Doing Sound: An Ethnography of Fidelity, Temporality and Labor Among Live Sound Engineers Whitney Slaten Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY 2018 © 2018 Whitney Slaten All rights reserved ABSTRACT Doing Sound: An Ethnography of Fidelity, Temporality and Labor Among Live Sound Engineers Whitney Slaten This dissertation ethnographically represents the work of three live sound engineers and the profession of live sound reinforcement engineering in the New York City metropolitan area. In addition to amplifying music to intelligible sound levels, these engineers also amplify music in ways that engage the sonic norms associated with the pertinent musical genres of jazz, rock and music theater. These sonic norms often overdetermine audience members' expectations for sound quality at concerts. In particular, these engineers also work to sonically and visually mask themselves and their equipment. Engineers use the term “transparency” to describe this mode of labor and the relative success of sound reproduction technologies. As a concept within the realm of sound reproduction technologies, transparency describes methods of reproducing sounds without coloring or obscuring the original quality. Transparency closely relates to “fidelity,” a concept that became prominent throughout the late nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first centuries to describe the success of sound reproduction equipment in making the quality of reproduced sound faithful to its original. The ethnography opens by framing the creative labor of live sound engineering through a process of “fidelity.” I argue that fidelity dynamically oscillates as struggle and satisfaction in live sound engineers’ theory of labor and resonates with their phenomenological encounters with sounds and social positions as laborers at concerts. In the first chapter, I describe my own live sound engineering at Jazzmobile in Harlem. The following chapter analyzes the freelance engineering of Randy Taber, who engineers rock and music theater concerts throughout New York City. The third chapter investigates Justin Rathbun’s engineering at Broadway’s Richard Rodgers theater production of “Porgy and Bess.” Much of engineering scholarship privileges the recording studio as the primary site of technological mediation in the production of music. However, this dissertation ethnographically asserts that similar politics and facilities of technological mediation shape live performances of music. In addition, I argue that the shifting temporal conditions of live music production reveal the dynamism of the sound engineers’ personhood on the shop floors of the live music stage. Table of Contents Acknowledgments iv Dedication v Preface vi Introduction 1 Theorizing Live Sound Engineering 1 Live Sound Engineering as Cultural Mediation 4 Live Sound Engineering and Ontologies of Music 12 History of Live Sound Engineering 18 Live Sound Engineering Equipment 26 Microphones 27 Preamplifiers 28 Equalization 28 Auxiliary Output Buses 29 Pan Potentiometer 29 Faders 30 Signal Processing 32 Power Amplifier 32 Loudspeakers 33 “Imagine That You Are a Sound”: Encountering Signal Flow 35 History of Live Sound Engineering Processes 39 Transduction and Live Sound Engineering 44 Fidelity and Sound Reproduction in Live Sound Engineering 47 Phenomenology: Time and the Representation of Live Sound Engineering 50 Chapter Summaries 54 Chapter One: Whitney Slaten Engineering for Jazzmobile in Harlem 58 Jazzmobile, Inc. 58 My Work Engineering with Jazzmobile 59 The Jazzmobile Team 59 Johnny Gary 62 Vicky Gohlson, Ph.D. 65 Linda Walton 70 Robin Bell Stevens 71 Eddie Moncion 73 The Jazzmobile Audience 74 !i Jazzmobile Audiences and Outdoor Labor 77 Profiles of Individual Jazzmobile Audience Members 79 Mtu 79 Buddy 80 The Photographers 80 Erroll 81 Sabella, the Woman with Topless Feathered Hats 82 Repatriation, Sincerity, Acoustemology and Cosmopolitanism 83 Reparation 83 Sincerity 85 Mixing for the Audience and the Space: Acoustemology 87 The Cosmopolitan Canopy 89 Equipment for Live Sound at Jazzmobile 90 Microphones 92 Cables and Stands 94 Mixer 98 Amplifiers 101 Loudspeakers 103 The Musicians: At Venues, During Setups and Mixes 106 My Brief History Mixing Live Jazz 106 Musicians and Gigs at Jazzmobile 110 Houston Person at Grant’s Tomb 110 Winard Harper at Grant’s Tomb 114 Antoinette Montague at Marcus Garvey Park 116 Antoinette Montague Interview 120 Bobby Sanabria at Marcus Garvey Park 125 Conclusion 129 Chapter Two: Randy Taber and the Labor of Live Sound Engineering 131 “To make them believe that I get it”: Building Trust and Confidence Between an Engineer and Musicians 132 Randy Working at Tarrytown Music Hall and the Pat Benatar Sound Check 142 Arriving at Tarrytown Music Hall 142 Lunch 147 Pat Benatar’s Entrance and Sound Check 147 Pat Benatar On Stage 149 Pat and William: The Musician-Engineer Encounter 152 Hiding 153 Leaving Tarrytown Music Hall 155 Transparency and Injustice: Pop Music Shop Floor Culture 155 Hammerstein Ballroom, Manhattan