Soundtracksforthem

photo credit: stormdog

Part one | Part two | Part three

It has spread it’s all called ‘techno’ or dance music regardless cause it’s created with technological equipment. Maybe that should be the only name, dance music because everybody has a different vision of what techno is now, you know. (Kevin Saunderson, Interviewed in the film Modulations)

I brought up Dr. Page at the beginning if only to illustrate a problem inherent to any analysis of electronic music and the forms of culture which develop it and around it, namely that of periodization. Electronic music has been around at least a century and a half, but the context of its production, distribution, and reception (and eventually consumption) have been subject to constant change during that time.

The development of electronic music, from Dr. Page through Thaddeus Cahill’s Telharmonium, Italian Futurist Luigi Russolo’s “Arte dei Rumori,” Karl Heinz Stockhausen’s “Kontakte” and “Microphonie”, Kraftwerk’s “Trans Europe Express”, to Giorgio Moroder, Donna Summers, and Afrikaa Bambataa is a long and complicated story. I mention these figures not to advance a notion that electronic music and its culture/s were subject merely to the creative abilities of “great” people. Rather, they are mentioned to give an idea of the breadth of the subject one makes reference to when the term “electronic music” is used.

When I envisioned how to tackle what I wanted to talk about, this arose most frequently as a potential hindrance. For while I knew well what forms of noise my use of “electronic music” made reference to, the term needed to be circumscribed somewhat for the purposes of this paper. Why, when completing a political economy of electronic music, might one speak of Frankie Knuckles and not John Cage?

The most useful way to delimit the subject of discussion was to use the term “popular.” Karl Heinz Stockhausen undoubtedly crafted his own sonic texture, but the first stirrings of what is variously referred to as “techno,” “electronica,” “club” or “rave” music where brought about at a markedly different point by an entirely different social class. This “point” therefore, I hope to demonstrate, unfolds gradually due to a number of factors during the seventies and eighties. In the process, electronic music leaks, almost by default, from the academy and large production studios into the realm of the popular. By “popular” I mean chiefly that it begins to be produced by a social class previously excluded from the process, that it grows up from beneath rather than being imposed from above.

The distinction between “high culture” and “popular” electronic music is an important one to make, especially in light of postmodern critiques which demonstrate the collapse of the distinction between the two. It remains a vital task to study and thus lend credence and value to the culture produced by disenfranchized groups such as the working class and other racially or sexually marginalized people. At the same time, one has to examine the factors contributing to the collapse of this distinction, factors which I argue are also largely political and economic. The simple point I am trying to make is that John Cage and his cohorts, for all of their creativity, most certainly did not come up with electro, techno, and house music. These musical genres, as well as the genres that they helped generate (jungle, drum and bass, gabba, trip-hop, speed garage, etc) were a product, originally, of working class culture.

A Transitional Period: Urban America in the Seventies

There appear to be times of bewildering transformation and change in the structure and organization of modern Western economy and society. It seems that capitalism is at a crossroads in its historical development signalling the emergence of forces – technological, market, social and institutional – that will be very different from those which dominated the economy after the Second World War. Though not uncontroversial, there is an emerging consensus in the social sciences that the period since the mid-1970’s represents a transition from one distinct phase of capitalist development to a new phase. (Ash Amin, 1995, p.1)

The first faint blips and bleeps we are listening for begin to make themselves heard against a context of significant social change. In the streets of American cities, reclaimed in the 1960’s by civil rights demonstrations, anti-war protests, and general civil unrest, the spirit of public action had gradually begun to recede. The global recession that lasted roughly between 1973-75 was to have a severe impact. Incredible pressure was put on the employment base of many regions, brought on by the combination of shrinking markets, unemployment, rapid shifts in spatial constraints and the global division of labour, capital flight, plant closings, technological and financial reorganization. (Harvey, 1995, p. 364)
Although domestic markets shrunk with the recession, capital had already begun to open and increasingly depend on markets beyond its national boundaries. One-time dominant American companies were no longer secure as other companies from Japan and western Europe in areas as diverse as textiles, televisions, videos, numerically controlled machine tools, and cars expanded their reach into previously implausible territory. The United States’ consumption of imports doubled between 1970 and 1980. (OECD)

The process being spoken of here didn’t begin in the 1970’s. Rather, the historical period we are studying saw a significant consolidation of such processes. In 1950, only three of the 300 largest transnational corporations (TNCs) had manufacturing subsidiaries in more than twenty countries, but by 1975, forty-four TNCs from the United States alone had that presence. (Dicken, 1992, p. 50) Faced with this new challenge as well as growing unrest and organization amongst “mass workers” (Negri, 1989, pps. 199-228), many larger companies chose during the seventies to arrange their affairs on a global scale.

