“A Living, Fleshy Bond”: the Electric Telegraph, Musical Thought, and Embodiment

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“A Living, Fleshy Bond”: The Electric Telegraph, Musical Thought, and Embodiment

Inge van Rij

Whether the telegraph can ever be rendered an Apollonicon, or be made

a medium for transmitting the mysteries of the gamut, is an hypothesis

more pleasant than practicable. There have not been wanting those,

however, who indulge in the suggestion of making the telegraph

discourse “most eloquent music.” (The London Anecdotes: Anecdotes of

the Electric Telegraph (London: David Bogue, 1848, p. 18.)

The electric telegraph swiftly secured its place in the public consciousness in Britain,

Europe, and the United States in the 1840s, and with it new tones entered the discourse and soundscape of modernity. As the authors of The London Anecdotes speculate, the wires that multiplied across ever greater distances could potentially render the telegraph a giant instrument capable of “most eloquent music.” Although somewhat dismissive of the practicality of such an enterprise, the Anecdotes authors were among many who heard in the sounds produced by wind in the wires a special form of music, one suggestive of the Aeolian harp. It is significant that this technology of industrialism should exist in symbiosis with an emblem of high

Romanticism. As John Tresch has pointed out, various technologies of this period were enmeshed with Romantic sensibility rather than existing in opposition to it.

Several so-called “Romantic machines” were “fluid mediators between mind and world.”1 The analogy between the telegraph and the Aeolian harp will repay further

I am grateful to Roger Parker and other participants in the Music and Science symposium for feedback on a preliminary version of this article, to Sarah Hibberd for her convening of the

2 consideration. However, the telegraph could be seen to “discourse most eloquent music” on several other levels––not only of the sounds of the apparatus itself but also of the idea of musical language, the role of spatiality, and the treatment of the body.

The telegraph also facilitated rapid transmission of communications pertinent to music, crossing the Atlantic and the Channel, then traversing the world, disseminating culture that was defined as “universal.” When in 1858 Britain was thus connected to the United States the American minister Henry Field described the telegraph as a “living, fleshy bond between severed portions of the human family.”2

However, rather than explore the telegraph’s role in communicating news about art music, I want instead to examine how, from the outset, the medium interacted directly with the very premises on which that music was constructed. The musical examples I consider in this article, by Johann Strauss II, Georges Kastner, Hector

Berlioz, and David Edward Hughes, were composed at various locations in

Continental Europe and the United States, connected to each other and to a burgeoning international market for art music via the very telegraph technology that, in different ways, they invoke. I will explore five main areas of interaction: the

symposium, and to Ivor Hughes for valuable information about David Edward Hughes and the provision of several images.

1 John Tresch, The Romantic Machine: Utopian Science and Technology after Napoleon (Chicago,

London: University of Chicago Press, 2012), p. 5. See also Emily Dolan and John Tresch, “A Sublime

Invasion: Meyerbeer, Balzac, and the Opera Machine,” The Opera Quarterly 27/1 (2011), 5–31, here

27; Carolyn Abbate, “Outside Ravel’s Tomb,” Journal of the American Musicological Society 52

(1999), 465–530, here 468;

2 Henry Field, quoted in Tom Standage, The Victorian Internet: The Remarkable Story of the

Telegraph and the Nineteenth Century’s Online Pioneers (London: Phoenix, 1998), p. 98.

3 technology of the apparatus, including its relationship to musical instruments; the use made in both music and telegraphy of a sonic language that could also be transcribed and that aspired to be universal; connections to the supernatural and

Spiritualism; the transformation of communication across space and time (including the technique and technology of conducting, in both senses of the word); and the position of the body––the “living, fleshy bond” through which both telegraphic and musical communication must pass.

Until recently, cultural histories of technology and music have typically focused on the advent of sound recording as the most significant turning point––as the moment when, to quote Jacques Attali, “everything suddenly changed.”3

According to this familiar narrative, recording configured music as disembodied sound, shifting the paradigm increasingly towards individual, specialized listening, and away from the shared social––and visual––experience of the salon, concert hall, or opera house (“stockpiling sociality,” as Attali suggests).4 Music was thereby rendered a commercial product for widespread dissemination. However, Jonathan

Sterne has warned against subscribing uncritically to narratives that overemphasize the impact of such late nineteenth-century technologies.5 He has pointed out how notions of disembodied sound, for example, were anticipated decades before sound recording, and suggested that the electric telegraph has been “relatively neglected in the history of the senses.”6

3 Jacques Attali, Noise: The Political Economy of Music trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985), p. 87.

4 Ibid., p. 88.

5 Jonathan Sterne, The Audible Past: Cultural Origins of Sound Reproduction (Durham: Duke

University Press, 2003).

6 Ibid., p. 142.

Indeed, the telegraph was crucial in the reconceptualizing of sound, for it offered new ways of thinking about the act of listening. Sterne has examined how telegraphy gave rise to the concept of specialized listening, filtering out noise in order to focus on meaningful sound; he draws an analogy between this process and the increasing aural attentiveness of audiences as described in James Johnson’s

Listening in Paris.7 In contrast to Johnson, however, Sterne argues that whereas music had been one of the primary frameworks for interpreting sound in the West, the nineteenth century saw the proliferation of alternative means of constructing a listening subject and an aural object, and he focuses on these.

By examining the relationship between the telegraph and art music, I will attempt to bring phenomenological and sound-studies approaches into dialogue with practices of Western art music to which they have typically been presented as alternatives. I consider not only the position of the listener but also the condition of the sonic object or musical work and the place of the performer in this world of increasingly abstract sound. Investigating the relationship between the telegraph and music affords the possibility of traversing scholarly divisions between mind and body; work and performance; metaphor and physical reality; sight, sound, and touch.8

7 James Johnson, Listening in Paris: A Cultural History (Berkeley: University of California Press,

1995); Sterne, The Audible Past, pp. 97–8.

8 On haptics and its implications for music, see Daniel A. Putman, “Music and the Metaphor of Touch,”

The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 44/1 (1985), 59–66; David Sudnow, Ways of the Hand:

The Organization of Improvised Conduct (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Pres, 1978); Sudnow,

Talk’s Body: A Meditation between Two Keyboards (New York: Knopf, 1979); Steven Connor,

“Edison’s Teeth: Touching Hearing,” in Hearing Cultures: Essays on Sound, Listening, and Modernity, ed. Veit Erlmann (New York: Berg, 2004), 153–72; Elisabeth Le Guin, Boccherini’s Body: An Essay in

Carnal Musicology (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005); Ivan Raykoff, “Piano, Telegraph,

Such journeys across the liminal divide are precisely what characterize both telegraph and music during this period.

