Orphans of the Orchestra, Part One

Ophicleide_001

Pictured above is an ophicleide, an obsolete wind instrument from the early nineteenth century.  It was played with a cup-shaped mouthpiece like a modern brass instrument, its length comparable to that of a trombone or euphonium, but instead of valves it had fingerholes and mechanical keys like a woodwind.  The ophicleide was just one of several instruments built along these lines, including the keyed bugle and the picturesque serpent (which predated the ophicleide as the bass member of the family: “ophicleide” actually means “keyed serpent,” in fact).  They filled the need for loud brass instruments that could play chromatic pitches instead of the limited range of notes available to “natural” brass like the bugle or hunting horn, especially in outdoor settings.  Before the invention of valves in the nineteenth century, only the trombone had such a capability.  The keyed brass filled that niche, but imperfectly: when the side-holes were opened, the acoustics of the instrument were compromised, and the sound was something like a tuba springing a leak.  Once valves were perfected and widely manufactured, it was all over for the keyed brass: the ophicleide gave way to the tuba, the keyed bugle to the cornet.

The nineteenth century was a period of great upheaval in instrument design.  In general, the era was dominated by both invention and improvements to existing instruments, sometimes defined as updating historical instruments to fit the demands of new music and the giant concert halls in which it was performed.  Violins dating from the seventeenth century were frequently rebuilt with longer necks and fingerboards to increase the string tension (and thus volume); bridges were raised; the square bow replaced the old curved bow, again in the name of greater focus and projection; gut strings were replaced with more reliable metal wound strings.  Changes like that were largely invisible if one were only examining scores; the advance of musical technique on the players’ part would be obvious, but it was still possible to play the music of Bach or Corelli on the updated strings. In the case of Bach, his music had been largely unknown until its revival by Felix Mendelssohn and others in the early nineteenth century, so there was little concern that modern performances wouldn’t sound like they had in his day.  In any case, it was common to rationalize that Bach would have taken advantage of modern developments if they had been available to him: it wasn’t called the century of progress for nothing.

Still, as tempting as it was (and often still is) to think of music in evolutionary terms, “survival of the fittest” didn’t always mean what its proponents thought it did.  Technological superiority didn’t always lead to success in the marketplace or long-term artistic change.  We often describe the sections of the orchestra as instrumental families, and a historical chart of instruments’ development very much resembles a family or evolutionary tree. In the case of music, however, the “environment” to which technological innovations respond include cultural attitudes, aesthetics and in some cases the whims of artists.  It can take years for new inventions to find a foothold, or perhaps they never do at all.  As with any other technology, the history of musical instruments is one of invention and innovation colliding with social use and craft tradition.  Change is often slow, and the repertoire composed for an instrument may be enough to keep it in use despite acknowledged difficulties.  Just as some argue that Betamax was superior to VHS, or that the QWERTY keyboard wasn’t necessarily the best arrangement for typewriter keyboards, instruments are adopted and thrive for reasons that sometimes go beyond their utility.

The double chromatic harp, a design that failed to catch on. Source: Metropolitan Museum of Art

The double chromatic harp, a design that failed to catch on. Source: Metropolitan Museum of Art

This is especially true in the orchestra.  New instrumental technology is sometimes rejected for being too radical; I won’t generalize about the conservatism of musicians, but suffice it to say that most classical musicians have a deep, lifelong investment in the traditions of their instrument, as well as the literature and institutions of concert music.  Changes in the way those instruments are played do occur, but only after long and careful evaluation, sometimes over generations, and frequently dividing performers over the worth of competing methods.

More importantly, styles change, and sounds that are valued in one era become tiresome or obnoxious to the next.  During the middle ages in Europe, for example, double reed instruments and bagpipes were very prominent.  Trumpets, their bells decorated to look like dragons or other beasts, often had tongues soldered into the bell that would vibrate when played, giving an extra buzz to the sound.  Some of the prominence of double reeds is due to their relative volume—even into the classical period they were among the loudest instruments available, especially for outdoor performance—but there was clearly an aesthetic that favored the bright and nasal, and the use of sympathetic vibration fit well with simple drone-based harmonies.

It’s unwise to count an instrument out too soon: by the end of the nineteenth century, the harpsichord was considered dead, replaced by the piano, and there was nothing unusual about performing the music of J. S. Bach on a twelve-foot grand piano.  Gradually, the harpsichord returned to prominence as the “early music” movement took hold, and not only as a vehicle for historically correct performance: new works were composed for it that took advantage of its dry, tinkling sound (a sound which, not coincidentally, now fit the reigning neoclassical sound better than it had fit the sumptuous and overpowering orchestration of the romantic era).  Even so, the earliest proponents of the harpsichord carried with them assumptions born of the nineteenth century.  Wanda Landowska, a vocal proponent of original intent (“You play Bach your way, and I will play it Bach’s way,” she once said) performed on an iron-frame harpsichord built for her by piano manufacturer Pleyel, and the sound is correspondingly huge, fit for the kind of large concert halls that Bach never knew, but which were standard by the beginning of the twentieth century.

In the end, one of the few composers to use the ophicleide extensively was Hector Berlioz, who included them in his Symphonie Fantastique and other scores.  (Berlioz was an early adopter, enthusiastically seizing on new and improved instruments to expand his orchestral palette; perhaps tellingly, Berlioz was one of the few Romantic composers who was not himself a virtuoso with a strong investment in the established order; like Wagner, he made the entire orchestra his instrument.) The parts are generally played on tubas without sacrificing much of Berlioz’s vision.  However, hearing the Dies Irae section of the Symphonie played on ophicleides, as in this recording made by John Eliot Gardiner with his Orchestre Révolutionnaire et Romantique, makes it clear that there is still a difference.  Such instruments may be historical curiosities, but they need not be forgotten entirely.

In my next installment, I’ll take a look at an instrument that exemplifies many of my above points about invention and tradition: the saxophone.

0 CommentsLeave a comment

Piano-Playing Pair Provides Powerful Performance: I review the Wichita Symphony

Ravel: Daphnis and Chloe Suite No. 2; Poulenc: Concerto for Two Pianos; Stravinsky: The Rite of Spring

Poster1_Print-sm

I’m happy to say that there were quite a few younger people at Saturday’s Wichita Symphony Orchestra concert, but there were enough empty seats that there is room for more. Perhaps they were persuaded by the WSO’s aggressive new ad campaign (I’m particularly taken by the suggestion that activities like jai alai will help audiences prepare for the heart-pounding excitement of a symphony concert); I saw several take advantage of the WSO’s $5 student rush tickets (one of the best-kept entertainment secrets in town).  Either way, I’m not inclined to blame them for the repeated interruptions from cell phones during the concert; in my experience, older concertgoers are equally likely to forget to turn them down.  I don’t believe the concert hall should be a mausoleum: Century II has already made the decision to allow food and drink in the hall during performances, probably in the interest of creating a more welcoming environment, and I’m sure it helps the bottom line.  Even so, one could sense the audience’s frustration when Maestro Daniel Hege waited for the ringtones to stop before beginning The Rite of Spring (the concert’s second half), and one still started chirping during the lightly scored woodwind introduction.  At best it’s an annoyance to other patrons; it worst it can interfere with the performance itself. It’s not a lack of education, or the influx of newcomers to the Symphony, it’s simple mindfulness: if the Warren Theatres can police cell phone use at the movies for the sake of a better experience, surely a live music venue can do the same.

Anyway, here’s what I wrote for The Wichita Eagle.

0 CommentsLeave a comment

What shape is a trumpet? (and other questions)

The real question is, where I am going to find cases for these things?

mellophone1mellophone2

The instrument at the top is a mellophone, a simplified substitute for the orchestral horn, once commonly used in bands to play the alto part.  (Instruments nowadays called “mellophones” are acoustically similar but wrapped differently, more like a bugle, or as we used to joke in high school marching band, “a pregnant trumpet.”)  The second instrument was once shaped like the one on the left, but was converted to its current bell-front configuration by a family friend.  It belonged to my uncle, a trumpet player, and was passed on to me.

