Sounds, Screens, Speakers

An Introduction to Music and Media

Charles Fairchild

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781501336256
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Medios de comunicación y artes escénicas
• Subtopic: Historia y crítica de la música

Sounds, Screens, Speakers provides a broadly comprehensive survey of the emerging field of music and media. Music has been present at the advent of nearly every new media form since the turn of the 20th century. Whether we look at the start of sound recording, film, television or the Internet, music has been a crucial participant in the social changes brought about by these new tools for making and listening to music. This book examines such changes starting in the late 19th century to the present. From the introduction of the microphone all the way through to music in reality television, the purpose of each section is not simply to move chronologically towards the present, but to focus especially on the tangible social relationships created through specific forms of mediation. With readings at the end of most chapters, key questions to facilitate additional discovery and research, and direction to additional readings and resources on popular websites and news sources, this text serves as the ideal introduction to popular music and media.

PART ONE

The early recording industry, 1875 to 1940

1

Mediated music, fidelity, and social anxiety

Background and topics

Picture yourself standing next to a piano surrounded by several of your friends. One is playing from a collection of songs she has collected and bound herself. The binding looks expensive. Each song looks like it has been annotated with new markings for dynamics and even a few extra notes here and there (see Figures 1.1 and 1.2; parlor scenes). The choice of songs as well as the ways in which they were performed would have said a lot about your friend. Many would have believed that her true character and qualities as a human being would have been, at least in part, revealed through this pleasurable ritual.

Now imagine a similar scene, only a few years later. The piano is still there, but it is not played nearly as often. Instead, a large rectangular wooden box stands in a prominent place in the same room. Within it is a round platter with a retractable arm with a small needle at the tip. There is a library of heavy, shellac discs sitting on a shelf inside the cabinet (Figure 1.3). Instead of the rich, full sound of the piano, a trebly, tinny, decidedly small sound emerges from this box. But those small sounds call up other worlds entirely. There are pianos, horns, strings, and often marimbas. Occasionally, there is a world-famous opera singer. The music is sometimes surprising, sometimes strange, but always engaging. “Making music” at home is a very different act now. It is almost as if the two social rituals are somehow disconnected.

FIGURE 1.1 A typical middle-class parlor piano (ca. 1910s).

FIGURE 1.2 A typical parlor scene (ca. 1910s).

FIGURE 1.3 Opera singer Enrico Caruso displays his Victrola phonograph (ca. 1910s).

Of course, they are very much connected. In fact, it is hard to understand what the introduction of sound recording meant to many people without understanding something of the cultures of music-making and listening in the home that preceded the gramophone in the form of sheet music. It is in doing so that we can see how, when one part of the chain of music production, distribution, and consumption changes, all of the others follow suit.

Over the next four chapters, we will see how the advent of new audio and visual technologies, such as sound recordings, gramophones, radio, and film, inspired a good deal of excitement and pleasure, but also evoked a good deal of social anxiety. While the pleasure people experienced from these technologies is commonly acknowledged and broadly understood by itself, when we try to understand it in relation to the kinds of social anxieties they evoked, we can come to a much better understanding of the kinds of social relationships these technologies created through music.

We will look at three interrelated issues that can help us understand this:

• the massive cultural changes going “in the background” in this time period;

• the new experience of music through sound recording; and

• prevalent conceptions of music in the past that are different than those we hold today.

The key readings for Part One are the collection of gramophone and phonograph advertisements found on pages 64–75 of this chapter. These will help you focus on the idea of “fidelity” which will be a main idea for this chapter especially. The concept of fidelity shaped the arrival of sound recording as a commercial technology primarily used for listening to music. We will address this idea through by examining these advertisements and working through a series of questions and writing activities. The goal of these activities as well as this chapter as a whole will be to understand the links between the new technology, sound recording, with the most widespread technology that immediately preceded it, sheet music. These will be instructive and important to understand. First, we will need to understand how much more significant and larger changes shaped how sound recording was understood and adopted.

Cultural change in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century

In the time period set out for Part One of this book, 1875 to 1940, massive cultural changes happened in the United States and many similar countries around the world. Of particular relevance to our understanding of the music industry will be the changes that enabled modern consumer culture to develop. Consider this list of the new communication technologies that were developed or “perfected” between the 1890s and the 1930s:

• “Advanced” printing techniques: (1850s to 1870s) mass production and distribution of newspapers and magazines creating a pervasive print culture comprised of information from around the world.

• Newspaper photography: (1880s to 1890s) artists’ drawings or etchings of events were gradually replaced by photo-engravings, then by “the real thing,” a process roughly analogous to sound recording.

