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Early Commercial Era

Ryan André Brasseaux

in Cajun Breakdown: The Emergence of an American Made Music

This chapter examines the dawn of Cajun recording. The Cajun community’s relationship to recording technology, the evolving nature of America’s recording industry, and Cajun music’s relationship to ... More

This chapter examines the dawn of Cajun recording. The Cajun community’s relationship to recording technology, the evolving nature of America’s recording industry, and Cajun music’s relationship to the ethnic, race, and hillbilly markets, are examined to illustrate the cultural intersections between the Bayou Country and America writ large. The pioneering recording careers of Joe Falcon, Cleoma Breaux Falcon, and Leo Soileau are also offered as further examples of the recording industry’s impact on local traditions and perceptions of Cajun music.Less

A Heterogeneous Tradition

Ryan André Brasseaux

in Cajun Breakdown: The Emergence of an American Made Music

Bayou Country’s musical terrain and the cultural and historical undercurrents that expanded the genre’s repertoire, stylistic range, and instrumental conventions are outlined in this chapter. Three ... More

Bayou Country’s musical terrain and the cultural and historical undercurrents that expanded the genre’s repertoire, stylistic range, and instrumental conventions are outlined in this chapter. Three factors encouraged heterogeneity in the Louisiana’s musical traditions: a musical network that stimulated exchange between musicians, thereby diversifying Louisiana’s soundscape; the historical idiosyncrasies and ethnic variation shaping cultural production in rural enclaves; and the tension between traditional and innovative tendencies within the genre. Residual colonial song structures performed by guitarist Blind Uncle Gaspard, Dennis McGee’s enigmatic fiddling that crossed stylistic and racial boundaries, the friction between conservative and progressive inclinations in regional Cajun popular culture, as performed by Leo Soileau and Moïse Robin, and Cajun readings of American popular culture as interpreted by accordionists Lawrence Walker and Nathan Abshire are used as points of departure in this discussion of heterogeneous musical expression on 78 rpm record.Less

A Gramophone in Every Grave

Steven Connor

in Dumbstruck: A Cultural History of Ventriloquism

The flourishing of the direct voice during the 20th century was undoubtedly encouraged by the development of acoustic technologies — the telephone, the phonograph, the gramophone, the microphone, the ... More

The flourishing of the direct voice during the 20th century was undoubtedly encouraged by the development of acoustic technologies — the telephone, the phonograph, the gramophone, the microphone, the megaphone, the radio, and the tape-recorder. The idea that the appliances and instruments are not only useful for making contact with spirits, but are also a feature of life beyond death, is a striking confirmation of the intermingling of technological modes of thought with supernaturalist ideas. For spiritualism, acoustic technology is not so much the proof of the retarding entanglement of psyche with the matter of techne, as the image of the evolving continuity of psyche. More than merely channels of contact with another order of existence, the telephone or the wireless are themselves a message concerning the magical, perfectible life of matter.Less

Inner Speech as a Gramophone Record: Jean Rhys’s Bohemian Voice and Popular Music

Angela Frattarola

in Modernist Soundscapes: Auditory Technology and the Novel

In Jean Rhys’s fiction, advertisements, songs, books, and voices of others impinge upon the interior monologues of her characters. In particular, the popular songs that are integrated into Rhys’s ... More

In Jean Rhys’s fiction, advertisements, songs, books, and voices of others impinge upon the interior monologues of her characters. In particular, the popular songs that are integrated into Rhys’s first-person novels enhance the auditory nature of her interior monologues. Yet, while the songs referenced in Voyage in the Dark (1934) and Good Morning, Midnight (1939) sometimes foster automatic responses and clichéd understandings for her narrators, they can also instill a sense of defiance and comfort, making music one of the few channels for a momentary sense of fulfillment and expression. By surveying Rhys’s depiction of popular gramophone recordings and their Bohemian associations in her short stories, this chapter reveals how Rhys crafts and commodifies a bohemian voice in her novels, which sounds out the dialectical relationship between a middle-class public with an appetite for lurid tales of the underbelly of society and so-called bohemians, who pushed the boundaries of individuality and freedom.Less

Early Recordings: Their Value as Evidence

Neal Peres Da Costa

in Off the Record: Performing Practices in Romantic Piano Playing

This chapter provides an overview of the history of sound recording. It covers early acoustic recording machines and techniques including the phonograph, the graphophone, and the gramophone and ... More

