In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Technology and Culture 45.2 (2004) 442-444



[Access article in PDF]
The Poetics of Rock: Cutting Tracks, Making Records. By Albin J. Zak III. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001. Pp. xvii+259. $48/$18.95.

Even after a century of sound recording, Albin Zak observes in The Poetics of Rock (p. xvii), "records remain mysterious to most people who listen to them. They hold a fundamental place in the dynamics of modern musical life, but what do they represent?" Two aims, unveiling the mystery of record making and unpacking the meaning of records, form the core of Zak's study. In the first he succeeds admirably, and as "an exploration of musical [End Page 442] composition in the recording studio—cutting tracks, making records" (p. xvi) The Poetics of Rock is one of the best. As to the meaning of records, his argument, while intricate and partly compelling, nevertheless overlooks an important, if obvious, aspect of the experience of listening to records, namely, that they are (most often) songs imbued with meanings apart from their sonic identities. Readers of Technology and Culture should be aware that The Poetics of Rock is not a history, but that should not detract from its value as a study of "recordists and their creative process" (p. xii). And for those historians who are also music lovers, particularly those interested in understanding how technology and practice have shaped rock composition, there is plenty here.

The book opens with an account of a recording session in a New York studio in which a bassist overdubs parts on a prerecorded track, listens to the results, then hones her performance not for its own sake but for its "durability" as part of the record. This process, Zak wants the reader to understand, is more than simply perfecting a performance; it is "record making," tantamount to musical composition, not something undertaken by the bassist alone but by the recording team. "All employ both intuition and deliberation in a collective effort to produce the record, and all are responsible in some way for the sonic inscriptions that form the record's essential identity" (p. xii). That often overlooked but essential fact established for the reader, Zak goes on to explore what he calls "the practice and language of record making" (p. xiv), which is itself a product of the records that have gone before. He does so by offering a wealth of philosophical reflections and accounts of recording sessions ranging across the stylistic continuum of rock, culled largely from interviews with recordists (artists, engineers, producers) in magazines like Mix, EQ, and Keyboard. But his sources also include works of musical analysis, biographies, and histories, as well as liner notes and the recordings themselves.

Zak, an assistant professor of musicology at the University of Michigan School of Music, as well as a songwriter and recordist, knows the territory well. His seven chapters cover every aspect of recording and offer both deft technical descriptions and imaginative writing about the meaning of music and the sonic qualities of recordings. Some truly evocative prose makes much of this book pleasurable reading. The only drawback to Zak's design is that it presumes a familiarity with a wide-ranging body of rock music; for his anecdotes to have their intended impact, the reader should have the song being discussed in mind. Talking about particular artists and their work can have the sedative effect of a jargon-laden monograph to those who do not possess the shared language Zak locates at the nexus between records and rhetoric, orality and literacy.

In his final chapter Zak turns from the empirical examples of record making to a more theoretical approach to his other aim, exploring the meaning of records. The "poetic/aesthetic economy of rock" (p. 184), he [End Page 443] argues, involves artists, fans, critics, and historians who listen to and interpret records in terms of other records. In other words, writing about music, as well as making records, invariably incorporates references to other music to invoke associations, what he calls the "intertextual reference . . . so prevalent in rock...

pdf

Share