Hace dos semanas, leyendo un libro sobre música, encontré algo que me dejó bastante fuera de juego. El libro es bastante aburrido ya que tiene que ir construyendo un aparato teórico en el que exponer sus ideas y tiene que hacerlo con una metodología que sea evidente y asimilable por el lector. En particular hablaba sobre si hay relación directa entre la música y las emociones. Bien, lo que me asombró fue que la respuesta obvia (yo me he emocionado) fuera descartada por ser un apreciación subjetiva, y por tanto, un dato que no se puede comprobar. No se, es algo que se hace en todas partes: en un juicio, en el procedimiento científico, etc. La verdad es que me dejó bastante desencantado (mejor dicho, me recordó el porqué) con mucha de esa cosa que llamamos periodismo musical y el zumbido que aparece alrededor en foros, comentarios o blogs. El dato objetivo que se podía aportar eran los cambios fisiológicos, pero estos podían deberse a las circunstancias en las que uno se encontraba con la música más que por el propio objeto sonoro. Quiero decir, si uno va al dentista, tiene una entrevista de trabajo o hace un examen, ¿se debe a la situación (preámbulos, esperas, la visión de determinadas imágenes, objetos, etc.) o se debe al hecho en sí (la operación, entrevista, examen)? Además hay emociones que no producen “excitación. En ese momento el autor decidía invocar y explicar las teorías sobre la emoción en psicología, momento en el cual (haciendo honor a la inteligencia demostrada por el planteamiento) cerré el libro pensando que había sido escrito en 1954, y que esta rama del saber, sufre revoluciones que dejan los libros obsoletos en cuatro o cinco años. Según Wikipedia estas son las teorías surgidas a lo largo de los últimos siglos.

En cierto modo, esta anécdota me sirvió como puntilla, ya que llevaba bastante tiempo dándole vueltas a la necesidad de tener que reinterpretar esa historia más o menos oficial que todos conocemos de la historia del rock, más allá de la acumulación de fechas, lo estético o lo personal y ver como afectó a su devenir el estado de la tecnología disponible, las circunstancias económicas, los desarrollos empresariales, estrategias de mercado, la legislación vigente, etc. etc. Puede parecer una exageración, si al final lo que uno quiere decir que el nuevo disco de Al Green, Peter Broderick o Bun B no están mal, pero quiero quitarme el lastre de muchas ideas preconcebidas que uno hereda y no me importaría saber porque determinadas cosas se hicieron como se hicieron y como estas marcaron el devenir de los acontecimientos. Me acordé de esta parte de un artículo que Mark Sinker publicó hace bastantes años, como adelanto de su libro “The Electric Storm” (que todavía no ha publicado pero sigue rescribiendo a medida que el material va aflorando y la perspectiva va cambiando con la edad), que en parte pone en evidencia que cualquier acercamiento a un objeto siempre es incompleta, en la que contaba como se produjo el cambio de las orquestas de jazz al bebop y el rhythm & blues. En realidad esto, que parece tan largo es el resumen, la historia es bastante más larga y creo haber identificado el libro (bueno, en realidad es una serie de tres volúmenes) de donde surgió esta información que ya tengo encargado, pero en fin, sirva de apunte:

Throughout the 1940s, sectors of the music-producing world were contesting the reins and rewards of creative control. From the mid-1930s, radio programs in which disc jockeys spun records had been turning audiences on to modes of music presentation that dispended with real-time musicianship and musicians. In 1940, Judge Learned Hand at long last –but controversially – ruled for radio over publishers, that playing a disc on the airwaves did not infringe sheet-music copyright.

ASCAP (the American Society of Composers, Authors, and Publishers) had been set up in 1914 to collect royalties, in line with the 1909 U.S. copyright law, for live performance and to agitate for a royalty percentage on its collection for sheet music sales (to homes, orchestras, and player piano an music box companies) and also on the sales of disc recordings of songs. Since radio’s arrival in the 1920’s, ASCAP had been agitating for the payment of royalties for airplay of live and recorded material. A Supreme Court ruling in 1917 had established that not charging admission to a music performance in a hotel or a restaurant did not therefore make the performance an act of charity or excuse it from copyright levy.

But a second decision that same year had tied the institution of royalties directly into the writing of music for years to come: a former member of the Original Dixieland Jazz Band had sued for his share of proceeds of their hit record “Tiger Rag”, and one Judge Carpenter had ruled, in effect, that no claims could be made on the intellectual property rights of mere horrible noise. Here was affirmed with immense force in juridical-financial terms the link that classicism assumed between acceptable artistic creativity and competent paperwork. By establishing the noncopyrightable nature of music that wasn’t “writable” (in the dots-on-staff sense), a line was drawn dividing sound into composed music and chaos.

Radio stations argued that because they had bought a disc, they had already paid to use it as they wished; by playing recordings, they were publicizing compositions at least as much as exploiting them (and besides, may radio stations in the early 1920s made no profit at all). Individual agreements were reached over yearly license fees (for example, with New York’s pioneering WEAF, which did turn a profit), but in the 1930s as radio grew in power (along with the jukebox), conflict increased. In 1939, with ASCAP threatening to rescind radio’s right to play any ASCAP registered recordings if a general royalties agreement was not reached, a number of stations banded together to set up Broadcast Music Incorporated (BMI), a rival copyright registration service, which made a point of courting less respectable (or “writerly”) forms of music, including country, blues, and Latin, allowing jazz improvisers and others to register recorded songs for publication prior to their even having a written version (where ASCAP refused membership to anyone without at least five songs already published)- in paperwork terms, a blow on behalf of incompetence.

With Learned Hand’s ruling coming on top of BMI’s arrival, a furious ASCAP withdrew all permissions for its songs to go on air from December 1940, driving radio straight into BMI’s arms (greatly increasing the number of DJ’ed disc-only broadcasts, ASCAP having the lock on live performance). And with union allergic Disney turning on them, as well as certain big houses, held out for less than a year before settling for about a third of the percentage they’d been demanding (and very close to that percentage BMI had been structured by its radio masters to accommodate).
The year 1940 was also the year that James Caesar Petrillo was elected president of the American Federation of Musicians to carry on a war against the jukebox he had waged for years as a local union man in Chicago. In 1942, 140.000 angry AFM members voted in Dallas for militant action: an on-air ban of all recordings. When record companies ignored a demand that a royalty on every disc sold be paid into the AFM’s Perfomance Trust Fund –in compensation for moneys and work lost to the jukebox and to discs played on radio– Petrillo called a strike: from August 1942, no union member was to record. It lasted more than two years, until the youngest major, Decca, with no stockpiles to speak of and a commitment to the newest dance-music fashions, capitulated in September 1943. The following year, Victor and Columbia caved.
The victory was pyrrhic at best: the effects of BMI’s earlier triumph over ASCAP combined with the effects of the (other) world war, on musician movement and consumer desire, to shift the favoured surface of inscription for sound from staff to shellac groove –with the further result that such rowdy and nominally “unwritable” musics as bebop and rhythm and blues arrived in force to oust the subtle paper orchestrations of swing (or else to push them toward Las Vegas kitsch). A second recording strike, in 1948, would sputter out as the industry transformed technologically, replacing seventy-eights with thirty-threes and forty-fives, shellac with vinyl, and inserting magnetic tape (a war spoil from Nazi Germany) into the studio process. Vicious battles between BMI and ASCAP would surface again in the 1950s, but from the early 1940s, paper ownership and paper capability began losing their financial clout within the industry, and even more their aesthetic priority.