The outward forms of brass instruments can be changed like this because of the simplicity of their construction (compared to the mechanical keywork of a woodwind instrument, for example) and because, acoustically, the tubing can be curved in many different ways without changing the basic sound of the instrument (up to a point: in general, the more bends there are in the tubing, and the tighter they are, the “stuffier” the horn will sound; unless there is a compelling need for a more compact shape, instrument manufacturers try to use an “open wrap” with as few bends as necessary).  The malleability of brass (not a single metal, but an alloy of copper and zinc, usually combined with smaller amounts of other metals such as nickel or gold) also makes it possible to be worked by hand with the right tools.

I’ve known a number of instrument technicians (repairmen), and converting or otherwise customizing horns is something most of them have done.  Like auto mechanics, it’s hard for them to resist the temptation to soup up or experiment on cast-off parts in hopes of building a hot rod.  Boredom can also be a factor: one technician I knew who served in the armed forces told me that a favorite prank on the base was to get the lead trumpeter’s instrument and surreptitiously remove its support braces, then slip it back in to his case.  It wasn’t impossible to play, but much less stable and comfortable, and it was always a memorable break from dull routine, especially if it was before a performance or review!

What really affects the tone of a brass instrument is whether the tube is mostly the same diameter (cylindrical) before expanding into the bell, or widens gradually throughout its length (conical).  This is the “bore profile” of the instrument, and it is the same no matter what shape the tube is bent into.  Brass with a cylindrical bore, like trumpets and trombones, are more penetrating in sound; conical-bore instruments, such as horns and bugles, are mellower.  Cornets, which are partially cylindrical and partially conical, have a sound that falls somewhere in between.  (The width of the bore also plays a role, and is in fact the primary difference between the three B-flat instruments marked “Tenor,” “Baritone,” and “Bass” in the following illustration–they are the same length but sound and play somewhat differently; there is no room for discussion here, but the nomenclature of low brass instruments has always had the potential for confusion.)

Brass available in both configurations, from The Music Men by Margaret Hindle Hazen and Robert M. Hazen

Brass available in both configurations, from The Music Men by Margaret Hindle Hazen and Robert M. Hazen

During the nineteenth century, the “golden age of brass,” a wide variety of different forms were tried out, some born of functional necessity and others out of the search for novelty.  Brass instruments were often designed in “families” that followed the same pattern, from the high E-flat cornet to the BB-flat “monster” bass tuba.  One of the most famous images of Civil War music is the “over the shoulder” brass band, with instruments that literally pointed backward, so that marching soldiers could hear them when the band marched or rode on horseback at the front of a formation.  After the war, over the shoulder horns continued to be used, but were gradually displaced by “bell front” or “bell up” instruments closer to the forms in use today.  (Note the use of rotary valves on the over the shoulder instruments; rotary valves are rarely seen on American instruments nowadays, with the obvious exception of the orchestral horn.)

Another pattern that was once widespread is the “helicon” or circular wrap, which went around the musician’s shoulder or wrapped around their torso like the modern Sousaphone, the only helicon instrument still in common use. (Contrary to popular belief, Sousa’s innovation was not the wrap-around shape, but the decision to enlarge the bell, at first pointing straight up, and later angled to point forward, for a more directed sound.)

One of the more eccentric shapes was conceived by Louis Schreiber of New York, who formed his “Schreiber horn” into a teardrop with an S-shaped bell.  (According to Schreiber’s 1867 patent, he justified his new shape partially on ergonomic grounds, with the weight of the bell resting on the player’s shoulder.)  Again, an entire family of Schreiber horns was created, although it didn’t last long and examples are now quite rare.

schreiber.alto

Musician with Schreiber horn, ca. 1870, from The Music Men

Musician with Schreiber horn, ca. 1870, from The Music Men

And that’s to say nothing of the famous double-bell euphonium, another innovation that has come and gone.  Such experimentation is now the exception: as far as the big instrument companies go, there is less room for innovation in the basic shapes of the instruments, even as a great deal of research (including computer modeling) and quality control that would have been unimaginable a hundred years ago goes into refining acoustic and mechanical properties.

David G. Monette has been a notable example of the artisanal approach, designing and building custom trumpets (most famously for Wynton Marsalis and other jazz greats) while pouring the fruits of his custom work into his instrument lines, much in the same way innovations in concept cars eventually turn up in the regular models.  Monette’s innovations include the “integral” or built-in mouthpiece and his instruments have an organic, art nouveau-influenced form.  Monette has also continued the nineteenth century tradition of crafting beautiful instruments to honor great musicians, or in the case of the Elysian Trumpet for New Orleans, to memorialize tragedy.  While Monette’s designs are available to a wider market than they once were, even expanding to a student line of mouthpieces, Monette remains a boutique brand when compared to the industry giants.

Elysian Trumpet by David G. Monette and Tami Dean

Elysian Trumpet by David G. Monette and Tami Dean

On the real fringes are the experimentalists who aren’t concerned with perfecting or customizing existing instruments at all, but use them as raw material for art in which the instrument and the performance are one.  As an example, jazz musician and horn sculptor Mark Southerland of Kansas City builds his own instruments (as well as work which is purely sculptural) from scrap parts for use in live performances that include elements of improvisation, ritual, and multimedia.  Southerland is a saxophonist, so his playable sculptures are actually woodwinds, but crossbred with borrowed trumpet and horn bells: they are true hybrids.  He follows in the footsteps of such free jazz pioneers as Rahsaan Roland Kirk, who modified his instruments so that he could play three saxophones at once.  Southerland’s work is qualitatively different from the nineteenth century inventors like Schreiber or modern artisans like Monette, closer in spirit to the found-object transformations of outsider art or the process of discovery undertaken by electronic circuit-benders.

Brass instruments aren’t the easiest article to collect; making them the medium of your art is even more challenging.  But all the examples I’ve given above started with a tactile, manual approach to music-making; even a factory-made instrument involves an enormous amount of assembly and finishing by hand.  For those who combine their musical sensibilities with an urge to tinker, creating a one-of-a-kind instrument can be uniquely satisfying, whether it’s as straightforward as a modified lead pipe or as exotic as a double-belled metallic flower.

0 CommentsLeave a comment

Intellivision (or at least its software) Lives!

When I got my first Atari VCS (as I knew it back in the day, but now universally known as the 2600), it promised the incredible: an arcade in my own home!  It didn’t take long to learn that it wasn’t quite what I imagined, but it was still the source of many hours of entertainment.  I didn’t get much of a chance to play games on competing systems at the time, though.  I recently found a copy of the retro video game anthology Intellivision Lives! for Gamecube. I already have the Activision Anthology for Gameboy Advance, collecting all the games that company produced for the Atari, and several collections of Atari games and various classic arcade games ported to current systems.  I’ll admit I’m a sucker for this kind of collection, not least for the nostalgia factor in being able to play these old games on modern equipment.  Often it doesn’t take long to scratch that itch, and I remember why I was happy to move beyond the blocky Atari graphics into PC games, and why the Nintendo Entertainment System was such a revelation when it was released a few years later.  And sometimes the classics aren’t as much fun as I remember, or I’ve been spoiled by newer games that don’t have the drawbacks I had no choice but to put up with in the old days.

Intellivision Lives!

But!  There are few greater pleasures than revisiting something you had thought long gone, only to find that it is as good as—or even better than—you remember.  For me this is especially true of those action-arcade favorites that made up for lo-res graphics and repetitive gameplay with elegant simplicity, combined with expertly ramped up challenges.  Asteroids and River Raid are just fun, and while I don’t spend hours in front of the screen trying to “roll over” the score until my thumb is sore from hitting the fire button any more, playing these old games does take me back, at least for a while.

Intellivision Lives! is a little different, though: I had played plenty of Atari games and classic arcade games as a kid, but I never owned an Intellivision or knew anyone that had one. So the nostalgic impulse was more for an era than for a specific game, and it was an opportunity to fill in some gaps in my knowledge.  Also, the game was cheap.  I had been aware of Intellivision, of course: the Intellivision ad campaign, starring George Plimpton and featuring side by side comparisons of Atari and Intellivision games, was ubiquitous in the early ‘80s.  (Was there ever a more withering putdown of Atari’s disappointing Pac-Man adaptation than Plimpton drily commenting, “Blinky, you look pale”?)  That snooty ad campaign, and Intellivision’s home computer-like number-pad controllers, made it clear that Intellivision (short for “intelligent television”) was serious: they were the thinking man’s video game company, at least to hear them tell it.

