Phonographic Encounters

Mapping Transnational Cultures of Sound, 1890-1945

Elodie A. Roy, Eva Moreda Rodriguez, Elodie Amandine Roy, Eva Moreda Rodriguez, Elodie A. Roy, Elodie Amandine Roy, Eva Moreda Rodriguez

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9780367439217
• eBook ISBN: 9781000427295
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Music

This cross-disciplinary volume illuminates the history of early phonography from a transnational perspective, recovering the myriad sites, knowledge practices, identities and discourses which dynamically shaped early recording cultures. With case studies from China, Australia, the United States, Latin America, Russia, Sweden, Germany, Spain, Portugal, France, and Italy, Phonographic Encounters explores moments of interaction and encounter, as well as tensions, between local and global understandings of recording technologies.

Drawing on an array of archival sources often previously unavailable in English, it moves beyond western-centric narratives of early phonography and beyond the strict confines of the recording industry. Contributions from media history, musicology, popular music studies, cultural studies, area studies and the history of science and technology make this book a key and innovative resource for understanding early phonography against the backdrop of colonial and global power relations.

Part I

Negotiating geographical and cultural boundaries

Intermediaries, traders and operators

1 Recording studios on tour

Traveling ventures at the dawn of the music industry

Sergio Ospina Romero

In 1917, George Cheney and Charles Althouse, recording experts of the Victor Talking Machine Company, spent almost the whole year on a transnational recording tour. They went first to Puerto Rico and Venezuela, and, after a few days in the United States, embarked on an expedition through Argentina, Chile, Bolivia, Peru, and Ecuador with blank and recorded masters going back and forth between Victor’s headquarters in New Jersey and different stations in South America. While on tour, Cheney and Althouse kept a meticulous register in a ledger book of the various performers and numbers they recorded in each place. Sometimes, these ledgers turned almost into a travelogue as the technicians accounted for multiple episodes and included various details about their experiences overseas as well as facts, vocabulary, or information that seemed to be relevant for their mission. Having technical expertise about the recording process was not enough. In some pages of the ledgers, for example, they wrote various things in Spanish that they would need to remember on a regular basis, such as instructions for the performers while in front of the recording horn, multiple rows with conjugations of common verbs, and repetitions of a single phrase like, quite tellingly, “Lo siento mucho” (“I am sorry”).¹ Indeed, in a trip like this, many things could go wrong—and actually did—just as many other things were simply out of control, so that apologizing could be almost intrinsic to the act of recording.

Notwithstanding the material challenges of traveling with the recording equipment, recording ventures of various kinds were a common endeavor during the acoustic era, that is, between 1877 and 1925. Considering the vulnerability of the technology and the various provisions needed to set the gear optimally, it was apparent that the acoustic paraphernalia was not supposed to be portable. Nevertheless, the recording industry engaged in traveling adventures almost from its inception. Edison’s original business model included itinerant shows in the late 1880s—with echoes in various parts of the world before the turn of the century; anthropologists began taking phonographs with them for their ethnographic fieldwork as early as 1890; in the early 1900s the demand for original musical contents was being supplied by recruiting international performers; and by 1910 various companies had already set recording expeditions to multiple parts of the world (Brady 1999; Feaster 2007; Suisman 2009; Hochman 2014; Pérez González 2018; Moreda Rodríguez 2019). Recording companies in the United States seized the opportunity whenever they could to bring foreign performers to their state-of-the-art studios in New York and New Jersey, either by taking advantage of the increasing immigrant population or by mobilizing musicians from remote lands. Still, this practice did not prevent them from engaging in international ventures with a bulk of equipment transported in numerous trunks on transoceanic steamships. In light of their design and operability, neither phonographs nor recording studios were meant to go on tour. Yet they did. The expansive dynamics of the business in the early days of the music industry did not have room for second thoughts. Untapped markets created the demand for troops of resourceful recording experts to whom, in light of their multifaceted labor while being abroad, I call recording scouts (Ospina Romero forthcoming).

