Charles Musser
- Published in print:
- 2016
- Published Online:
- May 2017
- ISBN:
- 9780520292727
- eISBN:
- 9780520966123
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- University of California Press
- DOI:
- 10.1525/california/9780520292727.001.0001
- Subject:
- Society and Culture, Media Studies
Politicking and Emergent Media looks at four presidential campaigns in the United States during the long 1890s (1888-1900) and the ways in which Republicans and Democrats mobilized a wide variety of ...
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Politicking and Emergent Media looks at four presidential campaigns in the United States during the long 1890s (1888-1900) and the ways in which Republicans and Democrats mobilized a wide variety of media forms in their efforts to achieve electoral victory. The 1890s was a pivotal era in which new means of audio and visual inscription were first deployed. Newspapers remained the dominant media, and Democrats had gained sufficient advantage in 1884 to put Grover Cleveland in the White House. In 1888 Republicans responded by strengthening their media arm with a variety of tactics, using the stereopticon, a modernized magic lantern, to deliver popular illustrated lectures on the protective tariff which helped Republican candidate Benjamin Harrison defeat Cleveland--though Harrison lost the rematch four years later. Efforts to regain a media advantage continued in 1896 as Republicans embraced motion pictures, the phonograph and telephone to further William McKinley’s campaign for president. When the traditionally Democratic press rejected “Free Silver” candidate William Jennings Bryan, McKinley’s victory was assured. As the United States became a world power in the aftermath of the Spanish-American War, audio-visual media promoted American Imperialism, the “paramount issue” of the 1900 election, as McKinley won a second term.Less
Politicking and Emergent Media looks at four presidential campaigns in the United States during the long 1890s (1888-1900) and the ways in which Republicans and Democrats mobilized a wide variety of media forms in their efforts to achieve electoral victory. The 1890s was a pivotal era in which new means of audio and visual inscription were first deployed. Newspapers remained the dominant media, and Democrats had gained sufficient advantage in 1884 to put Grover Cleveland in the White House. In 1888 Republicans responded by strengthening their media arm with a variety of tactics, using the stereopticon, a modernized magic lantern, to deliver popular illustrated lectures on the protective tariff which helped Republican candidate Benjamin Harrison defeat Cleveland--though Harrison lost the rematch four years later. Efforts to regain a media advantage continued in 1896 as Republicans embraced motion pictures, the phonograph and telephone to further William McKinley’s campaign for president. When the traditionally Democratic press rejected “Free Silver” candidate William Jennings Bryan, McKinley’s victory was assured. As the United States became a world power in the aftermath of the Spanish-American War, audio-visual media promoted American Imperialism, the “paramount issue” of the 1900 election, as McKinley won a second term.
Angela Frattarola
- Published in print:
- 2018
- Published Online:
- May 2019
- ISBN:
- 9780813056074
- eISBN:
- 9780813053868
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- University Press of Florida
- DOI:
- 10.5744/florida/9780813056074.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, 20th-century Literature and Modernism
Modernist Soundscapes questions how early twentieth-century auditory technologies altered sound perception, and how these developments shaped the modernist novel. As the phonograph, telephone, ...
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Modernist Soundscapes questions how early twentieth-century auditory technologies altered sound perception, and how these developments shaped the modernist novel. As the phonograph, telephone, talkie, and radio created new paths for connectivity and intimacy, modernist writers such as Dorothy Richardson and Virginia Woolf were crafting characters intimately connected by the prosody of voice, music, and the soundscape. As headphones piped nonlocal sounds into a listener’s headspace, Jean Rhys and James Joyce were creating interior monologues that were shaped by cosmopolitan and bohemian sounds. As the phonograph and tape recorder aestheticized noise through mechanical reproduction, Virginia Woolf and Samuel Beckett were deploying onomatopoeia and repetition to aestheticize words and make them sound out. Modernist Soundscapes encourages us to listen to these auditory narratives in order to grasp how the formal and linguistic experiments we have come to associate with modernism are partially a consequence of this historical attentiveness to sound. This heightened awareness of audition coincided with an emerging skepticism toward vision. Indeed, modernist writers turned to sound perception as a way to complicate the dominance of vision—a sensibility rooted in Greek philosophy that equated seeing with knowledge and truth. Without polarizing vision and audition, this book reveals how modernists tend to use auditory perception to connect characters, shifting the subject from a distanced, judgmental observer to a reverberating body, attuned to the moment.Less
Modernist Soundscapes questions how early twentieth-century auditory technologies altered sound perception, and how these developments shaped the modernist novel. As the phonograph, telephone, talkie, and radio created new paths for connectivity and intimacy, modernist writers such as Dorothy Richardson and Virginia Woolf were crafting characters intimately connected by the prosody of voice, music, and the soundscape. As headphones piped nonlocal sounds into a listener’s headspace, Jean Rhys and James Joyce were creating interior monologues that were shaped by cosmopolitan and bohemian sounds. As the phonograph and tape recorder aestheticized noise through mechanical reproduction, Virginia Woolf and Samuel Beckett were deploying onomatopoeia and repetition to aestheticize words and make them sound out. Modernist Soundscapes encourages us to listen to these auditory narratives in order to grasp how the formal and linguistic experiments we have come to associate with modernism are partially a consequence of this historical attentiveness to sound. This heightened awareness of audition coincided with an emerging skepticism toward vision. Indeed, modernist writers turned to sound perception as a way to complicate the dominance of vision—a sensibility rooted in Greek philosophy that equated seeing with knowledge and truth. Without polarizing vision and audition, this book reveals how modernists tend to use auditory perception to connect characters, shifting the subject from a distanced, judgmental observer to a reverberating body, attuned to the moment.
