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    liveliness, but I guess they had their priorities.
    Although the quietest harmonic and dynamic details and complexities
    could now be heard, performing in these larger more reverberant halls meant
    that rhythmically things got less distinct and much fuzzier—less African, one might say. Even the jazz now played in these rooms became a kind of chamber
    music. Certainly no one danced, drank, or hollered out “Hell, yeah!” even if it was Goodman, Ellington, or Marsalis playing—bands that certainly swing.
    The smaller jazz clubs followed suit; no one dances anymore at the Blue Note or Village Vanguard, though liquor is very quietly served.
    One might conclude that removing the funky relaxed vibe from refined
    American concert music was not accidental. Separating the body from the head seems to have been an intended consequence—for anything to be serious, you
    couldn’t be seen shimmying around to it. (Not that any kind of music is aimed 22 | HOW MUSIC WORKS

    exclusively at either the body or head—that absolute demarcation is somewhat of an intellectual and social construct.) Serious music, in this way of thinking, is only absorbed and consumed above the neck. The regions below the neck
    are socially and morally suspect. The people who felt this way and enforced
    this way of encountering music probably didn’t take the wildly innovative and sophisticated arrangements of mid-century tango orchestras seriously either.
    The fact that it was wildly innovative and at the same time very danceable created, for twentieth-century sophisticates, a kind of cognitive dissonance.
    RECORDED MUSIC
    With the advent of recorded music in 1878, the nature of the places in
    which music was heard changed. Music now had to serve two very
    different needs simultaneously. The phonograph box in the parlor became a
    new venue; for many people, it replaced the concert hall or the club.
    By the thirties, most people were listening to music either on radio or on
    home phonographs.N People probably heard a greater quantity of music, and a
    greater variety, on these devices than they would ever hear in person in their lifetimes. Music could now be completely free from any live context, or, more properly, the context in which it was heard became the living room and the
    jukebox—parallel alternatives to still-popular ballrooms and concert halls.
    The performing musician was now expected to write and create for two
    very different spaces: the live venue, and the device that could play a recording or receive a transmission. Socially and acoustically, these spaces were worlds apart. But the compositions were expected to be the same! An audience who
    heard and loved a song on the radio naturally wanted to hear that same song at the club or the concert hall.
    These two demands seem unfair
    N
    to me. The performing skills, not
    to mention the writing needs, the
    instrumentation, and the acous-
    tic properties for each venue are
    completely different. Just as stage
    actors often seem too loud and
    demonstrative for audiences used
    DAV I D BY R N E | 23

    to movie acting, the requirements of musical mediums are somewhat mutually
    exclusive. What is best for one might work for the other, but it doesn’t always work that way.
    Performers adapted to this new technology. The microphones that
    recorded singers changed the way they sang and the way their instru-
    ments were played.O Singers no longer had to have great lungs to be success-
    ful. Frank Sinatra and Bing Crosby were pioneers when it came to singing
    “to the microphone.” They adjusted their vocal dynamics in ways that would
    have been unheard of earlier. It might not seem that radical now, but croon-
    ing was a new kind of singing back then. It wouldn’t have worked without
    a microphone.
    Chet Baker even sang in a whisper, as did João Gilberto, and millions fol-
    lowed. To a listener, these guys are whispering like a lover, right into your ear, getting completely inside your head. Music