The Late Voice

Time, Age and Experience in Popular Music

Richard Elliott

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781628920642
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Music History & Criticism

Popular music artists, as performers in the public eye, offer a privileged site for the witnessing and analysis of ageing and its mediation. The Late Voice undertakes such an analysis by considering issues of time, memory, innocence and experience in modern Anglophone popular song and the use by singers and songwriters of a 'late voice'. Lateness here refers to five primary issues: chronology (the stage in an artist's career); the vocal act (the ability to convincingly portray experience); afterlife (posthumous careers made possible by recorded sound); retrospection (how voices 'look back' or anticipate looking back); and the writing of age, experience, lateness and loss into song texts. There has been recent growth in research on ageing and the experience of later stages of life, focusing on physical health, lifestyle and psychology, with work in the latter field intersecting with the field of memory studies. The Late Voice seeks to connect age, experience and lateness with particular performers and performance traditions via the identification and analysis of a late voice in singers and songwriters of mid-late twentieth century popular music.

1

Time, Age, Experience and Voice

Does some story link one sound to another?

Italo Calvino

Time

Introducing her performance of ‘Who Knows Where the Time Goes’ on the album Black Gold (1970), Nina Simone extends the question laid out in the song’s title and refrain by adding further questions: ‘What is this thing called time? . . . What does it do? . . . Is it a thing?’¹ Of the many things that time confirms for us, one is that, despite the remarkable endeavours of philosophy, art and science, we are only partially closer to solving the mysteries of time than those forebears who first meditated on them at length. Even to note this is to fall into the time-worn path laid out by other introductions to the topic. Paul Ricoeur, for example, begins his classic three-volume Time and Narrative with a direct question from Augustine’s Confessions – ‘What, then, is time?’ – and devotes his first chapter to Augustine’s exploration of the experience of time, before going on to connect it with Aristotle’s theory of plot.² Augustine’s question appears again in Eva Hoffman’s book Time, at the start of a chapter on ‘Time and the Mind’; here, it is immediately coupled with Augustine’s own response: ‘If no man ask me the question, I know; but if I pretend to explicate it to anybody, I know it not.’³ By placing this reference at the start of my own exploration, I wish to highlight the perennial importance of mental time, the human attempt to come to terms with temporal experience. Hoffman distinguishes between time as connected to the body, to the mind and to culture, while recognising the important interconnection of all these aspects. Reflecting on the first of these, she writes that ‘to be alive is to feel the passage of time, and to have time working through us in every cell, nerve ending and organ, as it takes us through its paces and plays in our bodies its mortal, vital tune’.⁴ The metaphor of the tune is an apt one for my own study and I wish to retain this idea of the body as an instrument on which, and through which, the work of time, age and experience can be heard. As we pass through time and space – to put a more active stance on what we may think we are doing – so time passes through us, leaving its marks on us. We experience this passage, as Hoffman says, in all aspects of our biology. But it is as a mental exercise that we attempt to stop time, to reflect upon it. As Hoffman notes, ‘If the propositions of the phenomenologists – Husserl, Bergson, Merleau-Ponty, Heidegger – still have resonance for us today, it is because they tried to analyse perceptions of time as a function of consciousness and subjectivity, rather than as an absolute, objective reality.’⁵

Mental time can be thought of, as Augustine suggested long ago, as ‘expectation, attention and memory’. The future passes through the present into the past, as in Augustine’s famous example of the recitation of a verse:

Suppose that I am going to recite a psalm that I know. Before I begin, my faculty of expectation is engaged by the whole of it. But once I have begun, as much of the psalm as I have removed from the province of expectation and relegated to the past now engages my memory, and the scope of the action which I am performing is divided between the two faculties of memory and expectation, the one looking back to the part which I have already recited, the other looking forward to the part which I have still to recite. But my faculty of attention is present all the while, and through it passes what was the future in the process of becoming the past. As the process continues, the province of memory is extended in proportion as that of expectation is reduced, until the whole of my expectation is absorbed. This happens when I have finished my recitation and it has passed into the province of memory.What is true of the whole psalm is also true of the parts and of each syllable. It is true of any longer action in which I may be engaged and of which the recitation of the psalm may only be a small part. It is true of a man’s whole life, of which all his actions are parts. It is true of the whole history of mankind, of which each man’s life is a part.⁶

That Augustine uses the examples of recitation and resonance makes appropriate the connection, if not the strict application, of his theories to music. Other thinkers have been drawn to similar analogies, such as when Husserl uses melody as an example of retention and protention, his way of explaining the flow of time through the present. For philosophers of time, there are important differences and disagreements to be highlighted in the theories of Augustine, Husserl and others, though it is not the purpose of this book to engage in those debates, nor to pick a ‘winning’ theory to apply to popular songs. Nor is the experience of music as time passing a primary concern here, though I do believe that an awareness of this possibility should be maintained. What can be done with a melody, and hence what can be done with time, are certainly important aspects of musical affect. Singers can play tricks with our expectations and use vocal art to alter our sense of time. Examples might include the use of tempo rubato (‘stolen time’), rhythm and vocal phrasing, all of which affect our sense of the perception of time by opening up a long present of expectation and surprise, a dialectic engagement with song. As Philip Ward writes of Sandy Denny’s vocal art, her ‘rubato elongation of a line seems to make time stand still’.⁷

