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Monday, November 21, 2016

From Chapter 3 of Richard Elliott's THE LATE VOICE: TIME, AGE, AND EXPERIENCE IN POPULAR MUSIC

...There is much to note here, from the period language through the criticism of rock music to the alliance of voice and gaze. Cornyn, an executive at Reprise, was responsible for writing liner notes to sixteen of the albums Sinatra released, from 1964’s It Might as Well Be Swing to 1984’s L.A. Is My Lady, as well as an extended note for a 1995 collection of Reprise recordings. As Gilbert Gigliotti observes, in authoring so many liner notes, Cornyn became ‘the voice of Frank Sinatra’.  It would be more accurate to say that Cornyn became an important part of a much larger machinery that produced this ‘voice’ and which would also include lyricists, composers, arrangers, musicians, engineers, producers, other label executives, promoters and critics. But Gigliotti’s highlighting of Cornyn as a part of this process is an intriguing one. Gigliotti notes the mixture of New Journalism (as essayed by Tom Wolfe and others), ‘hip’ language, poetic devices and advertising spiel that make up this essentially hagiographic discourse. Part of Cornyn’s job as a Reprise employee was to market Sinatra and so we might, as Gigliotti is aware, be suspicious of reading too much serious commentary into such texts. But it is equally important that Cornyn is shown to be a narrator of Sinatra’s public life in a way that is both inclusive and exclusive; through him, we get to hear about details we might not otherwise be privy to—orchestra rehearsals, recording sessions, conversations between Sinatra and his friends and fellow musicians. More than this, Cornyn’s writing reminds us, as Gigliotti notes, of the proximity between creative writing (especially poetry) and the language of marketing. Cornyn’s texts become another creative component of the layered self that is Sinatra’s persona. They also allow us to witness the development of Sinatra’s career, replete as they invariably are with allusions to his songs and his past. This is important for a consideration of time, age and experience because these are all factors underlined by Cornyn’s texts and which are used to narrate Sinatra to his audience and set the stage for listening. This sense of a narrated life becomes even clearer when the pieces are brought together, as they are in Gigliotti’s analysis and in the long text ‘Eye Witness’, which Cornyn contributed to the boxed set Frank Sinatra: The Complete Reprise Studio Recordings in 1995....