By 1906 Victor had already established itself as one of the leading recording companies in the United States. By means of its corporate agreement with the British Gramophone Company and the Deutsche Grammophon in Germany as well as the appeal of its flat discs and the unparalleled success of some of its “exclusive stars”—such as Enrico Caruso and John Philip Sousa’s band—Victor consolidated a stable and profitable business in North America, represented by millions of sales in records and talking machines (Suisman 2009; Liebersohn 2019). Yet the rest of the planet offered an appealing and unexploited area of business, and Victor expanded internationally very soon and very rapidly. And so did Edison, Columbia, Odeon, Pathé, the Gramophone Co., and a few other companies from the United States and Europe at the dawn of the twentieth century. Although almost every major company in the business at the time engaged in one way or another with foreign or ethnic repertoires, Victor, the Gramophone Co., and Odeon proved to be the most visible players in the game of sending recording technicians around the world. Since 1902, by virtue of the corporate agreement between Victor and the Gramophone Co., not only the records produced by each company could be commercialized (or reissued) by its transatlantic partner, but the two companies divided their areas of operations worldwide. While Victor was given the prerogative over the Americas, China, and Japan, the rest of the world—primarily Europe, Africa, and the other part of Asia—was for the Gramophone Company. Victor and Gramophone had the right and responsibility of representing each other’s interests and artists in their respective territories. Furthermore, the same scheme of world areas under their purview determined the specific destinations of their recording expeditions. Thus, while Gramophone’s travels focused on central and southern Europe, Russia, and Southeast Asia, Victor sent recording convoys throughout Latin America and, on one occasion, to East Asia. Still, although the relationship between both companies was reciprocal in multiple levels—including their mutual cooperation in terms of equipment and personnel—it was not necessarily a leveled field of power dynamics, as Victor eventually owned over 50% of the Gramophone Co. (Gronow 1982; Barnum 1991; Martland, 2013). As a matter of fact, while sharing with the readers of its trade journal the great appreciation for its talking machines in the royal circles of England, Spain, Italy, Egypt, and Persia, Victor made it clear that “Gramophone is the name under which the Victor is known in Europe” (“Royal Appreciation of the Gramophone,” The Voice of the Victor, Vol. IV, No. 1, January 1909, p. 5).

Michael Denning has recently depicted the recording business as something marginal during the acoustic era (Denning 2015, pp. 67–8 and 86–7). Nevertheless, such assessment is rather inaccurate, to say the least. It was certainly a blossoming industry of increasing proportions, and it was precisely the intensity of its global outreach before 1925 what made possible the post-1925 recording revolution Denning focuses on. Let’s consider briefly some numbers from the data available. To begin with, as Pekka Gronow has shown, while nearly 3 million records were sold in 1900, close to 140 million—equivalent to $106 million dollars—were sold in 1921. As early as in 1907, India imported 600,000 records, and a little later, when a local factory was established, the annual capacity increased to 1 million. Argentina imported 880,000 records in 1909, 1,750,000 in 1910, and 2,690,000 in 1913, while most European countries imported between 100,000 and 200,000 records annually on average through the 1910s—notwithstanding local production. In Russia alone, record sales reached 20 million copies in 1915. Whereas the Gramophone Co. issued 200,000 titles between 1898 and 1921, current reconstructions of Victor discographies during the acoustic period have long gone past the 120,000 recordings (Gronow 1983, 1998; Discography of American Historical Recordings). In 1908, Columbia set its first record’s factory in Japan, and by 1913 at least three local companies had emerged—as it would be also the case in Brazil and Argentina in 1913 and 1919, respectively (Johnson 2002, pp. 36–7; Cañardo 2017, pp. 14–19; Pérez González 2018).

