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Resounding New York City (1984)

As a native New Yorker, who has lived here my entire adult life (and dislikes leaving it, even for an afternoon in "the country"), I have always treasured (and even written about) the literature and art of my home town. Nonetheless, it seems to me that though the greatest books appear to capture much of New York City, the place still exceeded the capacities of either authors' imaginations or their medium. Not only was too much left out, but one recurring problem apparent to me is a failure to acknowledge how unprecedented and how extraordinary this City was--how it became a second nature that had all the coherence and comprehensiveness of primary nature and yet was completely apart and different from it. Too many authors in writing about New York seemed too eager to connect it to something old, such as birds and trees--to see the old in the new--rather than accept the city as a wholly unprecedented environment. Appreciative of this New York literature, yet aware of its inadequacies, I had come to regard New York City as one of the most fertile and challenging subjects for art.

Soon after I commenced to do creative work, beginning with visual poetry in 1967, I thought of doing a book of many pictures and few words that would emphasize images peculiar to New York--not only the familiar, extravagantly vertical landscapes unique to this city but such more subtle, less familiar peculiarities as rows of retail stores selling exactly the same items: jewelry stores on 47th Street, Chinese restaurants in Chinatown, or bridal shops that ran at that time along a certain block of Grand Street, just east of the Bowery. (That such stores could survive, amidst immediate competitors, is a fact that by itself implicitly distinguishes New York.) My ambition then was to put between covers a New York that had never been there before, with examples that would at once be unfamiliar and yet be comprehensively illuminating. It follows that I wanted these photographs to run off the margins of the page, to burst through traditional frames, just as the city itself is perpetually exceeding its frames and running off the margins of itself; for the design of the book I felt should be, in principle, as different from other books as New York City is different from other cities. My notion then was to make a book that was not just a representation of New York but an imaginative, stylish distillation of its uniqueness. However, unable to find a sponsor for this project, I let it recede into dormant memory. (Anyone familiar with my work now, so much of it in media other than books, might find it significant that at the time I thought initially and only in terms of a book!)

In the mid 1970s, I became involved in making imaginative radio, usually acoustically resetting earlier literary texts of mine; my esthetic intention was to realize on tape experiences of spoken language that could not be done live. I made duets with myself, using radically different amplifications for each voice; I made choruses of myself, in one case speaking in unison, in another case nonsynchronously. I used multitrack tape to make a fugue in which my own voice is multiplied up to 512 semblances of itself, and another fugue of four ministers speaking the first four books of the New Testament, the Gospels, simultaneously. For another piece I recorded prayers spoken by sixty ministers in twenty-five languages and then composed them into duets, trios, quintets and choruses ostensibly about the particular sound of the language of prayer, incidentally putting into the same acoustic space ministers who would not normally be heard together. These tapes were broadcast widely, not only in concerts accompanying my own tours, but over radio stations here and abroad. By the l980s I was able to obtain commissions for my strongest designs, not from American sponsors, alas, but from the great German radio stations. It is scarcely surprising that I began to think about doing an audio piece/program about New York City.

My first thought, which seems ever more odd in retrospect, was to write out of my own head a New York replica of Dylan Thomas's Under Milk Wood (1953), which survives in my memory as a model warm evocation of one's home town. I conceived of indigenous characters and outlined characteristics of their speech; but once I tried to write their lines, I realized the futility of this approach. The trouble was not just that the languages of New York are not as universally appealing as Welsh English; I cannot write like Dylan Thomas and, though awed, would not want to. Moreover, the more I thought about Under Milk Wood, I realized that it represented the climax of a certain period of creative radio, when most shows were done live (or initially in live time, even if they were recorded for later broadcast), because the only recording technology available at the time was wire that, though it could but cut, could not be reconnected without leaving an audible noise. By the end of the 1950s came the development of, first, audiotape, which could be cut apart and spliced together without making any atrocious telltale sounds, and then multitrack tape, which enabled the audio artist not only to make stereo effects but, more important, to put within a single acoustic frame sounds drawn from disparate sources. (In truth, audiotape arrived so quickly, and was accepted so widely as a cheaper and more practical storage medium, that its extraordinary significance for composition is still not commonly acknowledged.)

Working thirty years after Thomas, I had necessarily become familiar with audiotape editing and multitracking; so I decided that instead of writing my New York City on sheets of paper, it would be more appropriate for me collect the materials of my piece--to gather those sounds that make New York City audibly so different from everywhere else in the world. From the elements of this collection I would then compose, along certain principles suggested not only by the material but by my knowledge and experience of the city, a kind of symphony that would, like Under Milk Wood, be a warm radio portrait of one's home town. This proposal appealed to Klaus Schöning who had produced earlier works of mine at Westdeutscher Rundfunk (Köln). He commissioned the engineer John David Fullemann, a fellow New Yorker, to accompany me in field recordings and multitrack mixing. Typically for now, I began with a literary concept and a literary model, but both my means and ends were indigenous to arts other than books.

