In my column today, I reflect a bit on how far we’ve come in our ability to communicate the performance of music. It’s what I like to do on my KOWS  and KWTF shows, Deeper Roots: A Century of America’s Music.

A continuum is defined by Webster’s as “a continuous sequence in which adjacent elements are not perceptibly different from each other, although the extremes are quite distinct.” Folk and popular music have fed off themselves since the early 19th century, each evolving from ancestral roots, primarily of either European or African descent. Our ability to communicate the song at the time was ‘mouth to ear’ in different ways:  minstrelsy, churches, barn dances, front rooms, parlors and front porches. Printed music was also available in either scripted or shape-note form.

We now find ourselves on the other end of that great continuum. It’s a digital world right now; a time when we are exposed to the music as our senses pressed up against a glass of light and sound. This is a relatively new mechanism, this notion of ‘writing a performance to paper’ so that it can be repeated the same time by mechanically etching it onto a disc for a Victrola or arranging, on a high speed sheath of magnetic film in a disc drive, the elements of signals in ways that we might have created a Wooly Willy face in our childhood. In their macro form they are mechanical processes, and there is little difference in their application. While some may perceive some great and technologically profound difference, someday it will be looked upon as pretty much the same because the two technologies can be described in one word: kinetic. One (vinyl) is spinning at 33 RPM and the other (disc), is spinning at upwards of 7200 RPM.  Vinyl evangelists are no doubt correct that the feeling and depth of sound found in a record is very different than the CD or other digital form. But that discussion is for another time.

I digress…what is important here is that, no matter the media used to transmit the performance, the opportunity we are afforded is the ability to witness the evolution of the uniquely human form of communication: music. As we listen, we can hear the essence of the phrasings and verses, as well as the human factor of what was trying to be communicated at a particular time in human history. Tout simplement magnifique!