made a few mil And I keep stealin' Ice Cube will take a funky beat and reshape it Locate a dope break, and then I break it And give it that gangsta lean Dead in your face as I turn up the bass So you think you're protected Well you are til you put a funky beat on a record Then I have to show and prove and use your groove Cause suckers can't fade the Cube For a brief moment, it seemed that hip-hop was not only pointing in the same basic direction as the most extreme music being made by the avant-garde, it was going multi-platinum with it. We'll never know how much further out hip-hop might have travelled. But it is now history that immediately after the lawsuits, the music changed direction. [Gang Starr, 'Jazz Thing (Movie Mix)', 1990] http://rwm.macba.cat Some artists pursued obscurer sources to sample, or strengthened hip-hop's connections with its musical history by reaching back beyond seventies R&B and soul samples to earlier examples of jazz history. But the overwhelmingly preferred approach was to go back to basics, to keep the licensing manageable by making entire songs from only one or two basic loops, pushing the structure of rap songs away from collage and towards being a simple cover version of the sampled tune. Released late in 1992, Dr.

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