As traditional urban American jobs in industry began to disappear due to this global restructuring, the lack of economic growth and cuts to social welfare resulted in a shrinking social safety net in which to catch those disposessed in the process. In the midst of this maelstrom, urban space and living became increasingly compartmentalized. Veritable urban wastelands of devalued space began spreading in cities like Chicago and Detroit, caused as much by economic factors as by political ones, such as the trajectory city “development” was to take.

The United States’ formerly solid and dependable industries, steel, rubber, electrical appliances, machine tools, automobiles and automobile parts began to wither during the seventies. In Chicago and Detroit, two vital cities in the development of popular electronic music, the experience of such a process was unavoidable. Unlike New York, which was able to eventually climb out of the hole of bankruptcy through the production of what Harvey calls “fictitious capital,” there were few alternatives for these urban centres and these remained untaken.

I. Chicago

Chicago, once the backbone of the American steel industry, began to feel this “global” pressure first in the 1950’s. Faced with the depletion of the Mesabi iron-ore range in northern Minnesota, the industry had to watch as the prices of production rose. By the late 1950’s, Venezuela’s iron-ore deposits which had previously seemed so expensive, had become the world’s cheapest source (Lynch & Bensman, 1987, p. 82). Japan, taking advantage of the shrunken transport time afforded by huge freighters, began to challenge the US’s supremacy in the field.
Themselves affected by the crisis of 1973-75, Japan’s steel companies reduced their output in an attempt to increase domestic steel prices. This by itself was insufficient in dealing with the recession. They boosted their exports, sending their steel to the United States for 14 percent lower than the average for the period of April to September in 1975.

By 1983, foreign steelmakers and minimills combined to share 39% of the domestic market … American steelmakers were in a trap. Small profits made modernization bad business. But failure to modernize increased vulnerability to imports. Caught in a double bind, US steel companies responded schizophrenically; they have sought protection from imports, allied themselves with foreign steel producers, demanded wage concessions from employees, initiated new experiments in labour-management , modernized some old facilities, shut down some modern ones, and diversified out of the steel industry althogether. (ibid, pps. 86, 87)

The outlook was not bright for a good deal of the working class in Chicago. Shopping districts, such as Commercial Avenue in South Chicago, began to deteriorate, symptoms of the economic hardships the area was suffering. Some stores relocated to the suburbs, others turned to selling bargain basement priced and used merchandise. This economic turn downwards chiselled away at any confidence youths might have had about the future.

II. Detroit

Commonly known as “Motown” for the overwhelming presence of automobile and automobile parts in its industrial output, Detroit began to a similar process as early as the 1950s. As the boom began to decelerate, capital began to take advantage of its increasing mobility and slowly dematerialize from this urban centre as well. Previously,

Within a two-square mile area extending along the Grand Trunk and Michigan Central Railroads was one of the most remarkable concentrations of industry in the United States. To the North was Detroit’s second largest automobile factory, Dodge Main, which employed over thirty-five thousand workers in a five-story factory building with over 4.5 million feet of floor space. Studebaker had a plant at the corner of Piquette Avenue and Brush where it produced its luxury sedans. Just to the north, on Russell street, was a cavernous redbrick building that housed Murray Auto Body, a major independent producer of automobile chassis. Packard Motors produced cars in a sprawling ninety-five-building complex that extended for nearly a mile along East Grand Boulevard. At shift change time, the area came to a virtual standstill, as cars, buses, and pedestrians clogged the streets. The whole area was often covered in a greyish haze, a murky combination of pollutants from the factories and car exhausts. (Sugrue, 1998, p. 125)