Organ grinders and piano wire: technologies of the early electric telegraph

Many of the formative developments of the electric telegraph occurred at the heart–– or head––of the British Empire, in London. In 1816 Francis Ronalds (1788–1873) tested an electric telegraph of thirteen kilometers running through his property in

Hammersmith; in 1837 Charles Wheatstone (1802–1875) and William Fothergill

Cooke (1806–1879) tested the first commercial telegraph on a line between Euston and Camden Town.9 By the mid 1850s most towns in Britain were connected to

London via telegraph. The early 1850s saw the first successful, if initially short-lived attempts at connecting Britain to the Continent. And in 1858 Britain was connected to the United States. Later, the network of wires would extend still further, connecting

London with the Empire and circling the globe through the “all red line” that touched down only on British possessions. As early as 1851, when the telegraph cable first connected Britain to the Continent, Paul Julius von Reuter moved to London because, with its status as a major telegraph hub, it was the best place to base his business of gathering and communicating news.

Typewriter: Listening to the Language of Touch,” in Media, Technology, and Literature in the

Nineteenth Century: Image, Sound, Touch, ed. Colette Colligan and Margaret Linley (Farnham,

Surrey: Ashgate, 2011), 159–86; and Raykoff, Dreams of Love: Playing the Romantic Pianist (Oxford:

Oxford University Press, 2013.

9 On the development of the telegraph, see Ben Marsden and Crosbie Smith, “‘The most gigantic electrical experiment’: The Trials of Telegraphy,” in Engineering Empires: A History of Technology in

Nineteenth-Century Britain (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), pp. 178–225. For a longer and more populist account, see Standage, The Victorian Internet.

Wheatstone also invented various musical instruments. Some of them share characteristics of the telegraph. For example, the “enchanted lyre” was controled by a keyboard in another room, so that the lyre appeared to play itself in a manner suggestive of both the telegraph’s ability to communicate across space and its association with the uncanny.10 However, the Cooke/Wheatstone telegraph system was still primarily visual rather than aural (indeed, the word telegraphy denotes the transmission of writing across space); it employed a system of levers that, through charges relayed by the connecting wire, pointed to different letters.

The most famous telegraph system––the one developed by Samuel Morse and Alfred Vail in the United States in the early 1840s––was also initially oriented towards vision: the code of dots and dashes was embossed onto tape at the receiving end, to be read, decoded, and transcribed into written text. However, by the 1850s professional telegraphers had realized that, rather than waiting to decipher the print-out, they could work more rapidly by transcribing the message directly from the sounds of the machine as it received the communication. Telegraphers developed very sensitive hearing and were often able to distinguish the characteristic sounds of their individual peers down the line––the staccato touch of one assertive character as opposed to the legato touch of her friend.11

The relationship between sonic “performance” and transcription in the Morse system is suggestive of that between music and score. However, the most obvious

10 Alison Winter, Mesmerized: Powers of Mind in Victorian Britain (Chicago: University of Chicago

Press, 1998), p. 39. See also, Melissa Dickson, “Hearing Things: Wheatstone’s Harp and the

Materiality of Sound,” in Sound Knowledge: Music and Science in London, 1800–1850, ed. Ellen

Lockhart and James Q. Davies (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, forthcoming).

11 Sterne, Audible Past, pp. 123, 152. See also Edwin Gabler, The American Telegrapher: A Social

History, 1860–1900 (New Brunswick and London, 1988), p. 80.

7 connection between specific telegraph technology and music is found not in the

Morse/Vail system, but rather in telegraphs that used a keyboard resembling that of a piano. In the “type printing” system developed in the late 1840s by American Royal

Earl House (1814–1895), letters were printed directly at the receiving end without needing to be transcribed. One account suggests that it was possible for a particularly skilled operator to “play tunes upon this instrument with very great success.”12 Skilled telegraphers of the House system could sometimes decode messages by listening to the subtle differences in pulsations used to relay each letter.13 House’s system required two operators, one of whom operated the air pump and was known colloquially as the “organ grinder.”14

The increasing interaction between musical and telegraphic technology was evident at the 1851 Great Exhibition in London. Telegraphs and musical instruments were displayed in the same category (“Philosophical, Musical, Horological and

Surgical Instruments”) and Dionysius Lardner marveled that there should be “certain small instruments like barrel-organs or pianofortes, played on by boys; that by means of these instruments, the aforesaid lightning should, at the will and pleasure of the said boys, deliver messages at any part of Europe, from Petersburgh to

Naples; and, in fine, that answers to such messages should be received instantaneously.”15

12 George Bartlett Prescott, History, Theory, and Practice of the Electric Telegraph (Boston: Tickner and Fields, 1860), p. 125.

13 Ibid., p. 125.

14 Ivor Hughes and David Ellis Evans, Before We Went Wireless: David Edward Hughes FRS; His

Life, Inventions and Discoveries (Bennington, Vermont: Images of the Past, 2010), p. 345, n. 8.

15 Dionysius Lardner, The Great Exhibition and London in 1851 (London: Longman, Brown, Green, and Longmans, 1852), p. 120.

The most significant figure in “type printing” telegraphy was David Edward

Hughes (1831–1900). Hughes built on aspects of the House system, but greatly improved the mechanism. He and his two brothers were musical child prodigies (see plate 1) who, after successful tours of Britain, moved to the United States, taking with them an English concertina invented by Wheatstone.16 Hughes retained his musical ambitions well into adulthood. He developed his telegraphic technology alongside activities as a composer, performer, and teacher of music. As he wrote to his sister, while employed as a teacher of music and science at a women’s college in Kentucky in 1850–52:

I worked hard on my music, knowing that my only chance in life was to

become a real famous musical artist, but just midway in these studies my

mind again became haunted with my old idea of a telegraph – I could not

resist it so I again bought old clocks and again went to work, dividing my

time as near as possible between the practise and composing of music

and tinkering on my Telegraph.17

One published account suggested that Hughes developed his telegraph in order to

“contrive a machine for copying extempore music, so that his melodious improvisations might not be lost.”18 Hughes himself denied this; nevertheless, his

16 Hughes and Evans, Before We Went Wireless, p. 343, n. 13; see also Dan Worrall, ‘David Edward

Hughes: Concertinist and Inventor’, http://www.angloconcertina.org/files/HughesforWebsite.pdf

[accessed 23 December 2014].

