London College of Music
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Musical Meaning and the Musicology of Record Production
Beitraege zur Popularmusikforschung Vol.38 (edited by D. Helms and T. Phelps) Bielefeld. (2012)
Download (.pdf) The stadium in your bedroom: functional staging, authenticity and the audience-led aesthetic in record production
Popular Music (2010), 29 : pp 251-266
This article will discuss how two major contributing factors, functional staging and perceived authenticity, have had... more This article will discuss how two major contributing factors, functional staging and perceived authenticity, have had and continue to have a powerful influence on the sound of record production across geographical boundaries and throughout history. Functional staging is a concept building on the idea of phonographic staging developed by William Moylan and Serge Lacasse and related to Allan Moore's ‘sound-box’. The staging of sounds in the record production process is considered to be functional if the reason for their particular placement or treatment is related to the practicalities of audience reception rather than to aesthetics. It is not a question of whether the music has a function or not but whether that function has influenced the staging of the recorded music. Thus the divergence of staging techniques used in dance music and rock music that began in the 1970s can be seen as resulting from the different functions the music was put to by the different audiences. Music that is played back through large speakers in a club for the purpose of dancing needs to maintain the clarity of the rhythmic elements and so the ‘drier’ techniques of drum and percussive instrument mixing that characterise dance music developed. Rock, however, was more frequently played back in the smaller, less ambient, home environment and so reverberation was added to simulate the atmosphere of the large-scale venue. At the same time, a variety of culturally constructed notions of authenticity have developed within different musical audiences. Why is it that Queen felt the need to inscribe ‘no synthesisers were used in the making of this album’ on their early records and yet Brian May felt entirely comfortable constructing multiple layered performance ‘patchworks’ of guitar tracks? Why might the use of one type of technological mediation be considered more or less authentic than another? Using examples taken from recordings from all around the world and from ‘art’ and ‘popular’ forms of music, this article will explore how audience-led cultural trends in recording and production practice have resulted in the particular ‘sounds’ of different recorded music genres.
The Medium In The Message: Phonographic staging techniques that utilize the sonic characteristics of reproduction media.
Proceedings of the Art of Record Production Conference. University of Massachusetts Lowell. 2008 http://www.artofrecordproduction.com
PhD in Studio Based Composition
Compositions and accompanying exegesis can be listened to and read at http:www.zagorski-thomas.com
Shouting Quietly: changing musical meaning by changing timbre through record production
Proceedings of the Conference on Interdisciplinary Musicology, Montreal. 2005
'Mares Eat And Does Eat Oats And Little Lambs Eat Ivy: non-verbal meaning in lyric performance
Proceedings of the International Association for the Study of Popular Music. Rome 2005
'The US vs, The UK Sound: meaning in record production in the 1970s
Proceedings of the Art of Record Production Conference. London 2005. http://www.artofrecordproduction.com
'Spotlihghting Gesture: shaping sound through record production to highlight gestural meaning in music intended for dance
Proceedings of Music & Gesture 2, The Royal Northern College of Music, Manchester. 2006.
Manipulating Groove Through Record Production
Invited Speaker for Workshop at the Rhythm In The Age of Digital Reproduction Research Centre, Oslo. 2006
"We Don't Write Songs, We Write Records": a compositional methodology based on late 20th century popular music
Proceedings of the International Conference on Computer Music. Tulane University, New Orleans. 2006
Functional Staging Through The Use of Production Techniques In Late 20th Century African and Cuban Popular Music Recordings
Proceedings of the Art of Record Production Conference. Edinburgh University. 2006 http://www.artofrecordproduction.com
Whose Line Is It Anyway? - some thoughts on performance, composition, record production and auteurship
Paper given at the CHARM / RMA Conference at Royal Holloway. Sep. 2007
Gesturing Producers and Scratching Musicians
Proceedings of the Art of Record Production Conference. Queensland University of Technology, Brisbane Dec 2007. http://www.artofrecordproduction.com
Real and Unreal Performances
Chapter in Anthology on Rhythm In The Age of Digital Reproduction edited by Anne Danielsen. Forthcoming 2010