Joanna Demers
- Published in print:
- 2010
- Published Online:
- September 2010
- ISBN:
- 9780195387650
- eISBN:
- 9780199863594
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195387650.003.0002
- Subject:
- Music, History, Western, History, American
Chapter 2 explores how electronica conceives of sound material as a metaphor. Compared with post-Schaefferian electroacoustic music, electronica spends less time dictating listeners’ responses. ...
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Chapter 2 explores how electronica conceives of sound material as a metaphor. Compared with post-Schaefferian electroacoustic music, electronica spends less time dictating listeners’ responses. Sounds of the outside world, sounds of other works, and sounds newly created all figure in electronica. What matters in electronica is not the origins of sound so much as the metaphors that portray sound as malleable material, the product of construction, reproduction, or destruction. These metaphors often correspond to actual sound-production techniques. Construction is often synonymous with sound synthesis, reproduction with sound sampling, and destruction with the defacement of the phonographic medium. But of course, the most interesting moments in electronica occur when the metaphor describing sound does not correspond with the actual means of producing it. When digital signal processing hides or disguises the provenance of a sound, listeners can hear in an old sound something supposedly new.Less
Chapter 2 explores how electronica conceives of sound material as a metaphor. Compared with post-Schaefferian electroacoustic music, electronica spends less time dictating listeners’ responses. Sounds of the outside world, sounds of other works, and sounds newly created all figure in electronica. What matters in electronica is not the origins of sound so much as the metaphors that portray sound as malleable material, the product of construction, reproduction, or destruction. These metaphors often correspond to actual sound-production techniques. Construction is often synonymous with sound synthesis, reproduction with sound sampling, and destruction with the defacement of the phonographic medium. But of course, the most interesting moments in electronica occur when the metaphor describing sound does not correspond with the actual means of producing it. When digital signal processing hides or disguises the provenance of a sound, listeners can hear in an old sound something supposedly new.
Ryan André Brasseaux
- Published in print:
- 2009
- Published Online:
- September 2009
- ISBN:
- 9780195343069
- eISBN:
- 9780199866977
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195343069.003.0003
- Subject:
- Music, History, American
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 ...
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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
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.
Ryan André Brasseaux
- Published in print:
- 2009
- Published Online:
- September 2009
- ISBN:
- 9780195343069
- eISBN:
- 9780199866977
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195343069.003.0004
- Subject:
- Music, History, American
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 ...
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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
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.
John M. Picker
- Published in print:
- 2003
- Published Online:
- September 2007
- ISBN:
- 9780195151916
- eISBN:
- 9780199787944
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195151916.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, 19th-century and Victorian Literature
This book shows how, in more ways than one, Victorians were hearing things. The chapters cover the railway that tore with a shriek, roar, and rattle through an eminent novelist's city and ...