17 Letter of 27 May 1892; quoted by Hughes and Evans, Before We Went Wireless, p. 31.

18 Telegraph Journal 2/51 (17 December 1864); quoted in Hughes and Evans, Before We Went

Wireless, p. 345, n. 6.

9 telegraph does reveal the ways in which music shaped his thinking. Early models used piano wire for the writing apparatus;19 the first functional mechanism featured a rotating cylinder with pins, much like a music box.20 The fully developed apparatus used a keyboard of white and black keys that, like the House telegraph, was clearly modeled on the piano keyboard (see plate 2). In 1860 Hughes sold his telegraph system to the French government, which had been using a visually oriented system by Louis-François-Clément Breuguet (1804–1883). The Hughes apparatus was in widespread use on the main telegraph lines in France by 1862, spreading to other

European countries and to Britain by 1872. The move away from older semaphore- style systems was now complete, and regardless of whether the Morse/Vail or

Hughes system was used, the look, operation, and sound of the apparatus of the telegraph were now imbued with implications for music.

[Insert near here:

Plate 1: Notice of performance by David Edward Hughes and his brothers; image supplied by Ivor Hughes.

Plate 2: Telegraph apparatus of David Edward Hughes; photograph taken at the

Musée des Arts et Métiers, Paris, by Ivor Hughes.]

Sounds of the telegraph––a “langue universelle”?

In 1857 Johann Strauss II celebrated his return to Pawlowsk (just outside St

Petersburg) with the performance of a newly composed waltz entitled Telegrafische

19 Hughes and Evans, Before We Went Wireless, p. 34.

20 Personal correspondence with Ivor Hughes; see also the images of the mechanism on Hughes’s website: http://davidedwardhughes.com/hughes-telegraph [accessed 23 December 2014].

Depeschen (Telegraphic Dispatches). The introduction to the waltz immediately recalls the installation of a new telegraph line, which Strauss had witnessed in the same town the year before (see ex. 1).

[Insert near here:

Example 1: Johann Strauss II, Telegrafische Depeschen, opening]

With the metrically irregular staccato clatter of the strings and small snare drum,

Strauss violates the expected rhythmic stability of the waltz genre. Embodied music, or dance, is temporarily sacrificed to the industrial noise of the telegraph, rapping out its messages in Morse code across an ever denser and broader net of wires. At the same time, the piano arrangement of the telegraphic waltz domesticates the oddness of the new technology, bringing it into the home from the public arena in the same way that the telegraph itself would move from the military domain to the public (or commercial) world and from thence to the personal or domestic spheres.

After some more familiar waltz business, Strauss concludes Telegrafische

Depeschen by quoting the melody from a song that was widely popular in Vienna.21

As the cover page of the piano score suggests, Strauss’s waltz functions like a kind of telegraphic dispatch, a communication between Vienna and Russia, traveling

21 “Was macht den der Prater, sag blüht er recht schön? / Die Blätter fall’n ab, es ist völlig nicht z’gehn. (Ja nur ein Kaiserstadt, ja nur ein Wien.)” From Aline oder Wien in einem andern Welttheile

(1822, words by Adolph Bäuerle, music by Wenzel Müller); see Norbert Rubey, “Johann Strauß:

‘Telegrafische Depeschen,’” in Bekenntnis zur Österreichischen Musik in Lehre und Forschung: Eine

Festschrift für Eberhard Würzl, ed. Walter Pass (Vienna: Vom Pasqualatihaus, 1996), p. 218.

11 along lines that simultaneously resemble both telegraph wires and musical staves

(see plate 3).22

[Insert near here: Plate 3. Title page of Strauss’s Telegrafische Depeschen.]

By the time Strauss wrote his Telegrafische Depeschen in 1857, Morse’s alphabet of dots and dashes had become widespread, and Morse code and its telegraphic relatives were starting to be viewed as a form of “universal language.” In fact, Morse’s telegraphic system had a direct impact on language. As one commentator pointed out in 1873, the “Italian” alphabet was becoming an international standard for communication through its connection with Morse code and telegraphy. Moreover, telegraphy affected local languages: shorter words predominated over long ones and distinctive regional idioms receded in favor of words and syntax with a wider common usage. The language of telegraphy, including the language of news dispatches, became the easiest for a foreign traveler to comprehend.23

While we might now be highly sensitive to the loss of distinctive local meaning in what one commentator of the time described as a Darwinian “survival of the

22 A similarly telegraph-themed waltz by Strauss’s father Johann Strauss I, twenty years earlier

(1837), may also have been intended to evoke something of the transnational dissemination of popular themes: Musikalischer Telegraph is a potpourri perhaps mostly assimilated in Paris during

Strauss’s visit to that city in 1835. The potpourri genre was popular, but Musikalischer Telegraph has little outside this element of transmission to explain its title.

23 See anon., “The Telegraph,” reprinted from Harper’s New Monthly Magazine XLVII (1873), quoted in George Shiers (ed.), The Electric Telegraph: An Historical Anthology (New York: Arno Press,

1977), p. 360.

12 fittest,”24 the ability to communicate with people in increasingly distant regions was typically viewed at the time with great optimism, as evidenced by Henry Field’s proclamation that the transatlantic cable would “bind the human race in unity, peace and concord.”25 Similar optimism (and grandiosity) underpins claims from the same period that European art music spoke a “universal language” that was at the same time more advanced or evolved than so-called “primitive music.”26

Of course, unlike Morse code, music was usually seen to have attained its universality precisely through its lack of explicit semantic content.27 Attempts were made, however, to align musical language and the semantic content of telegraphy more closely. For many years the French musician François Sudre worked at a language he termed “téléphonie,” which he described as a “langue musicale universelle.”28 Unlike Morse code, which spelled out words letter by letter, Sudre’s system used combinations of up to four pitches to signify whole words (see table 1).

His language is thus sometimes known as “solresol,” since sol-re-sol (i.e. g–d–g) is

24 Ibid.

25 Henry Field, quoted in Standage, Victorian Internet, p. 98. See also the toast offered by Edward

Thornton: “Steam was the first olive branch offered to us by science. Then came a still more effective olive branch – this wonderful electric telegraph, which enables any man who happens to be within reach of a wire to communicate instantaneously with his fellow men all over the world” (p. 87).

26 Kathleen Marie Higgins traces such attitudes well into the twentieth century (including, for example, in Scruton’s Aesthetics of Music); see The Music Between Us: Is Music a Universal Language?