Class Company Theater: Setup and Sound Check 158 !ii Sound Check at the Hammerstein Ballroom and Time Alignment in Randy’s Sound Engineering Labor 170 Time Alignment in Randy’s Sound Engineering Labor 173 Faith/Trust/Fidelity 177 Randy Working at City Winery at a John Sebastian and Jimmy Vivino Performance 181 Arriving at City Winery: “They Didn’t Know Who Randy Was” 181 City Winery as a Venue 183 Sebastian and Vivino 185 The Mixer and Mixing 189 Intimacy, Venue, and Engineering Live Popular Music 190 Transparency: A Phenomenology of Mixing 191 Chapter Three: Transparency, Color and Liveness: Justin Rathbun Live Sound Engineering Porgy and Bess on Broadway 197 Sonic Color 201 Genre Conventions 203 Sonic Colors of Race 204 Encountering Porgy and Bess on Broadway 207 Interview with Nevin Steinberg and Jason Crystal 223 On Sound Design, Fidelity, Intelligibility, Reinforcement and Acoustics 225 On Specifying Equipment per Production/Four Wall Contract 227 Equipment 228 Sound Signatures vs. Transparency 229 Engineers 231 Opening Interview with Justin Rathbun at Richard Rodgers Theater 234 Justin and His Path to Live Sound Engineering on Broadway 235 Broadway musical theater production: reinforcement v. amplification 236 On Equipment: the gear for this production 238 Labor and Fidelity 241 Justin’s Tour of Richard Rodger’s Theater 242 Stage Door 243 Below the Stage 243 Front of House (FOH) 246 “The Butt Kicker” 254 Justin Mixing Porgy and Bess on Broadway 257 Conclusion 264 Conclusion 268 Bibliography 271 !iii Acknowledgments The intellectual and artistic support of the past and present members of The Columbia University Center for Ethnomusicology, The Columbia University Department of Music, The Columbia University Center for Jazz Studies, and the Columbia University Graduate School of Arts and Sciences brought this research from an idea to a dissertation. I am ever thankful to each of you. The live sound engineers who were interlocutors for this project were generous with no bounds and I am indebted to them. My dissertation committee members John Szwed, George Lewis, Walter Frisch, Christopher Washburne, and Aaron Fox gave feedback of praise and critique that I will be thinking about for a long time to come. I have special gratitude to Aaron Fox, my advisor, who saw the significance of a live sound engineering studies project and encouraged me from the beginning. The fellow graduate students who were with me on the journey, as well as my students at Columbia, William Paterson University, Seton Hall University, and The New School gave me collegiality and inspiration. The steadfast love of my family and friends sustained me, and, above all, the loving support of my wife, Marti. From the bottom of my heart, thanks to you all. !iv Dedicated to Marti and Wesley… !v Preface My earliest memories of live sound engineering begin where I grew up, on Grant Avenue in Scotch Plains, New Jersey in the 1980s. My parents and I lived in a Cape Cod-style house with a yard that seemed like an enormous space to me. In the summer months, I played outside in that yard while my mother gardened, tending to a variety of herbs, vegetables, and Jersey tomatoes while at the same time yearning for the ability to grow the fruits and vegetables of her native Jamaica. After a sojourn in Toronto, my mother had married my father and moved to Scotch Plains. As a newcomer to the racial politics of the United States, this wife and mother, who identifies as an Asian-Euro-Afro-Jamaican, kept largely to herself and her family; she remained in close contact with her sister (who had also married a local man and lived in a nearby New Jersey town), her mother in Toronto, and other family members in Florida and Jamaica. Her sense of both belonging to and longing for Jamaican culture was strengthened when she became a culinary historian of Caribbean cuisine; she eventually wrote a cookbook, appeared on television, and lectured at universities, including The New School, on the food cultures of this region.1 My father, an African-American man somewhat older than my mother, was born and raised in the Vailsburg neighborhood of Newark, where his parents were active in the family church; our family’s affiliation with Bethany Baptist Church dates back to its founding in 1871, when newly emancipated black families began moving from places like Richmond and 1Sybil Slaten has made numerous appearances on television and radio shows including UPN 9 with Matt Lauer, WABC-TV, the Lifetime Channel, WOR RADIO’s “Food Talk” with Arthur Schwarts and “Dining Around” with Gene Burns. Sybil is the creator and host of “Caribbean Kitchen,” a series of cooking videos and has written a cookbook of Caribbean recipes. !vi Culpepper, Virginia to Newark in a precursor to the Great Migration. My grandparents were formally-trained classical musicians: after studying keyboard performance at the Department of Music at Columbia University in 1928, my grandfather and my grandmother, a classical soprano, performed concerts of spirituals throughout the area.