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This book shows how, in more ways than one, Victorians were hearing things. The chapters cover the railway that tore with a shriek, roar, and rattle through an eminent novelist's city and countryside; the street music that drove a famous historian to a soundproof room and a popular illustrator to his premature death; the newly invented telephone that enchanted a queen; and the phonograph that preserved the gruff growl of a poet laureate. This book's approach to the representations close listeners left of their soundscapes draws upon literary and scientific works to recapture the sense of aural discovery figures such as Babbage, Helmholtz, Freud, Bell, and Edison shared with the likes of Dickens, George Eliot, Tennyson, Stoker, and Conrad. The book chronicles the shift from Romantic to modern configurations of sound and voice, with an ear for the intersections of 19th-century technology, psychology, and acoustics. The difficult questions this book raises about sound remain with us: who decides who gets heard and what gets silenced? Who determines what is music and what is merely noise? What roles do public reading and audio recording play in the development of an author's distinctive voice? What is at stake in close listening, and what would we hear if we practiced it?Less
This book shows how, in more ways than one, Victorians were hearing things. The chapters cover the railway that tore with a shriek, roar, and rattle through an eminent novelist's city and countryside; the street music that drove a famous historian to a soundproof room and a popular illustrator to his premature death; the newly invented telephone that enchanted a queen; and the phonograph that preserved the gruff growl of a poet laureate. This book's approach to the representations close listeners left of their soundscapes draws upon literary and scientific works to recapture the sense of aural discovery figures such as Babbage, Helmholtz, Freud, Bell, and Edison shared with the likes of Dickens, George Eliot, Tennyson, Stoker, and Conrad. The book chronicles the shift from Romantic to modern configurations of sound and voice, with an ear for the intersections of 19th-century technology, psychology, and acoustics. The difficult questions this book raises about sound remain with us: who decides who gets heard and what gets silenced? Who determines what is music and what is merely noise? What roles do public reading and audio recording play in the development of an author's distinctive voice? What is at stake in close listening, and what would we hear if we practiced it?
Roshanak Kheshti
- Published in print:
- 2000
- Published Online:
- May 2016
- ISBN:
- 9781479867011
- eISBN:
- 9781479861125
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- NYU Press
- DOI:
- 10.18574/nyu/9781479867011.003.0002
- Subject:
- Society and Culture, Cultural Studies
This chapter explores the important biopolitical role that listening to the sounds of the other has played in the twentieth and early twenty-first world music culture industry (WMCI), in both its ...
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This chapter explores the important biopolitical role that listening to the sounds of the other has played in the twentieth and early twenty-first world music culture industry (WMCI), in both its academic and commercial guises. It examines bodies as sites through which the other’s sounds resonate, and the deeply libidinized practice of listening that American consumers have been trained in through the technological developments of the last hundred years. Through its increasing domestication by the gramophone industry and the ascension of the bourgeois woman, the target market for the machine’s home use, chapter one also argues that the WMCI is intimately tied to the feminization of listening. I examine the domestication of sound both among collectors and among listeners as a process that brought Native and African American noises under discursive control, rendering them legible “phonographic subjects.” This practice fed the desires of feminized, domesticated listeners who not only sought exotic sounds on the phonographs that replaced the pianos in their parlors, but also a new domesticated other on whom the white female listener had a social leg up.Less
This chapter explores the important biopolitical role that listening to the sounds of the other has played in the twentieth and early twenty-first world music culture industry (WMCI), in both its academic and commercial guises. It examines bodies as sites through which the other’s sounds resonate, and the deeply libidinized practice of listening that American consumers have been trained in through the technological developments of the last hundred years. Through its increasing domestication by the gramophone industry and the ascension of the bourgeois woman, the target market for the machine’s home use, chapter one also argues that the WMCI is intimately tied to the feminization of listening. I examine the domestication of sound both among collectors and among listeners as a process that brought Native and African American noises under discursive control, rendering them legible “phonographic subjects.” This practice fed the desires of feminized, domesticated listeners who not only sought exotic sounds on the phonographs that replaced the pianos in their parlors, but also a new domesticated other on whom the white female listener had a social leg up.
Steven Connor
- Published in print:
- 2000
- Published Online:
- October 2011
- ISBN:
- 9780198184331
- eISBN:
- 9780191674204
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198184331.003.0017
- Subject:
- Literature, Film, Media, and Cultural Studies
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 ...
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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
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.
Angela Frattarola
- Published in print:
- 2018
- Published Online:
- May 2019
- ISBN:
- 9780813056074
- eISBN:
- 9780813053868
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University Press of Florida
- DOI:
- 10.5744/florida/9780813056074.003.0005
- Subject:
- Literature, 20th-century Literature and Modernism
Chapter 4 questions how the common turn-of-the-century practice of listening to the telephone, phonograph, and radio through headphones may have aided modernists in turning up the volume and ...
