How Music Works
December 2012
David Byrne / Canongate
I developed my music listening habits as a teenager back in the 1980s in western-suburban Melbourne around the idea that the most authentic kind of music was hard rock played with electric guitars, wooden drumsticks beating on pigskin and an unmediated human voice. To me that music had an integrity that the newly-emergent synth-pop of the time would never be able to match. It’s an attitude that sounds embarrassingly conservative now. It certainly limited the kinds of sounds I allowed myself to listen to. Now, from time to time when I discover some of the beautiful things I missed out on that I will never experience in their most authentic moment, I can’t help but feel some regret. Yet sometimes that conservatism, rooted as it is in the complex relationship between technology and music, and the search for authenticity, persists. I recognise it especially in my easy dismissal of the kind of auto-tuned, corporate kiddy-pop that dominates the charts my kids like to listen to. One Direction. Katy Perry. That’s not really singing, is it? It’s not really real music. Or is it?
In a more ancient form, this is the question that asks directly: what is music? In How Music Works David Byrne, best known as the lead singer for the band Talking Heads, but who is also a thoughtful artist and writer, uses ten essays to more-or-less explore how he approaches the question. It’s a book written for any contemporary participant in music, whether composer, player, listener or something of all three.
The key shift in musical technology for Byrne was the rise of recording technology over a century ago. It was a change that profoundly altered the way we experience music. With recording, Byrne writes, music was no longer so profoundly ephemeral, ‘it came to be regarded as a product – a thing that could be bought, sold, traded, and replayed endlessly in any context.’
It’s this contextual aspect of music that seems to fascinate Byrne most of all. He writes about music in different cultural and physical spaces, his distinct experiences as both a performance and recording artist, the importance of amateurism and collaboration, the contribution of a ‘scene’ to musical movements and some very large ideas about its physical and even cosmic significance. Byrne’s early experiences at New York’s legendary CBGBs features a fair bit too. He even maps the shifting layout of the venue over the years in a way that links across chapters into a very frank and practical analysis of the business and finance of music-making for the digital age.
The most interesting chapters are on the role of analog and digital technologies in the shaping of music. Byrne’s writing about the sometimes strange tradition of hi-fi evangelists, like the 1920s technicians from ERPI who saw their job of wiring theatres around the world for sound as a force for spreading democracy, capitalism and free-speech (just like today’s digital crusader-entrepreneurs) is offset by his exploration of the logic of movements of lo-fi artists, people like tUnE-yArDs’ Merrill Garbus.
Byrne is an erudite, curious, gentle and transparent essayist, who writes plainly yet intelligently about what he has learned from his long experience as a musician and, on the back of his Bicycle Diaries (2009) about the experience of cycling as his principal means of transportation, it builds his reputation as a prominent public thinker about the wonder of the everyday.
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