GAMEAD_intellivision_twopager

The closest I got to an Intellivision in the ‘80s was during the brief period in which my local mall’s record store decided to branch into selling game consoles and had floor models set up to play.  If you weren’t a video game-hungry kid at that time, it might be hard to imagine how packed the store would be.  In those days you either fed quarters into an arcade machine or angled to get a home console of your own; there was little in between.  So I don’t think I got any closer than watching somebody else walk a Smurf around on the Colecovision (yes, one of Coleco’s exclusive properties was a game about the Smurfs; no, I don’t know if it was any good), and do . . . something . . . on an Intellivision.  It’s not just that my memory of events 30+ years ago is foggy, it’s also that it wasn’t always clear what was happening on screen when you watched someone else play a game in those days.  Sometimes it wasn’t clear even if you were the one playing!

To tell the truth, some of that head-scratching abstraction that was a hallmark of early console games came back to me playing Intellivision Lives!  Because of programming limitations, it was common for the instruction manual to do a lot of heavy lifting, explaining the premise, goals of the game, and even inspiring the player’s imagination with artwork that might have little in common with the virtual Lego bricks that appeared on the TV screen.  Luckily, modern game machines have plenty of memory, so these retro anthology discs can be padded out with on-screen instructions, snazzy menus (Intellivision Lives! features a virtual pizza parlor the player can “walk” around in, stopping at different arcade machines to select the games), and bonus materials like box art and video clips.  Still, the experience can be anything but intuitive: for starters, the complex Intellivision controls had been mapped onto the equally complex but different Gamecube controller, so games like Vectron were impenetrable, even with the instructions, and more ambitious simulators like Utopia (which, from what I can tell, really does deliver on the promise of an experience with the depth of a PC text game) I couldn’t even get to start properly.  Maybe when I have more time to study it.

Still, I did find some fun games that were obvious enough, like Astrosmash, a pleasantly chaotic mix of Asteroids and Space Invaders with space rocks and bombs falling with increasing speed on a ship at the bottom of the screen that tries to shoot them before they land.  There was also Thunder Castle, a truly impressive sword-and-sorcery-themed maze game that is unmistakeably a product of its time, but artfully so: with its beautiful pixelated graphics and chiptune rendition of themes from Schubert’s “Unfinished” Symphony, and its continually changing, non-scrolling screen, Thunder Castle resembles the PC and Apple games of the time like Lode Runner or Conan more than either the late period of the Atari 2600 or the early days of the NES.  Considering it came out very late in the Intellivision’s product cycle (after parent company Mattel had decided to cut Intellivision loose, in fact: it was published independently), it’s not surprising that it didn’t have a big impact on the “console wars,” but it’s a game that’s worth rediscovering (and from what I can tell it has found new life in recent years as a downloadable PS3 and iPad title).  I will definitely be spending some more time with Thunder Castle.

thundercastle

BONUS VIDEO: I found this while searching for the “Blinky, you look pale” commercial.  I guess Intellivision wanted its own version of the famous “Mean” Joe Green Coke commercial, but it does take the 1980s “soft sell” approach to a comical extreme.  Yes, that’s Henry Thomas of E. T. fame.

0 CommentsLeave a comment

The Pleasures of Anthology, Part Seven

It occurs to me that in delving into the history of recorded music, I have somewhat strayed from my stated purpose of looking at influential or personally important anthologies.  In this final installment of “The Pleasure of Anthology,” I’ll look at a work that is both: Harry Smith’s Anthology of American Folk Music.  Smith is a fascinating figure by himself, and the AAFM, which he put together for Folkways Records in 1952, is only a small part of his artistic output, which included experimental films, paintings, and poetry, as well as ethnographic research on American Indian rituals, string games, and dance (Smith studied anthropology in college, but had begun his studies even younger, visiting an Indian reservation near his boyhood home in Washington state and recording and interviewing members of the tribes there).  It is the AAFM, however, that has had the most enduring influence.

AnthAmerFolkMusic

Peripatetic, Bohemian, obsessive Harry Smith has more in common with the anthologists like Bill Blackbeard than might first appear.  One of the primary accomplishments of his Anthology was to put an unacknowledged, even disdained, part of history front and center in the popular consciousness: the commercial recordings made by rural Southerners before the Great Depression.  Such records were produced by big Northern labels like Columbia and Okeh after they realized that people (both black and white) in isolated small towns would buy records made by people like them.  The countless 78s that Smith tracked down, collected, and sorted through held ballads, fiddle tunes, jug band stomps, and quasi-musical sermons, among other genres, either recorded on the spot by traveling recording outfits or in studios in Chicago or New York.  Almost all of these were relegated by their original labels to “race” or “hillbilly” lines, for black and white customers, respectively, and as such were promoted only in limited areas and then forgotten.  Not for these records would there be red labels or pink-paged catalogs.

Smith was one of many collectors scouring the countryside for old records—there had been a lively community of jazz and blues collectors, united by newsletters and fan-assembled discographies since the 1920s—but Smith was one of very few looking for “folk” music, and he was by far the most knowledgeable, generous with his learning if not with the records themselves.  (According to fellow collector Luis Kemnitzer, “He would lend out books that he thought you might want, gave away paintings and collages, but once a record came into his room it never left.”  Don’t we all know someone like that?)

Smith’s work was preservative, too: according to Smith’s longtime friend, poet (and founding member of The Fugs) Ed Sanders, “There was a big drive by the government to collect laminated records in order to secure the shellac for the war effort, so the records he was particularly seeking, from the 1920s and ‘30s, were in great danger of being wiped from history, a factor which may have given his collector-obsession an extra energy.  On the other hand, the government drive brought millions of records out of the attics of America, making them easy to find.”* As with the science fiction anthologists, passionate collectors like Smith not only chose the best examples of their medium to showcase, they effectively created new fields, new spaces for preserving and discussing cultural artifacts that might otherwise be forgotten.

The songs themselves sound much older than the mere two or three decades that separated them from 1952; listeners who had only been familiar with the music of polished groups like The Weavers were struck by the stark, ghostly quality of many of the voices and the sometimes eccentric quality of the music.  Even though many of the recording artists were professional musicians (on a regional level, at least), there is nothing slick or cookie-cutter about them; they have more in common with the rough-hewn, self-taught geniuses of the early jazz era, and in the best of these recordings there is something of the same energy.

The 84 recordings Smith chose are divided into three volumes: Ballads, Social Music, and Songs, each volume originally on two LPs.  Smith’s ordering and his brief, even telegraphic, notes are carefully considered to guide the listener through the not-so-distant but disappearing land that Greil Marcus called “The Old, Weird America.”  Smith saw the project as half scholarly and half an agent of cultural transformation, but he mostly lets the music speak for itself.  If there is an agenda beyond simply making the music more available, it might be found in Smith’s refusal to list or even acknowledge the race of the performers, instead emphasizing the connections that transcend segregation.  In Marcus’ words, “Linking one performance to another, he ultimately linked each to all”—an excellent description of what a great anthology can accomplish.

Everyone has their favorite disc in the Anthology; the Ballads and Songs of Volumes One and Three appear to have had the most influence on the contemporary folk movement, but the “Social Music” of Volume Two is mine.  Most of the tracks are instrumental, rhythmic fiddle or banjo music for square dancing (on “Georgia Stomp,” the fiddler calls the dance steps out as he plays), as well as what can only be called good-time party music (“Moonshiners Dance,” one of my favorites, sounds like a rural Spike Jones by way of an A&M college bash).  All of these dance numbers fit into the two- to three-minute span of a record side, but within that short time they create their own worlds.  There is a droning quality (in the literal sense of a repeated pitch or chord) that one easily associates with “primitive” music, to the diddly-bow or the monochord that fascinated Smith, and some of the music is genuinely archaic—pan pipes are represented, made of reeds cut by hand—but mingled with urban trends or Tin Pan Alley standards that show the creeping influence of radio and commercial sheet music.