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Chapter 4 questions how the common turn-of-the-century practice of listening to the telephone, phonograph, and radio through headphones may have aided modernists in turning up the volume and recording interior monologue—one’s “inner speech” that sounds out within the auditory imagination. Using Jonathan Sterne’s historical study of how headphones created a “private acoustic space,” this chapter postulates that listening to voices and music through headphones created a new sense of a personal and aesthetically objectified space within one’s head. Just as headphones brought unfamiliar sounds and voices into one’s private headspace, James Joyce represents the stream of consciousness as a collage of voices and sounds from literature, religion, popular culture, and the soundscape. In Ulysses (1922), Joyce creates an auditory cosmopolitanism, by allowing the languages and sounds of the surrounding world to penetrate and influence the interior monologues of his characters.Less
Chapter 4 questions how the common turn-of-the-century practice of listening to the telephone, phonograph, and radio through headphones may have aided modernists in turning up the volume and recording interior monologue—one’s “inner speech” that sounds out within the auditory imagination. Using Jonathan Sterne’s historical study of how headphones created a “private acoustic space,” this chapter postulates that listening to voices and music through headphones created a new sense of a personal and aesthetically objectified space within one’s head. Just as headphones brought unfamiliar sounds and voices into one’s private headspace, James Joyce represents the stream of consciousness as a collage of voices and sounds from literature, religion, popular culture, and the soundscape. In Ulysses (1922), Joyce creates an auditory cosmopolitanism, by allowing the languages and sounds of the surrounding world to penetrate and influence the interior monologues of his characters.
Bruce Vermazen
- Published in print:
- 2009
- Published Online:
- January 2010
- ISBN:
- 9780195372182
- eISBN:
- 9780199864140
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195372182.003.0011
- Subject:
- Music, History, American
From June 1918 until May 1920, the Six Brown Brothers spent most of their time in road tours of Jack o' Lantern, but they continued to record for Victor, and during Jack o' Lantern's 1918 and 1919 ...
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From June 1918 until May 1920, the Six Brown Brothers spent most of their time in road tours of Jack o' Lantern, but they continued to record for Victor, and during Jack o' Lantern's 1918 and 1919 summer recesses, they appeared in Florenz Ziegfeld's Midnight Frolic. Bert Williams, the great mixed-race comedian who, like Tom Brown, worked in blackface, was one of the Frolic's stars. In December 1918, Percy Brown died in the world epidemic of the so-called Spanish influenza. In 1919, the act began also to record for the Emerson Phonograph Company, and H. A. Waggener gave Tom an 1863 Sax soprano saxophone, which he began to use onstage.Less
From June 1918 until May 1920, the Six Brown Brothers spent most of their time in road tours of Jack o' Lantern, but they continued to record for Victor, and during Jack o' Lantern's 1918 and 1919 summer recesses, they appeared in Florenz Ziegfeld's Midnight Frolic. Bert Williams, the great mixed-race comedian who, like Tom Brown, worked in blackface, was one of the Frolic's stars. In December 1918, Percy Brown died in the world epidemic of the so-called Spanish influenza. In 1919, the act began also to record for the Emerson Phonograph Company, and H. A. Waggener gave Tom an 1863 Sax soprano saxophone, which he began to use onstage.
Neal Peres Da Costa
- Published in print:
- 2012
- Published Online:
- May 2012
- ISBN:
- 9780195386912
- eISBN:
- 9780199933365
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195386912.003.0001
- Subject:
- Music, History, American
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 ...
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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
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.
William Howland Kenney
- Published in print:
- 2004
- Published Online:
- October 2011
- ISBN:
- 9780195171778
- eISBN:
- 9780199849789
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195171778.001.0001
- Subject:
- Music, History, American
Have records, compact discs, and other sound reproduction equipment merely provided American listeners with pleasant diversions, or have more important historical and cultural influences flowed ...