In terms of the production of phonographs and other talking machines, the numbers went from 345,000 in 1909 to 514,000 in 1914 and to 2,230,000 in 1919 (Gronow 1983). Between 1905 and 1914, at least 449,603 packages with phonographic merchandise (representing a total value of more than $11 million dollars) left the port of New York, aiming to multiple destinations around the planet; more than 30% of those packages went to Latin America and the Caribbean (Liebersohn 2019, pp. 181–6). Likewise, between 1914 and 1919—despite WWI—the manufacture value of phonographic products in the United States grew from $27 to almost $160 million—an increase of over 500% (Talking Machine World 17, 15 June 1921, p. 105). Through most of the 1920s, in spite of the competition with radio and some financial setbacks, the industry kept growing. US companies sold about 100 million records annually, with record sales in most countries of the world ranging between 100,000 and 1 million per year (Gronow 1983). Early in the decade, one label alone in Australia was importing nearly 100,000 records per month, and by 1925, when the acoustic era was reaching its end and the local recording industry was just taking off, it was estimated that there could be as many as 1 million phonographs in Australia. Four years later, record sales in Finland were close to 1 million copies, at a time when the population of the country barely surpassed the 3 million mark (Johnson 2002, p. 37). By the end of the 1920s, between a third and a half of the households in North America and Europe had a talking machine, and there were some cities in the United States in which such figure reached 60%. And certainly not only among middle or upper classes. In 1924, 23% of working-class homes in Muncie (Illinois) reported that they had a phonograph, while a survey made in rural Alabama in 1930 indicated that more than 50% of the houses did not have pipelines but 12% had a phonograph (Suisman 2009, p. 249; Barnett 2020, pp. 5–8).

Yet numbers provide us only with a partial insight into the growth of the recording industry. Behind and beyond those numbers, there are countless stories pertaining both the imperial outreach of recording companies and the extent to which phonograph culture, as an unprecedented social phenomenon, grew and gained currency around the world in the early twentieth century. While most histories of the acoustic phonograph and the early recording industry have focused on the initiatives of the executive heads of the companies and the operations of the companies themselves—somewhat in abstraction—I am interested in the heterogeneity of narratives and actors that contributed to the blossoming of the business, from recording scouts to the listeners. In the remainder of this chapter, I unearth some of those stories pertaining to the production of acoustic recordings in itinerant scenarios. Elsewhere I have studied a different set of narratives and actors in relation to the circulation and consumption of these records (Ospina Romero 2021). By engaging with the minutiae of the recording ledgers and other material vestiges of the scouts’ journeys, I will focus on some episodes in the recording expeditions set by the Victor Talking Machine Company through Latin America and East Asia in the 1910s, in order to analyze the scouts’ improvisations on the ground.

These improvisations, I argue, are traces of the extemporaneous and imperial character of both the recording industry and the United States at the time. The global expansion of recorded sound entailed the consolidation of media empires such as that of the Victor company, defined, in my view, by the intersection of commercial agendas and new audible regimes (De Grazia 2005; Radano and Olaniyan 2016). Nevertheless, rather than orderly, logical, or controlled entities, these media empires were messy formations, constituted and sustained in conditions of incoherence, unevenness, and even anarchy as well as across improvisations around recording procedures, repertoires, personnel, marketing, and organizational structures (Kaplan 2002; Mann 2003; Stoler 2010). While setting up makeshift recording laboratories, these recording scouts faced multiple challenges, including identifying local talent, negotiating copyright deals, and sometimes wrangling tardy, drunken performers into the studio. It is clear that these recording scouts were attempting to follow executive master plans to open up new markets for the phonograph. Yet, it was up to them and the people they worked with everywhere to figure out how to put such plans into practice. Some procedures in relation to the operation of the technology were somewhat foreshadowed as well as certain guidelines and expectations set by the companies. Nevertheless, the expeditions implied an unpredictable array of spontaneous decisions. For the most part, just as some of the musicians they brought in front of the recording horns, the scouts were playing by ear.

Thus, while exploring the quotidian challenges of recording scouts, this chapter is also a study of the imperial dynamics and the (neo)colonial practices that shaped the recording business and propelled its global ventures in the early twentieth century. The everyday situations in the expeditions were, I believe, the actual playground of imperial dominance and cultural resistance in the international dealings of recording companies. After inquiring into some pioneering transnational recording ventures in the early 1900s, I will examine the unfolding of Victor’s expeditions and the scouts’ improvisations in matters of social interactions and technology. At the end, I will come back to the relation between coloniality, empire, and the scouts’ multifaceted labor.

Sending phonographs and recording experts abroad

In 1878, after having filled the patent for hi...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of figures
• List of contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: entangled phonographies
• PART I Negotiating geographical and cultural boundaries: intermediaries, traders and operators
• PART II Repertoires, auditory practices and the shaping of new listening identities
• PART III Phonography as ideology: the reordering of knowledge and sensibilities
• PART IV The social geographies of record-shopping
• Index