Ieuan franklin
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4.2 Urban SoundscapesAs their work is public by nature and historically and culturally situated, radio producers, like oral historians and public folklorists, must necessarily be responsible to those communities from which they obtain their information (Spitzer 1992: 80) if their work is to be recognized as oral/aural history. How the radio producer interprets this responsibility is dependent on their attitude to their work and the nature of their commitment (or lack thereof) to those communities, and this attitude or commitment can create certain kinds of bias. These biases must, of course, be seen as sources of data in themselves, as in ethnography (Hammersley and Atkinson 1983: 130). To begin to illustrate this point, we can briefly discuss the actuality-based documentaries made in New York by the late Tony Schwartz between 1946 and 1958. Schwartz was perhaps the most important of the American post-war field recordists and documentarians, a hobbyist whose interest in history and folk music led him to record urban folklore and soundscapes (Hardy III and Dean 2006: 518), and a figure who still exerts a huge influence on National Public Radio producers, such as the Kitchen Sisters (Davia Nelson and Nikki Silva). During this period Schwartz walked the streets of New York armed with a twelve-pound Magnemite recorder and a microphone strapped to his wrist, recording street songs, children’s games, and overheard conversation. Long before the iPod made such eclectic mixing de rigeur, Schwartz spliced together such diverse snippets of life, producing features which were subsequently released as LPs on the pioneering Folkways record label, and broadcast on his radio show Around New York on radio station WNYC. Whilst Schwartz’ actualities were quite literally ‘drawn from life’, Stoever’s ‘close listening’ has discerned their utopian perspective, constructed through the editing process. Due to the evocative nature of its description of Schwartz’ soundscapes, and the acuity of her critique, the following passage is worth quoting at length: Black and Puerto Rican children bang out rhythms on trashcans and empty Pepsi bottles in a Harlem housing project. A Jewish grocer in Manhattan recounts the story of a dying friend whose last words told police “it was white folks that killed me, not colored folks.” A man in Spanish Harlem leans over a jukebox playing a nostalgic lament, translating the words that float past: “I wouldn’t change Puerto Rico by 4,000 New Yorks.” These unique and surprisingly resistant sonic moments are culled from the “sound effects” recordings made by Tony Schwartz on Folkways Records between 1946 and 1958… During the transitional post-war era of urban conflict, increased segregation, and accelerating “white flight,” Schwartz made 19 LPs for Folkways that simultaneously affirm and challenge the notion that music and audio culture function as forces of social cohesion in the United States. On the one hand, Schwartz couples swift juxtaposition with seamless editing to present a vibrant, multicultural urban environment where the sounds of a black cab driver singing spirituals can co-exist with a Jewish salesman hawking Parker pens. Through an auditory recreation of the post-war metropolis – complete with rumbling El Trains, honking horns, and jackhammers – Schwartz attempts to reclaim the noisy, ethnically diverse urban streets as the pre-eminent crucible of American identity in the face of increasing white migration to the quiet, sterile, and secluded suburbs. However, although invisible, the mechanical ear of the microphone is far from objective. While Schwartz presents his work as typical of what might be experienced on any day in 1950s New York, he is carefully editing the city, re-mixing its sounds primarily for an audience of eavesdropping white ears. Schwartz persuasively uses the sonic medium to make the threatening cultural “noise” of “the Other” recognizable as meaningful sound to the default (white) American ear… (Stoever 2006). Stoever’s analysis highlights the way in which (even) ostensibly transparent and unmediated ‘slice of life’ soundscapes can be characterised by the motivations inherent in their construction, subsumed within the broad motivation to create aesthetically pleasing artistic forms from everyday expressive culture. Through ‘auditory recreation’ Schwartz created a kind of imagined community by harmonising miscellaneous and discordant elements from his local soundscape (one of LP recordings was titled New York 19, after his ‘zip code’ or postal code) into a sound document; a “mediated presence that shrinks space into something manageable and habitable” (Bull 2000). Schwartz attained a kind of mastery over the outside world by rendering its “cultural noise” intelligible and graspable – like most forms of folklore and popular culture, his work “domesticates the unattainable and threatening and reduces the increasing range and strangeness of the individual’s world to the synthesized…and safely repeatable form of a story, documentary, a performance, a show” (Burns 1967).127 Through this process Schwartz invited listeners to re-awaken and re-assess their relationship with a place. On one level, Schwartz’ soundscapes document real locations; the sounds are processed through fieldwork technique and production but never to the degree of being