Abstract
The department store, the cinema, advertising, cars, telephony, radio and phonography were all characteristic features of early 20th-century modern life in the West. They each signified in their different ways its changing social configurations and its emergent consumer culture. Music was central to the fabric of modern life in this period. It was heard across the sound reproduction technologies of the cinema and radio as well as through the phonograph machine, and significantly it was an item now to be purchased and budgeted for. Sales of radios and phonographs rose rapidly after the First World War, and attendance at the cinema steadily grew larger throughout the interwar period. Music had of course been paid for before this time. People were charged an entrance fee when they attended the music hall, the minstrel show, vaudeville and musical theatre, but music had never before been commodified on the scale witnessed during the first 30 years of the previous century.
This purpose of this very useful volume is to show, from contemporary sources, the responses people made, and the attitudes they adopted, to these new channels of music during the period of transition between their initial introduction and their eventual integration into the accepted pattern of everyday life. The focus is primarily North American, which is fine insofar as the abundance of material clearly justifies this; it is nevertheless a limitation in that it doesn’t allow any comparative perspectives to develop across different cultural geographies. The sources are mainly journals and magazines, including those new magazines that emerged during this period catering for fans of radio, film and phonography, but other documents figure too, and these are varied: advertisements, songs, fan letters, literary fiction, the popular press. The period covered is roughly the 70 years from the late 19th century to the end of the Second World War, by which time these three music and media technologies had been thoroughly absorbed and adapted to the rhythms and rituals of day-to-day, week-to-week social life.
The book is in three sections, each dealing with one of the three media, and in the main the source material is thematically rather than chronologically arranged. A helpful feature of these sections is the introduction that precedes them, written by one of the three editors. The first of these by Mark Katz, author of Capturing Sound (2010), takes us through the readings on sound recordings, starting with Thomas Edison and others shortly after the invention of the phonograph, as they looked ahead to its future and how it would affect music and the process of listening to it. Further readings deal with the listening experience itself as people adjusted to mechanical playback, reacted against it, or differentiated themselves as phonograph listeners – as, for example, along stereotypical gender lines; with the responses of performers, composers and educators; and with the debates that developed over the value of recorded music. John Philip Sousa was notoriously hostile, regarding ‘machine music’ as likely to have deleterious consequences both for musical amateurs and musical professionals.
Tony Grajeda introduces the section he has compiled on cinema, starting with the point that the silent cinema was never truly silent, since there was voiceover commentary by film lecturers and actors speaking lines roughly in sync with the images on screen, attempts to combine phonography and cinematography, and regular musical accompaniment provided by piano players or small ensembles. The readings in this section provide further details about these sounds of the early cinema, along with discussion of conducting and scoring movie music, and responding to the talkies. The readings for the final section have been put together by Timothy Taylor. In his introduction he traces the major features involved in the experience of early radio and all it brought into the domestic environment. He then organizes the readings around such themes as early impressions, radio in everyday life, advertising, opinions for and against music on the radio, and responses to crooning.
This is a much needed anthology, bringing back from archival obscurity a broad range of fascinating documents from the early history of these three key sound technologies. They show how people used, experienced and responded to music media at this time, in relation to the social, cultural and political contexts in which they lived. We owe the three editors a considerable debt for doing the necessary research and for organizing and explaining the value of what they have unearthed.