At the end of the 19th century, the phonograph was one of the major technological transformations of the way music was recorded, archived and distributed. Following this invention, a large part of the music industries grew and became the basis of popular music as we now know it. The case of the phonograph shows the importance of new technologies in our relationship with music. Without going into technological determinism, this edited volume collects a wide array of first-hand documentation (120 short pieces dating from 1878 onwards) that help us to understand how some of the key music technologies gained significance in the American context. In this sense, editor Timothy D. Taylor suggests that these primary sources should be read ‘ethnographically’ in order to reveal ‘how people were feeling and thinking about these technologies and the changes they were bringing to everyday people's lives’ (p. 8). In ethnographic vocabulary, the extent of the samples collected in this book could be used as a ‘grand tour’ of the structure of feeling that accompanied the introduction of the phonograph, the cinema and the radio. Even though the documents gathered are very thought-provoking by themselves and one of the aims of the book was simply to make them widely available to academia, contributions by the editors that introduce each part are the keys to emphasising the various issues that these technologies produced. They also help to organise and clarify the significance of the plethora of these documents.
The book is divided in three parts, each focusing on a specific technology. The first one is dedicated to the phonograph. As a popular music scholar, my first thought was that the history of this technology was, from the very beginning, the history of popular music. However, starting with Edison's writing about its invention, the items collected tend to counteract this assumed relationship. Edison lists probable applications of the phonograph and mentions music only at number five, after a few office duties. The items collected in this book show that the musical potential of this technology took more than a decade to become evident. For the audience, however, the experience of listening to music was transformed in depth and the industries behind the phonograph had to relate it to existing references. On the one hand, they focused on the technology's transparency and realism in rendering usual forms of music performances, and on the similarity in context of use (like phonograph parties and outdoors concerts, for example). On the other hand, this transparency was challenged by many composers, performers and commentators whose comments are collected here and who presented the phonograph as an opaque medium. In fact, some of them saw it as a musical instrument in itself that called for its own compositional logic, while others conceived it as a threat to artistic values. The evidence gathered helps us to understand the problematic articulation of the phonograph and popular music during its first decades. Early on, the phonograph was being sold as a domestic music technology; it is therefore no surprise that issues of gender are central to the documents collected. While they show that women were first recognised as consumers by the industry, they also provide a glimpse into the way in which the phonograph was gendered differently when conceived either as a technology or as household furniture intended for domestic pleasure.
The second part of this book focuses on cinema. As editor Tony Grajeda underlines in his introduction to this section, the documents collected show that the relationship of sound and cinema preceded the release of the Jazz Singer, the first ‘talkie’ to circulate widely in the USA. In fact, from the very beginning, moviegoers were far from experiencing cinema in silence. Advertisements and editorials about the phono-cinematograph, kineto-phonograph and other technologies for ‘singing and talking pictures’ dating from two decades before the Jazz Singer, are evidences given in this book of how the technology itself was conceived in order to articulate sound, music and moving pictures from the beginning. Of course, the importance of live musicians’ accompaniments for the experience of moviegoers is highlighted in many of the items compiled here and includes pianists, singers or large orchestras. The uncertainties of the period regarding the subordination of music to the moving pictures is also illustrated. Interestingly, many items deal with the good practices of musicians and cinema operators in order to realise an enjoyable event. The evidence gathered here illustrates the ways in which, during the first decades following its invention, cinema was articulated to music not only in the narratives of movies, but also as performances in a larger entertainment assemblage, alongside magic, comedy and other forms of popular leisure.
The last section of this book focuses on radio. As editor Taylor suggests, at the time of its invention this technology had more in common with the telephone than with the phonograph: instead of archiving sound, the radio was about transmitting it through a distance. However, just like the phonograph, radio came to develop its own new celebrities, habits and a different organisation of domestic space and leisure time. As with the other technologies surveyed in this collection, it also came with yet another singular relationship to music. The items compiled regarding the healing power of radio are particularly significant here, since the confusions between the technology and what is broadcast (music) signal their tight relationship. They also help to understand the way in which this technology did ‘shape people's experiences of music and entertainment […], transforming people's conception of public and private’ (p. 254). In fact, radio was understood as creating a sense of home and intimacy, even in public settings, and it was thought that it could heal people, put a child to sleep or herd cattle. The documents collected in this section highlight the way in which this intimacy took a musical form, through crooning (a genre seen at the time as sexually ambiguous) and came with the fear of its impact on the ears, tastes and morality of younger generations and women. Radio was also a powerful tool for musical education: for some of the commentators of the period it was a democratisation tool, its intimacy bringing a wider audience to the knowledge of a greater variety of genres.
This very interesting collection succeeds in giving a wide-ranging impression of the way these technologies entered everyday life in the USA. More interestingly, it documents the first decades following their invention, a period during which their significance and social codes were not yet fixed. These moments are important in that they were determinants in the way music and these technologies were to become related. In this sense, it is a valuable addition as teaching material. However, there is a difficulty inherent in any collection of historical documents of this kind: it is a wide-angle view of this specific period in the USA, which gives a general idea of the debates and conceptions that were circulating. This book's objective was not to be the definitive collection about the early days of the phonograph, radio or cinema. There is no claim for this to be some all-encompassing survey of the debates and issues they were related to, and it should not be read as such. This collection might be understood as an appeal for the reader to look for more details on some of these issues, an impression of the plasticity of these technologies in the USA.
