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My own research (ie, looking it up on wikipedia) suggests it predates the existence of recording!
One of Holst's planet suites ends with a choir quietly singing in an adjoining room while someone slowly closes the door to the room, causing a natural fade out. Apparently this caused a sensation when it was first performed.
On recordings, it seems to go back to the very beginning - often because the piece of music was longer than they could fit on the recording, so they'd fade out at the end of side one and fade it back up at the start of side two.
So chances are the practice began for purely practical reasons. But I'd like to know when people started fading not because they had to but because they thought it was better.
It can be a sign of laziness, I suppose, but as someone who's recorded hundreds of songs over the years all I can say is that some songs cry out for a fade while with others a formal ending seems more appropriate.
Take "Hey Jude" (which I wrote a few years back). It would be simply wrong for it NOT to fade out. That huge chant at the end needs to sound like it goes on forever. But a song like "Here, There and Everywhere" clearly needs a "proper" ending.
Then there're songs like "A Hard Day's Night" which provide a cunning, sophisticated fade: the band give a strong, closed end on the phrase "I feel alright" but just as they do that Harrison starts up a slightly trippy, repetitive arpeggio which continues on its own and then fades. That was in 1964 - any earlier examples of such a carefully constructed and pre-planned fade?
If I was trying to draw up rules about when to fade and when not to (and God knows I am), I'd be tempted to say that the more repetitive the music, the more natural it is to fade. The exception to that, though, is electronic music. The Chemical Brothers, Leftfield, etc almost always provide definite endings to their music despite the fact that repetition is its very life-blood. On the other hand, you could argue that their songs provide a sort of "faux-fade" by petering out in a blizzard of strange noises/sound effects.
Hmmm. Not sure.
_________________ Reason and rationality may be pursuing us, but we are faster.
Wittgenstein Blog: http://lwpi.blogspot.com/
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