David's point about context sounds fuckin' cool: I heard a panel
discussion on record production on the radio this weekend that
included Niles Rogers, the fuckin'-cool-sounding producer-guitar
player from Chic and, of course, of David Bowie's least-twee, funniest
album, Let's Dance. (The great final flameout of his artistic
relevance.) One of the points made was that a producer is like a film
director - not someone making a soundtrack but someone *making the
film* by assembling the creative elements into a coherent package. And
it seems to me that a lot of arrangement choices are the aural
equivalent of montage.
Great montage includes, for one thing, the awareness that cliches
(eg., screaming to indicate fear, minor chords to indicate sadness,
darkness to indicate menace, spare instrumentation to indicate grit)
are a trap. You're unlikely to create something striking and original
because you're telling people what they already know - whereas horror
in full daylight might be more horrifying, whereas happy songs in
minor keys (which is a tradition in many parts of the world) might be
more evocative, whereas lush instrumentation may convey a sense of
suffocating self-awareness... (Of course, the cliches used carefully
might also be original and striking but that seems an even more
daunting challenge doesn't it?)
The other important element in montage of course, is montage itself.
That is, as Eisenstein realized (based I recall on psychological
studies), that people will read values into neutral images depending
what precedes and follows. So you can cut from a crying baby to a
woman seated at a table with a blank expression, and the audience will
guess she's a mother at wit's end; or you can cut from Marcello
Mastrianni opening a bottle of wine to a woman seated at a table and
people will assume she's rapt with anticipation for her lover.
This is just an analogy to support what David's saying about inherent
meaning and artistic choice - that putting strings on something isn't
always sweetening, that a slow slide down a steel guitar is a prism we
see the song through, not a dictator of a particular emotive content.
(I can accept that through tradition and perhaps even inherent musical
wiring we're *likely* to hear these things one way or another, but
like David I'm highly suspicious of literal equivalences.)
Though that's not to say that some countrypolitan music didn't get the
shit produced out of it, just like some spare music sounds wobbly and
flat. In art how you use the tool matters at least as much as the tool
itself, McLuhanism be ... well, not damned, but at least somewhat
modified.
Carl W.