There are songs on Volume Two, as well—not “Songs” as Smith defined them, but vocal music nonetheless.  I sometimes presented Jim Jackson’s heartbreaking “Old Dog Blue” as an example of a “floating couplet” proto-blues song when I taught Music Appreciation, an act of bravery (or foolishness) considering it’s hard for to listen to without getting choked up.  Like other songs on the Anthology that have been the focus of intense study, “Old Dog Blue” is at once crystal-clear on the surface—a reminiscence of a faithful hound, now passed away—and deeply mysterious, with seemingly biographical references (like “a little bitty girl with a red dress on”) thrown in, suggesting an entire life in the same way a white tip on the ocean suggests the iceberg beneath the surface.  Whether the lyrics are drawn from  Jackson’s memory, the common property of rural song, or consciously constructed by Jackson, the result is a song that seems to imply more than it says. The Romantics like Robert Schumann knew how evocative fragments could be, leaving gaps for the listener’s imagination to fill in: Jackson, and many of the other artists present, do the same, whether on purpose, or because of the limitations of recording, or simply because of the cultural gulf that separates us from them.

In the original booklet that came with the AAFM (reproduced for the lavish 1997 CD rerelease), Volumes Four, Five, and Six were promised, but they never arrived.  According to knowledgeable sources there were disagreements over the playlist between Smith and Folkways publisher Moses Asch, and Smith, ever temperamental, dropped the project.**  Later, Smith seems to have simply lost interest in this kind of anthologizing, moving on to studying quilt patterns and other, more physical, examples of folk life.  Within a few years of the original AAFM there was a flood of rereleases of similar material, fueled by the interest Smith had awakened.  It didn’t seem as important for him to continue since others had picked up the thread.  How short a creative period may turn out to be, especially for one with such diverse interests as Harry Smith: what may appear to be a mercurial temperament may simply be a restless intellect, always searching for new territory to explore.

*A comparable situation prevailed in the mid-1990s, when I was doing my most serious collecting: vinyl was considered dead, doomed to be replaced by CDs, and almost every garage sale or junk store had a crate (or several) of records at bargain prices.

** Following the CD reissue of the AAFM, a fourth volume was released on the Revenant label in cooperation with the Harry Smith Archives, based on a playlist Smith had compiled but with notes written by others.  Although it is little more than a footnote to the original AAFM, it’s still a worthwhile sequel, concentrating on music from the 1930s, and it includes songs that would become classics when reissued by others: Robert Johnson’s “Last Fair Deal Gone Down” and The Carter Family’s “No Depression in Heaven,” for example.  It is from the liner notes to Volume Four that I have drawn Ed Sanders’ comments.

0 CommentsLeave a comment

The Pleasures of Anthology, Part Six

When I was growing up, there were quite a few format choices if you wanted to buy a recording of a song you liked.  45 rpm singles were the most popular with young listeners like me, and I had quite a few of those; my sister had even more.  45s were so ubiquitous that I remember the local radio station handing them out at parades.  There were albums, too, of course, long-playing 33 1/3 rpm records that contained ten songs or so—the hits, and a bunch of other stuff that might be good, but you’d have to buy the album to find out, as they never played the non-single tracks on the radio.  The first two albums of my own were Pac-Man Fever and Styx’s Kilroy Was Here, both of which I played non-stop, so that should tell you everything you need to know about me as a child.

Nowadays, the greatest disdain is reserved for the “greatest hits” package: when somebody lists a Greatest Hits as one of their favorite albums, it smacks of dilettantism; the implication is that their knowledge is only surface-deep or defined by songs that someone else decided were “the best.”  In short, they have committed the sin described by the record store clerk I mentioned previously, putting someone else’s preferences in place of their own.  Worse, the Greatest Hits divorce songs from their context within the album.  According to this point of view, the ideal recording artist makes statements at the level of the album, not the individual song, with each song contributing to a greater whole, like movements of a symphony.  That’s true of some albums and recording artists, but really only a minority, and even looking back to the “good old days” when albums were king paints a misleading picture.  As I recall it, the only albums that everyone agreed on back then were the mega-hits like the Saturday Night Fever soundtrack and Michael Jackson’s Thriller, an album that was so huge that on the last day of school my fourth grade class gathered to watch the full-length music video for the title song as a treat.  Albums like that could stay on the charts for months, even years, releasing singles until you had heard so many of the songs that it seemed silly not to give in.  The “all killer, no filler” album was a rarity, of course—it was more common for there to be two or three good songs and a bunch of forgettable junk—that was why it was so exciting when one came along.

Michael-Jackson-Thriller-cover1

Histories of the record industry tend to emphasize how revolutionary the long-playing record was when it was introduced in 1948.  No longer did listeners have to get up and change the record every few minutes: they could put on an LP (or several, if they had one of the newer phonographs with an automatic record changer) and have uninterrupted background music at home for (potentially) hours at a stretch.  Between the LP and radio, music lovers had fewer reasons to go out; once television was introduced, the media cocoon of the second half of the twentieth century was complete.

However, LPs first became popular as a vehicle for Broadway soundtracks, classical music and the emerging genre of “mood” music, i.e. music for grown-ups.  The transition to the album format was much slower for youth-oriented music like pop, rhythm and blues, and rock and roll.  The single was still king in those genres until the 1960s, and artists were expected to record in both formats: as Elijah Wald describes in How the Beatles Destroyed Rock ‘N’ Roll, artists such as Frank Sinatra and Sarah Vaughan recorded adult-oriented “theme” albums as well as pop singles, effectively for two different audiences:

Although Sinatra placed nine albums in the top two chart positions between 1955 and 1960 and had six top-ten singles in the same period, they included no overlapping tracks.  Even a song as iconic as “One for My Baby (and One More for the Road)” was strictly an album track, and though Capitol also released compilations of his singles, those packages never did as well as single-less sets like Come Fly with Me and Only the Lonely. . . .  Elvis was the only artist to be equally successful in both formats without specifically tailoring his LPs to the adult market.

Gradually this changed, and in the 1960s the Beatles turned their albums into thought-out, aesthetically unified song cycles, eventually abandoning live performance altogether so they could concentrate on their studio work; Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band (released in 1967) is generally cited as the first “concept album,” the term by which such efforts would be differentiated from the more typical collection of unrelated songs, but it was preceded by Sinatra’s albums, the Beach Boys’ Pet Sounds, and the Beatles’ own Revolver, albums whose contents are unified not only by thematic connections but by sonic ones as well: throughout the 1950s, instruments were often added to pop recordings for the novelty value: Mitch Miller’s production of Rosemary Clooney’s singles include harpsichord, marimba, and oboe, for example. For Pet Sounds, Brian Wilson went much further, creating an instrumental pallet that included strings, brass, and free reeds (accordion and bass harmonica), giving the entire album an unprecedented unity.  The studio revolution of the psychedelic ‘60s was built on a foundation that included Miller, Sinatra’s arranger Nelson Riddle, and Wilson’s idol Phil Spector, as well as the avant-garde electronic experimentalists (like Karlheinz Stockhausen) cited by the Beatles.

Such aesthetic unity is the real legacy of this fertile period, not the “concept album’s” pretensions of narrative specificity.  After the 1960s it would be unusual for a rock or pop album to lack a unified sound: artists might change their approach from album to album (sometimes drastically: think David Bowie), but each album was judged as an artistic statement akin to a Romantic symphony, whether or not it had been conceived as such.  As an example, They Might Be Giants’ 2001 album Mink Car, with its mixture of production styles and genre exercises, is often dismissed by fans, and even for its defenders (of which I am one) it feels like a “greatest hits” package, lacking the organic sense of “togetherness” listeners have come to expect from albums.

TheyMightBeGiantsMinkCar

But perhaps it’s not Mink Car that’s out of step: shortly after its release the same year, the iPod popularized “shuffling” as a listening mode.  CD players had featured shuffle mode since their introduction in the 1980s, and multi-disc changers allowed listeners to play tracks from several CDs in random order, but the iPod allowed one to randomize a complete library of mp3s, a listening experience that could be disorienting, exciting, and liberating—specifically, liberating songs from their contexts within album playlists.  Suddenly, the single was fashionable again.*   They Might Be Giants had previously put a set of short (most just a few seconds) songs called “Fingertips” on their album Apollo 18, specifically to take advantage of the shuffle feature.  The iPod made it possible to shuffle their entire catalog, for example, and in that context the variety of styles on Mink Car didn’t seem out of place at all.

The term “album,” applied to LPs, was borrowed from previous 78 albums, which had several sleeves bound together to hold multiple discs; the resulting product was much like a book, and comparable to a photo album.  Moreover, some albums were sold in the same way as photo albums: empty, with room for listeners to keep their favorite discs in the pockets.  In that sense, the album was purely a storage solution.  Like iTunes customers today, and like teenagers in the 1950s, 78 buyers often preferred to buy only the songs they wanted, not the complete albums assembled by record producers.

