Long ago, big downtown department stores would let you take a record (these big old things) into one of a number of small soundproof rooms. In there would be a record player and a set of headphones. Those devices were nothing like the sophisticated gadgets we have today. There was no foam on the headphones, just brutal plastic discs that sat outside your ears with a hole to the metal speaker diaphragm inside. The record player had a steel needle, not even a diamond needle. At that time, steel was an advance over cactus needles that you had to sharpen.
The Stix, Baer, and Fuller record department in St. Louis was indulgent in letting a little kid (me) pretend he was going to buy records. My parents would drop me off in the record department (or book department…both are still my obsessions) and I would immediately go looking for my sure-fire favorites to take into a booth and listen to: Igor Stravinsky‘s The Rite of Spring, Oskar Sala‘s Space Opera, and Dmitri Shostakovich‘s Symphony #1.
If you’re thinking those are weird records for a 12 year old kid in 1957 to be listening to, you’re probably right. Let’s just say it explains a lot, including the fact that just 10 years later, one of the composers I habitually listened to in those days, Vladimir Ussachevsky, wrote the liner notes for my own first album of electronic music released by ESM Records.
It wasn’t only record departments that had listening booths in those days. The St. Louis library had them too, and there, I could also get the musical score for the piece so I could watch the score and listen to the recording at the same time. Often, I’d get dreadfully lost in the score, but I eventually got better at keeping up.
I’d head into the booths with excitement because I knew that my favorite pieces would transport me to worlds beyond the humdrum existence of a kid’s world. My test to know if I really liked a piece or not was that if it made me “float” when I closed my eyes, it was a “good piece.” To my 12 year old mind this was an inviolate rule. Oskar Sala’s music is totally and utterly forgotten today by almost everyone, but I can still hear it in my memory, because his music relied very heavily on an electro-acoustical echo and that audio effect was always guaranteed to make me tumble slowly, head over heels in the space inside my mind.
We all know that echo sound from our youth in the (pre-Sputnik) top-40 instrumentals with guitar sounds like in Rumble by Wray, Link, And His Ray Men or Apache by Jorgen Ingmann & His Guitar, or Out of Limits by the Marketts, or Rebel Rouser by Duane Eddy, or Wipe Out by the Surfaris…on and on. At first the effect could only be created in recording studios or electronic music studios. Then by the 60s/70s there were electro-mechanical device available for the individual musician. One was called the Roland Space Echo. Eventually the delay effect was simulated digitally and now it’s so old hat that it’s invisible.
In the time I’m talking about, however, the electronic echo hadn’t really found its way into pop music but was reserved for “experimental music” like Skala’s or like Karlheinz Stockhausen‘s Kontakte. It was a powerful music effect, rhythmic as well as dynamic. Stravinsky and Shostakovich didn’t need to resort to those electronic gimmicks, though, because their novel acoustic orchestrations, primal rhythms, dissonant harmonies, and peculiar melodies excited me in a way that music of the Pat Boone ilk never could (that was “pop” music at that time).
That echo effect (DONG, Dong, dong, dong) gave rise to a whole sensibility of music that coupled with the esthetic of an earlier, non-electronic composer, Erik Satie, gave rise to an entire genre of music now known, variously, as New Age, soundscapes, trance music, electronica, electronic-music, musique concrète, etc. Those are all different kinds of music of course, but they share a common ancestory whether their composers are aware of the fact or not.
I know today there must be kids doing the 21st century equivalent of sneaking into record store listening booths for a free listen to music that makes them float. That thought makes me very happy.
In case you can’t tell, I’ve been listening to Rockin’ Instrumentals
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Someone should do a study about the music kids are fascinated by/drawn to and who they turn out to be as adults.
My parents had a sizeable collection of albums, and a big stereo console that looked like a piece of furniture with a flip up top to play them on. Of all those records that my mother had collected, I listened to three over and over and over: The original soundtrack to “Oklahoma!,” Frank Sinatra’s “Ol’ Blue Eyes Is Back,” and Roberta Flack’s “Killing Me Softly.”
Gee. Wonder if that foretold anything?