(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012), p. 4.

27 For Hanslick, “Music … is a kind of language which we speak and understand yet cannot translate;” see On the Musically Beautiful, quoted in Higgins, The Music Between Us, p. 78.

28 François Sudre, Langue musicale universelle inventée par François Sudre, également inventeur de la téléphonie (Paris: G. Flaxland, 1866). The book was published posthumously and the introductory section appears to have been written by Sudre’s widow.

13 the combination of pitches he assigned to the word “language.” Sudre developed

“téléphonie” before the creation and rise of Morse code; even after the latter became widespread, some continued to promote Sudre’s “langue musicale” as a more efficient approach.29

[insert near here: Table 1: Extracts from Sudre’s Langue musicale universelle

(1866)]

Sudre was confident that his language would break down national barriers. He envisaged it being broadcast across distances, like other telegraphic languages; it was described in the preface as “a universal musical language, by means of which

(after just three months of study) all the different peoples of the world […] can understand each other.”30 However, while Sudre recognized the need to translate his musical dictionary from French to other languages, including Chinese and Persian, he seemed oblivious to the fact that his whole system of classifying words in the

29 See Sudre, Langue musicale universelle.

30 “Langue musicale universelle au moyen de laquelle (après seulement trois mois d’étude) tous les différents peuples de la terre, les aveugles, les sourds & les muets peuvent se comprendre réciproquement. Langue à la fois parlée, écrite, occulte & muette, inventée par F. Sudre et approuvée par l’Institut de France.” Sudre, Langue musicale, n.p. See also: “Il n’est donc pas étonnant que dans les temps anciens, comme dans les temps modernes l’on se soit livré à la recherche des éléments d’une langue qui pût devenir universelle. Occupé pendant quarante-cinq ans de cette importante question, j’ai toujours pensé que le problème ne pouvait se résoudre qu’à l’aide des notes de la musique, vu que l’universalité du signe, son uniformité figurative, la facilité de l’écrire, de le prononcer, de l’indiquer sur les doigts, et de le rendre appréciable par le toucher, faisaient de ce moyen quintuple de communication la langue la plus propre à l’universalité.” p. I. Emphasis in the original.

14 dictionary was itself culturally specific, like a free-association test writ large. For example, Sudre clustered the words “castanet” and “tambourine” with “museum” and

“tableau,” thus relegating certain instruments to the status of static objects rather than situating them as part of lived traditions. Moreover, he did not question the authority of his own musical tradition: the word “music” is grouped with “to compose” and “note,” then “melody” and “harmony” (see Table 1), rather than with elements emphasizing performance, dance, or rhythm. As he put it, “This language is formed by the seven musical pitches whose universality cannot be doubted.”31 Sudre held demonstrations to solicit support for his communication system. His “téléphonie” was examined several times by a committee from the Institut de France, which included musicians (Chérubini, Lesueur, Catel, Boieldieu, Auber, and Paer) as well as scientists. He also brought the “langue musicale” to London in 1835 and 1852, where a number of papers, including The Times and Morning Herald, apparently reported on it favorably.32

Although the French government did not adopt Sudre’s system officially, and although the British remained skeptical of some claims about the universality of his language,33 Sudre appears to have made an impression on the French musical consciousness of the time. Berlioz’s futuristic novella Euphonia (1844) imagined the

31 “Cette langue est formée des sept signes de la musique dont l’universalité ne peut être mise en doute …” Ibid., n.p. Emphasis in the original.

32 Ibid., n.p.

33 “M. F. Sudre’s ‘Universal Language’”, Examiner 2325 (21 August 1852), p. 534: “So far as we could make out, however, the invention appeared to be rather one for facilitating expression or communication, from individual to individual, in any language – in fact, a sort of vocal short-hand – than anything which can lay claim to being a universal tongue.”

15 citizens of a musical city in the year 2344 communicating with each other using

Sudre’s system. The latter’s language also appeared to feature in an 1842 opéra comique by the French violinist and composer Jacques-Féréol Mazas. In Le

Kiosque, a mute character carries on a flirtatious conversation with several women by answering their questions with patterns of notes played on his violin. Berlioz took this to be a reference to Sudre (who similarly demonstrated his musical language through violin performances) and satirized the scene mercilessly:

Then along comes a grand French soldier who is mute, but who

plays the violin in such a way as to demonstrate that, if he finds

himself in battle, he won’t waste time on words but will prove himself

with his bow. The women ask him: Which of us do you find the most

beautiful? – He replies: La ré [A–D, or “the D”] Which do you find the

most pleasant? – La sol. [A–G, or “the G”]; in your opinion, who sings

the best? – La si. [A–B, or “the B”]

There’s nothing to be said through music of such an impertinent

nature. But these women, far from seeing through these dire puns, feel

truly flattered, and take it all for gallantries in a major key, which must

surely annoy the mischievous soldier. I ask myself: Why is he mute?

Following his lead and using the telephonic language invented by Mr

Sudre, I assure you that it is not fa si la [facile à, or “easy to”] discover.

Perhaps it’s to be better understood; perhaps it’s in order not to be

understood; perhaps it’s an idea, a passing madness; perhaps it’s so that

he has to play the violin – which would be a clumsy idea since, among the

handicapped, you scarcely see anyone other than the blind playing this

instrument.34

Aeolian harp and death by wire

Musical imitations of the languages of telegraphy, as well as “téléphonie” itself, forced a precise semantic meaning onto musical sound, thereby departing from

Romantic ideals of musical transcendence. However, another form of imitating the telegraph sonically revealed a relationship between the telegraph and art music more sympathetic to those ideals. Musical evocations of the Aeolian harp could simultaneously suggest the sound of the wind in telegraph wires. Both the telegraph and the Aeolian harp appealed to Romantic sensibilities in part because of the mystery of their operation––the fact that they channeled invisible substances

34 “Il y a ensuite un grand militaire Français et muet, mais qui joie du violon de manière à prouver qu’un jour de bataille, sans perdre son temps en vaines paroles, il sait se faire blanc de son archet. Ces dames lui demandent : Laquelle d’entre nous vous paraît la plus belle ? – Il répond : La ré, - Laquelle vous semble la plus aimable ? – La sol. – Laquelle, à votre avis, chante le mieux ? – La si. – On ne peut rien répondre en musique le plus impertinent. Mais ces dames, loin de croire à la possibilité de ces affreux calembours, se trouvent fort honorées, et prennent tout cela pour des réparties galantes dans le mode majeur ; ce qui doit fort contrarier le facétieux militaire. On me demandera : Pourquoi est-il muet ? Usant aussi de la langue téléphonique inventée par M. Sudre, je vous assurerai que ce n’est pas fa si la découvrir. Peut-

être est-ce pour mieux se faire comprendre, peut-être est-ce pour n’être point compris, peut-être est-ce une idée, une folie qui lui passe par la tête ; peut-être est ce pour paraître obligé de jouer du violon, ce qui serait une grosse idée ; car, parmi les infirmes, on ne voit guère que les aveugles jouer de cet instrument.” Jacques-Féréol Mazas, Le Kiosque, Opéra-Comique (libretto by Scribe), 1842 – review by Berlioz, Journal des débats (13 November 1842); reprinted in

Berlioz, Critique musical (Paris: Buchet Chastel, 2004), vol. 5, p. 223.