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Have records, compact discs, and other sound reproduction equipment merely provided American listeners with pleasant diversions, or have more important historical and cultural influences flowed through them? Do recording machines simply capture what's already out there, or is the music somehow transformed in the dual process of documentation and dissemination? How would our lives be different without these machines? Such are the questions that arise when we stop taking for granted the phenomenon of recorded music and the phonograph itself. This book is in-depth cultural history of the phonograph in the United States from 1890 to 1945. It offers a full account of what the book calls “the 78 rpm era” from the formative early decades in which the giants of the record industry reigned supreme in the absence of radio, to the postwar proliferation of independent labels, disk jockeys, and changes in popular taste and opinion. By examining the interplay between recorded music and the key social, political, and economic forces in America during the phonograph's rise and fall as the dominant medium of popular recorded sound, this book addresses such issues as the place of multiculturalism in the phonograph's history, the roles of women as record-player listeners and performers, the belated commercial legitimacy of rhythm-and-blues recordings, the “hit record” phenomenon in the wake of the Great Depression, the origins of the rock-and-roll revolution, and the shifting place of popular recorded music in America's personal and cultural memories.Less
Have records, compact discs, and other sound reproduction equipment merely provided American listeners with pleasant diversions, or have more important historical and cultural influences flowed through them? Do recording machines simply capture what's already out there, or is the music somehow transformed in the dual process of documentation and dissemination? How would our lives be different without these machines? Such are the questions that arise when we stop taking for granted the phenomenon of recorded music and the phonograph itself. This book is in-depth cultural history of the phonograph in the United States from 1890 to 1945. It offers a full account of what the book calls “the 78 rpm era” from the formative early decades in which the giants of the record industry reigned supreme in the absence of radio, to the postwar proliferation of independent labels, disk jockeys, and changes in popular taste and opinion. By examining the interplay between recorded music and the key social, political, and economic forces in America during the phonograph's rise and fall as the dominant medium of popular recorded sound, this book addresses such issues as the place of multiculturalism in the phonograph's history, the roles of women as record-player listeners and performers, the belated commercial legitimacy of rhythm-and-blues recordings, the “hit record” phenomenon in the wake of the Great Depression, the origins of the rock-and-roll revolution, and the shifting place of popular recorded music in America's personal and cultural memories.
William Howland Kenney
- Published in print:
- 2004
- Published Online:
- October 2011
- ISBN:
- 9780195171778
- eISBN:
- 9780199849789
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195171778.003.0001
- Subject:
- Music, History, American
Reimagining the historical influence of the phonograph and recorded music in American life this chapter begins with a reconsideration of Evan Eisenberg's description of domestic consumer phonograph ...
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Reimagining the historical influence of the phonograph and recorded music in American life this chapter begins with a reconsideration of Evan Eisenberg's description of domestic consumer phonograph culture. Eisenberg imagined domestic interactions of Americans with the phonograph as “ceremonies of a solitary”, ritualistic observances in which the listener summons forth the sound of voices and musical instruments of his or her own choosing. The talking machine fragmented the unifying role of live music in late 19th-century social rituals. This chapter compares two different but interrelated patterns of listeners' reaction to phonograph records in the United States between 1890 and 1945. The first circle of popular resonance to phonographic sound emerges from the analysis of responses by a group of 2,644 Americans who filled out a survey undertaken in 1921 by Thomas A. Edison Inc. The second pattern of phonographic culture—circles of jazz resonance—first emerged at about the same time, flourished in tension with Edison's consumers, and died in the depression, only to be revived once it was over.Less
Reimagining the historical influence of the phonograph and recorded music in American life this chapter begins with a reconsideration of Evan Eisenberg's description of domestic consumer phonograph culture. Eisenberg imagined domestic interactions of Americans with the phonograph as “ceremonies of a solitary”, ritualistic observances in which the listener summons forth the sound of voices and musical instruments of his or her own choosing. The talking machine fragmented the unifying role of live music in late 19th-century social rituals. This chapter compares two different but interrelated patterns of listeners' reaction to phonograph records in the United States between 1890 and 1945. The first circle of popular resonance to phonographic sound emerges from the analysis of responses by a group of 2,644 Americans who filled out a survey undertaken in 1921 by Thomas A. Edison Inc. The second pattern of phonographic culture—circles of jazz resonance—first emerged at about the same time, flourished in tension with Edison's consumers, and died in the depression, only to be revived once it was over.
William Howland Kenney
- Published in print:
- 2004
- Published Online:
- October 2011
- ISBN:
- 9780195171778
- eISBN:
- 9780199849789
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195171778.003.0002
- Subject:
- Music, History, American
In the 1890s, before the phonograph industry had time to establish what became in to the teenagers of the following century a tidy facade of domestic bourgeois respectability, another largely ...