Songs pass through us from future into past. Like Augustine’s recited verse, they are, in one sense, fixed, bounded and knowable objects. But they are also, to adopt something closer to a Husserlian approach, examples of the open, infinite future of possible time; cloud-like they are there ahead of us and pass through us (and the present) into the past. Once they have passed, they are not simply contained in some locker room of the mind, but rather, in order to still exist, they must be replayed and pass through us again. This passing is both a process of continual loss and the promise of something regained; as such, it can be a cause of consternation and anxiety. Perhaps the desire to fix time has lain behind the many attempts to explain it, whether poetically or scientifically (or both, as in the precise, searching lines of T. S. Eliot’s Four Quartets, to which I’ll return below). The fantasy that one can fix time, or understand it as being motionless, recurs in various logical explanations from Zeno’s famous paradoxes, through Newton’s observations on time, space and motion to Russell’s philosophical treatises and beyond. In a reflection on the passage of time and the experience of ageing, Jean Améry argues that such logical attempts to fix time are of little help when contemplating its ceaseless, unidirectional flow:

Time has passed, flowed by, rolled on, blown away, and we pass with it . . . like smoke in a strong wind. We ask ourselves what time might actually be, about which we say that everything glides and runs by with it – ask ourselves with a tenacious naïveté that borders on total ridiculousness, and then are taught by those thinkers who are so adroit in logical play that the question, when asked in such a banal form, is deceptive. . . . Answers exist to many questions about time, and sufficiently sharp and well-trained thinkers have tried to find them. But what they’ve come away with has little to do with our concerns.⁸

For Améry, ‘logical play . . . has little to do’ with his concerns because his concerns are with the inevitability of ageing and the end of life. To stare at mortality in the stark light of this inevitability, which is what Améry wishes to do, is to find all other explanations of time – logical, illogical or paradoxical – irrelevant.

Music can be a form of escape from the realities of time or it may invite us to reflect on mortality and inevitability. The singer-songwriter Guy Clark plays on the notion of time as escape on his second album Texas Cookin’ (1976), the back sleeve of which contains the following message for the listener: ‘Once upon a good time we got together and made a record of ourselves having a good time making a record – this is it.’ The album’s fourth track, ‘It’s About Time’, contains more such playfully reflexive lines, describing tunes that drift through halls ‘trying to put a stop to clocks on the wall’ and a record player that ‘fakes it’ in order for a couple to ‘keep time’ with each other by dancing. ‘It’s only time’, sings Clark, ‘And only time will tell.’⁹ But even without this lyrical reflexivity, music can be understood to be taking us way from time, or putting us in a different configuration of time. Music, in Simon Frith’s formulation, ‘enables us to experience time aesthetically, intellectually, and physically in new ways. . . . [It] allows us to stop time, while we consider how it passes’.¹⁰

Music may be seen as a model of passing time but it is also a removal from everyday time, in which time may even be retrospectively experienced as having stood still. As Paul Virilio notes, ‘At a concert, when the musical motor shuts off, not only is there a liberating violence of ovations and handclapping but also a thunderstorm of sneezing, coughing, scraping of feet – as if everyone suddenly reacquired possession of his own body.’¹¹ Such experiences might leave one legitimately wondering just where the time went, though it should perhaps be noted that this is only likely to occur at a performance in which one is fully engaged. We have surely all experienced concerts in which we find ourselves bored and in which time suddenly seems to drag; when this occurs, one can become all too aware of the body as one shifts uneasily in one’s seat or, as is more likely in a popular music context, from one foot to another. For the drift to work, we require an engagement over time such that we lose track of time. However, while the experience of listening to music understandably provides a typical example, such moments of contemplative loss can come upon us in many other situations. Sylviane Agacinski connects the examples of a gazer on the shore and a moviegoer:

The one whose eyes follow the flight of a gull over the sea adopts the temporality of that flight; his time becomes the gull’s time. The stroller’s idleness is similar to the idleness of someone at a play or a movie. Each of them yields to the rhythm of a movement that is not their own. In forgetting his own movement, and thus his own time, the stroller embraces the time of things. But the gull’s time is not the departing boat’s time, or the rock’s time emerging from the waves, or the child’s time playing on the beach. In the midst of a world that passes at such different speeds, the contemplative observer loses time. He no longer has his own time, and he feels the absence of absolute temporality. When we leave a movie theater, we also leave the film, and its temporality that our thoughts had so intimately embraced, to rediscover our own time and our own life. For an instant, we remain suspended between two times.¹²