The sounds of industry, however, were to fade for metropolitan Detroit. Twenty-five new plants were built in the suburbs by the big three (Ford, General Motors, and Chrysler) between 1947 and 1958 and many more were established in small and medium-sized cities in the mid and southwest United States. (ibid, p. 128) Following the car manufacturers, related sectors began to drift away, such as machine-tool manufacturers, metalworking firms, and parts manufacturers. The city lost 45.3% of its total manufacturing employment between 1947 and 1977. (US Department of Commerce, Bureau of the Census) Detroit’s industrial landscape steadily lost the previously described vibrance at shiftchange, turning into block after block of vacant hulking structures, ossified reminders of the transition this new form of music was born out of.
Popular electronic music came about, for a host of reasons we will examine next, in the city. Our analysis of the changing face of two specific cities – Chicago and Detroit – will serve us if we are to have a richer understanding of how this process came about. As David Harvey reminds us, the interrogation of Marxist formulations reinforced the idea that:

… dimensions of space and time matter, and that there are real geographies of social action, real as well as metaphorical territories and spaces of power that become vital as organizing forces in the geopolitics of capitalism, at they same time as they are sites of innumerable differences and othernesses that have to be understood both in their own right and within the overall logic of capitalist development. (1990, p. 355)

An Industry Made Popular

In this sense, the 1970’s proved to be transitional: Although only a handful of individuals designed what amounted to a whole new genre of musical instruments – the synthesizer – and simultaneously went about the business of creating a new market for their products, another generation of entrepeneurs (and a large number of corporate interests) would ultimately reap the benefits of these early developments. In particular with the development of microprocessor technology into musical instrument design, momentous changes took place within the entire structure of the synthesizer industry. These changes placed the synthesizer manufacturers firnly within the dynamics of the contemporary computer and electronics industries, where a much broader set of technological and economic forces characteristic of late twentieth-century capitalism are at play. (Paul Theberge, 1997, p. 42)

For the reasons previously discussed, it is beyond the scope of this paper to examine the birth and development of electronic music in any sort of exhaustive fashion. In the discussion that follows however, a handful of historical examples can hopefully help illustrate some of the themes I outlined in the theoretical section.
In Electronic Music, Andy Mackay isolates William Duddell as having created the first electronic instrument. (1981, p. 11) While issues such as who got there first need not concern us (Dr. CG Page may continue to rest in peace) the conditions in which the “there” was gotten to are of interest. In 1899, Duddell, a distinguished physicist, was commissioned to look into an annoying side effect of a relatively new technology, the electric streetlight. He discovered that “the carbon arc lamp produced a note when a coil and a capacitator were placed in parallel with it, the arc itself acting as a simple electrostatic speaker. By adding a keyboard to control the oscillations in the circuit, Duddell was able to play tunes on his remarkable invention…” (ibid, p. 11)

While the “Singing Arc” was never put to commercial use, the context it was borne out of is telling. It is exemplary of how certain social classes were the first to harness electronically generated sounds. Firmly entrenched in the hiss and hum of the modern industrial era which brought them forth, these sounds would overwhelmingly be subject to the tinkerings of an insular upper class for another three quarters of a century.

The Telharmonium for example, referred to by its inventor (Thaddeus Cahill) as an “electric music plant,” which produced “high class music,” is commonly lingered on by historians in the field. It cost over $200,000 to develop, weighed in at 200 tons and required thirty boxcars for transport, initiating the era of enormous electronic instruments. Cahill believed that the only feasible method for widening the audience for its sound was for it to be produced at the source and distributed along the still-developing telephone system.

The idea of using telephone lines to distribute electronic information might not seem as ill conceived nowadays with our much-lauded information superhighway. The Telharmonium however, whose pure sounds overwhelmed audiences of the day, was ultimately undone by the fact that it interfered with the local commercial telephone system. Starved of its only means of distribution it withered away into obscurity.

