Daniel Biro

Just read about a new book on Henry Ford who, not content with populating the world with his ubiquitous ‘Model T’ automobile in the 1920s, was apparently also keen to keep American civilisation on the right track. In his eyes this meant getting rid of ‘corrupting’ Jewish influences. Ford was a well known anti-semite and, this being the beginning of the jazz age, jazz music was anathema to him. Polkas, quadrilles and square dances reflected ‘proper American values’ but jazz was ’sex dancing’.

Interestingly, he hated the ‘abandoned sensuousness of jazz’s sliding notes’ that he claimed ‘are of Jewish origins’. Was he referring to Klezmer music and its clarinet glissandi? What about the black origins of jazz? Who influenced who?

If sliding notes were a shocking new element in Western music, it would be ironic that the poor little Jewish immigrant escaping a life of poverty and pogroms from a his Eastern European shtetl with only his clarinet under his arm would end up corrupting the ‘clean’ straight attacks of Western musical tradition with his filthy suggestive glissandi and their sensual/sexual connotations, thus changing American music forever…

This reminds me of a funny episode from my past life as a studio session musician. I was called in to play some piano on what was to be the soundtrack to a video sex-guide. In those days buying porn videos in the UK was illegal so the only way to sell sex videos over the counter was to disguise them as ‘educational’… The producers carefully explained to me that in no way could they put any electric guitars or saxophones on the soundtrack as these instruments would be seen as too raunchy and too reminiscent or ‘real’ porn films soundtracks. So there I was tinkling away new-age-type stuff while on screen these two people were humping away like rabbits.

So there you have it: to avoid any sexual suggestions in your music remove all guitars, saxophones and, above all, glissandi.

(My historical knowledge about who influenced who in the early jazz age is limited and would need clarification. A fascinating subject. Comments please.)

Daniel Biro

Just saw an OK BBC documentary on Brian Eno. Must say I’ve always been a big fan of his and the whole Ambient philosophy.

And yet it’s interesting to note that very little of his ideas have had much effect in the real world. What has become the ‘ambient’ music of our lives (shops, restaurants, cars, lobbies etc) is the restless beat of dance music, and not the slow ever-changing soundscapes that Eno advocated more than 20 years ago. ‘Music For Airports’ never ended up in airports or anywhere else apart from art galleries and installations.

Nevertheless I believe there is still a huge untapped potential for intelligent tailored sound-design for public spaces that would truly reflect the nature and functionality of each individual environment. It’s just that designers still have no or very little understanding of sound and what it can do. Architects rarely think acoustically which why so many buildings and rooms sound awful when you’re in them. Sound is always an afterthought and usually means putting up a few speakers and buying the latest compilation CDs.

So many bold architectural concepts have materialised in our cityscapes but sonically nobody seems to want to push the boat out. Why don’t famous architects like Foster, Liebeskind, etc ever include sound sculptures or some of the generative methods developed by Eno into their work? Is it lack of understanding or is it they fear it would impose too much on the users? Maybe sound is ultimately too ‘penetrative’, too disturbing if different from the completely mundane. Maybe the reason we have so much dance music in our public environments is because it is so dull we don’t really notice or care about it anymore.