The The skillset of professional studio musicians in the German popular music recording industry

Among the professional roles in the recording industry, studio musicians have received relatively little academic attention. Who has played on a record and who has developed the rhythms, melodies and fills are secrets that remain hidden behind closed studio doors. Since the little public media available mainly recollects memories of past stars or musical developments from more than twenty years ago, little is known about more recent biographies, individual skills and working practices of average studio musicians from different parts of the world. Against this backdrop, the present study explored the skillset of studio musicians in Germany’s popular music recording industry. The interviewees provided rare insights into their careers, expressed their views on technological developments and depicted their economic realities. With increasing power and affordability of music production resources, new business models for studio musicians were developing along with a change of skills. For a long time, the successful studio musician had incredible playing skills, stylistic flexibility and was an excellent sight-reader. These requirements seem to have shifted; today’s musicians must have a broader skillset and be experts beyond their instruments. A repertoire of ideas and sounds to be offered spontaneously in a recording session are highly valuable next to empathy, social skills and a likeable and humble personality. The musicians must be both unique and flexible to serve a project and compete with the many fellow musicians and programmers of computer instruments.

Gone with the Wind, Part I

This chapter reconstructs the scoring of Selznick’s most famous film. The story interweaves several familiar anecdotes, such as Steiner’s furious discovery that another composer had been primed to replace him, into a more comprehensive, critical review of the full collaboration. Included are Steiner’s adaptation of musical ideas from Margaret Mitchell’s source novel, his divvying of the film’s music among multiple composers (Hugo Freidhofer, Adolph Deutsch, and Heinz Roemheld), Lou Forbes’s delicate negotiations with Selznick, the rejection and rewriting of critical passages of the score, the efforts of orchestrators, and the recording of the music with studio musicians. With archival materials ranging from Steiner’s doodled marginalia to Forbes’s legal files, a new impression of the score’s construction emerges: one in which a new level of involvement from Selznick prompts an unprecedented and vigorous style of musical collaboration—dubbed “Max Steiner and Co.”—that affected both process and product.

Sam Cooke as Pop Album Artist—A Reinvention in Three Songs

Though African American singer, songwriter, and entrepreneur Sam Cooke (1931–1964) is commonly celebrated as a pioneering soul singer, the preponderance of Cooke recordings suggesting to many critics a “white” middle-of-the-road pop sound has troubled this reception. From June 1957 until the end of 1959, Cooke recorded for the independent label Keen Records, where he charted a course for realizing his professional and socioeconomic aspirations, including his determination to harness the prestige attached to the long-playing album and the “album artist.” This article explores relationships between the repertory, performances, and production on three Keen album tracks: “Danny Boy,” “My Foolish Heart,” and “I've Got a Right to Sing the Blues.” These recordings reveal Cooke's seldom-noted proximity to contemporaneous figures and concerns: “Irish tenor” Morton Downey, who built a career on the fluidity between ethnic identity and pop's transparent “whiteness”; Billy Eckstine, who struggled to navigate the racial and sexual politics of the pop balladeer; and the black studio musicians whose campaign for employment equity in 1950s Los Angeles found resonance with Cooke's vision. Taking Cooke's endeavor seriously positions us to assess freshly Cooke's skills as a vocalist, the processes through which “pop” becomes racialized as white, and intractable methodological challenges in black music studies.