(electricity or wind) “known only by their effects.”35 The physics of the wind harp were not understood until the 1870s;36 before this, the instrument was often taken as a symbol of transcendence, of the sympathetic vibrations of the Weltseele, or

(particularly in England) as a metaphor for the creativity of the artist, inspired by forces beyond his or her rational comprehension.37

The Aeolian harp also fascinated musicians. Perhaps the most conscientious imitation of the Aeolian harp is found in the cantata Stéphen, ou la harpe d’éole

(1856), by Georges Kastner (1810–67), a Parisian composer and theorist who acted as a correspondent for London’s Musical World. The titular protagonist is about to take his own life in a fit of Romantic agony when he hears the sound of the wind harp emanating as if from heaven. (The scene is followed by choruses of triumphant angels and disgruntled demons frustrated at being denied victory over Stéphen’s soul.) Kastner explored sustained wind notes and simultaneous string harmonics, the latter still unusual at the time, to create the distinctive sound of the Aeolian harp (see ex. 2).

[insert near here: Example 2: Georges Kastner, Stéphen, ou la harpe d’Éole, “Effet d’orchestre imitant l’harpe d’éole.”]

35 Tresch, The Romantic Machine, p. xiii.

36 Thomas L. Hankins and Robert J. Silverman, Instruments and the Imagination (Princeton: Princeton

University Press, 1995), pp. 95–9.

37 Ibid, p. 103. See also Carmel Raz, “The Expressive Organ within Us”: Ether, Ethereality, and Early

Romantic Ideas about Music and the Nerves,” 19th-Century Music 38/2 (2014): 115–44.

Kastner also wrote works on orchestration that were among the most significant precursors of and influences on Berlioz’s treatise (1843, revised in 1855). Moreover, his experimentation with string harmonics has been understood in the context of a wider exploration of orchestral timbre as a constitutive element of music––a foregrounding of technology that could be seen to turn the orchestra itself into a

“Romantic machine.”38 Kastner’s division of the orchestra of Stéphen into two bodies, and the suggestion that the flutes and clarinets should be positioned as far as possible from the listener (“aussi éloigné que possible d’auditoire”), are suggestive both of Berlioz’s attention to spatial placement and of the telegraph’s ability to communicate across distance. Indeed, Kastner published his cantata at the conclusion of a substantial treatise on the wind harp, in which he articulates an analogy between this instrument and the sound of the telegraph wires:

People crossing the Pont d’Iena attended a new kind of concert. The wind,

blowing violently through the network of eighteen wires of telegraph lines,

made those wires vibrate and drew from them harmonic sounds that

exactly recalled those of the ancient Aeolian harps. Through the silence of

the night, and by moonlight, this noise mixed with the murmur of the river,

impressing the observer vividly and peopling his mind with fantastical

memories. It was like attending the scene of a melodrama, and not much

was missing in order for phantoms to be perceived on the quays.39

38 Tresch, The Romantic Machine, pp. 141–3 On Berlioz’s use of the orchestral “machine,” see also

Dolan, The Orchestral Revolution, pp. 211–19; and Inge van Rij, The Other Worlds of Hector Berlioz:

Travels with the Orchestra (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015).

39 “On lisait dans les journaux de 1850: ‘Les personnes passant sur le pont d’Iéna assistent à un concert d’un nouveau genre. Le vent, soufflant avec violence dans le faisceau formé par les dix-huit

During the same period, the American transcendentalist poet and philosopher

Henry Thoreau similarly connected the sounds of telegraph wires directly to the

Aeolian harp, inspiring a new philosophy of what he called “unpremeditated” music that would influence Ives and Cage in the next century:40 “As I went under the new telegraph wire, I heard it vibrating like a harp high overhead. It was as the sound of a far-off glorious life, a supernal life, which came down to us, and vibrated the lattice- work of this life of ours.”41 In London, too, the analogy was frequently drawn between the telegraph wires and the Aeolian harp: “Why could not a grand Aeolian

fils des lignes télégraphiques, fait vibrer ces fils et en tire des sons harmonieux qui rappellent exactement ceux des anciennes harpes éoliennes. Par le silence de la nuit, et par un clair de lune, ce bruit se mêlant au murmure des eaux du fleuve impressionne vivement l’observateur et peuple son esprit de souvenirs fantastiques. Il croit assister à une scène de mélodrame, et peu s’en faut qu’il n’aperçoive des fantômes sur les quais.” See L’Assemblée nationale (19 December 1850) and La

Liberté (5 April 1855); see also Georges Kastner, La Harpe d’Éole et la musique cosmique: Études sur les rapports de phénomènes sonores de la nature avec la science et l’art; Suivies de Stéphen ou

La Harpe d’Éole – Grand monologue lyrique avec chœurs (Paris: Brandus, 1856).

40 Frank Mehring, “‘Unpremeditated Music’: Thoreaus avantgardistische Vorstöße in eine

Neudefinition von Musik,” Amerikastudien 47/1 (2002), 39–54. See also Gordon Monahan, “Singing

Wires: the Music of Aeolian Harps,” Musikworks 30 (2009), 12–16. Monahan quotes Thoreau, including the following:

“Every swell and change or inflection of tone pervaded and seemed to proceed from the wood [of the telegraph poles], the devine [sic] tree or wood, as if its very substance was transmuted. What a recipe for preserving wood, perchance – to keep it from rotting – to fill its pores with music! How this wild tree from the forest, stripped of its bark and set up here, rejoices to transmit this music! […] To have a harp on so great a scale, girdling the very earth, and layed on by the winds of every latitude and longitude, and that harp were, as it were, the manifest blessing of heaven on a work of man’s!” p. 15.

