12 August 2022. Music | Content
Re-inventing English music // What we learn from the tale of ‘Pink Sauce’
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1: Reinventing English music
(W.G. Whittaker, British Library, Public Domain)
I was in the Malvern Hills this time last week, for family reasons, and it reminded me of a programme I watched earlier this year about how—towards the end of the 19th century—Vaughan Williams and Gustav Holst set out to transform English music. (Sadly, the programme—co-presented by Amanda Vickery and Tom Service—isn’t currently available even to UK-based readers on iPlayer.)
The two had met at the Royal College of Music in the 1890s, at a time when, Elgar notwithstanding, English classical music had a moribund reputation in Europe. (In truth, at risk of sweeping generalisation, the only British-based composers who had had much impact since Purcell had moved here from the continent.) Despite his name, Holst was born and bred in England, and deeply rooted here.
Their vehicle for this transformation was the English folk song, and at a time when people were leaving the land in great numbers, and the folk song tradition was thought to be threatened as a result, they joined the effort led by the folklorist Cecil Sharp to collect and transcribe as many folksongs as possible. Vaughan Williams in particular was assiduous in this project: he made something like 800 trips to collect folk songs in about a decade at the start of the 20th century.
If this is a post about music, it is also a post about technology, because their endeavours were helped by two then recent technologies. The first was the bicycle, which allowed them to travel further than previously, and to out of the way places. The second was the recording cylinder. This doesn’t have a great reputation these days, mostly because the sound quality is terrible, but it had one particular advantage, both when the songs were being recorded and when they were being transcribed.
(Wax cylinder phonograph. Photo Ben Franske, via Wikipedia. CC BY-SA 4.0)
You only got one shot on each of the cylinders, but you could play them back immediately to the singers, who were likely to be hearing their recorded voices for the first time. When transcribing, you could also stop and start them if you got to a tricky bit. In some ways they had some of the affordances of a reel to reel tape recorder rather than a shellac or vinyl record.
Both Vaughan Williams and Holst used this rich repertoire to some effect. Vaughan Williams’ ‘Folk Song Suite’ (11 minutes) is a stirring piece of music. The programme pointed towards Holst’s ‘Egdon Heath’ (12 minutes) as an example of a piece that drew on the influence of the folk song repertoire. His ‘Somerset Rhapsody’, similarly.
And while I was researching this piece I stumbled on a video on Reddit where a contributor had assembled the songs collected—including some original recordings by Vaughan Williams—and the composer’s use of them in the ‘Folk Song Suite’, which if nothing else gives you a sense of what the originals sounded like (11 minutes).
If you’re interested it’s worth clicking through to the notes on the video—and some of these songs are now fixtures in the British folk repertoire.
Five of these are early phonograph recordings (two probably made by Vaughan Williams himself), which were most likely the actual recordings from which he derived the melodies. The others are traditional performances of the same songs recorded in more recent years. For these, I attempted to find recordings that were as similar as possible to the melodies used by Vaughan Williams... All of the nine recordings are authentic in the sense that they were performed by ordinary people who most likely learnt them orally from older members of their communities.
The ‘Folk Song Suite’ premiered in 1924, and ‘Egdon Heath’ in 1927. The programme reminded us that both pieces, and the composers’ reputations more generally, benefitted from two more technologies. The first was the invention of the public service broadcaster, the BBC, which took over the Prom Concerts in 1927, following the death of their founder, Henry Wood, and started broadcasting them to the then emerging radio audience.
The second technology was the phonograph. The first recordings of the ‘Folk Song Suite’ and ‘Egdon Heath’ were made towards the end of the 1920s, as the more affluent members of the British middle class started to buy phonographs and records for their own use.
It’s the 150th anniversary of Vaughan Williams’ birth this year (he was a couple of years older than Holst), and his music is all over this year’s Proms repertoire. So obviously there are people complaining that he traduced the folk music he drew from. Easy money.
And why did the Malverns remind me of all of this, you might be asking? Well, in 1921, the Three Choirs Festival featured the music of both composers, and afterwards they went walking together. On a walk through the Malverns the composer W.G Whittaker went with them, and took his camera.
(W.G. Whittaker, British Library, Public Domain)
2: What we learn from the tale of ‘Pink Sauce’
Over at Nieman Lab Jessica Maddox has a post about ‘Pink Sauce’, a condiment which has apparently been the talk of TikTok, and not in a good way. I’d missed the excitement, but Maddox argues reasonably persuasively that this might be the end of a cycle for the ‘instagrammable’ world of TikTok and Instagram.
Maybe I’d better back up a bit first, and let her tell the story:
'Pink Sauce’ was created by a private chef and mixologist who went by the TikTok username Chef Pii:
After teasing that she couldn’t quite describe what the sauce tasted like, the product went live on July 1, and individuals could buy a bottle online for $20. The website revealed the ingredients: Water, sunflower seed oil, raw honey, distilled vinegar, garlic, pitaya (dragon fruit), pink Himalayan sea salt, dried spices, lemon juice, milk, and citric acid.
So far, this probably comes under the heading of ‘nice work if you can get it’, and certainly the orders poured in. The problems started when the bottles started arriving. The colour was off. Some bottles gave off a smell when opened. Others exploded. Despite having milk as an ingredient, they weren’t shipped in refrigerated packaging. The labels were misspelt. Some buyers were concerned about the risk of botulism. The necessary permissions from the Food and Drink Administration may not have been acquired.
Well, logistics are always tough.
The article also has an entertaining video, from TikTok of an instantly disappointed buyer opening their bottle, which sadly I can’t embed here. Here’s a still from that moment:
Pink Sauce was a condiment made for social media. It was bright, pretty, and mysterious. was part image, part mystery. On one hand, Pink Sauce fits the ideal social media aesthetic — bright, pretty, and makes any simple food “pop.” Chef Pii promised the sauce was “sweet, it’s tangy, it’s a little spicy.” It looked pretty and it made for interesting content, both in terms of unboxing and videos answering the mystery about the taste.
Although Pink Sauce was a product of TikTok, Maddox locates it in the 2010s, when in many ways food became ‘instagrammable’ and Instagram reshaped the food industry:
Estonian internet scholar Katrin Tiidenberg argues that the idea of something being Instagrammable refers to “those aspects of platforms and apps that we perceive as making it possible … for us to be able to perfectly capture and present our life as enjoying, inspiring, and jealousy-inducing.” Businesses, brands, and artists leaned in as well, and the second half of the 2010s saw a proliferation of “made-for-Instagram” activities.
In particular, this involved a visual food aesthetic that was actively pursued by restaurants, and others, and actively encouraged by the media, for whom bright shiny colourful pictures were sent as if from heaven:
Food media scholar Emily Contois points out that in the 2010s, Instagram influenced major aspects of the food industry, from presentation to restaurant lighting. Then there were the dishes themselves — marshmallow flowers that bloom in hot chocolate, crazy milkshakes, cookie dough shot glasses.
Pink Sauce is clearly a product of this world, with the added element of a ‘side hustle’ that has gone wrong. There’s a sense that it’s come from the wrong place—TikTok has tended to emphasise rawness and authenticity rather than performance and visual perfection. Maddox locates the Pink Sauce moment in the precarious economics of the online world. But I wonder if it might be another sign that the whole glossy influencer culture is running into the sand.
j2t#360
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