Developing a Default Critical Style

Models, Problem Practices, Rhetorical Mastery, , , , , , , , , ,

arguing people

This is the most interesting kind of rhetoric, and a style to be used by anyone who wants to be a better communicator.

We think of everyday communication as the passing of information from one to another. That is often true, but listen carefully, and it is clear that more is going on. It’s one thing to receive directions for driving to a new restaurant. But its another when the “information” being passed on by a friend is, incidentally, a judgment on its quality.

Yah. I know the spot you are talking about. It’s at the corner where Awful meets Expensive. Actually, keep going straight and its about a mile on the right.

Maybe you know fewer wise guys. But we get the point. We embed attitudes, judgements, and evaluations in almost everything we say. Most of us have an endless store of descriptive adjectives to employ. Those silos never seem to be drawn down by overuse. And in the company of friends, it can be affirming to our egos to have an opinion. But everyday rhetoric that is essentially a string of opinions is its own ersatz style. And it seems to be the norm as we “converse” more and more in very truncated messages. Talk to your uncle Fred or listen to the President, both of whom should pay a surcharge for all of their dismissive one-liners. It’s too much. A few more samples:

This novelist never had an original character. End of story.

He’s a nice guy but is only good for three chords on that guitar.

Her dozens of movies in the 1950s were pretty mediocre.

Except for the Bolt, Chevy never made a good car.

The problem here is partly that we are smuggling unearning attitudes into a conversation, skipping the obligation to explain ourselves. We owe others the courtesy of having real reasons. Because we are blessed with the vast resources of ordinary language, our conversational partners deserve at least a little more substance and less attitude. A renewed obligation to explain turns what is may be a truncated introjection into a clearer critical stance.

By the use of the term “critical” here, I mean judgements and information that include useful detail. All we need is the will to do it and an interlocuter with a little patience. A person is not a drama critic if their view is represented in one simple dismissal. They are not a thoughtful judge of a musician if their efforts can be reduced to the brevity of a social media troll. Good criticism paves the way to more understanding and insight.

If we become more aware of assertions that should be explained we are using a critical style to elevate an exchange with another. We often let ourselves off the hook too easily when we offer a blustery contention that too often signals that no more need be said.

The classic film My Dinner with Andre (1981) offers a sense of what it like to use conversation to fully interrogate our thoughts. As the film suggests, good conservation is a worthy goal of two souls trying to make sense of their place in the world.

As Researcher Deborah Tannen described in the 1990s, the genders may be wired differently. With many exceptions, a pattern of clipped dismissals may still be more typical of men than women. Whether there is still a preference for opinion giving in lieu of more dialogical communication is open to debate. But I have no problem identifying male friends or even the current President with a communication style front-loaded with declarations, and final judgements: all without a hint of putting them to the test by hearing from others.

To be sure, a critical style is bound to retain loose ends and unexplored contentions, but if it is augmented with evidence and good reasons, it is a more useful way to relate to others. The style requires having the will to explain oneself rather than merely recycling one easy summation.

One route to thinking in terms of a critical style is to get in the habit by reading more thoughtful writing about areas of special interest, which could range from art or architecture, or novels and music. Critics and columnists online or in print are paid to explain their opinions. We read them because we want to hear their reasons, not just a curt thumbs up or down. This is the most interesting kind of rhetoric, and a style to be emulated by anyone who wants to be a better communicator. One-word judgments just don’t cut it.

The Glories of Making Music in the Same Space

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No one was going to tell Frank Sinatra to sing inside a tiny vocal isolation booth.

Many managers are not fans of working remotely. They often point out that there is something to learn about the advantages of meeting colleagues in real time and space. The same idea is present in the seemingly distant realm of music-making. Barbara Streisand’s Partners album (2014) famously created tracks pairing Streisand with different performers in sometimes distant studios. The audio engineering is clever, but it doesn’t seem to be an ideal way to make music. As a New York Times critic noted, “the instrumentation and the vocal tracks are so processed in pursuit of a high-gloss perfection that any sense of two people standing side by side and singing their hearts out is lost.”

Audio recording has advanced from the days when a small group of musicians would gather around a tiny, elevated platform and try to cast their music into a horn that collected enough sound to cut the vibrations into a wax disk. Recordings before 1920 were made in this awkward but honest way. No electronics were involved. No one phoned anything in. What is heard on those old 78s is the result of the use of a small acoustic space.

Obviously, the evolution of modern electronics changed all of that. Microphones, amplifiers and various gadgets appeared in the audio chain, sometimes adding over-dubs, reverberation and electronic tricks, partly turning recording into a science focused on the engineering of sound.

If the first wave of recording captured musicians in the same space and time, the second wave typically gave us a studio covered by a sea of microphones. But in the 1940s and 50s the goal of an audio engineer was to capture as much as you could, and usually on the musician’s terms. There were probably a few times when a record producer thought of suggesting that Frank Sinatra might get a better recording if he were isolated in a separate booth. But this was the Chairman of the Board, and he clearly wanted to feel the rumble of the Count Basie Band or the lushness of Nelson Riddle’s arrangements.

Even so, less established pop artists began to yield to their producers and engineers who were using newer tools like multi-track recorders and electronic sound “enhancement.”  In this third wave the final version of a song or album was an amalgam of live performance later altered by add-ons of strings, backup singers or new tracks with singers harmonizing with themselves. Performers accustomed to live performance were sometimes put off by this piecemeal approach, but soon it was the record rather than the live performance that was the final benchmark of a career.  Suddenly a live performance needed to use synthesizers and “backing tracks” to approximate the instruments and performers heard in the original recording. In simple terms, popular recorded music offered an altered soundscape that only gives the illusion of an event captured in one space and time.

Hearing the Room

If we want to hear an unaltered live performance, we have the records of some brave musicians, classical groups, and a smattering of jazz performances.  But the “all at once” philosophy in popular music was beginning to die out, leaving examples like Sinatra’s classic Songs for Swinging Lovers recorded in Capitol’s Studio A in 1956. As a photo from the session shows, Sinatra is in front of Nelson Riddle’s band and just a few feet from a Neumann U47 tube microphone. No one was going to tell Sinatra to sing away from the rest of the group.

In that still admired recording engineers had to work to keep the sound of the band from drowning out Sinatra’s voice. But everyone got the benefit of the energy that was evident in the performance. And it offers a tangible sense of space: an open-air ambiance contributed by a room that still exists in Hollywood.

Recording ambiance is part of what makes music in many forms so special. Here’s an obvious case: a clip of Richard McVey playing a well known British anthem within the 355-foot long Chichester Cathedral’s impressive nave. The organ and the open space work together to deliver a sonic gem.

Obviously, with recordings of popular music that are “built up” over time, producers, mastering engineers, and other various technicians now count themselves as co-producers of a performance. Among other things, the vocal isolation booth in a studio makes it possible to alter a singer’s wobbly performance with add-ons like reverberation or pitch correction, leaving the sounds produced by other studio musicians unaffected by this kind of vocal “sweetening.” And multi-track recording makes it easier to add a musician who was absent in the original session.

Virtuoso musicians like jazz drummer and songwriter Nate Smith still prefer what happens in real time with musicians in the same room. They may try a few versions of a piece, but Smith insists that his recordings let a listener experience all but not more than what he and his bandmates heard together in the studio.

Ironically, JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon has made the same point about wanting employees back in the office. To be sure, it is harder on the employees, but the best collaboration happens when there is direct and unmediated access to what others are doing.