This chapter provides an overview of the history of sound recording. It covers early acoustic recording machines and techniques including the phonograph, the graphophone, and the gramophone and discusses the differences between wax disc and wax cylinder recording. It also covers the invention of microphones and the dawn of electrical recording. The chapter looks also at the other important means of preserving the artistry of pianists through the process of roll recording and playback using the reproducing player piano system. The main systems (Welte-Mignon, Duo-Art, and Ampico) and their differences are discussed. The limitations of these various types of recording are debated and conclusions about the information that may be safely extrapolated are put forward.Less

Americans Abroad: Innocents and Transnationals

Harry Liebersohn

in Music and the New Global Culture: From the Great Exhibitions to the Jazz Age

Thomas Edison invented the phonograph and planned a global business – which he launched with mediocre success; his provinciality contrasts with the collaborative skills and transatlantic success of ... More

Thomas Edison invented the phonograph and planned a global business – which he launched with mediocre success; his provinciality contrasts with the collaborative skills and transatlantic success of Emile Berliner. Edison monitored his recordings with the mentality of a sound engineer; he and his associates in the National Phonograph Company dithered while their rivals at the Victor Talking Machine Company snapped up the top talent. Edison’s company tried on markets like the Chinese and other immigrant record markets, but with limited commitment to marketing. They got off to a slow start in Russia, India was a disaster, and they faltered in Mexico. By 1908 their failure at communications was manifest. By contrast, Berliner was a transatlantic networker. Born in Hanover, Germany, he emigrated to the United States and was launched as an inventor by the Bell Company. With his brother, Joseph Berliner, he built a transatlantic business that included Deutsche Grammophon. In the United States, his protégé Eldridge Johnson built up Victor with a genius for middle-class marketing, while their British partner, the Gramophone Company, became a springboard for worldwide recording.Less

From Forces’ Choice to Desert Island Discs: The BBC’s promotion of personal choice in wartime

Jenny Doctor

Julie Brown, Nicholas Cook, and Stephen Cottrell (eds)

in Defining the Discographic Self: Desert Island Discs in Context

Up to 1939, the BBC followed a paternalistic music programming policy that sought to educate as well as to entertain, airing a high proportion of art music. When war was declared in 1939, the ... More

Up to 1939, the BBC followed a paternalistic music programming policy that sought to educate as well as to entertain, airing a high proportion of art music. When war was declared in 1939, the Corporation’s policies reversed, aiming to unite the nation and maintain morale. Shows focused on popular and light music, and the BBC developed alternative programming approaches, in particular the promotion of personal choice. Series like Forces Music Club, Forces’ Choice, and Forces’ Favourites, continuing after the war as Family Favourites and Two-Way Family Favourites, popularised a formula in which listeners requested gramophone recordings to be aired. Thus, when Roy Plomley’s Desert Island Discs launched in January 1942, it followed in a line of war-time, listener-led gramophone programmes; unusually, only this one featured musical choices of celebrated personalities. Little could anyone predict that DID’s programme formula would long outlast the policies and conditions of the BBC at war.Less

Desert island discomorphoses: Listening formations and the material cultures of music

Kyle Devine

Julie Brown, Nicholas Cook, and Stephen Cottrell (eds)

in Defining the Discographic Self: Desert Island Discs in Context

Musical identities are forged in relation to the material properties of media formats. The cultures of listening and modes of identification fostered by the 78-rpm disc, for example, are not the same ... More

Musical identities are forged in relation to the material properties of media formats. The cultures of listening and modes of identification fostered by the 78-rpm disc, for example, are not the same as those that took shape around the LP or the MP3. Each technology affords different modes of musical identification, fandom, enjoyment, and taste. To read Desert Island Discs as a continuous archive of self-presentation or a straightforward reflection of musical taste is thus to overlook a key point: the programme equally reflects seven decades of change in the material cultures of music. This chapter combs the online Desert Island Discs archive for evidence of the relationship between the discographic self and the ‘discomorphosis’ of music, focusing on such conjunctures as the hypothetical wind-up gramophone that furnished the island in 1942, the introduction of the LP and transistor radios around 1950, and the introduction of the iPod in 2001.Less

The Background to 1945

Peter Manning

in Electronic and Computer Music

This chapter traces the development of electronic music in the early twentieth century. The discussions include Thaddeus Cahill's electrically based sound-generation system, subsequently known as his ... More