Yet even that is predated by the use of “album” as a collection of music; in the early nineteenth century it became fashionable for composers to sketch short pieces of music in the albums of their friends or patrons, sort of like signing their yearbook.  These short pieces were known as Albumblätter, or “album leaves.”  Gradually the term came to be applied to any short piece dedicated in such a manner; Beethoven’s famous Albumblatt für Elise was one such.  From there it was a short jump to composing sets or cycles of short pieces and designating the entire work as an “album.”  Robert Schumann composed sets titled Albumblätter and Album für die Jugend (“Album for the Young”), and other composers followed his example.  Schumann, in particular, was interested in cyclical forms that included hidden connections between otherwise quite different movements. When considering the classical forefathers of the “concept album,” in addition to the usual grandiose, totalizing suspects such as Richard Wagner and Gustav Mahler, a nod should also be given to Robert Schumann.

Publishers also assembled “albums,” bound volumes of compositions by particular composers, and of course sheet music is still published in that format today (although, like books, recorded music, and everything else, it is also available in a dizzying array of digital formats).  Interestingly, Beck released an album in 2012, Song Reader, that hews to this original definition.  Of course it is common for sheet music to popular albums to be published, but in Song Reader’s case there is no audio version, at least not officially: Beck has invited readers of the book to upload their own versions of the songs to the Song Reader website, a case of modern technology putting a new spin on social music-making forms that had mostly been marginalized by that technology decades earlier.

* Moby, an early and vocal advocate of the iPod, was featured on the cover of The New York Times Magazine in 2002; superimposed over his photo was a list of the contents of his iPod.  The implication was clear: the iPod hadn’t just changed the way people accessed their music collections—it had given birth to a new aesthetic of musical mixing and matching, embodied by Moby and his output.  Interestingly, the article describes how carefully Moby sequenced the songs on his albums, even with the knowledge that the producer no longer has the final say in the listener’s experience, if he ever did.  If we don’t see as many of those media think pieces about “remix culture” anymore, it’s largely because the concept has become so commonplace as to be invisible.

(Continue to Part Seven)

0 CommentsLeave a comment

The Pleasures of Anthology, Part Five

A few years back I was browsing a new-and-used record store in Kansas City.  It will surprise no one that my affection for old book sales also extends to the crates of old records at music stores, and I used to spend many happy hours browsing their shelves.  I drifted down into the basement, where there were quite a few CDs and records, including 78s, of early jazz, one of my passions.  I was looking over a CD of guitarist Eddie Lang’s collaborations with violinist Joe Venuti, chatting with the clerk, a guy with a handlebar moustache, horn-rimmed glasses and a Hawaiian shirt (this was about fifteen years ago, before such a combination would be so commonplace as to be a hipster cliché).  He was justifiably proud of the store’s selections of 78s, but when I mentioned I didn’t have a 78 player and mostly relied on compilations, he sniffed, “I don’t like to let anyone else tell me what I can and can’t listen to.”  The conversation was effectively over.

I didn’t take it too personally.  A run-in with a snooty record store clerk is practically as much a rite of passage as throwing away one’s old comic books only to regret it later, and in the broader sense I agree with him.  As much as I respect the anthologist’s art, I’m all too aware of how much is out there that won’t be repackaged in modern formats.  I have a 78 rpm record player now, but hardly any discs to play on it.  I’m grateful for such online institutions as the Cylinder Preservation and Digitization Project, which makes very old and/or rare recordings available, the only filter being the rate at which its curators can acquire and digitize its holdings, but at the time of this conversation that would be a few years in the future.

What strikes me in hindsight is how different the attitude toward compilations is among music fans and readers of short stories.  I’ve never heard a sci-fi reader turn up his nose at a Groff Conklin anthology and say, “No thanks, I’ll stick to my issues of Astounding and Unknown Worlds.”  Very few will bother to track down a Kurt Vonnegut story in Playboy when it can easily be found between hard covers.  True, hardcore record collectors are also a minority, but the concepts of authenticity and authorial voice are different in the two areas.

To a large degree, this is due to the ephemeral nature of print magazines and the vital role anthologies have played in both keeping stories alive and developing a canon of widely-known and –respected work.  As anthology expert Bud Webster compellingly argues in his Anthopology 101,

There were paper drives here in the US well into the 1960s, and had been since the war years; thousands of old magazines were recycled in these drives, not counting the ones that were simply tossed out after reading, or the collections “cleared away” by well-meaning mothers when their sons and daughters went off to college.  Were it not for the anthologies and their editors and publishers, much of the science fiction we grew up reading and wondering over might never have been reprinted.

It should be obvious that this goes double for comic books and triple for newspapers.

By comparison, there was nothing ephemeral in the way recorded music was packaged and sold.  Quite the opposite: before the advent of recording, a performance could be heard only once and was then gone forever.  Recording, in the words of David Suisman in Selling Sounds, stopped the flow of time “as a dam holds back the flow of a river,” storing sounds indefinitely in the grooves of a cylinder or disc.  The permanence of records didn’t always live up to the hype (records could warp, scratch or crack from mistreatment, or wear out through overplaying; even compact discs weren’t quite as invulnerable as they were originally made out to be), but it represented a huge change, and one that took nearly a decade for both consumers and producers to get their head around.

From about 1890 to 1900, Edison cylinder phonographs and competing disc-based gramophones were known as “talking machines;” Edison predicted that his device would find its greatest utility in business as a dictation aid, and a great deal of the recordings commercially sold were famous speeches, passages from the Bible, and the like.  Up until the turn of the century, such machines were little more than a novelty.

Criticisms of “disposable” pop music and novelties are as old as the music industry itself, and that label adhered to both Tin Pan Alley pop songs (which pioneered the kind of built-in obsolescence associated with “one-hit wonders” and prefab stars), most commercial records, and the machines themselves. It was the Victor Talking Machine Company, a competitor of Edison and Columbia, that realized they could sell more machines by creating a musical product with cultural cachet—in modern terms, hardware sales could be driven by providing desirable software—and in 1902 the Victor Red Seal series was born.

The Red Seal records featured respected musical artists (most famously the Italian tenor Enrico Caruso; the Red Seal artists were predominantly European, an important signifier of quality in American culture) performing operatic excerpts and other high-status repertoire, recorded with the best quality possible.  Just as important, the Red Seal records were set apart from the regular “Black Seal” series by their packaging (the “Red Seal” refers to the red paper labels on the records) and by a higher price; they were even listed in a separate section of the Victor catalog, printed on pink pages.  Their desirability was part of a marketing strategy; even Victor’s executives admitted that the Red Seal records didn’t sell as well as the Black Seals, but they were an effective advertisement for the line as a whole. More to our point, as Suisman says, “the Red Seal records were quintessentially middlebrow; they presented an ad hoc assortment of digestible classics [the length of a record side was only two to four minutes] as a timeless and definitive canon.”  They made it psychologically okay to value records as something other than a passing fad, and transformed the fledgling industry.

Feodor_Chaliapin_-_Song_of_the_Flea_-_Victor_14901B

So we’ve established that records, once they found a foothold and adjusted listeners’ expectations, aspired to a permanence that fiction might only attain when safely preserved in book form.  There is also the difference between recorded sound and print media: the words of a story are the same (barring drastic editorial change) whether in a magazine or a book; they can even be translated into another language. In some cases, the book versions of stories are more definitive, removing editorial changes (or misprints) and allowing the author’s original voice to come through more clearly.  By contrast, the promise of audio recording is its faithfulness, the idea that you are hearing a piece of music just as it was performed by the artist; what could be more authentic than that?  The transfer of music from one format to another has been fraught with controversy among listeners; indeed, Victor and the other record companies had to work very hard to make their limited recording facilities sound as good as they did before the introduction of electrical recording in 1925 (they weren’t necessarily trying to convince listeners that a recording was “just as good” as a live concert; they counted on the fact that for most people, a record would be as close to hearing Caruso as they ever got).  In converting monophonic recordings from 78s to LP, producers sometimes introduced “fake stereo,” the aural equivalent of colorizing a black and white movie. The debates over the merits of analog vs. digital sound are well known, and the primary appeal of mp3s has been convenience, not sound quality.

