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Bluegrass and Technology

Bluegrass as High Tech Music

Bluegrass as Response to Technology

Bluegrass as the first Cyber-Genre

Bluegrass and Technology

We sometimes talk as if first there was bluegrass, then suddenly all this high-tech stuff came along in the last few years, and now what do we do about it? I'd argue that much of the stylistic flavor of bluegrass is about technology, and asserting artistic control over technology.

The history of bluegrass reveals the impact of technology and technological change on culture, and the resilience of culture in the face of that change. In its form, structure, content and style, bluegrass music captured some of the essence of the new technological world, which allowed it an astonishing measure of success. In its original context at least, bluegrass music was-well, high tech: virtuosic; distinctive; replicatable; precise. Yet it also represented clear aesthetic choices and stylistic constraints, not least its acoustic instrumentation, that gave it a distinct "classicism" relative to other musical styles and trends.

At the same time, in its subject matter bluegrass addressed the conflicts and sorrows of people uprooted from traditional communities as well as the memories of an older way of life. Finally, in the transformation of bluegrass into a genre and a community, it presages the kinds of theme-based communities that I believe will be part of the landscape of society in the post-Internet world.

Bluegrass as High Tech Music

Bluegrass music flowered right after 1945, when war-time restrictions on recording were lifted. Bluegrass music sounded great on radio and on record; a polished, tight, exciting, differentiated and clean sound. The music celebrated technique, virtuosity, individual creativity. It was fast, precise, inventive, and tight. It was also, literally, high: some bands deliberately pitched their instruments a half-step high (incidentally, also a habit in Irish traditional music contests). These musicians knew about resonance, overtones, the buzz of perfect tight harmonies.

The sound of the ensembles was clean, layered, with distinct solos for each instrument as opposed to the expressionist wash of the old string band aesthetic. Scruggs-style bluegrass banjo's tight, ringing drum-head, finger-picked rapid-fire syncopations created a cutting, precise, staccato sound that could drive a band in a way old-time frailed banjo could not--a sound that could be called pointillistic, or, as Matt Glaser said to me, digital (at the time I sensed this was somehow a pun, but I couldn't quite put my finger on it). Older bow-rocking styles of fiddling gave way to a polished sound where more detail was happening at the surface, at a level the ear could latch on to in the midst of a band, floating over a radio. In live performance, acoustic instruments and tight harmony singing meant great dependence on microphones, of which there were usually too few at gigs, led to complex choreographies as players stepped up to and back from the microphones, avoiding collisions and bodily injury with split-second timing.

Even the sense of time in bluegrass music is a world away from that of old-time fiddle music, though it might be hard to pin down the difference with words other than "drive" or, as Alan Lomax put it, "folk music with overdrive". Jeremy Rifkin, in his book Time Wars, talks about how our cultural sense of time has been changed by technology. Since music makes our sense of time audible in an incredibly direct way, vintage bluegrass recordings reveal a lot about how the sense of time was changing in this country after WWII. This wasn't just the rhythm of the freight train finding its way into the music; it was the rhythm of the Bluegrass Boys' 9-passenger Packard limousine rolling from tent show to tent show (with a few baseball games thrown in).

Bluegrass as Response to Technology

But bluegrass was more than music that skillfully made use of technological elements. The subject matter of bluegrass, and its appeal, had much to do with speaking to people about the impact of technology, and industrialization and urbanization and its impact on their lives. Unlike older music that hearkened to rural themes, some composed by professional Northern songsters, bluegrass didn't rely entirely on sentimentalism. Many songs dealt with the pain of loss-- of family, of community, of work, of the land—in a direct and honest way. At that time more people than ever were moving off of farms and rural communities, into cities, returning from the armed forces. Bluegrass appealed to those steeped in the older traditional music, offering them an avenue of commercial opportunity and individual creativity while still maintaining deep connections with their musical and cultural roots. In later years, it continued to offer a sound distinct from more mainstream country, and the emerging rock and roll explosion.

Bluegrass as the first Cyber-Genre

Bluegrass was a brilliant artistic response to a moment in our culture defined in no small way by sweeping technological changes. As a result, it reached right through the technology and created an entire global community of its own. And here, I think, lies one of the most profound lessons it offers for how people and culture can respond to technology in an empowered way.

Before bluegrass as genre arrived as a phenomenon, I doubt if anyone could have envisioned it or come up with a formula for its creation. Even Bill Monroe, the father of bluegrass, was taken by surprise when it changed from a repertoire, to a sound, to a style: a style that could be imitated by more others than he ever dreamed. (By all accounts he was even annoyed about this.) Not many of us sit down to write a poem and find we have unwittingly created a new alphabet.

One way we make technology coherent for ourselves is binding large sets of stylistic choices into identifiable "niches". Bluegrass became such a niche — a form so fruitful and rich that a half-century of incredible musicians, as well as families, amateur pickers, community groups, have enjoyed and not exhausted its possibilities.

On the Internet, the pervasiness of networked communications combined with people's needs for focus, limits, boundaries, community, has lead to an explosion of such niches, in all art forms and media. At the same time, the forces that tend to erode, challenge, nibble at the edges of the integrity of such niches are getting stronger as well. [ Remember, I wrote this in 1994!] In the past few years, computer and communication technology have fostered an explosion of many "communities of knowledge"; the information cities, if you will, where the information superhighways come from and go to. I believe these communities, even now, are still embryonic, via different converging combinations of technologies: smart digital libraries, electronic mail archives, multi-media, virtual reality, and so on. Whatever we name them, it's clear that these new information cities will require both new technological and new social forms; that is, we don't yet know how to behave like good citizens in them. As a musician as well as a technologist, I have a hunch that they will work in ways that are mysteriously like the ways of traditional musical communities—if we define traditions as bonds of shared knowledge that link people both within and across cultures.

What can bluegrass as an artistic phenomenon teach us about how people transform cultural traditions to adapt and humanize new technology? Can we see reflections of the same processes in what's happened more recently with reggae, traditional Irish music, African popular music? Can we see the skills, personal and communal, celebrated in bluegrass as a kind of archetype we can apply to structuring the new kinds of virtual communities now appearing? Can we make these communities more harmonious, more dynamic; capable of celebrating individual virtuosity while helping people to move together? Can we make a discussion group on the Internet feel more like an all-night picking session in a parking lot?

We can learn many valuable lessons relevant to the future of our social life in a Web-networked world, by understanding more about the history and community dynamics that creates a living genre such as bluegrass music.

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