41 Quoted in Hankins and Silverman, Instruments and the Imagination, p. 209.

20 telegraphic harp be made, the winds composing their own music, as the lightning now furnishes its own electrography?” mused the authors of The London Anecdotes in 1848.42 Kastner, Thoreau, and the London writers reflect a widespread misunderstanding of telegraphic technology in its early years. As the London

Anecdotes relate, “Another very general but erroneous idea, even among the better order of folks, is, that the humming, Aeolian harp-like effect of the wind on the suspended wire is caused by the ‘messages passing.’”43

Others simply heard the sound of the wind in the wires as ethereal or uncanny, after the fashion of the Aeolian harp. Although the telegraph was clearly an item of industrial technology controlled by human operators, in its early years it often evoked and even extended the metaphysical mysteries of the Aeolian harp, whose music was produced without human agency.44 For Kastner’s Parisians the telegraphic wind harp conjures fantastical memories and phantoms; for Thoreau the same sound evokes the “supernal life”; while in London “Many have experienced the supernatural sensations if we may so speak, the mysterious and musical murmurs.”45 The first message Morse communicated down the wire famously invoked a metaphysical marvel: “What hath God wrought?” Moreover, telegraphs were often associated in less Romantic terms with death and the afterlife. Stories abounded of criminals being

42 London Anecdotes, p. 19.

43 Ibid., p. 17.

44 Musical instruments such as the anémocorde and piano éolien synthesised aspects of the wind harp with the piano keyboard, further strengthening the suggestive resonance with subsequent developments in the electric telegraph – or, at least, with the House and Hughes systems with their keyboard transmitters. See Emily I. Dolan, “E. T. A. Hoffmann and the Ethereal Technologies of

Nature Music,” Eighteenth-Century Music 5 (2008), 14.

45 Ibid., p. 19.

21 captured and brought to justice thanks to the telegraph.46 For many years, the most common subject for a telegram received by the average citizen was news of a dying relative or a recent death––the telegraph made it possible for people to reach the relative in time to say goodbye, or at least to attend the funeral, and thus to interact on multiple levels with the liminal world of the Aeolian harp.

Space, time, and the afterlife––or Beethoven on Saturn

The telegraph’s association with messages about death was only one reason for the unease it sometimes caused in its early years. It seemed mysterious or downright uncanny to many because of the way in which it transformed perceptions of space and time, agency, and the body. The radical nature of this transformation is evidenced by historical anecdotes that reveal the difficulty many had in comprehending the telegraph’s transcendence over the physical domain. One

German woman, for example, turned up at a telegraph office with a bowl of

Sauerkraut and insisted that it be wired to her son, then a soldier in the Franco-

Prussian war.47 Similarly, the London Anecdotes recount several cases of confusion about the materiality of the telegraph: one man thought his misplaced coat had been sent to the train station via telegraph, another his umbrella; there was a common misconception that telegraph wires were hollow and that objects could be sent through them.48

46 When the murderer Tawell was executed for his crime, the telegraph became known as “the cords that hung John Tawell;” see Standage, Victorian Internet, p. 51.

47 Ibid., p. 65.

48 London Anecdotes, pp. 38, 69, 92.

The disembodiment associated with the telegraph also led it to be invoked in séances, as a means of communicating across the unfathomable distance between this world and the next.49 Table rapping employed Morse code; indeed, it was even suggested that Morse must have been in communication with the spirit world in conceiving his telegraph.50 A popular French manual for communicating with the dead was published in Britain under the title Celestial Telegraph.51 Some even proposed that the afterlife should cultivate dead telegraphers capable of deciphering the messages of the living, and that there must be spiritual “batteries” to power their machines.52

Music interacts with the combination of the telegraph and the afterlife in several ways. The idea of communication from beyond the grave fed into notions of the musical canon and the transcendental character of genius, as evidenced by two satirical accounts of séances involving composers.53 In 1863 the pianist, composer,

49 The Spiritualist movement originated in the United States, but was exported to Britain in 1852.

Richard Noakes, “Spiritualism, science and the supernatural in mid-Victorian Britain,” in The Victorian

Supernatural, ed. Nicola Bown, Carolyn Burdett, and Pamela Thurschwell (Cambridge: Cambridge

University Press, 2004); Jeffrey Sconce, Haunted Media: Electronic Presence from Telegraphy to

Television (Durahm, NC: Duke University Press, 2000).

50 Sconce, Haunted Media, p. 25.

51 Louis-Alphonse Cahagnet, Magnétisme: Arcanes de la vie future dévoilés (Paris: Germer Baillière,

1848–9).

52 Steven Connor, “The Machine in the Ghost: Spiritualism, Technology, and the Direct Voice,” in

Ghosts: Deconstruction, Psychoanalysis, History, ed. Peter Buse and Andrew Stott (London:

Macmillan, 1999), p. 212.

53 On the growth of the canon in Paris, including the rise of the idea of the transcendence of works by dead composers, see Katharine Ellis, Music Criticism in Nineteenth-Century France: La Revue et

Gazette musicale de Paris, 1834–1880 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), pp. 3–6.

23 and music critic Oscar Comettant (1819–98) included in Les Civilisations inconnues a chapter on “Le monde des esprits” in which he relays an account of a musical séance. The analogy between the telegraph and séance as means of communication across seemingly insurmountable distances is made explicit in the exchange that follows. Allan Kardec (1804–69), a key figure in French Spiritualism, rebuts Comettant’s skeptical critique by pointing out that “if, even just fifty years ago, someone had claimed that it would be possible to send correspondence from one side of the world to the other in just a few minutes […] he would have been ridiculed.”54

The telegraph analogy might be thought to inform both the mystery and the banality of Comettant’s accounts of musical séances. In one, the spirit of Mozart supposedly resides on Jupiter, but communicates with a medium on Earth, dictating the fragment of a new sonata from beyond the grave. Comettant ridicules the scenario with heavily ironic asides, pointing out that Mozart must have let himself go since his death (“Mozart se néglige depuis qu’il est mort”), for the composition in question displays a general immaturity of melodic and harmonic thought––it even contains hidden octaves.55 At another séance, Mozart’s posthumous fragment is performed alongside a piece by Chopin. The spirit of Mozart is then quizzed before it hands over the proceedings to Chopin who, although describing himself as a

54 Oscar Comettant, Les Civilisations inconnues (Paris: Pagnerre, 1863), pp. 265–6. “A celui qui eût dit, il y a seulement un demi-siècle, qu’en quelques minutes ou correspondrait d’un bout du monde à l’autre, qu’en quelques heures on traverserait la France, qu’avec un peu d’eau bouillante un navire marcherait vent debout, qu’on tirerait de l’eau des moyens de s’éclairer et de se chauffer ; à celui qui eût proposé d’éclairer tout Paris en un instant avec un seul réservoir d’une substance invisible, on lui eût ri au nez.”

