Great ad copy! The record player as orgasmatron!
Soon there was a flurry of recordings of school and parlor performers, sung greetings, holiday wishes, and all sorts of amateur performances. The early phonographs were like YouTube—everyone was swapping homemade audio recordings. Composers were even recording their playing and then playing along with themselves. Soon enough that function was taken away. I would be inclined to believe that this anti-participatory, non-egalitarian move by the manufacturers might have been urged by the newly emerging recording companies, who would have claimed that they weren’t being evil but simply wanted to market “quality” recordings that would elevate the musical taste of their customers and the nation as a whole. Victor and Edison had “signed” a number of artists, and naturally they wanted you to buy their recordings, not make your own. The battle between amateurs and “professionals” isn’t new; it has been fought (and often lost) many times over.
Courtesy of Georg Neumann GmbH
John Phillip Sousa, the march king, was opposed to recorded music. He saw the new music machines as a substitute for human beings. In a 1906 essay entitled “The Menace of Mechanical Music,” he wrote, “I foresee a marked deterioration in American music and musical taste… in this twentieth century come these talking and playing machines that offer to reduce the expression of music to a mathematical system of megaphones, wheels, cogs, discs, cylinders and all manner of revolving things.”5 God save us from revolving things!
He’s not totally crazy, though. Despite his Luddite ravings, I tend to agree that any tendency to turn the public into passive consumers rather than potentially active creators is to be viewed with suspicion. However, the public tends to surprise us by finding ways to create using whatever means are available to them. Some creative urges seem truly innate and will find a means of expression, a way out, no matter if traditional means are denied to us.
Sousa and many others also deplored that music was becoming less public. It was moving off the bandstand (where Sousa was king) and into the living room. Experiencing music used to always be something you did with a group of other people, but now you could experience it (or a re-creation of it, as Edison would have it) alone. Shades of the Walkman and the iPod! To some, this was horrific. It was like drinking alone, they said; it was antisocial and psychologically dangerous. It was described as self-stimulation!
In his book Capturing Sound: How Technology Has Changed Music, Mark Katz quotes Orlo Williams, who wrote in 1923, “You would look twice to see whether some other person were not hidden in some corner of the room, and if you found no such one would painfully blush, as if you had discovered your friend sniffing cocaine, emptying a bottle of whisky, or plaiting straws in his hair.” Williams noted that we think people should not do things “to themselves.”6 It was as if the individual had selfishly decided to have a strong emotional experience, maybe even over and over again, whenever they felt like it, just by putting on a record, stimulated by a machine—there was something wrong with it!
One might think that these same worrywarts might also disdain recordings on the basis that they sacrifice the visual elements inherent to performance—the costumes and sets of grand opera, the hubbub and smells of a music hall, or the stately atmosphere at the symphony—but that was not always the case. The twentieth-century philosopher Theodor Adorno, who wrote great quantities of music criticism (and tended to dislike popular music), thought that removing music from the accompanying visual spectacle was sometimes a good thing. You could, in his view, appreciate the music more objectively, without the often tacky trappings of performance. Jascha Heifetz, the classical violinist, was a notoriously unexpressive presence on stage; he was described as being stiff, immobile, cold. But by listening with one’s eyes closed, or to a recording, one could discern the deep feeling in what might have previously seemed a soulless performance. Of course, the sound itself didn’t change, but our perception of it did—by not seeing, we could hear in a different way.
With the ascendance of radio in the twenties, people had another way to experience music. With radio, one definitely needed a microphone to capture the music, and the sound went through a whole lot of other electrical transmutations before the listener heard it. That said, mostly people really liked what they heard on the radio; the music was louder than on the Edison players, for starters, and there was more low end. People liked it so much that they demanded that live acts should “sound more like the radio.”
What has happened is to some extent what Sousa feared: we now think of the sound of recordings when we think of a song or piece of music, and the live performance of that same piece is now considered an interpretation of the recorded version. What was originally a simulation of a performance—the recording—has supplanted performances, and performances are now considered the simulation. It seemed to some that the animating principle of music was being replaced by a more perfect, but slightly less soulful, machine.
Katz details how recording technology changed music over the century of its existence. He cites examples of how instrument-playing and singing changed as recordings and radio broadcasts became more ubiquitous. Vibrato, the slight wavering in pitch, is often employed by contemporary string players, and it is a good example of the effect of recordings, because it’s something we take for granted as always having been there. We tend to think, “That’s how violin players play. That’s the nature of how one plays that instrument.” It wasn’t, and it’s not. Katz contends that before the advent of recording, vibrato added to a note was considered kitschy, tacky, and was universally frowned upon, unless one absolutely had to use it when playing in the uppermost registers. Vibrato as a technique, whether employed in a vocal performance or with a violin, helps mask pitch discrepancies, which might explain why it was considered “cheating.” As recording became more commonplace in the early part of the twentieth century, it was found that by using a bit more vibrato, not only could the volume of the instrument be increased (very important when there was only one mic or a single huge horn to capture an orchestra or ensemble), but the pitch—now painfully and permanently apparent—could be smudged by adding the wobble. The perceptibly imprecise pitch of a string instrument with no frets could be compensated for with this little wobble. The mind of the listener “wants” to hear the correct pitch, so the brain “hears” the right pitch among the myriad vaguenesses of pitch created by players using vibrato. The mind fills in the blanks, as it does with the visual gaps between movie and video frames, in which a series of stills create the impression of seamless movement. Soon enough, conventional wisdom reversed itself, and now people find listening to classical string-playing without vibrato to be painful and weird.
I suspect that the exact same thing happened with opera singers. I have some recordings made at the very beginning of the recording era, and their use of vibrato is much, much less frequent than what is common nowadays. Their singing is somewhat closer to what we might call pop singing today. Well, not exactly, but I find it more accessible and less off-putting than the fuzzy, wobbly pitching typical of contemporary opera singers, who sometimes exaggerate the vibrato so much you hardly know what note they’re supposed to be hitting unless you know the song already. (Further proof that the mind of the listener “hears” the melody it wants to hear.) Again, it’s assumed now that wobbly is how opera is supposed to be sung, but it’s not. It’s a relatively recent—and in my opinion, ugly—development forced upon music by recording technology.
Other changes in classical music were not quite as noticeable. Tempos became somewhat more precise with recording technology. Without the “distraction” of visual elements in a performance, unsteady tempos and rhythms can sound pretty damn sloppy and are rudely apparent, so players eventually learned to play to a consistent interior metronome. Well, they tried to, anyway.
This is an issue with pop and rock bands, too. My former bandmate Jerry Harrison has produced a number of first albums by rock bands, and he has observed more than once that the biggest and often