That Agacinski can provide a rich variety of temporal experiences without once mentioning music or listening serves as a reminder that music, while often presented as the ultimate art of time rather than space, is not unique in its focus on temporality. Casting our eyes over a painting or sculpture is a temporal as much as a spatial experience, not only in that it takes us time to take it all in, but also in that we may discern a narrative of some kind being communicated to us in the artwork, one that, like all narratives, unfolds over time. So too with reading, as Michel de Certeau highlights:

[S]ince he is incapable of stockpiling (unless he writes or records), the reader cannot protect himself from the erosion of time (while reading, he forgets himself and he forgets what he has read) unless he buys the object (book, image) which is no more than a substitute (the spoor or promise) of moments ‘lost’ in reading.¹³

Leonard Cohen, the poet and singer-songwriter whose work I discuss later in this book, makes a distinction between poems and songs by saying that, whereas one can linger over a poem because of its spatial representation, reading backwards if necessary, one experiences the song as a unidirectional force in which it is impossible to go back in time. This is certainly true, and even if one attempts a thought experiment in which a combination of rewinding and replaying is made analogous to the processes of reading backwards or jumping across the space of the poem, there is a sense that the musical work falls apart more obviously during such processes. At the same time, we should recall the role of poetry as a spoken, recited or chanted medium, which also prevents such lingering, and music as a temporal flow made spatial in the process of notation or sonic visualisation. The cutting, splicing, sampling and repetition of the musical text by producers, hip hop artists and other kinds of remixers and remasterers rely on the notion of an analysis every bit as spatial as that of poetic exegesis. We might think of songs as poems voiced (and hence timed) and of poems as speech made spatial; both processes recognise a dynamic interaction of time and space.

Then there is representation. I am as interested in the ways in which texts, as well as being temporal processes – things that take time – also take time as their theme, as in the Sandy Denny and Guy Clark songs quoted earlier. Where any sentence or melody would do for a Husserlian account of temporal flow, I am interested in the signifying power, in the semantics of what is delivered in that flow. To take an example from the world of poetry, T. S. Eliot’s Four Quartets is a work devoted to the contemplation of time, particularly in its opening poem ‘Burnt Norton’. The poem contains numerous lines on the temporal flow of words and music, presenting itself as a philosophical treatise on the experience of passing time, time past and – in the religious preoccupations that come to dominate the Four Quartets – time to come. As a work of poetry, it is also an example of aesthetic experience and, if the distinction is necessary, the aestheticisation of experience. The famous opening lines of ‘Burnt Norton’, in which we read that ‘Time present and time past / Are both perhaps present in time future / And time future contained in time past’, strike the keynote of the poem not only in the preoccupation with the words ‘time’, ‘present’, ‘past’ and ‘future’, but also in the establishment of a twisting, riddling style that will continue through the poem. This twisting represents both the restlessness and indecision of the mind when faced with ‘big issues’ and the slippery nature of fixing the experience of temporal flow, echoing attempts across the centuries to account for such experience. The rest of the poem depicts a process of wandering and looking for stillness: ‘the still point of the turning world’. Eliot uses speech and music as examples of things which will not stay still, just as memory will not stay still. There is a dialectic process at play: ‘Except for the point, the still point, / There would be no dance, and there is only the dance.’¹⁴ And, without the dance, there would be no desire for the still point, for the point in time and space where one might halt the dance for long enough to contemplate it fully. The Four Quartets constantly contrast the transient with the eternal, the latter understood via Eliot’s religious beliefs. In doing so they provide an unexpected but interesting comparison with the religiously inflected old-time songs discussed in the next chapter, which often contrast the ‘short life of trouble’ with the eternal hereafter.¹⁵ More pertinently for the general points I wish to make here, the poems provide an explicit example of the ways in which the contemplation of time can be represented in a form which, as Eliot shows via constant linguistic play and reference to language’s incapacity to fix time, is itself subject to time.

Four Quartets highlights contemplative time, in that the poet takes a significant amount of time to get to grips with time and asks of his readers that we also take time with the poem: time to read it in the first place (it is quite long) and time to return to it, to dwell on its layers of meaning. It is also a visual device and so we are invited to let our gazes drift across the f...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title
• Introduction
• 1  Time, Age, Experience and Voice
• 2  ‘Won’t You Spare Me Over till Another Year?’: Ralph Stanley’s Late Voice
• 3  September of My Years: Age and Experience in the Work of Frank Sinatra and Leonard Cohen
• 4  Time Out of Mind: Bob Dylan, Age and Those Same Distant Places
• 5  Both Sides Now: Joni Mitchell, Neil Young and the Innocence and Experience of the Singer-Songwriter
• Conclusion: Late Thoughts
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• Copyright