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?
Harry Liebersohn
- Published in print:
- 2019
- Published Online:
- May 2020
- ISBN:
- 9780226621265
- eISBN:
- 9780226649306
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- University of Chicago Press
- DOI:
- 10.7208/chicago/9780226649306.001.0001
- Subject:
- Music, History, Western
This book explores music and globalization since the mid-nineteenth century. Its starting-point is the world’s fairs and other exhibitions that showed off foreign musicians and instruments to mass ...
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This book explores music and globalization since the mid-nineteenth century. Its starting-point is the world’s fairs and other exhibitions that showed off foreign musicians and instruments to mass audiences in Europe and the United States; it ends with the worldwide embrace of new musical genres like tango and jazz. The book’s geographic focus is the Atlantic triad of Germany, Britain and the United States, but it traces the migration of non-Western music into these countries and the musical response to globalization in the metropolises of India and China and remote settlements from South America to the Arctic. The three parts of the book capture diverse dimensions of globalized musical culture: its overlap with the arts and crafts movement, scientific analysis of pitch and scales, and worldwide distribution through the phonograph. The cast of characters who made music global includes familiar names like Thomas Edison and Hermann von Helmholtz, but also A. J. Hipkins, a London piano tuner turned renowned scholar and advocate of musical diversity; Erich von Hornbostel, the refined Viennese who directed the first archive of world music; Nuskilusta, who toured Germany with a Native American music ensemble; and the Indian recording star, Gauhar Jaan. In dialogue with historians, musicologists and social theorists, the book concludes that the new global culture is not a novelty of our own time, but a long-established transformation of modern artistic and intellectual expression that still defines how we think, feel and hear.Less
This book explores music and globalization since the mid-nineteenth century. Its starting-point is the world’s fairs and other exhibitions that showed off foreign musicians and instruments to mass audiences in Europe and the United States; it ends with the worldwide embrace of new musical genres like tango and jazz. The book’s geographic focus is the Atlantic triad of Germany, Britain and the United States, but it traces the migration of non-Western music into these countries and the musical response to globalization in the metropolises of India and China and remote settlements from South America to the Arctic. The three parts of the book capture diverse dimensions of globalized musical culture: its overlap with the arts and crafts movement, scientific analysis of pitch and scales, and worldwide distribution through the phonograph. The cast of characters who made music global includes familiar names like Thomas Edison and Hermann von Helmholtz, but also A. J. Hipkins, a London piano tuner turned renowned scholar and advocate of musical diversity; Erich von Hornbostel, the refined Viennese who directed the first archive of world music; Nuskilusta, who toured Germany with a Native American music ensemble; and the Indian recording star, Gauhar Jaan. In dialogue with historians, musicologists and social theorists, the book concludes that the new global culture is not a novelty of our own time, but a long-established transformation of modern artistic and intellectual expression that still defines how we think, feel and hear.
Jason Camlot
- Published in print:
- 2019
- Published Online:
- September 2019
- ISBN:
- 9781503605213
- eISBN:
- 9781503609716
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Stanford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.11126/stanford/9781503605213.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, Film, Media, and Cultural Studies
Phonopoetics tells the neglected story of early “talking records” and their significance for literature from the 1877 invention of the phonograph to some of the first recorded performances of ...
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Phonopoetics tells the neglected story of early “talking records” and their significance for literature from the 1877 invention of the phonograph to some of the first recorded performances of modernist works. The book challenges assumptions of much contemporary criticism by taking the recorded, oral performance as its primary object of analysis and by exploring the historically specific convergences between audio recording technologies, media formats, generic forms, and the institutions and practices surrounding the literary. Opening with an argument that the earliest spoken recordings were a mediated extension of Victorian reading and elocutionary culture, Jason Camlot explains the literary significance of these pre-tape era voice artifacts by analyzing early promotional fantasies about the phonograph as a new kind of speaker, and detailing initiatives to deploy it as a pedagogical tool to heighten literary experience. Through historically-grounded interpretations of Dickens impersonators to recitations of Tennyson to T.S. Eliot’s experimental readings of “The Wasteland” and of a great variety of voices and media in between, this first critical history of the earliest literary sound recordings offers an unusual perspective on the transition from the Victorian to Modern periods and sheds new light on our own digitally mediated relationship to the past.Less
Phonopoetics tells the neglected story of early “talking records” and their significance for literature from the 1877 invention of the phonograph to some of the first recorded performances of modernist works. The book challenges assumptions of much contemporary criticism by taking the recorded, oral performance as its primary object of analysis and by exploring the historically specific convergences between audio recording technologies, media formats, generic forms, and the institutions and practices surrounding the literary. Opening with an argument that the earliest spoken recordings were a mediated extension of Victorian reading and elocutionary culture, Jason Camlot explains the literary significance of these pre-tape era voice artifacts by analyzing early promotional fantasies about the phonograph as a new kind of speaker, and detailing initiatives to deploy it as a pedagogical tool to heighten literary experience. Through historically-grounded interpretations of Dickens impersonators to recitations of Tennyson to T.S. Eliot’s experimental readings of “The Wasteland” and of a great variety of voices and media in between, this first critical history of the earliest literary sound recordings offers an unusual perspective on the transition from the Victorian to Modern periods and sheds new light on our own digitally mediated relationship to the past.