This chapter traces the development of electronic music in the early twentieth century. The discussions include Thaddeus Cahill's electrically based sound-generation system, subsequently known as his Dynamophone or Telharmonium, which was first presented to the public early in 1906 at Holyoke, Massachusetts; the construction of electronic musical instruments; the birth of the commercial 78 r.p.m. gramophone record and the development of electrical recording systems; and the advent of magnetic tape systems.Less

Play It Again, Saraswathi: Gramophone, Religion, and Devotional Music in Colonial South India

Stephen Putnam Hughes

in More Than Bollywood: Studies in Indian Popular Music

This chapter considers the relationship between Hinduism and the history of music recording in South India. It argues that over the first decades of the 20th century, the introduction and commercial ... More

This chapter considers the relationship between Hinduism and the history of music recording in South India. It argues that over the first decades of the 20th century, the introduction and commercial success of the gramophone business was built around a series of constitutive relations with Hinduism. Record companies in South India not only drew upon Hindu musical traditions and performers, but they also used Hindu iconography to market their records and represent their business practices. Moreover, these companies produced records according to the Hindu ritual calendar, turned the studio recording sessions into places of worship, and sought to locate gramophone technology within a Hindu theology of sound.Less

Death by Gramophone

Sebastian D.G. Knowles

in At Fault: Joyce and the Crisis of the Modern University

Modernism grew up with the gramophone and came to fear its mechanization as a threat to the lost aurality of a pre-war world. For many modernists, Joyce among them, the gramophone brought death, as ... More

Modernism grew up with the gramophone and came to fear its mechanization as a threat to the lost aurality of a pre-war world. For many modernists, Joyce among them, the gramophone brought death, as the opposite of what they were writing for and a direct threat to their writing lives. Joyce’s gramophone recordings are paired with T. S. Eliot’s writings on the music-hall, and particularly the vaudeville performer Marie Lloyd, to show the humanity of live performance against the soullessness of art in a box. Other modernist works, from To the Lighthouse to As I Lay Dying to Krapp’s Last Tape to Brighton Rock, make an appearance in this wide-ranging study.Less

Gimpel’s Theatre, Lwów: The Sounds of a Popular Yiddish Theatre Preserved on Gramophone Records 1904‒1913

Michael Aylward

in Polin: Studies in Polish Jewry Volume 32: Jews and Music-Making in the Polish Lands

This chapter examines how the music of the Yiddish theatre was preserved on gramophone records between 1904 and 1913. It describes how the gramophone brings to life the sounds and atmosphere of the ... More

This chapter examines how the music of the Yiddish theatre was preserved on gramophone records between 1904 and 1913. It describes how the gramophone brings to life the sounds and atmosphere of the popular Yiddish theatre in Galicia in the most vivid manner imaginable. It also talks about the record companies that focused on Gimpel's theatre in Lwów, such as Favorite, Beka, and the Gramophone Company that recorded about 800 titles of Yiddish theatre music. The chapter provides a very brief history of the theatre founded by Jakob Ber Gimpel and gives an overview of the recordings the theatre made in the decade preceding the First World War. It mentions the field recordings being made in rural Hungary by Béla Bartók and Zoltán Kodály.Less

The ‘Lust Machine’: Recording and Selling the Jewish Nation in the Late Russian Empire

James Loeffler

in Polin: Studies in Polish Jewry Volume 32: Jews and Music-Making in the Polish Lands

This chapter investigates the role of the gramophone in the development of the Jewish national idea through the propagation of specifically Jewish forms of composition. It talks about Pinkhas ... More

This chapter investigates the role of the gramophone in the development of the Jewish national idea through the propagation of specifically Jewish forms of composition. It talks about Pinkhas Minkovsky, who published a book in order to warn the dangers of the “lust machine” or gramophone that constituted a “pornographic” response to the ills of modernity and a threat to the Jewish people. It also mentions Wolf Isserlin and his brother Mordkhe who turned into gramophone entrepreneurs and opened their own gramophone factory. The chapter investigates why Minkovsky opposed the gramophone while Isserlin staked his career on it. It explains that Minkovsky feared the desecration of Judaism and believed Jewish music was sacred, while Isserlin considered the gramophone as a secular commodity and rushed to commercialize it.Less