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In the 1890s, before the phonograph industry had time to establish what became in to the teenagers of the following century a tidy facade of domestic bourgeois respectability, another largely forgotten world of coin-operated cylinder machines spun forth raucous worlds of popular entertainment. This other, earlier, and formative phonographic world, so suggestive of the juke box circles of the 1930s, provides ample evidence that the industry planted strong roots in turn-of-the-century popular culture. Many Americans learned how to use recorded entertainment as a significant new means of holding reminders of the past in suspension with reactions to the present. The phonograph parlors of the 1890s introduced short samples of the sounds of American popular music into the public urban world of “cheap amusements”, commercialized entertainments like concert saloons, musical halls, vaudeville theaters, dime museums, and burlesque halls that flourished in the emerging bright-light neighborhoods of cities in the United States. The Coney Island Crowd continued to make disc recordings intended for domestic use up to World War I.Less
In the 1890s, before the phonograph industry had time to establish what became in to the teenagers of the following century a tidy facade of domestic bourgeois respectability, another largely forgotten world of coin-operated cylinder machines spun forth raucous worlds of popular entertainment. This other, earlier, and formative phonographic world, so suggestive of the juke box circles of the 1930s, provides ample evidence that the industry planted strong roots in turn-of-the-century popular culture. Many Americans learned how to use recorded entertainment as a significant new means of holding reminders of the past in suspension with reactions to the present. The phonograph parlors of the 1890s introduced short samples of the sounds of American popular music into the public urban world of “cheap amusements”, commercialized entertainments like concert saloons, musical halls, vaudeville theaters, dime museums, and burlesque halls that flourished in the emerging bright-light neighborhoods of cities in the United States. The Coney Island Crowd continued to make disc recordings intended for domestic use up to World War I.
William Howland Kenney
- Published in print:
- 2004
- Published Online:
- October 2011
- ISBN:
- 9780195171778
- eISBN:
- 9780199849789
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195171778.003.0003
- Subject:
- Music, History, American
The history of the phonograph clearly demonstrates important ways in which economic and cultural forces have shaped technological inventions in the world. In 1877, Thomas Edison invented the first ...
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The history of the phonograph clearly demonstrates important ways in which economic and cultural forces have shaped technological inventions in the world. In 1877, Thomas Edison invented the first functioning prototype of the phonograph, but others subsequently patented major improvements and, in the process, reinvented and reconstructed the phonograph and means of recording sound. In some ways, phonograph technology did determine the broad outlines of sound recording from the popular music in the 1890s to opera in the 1910s. All of the great pioneers of the phonograph industry—Thomas A. Edison; Emile Berliner, inventor of the flat disc; Edward Easton; and Eldridge Reeves Johnson, founder and director of the Victor Talking Machine Company—agreed that their invention should become a permanent part of every American home. The Victor Talking Machine Company reinforced the upper and middle levels of an American musical hierarchy in recorded music. This aesthetic stance influenced the initial desire to make records abroad and the subsequent program of recording within the United States for sale to this country's immigrants.Less
The history of the phonograph clearly demonstrates important ways in which economic and cultural forces have shaped technological inventions in the world. In 1877, Thomas Edison invented the first functioning prototype of the phonograph, but others subsequently patented major improvements and, in the process, reinvented and reconstructed the phonograph and means of recording sound. In some ways, phonograph technology did determine the broad outlines of sound recording from the popular music in the 1890s to opera in the 1910s. All of the great pioneers of the phonograph industry—Thomas A. Edison; Emile Berliner, inventor of the flat disc; Edward Easton; and Eldridge Reeves Johnson, founder and director of the Victor Talking Machine Company—agreed that their invention should become a permanent part of every American home. The Victor Talking Machine Company reinforced the upper and middle levels of an American musical hierarchy in recorded music. This aesthetic stance influenced the initial desire to make records abroad and the subsequent program of recording within the United States for sale to this country's immigrants.
William Howland Kenney
- Published in print:
- 2004
- Published Online:
- October 2011
- ISBN:
- 9780195171778
- eISBN:
- 9780199849789
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195171778.003.0004
- Subject:
- Music, History, American
Cultural stereotypes in the United States constrained the involvement of immigrants with recorded music while simultaneously opening limited avenues of opportunity, especially for those from ...
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Cultural stereotypes in the United States constrained the involvement of immigrants with recorded music while simultaneously opening limited avenues of opportunity, especially for those from continental European nations. Just as Victorian tradition considered females particularly musical and, therefore, apt consumers of recorded music, so it taught that Europeans had invented and most skillfully developed the traditions of concert hall music that had been grafted onto the American artistic life. The phonograph industry therefore quickly turned to recording “foreign” concert hall vocal artists from Europe. Surprisingly enough, this colonial attitude eventually led the recording industry to a variety of multiculturalism dominated by European musical traditions. The importation into America of “foreign records” by European artists became a regular practice of the recording industry, interrupted (but not ended) by the two world wars. A second, culturally distinct, ethnic recording concept accelerated during World War I: that of recording for American ethnic customers the music of European immigrant musicians living in the United States.Less
Cultural stereotypes in the United States constrained the involvement of immigrants with recorded music while simultaneously opening limited avenues of opportunity, especially for those from continental European nations. Just as Victorian tradition considered females particularly musical and, therefore, apt consumers of recorded music, so it taught that Europeans had invented and most skillfully developed the traditions of concert hall music that had been grafted onto the American artistic life. The phonograph industry therefore quickly turned to recording “foreign” concert hall vocal artists from Europe. Surprisingly enough, this colonial attitude eventually led the recording industry to a variety of multiculturalism dominated by European musical traditions. The importation into America of “foreign records” by European artists became a regular practice of the recording industry, interrupted (but not ended) by the two world wars. A second, culturally distinct, ethnic recording concept accelerated during World War I: that of recording for American ethnic customers the music of European immigrant musicians living in the United States.