55 Ibid., p. 259.

24 wanderer (“errant”), is presumably at this moment passing through Mozart’s spiritual home on Jupiter. The suggestion that spirits of composers might reside within proximity of one another gives a bizarrely literal form to the notion of the canon

(Jupiter here standing in for that more familiar site of canonic immortality, the

“imaginary museum”)56 and also incorporates an aspect of telegraphy. As Jeffrey

Sconce suggests, the idea of a “sovereign electrical world” or an “electronic elsewhere” was, along with disembodiment, another feature typical of fiction stimulated by telegraphy and other new technological applications of electrical

“flow.”57

The role of instrumental performance––an act that involves both body and machine––in this disembodied world is another source of tension in Comettant’s account. When asked if he could play the piano in the afterlife, Mozart’s ghost replies that he could, but it would be “pointless” (“inutile”).58 Chopin’s spirit then informs the medium that there are performers in the afterlife who play the composer’s work with a thousand times more accuracy than those in this world, and who perform on a special instrument––“a sort of organ of a precision and melodiousness that you could not comprehend.”59 The performers are supposedly wanderers (“errants”) like

Chopin. “If the leader of the orchestra [Chopin himself] and the performers are wanderers, the organs are wanderers also.… It’s very curious, and I don’t really

56 Lydia Goehr, The Imaginary Museum of Musical Works (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992; rev.

2007).

57 Sconce, Haunted Media, p. 9.

58 Comettant, Les Civilisations inconnues, p. 261.

59 Ibid., p. 264.

25 understand it,” Comettant remarks.60 The idea of a composer dictating, from beyond the grave, a composition to be interpreted by a performer in this world may have resonated metaphorically with ideals of performers channeling the composer’s voice. But the metaphor breaks down when the performers and, in particular, the instruments are also imagined to exist in a realm beyond the physical. Performers, and the technologies of performance, Comettant implies, must, like the telegraph apparatus and the medium, be situated firmly in the physical world of bodies and machines, with all their limitations and imperfections.

Several of these issues are captured and reimagined in a feuilleton published by Berlioz in the same year. After touching on Comettant’s Les Civilisations inconnues, Berlioz envisages his own musical séance. But he ups the ante: rather than communicating with Mozart on Jupiter, Berlioz describes interplanetary communication with Beethoven, whom he locates even further afield, in the rings of

Saturn. Beethoven’s spirit is summoned by a medium who can supposedly channel new compositions dictated by the Master:

The medium, who is himself half spirit, half slaps Beethoven on the back

and without further ado asks the demigod to dictate a new sonata. No

need to tell him twice; the table begins at once to frolic about while the

medium takes down the dictation. The sonata written, Beethoven is off

back to Saturn. The medium, surrounded by a dozen dumbfounded

spectators, goes to the piano and plays the sonata, and the dumbfounded

spectators turn into a disconcerted audience as they perceive that the

60 “Si le chef d’orchestre et les exécutans sont errants, les orgues sont aussi errantes, et sans doute à claviers mobiles. C’est très-curieux, et je ne comprends pas bien ;” Ibid., p. 264.

sonata is not a half platitude, but a total platitude, an absurdity, sheer

nonsense.61

The séance and the telegraph again provide a context for familiar aesthetic concepts, and again it is in the awkward physical dimension (the medium is “half spirit” and thus “half slaps Beethoven on the back”) that the analogy becomes most humorous. Berlioz strengthens the telegraph analogy in his reworking of Comettant’s premise. The musical dictation now occurs through a levitating table, whose language must be decoded by the medium, just as the telegraph operator sitting at the keyboard of a Hughes telegraph instrument (which had been installed on all the major French telegraph lines in the two years immediately prior to the satirical narratives of Berlioz and Comettant) oversaw the receipt of a message sent from a keyboard at a remote location.

A similar convergence of telegraphy, Spiritualism, and music is already present in Berlioz’s incomplete opera La Nonne sanglante. In Eugène Scribe’s libretto (set partially by Berlioz in the mid-1840s and eventually set in its entirety by

Gounod in 1854), the heroine Agnès tells her lover Rodolphe about the ghost of the nun that walks the halls of the castle once a year. Although Rodolphe is skeptical,

Agnès seems almost to conjure the ghost as she explains her fears and describes the uncanny visitor. In the second verse of Agnès’s ballad, Berlioz requests that the double basses be divided into two groups. These are positioned on either side of the

61 Journal des débats on 23 July 1863. The account of the séance was subsequently published in À

Travers Chants. This translation is taken from Berlioz, “Beethoven in the Rings of Saturn,” in The Art of Music and Other Essays (À Travers Chants), trans. Elizabeth Csicsery-Rónay (Bloomington and

Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1994), p. 55.

27 orchestra, passing their soft low pizzicato back and forth across the auditorium, like telegraphic signals between this world and the next (see ex. 3).

[insert near here: Example 3: Berlioz, La Nonne sanglante, Duet––Légende]

“This living telegraph:” conducting (via) electricity

Around the time Berlioz composed the “Légende” of La Nonne sanglante, during the mid-1840s, he also wrote his futuristic novella Euphonia, in which both telegraphic technology and Sudre’s musical language coordinate the lives of citizens and the players of a massive festival orchestra, each of whom has a receiver at his or her desk:

The language of the tower organ, this aural telegraphy, is hardly

understood by any but Euphonians; they alone are familiar with

telephony, an invention whose importance was foreseen by one Sudre in

the nineteenth century.62

An ingenious mechanism […] which is actuated by the conductor without

being visible to the public, indicates to the eye of each performer, and

quite close to him, the beats of each measure. It also denotes precisely

the several degrees of piano or forte. In this way the performers are

immediately and instantaneously in touch with the conductor’s attention,

62 Berlioz, Evenings with the Orchestra, trans. Jacques Barzun (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,

1999), p. 285.