Languages of Listening

Laura Tunbridge

in Singing in the Age of Anxiety: Lieder Performances in New York and London between the World Wars

This chapter addresses questions of repertoire and post-war debates over which songs should be sung, by whom, and in what language. In both London and New York there were objections not only to ... More

This chapter addresses questions of repertoire and post-war debates over which songs should be sung, by whom, and in what language. In both London and New York there were objections not only to hearing enemy musicians but to hearing the German language. The resultant ‘ban’ on lieder went beyond wartime politics for it boosted campaigns to promote English-language repertoire and there was much debate about the use of translations on the concert platform. Media technologies were also important: gramophone recordings, radio broadcasts, and sound films all engaged with the question of how to present lieder. Events such as the centenary of Schubert’s death in 1928 were used to promote new kinds of consumption and listening. The increased dissemination of music also promised to change audience demographics to encompass the interwar category of the “middlebrow."Less

Malay Women Singers of Colonial Malaya: Voicing Alternative Gender Identity and Modernity

Tan Sooi Beng

in Vamping the Stage: Female Voices of Asian Modernities

Popular Malay music developed in Malaya in tandem with socio-political transformations which took place as a result of British colonialism. It was at this time that a new type of local commodified ... More

Popular Malay music developed in Malaya in tandem with socio-political transformations which took place as a result of British colonialism. It was at this time that a new type of local commodified urban popular music known as lagu Melayu (Malay song) emerged to entertain the multiethnic urban audiences from different social and class backgrounds. This new music was shaped by the convergence of the new social conditions, technology such as print, gramophone, radio, film, microphones, cultural forms, and performance sites that emerged. By examining the song styles and texts of 78 rpm recordings of Lagu Melayu, oral interviews with performers, and published texts of the colonial period, this chapter illustrates how the new popular music accorded women performing artists voice and agency to negotiate dominant discourses regarding modern colonial subjectivity and gender. Women singers promoted a type of vernacular modernity that was not defined solely in European terms butwas characterized by continuity, difference, and hybridity. The musical recordings and stories of their lives reveal the complex polyvocal and sometimes contradictory experiences of women performers in colonial Malaya.Less

A Wall of Sound: The Gramophone, the Radio, and the Noise of Neighbors

Karin Bijsterveld

in Mechanical Sound: Technology, Culture, and Public Problems of Noise in theTwentieth Century

This chapter discusses how objective scientific standards have been unable to regulate noise emanating from gramophones and radios in the neighborhood. It finds that noise level-based legislation has ... More

This chapter discusses how objective scientific standards have been unable to regulate noise emanating from gramophones and radios in the neighborhood. It finds that noise level-based legislation has been unable to address this problem in an effective manner except for proposing the soundproofing of houses. The chapter specifically focuses on the efforts of the Dutch government aimed at addressing neighborhood noise problems. The country was unable to address the problem through noise level-based legislation. The national government implemented the Noise Abatement Act in 1979. It also initiated a significant public information campaign to address the problem of neighborly noise instead of regulating such noise through the act.Less

Film, Gramophones and the Noise of Landscape in Dylan Thomas and Lynette Roberts

Zoë Skoulding

in Reading Dylan Thomas

In Part II of Lynette Roberts’s Gods with Stainless Ears (1951), a gramophone washed up on the south Wales seashore may be seen in the light of Roberts’s interest in film in a period which had, ... More

In Part II of Lynette Roberts’s Gods with Stainless Ears (1951), a gramophone washed up on the south Wales seashore may be seen in the light of Roberts’s interest in film in a period which had, according to John Cage, seen a new awareness of ‘sound effects’ and a resulting tension between ‘noise and so-called musical sounds’. Roberts wrote in the preface: ‘when I wrote this poem, the scenes and visions ran before me like a newsreel’. However, rather than presenting poetry and film as potentially complementary elements, Gods seems to evoke filmic techniques through its juxtapositions and awareness of environmental sound. The seashore gramophone also echoes an image in Dylan Thomas’s 1935 poem ‘I, in my intricate image’, which in its expansive scope and its densely detailed coastal imagery has several similarities with Roberts’s poem. For both poets, landscape is mediated by awareness of film, and by the approach to environmental sound that film enables. Film’s sensory simultaneity provides a model for locating the lyric and narrative energies of the poems within the landscapes they describe as well as the media landscape of the mid-twentieth century.Less