William Howland Kenney
- Published in print:
- 2004
- Published Online:
- October 2011
- ISBN:
- 9780195171778
- eISBN:
- 9780199849789
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195171778.003.0005
- Subject:
- Music, History, American
The public history of the early phonograph business echoes with the sounds of its male inventors, entrepreneurs, and recording artists. From the crusty phonograph patriarch, Thomas Edison himself, ...
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The public history of the early phonograph business echoes with the sounds of its male inventors, entrepreneurs, and recording artists. From the crusty phonograph patriarch, Thomas Edison himself, all eyebrows and blunt curmudgeonly wisdom, to the rugged globe-hopping of Frederick Gaisberg and the big game and fly rod heroics of recorded sound tycoon Eldridge Reeves Johnson, the phonograph industry catered to male consumers, so resoundingly engraved on the vocal recordings of Enrico Caruso. The industry's growing involvement in music for domestic consumption made the phonograph into a medium for the expression of evolving female gender roles in the United States. Many American women's lives began to change in the early 20th century and women, defined as the primary audience for recorded music, responded in unforeseen ways to the recording industry's efforts to further shape their lives of domestic submission. American women quickly adopted the talking machine into their lives, as record consumers, often as retailers, and occasionally as recording artists.Less
The public history of the early phonograph business echoes with the sounds of its male inventors, entrepreneurs, and recording artists. From the crusty phonograph patriarch, Thomas Edison himself, all eyebrows and blunt curmudgeonly wisdom, to the rugged globe-hopping of Frederick Gaisberg and the big game and fly rod heroics of recorded sound tycoon Eldridge Reeves Johnson, the phonograph industry catered to male consumers, so resoundingly engraved on the vocal recordings of Enrico Caruso. The industry's growing involvement in music for domestic consumption made the phonograph into a medium for the expression of evolving female gender roles in the United States. Many American women's lives began to change in the early 20th century and women, defined as the primary audience for recorded music, responded in unforeseen ways to the recording industry's efforts to further shape their lives of domestic submission. American women quickly adopted the talking machine into their lives, as record consumers, often as retailers, and occasionally as recording artists.
William Howland Kenney
- Published in print:
- 2004
- Published Online:
- October 2011
- ISBN:
- 9780195171778
- eISBN:
- 9780199849789
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195171778.003.0006
- Subject:
- Music, History, American
Commercial recordings of music made by African Americans, discs designed by record companies to sell to African Americans, finally emerged in the 1920s as a further extension of earlier ethnic music ...
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Commercial recordings of music made by African Americans, discs designed by record companies to sell to African Americans, finally emerged in the 1920s as a further extension of earlier ethnic music recording programs. The phonograph's mediation of the musical experience for both performers and listeners emerges clearly enough in ethnic records, but all the more so in those marketed to African Americans. Just as the recording industry had created its spinning encapsulations of ethnicity, so too it now turned to making engravings of the sounds of race. From 1920 to 1945, the race record era, many different companies made recordings of African American music, but four major record labels—Okeh, Paramount, Brunswick/Vocalion, and Columbia—took control of the field. Race records, however, present a dilemma: several Black musicians and singers claimed that despite the rich eclectic variety of Black popular music, they were allowed to record only blues.Less
Commercial recordings of music made by African Americans, discs designed by record companies to sell to African Americans, finally emerged in the 1920s as a further extension of earlier ethnic music recording programs. The phonograph's mediation of the musical experience for both performers and listeners emerges clearly enough in ethnic records, but all the more so in those marketed to African Americans. Just as the recording industry had created its spinning encapsulations of ethnicity, so too it now turned to making engravings of the sounds of race. From 1920 to 1945, the race record era, many different companies made recordings of African American music, but four major record labels—Okeh, Paramount, Brunswick/Vocalion, and Columbia—took control of the field. Race records, however, present a dilemma: several Black musicians and singers claimed that despite the rich eclectic variety of Black popular music, they were allowed to record only blues.