The Hammond organ (introduced in 1935) gives us our first glimpse of an emergent trend in the development of electronic music instruments. It was perhaps the first well-executed electronic instrument within the economic structure of capital. From the very moment of its inception, commerce is present as a part of its genetic makeup. Laurens Hammond, in envisioning its use by churches, had targeted a very specific market segment. “While the Hammond organ is played like a pipe organ, it is not made in imitation of it,” the Hammond Instrument Company reassured its envisioned patrons.
The instrument went on to be a commercial success, surpassing even its developer’s expectations. While in the first couple of decades of the instrument’s existence it was installed primarily in churches, the well-conceived product began to develop a following outside this institutional context. It was used by Karlheinz Stockhausen, Jimmy Page, the Beach Boys, and at the more grassroots level of culture, it had a sustained presence in popular jazz music of the 1950’s and 60’s.
Running parallel to this series of instruments is the history of how institutions began to harness electronic sound. During the 1940’s the world of electronic music and computers inevitably begin to collide. Developed to process war data, the computers of this period were programmed by inserting paper tape punched with holes to code routines into the machines, the same way player pianos and an early oscillator (Coupleaux-Givelets’) stored information. This near fusion in design between early computers and electronic music generating equipment finds its expression in the synthesizers developed by the Radio Corporation of America during the 1950’s. The first model, built to study the nature of sound, was a room-sized monster with a very limited scope for commercial application.

RCA was involved in much of the recording work going on in America during the period, and as such had little reason to share technical knowledge with anyone else. A few commercial prototypes of this machine were developed nonetheless, the first one carrying the name “Mark II.” Based loosely on the Electronic Numeric Integrator and Calculator (ENIAC) design developed by the military, the Mark II only managed to end up in other institutional settings such as Columbia University, where a great deal of academic electronic music research was carried out at the time. (Newquist, pps. 14-15)
According to Theberge, the explosion of the synthesizer industry in the 1970’s owes a lot to the creative collaboration between composers and entrepeneurs in the previous decade. The story of Robert Moog represents perhaps the culmination of this trend, and as such deserves to be examined more closely. Moog was – more than simply an inventor – an entrepeneur as well. During the late fifties and early sixties, while being a part of the university-based music community, he managed to keep his finger on the pulse of the electronic instrument market by constructing and selling Theremins from his own home. Perhaps the demand he perceived impressed on him the need to create an instrument whose more accessible characteristics lent themselves to a wider market than the one he kept in regular contact with.
The Minimoog presented somewhat pedestrian formal features, such as the conventional organ keyboard as a controller and the fact that it was portable. Initially Donald Buchla, also involved in the project, was hesitant about deploying these features for fear of alienating an avant-garde electronic music movement with which he was more closely connected. (Theberge, p. 55) This tension is described by Moog himself: “At the beginning I think everybody outside of the electronic music field thought that synthesizers were supposed to imitate traditional instruments. Whereas the people who were inside electronic music wanted to use the synthesizer to make completely different sounds.” (interview in the film Modulations) The Minimoog became one of the most popular electronic keyboards of the 70’s.

Moog’s legendary status amongst the popular electronic music community is telling of a world-view in which progress comes about as a result of “great men,” independent of social, political, or economic forces. Moog was, no doubt, an exceptional and in many ways visionary innovator, but the story of his company, the R. A. Moog Company, suggests that other forces are at work within the production of electronic instruments. Established in 1954, it became a fulltime operation in 1964. The first Moog hit the market that same year. After being incorporated in 1968 and having its name changed to Moog Music Inc. in 1971, it was scooped up by the Norlin Corporation (itself formed in 1970 from a merger between the Chicago Musical Instrument Corporation, and a foreign holding company, ECL Corporation). (Theberge, p. 55)
Theberge accurately outlines how the development of the synthesizer industry initially involved small scale collaborations between engineers and entrepeneurs and increasingly became the domain of large corporate concerns due to the “huge technical and capital investments required.” (ibid, p. 70) For Moog, it meant that he soon found himself a paid employee in a company in which he had once been at the forefront of technical design. Organizational shifts towards teams of people involved in the production of increasingly complex synthesizer projects quickly overtook this innovator, who had developed the Minimoog in only six months. By contrast, the Korg Wavestation developed a mere twenty years later occupied some twenty people over a period of over three years.

The period we are examining then, from a the perspective of technological design and innovation, is one that has been subject to intense change and accelleration with regards to production practices and product design. Large corporations such as Yamaha and Roland (as well as some smaller organizations such as E-mu, Ensoniq, and Alesis) were able to more fully take advantage of the emerging market and its breakneck pace of development. It is ultimately these two companies which complete the slide of electronic music instruments into the popular market, bringing synthesizer technology to social groups previously excluded from the electronic music production (and, equally important consumption) process.