unrecognisable. On another level, the soundscape is an “imaginary space” (Ray 2006: 17) created through the choices made by the sound artist, recordist or radio producer during the editing process. It is a vital point here that it is listening, more than any other sense, which performs an integrative or utopian function, in meeting the desire for proximity and connectedness that is sorely lacking in capitalist society (Erlmann 2004: 8).128 This utopian aspect of Schwartz’ work might also therefore correspond to what is often an implicit desire shared by oral historians, public folklorists and radio producers to recover the Gemeinschaft (community) which has been crowded out by Gesellscheft (society) (Tönnies 1887/1957). This is achieved through the selection and assemblage of vernacular culture in the form of recorded sound; access to orality and ambience here ‘breaks the bounds’ of material culture and provides points of entry into rich systems of signification, complex layers of culture. Of great relevance here is a long-forgotten radio feature called Sticks and Stones, which was devised by Leslie Daiken, produced by David Thomson and broadcast on the BBC Home Service on 14th August 1956. Preceding the publication of Opie and Opie’s classic The Lore and Language of Schoolchildren (1959/1977), the programme investigated the vibrant oral tradition represented by playground rhymes and street slang. (This was also a major preoccupation of Schwartz, who recorded an LP of children’s songs and games for Folkways Records). Apart from some narration by Duncan McIntyre, and occasional studio speech by Denise Bryer and Effie Morrison (some of the rhymes are spoken in the studio for the sake of clarity, or where no field recordings were obtained), Sticks and Stones entirely consists of actuality recordings in the streets and playgrounds of Dublin and Glasgow. One of the programme’s most important observations is that many rhymes and skipping games have a conservative or documentary quality – they preserve fragments of social concern and anxiety, or otherwise represent a kind of ‘early warning alarm’. For example, the ‘bogeyman’ rhyme was prevalent due to the fact that the bogeyman is often a real figure in tenement life – the police, landlord, or bailiff with an eviction order in his hand….
A bogeyman came after me and stole my penny whistle. I asked him for it back, he said he hid nae got it, Aye aye aye ya tell a lie, I see it in your pocket (Thomson 1956). The example is also given of a Dublin skipping game which adapts a traditional ‘tinker, tailor’ format to include ‘an I.R.A.’, a ‘noxie man’ (an auxiliary soldier) and ‘a black ’n’ tan’. There are other examples of social history encoded within children’s rhymes and games. A poor man’s lawyer who once defended tenants against eviction orders lives on in the popular refrain ‘Harvey Duff, Harvey Duff, shut the door and that’s enough!’ (This was presumably his advice to tenants). Glasgow district midwives in their green uniforms inspired a game entitled ‘The Green Lady’. In Dublin, the coalman’s cry ‘Coal Blocks! Coal Blocks!’ was adopted into a rhyme. In that city the arrival of bread vans heralded another ritual, in which children held onto the back of a vehicle to get a short ride (called ‘scutting’): After school, the horse vans from the famous Dublin bakeries come through the crowded streets in all directions towards Parnell Street, where an archway leads into the stables. And here the children lie in wait, keeping an old custom going (Thomson 1956). The rhymes and games that heralded the arrival of figures such as the coalman or the chimney sweep signalled the opportunity for convivial fun or mischief, and are rooted in a particular place and time. In an adult, contemporary society, where home delivery of staple goods has changed or ceased altogether and door-to-door merchants provide unwelcome interruptions, the associations are different; Many neighbourhood sounds, although they may be distinctive, seldom involve familiarity with the person producing the sound, given the transience of urban dwellers and the impersonality of many newer forms of neighbourhoods. Therefore, such sounds are more likely to be treated as annoyances and not as relevant information (Truax 2001: 20). The actuality of children ‘scutting’ on bread vans features the distinctive sound of horse hooves on cobbled streets. The recording is very evocative and nostalgic, as it summons up an image of bygone times and close-knit community, and this must surely have been the case even at the time of the broadcast, as Thomson’s narration registers some surprise that “the old custom survives” in the post-war era. Disappearing customs also mean endangered or disappearing sounds; Truax has noted how patterns of association become encoded in such sounds, which can be remarkably potent in evoking memories: The romance associated with a past sound arises from nostalgia for a time and circumstance that no longer exists. The sound seems romantic because it has the power both to evoke the past context and to idealise it…Sounds and their original context are stored in the memory as patterns. Recalling the context may revive a memory of the sound, and the sound, if heard again, usually brings the entire context back to life (Truax 2001: 29). Download 1.05 Mb. Share with your friends:
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