Leigha Baugham

Communications 141

Professor Jim Lee

Final Project

In any discussion of auditory landscapes, musical thought and exploration account for a great deal of the peaks and valleys that we have come to familiarize ourselves with in the domain that we have come to know has audio art.

While music makes up only a small fraction of any definitional analysis of the conceptual texture that presents aural manifestations as art, it can represent and offer a great deal of informational, textural, and cultural context.

However, as society as we know it has become increasingly more global and driven by the ideology of “technology at your fingertips”, it can be no big surprise that musical innovations, changes, and mutations can and do act as cultural artifact. This cultural artifact of sorts can serve as both reflections and representations of the time period and the dogma borne of its social movements.

This phenomenon is particularly evident in one of music’s latest offspring of a genre typically unified by the appellation of “house” music. Some may call this particular designation of musical enterprise, “techno” or one of the many subgroups and mutations that have splintered off from the mother category since its appearance in the early eighties.

But beyond representing a mere musical interest, “house” music seems to have arisen out of interesting social and cultural dialogue that has allowed the music to act as a discourse for a misrepresented slice of the population in a historical perspective.

While unassuming in its demeanor and reputation, “house” music and the electronic music that this sphere created went far beyond the dance clubs and parties in which it originated and made perhaps one of the most telling cultural and societal statements that could be said of the current generation.

This generation is one that has come to understand the world through a confusing maze of social standards attributed to color televisions, e-mail, and readily available modems. All the while relying on the instant gratification of technology and its (false?) promise of a better reality, a better life, a better existence.

That said, let us begin our journey of “house” at the front door. Before there was a genuine discussion on the “house” music that manifested itself over the course of several years in the decade of decadence and “Reagonomics,” there was a community that had created a discourse surrounding electronic music and its implications.

This particular discourse community arose out of the 1950’s and considered the far-reaching affects of electronic music. According to Leonard Kasdan and Jon H. Appleton, “So-called classical or serious music had, by 1950, become increasingly complex and difficult to perform. Composers had not ignored the pace of the technological age, and their music reflected the increased speed and variety of events that occur during any given period” (Heifetz 23).

It was if an evolving society needed artistic representations that had the ability to keep up with its ever-changing dynamic landscape, and electronic music provided this outlet for composers as well as musicians to travel alongside these intense societal changes.

Let us venture upstairs to talk of more recent manifestations of electronic music. “House” music is said to have made its first appearances in the clubs of Chicago, New York, and Detroit. The year was 1977, and DJ Frankie Knuckles moved his operation from New York to Chicago. It was here that Knuckles became the primary DJ at the gay club “the Warehouse” in downtown Chicago (Rietveld 16).

While acting as the primary DJ for the club, Knuckles began to play around with a new style of working records. Most of the clubs of the time utilized the same tried and true method of playing one record, and then when that particular tune ended, another record would begin.

This style of playing records was popular, but it was also extremely linear, and one-dimensional, not completely unlike the commercialized disco of the time. But Frankie Knuckles began to mix one record into another. He introduced Philadelphia Soul, New York Club, Euro-disco along with his own manufactured sound effects (Rietveld 17).

Knuckles catered to the tastes of his audience by playing tempos of around 124 beats per minute (bpm) and would take popular disco hits and restructure them using an array of “rhythm makers and drum machines and would totally re-edit a song” (Rietveld 17). It was from this new method that the term “house” was coined as it was used in reference to the club “the Warehouse” and more importantly, DJ Frankie Knuckles’ innovative, new style (Rietveld 17).

This style of “slow-mixing” caught on, in the clubs in the Northeast metropolitan areas of Detroit, and New York where DJ Larry Levan, a colleague of Knuckles carried the sound to unheard of levels. It wasn’t long before “house” music began to grow and expand as it eventually moved across the Atlantic Ocean into the heart of Britain and Europe.

“House” music eventually began to develop certain characteristics that united the particular form of electronica. “House”, and in particular Chicago “house” have come to be defined as having a 4/4 beat that received accentuation and depth from a regular bass drum line and by an open hi-hat that fell on the off-beats.