William Howland Kenney
- Published in print:
- 2004
- Published Online:
- October 2011
- ISBN:
- 9780195171778
- eISBN:
- 9780199849789
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195171778.003.0007
- Subject:
- Music, History, American
In the early history of the phonograph and recorded music, if not in the minds and performance practices of all vernacular musicians, blues and hillbilly music should receive separate consideration; ...
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In the early history of the phonograph and recorded music, if not in the minds and performance practices of all vernacular musicians, blues and hillbilly music should receive separate consideration; the recording industry rigidly distinguished between rural white and rural Black recorded music by creating and maintaining segregated recording and marketing categories. Making and replaying sound reproductions of what record producers first called “old familiar tunes”, “hill country tunes”, “old time music”, and, beginning in 1925, “hillbilly” music, swiftly intertwined supposedly rustic white southeastern American musicians with complex patterns of northern urban industrial commerce. Producing, recording, and consuming records of what passed for white rural southern music primarily served the economic interests of the northern recording companies that discovered remarkably little difficulty in harnessing southern entrepreneurial ambitions to their own corporate ends. Hillbilly records were born when northern and southern entrepreneurs began to envision how professionalized southern vernacular musicians would appeal when recorded and packaged as untutored rural southern mountaineers. Pioneer record producers like Ralph Peer liked to call their work in the South “recording expeditions”.Less
In the early history of the phonograph and recorded music, if not in the minds and performance practices of all vernacular musicians, blues and hillbilly music should receive separate consideration; the recording industry rigidly distinguished between rural white and rural Black recorded music by creating and maintaining segregated recording and marketing categories. Making and replaying sound reproductions of what record producers first called “old familiar tunes”, “hill country tunes”, “old time music”, and, beginning in 1925, “hillbilly” music, swiftly intertwined supposedly rustic white southeastern American musicians with complex patterns of northern urban industrial commerce. Producing, recording, and consuming records of what passed for white rural southern music primarily served the economic interests of the northern recording companies that discovered remarkably little difficulty in harnessing southern entrepreneurial ambitions to their own corporate ends. Hillbilly records were born when northern and southern entrepreneurs began to envision how professionalized southern vernacular musicians would appeal when recorded and packaged as untutored rural southern mountaineers. Pioneer record producers like Ralph Peer liked to call their work in the South “recording expeditions”.
William Howland Kenney
- Published in print:
- 2004
- Published Online:
- October 2011
- ISBN:
- 9780195171778
- eISBN:
- 9780199849789
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195171778.003.0008
- Subject:
- Music, History, American
The economic depression of the 1930s decimated the recording industry in the United States: hard times so undermined the phonograph companies that many never recovered. Victor and Columbia survived ...
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The economic depression of the 1930s decimated the recording industry in the United States: hard times so undermined the phonograph companies that many never recovered. Victor and Columbia survived by merging with other media corporations. The Depression's long-term economic effects, combined with the development of new communication technologies, served to accelerate the expansion of a few leading recording companies into business conglomerates that supplied recorded music for movies, radio, and jukeboxes. These multimedia consolidations led to the simultaneous playing of a limited number of popular songs on movie sound tracks, radio broadcasts, and jukeboxe sounds, saturating the media with hit songs, overwhelming young and musically unformed Americans, and absorbing ethnic and race music traditions into popular music formulas. The hit record phenomenon, so often exaggerated by phonograph critics, highlights a fundamental process in popular recorded music in the United States and a phonographic paradox: the power of a particular musical performance diminishes with repeated listening.Less
The economic depression of the 1930s decimated the recording industry in the United States: hard times so undermined the phonograph companies that many never recovered. Victor and Columbia survived by merging with other media corporations. The Depression's long-term economic effects, combined with the development of new communication technologies, served to accelerate the expansion of a few leading recording companies into business conglomerates that supplied recorded music for movies, radio, and jukeboxes. These multimedia consolidations led to the simultaneous playing of a limited number of popular songs on movie sound tracks, radio broadcasts, and jukeboxe sounds, saturating the media with hit songs, overwhelming young and musically unformed Americans, and absorbing ethnic and race music traditions into popular music formulas. The hit record phenomenon, so often exaggerated by phonograph critics, highlights a fundamental process in popular recorded music in the United States and a phonographic paradox: the power of a particular musical performance diminishes with repeated listening.