Finally, there is the context of the individual song itself, and I think this is where anthologies become suspect for many purists.  In my next installment, I’ll look at the concept of the album, and its rise and fall in importance to recorded music.

0 CommentsLeave a comment

The Pleasures of Anthology, Part Four

You can read Parts One, Two and Three here, here and here.

In the foreword to the trade paperback edition of her late husband’s magnum opus Squadron Supreme, Catherine Gruenwald writes,

Mark always liked when I read his work, and he waited until the exact right time to unleash this particular story upon me.  In 1993, I was conveniently laid up for a week recovering from a minor surgical procedure, and he quietly decided this was the perfect time.  It did make the most of my captive-audience status, but it also made the recuperating process more pleasant as I breezed through each issue, especially without the usual wait between installments experienced by readers who caught it the first time out.  I thought about all those kids who read through stacks of comic books as they suffered through weeks of broken-leg mending and measles bouts.  Mark saw to it that I came into fandom the way others of our generation had!

My version of that experience came when I was in seventh grade and contracted Legionnaire’s disease.  I was hospitalized for two weeks and was significantly weakened by the illness.  I couldn’t talk or laugh too much without suffering coughing fits, and even getting up to walk around left me winded.  In the hospital I was in an oxygen tent and took treatments by inhalation at regular intervals, even during the night. (Incidentally, whatever the phrase “night nurse” might suggest to you, my experience didn’t live up to it.)  Although I wouldn’t recommend that method of immersion, I have one fond memory of that period thanks to a timely gift from my grandparents: The Smithsonian Collection of Newspaper Comics, edited by Bill Blackbeard and Martin Williams, which I devoured between treatments and brief visits from friends.

Smithsonian.newspaper

My mother’s parents had enabled my comics addiction quite a bit over the years: A Smithsonian Book of Comic-Book Comics had been a birthday gift the previous year (they lived in Arlington, Virginia, just outside Washington, D.C., so I received a lot of Smithsonian-themed gifts), and they always saved the color Sunday comics sections from the Washington Post for my sister and me to read when we visited.  The Post carried more and newer comic strips than my hometown paper, so I had the inside track on stuff like The Far Side and Calvin and Hobbes, and would try to describe these creative, mind-blowing works of art to my sometimes skeptical friends.  When those comics were picked up by the Pittsburg (Kansas) Morning Sun, their first daily installments invariably underwhelmed my friends.  The first Far Side to run in my hometown was, I think, the “Thor’s hammer, screwdriver, and crescent wrench” panel that even Gary Larson couldn’t explain.  Others, like Bloom County, were never carried in my hometown paper at all.

Gary Larson's plot to destroy my credibility, Exhibit A

Gary Larson’s plot to destroy my credibility, Exhibit A

The boundaries between newspaper comics and comic books were quite porous, both historically and in my experience.  I started off reading the newspaper strips from a young age, the kid-oriented ones like Winnie the Pooh at first, gradually expanding my range until I was even reading the soap-opera strips, grown-up adventures, and even the political cartoons on the editorial page.  I enjoyed the adventures of time-traveling caveman Alley Oop, and the globetrotting fisticuffs of Captain Easy, another legacy from the comic strips’ Depression-era golden age. Paperback collections of favorites like Peanuts, The Family Circus, and Garfield were among the first books I owned.  By seventh grade, I was serious about reading and collecting comic books, but I still read the newspaper strips and I was starting to think of myself as a student of the medium.  According to my parents, I even asked for the daily paper while I was in the hospital, so I could keep up (I don’t remember that, but I admit it sounds like me).

The best stories in the Smithsonian collection, adventures like the “Plunder Island” saga in Thimble Theatre (the home of Popeye), delivered the same combination of thrills, humor and pathos that I associated with movies like Star Wars and Raiders of the Lost Ark.  In hindsight it’s obvious why: George Lucas and Steven Spielberg were Baby Boomers, born in the mid-‘40s, rather than children of the Depression, but they obviously shared a love for movie serials and pulp novels and channeled the same sense of wonder and excitement into their original creations.  And they fit into a larger pattern: the years in which I grew up, the 1970s and ‘80s, were the crest of a wave of interest in the popular culture of the 1930s and ‘40s.  In addition to homages like Indiana Jones that hearkened back to the pulp era, the original characters from magazines, comic books and strips, radio shows, and serials were being repackaged for modern audiences or brought back to life in new formats: during my childhood there were big screen or TV adaptations of Conan the Barbarian, Popeye, Flash Gordon, Little Orphan Annie, and Buck Rogers, not to mention the ever-present superheroes whose roots went back to the same time period.  There was even a Doc Savage movie, although I’ll admit I haven’t seen it.

Whether I enjoyed the strips because I had been prepared by the resurgence of Depression-era culture or would have enjoyed them for their own sake without being primed is beside the point.  It was, I felt, material I needed to read, and that I encountered at the right time: it was the real stuff.  The Smithsonian Collection of Newspaper Comics fit my adolescent concept of reading as mastery perfectly: I was old enough to take the book seriously, reading it cover to cover, including the informative but not too academic prose accompanying the strips, but I was young and unoccupied enough to lose myself completely in the detailed artwork and the lengthy excerpts from Thimble Theatre, Mickey Mouse, and Dick Tracy.

Perhaps that’s the best explanation for the obsessions that grip us in the early teen years: what else did I have going on? Like those bedridden kids Catherine Gruenwald alludes to, I was in an ideal environment to be completely absorbed by my reading.  All my needs were taken care of.  Everything was new to me, so I had a greater tolerance for the lulls that beset any collection than I do now: back then, even the boring parts contributed to the overall design, set the baseline against which I judged the really superior stuff.  Now I have children of my own, and even when I have the time to read deeply it’s harder to access the state of complete absorption that I experienced then.  There are just too many other things occupying my mind; that’s the condition of adulthood.

thimbletheatre

The New Smithsonian Book of Comic Book Stories, edited by Bob Callahan, was published a few years ago, a follow-up to Barrier and Williams’ volume.  I eventually purchased it, but I haven’t read the whole thing.  In part it’s because I’m already more familiar with the territory it covers, from the 1960s to the present, and I’ve read more of the stories that it reprints.  It could be the mixed-up pages, an off-putting production error that makes the book less authoritative than was obviously hoped.  Perhaps the sheer variety of comics that have been created since the 1960s make it more difficult for any one book to be comprehensive.  But it’s also because of that difficulty of finding time and recapturing youthful engagement that I’ve alluded to.  I’ll pick it up, read a few pages, and put it back on the shelf.  Even if I read every page, it won’t be with the kind of rapt attention I gave the two previous Smithsonian books.  And that’s okay: one of the chief pleasures of the anthology, and one I haven’t put nearly enough focus on, is the freedom to browse, to pick and choose, to be selective.  It isn’t a novel or a textbook that needs to be read in sequence, even though I, like many youthful readers, would treat it that way.

I recall my mother sitting in the hospital room with me, keeping watch, and the realization of what my illness must have been like for my parents hits home in a way that didn’t even occur to me before I had kids (according to my parents, the scariest part was not having a diagnosis for the first week of my hospitalization).  My mother would read too, usually a mystery novel, along with crossword puzzles and cross-stitching: there wasn’t much else to do.  My father would come during visiting hours, but he confirmed that he, also, would read during his down time, sitting in our empty house.  It sounds lonely, and maybe a little scary, but it was actually comforting: that’s kind of the way it was at home when we were together anyway, separated by our different reading but joined by a common activity.  The books that comforted me weren’t the same as my parents’ books; I’ve encouraged my children to read, and to read comics, but I won’t insist that they read the same books I treasured.  I hope they will, but it’s more important that, like me, they find the books they need, when they need them.

(Continue to Part Five)

0 CommentsLeave a comment

The Pleasures of Anthology, Part Three

You can read Parts One and Two here and here.

As far as shared worlds go, it doesn’t get much more eclectic than superhero comics: just as an example, the three most recognizable characters in DC’s universe are an alien from another planet, an Amazon warrior with ties to the Greek gods, and a self-made vigilante, illustrating nicely the superhero genre’s connections to science fiction, mythology and pulp adventure.  It helps to realize that Superman, Wonder Woman and Batman were not originally invented with the idea of coexisting in the same world, but grew organically in their own books, developing their own identities, casts of characters, themes, and locales before anyone thought of teaming them up.  It was only later that the tangles of continuity across different books had to be cleaned up and what were often spur-of-the-moment inventions rationalized and codified.

