The great American artist Robert Rauschenberg designed Talking Heads limited edition cover of Talking Heads Speaking In Tongues, so David Byrne as Renaissance man is not a shock. However, Byrne’s speech at the TED conference (Technology, Entertainment, Design) about the influence of the architecture of a venue on musi was a first even for him.
. I had never really thought deeply about this, it is obvious it would be difficult to play an acoustic show in a sport stadium, or heavy metal in a tiny place, but David Byrne proposes an original idea. Do we make music to fit a context? Is there an adaptation of music according to the specific venue of the time?
According to the romantic and traditional view he mentions at the end of his talk, creation is often considered as a passion, an outpouring of emotions that shape into something. But his thesis is quite convincing, the vessel these emotions are going to be injected into is there first, artists are intuitively aware of it and are going to shape their creation in function of this vessel. And he goes on with examples as diverse as CBGBs and punk rock where musicians had to play loud enough to overcome people shouting out and falling down, the Disney hall or the Carnegie hall and symphonic music which sounds so great there because of the acoustics, the cathedrals and the religious music which has long notes, almost no rhythm and does not change keys.
According to this logic, you would not want to hear a loud rock band in a church because of the reverberation. However, Arcade Fire did perform in churches several times and even renovated a little church and transformed it into their recording studio. No wonder they wrote these organ songs for ‘Neon Bible’!
So if musicians seem to adapt their music to the available venue, there is an exception with Wagner who built an opera house specially designed for the performance of his operas! I don’t know what band could do that today, not even U2! Talking about U2 could you imagine them anywhere else than in a large arena? U2 has built their music to fit these huge places.
The Motown Records’ headquarters in Detroit, Michigan, a former photographers’ studio, (nickname ‘Hitsville U.S.A.’) forged the sound of many Motown artists, from Smokey Robinson, Marvin Gaye to the Supremes, and the Jackson 5.
Then come the loud, full-blasting music designed for car sound systems, the whispering and intimate music designed for the microphone and the current music for the mp3 and the ipod.
This is a whole new perspective on creation, the realization there is an evolutionary process, music co-evolves with its physical environment.
Many bands have embraced architectural ideas in their names (like the gothic rock group Bauhaus which took its name after the German Bauhaus art movement, literally ‘House of Building’ or Architecture in Helsinski), and some movements like minimalist, gothic or baroque apply to architecture as well as to music. There are chamber music made to be played in a palace chamber, house music made to be played in discotheques, garage rock, cabaret music and elevator music…
But environment is a large idea, Byrne was only talking about buildings and venues.
And when there are no buildings? Can you imagine the early Beach Boys’ music played elsewhere than in a place related to the beach or the surf culture? Surf rock, space rock, country rock, at least music is sometimes categorized by a location.
This idea could go on forever.
Music and buildings have probably influence each other reciprocally, in symbiosis.
Which one came first? The venue or the music?
But we still can choose our environment and may be more artists will participate in creating the environment in which they perform.
After all this, you have to wonder if the ipod is the next venue? I mean, people still go to live shows in mass but at least as many (or more) people listen to their music almost exclusively on their ipod. The intimacy of the listening experience with the mp3 player is probably changing the music we listen to.
In 2005-9, David Byrne experimented even more about this fusion between buildings and music with his sound installation ‘Playing the Building’: he converted the infrastructure of a building into a giant musical instrument by attaching devices to the metal beams, pillars, heating pipes, water pipes. The devices, which do not produce sound themselves, were causing the building elements to vibrate, resonate and oscillate so that the building itself became a large musical instrument.
He is such a weird and entertaining guy!