Searching In Vain

“If Music Be The Food Of Love…Then Prepare For Indigestion” was an album by a British group rejoicing in the name of Dave Dee, Dozy, Beaky, Mick & Tich, way back in 1966. Although a reasonably successful grouping in the UK, they didn’t trouble the US charts, reaching only number 52 with one song and not even managing the top 100 with a couple of others. The group’s putative leader, Dave Dee, had been a policeman and had attended the road traffic accident in which Eddie Cochran lost his life and Gene Vincent was seriously injured. Dee rescued Cochrane’s guitar from the crash site and returned it to the family later. I know all this because the accident happened near my home town and because I was part of a family all of whom had wildly differing tastes in music, which we listened to, read about and, mostly, argued about.

Being the youngest of four meant that I got a lot of hand-me-down stuff, including being subjected to whatever was being listened to on the radio or on our rather elderly record player. My mother loved musicals, and I remember being taken to see big musical films like South Pacific and The Sound Of Music and also being really scared by The Wizard Of Oz when I was very young. She was also a fan of Hope & Crosby—Bob & Bing, how soon we forget—so I got to hear quite a lot of crooning as well. My father, like many of his wartime RAF pals, liked American big-band jazz, so Glenn Miller and Duke Ellington entered my world of music as well.

They both liked Gilbert & Sullivan, so my earliest memory of theatre-going was to see the D’Oyly Carte Opera Company. My eldest brother was the highbrow, mainly classical in his taste, but he also introduced me to the intricacies of Dave Brubeck, and I learned to keep clapping along to the 7/8 time signature of “Unsquare Dance,” even through the tricky final section, earning the approving laughter of Joe Morello at the end of the track. From my other brother, I got Buddy Holly, Gene Vincent, Eddie Cochran, and the splendidly named Clarence “Frogman” Henry, named for his throaty voice, rather than for his diving proclivities. From my sister, I got American soul music and the best of British pop, including The Beatles’ early stuff, and for myself, I got Clapton, Hendrix, and Tull on the “rock” hand and Fairport Convention, Al Stewart, Pentangle, and a bunch of other British artists on the “folk” hand.

And then, as I mentioned earlier, there was the radio. One of my favorite radio programs, which also started my love for sound effects, was an anarchic and rather loosely structured comedy program called The Goon Show, written mostly by comedy genius and manic-depressive Spike Milligan and starring a young Peter Sellers alongside Milligan and a short, fat, Welsh singing comedian (his description, not mine; he described his singing as “more can-belto than bel canto”) Harry Secombe. Aside from the mad-cap comedy, father to the bastard child that is Monty Python, each episode of The Goon Show contained two musical numbers, not the saccharine close harmony groups usually found in such programs but performances by two stalwarts of the British jazz scene, the harmonica-playing Dutch emigrant Max Geldray and Ray Ellington, the son of a black American music-hall artist and a Russian-Jewish mother, and leader and drummer of his own quartet. They were aided and abetted by members of one of the BBC’s orchestras, with arrangements by the brilliant Wally Stott, who later underwent GRS to become Angela Morley. These were often stunning arrangements of jazz standards, flawlessly played and perfectly captured by the BBC studio managers using no more than a handful of microphones. You can go online and find audio feeds of old episodes of The Goon Show, and, although you may not understand the jokes, especially the rude stuff that foxed the BBC censors, you can rejoice in the music and the wonderful, mostly live, sound effects. (I recommend “Dishonoured – Again” and “Tales Of Old Dartmoor” as being particularly good examples of the genre.)

So here was I, not yet in my teens, but already beginning to have my musical tastes rather radically affected, which probably explains the eclectic nature of my music collection. The vinyl shelf, arranged more or less alphabetically, starts with ABBA and ends with Zemlinsky; the CD shelves, carrying around 3,000 CDs, contain even more esoteric material, with discs from almost every musical genre known to man, plus a couple that really aren’t, like the disc called Gravikords, Whirlies & Pyrophones, full of music made by some of the world’s weirdest instruments, which has been immensely useful.

I’ve spent what must add up to at least a couple of years browsing in record stores at one time or another, either for shows or for my own listening pleasure, but of course that’s scarcely possible these days, as there are virtually no record stores left any more. So where does today’s designer or director go to find music? Well, he goes online, to iTunes, to Spotify, to Amazon, or to many of the other sites where he can browse through recordings by entering keywords that he thinks might be relevant to the production in which he’s engaged, and judging by what I’ve experienced lately, this is not necessarily a good idea.

In the past couple of months, I’ve worked on three different shows, with three different directors, each of whom, after extensive online searching, has come up with the same piece of music by the same band. The piece in question is a largely bland track of what’s generally known as ambient music, although in this case, after a few minutes of mindless noodling, there’s a pointless crescendo, after which the mindless noodling returns. In each case, I questioned how the director came up with the results, and in each case, I was told it was as the result of a gradual narrowing down of results using the search facilities on Spotify, not in any focused way, but in a “find me a bit of music that’s a bit similar to this” way.

What I found odd was the fact that this was not necessarily music that they liked or had any impact but was simply the result of entering words like “ambient” and “mystic” into a search engine and then playing a few seconds of each result until they came to something that wasn’t particularly offensive and deciding that would do the job. I was also quite struck by how little any of these (young, all aged under 30) directors knew about music from any other era than the one that they’d grown up in and seemed unwilling to investigate, preferring the more instant gratification of the Internet.

Now, I use online music sites for some research (although I take the music I use from physical media for legal, as well as aesthetic, reasons; that’s another story, and one that’s going to have repercussions as more and more artists release material for download only), and I’ve got some fantastic results through Internet links, mainly through reading about music and from personal recommendations from others. Very rarely, however, have I driven down through a music site search engine until I reach what a computer algorithm thinks is something I might like or find useful. But I also know that soon, it may be the only way to research and purchase music, and I find that rather sad.

John Leonard is an award-winning designer who has been working in theatre sound for 40 years. In his spare time, he records anything that makes an interesting noise in high-definition surround sound. His two libraries, The Voice Of Poseidon and The Sounds Of Flight, are available online at www.johnleonard.co.uk/immersive.html. Live Design readers receive a 30% discount with the code LDM30.