Beyond the editorial offices of DC and rival publisher Marvel (and to a lesser extent Charlton, Fawcett, and the other small publishers that would either fold or be absorbed by DC), the first serious considerations of comic book worlds and how they were put together were written by fans, for fans.  The comics fanzine Xero emerged in 1960, and more were to follow.  Fanzines and amateur press publications have largely moved online since the rise of the internet, but organized fandom used to leave quite a paper trail, spread by word of mouth and united by newsletters, fan clubs and conventions, often advertised in the comic books and science fiction magazines where like-minded readers would be most likely to find them.  Many of the fan writers would go on to work in the industry: Roy Thomas and Mark Gruenwald were both superfans who had in common an encyclopedic knowledge of characters and plot points that they would build on in their own stories for Marvel in the 1970s and ‘80s.  Gruenwald had even made his name with a self-published thesis on comic book universes and their interconnected nature.

Even when writing about comic books began to enter the mainstream, it was still written from the point of view of a comics reader rather than a disinterested outsider.  Jules Feiffer got the ball rolling with The Great Comic Book Heroes in 1965, a critical history of comic books in the 1930s and ‘40s mixed with Feiffer’s memories of reading comics as a child and working in the industry as a young adult; All in Color for a Dime, edited by Dick Lupoff and Don Thompson, was published in 1970, collecting a number of essays, including Lupoff’s own “The Big Red Cheese” (about Captain Marvel) from that first issue of Xero; and so on.

Feiffer, of course, was the long-running cartoonist in The Village Voice­ and had counter-cultural cachet; Lupoff would make his mark as a science fiction author and scholar of (among other subjects) Edgar Rice Burroughs; Thompson, with his wife Maggie, founded the influential Comics Buyer’s Guide.  Authoritative as their essays are, one of their chief values is in putting the reader in the shoes of a young kid encountering Superman or Captain Marvel for the first time, seeing the characters through their eyes and accepting them on their own terms.  But such is almost always the way, especially when pop culture subjects are involved: the first writing on jazz was descriptive, by journalists rather than musicologists, and the first jazz discographies were written by aficionados to aid fellow record collectors.  Scholarly writing would later lag behind journalists and fans of rock and hip-hop as well.

A Smithsonian Book of Comic-Book Comics, edited by Michael Barrier and Martin Williams, appeared in 1981, by which time scholars were taking note of comic books and it was more common for books on the subject to disentangle history and criticism from the personal and anecdotal.  A Smithsonian Book may not have been the definitive volume on the subject, but it certainly seemed so to me as a young teenage comic book reader encountering it for the first time.  Of course, more than the scholarly apparatus it was the reprints of comics from the “Golden Age” (up to 1954, the date of the adoption of the Comics Code by the industry) that made the book so valuable and enjoyable.  I had been collecting superhero comics for a couple of years, starting with reprints of Stan Lee’s and Steve Ditko’s Spider-Man in the pages of Marvel Tales and gradually getting into the current stuff from there; reading about the storied history of Marvel and the Distinguished Competition made me feel like a real newbie, but the truth was I had been reading comics most of my life.

smithsonian

Before middle school, when I was younger than ten, most of the comic books I read were licensed “funny animal” books starring the Looney Tunes or Disney characters, and were often more far-ranging and imaginative than you would expect: Did you know Goofy had a side career as a superhero?  If you read Super Goof you did!  Just as Floyd Gottfredson’s Mickey Mouse strips gave its title characters a sense of scope and adventure grander than what could be shown in the short animated cartoons, so the licensed Gold Key and Dell comics expanded my young mind by showing the “further adventures” of characters I already knew and loved.  And needless to say, I enjoyed the Uncle Scrooge comics of Carl Barks long before I knew who Barks was, having a particular fascination with the evil duck sorceress Magica de Spell: who was this vivid character whom I had never seen in an animated cartoon?  Why would Walt Disney (for of course I thought that’s who drew all the comics—he signed them, didn’t he?) create such a great villain and not use her in a movie?  Why did all the Disney characters have such complex, fulfilling lives offscreen?

Image

Oddly, when I graduated to more “mature” (or so I thought) comics, I completely discounted the funny animal comics I had cut my teeth on, and got rid of them completely.  This isn’t an unusual experience by any means: most of us go through at least one phase where we clean out all the “kid’s stuff,” only to regret it later.  What separated my later comics habit from my funny animal years wasn’t just the subject matter—there were some Twilight Zones, Archies, quite a few issues of Mad and Cracked, and even some superhero books mixed in with the comics I threw out—but my self-consciousness that I was collecting comics, that I had to keep them organized, follow a checklist, fill in gaps in my knowledge, and basically keep up: all the demands of fandom.  Before that, comics were acquired at random (sometimes brought home by my parents when my sister or I was sick), often in one of those packs of three miscellaneous comics in a plastic sleeve (you could see the covers of the two on the outside, but the one in the middle would be a mystery, and may or may not have anything to do with the other two).  That’s how we ended up with a bunch of Spire Comics’ gospel-themed Archie comics, basically church tracts starring the Riverdale gang.  Except for a few favorites, they were equally disposable, in the tradition of pop culture since the dawn of mass production, and the ones that didn’t completely disintegrate wound up unceremoniously dumped in a cardboard box, a sort of comics slush pile.

A Smithsonian Book of Comic-Book Comics helped me make connections between my undiscriminating childhood and my status-conscious adolescence.  It taught me Carl Barks’ name and helped show me that his talking duck characters weren’t just for little kids; it introduced me to the original version of Captain Marvel, before DC ensnared publisher Fawcett in a crippling lawsuit over his supposed similarities to Superman; it let me connect the name Basil Wolverton to the grotesque caricatures I had already seen occasionally in Mad; it introduced me to the ambitious and insightful work of Will Eisner in The Spirit and the breadth of E. C.’s output before the comics panic of the ‘50s and the Comics Code forced them to cancel everything but Mad; it made me unable to see Marvel’s parodic Forbush-Man without thinking of the similarly attired Red Tornado from Sheldon Mayer’s Scribbly.  It would even, much later on, form a foundation for me to understand what the heck was going on in the historically-informed comics of Tony Millionaire and Art Spiegelman.

ImageImage

Aside from giving me some ammunition if I’m ever cornered by Harlan Ellison, the Smithsonian book provided a great deal of entertainment and enriched my appreciation of the current books I was reading.  My adolescent comic book collecting in the 1980s coincided with a period of reassessment in the superhero world: Superman’s fiftieth anniversary would be celebrated in 1988, and (perhaps not coincidentally) fifty years of world-building and cross-referencing would be consolidated (or swept away, depending on your perspective) in 1985 by DC’s Crisis on Infinite Earths, clearing the decks for a “fresh start” for Superman and company in the first and biggest of many company-wide “reboots” to come.  The complexity of DC continuity included a number of parallel worlds, including separate universes for the Golden and Silver Age versions of characters, introduced to explain how Superman could fight saboteurs during World War II and still be a young man in the 1960s.  It was simple, really: there was an old Superman in one world and a young one in another, and sometimes they would break down the barriers between universes and team up.  Captain Marvel even came on board in the 1970s, at first in his own world (“Earth-S”) and later woven into the fabric of the DC universe as other characters had been before him (although he started going by the name Shazam to avoid confusion with that other comic book company).

The 1980s were also truly DC’s decade on screen, especially for Christopher Reeves’ iconic portrayal of Superman, but not overlooking Lynda Carter’s Wonder Woman on TV and the truly game-changing 1989 Batman directed by Tim Burton and starring Michael Keaton (many fans have cooled on Burton’s Batman in favor of Christopher Nolan’s grittier trilogy, but it’s hard to overstate what an event the 1989 film was at the time).  By comparison, Marvel’s best-received screen adaptation was The Incredible Hulk in the early ‘80s.

