WED., AUGUST 22, 2007
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Between The Notes: Tony Schwartz
by Todd Burns
Tony Schwartz is agoraphobic. This fact, by itself, is unremarkable. But consider this: Tony Schwartz is also one of the world's foremost field recordists. A man whose collection of more than 10,000+ tapes from around the world gets anxious about leaving the house by himself.
Schwartz's musical odyssey began in the '30s. His high school's radio station piqued an interest in folk music that followed him through World War II, after which he bought a wire recorder so that he could capture his favorites for future playback. Knowing that others were undoubtedly doing the same thing, Schwartz wrote to the manufacturer and got the addresses of fellow recorders. This nascent tape trading circle was good to him. Schwartz said in an interview with People magazine that he received "thousands of replies," many of which documented local customs from places as far-flung as Sweden, Nigeria and Puerto Rico. So many, in fact, that Schwartz hardly knew what to do with them all.
Around this same time, Schwartz was using his own wire recorder around the city as well. His agoraphobia didn't allow him to get far, though, which is why one of his first collections of recordings for the Folkways label was New York 19 — an ode to his ZIP code. In it, Schwartz opened up his mailbox to play many of the tracks that had been sent to him (including, notably, "Mbube," which was the inspiration for the Weavers' classic "Wimoweh"), as well as his own recordings of local street musicians, doormen and theater barkers.
The latter two may seem like peculiar choices for a "music" record, but as Schwartz made further plain on Millions of Musicians, the human voice is just as melodious when speaking as it is when singing. Whether it be street vendors luring potential customers, the shockingly tonal German language or the various calls and whistles of family members, it's an album that does an striking job of uncovering the musicality of daily life. (Listen especially to the recording of auctioneers, which lasts only for a tantalizing minute-and-a-half, but was later taken to hypnotic extremes by Werner Herzog in his 1976 documentary How Much Wood Would a Woodchuck Chuck.)
During the mid '50s, when Schwartz was busy collecting field recordings from his neighborhood and from around the world, he began to host a radio show for New York Public Radio entitled Around New York. Some of these radio pieces found their way on to the 1962 release You're Stepping on My Shadow, "Sound Stories" of NYC, including one of his most famous recordings, "History of a Voice," in which Schwartz practices what he called "time-lapse sound" by tracking the evolution of a young child's voice over her first nine years of life.
As Schwartz got more experienced with the radio form, his pieces began to sound more and more polished. Any recording from 1970's Tony Schwartz Records the Sounds of Children, for instance, wouldn't sound out of place on Ira Glass' This American Life. "Death of a Turtle" is perhaps the best example of this. In it, Schwartz questions seven-year-old Daryl as he goes through the process of burying his pet, complete with a choppy harmonica-rendered "Taps."
Schwartz hosted Around New York for more than thirty years and still continues to trade tapes of recordings to this day, but it was far from the only thing that he did with his life. Schwartz was perhaps even better known as an ad man. His most renowned work came in the political arena, namely the infamous "Daisy" spot, which harrowingly depicted the consequences of a nuclear holocaust, is often credited as helping to cement the presidency for Lyndon Johnson in 1964. He could be massively funny, too: another ad simply put the words "Spiro Agnew, Vice President" on the screen and allowed a voice to be heard moving quickly from giggling to full-fledged guffaws.
But even as Schwartz learned to exploit the medium of television to its full potential, his greatest love remained radio. The form allowed him both the freedom and the reach that television didn't offer. Or, as Schwartz put it in a recent interview with Ira Rifkin, “the best thing about radio is that people were born without earlids. You can't close your ears to it.” Of course, with Tony Schwartz, you'd rarely want to anyway.
Schwartz's musical odyssey began in the '30s. His high school's radio station piqued an interest in folk music that followed him through World War II, after which he bought a wire recorder so that he could capture his favorites for future playback. Knowing that others were undoubtedly doing the same thing, Schwartz wrote to the manufacturer and got the addresses of fellow recorders. This nascent tape trading circle was good to him. Schwartz said in an interview with People magazine that he received "thousands of replies," many of which documented local customs from places as far-flung as Sweden, Nigeria and Puerto Rico. So many, in fact, that Schwartz hardly knew what to do with them all.
Around this same time, Schwartz was using his own wire recorder around the city as well. His agoraphobia didn't allow him to get far, though, which is why one of his first collections of recordings for the Folkways label was New York 19 — an ode to his ZIP code. In it, Schwartz opened up his mailbox to play many of the tracks that had been sent to him (including, notably, "Mbube," which was the inspiration for the Weavers' classic "Wimoweh"), as well as his own recordings of local street musicians, doormen and theater barkers.
The latter two may seem like peculiar choices for a "music" record, but as Schwartz made further plain on Millions of Musicians, the human voice is just as melodious when speaking as it is when singing. Whether it be street vendors luring potential customers, the shockingly tonal German language or the various calls and whistles of family members, it's an album that does an striking job of uncovering the musicality of daily life. (Listen especially to the recording of auctioneers, which lasts only for a tantalizing minute-and-a-half, but was later taken to hypnotic extremes by Werner Herzog in his 1976 documentary How Much Wood Would a Woodchuck Chuck.)
During the mid '50s, when Schwartz was busy collecting field recordings from his neighborhood and from around the world, he began to host a radio show for New York Public Radio entitled Around New York. Some of these radio pieces found their way on to the 1962 release You're Stepping on My Shadow, "Sound Stories" of NYC, including one of his most famous recordings, "History of a Voice," in which Schwartz practices what he called "time-lapse sound" by tracking the evolution of a young child's voice over her first nine years of life.
As Schwartz got more experienced with the radio form, his pieces began to sound more and more polished. Any recording from 1970's Tony Schwartz Records the Sounds of Children, for instance, wouldn't sound out of place on Ira Glass' This American Life. "Death of a Turtle" is perhaps the best example of this. In it, Schwartz questions seven-year-old Daryl as he goes through the process of burying his pet, complete with a choppy harmonica-rendered "Taps."
Schwartz hosted Around New York for more than thirty years and still continues to trade tapes of recordings to this day, but it was far from the only thing that he did with his life. Schwartz was perhaps even better known as an ad man. His most renowned work came in the political arena, namely the infamous "Daisy" spot, which harrowingly depicted the consequences of a nuclear holocaust, is often credited as helping to cement the presidency for Lyndon Johnson in 1964. He could be massively funny, too: another ad simply put the words "Spiro Agnew, Vice President" on the screen and allowed a voice to be heard moving quickly from giggling to full-fledged guffaws.
But even as Schwartz learned to exploit the medium of television to its full potential, his greatest love remained radio. The form allowed him both the freedom and the reach that television didn't offer. Or, as Schwartz put it in a recent interview with Ira Rifkin, “the best thing about radio is that people were born without earlids. You can't close your ears to it.” Of course, with Tony Schwartz, you'd rarely want to anyway.
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