Reading a history of modern art, it occurred to me that many of the cliches about how the photograph impacted the visual arts are true. The photograph changed the way people set about capturing images, and what they expected that to do for them. It changed their ideas about what audiences might want from a painting.

Take expressionism of all kinds (small e). This is a kind of image-making animated by the idea that, without the pressure toward visual accuracy which impinged on painting for so long, the important point of a painting is to give a visual insight into an emotional state. This is different from crafting an accurate picture of a selected possible world -- Holofernes having his head cut off, for example -- for no matter how expressive that selection might be, no matter how loosely it might be conjured, there is more emotional veracity to be had in a picture of a non-possible world (or that's the claim). A brand-new vision. The urgency is upon the artist to express with emotional charge. Emotions, moods, colors -- these were always on stage, of course. They were always more than half the reason for the painting to be there. But now, in nonrepresentational (or less-representational) art, with the stage taken away, they go barefoot. Or they stand on stilts.

Or, take the idea a different direction, so that the artist's emotions are not so privileged. Say the point of a painting is to arouse emotions in the spectator. Now, we set about figuring out how to affect him; accurate visual representation is clearly not the only way, and in fact, it may be quite a limited way of getting right at him, involving him, engaging him. All kinds of experiments are tried.

Some general attributes of expressionist (or even impressionist) painting: predominance of color effects, simpler form, tendency to flatness, less interest in space, minimally narrative, more spontaneous.

This has all been said better elsewhere; my point today is that there is an analogy to be drawn between photography's impact on painting and recording's impact on popular music. The photographic "freezing" (and then the copying, the duplication, the infinite propagation. . . ) has some relation to the recording of an excellent performance of a musical work.

The recording makes the music finished; it makes it distributable. The musician can play it again, but the recording will persist in being the standard by which those performances may be understood -- the backing paper on which they will be colored. In a similar way, we can be fascinated by comparing a photograph of a church to a Monet painting of that church, but we can never doubt which is more fundamental. Monet's vision is idiosyncratic, expressive; the photograph is democratic, and it looks at things the way we generally do. It's commonsensical: it has a lens. Monet has a sensibility.

We believe that a photograph is how things look; we believe that a recording is how things sound. Both of these ideas are mildly fictional in one sense -- technology introduces some turbulence -- but deeply true on another. Despite the abuses we can see around us, there is really no point quibbling with the basic truth-telling function of photographs. Even as the photograph makes its way (thanks to digital tools) into flights of fancy, and starts to be unreal, paper money, there's still gold in the bank backing it up. The currency of photographs doesn't float -- at least not yet. And the same can be said of recorded music: manipulations abound. Who knows whether or not Britney Spears really has a good voice? Or if she even sings? But outside the studio walls, there are still recorders you can buy, good ones, and you can prove to yourself that it works. The machine can't tell the whole truth of what a sound is like -- and what would that be anyway? -- but it can't lie either.

Images were, of course, in some sense reproducible for hundreds of years before the photograph, because there was printing. Musical sound was never distributable that way, until this century. For music, the printing press and the photograph were invented at the same time: they are combined in the black wax disk.

And what formal changes in the art does this technology give rise to?

There's no such thing as "representational" music, in the way that there is representational painting. There is no ideal of "accuracy" or "versimilitude" to be shrugged off. There are, however, other ideals which were indeed shrugged off, around the time of the introduction of recorded music.

This introduction happened in two stages: before the Depression, and then after the second World War. The period after the War is particularly interesting, and particularly close to home, since it saw the victory of rock and roll and the destruction of Tin Pan Alley. These events still resonate. Many sociological factors have been cited in the telling of this story, and it's been well-told. But it seems important to footnote that story with the idea that, at least on its face, rock and roll music shares many qualities with expressionist and even impressionist painting.

Harmonically, the music is more flat, and simplified in musical form from what was standard in popular music before; musically, it uses primary colors. It is more emotionally raw, with less formal indirection between lived experience and musical expression than can be found in the standards. Valuing spontaneity and placing less weight on formal perfection, it more frequently obeys the impulse to authentically reflect the performer's inner state, or to rouse the audience into a powerful singular emotion. It is participatory, it engages. It changes the terms of the game, shifting the balance away from melody and harmony, toward rhythm.

One interesting thing about this toy model, this analogy, is that it predicts the success or failure of certain elements of rock music. It would predict that, by being closer to the core of the musical movement, closer to the idea of expressionism, punk would succeed. Prog rock would fail, by misunderstanding the basic terms of the game.

This says nothing at all, however, about hip hop. Since there weren't any really important technological changes prior to hip hop's birth, perhaps its development is purely sociological. Perhaps it could have happened any time in the hundred years after the invention of the record.

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