The presence of a programmed drum machine adds to the fast pace that is distinctive of “house” and runs at about 120 bpm to 135 bpm. Much of the lyrical content of “house” refers to a sense of community and carries with it sometimes explicit sexual references. To add to its historical roots among the African-American culture, many of the chord structures are derived from gospel music (Reitveld 37,38).

Most of the dance tracks that the DJ’s used to create their varied mixes were found on 12” vinyl records. The 12” format allowed the grooves to be wider apart than those found in the 7” counterpart. This 12” format meant that there was more space for dynamics in sound, such as bass, which needs a large space in the spaces of the vinyl if the bass is found “high up in the mix” (Reitveld 106).

Now, every house is made up of certain components that must meet the right conditions in order for an individual structure to come into being. The case is no different for the new electronic music genres.

As the decade of the Eighties opened and the death of Disco had firmly been cemented in the collective consciousness of American culture, technology, and its infectious arms reached out and the advent of new audio production technologies became the catalyst. All that was needed was a few imaginations and an audience that was willing to participate.

The technologies that came along have become staples of our common understanding of audio production and influenced our conceptual knowledge of popular music. We have been predisposed to such a degree that we, as a culture have ceased to recognize these technologies for what they are and the ways in which they have shaped much of the popular music that will live on to earmark this era, like a wrinkle in time. Wrote John Cage, “What we can’t do ourselves will be done by machines and electrical instruments which we will invent” (Reynolds 242).

The “sampler” has become a technology that has allowed for both controversy and creativity as it has pushed the boundaries of “mimetic” machinery. A sampler is a digital recording device with which one can manipulate sound textures that have been recorded with it. Samplers have greatly influenced areas such as Hip-hop and “house,” and the derivatives there of (Rietveld 132).

Alongside the device known as the sampler, was the technology called a “sequencer,” which allowed the user to record, memorize, and replay a sequence of notes. When the producer programmed it, the sequencer could trigger a synthesizer, drum machine, and samplers. All of this was carried out through a cable network called a MIDI, or a Musical Instrument Digital Interface (Rietveld 122).

Another technologically sound step in the electronica direction was the drum machine. Usually the little Japanese- made box was small in stature, and of little expense. These drum machines simply played back electronically produced beats. But what was most remarkable was that the advent and acceptance of drum machines allowed music to progress without the tempo restrictions that marked a human drummer. Whereas before, human drummers could physiologically only beat for so fast and for so long, no a drum machine needed a break and its near perfect rhythmic patterns could easily exceed 170 bpm.

The theme of technology can be found to be interwoven completely throughout the fabric that become the “house” music of the Eighties, eventually of the Nineties, and finally, the Millennium. But while technology may be equated with the somewhat antiquated notion of progress, it is the very technology that must reject historical sensibilities and traditional dimensions in favor of innovation, and the pursuit of the “next big thing”, while maintaining some hierarchical position over the traditionalist form of expurgation.

In all of its glory the technological components that saw a rise to the pervading nature of “house” music was not without its threatening dynamic. It was all of those electronic devices that allowed for a more diversified musical with which to start developing new musical ideas in the form of electronic music and “house.”

However, those same device have brought with them some problems to the musical table, that before existed, but not nearly to this degree. In 1982, the British Musicians Union (MU) attempted to place a ban on synthesizers and drum machines because the organization believed that the musical proletariat that consisted of traditional musician trained in more conservative backgrounds, would find themselves with becoming unemployed (Rietveld 139).

In 1988, John Morton, the then secretary of MU publicly denounced sampling because he feared that the talents of the traditional musicians would be stolen. Oddly enough, by the point in the technological ball game, many of the members of the MU were taking part in the electronic possibilities (Rietveld 139).

Now we have had technical spattering of the definitional analysis, but we haven’t examined the aesthetic of “house” music and what cultural and significance it has played in the last years of the 20^th century.