• Telegraphy: (invented 1844; widespread use by 1855) the transportation of information across vast distances very quickly using wires.

• Telephony: (1870s) the transportation of actual sounds across vast distances very quickly using wires.

• Sound recording: (invented 1877; widespread use by 1905) the encoding of sound in physical, mostly reproducible forms.

• Sound reproduction: (invented 1887; widespread use by 1905) the mass production of physical carriers of sound.

• Wireless transmission of information: (1900s to 1910s) an extension of telephonic technology, but this time without wires.

• Radio broadcasting: (invented 1906; widespread use by 1920) the use of wireless transmission of sound to present music, talks, and entertainment, was m ost often live in the first decades of its existence.

• Microphones and amplifiers: (1920s) the electric encoding of sound for recording or transmission and eventual reproduction as live or recorded sounds.

• Moving pictures: (invented 1896; widespread use by 1910; with sound “talkies,” ca. 1928) the creation of strips of photographic images which mimicked movement, eventually synched up with sound.

• Television: (1940s) the wireless transmission of sounds and images across vast distances, live by necessity for the first several decades of its existence.

When taken as a whole, these new tools outline a wholesale reordering of the sensory experience of many aspects of culture in a relatively short period of time. It should not be surprising then, that this was accompanied by a good deal of both excitement and dread, both joy and fear. However, it is not simply the emergence of these tools and technologies that affected people so significantly. There were a great many other changes going on that shaped how all these new “cultural technologies” were experienced. In addition to the tangible sorts of change I’ve just listed, there were also a great many less tangible ones. Across most of the industrialized world, the kinds of social and economic connections that knitted various communities together were becoming unstuck and reformed. The reasons why this was happening were many and extremely complex. However, we can sum them up in a useful way here.

It is important to understand that very large numbers of people around the world were experiencing significant changes in all areas of their lives, including work, family relationships, community life, and the ways in which they ate, dressed, traveled, and felt. As the cultural historian Jackson Lears has explained, the dominant social ethos of the Victorian era, which “enjoined perpetual work, compulsive saving, civic responsibility, and a rigid morality of self-denial” had gradually given way to “a new set of values sanctioning periodic leisure, compulsive spending, apolitical passivity and an apparently permissive . . . morality of self-fulfillment.” The name for this new culture is familiar to us: consumer culture.

While these gradual transformations were uneven and took many decades to occur, they were still very widespread phenomena even before the turn of the twentieth century. Instead of feeling like they were part of close economic and cultural networks that were immediate and familiar, many people could see they were becoming part of a very different type of society, a mass consumer society. Lears argues that this left many people with a sense that reality itself was somehow more distant and it was “real life” was “something to be sought rather than merely lived.” This was due to increasing urbanization, in which more and more people lived in close proximity to large numbers of people who were not personally known to them. It also stemmed from technological developments in almost all areas of personal life.

Things that have been taken for granted in many wealthier countries of the world for over a century, such as indoor plumbing, central heating, or even canned food, were at that time new modern conveniences. Lears explains that they were thought by some to be symptoms of what was called “over-civilization.” The phenomenon of over-civilization was thought to have caused what many regarded as a genuine epidemic of “diseases” such as malaise, ennui, melancholy, nervous prostration, or neurasthenia which was a kind of paralysis of the will. These changes produced various kinds of discomfort and sometimes even panic. Further, the complex interdependent market economy that produced and facilitated such things was said to threaten a highly valued sense of individual autonomy. New types of work were more and more common. Instead of working at home or on a farm in some kind of manual labor, more and more people worked in offices. They were no longer the owners of their labor or time. With all of these new types of more distanced, freer, more individual and anonymous social relationships came a different experience of everyday life, one that felt less real and immediate to a great many people.

From sheet music to the gramophone

If we imagine phonograph to be just one of so many of these kinds of modern conveniences, then it is not hard to see how the experience of music was just one more aspect that contributed to a much wider and deeper sense of unease. Instead of hearing someone you knew playing a familiar kind of music for you, you would listen to a machine make new and strange sounds that came from some distant place made by people you knew very little about.

If we can briefly compare the cultures of music-making that stemmed from sheet music and those that stemmed from sound recording, then we can more easily see why some feared and resented the new medium even as others embraced it wholeheartedly. Importantly, underlying both the enthusiasm and the worry was a common conception of music that we don’t completely share with our historical forbears. To put it almost crudely, good music was thought to make you a better person and bad music was thought to make you a bad person. Good music was music that ennobled you and made you accepting of a particular kind of mora...