Personal Timbre – The Missing Element (or Why Contemporary Music Listening Tests Are Hard)

In the 1990s Johnny Cash’s career was revived by legendary producer Rick Rubin, best known for working with acts such as The Beastie Boys, Slayer, and The Red Hot Chili Peppers. These American series albums (as they became to be known because they were released on Rick Rubin’s own label American Recordings) are haunting and sparsely arranged. Most tracks are simply Cash’s voice and acoustic guitar and when other instrumentation is used it takes a backseat to the output of Cash himself.

A striking aspect of this collection is the large volume of cover songs and the variety of the covered material:

“Hurt” by Nine Inch Nails,
“Rusty Cage” by Soundgarden,
“Personal Jesus” by Depeche Mode,
“One” by U2,
“In My Life” by The Beatles,
“Desperado” by The Eagles,
“I Won’t Back Down” by Tom Petty,
...and on and on and on

However, what is even more interesting is how Johnny Cash makes these songs his own. Without changing much from the original structure of the songs, Cash delivers these tunes in such a way that they all sound like Johnny Cash songs. He manages to turn everything from grunge to industrial to synth pop to classic rock into a Johnny Cash style country dirge. I’d venture a guess that listeners unfamiliar with the original tunes would not even question whether or not Cash wrote these songs. I’d hypothesize that this is mostly due to the timbre of Cash’s voice.

With the majority of music we’ve experienced this semester, in determining a piece of music’s composer we are left to guess from a list of clues – amount of chromaticism, instrumentation, genre, etc. However, these generalizations can prove to be misleading. Schoenberg did not always write atonally, Wagner did not only write operas, and Varèse didn’t just write percussion pieces.

Timbre is an especially sticky subject. A piano is a piano is a piano. (unless John Cage has instructed you to fill it full of erasers, tacks, and spoons) And I wouldn’t be able to tell the difference between Saint Louis Symphony Orchestra and the Boston Symphony Orchestra. (Maybe some people could, but I couldn’t.)

Many of the advances in timbre are related to new technologies – Steve Reich’s tape loops, George Crumb’s amplified string quartet, and the Moog synthesizer. The electric guitar has become an enormous source of timbral variety. There are so many different combinations of guitars, pick-ups, amplifiers, and effects available that the possibilities are practically limitless.

However, the most instantly identifiable timbral element in modern music is the human voice. In contrast to operatic singing in which it seems there is an ideal tone which all opera singers strive for, early on rock ‘n’ roll accepted the individuality of the human voice. Artists such as Elvis Presley, Chuck Berry, and Jerry Lee Lewis probably wouldn’t have made the cut on American Idol (the nadir of contemporary music) but, what they lacked in technical proficiency, they more than made up for in sweat and soul. Thankfully this acceptance of individuality continues to thrive to today and provides us with a rich diversity of performers from which anyone should be able to find something they enjoy.