And so we went out into New York, with both an Uher 4200 reel-to-reel machine and an Aiwa miniature "walkman" recorder whose eraser head had been removed. We had two sets of stereo microphones: a pair of highly visible foot-long directional microphones pointed 90 degrees apart at their base, and then a pair of tiny bullet-shaped Sonys, initially designed to be clipped to the lapels of a television interviewee. We clipped them, instead, towards the bottom ends of the headband of our hip walkman earphones. An uneducated eye might notice that our earphones appeared to have an extra piece. We focused, as I said, upon sounds unique to New York, and so initially recorded all kinds of subways, which I'll discuss later. We also recorded densities within circumscribed spaces, such as Grand Central Station at rush hour, the passageways at the Atlantic Avenue subway intersection, the OTB betting parlors, a bank of electronic cash registers at a popular grocery store, the celebrants at the centennial of the Brooklyn Bridge walking through the canyons of lower Manhattan or a certain popular retail store (47th St. Photo) that has low ceilings and scores of customers. We recorded the floor of the Commodities Exchange, where hundreds of traders continuously shout their bids in a numeric shorthand; we recorded automotive traffic jams that sound considerably different in the canyons of the city than in the open spaces of the country. At least a dozen merchants lowered their front security shutters before our electronic ears. We recorded police sirens that are particularly piercing and then garbage trucks that are incomparably noisy, the first by design, the second apparently by neglect. We planted our stereo shotguns under the Brooklyn Bridge, whose metal grating resounds in a singular way, and later captured the less obvious vibrations of the Staten Island Ferry docking. We recorded men playing handball and basketball, and even caught the beginnings of ethnic conflict. We captured a Mets baseball game in which airplanes continually fly overhead, thanks to the amount of traffic at nearby La Guardia Airport, and then a Yankees game where the veteran public address announcer has a memorable speaking style. We simply panned down the radio dial in a city that has a dense variety of stations, each with a definite style, incidentally broadcasting in several languages. We recorded several of the City's most striking radio voices--the abrasive pitchman for Crazy Eddie, Larry Wachtel, among others. We bought lots of finger foods, if only to record salespeople's' talk. The distinctive speech of New York we found in various places: a Mayor whose voice is at once instantly identifiable and yet so patently New Yorkish; the voices speaking on the telephone answering machines of public institutions, such as government offices or movie houses.

We especially listened to two kinds of talk I regard as more typical of New York than elsewhere. The first kind is languages other than English that are nonetheless filled with English words (that stand as aural signs of the continuing acculturation of immigrants). We found one Chinese greengrocer who invariably interrupted his Chinese monologue to quote prices in English, and another whose Chinese was riddled with "okay" and "thank you." We recorded radio advertisements in which Portuguese (or another language) is interrupted by street addresses with numbers in English. We also caught people speaking English and another language in alternate sentences or, sometimes, simultaneously. The best German example of this last phenomenon came from two women in a fancy food store in the once-German Yorkville section; the best Spanish example came from a playground whiffleball game among teenagers.

The second kind of language more prevalent here, in my experience, is edgy, aggressive speech which I associate first of all with people who are regularly in conflict situations: taxi drivers, salesmen with unfixed prices, tradesmen, service workers. Not unlike city people elsewhere, New Yorkers in public are quick to escalate the volume of their voices (and, sometimes to the surprise of outsiders, just as quick to drop the volume). We found this edgy quality not only in English-speaking New Yorkers but in Spanish-speaking and Russian-speaking New Yorkers, among others. We recorded a street pitchman promoting a scam called "three-card monte" and an aggressive East Indian street seller who, though he had an Anglo-Indian accent, hawked his goods with New York style. We also found New Yorkers wise-cracking before an audience of strangers, exemplifying customs that would be unknown in the provinces. We heard an abundance of vibrant male New York speech in populous legal betting parlors, called OTB's, which I recommend to all tourists who like to listen to special human talk. (My own favorite OTB sits on the corner of Canal and Centre Streets in downtown Manhattan. In its tight space are usually groups of Chinese, Hispanics, alcoholics, and blacks, each with their own verbal styles, in addition to a central table around which appear to congregate, in a continuing conversation, representatives from all groups.) My intern Sherian Xavier took even more surreptitious Aiwa microphones into places I could not go--to a Jamaican barbershop whose customers talk as though they were still outdoors, and to a welfare line where women scream at their children and at each other.

