We are in the second week of Listening Club and already a theme has emerged that, I presume, Sam and I will be revisiting time and again: It is difficult to free oneself from the ideas one inherits.
First Consideration: Sam and I were initiated into the audio world via lengthy careers in public radio journalism.
It’s November 2021. I’m taking my first Covid-era flight to the east coast to visit Sam in Massachusetts and do some work on our upcoming virtual listening series––eleven 75-minute shows mixed for headphones and live-streamed via YouTube to people all across the country. We’ve decided to add a few new shows to this year’s lineup, one of which is titled “Centennial Sounds,” on the occasion of all sound recordings made before 1923 entering the public domain via the Music Modernization Act. So basically we wanted to make a show all about really old, scratchy, and fuzzy recordings, most of which were done on wax cylinders; and we wanted to keep it in our style, which is allergic to language, focuses on the experiential, and eschews the didactic.
We had been talking to a few archives to try to get our heads around this project: The Library of Congress, Smithsonian, and the New York Public Library, to name a few. The NYPL was especially helpful: led by archivist Jessica Wood, the library turned us on to many rare recordings and even offered to give us an extensive tour of their Music and Recorded Sound Division, especially to check out their extensive wax cylinder collection. So I decided to stop off in New York first before continuing on to Sam’s place––I wanted to make a piece about an archive for the Centennial Sounds show out of the visit.
Second Consideration: The overwhelmingly predominant forms of public radio journalism are (1) interviews; (2) short headlines and “news spots”; (3) 3-5 minute features (multiple characters, scenes); and (4) long-form, narrative-driven stories.
For these formats, a tour of a renowned archive is public radio gold: slightly nerdy and esoteric enough, yet accessible and fairly predictable. It’s also quite easy. You get some sound of your tour guide showing you their most famous pieces from the collection (in this case at NYPL it might have been an enormous cache of Lou Reed memorabilia, sheet music, and ephemera, with the added news hook that a cassette tape containing 12 unheard songs by Reed had very recently been discovered by a Cornell professor), get a few good lines from the tour guide, hit the Reed news hook hard, and voila, you have a three-and-a-half minute public radio story in which listeners feel like they’ve learned all about Lou Reed’s genius and why archives are cool.
This basic approach is what I was subconsciously considering as I entered the NYPL. I really had no idea what to expect or how to make a sound-focused piece about stacks and stacks of written material and inanimate objects, so my instinct went back to what I actually know: public radio storytelling. Sure, the library also has this incredible collection of early sound recordings on old media––cylinders that you need an old phonograph to listen to. But somehow the idea of just listening back to a bunch of old recordings and hearing what an expert had to say about them didn’t excite me; and it certainly didn’t get at the meaning of an archive.
I left the archive with 2.5 hours of tape of Jessica Wood and Jeffrey Willens of the NYPL telling me things and showing me around their collections. They did show me a few old and rare pieces of audio-related machinery––an old phonograph with a few different styluses; a record-cleaning machine designed for media in a pre-vinyl era––which they graciously operated for me so I could record their sounds. So it was something, but there was no clear path forward outside of making a talk-heavy, explanatory piece about the archive: what it does, what’s in it, and why it is all important.
Third Consideration: It is necessary for public radio and podcast pieces to provide the listener with something to learn, with a takeaway.
A brief aside: Sam and I had actually taken a crack at making an experiential piece about an archive a few years earlier. We were doing a residency at Cornell University where our main project was to make a sonic representation of the university itself. We ended up creating an 80-minute, octophonic live show consisting of about 20 vignettes, one of which was about Kroch Library, the university’s de facto archive (officially “The Rare and Manuscript Collections”). You can listen to that work here:
I think it turned out pretty well, but it’s interesting to me now that, while still rather abstract and sound-focused, it was our most heavily-spoken piece in the show. We relied heavily on our tour guide, Evan Earle, to provide us with the narrative tissues to make the piece work. Still, not a bad effort. It was something that we’d build on to make the piece on the NYPL archives.
I finally arrived at the train station in Springfield, Massachusetts, where Sam picked me up to go back to his home in Hadley. We were to spend the next 12 days giving shape to the Centennial Sounds show.
The next day I set to work on the archive piece. I went through all the tape I had gathered and organized it, discarding sections I knew were off topic and trying to figure out a way to assemble the non-talking parts into a cohesive whole. That day came and went; it was going poorly.
The entire next day I abandoned the sound-focused approach and tried to do something with all of the facts and observations Jessica and Jeff had related to me. The spoken material was definitely good: the information was interesting, the anecdotes and stories compelling. I made a pretty good 5-minute, non-narrated piece (i.e. one where only the subjects speak and I, as narrator, do not). Sam listened to it and agreed, but the elephant in the room remained: we are supposed to be making audio that challenges and leaves room for people to have their own thoughts and associations. We are supposed to be branching out from our public radio heritage.
We scrapped the piece. Two days gone and, I felt, wasted.
When you listen again and again to the same 30 to 60 minutes of audio that you yourself have recorded, interesting things emerge. I suppose it’s a similar phenomenon to reading a text deeply: you start to make connections and associations you hadn’t before. So after listening to these clips from the archive innumerable times, and talking about them with Sam ad nauseum, something came to us. There were several scenes in the tape of Jessica taking boxes of material off the shelves, opening them up, and showing and explaining to me what we were looking at. The process of removing all these boxes, opening them up, closing them again, and putting them back on the shelf…this felt significant to us. It sounded like an archive.
But I only had two or three good, clean recordings of it while I was with Jessica at the NYPL, and I hadn’t the foresight at the time to ask her to make these sounds for me a bunch of times without us talking over it. So we didn’t have the raw materials to really make anything from it. We then remembered this short piece we had made for the Kronos Quartet streaming show from the year before. Here the idea was to put an E-flat chord––the one from a Beethoven symphony, and the one that began quartet member David Harrington’s love affair with music––in as many different and unfamiliar contexts as possible. One of these contexts was a refrigerator:
In this piece you can hear us opening and closing the door of the fridge as the chord is playing inside.
Thus “Musical Drawers” was born. Sam and I proceeded to record as many different cabinet and drawer doors opening and closing in his house as we could find. Inside of all these fictional archival drawers we put musical recordings taken from cylinders in the NYPL collection. Jessica then is imaginatively taking containers off the shelves, opening them up, letting us hear what’s inside, and then closing them back up again: a sound piece about an archive without saying it’s about an archive.
Although, at the beginning of the piece we do use a bit of tape from Jessica saying where we are. Again, it’s hard to free oneself, totally, from the ideas one inherits.
Loved to read this, thank you for sharing a bit of your process.