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.
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.
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.
Harry Liebersohn
- Published in print:
- 2019
- Published Online:
- May 2020
- ISBN:
- 9780226621265
- eISBN:
- 9780226649306
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University of Chicago Press
- DOI:
- 10.7208/chicago/9780226649306.003.0009
- Subject:
- Music, History, Western
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 ...
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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
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.
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.
Tracey E. W. Laird
- Published in print:
- 2005
- Published Online:
- October 2011
- ISBN:
- 9780195167511
- eISBN:
- 9780199850099
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195167511.003.0004
- Subject:
- Music, Ethnomusicology, World Music
The early decades of the 20th century was a time of progress for the United States. Shreveport played a vital part in the story of the rise of the phonograph industry. After advances in research into ...
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The early decades of the 20th century was a time of progress for the United States. Shreveport played a vital part in the story of the rise of the phonograph industry. After advances in research into phonographs, they began to appear in drugstores and bars. The affluent image associated with the phonograph began to widen in the 1920s. Due to the effect of the phonograph, many early hillbilly musicians portrayed the stresses and ambivalences of the era when mass media began to change music and musical practice. The impact of hillbilly music as characterizing southern sounds extended beyond any previous negative undertones. However, later on as phonograph companies struggled, radio moved to the center stage as the medium for listening to popular music.Less
The early decades of the 20th century was a time of progress for the United States. Shreveport played a vital part in the story of the rise of the phonograph industry. After advances in research into phonographs, they began to appear in drugstores and bars. The affluent image associated with the phonograph began to widen in the 1920s. Due to the effect of the phonograph, many early hillbilly musicians portrayed the stresses and ambivalences of the era when mass media began to change music and musical practice. The impact of hillbilly music as characterizing southern sounds extended beyond any previous negative undertones. However, later on as phonograph companies struggled, radio moved to the center stage as the medium for listening to popular music.
Lisa Gitelman
- Published in print:
- 2017
- Published Online:
- May 2020
- ISBN:
- 9781474416368
- eISBN:
- 9781474434591
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Edinburgh University Press
- DOI:
- 10.3366/edinburgh/9781474416368.003.0004
- Subject:
- Literature, 20th-century Literature and Modernism
Although mostly forgotten today, nickel-in-the-slot phonographs were a popular and telling symptom of acoustic modernity around 1890. At the rate of a minute or two of recorded sound per nickel ...
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Although mostly forgotten today, nickel-in-the-slot phonographs were a popular and telling symptom of acoustic modernity around 1890. At the rate of a minute or two of recorded sound per nickel deposited, these machines paved the way for the widespread private ownership of phonographs by pioneering their use a public venue where the uncanny experience of listening to absent voices was standardized by the logics of exchange and exhibition. The sound of money falling into the slots was answered automatically by the siren’s call of a voice with no speaker, calling for more money to be deposited. Because they flickered briefly at a conjunction of publics and markets, automatic phonographs provide a way to parse some of the conflicts attending the money economy during the 1890s, that crucial decade in the establishment of modernity as a technological way of life. Canning popular music, and privatizing its audition in serial acts of consumption, these devices were instrumental in the progressive abstraction of public space. Considering both the design and contexts of use of the devices helps to illuminate the conflicted subjectivities of markets and publics in the fin de siècle.Less
Although mostly forgotten today, nickel-in-the-slot phonographs were a popular and telling symptom of acoustic modernity around 1890. At the rate of a minute or two of recorded sound per nickel deposited, these machines paved the way for the widespread private ownership of phonographs by pioneering their use a public venue where the uncanny experience of listening to absent voices was standardized by the logics of exchange and exhibition. The sound of money falling into the slots was answered automatically by the siren’s call of a voice with no speaker, calling for more money to be deposited. Because they flickered briefly at a conjunction of publics and markets, automatic phonographs provide a way to parse some of the conflicts attending the money economy during the 1890s, that crucial decade in the establishment of modernity as a technological way of life. Canning popular music, and privatizing its audition in serial acts of consumption, these devices were instrumental in the progressive abstraction of public space. Considering both the design and contexts of use of the devices helps to illuminate the conflicted subjectivities of markets and publics in the fin de siècle.
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 ...
More
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.