The birth of “house” arose out of expressions of marginalized groups in the Northeast. It was the popularity among gay clubs with mostly African-American and Latino populations that cheered on Frankie Knuckles for the first time in Chicago.

While the basement remains on the bottom, and relatively out of sight, it is still a foundation on which the rest of the structure stands. Some degree of cultural reflection has to be made here for this music not only embraced a group of people that had relatively little or no voice in a society that completely relegated them to the insignificant or the non-existent. For much of the early part of the “house” experience, both the latter and the former were true. As, “house” spread into Europe, a sense of defiance arose as apart of the subculture that walked hand in hand with the music that was turning into a lifestyle phenomenon in the heart of Europe.

One such cry of defiance that arose and slowly more and more British youth hoped onto the wave of the underground, was in the dozens of pirate radio stations that flocked up all around the city. Most, if not all of the commercial legal stations were completely devoted to mainstream music, and the music that rested on the outskirts of acceptance or popularity went with airplay, and the waves were monopolized by a legal politicking.

However, the pirate radio stations gave the people what they wanted to hear, when they wanted to hear it. They would use a microwave transmitter to send the programs from the studio to a remote transmitter, from which the broadcast was made (Reynolds 229).

Many cultural representations can be made just by looking at the different sub-categories that have splintered off from the first broad definition of “house” that was coined in the early 1980’s to create some interesting notations on culture.

The Dutch City of Rotterdam is an industrial city of hard workers and sounds of machinery. This aesthetic is brought to life by the “techno” that comes from the area. It would delight the Futurists Avraamov and Russolo to note that the sounds of pile drivers, circle saws, tugs, boats, and cranes frequently find themselves in the lush musical language that finds itself distinct to Rotterdam (Reynolds 91).

Another sub-group of “house” called “jungle,” plays on the rhythmic patterns found in hip-hop and rap and mesh them with characteristic “house” which produces a funky hybrid. Jungle is made up of breakbeats, or the percussion only section of a funk or disco tracks. The breakbeats are sampled and then fed into the computer, where the beats could be stretched, compressed, shifted, reversed, and resequenced and processed. But this new rhythmical pattern was compounded by the fact that the beats were traveling in excess of 170bpm usually falling somewhere around 172bpm. But “jungle” seemed to match the aggression felt by black youths in American that were making both political and social statements through rhythmic lyrical word and tonic poems. Jungle seemed to reflect the same defiance within the “house” setting that Europe found to be so appealing.

But the single most remarkable thing that the stylistic accommodations that “house” music had to offer was its sheer accessibility. The complete emphasis as a computer-generated art form, places society in the position of becoming the creator of the art that it chooses to consume.

No longer relegated to the studied and traditional, anyone with a personal computer and the proper software can engineer, compose, and produce. And no with the possibility of burning CDs directly from your computer, no middleman is needed in the dissemination of the product. The technology has allowed for the democratization of the electronic music.

While “house” music may have been born deep inside the tomblike clubs and darkened basements of parties, the music has come to represent the changing of the guard in the dynamic of musical structure. Our technologically savvy society has allowed such innovations to pervade our consciousness and create a reality based on questionable hopes for a questionable future.

Instant gratification has become the buzzword as the attention spans get shorter and shorter, and so with it does a culture’s understanding.

But our of this cynical oven has sprung new ways in which our culture can explore its own representations of technology and what it has come to mean and maintain in our global existence.

The primal urges or body movement were once thought only to gotten from live drummers and musicians but our technology has caught up with and perhaps even surpassed our imagination, as “house” and other “techno” styles have come to represent cultural values, technological expansion, and an expanse of musical possibilities.

Works Cited

Heifetz, Robin Julian: On the Wires of Our Nerves – the Art of

Electroacoustic Music Bucknell University Press, Lewisburg 1989.

Reynolds, Simon: Energy Flash Picador, London, England; 1998.

Rietveld, Hillegonda C. This Is Our House-House music, cultural

Spaces and technologies; Ashgate Publishing Co.; 1998