The 1950s and 1960s saw a profusion of avant-garde works that employ some degree of mobility, the best-known being Stockhausen’s Klavierstück XI and Boulez’s Piano Sonata No. 3. This chapter surveys discourse on indeterminacy, open works and mobility in order to test the hypothesis that the existence of recordings created a new ontology that allowed in part for mobile works to come on the scene. Since the work’s “essence” would henceforth be assured by recordings, scores were freed from their role as guarantors of a work’s ontology, allowing them to become more playful and open-ended. This chapter focuses on the way contemporary listeners may have understood this connection. In this light, mobile works can be viewed as a “phonograph effect” (in Mark Katz’s sense), and some of the basic historiographic presuppositions about musical modernism, one that sees an autonomous avant-garde isolated from a burgeoning record industry, are thereby interrogated.

This chapter situates noir soundtracks as a technology of blackness in Western modernity. With the formulation “black records,” it points up the deep transnational and technological entanglements of what we can call, following Tyler Stovall’s lead, “a new, postcolonial genre of criminality.” Tapping into contemporary research by black studies and sound studies scholars, it connects noir soundtracks with the history of technologies meant to facilitate the tracing, tracking, identification, and surveillance of people deemed marginal, criminal, or suspect in the West’s long twentieth century. The first of the chapter’s three sections, “Liner Notes,” builds from Peter Szendy’s conceptualization of the dynamics of surécoute – overhearing – in espionage films to suggest the importance of structures of listening and overhearing manifest in noir film. The “A-Side: Miles and Malle: Ascenseur pour l’échafaud” focuses on Davis’s signature performance and soundtrack composition for Louis Malle’s Ascenseur pour l’échafaud. “B-Side: Melville, Martial, and Solal: Deux hommes dans Manhattan” focuses on the sound and phonographies of blackness in Jean-Pierre Melville’s Deux hommes dans Manhattan. Built on scenes of sound recording within and without the narrative structures of the film, the chapter considers how the sonic tracing, tracking, and recording of dark or deviant bodies in noir fiction and film ushers in new modalities for thinking and feeling urban modernity, and provides an important entryway into the discussion about the “phonographic” as “a singular mode of (black) modernity” (Weheliye).