Some of our New York City sounds are so subtle that I sometimes wonder if outsiders can understand them. In one sequence, our microphones move without comment from the vehicular noise of Eighth Avenue to the human noise of the main bus station, suddenly changing acoustic universes. In another sequence, we caught a sonic phenomenon that seems indigenous to New York. Here, if the burglar alarm goes off on a car that remains otherwise unharmed, especially in a nonresidential area, the police generally ignore it, contending that they have other more important things to do; and the car's alarm will blare until it runs down or its owner returns to cut it off. We recorded one of these interminable alarms first on the street, amid passers-by with loud portable radios, and then moved into a nearby diner where the alarm could still be heard, albeit in muffled form. As our recording continues, the alarm from time to time becomes louder only to return to its muffled state, because, it should be clear, the door separating the diner from the street opens and closes. This scene was so evocative to me that I let it stand by itself--unmixed with anything else. However, in my observation, few listeners can figure out, without my telling them, why the alarm's sound should increase and decrease! (And while I think in principle that everything in the piece should be comprehensible, even to non-New Yorkers, I also like the subtlety of this section too much to cut it. Maybe no one needs to understand precisely why a siren's volume should fluctuate; that is by itself a mysterious New York experience.)

I saved for last our taping of subways, because they are such a rich reservoir of distinctive New York sounds. Nowhere else, in my experience, has turnstiles as noisy as ours (if their subways have turnstiles at all). They make their strongest sound at rush hour when scores of people pour through a bank of them, their footsteps becoming a sort of sustained ground bass to the more varying crunching percussion. Nowhere else, in my experience, are the subways so loud, but anyone who listens carefully can perceive that they are loud in different ways:

1.) The very loud rumble made by an express train on an extended route, such as 125th Street to 59th Street, on the A or D train, especially if the subway car is old enough to lacks air conditioning, its windows must be opened.

2.) The even louder noise made by an express train roaring through a station where only locals stop. (If the first sound is best perceived from inside the train, this one is best heard outside.) Perhaps the loudest (and thus most useful to us) is at 59th Street, Columbus Circle, on the 7th Avenue IRT.

3.) A duet made by an express train speeding behind a local that is coming to a stop, as the sounds of one train appear to resonate through another. (Indeed, this concept of two classes of urban trains, one faster than the other, running on parallel tracks, appears to be unique to New York, though, of course, common on suburban routes.)

4.) The ear-splitting screeches made by trains on curves. Some of these are caused by the age of the system's tracks; others result from the current use of cars that are far longer than what the system's original designers had in mind. The track at Union Square is so sharply curved that most cars screech even at slow speeds. The southbound track at 42nd Street, also on the Lexington Avenue line, offers another high pitched screech; my own nemesis is the BMT (RR train) in lower Manhattan.

5.) Subways passing overhead on elevated lines can be especially noisy if you are directly underneath them, or the space underneath them is surrounded on both sides by buildings that rise at least to the height of the elevated track. The one we recorded runs over Brighton Beach Avenue.

6.) Conductors announcing stations or other advice through shamelessly abrasive loudspeakers. Why the amplification systems should sound like lawnmowers I do not know, but nothing similar I have heard in subways anywhere else approaches ours for volume and noise.

7.) The clanking of special trains, such as the one that collects garbage cans or another that collects money from the token booths. They appear to be built upon the chasses of cars so noisy no passenger could tolerate them.

8.) A speeding train recorded from the shelves between the cars. This is possible only on older cars (as doors at the end of newer air-conditioned cars are sealed) and is thus ever more louder.

Of course, there are other New York subway sounds that are not necessarily ear-splitting, such as the unamplified, human-scale shouting matches that sometimes break out between conductors trying to close the doors and impatient riders trying to squeeze their bodies through. These exchanges of edgy speech happen most frequently at the Times Square end of the shuttle that runs to Grand Central Station. Another is the normal friendly conversation over subway noise. (If you electronically filter out the background roar, this can sound like shouting.) Trains going over the bridges that connect Manhattan to the outer boroughs also make unusual sounds that are best heard from outside, on the bridge; and when two trains cross each other on such bridges, there yet another striking sound. Trains passing over the creaky Manhattan Bridge sometimes sway from side to side, creating a wavering sound that is subtly different from other interior subway sounds.

[For more audio details, see the full essay in my book Radio Writing (1995) or the notes accompanying the two CDs (2006).]

I found a regular artist's studio on Lexington Avenue opposite Grand Central--on the fifth floor of an old brick building. ... They were building the Lexington Avenue subway and the racket of concrete mixers and steam drills was constant. It was music to me and even a source of inspiration--I who had been thinking of turning away from nature to man-made productions.

--Man Ray, Self-Portrait (1963)

Having given presentations of my audiotapes from time to time, I recognized that listening to taped sound alone, in a concert circumstance, was simply too limited an experience for an audience. It would have been nice to do the New York City picture book I planned sixteen years ago (and still would be nice, even though the bridal shops are gone), but even that would be inappropriate for a seated audience. So the best solution would be my producing a large number of slides of New York City images, again both particular and indicative--at least 3,000, perhaps more--for an evening-length performance. These slides would then be projected simultaneously through several projectors, ideally aimed not at a single screen, but distributed around the performance space so that their images overlapped, much as sounds overlap on the audiotape; and these images likewise should convey an experience of New York that is at once both a representation and an intensification.

I could also imagine my New York City, or parts of it, becoming the soundtrack of a film, the music, in a reversal of convention, preceding the visual track, the film extending literature, rather than adapting it; but that would be another story.