I don’t bring up Crisis or Burton’s Batman to make comparisons with DC’s New 52 or to point out Marvel’s current domination of the big screen.  The contrast speaks for itself, and more importantly the industry has changed greatly: one’s preference for a particular era of comics says as much about one’s age as it does about one’s taste.  I’m thankful I stopped collecting before the huge boom of the early ‘90s—otherwise I might be burdened by nostalgia for foil-stamped hologram covers, oversized guns, and costumes festooned with pouches!  Nor do I want to say things were better then just because I was younger: Crisis on Infinite Earths pissed off plenty of comics fans, myself included.  I liked the alphabet soup of parallel worlds and twisting timelines in the DC multiverse.  It irritated me to see whole settings and storylines erased from official existence.  On the other hand, if I were an editor or writer, chained to stories that had been written decades before, I might have felt differently.  Still, good writers had ways of getting around that, and a good story trumped pedantry any day.

And of course the characters who had been written out came back: Supergirl came back.  Titano the Super-Ape came back.  The Huntress came back.  Kamandi and OMAC and all the rest found ways back in, sometimes in different places and sometimes greatly changed, but eventually they came back.  And when Superman himself died, and it turned into a media frenzy, comics readers just nodded sagely to each other and knew it wouldn’t be permanent.  He’d be back.  Just ask Captain Marvel.

(Continue to Part Four)

0 CommentsLeave a comment

The Pleasures of Anthology, Part Two

Read Part One here.

As you can probably tell from the previous examples, my own preferences lean toward science fiction and fantasy.  Of my favorite authors, New England horror writer H. P. Lovecraft (1890-1937) has had by the far the greatest influence on me, and his connections to other writers (by letters and acquaintance, or by the coincidences of publication) have been a constant thread in searching for stories.

Referring to Lovecraft as a “horror” writer can be a bit misleading: although he considered the cultivation of a frightening atmosphere his primary goal, he mostly eschewed “the literature of mere physical fear and the mundanely gruesome.”  Rather, he was a practitioner of “weird fiction,” a catch-all label for nascent science fiction, fantasy, and horror before those genres had clearly defined markets.  Most of Lovecraft’s work cultivated a sense of ancient, alien forces intruding into the present day, and although he borrowed a great many elements from the gothic horror of the previous century—books full of suppressed secrets, crumbling old houses, ominous supernatural signs—he married them to a scientific outlook, in which the most frightening truths were not to be found in the evil actions of men but in the indifference of a hostile, uncaring universe.  As he wrote in his seminal essay Supernatural Horror in Literature, “The true weird tale has something more than secret murder, bloody bones, or a sheeted form clanking chains according to rule.”

I didn’t know much about Lovecraft’s outlook when I started looking for his stories.  All I knew was that his reputed blend of science fiction concepts, ooky tentacled monsters and dreamlike air of mystery appealed strongly to me as a budding reader of fantastic fiction.  As hard as it may be to believe now, Lovecraft’s work wasn’t easy for me to track down when I was young, even though his name (and that of his creation, “Cthulhu”) was known to me.  He was almost mythical, and I think he would have enjoyed the aura surrounding his work, had he still been alive; I knew that his “Cthulhu Mythos” had been included in the first printing of the Advanced Dungeons & Dragons book Deities & Demigods, but was removed from later printings due to a copyright dispute—or is that what they wanted me to think?* Every detail fueled my interest, until I was finally able to read his work for myself; fortunately, he more than lived up to the hype, at least in my experience.  My being at the “golden age” of twelve or thirteen surely didn’t hurt.

My first tastes of his elaborate mythology came from anthologies, a single story by him (or one of his imitators**) included here or there.  For a long time, even after I had read all of Lovecraft’s fiction (down to the dire posthumous “collaborations” by his executor August Derleth), I would search tables of contents for his name, not in hopes of finding something new but as a sign that the editor recognized the good stuff and that the rest of the book might be in the same vein.  Similarly, anything connected to the legendary pulp magazine Weird Tales, in which Lovecraft published most of his work, was a must-have.

That’s how I acquired Weird Tales: 32 Unearthed Terrors, edited by Stefan R. Dziemianowicz, Robert Weinberg and Martin H. Greenberg.  This collection includes one story from each year the magazine was published (in its original incarnation; it has since been revived), from 1923 to 1954.  There are some terrific opportunities for juxtaposition: you can leap from the brooding, necrophilia-themed “The Loved Dead” of C. M. Eddy (1924’s entry) to the sophisticated modern ghost story “Legal Rites” by Isaac Asimov and a pseudonymous Frederik Pohl (1950, the pair’s only publication in Weird Tales), or from space opera (Nictzin Dyalhis’ “When the Green Star Waned,” 1925) to sword and sorcery (Robert E. Howard’s “The Shadow Kingdom,” 1929) to occult detective (Seabury Quinn’s long-running character Jules de Grandin in “Satan’s Stepson,” 1931).  There’s also plenty of the “mundanely gruesome,” to be sure: the pulps were known for their often lurid content, and Weird Tales, Lovecraft’s opinions aside, was no exception.

WeirdTales

In any case, Lovecraft is included, represented by his novel The Case of Charles Dexter Ward, originally published posthumously over two issues in 1941.  Covering, as it does, such a wide range of time and variety of authors (including, in addition to those mentioned above, future luminaries such as Ray Bradbury, Richard Matheson and Robert Bloch) gives it the character of history, sampler and tribute all in one, a sort of “This is Your Life” for a long-gone but fondly remembered magazine.

I’ve returned to many of the authors in this anthology over the years and read more of their work when I could find it.  Some of the stories I enjoyed, however, have effectively been dead ends until recently: for example, Arthur J. Burks’ 1936 story “The Room of Shadows,” a creepy story about a hotel room haunted by its previous occupant, a “Eurasian” vampire whose conquests are turned into vicious miniature “sleeve-dogs.”  It’s the kind of thing that sounds ridiculous when summarized, but that’s true of many fantasy and horror stories, and Burks excels at capturing the main character’s confusion and mounting fear, along with some PG sensuality in the form of a mysterious femme fatale.  The editors cite “The Room of Shadows” as “an example of how a talented author uses staple pulp characters and situations to rise above cliché,” and it left me wanting more.  Burks published a collection of stories, Black Medicine, in 1966, long out-of-print, expensive, and unavailable.  Now, however, a number of his stories are available in e-book editions.  I prefer hard copy, but when it comes to hard-to-find stuff like this, I’ll take it in any form I can find it.

A different animal altogether is H. P. Lovecraft’s Book of Horror; it’s edited by Stephen Jones and Dave Carson, but as the cover states, it’s really Lovecraft’s book, compiling Supernatural Horror in Literature along with a number of the stories Lovecraft cited as examples and influences on his own work.  Both the essay and the stories are in the public domain and are available in multiple formats, but it’s convenient to have them in one place, and the editors provide a smattering of commentary.  Still, it doesn’t hold the place in my heart that 32 Unearthed Terrors does.

Lovecraft

In both books, the diversity of styles and concepts is striking: there is room for all of the genres listed above and more; the very concept of the “weird tale” was nebulous enough to allow a variety of approaches, as long as there was something out of the ordinary.  Weird Tales was billed as “The Unique Magazine,” and as Robert Bloch writes in his introduction to 32 Unearthed Terrors, “There is no such thing as a ‘typical’ Weird Tales writer, nor is there a ‘typical’ Weird Tales story.”  Yet, the stories are often conservative on the individual level, in the sense that there are generally not more than one or two supernatural elements at play, especially in those set in the modern world.  Even those set in the far future, the mythic past, or a “lost world” often feature a single driving narrative to which all the world-building and window-dressing are subordinate.  The stories are short, and economy of means is key: pulp writers were paid by the word, not the idea.

The great thing about this tendency is that, whether reading an issue of the magazine or a latter-day anthology, while the reader may be dazzled with the sheer variety of ideas on display, each story is allowed to be itself, undiluted, and allows the reader to observe many of the building blocks of modern fantasy when they were still emerging.  Just as Lovecraft and his fellow Weird Tales authors influenced modern writers, so did they draw from previous authors, synthesizing their influences into personal styles, a process that still continues today.

In Part Three, I’ll look at anthologies in a different medium: comics!

* My experience with role-playing games and my search for the “Cthulhu Mythos” printing of Deities & Demigods are subjects for another post.

** I believe the first true Mythos stories I was able to find were by “Conan the Barbarian” creator Robert E. Howard.  Lovecraftians will know that the “Cthulhu Mythos” took hold in large part because Lovecraft encouraged his writer friends to make use of his creations in their stories, and he borrowed freely from theirs, creating a “shared world” (at best a collection of themes and premises rather than a tightly-knit continuity) before such things became au courant.

0 CommentsLeave a comment