This concise history of electronic music caught my attention, since I've always used examples from history of music in my history-of-computing course, as these offer such nice examples of the far-reaching consequences of the rise of the digital age. Live Wires offers much information and a great narrative on the history of electronic music. In five chapters, the author treats five different technologies that shaped modern music: the tape recorder, circuits (synthesizers, mainly), the turntable, the microphone and the computer. Reading Daniel Warner's book made me aware of the potential music has in researching cultural changes due to technology, which reaches beyond what I had been teaching up to now.
If you pick up this book, you'll surely read about the music of your youth (and afterwards), and learn that there was more to it than you might have expected. Not only did I come across more electronic influences than I was aware of; composers, musicians and the audience (or the listeners) have all fundamentally changed their ideas about music over the last century. Warner makes you aware of these changes in his fluent and catchy style, offering a lot of detail, on both the technicalities and the social context. The details he includes serve a clear purpose, and although the structure of the book implies that some names will pop up in most chapters, that didn't bother me. It might, as I experienced, make you reread earlier paragraphs now and then, to remember the chronology of events. I particularly enjoyed the ‘Recommended listening’ list, an addendum which delayed the writing of this review for several weeks.
There are three critical remarks to be made. First of all, Warner takes the technological changes in music production as a guiding principle in his history. While I agree with him, that you can't discard the technicalities in this history, he takes this to an extreme, by making technological developments the core of his account. Sometimes the technology itself is even taken for granted, as if the ideas underpinning it were obvious and just waiting for realization. Certainly with the computer this has not been the case: all kinds of people were appropriating these machines for their purposes and it was their success, or lack thereof, that stimulated industrial production of machines. Warner's book offers stories about how the microphone and other technologies were adopted by a variety of musical (sub)cultures, who were not necessarily in touch – in some cases weren't even aware of each other's existence. One may also read how, sometimes, these technologies were experimented on by musicians or composers striving for a particular effect, thereby creating or initiating the demand for a particular technology. These subcultures of musicians/composers, growing in number over time, would have offered a much more suitable structure to the narrative.
A second critical remark is that Warner doesn't distinguish between use and appropriation, as has become common in the history of technology. Admittedly, he may have a point in this case, since musicians are always appropriating their instruments, but he doesn't make this explicit. In the chapter about the microphone, Warner relates some beautiful parallels to the computer stories in the development of this technology. The microphone wasn't just used to record or amplify as it was designed for, but was by some people, Warner shows, discovered to make new sounds audible to the audience, and therefore offered new opportunites to the composer. Musicians made unexpected use of one of the drawbacks of the new equipment: the feedback whooping when the microphone would pick up it's own amplified sound. Certainly on some level, one can speak of appropriation here. A discussion on the applicability of ‘appropriation’ as a theoretical framework would have benefited this book.
Finally, the epilogue is a disappointment. In the introduction, Warner hints at a historical development that forever changed both the composers and the listeners profoundly, for better and for worse, democratizing the music scene. In the five chapters constituting the bulk of the book, he describes various ways in which this came about. A summary of this, and what it says about the historical development of music on a more general level, would have been welcome. As it stands, the reader must be content with just a few reminiscences, hinting more to the future of music than to its history.
Nevertheless, Warner's book has much to offer. Live Wires is a real page turner, which will keep the reader engaged. I recommended it to everyone who teaches a history-of-technology course and wants to illustrate the impact of technology using the history of music. Despite its shortcomings, it is a wonderful book to read: Warner is bound to baffle you, and because he is clearly knowledgeable about his subject, he raises awareness of a lot of new information, making this book a great introduction to a subject that deserves attention. Students are bound to hear something to their liking in the ‘Recommended listening’; historians will surely change their teaching on the subject. Thanks must go to Daniel Warner for this. I guess that the book would be most enjoyable as an ebook – so that you may actually listen to it.