and can respond to it as promptly as do the hammers of a piano under

the hand pressing the keys.63

Lacking the “ingenious mechanism,” the regular baton of Berlioz’s time was itself sometimes compared to a telegraph. A visual analogy is pertinent here, since some electric telegraphs were based on communication via the movements of a stick or needle––one resembling the motion of a baton. In 1817 there had been a debate in these terms over Spontini’s use of a baton at the Paris Opéra, a theatre that had recently returned to the use of the violinist’s bow: “Doesn’t it seem as if the pathetic role of this living telegraph is an integral part of the score, and that the ugly ghost of pedantry and foolishness has created a magic instrument gifted with the peculiar ability to animate others?” demanded one music lover.64 In his Orchestration Treatise

(1843), as in the passage from Euphonia quoted above, Berlioz imagined the conductor “playing” on the orchestral musicians like a hand at the keyboard.65

Moreover, in 1855 Berlioz added a discussion of conducting to his Orchestration

Treatise, suggesting that the conductor charge the instrumentalists with his electricity in a manner even more suggestive of the telegraph: “His emotions and feelings will

63 Ibid., pp. 286–7.

64 “Dans une lettre au journal, un mélomane proteste: ‘Ne semblerait-il pas que le pitoyable rôle de ce

Télégraphe vivant fît partie intégrante de leur partition, ou que ce vilain spectre du pédantisme et de la sottise fût un instrument magique doué de l’étrange vertu d’animer les autres?’” Agnès Terrier,

L'Orchestre de l'Opéra de Paris de 1669 à nos jours (Paris: Éditions de la Martinière; Opéra National de Paris, 2003), pp. 132–5.

65 Macdonald (ed.), Berlioz’s Orchestration Treatise, p. 319.

29 then pass to them, his inner flame will warm them, his electricity will charge them, his drive will propel them. He will radiate the vital spark of music.”66

In 1855 the electric telegraphs of Euphonia became a reality. The so-called

“electric metronome” was developed, enabling conductors to relay signals to subconductors in order to facilitate the coordination of large forces or off-stage musicians. Berlioz employed the technology in the massive festival performance for the 1855 Exposition universelle in Paris, where the Belgian inventor Henri

Verbrugghen was responsible for installing the device.67 “Thanks to my electric metronome I literally held in my hand this immense musical mammoth,” Berlioz wrote to Liszt.68 In the Orchestration Treatise he praised the electric metronome. Perhaps significantly, given the telegraph’s association with military coordination and the power of Empire, his example of possible applications extends the conductor’s authority from one political center to another:

Communication through the fluid to the moving baton is completely

instantaneous, however far it has to travel. Performers in a group

backstage with their eyes on the electric metronome’s baton are thus

66 Ibid., p. 337.

67 The repertoire performed at the grand Festival concert was: three movements from Berlioz’s Te deum, one movement from his Symphonie funèbre et triomphale, L’Impériale, as well as the overture to Der Freischütz, an extract from Gluck’s Armide, the final three movements of Beethoven’s Fifth

Symphony, Mozart’s Ave verum, and extracts from Rossini’s Moïse en Egypte, Meyerbeer’s Les

Huguenots, and Handel’s Judas Maccabée.

68 “Grâce à mon métronome électrique j’ai littéralement tenu dans la main cet immense mammouth musical.” Berlioz (30 November 1855), Correspondance générale (Paris: Flammarion, 1989), vol. 5

(ed. Hugh Macdonald and François Lesure), p. 199.

directly in touch with the conductor’s indications; if he needed to he could

conduct a piece played at Versailles from the middle of the orchestra of

the Paris Opera.69

Berlioz subsequently urged the use of the electric metronome at major opera houses. He employed it himself in his cantata L’Enfance du Christ to coordinate the off-stage chorus of angels, thereby evoking the ethereal distances the telegraph might traverse. In Les Troyens he requested an electric metronome, this time to marshal the flanks of off-stage musicians who converge on the stage with the Trojan horse.

The electric metronome was not the only application of telegraphic technology to musical space. The coordination of the keyboard mechanisms characteristic of the

Hughes telegraph inspired several inventors to conceive means of transmitting music across significant distances. In his 1860 treatise on telegraphy, George Bartlett

Prescott described a musical “experiment” whereby a telegrapher in Boston played

“tunes” down the wire to the New York office. As Prescott subsequently made clear, it was only the “time of music” (i.e. the rhythm) that was transmitted; nevertheless, he explained that it would also be possible to transmit pitch by varying the rate of pulsations on the telegraph wire, thereby causing the wire to vibrate at different frequencies. “The adaptation of this power to the production of music upon telegraphic piano-fortes at any distance which may be desired, is a matter of the

69 Macdonald (ed.), Berlioz’s Orchestration Treatise, p. 355. As Alison Winter has suggested,

“Berlioz’s musical technology would have reminded onlookers of the international telegraphic networks that were being celebrated at this exhibition. The use of human beings in Berlioz’s ‘electric baton’ made his instrument similar to other experiments in recent years using groups of living things as collective scientific instruments.” Winter, Mesmerized, p. 317.

31 utmost simplicity,” he concluded.70 Ten years later, similar applications of telegraph technology were still being contemplated. Texan surgeon G.P. Hachenburg proposed connecting by telegraph wire ten pianos positioned at various points in a concert hall, the instruments to be played by a single pianist in a sort of surround- sound amplification. Some were dismissive of the musical worth of such an enterprise. “Hearing a number of ten equal instruments all playing the same tune is, according to my taste, a most excruciating trial for any audience,” complained P.H.

Vander Weyde,71 who proposed instead that transmitting a pianist’s performance to diverse locations would be a more worthy application of the technology. Vander

Weyde acknowledged that this idea was not new, citing a plan to connect London’s various church organs to that of St Paul’s.72 However, he envisaged an even more ambitious application of the concept, proposing that houses could be supplied with music in the same way that they were supplied with water and gas.

As early as 1848, the authors of the London Anecdotes anticipated using telegraph technology to make music without the performers being visible––“to realize with musical instruments what has already been done with clocks … . We may have electrical organs in our churches as well as electrical clocks in our houses.”73 But

Vander Weyde goes further, suggesting that performers in different styles might broadcast simultaneously, with schedules of works published in advance so that listeners could tune in according to their tastes. Vander Weyde’s conception had to

70 Prescott, History, Theory and Practice of the Electric Telegraph, p. 336. See also Raykoff, “Piano,

Telegraph, Typewriter,” p. 168.

71 P.H. Vander Weyde, “On Musical Telegraph Companies,” Scientific American, 25 (11 November

1871), 309.

72 Vander Weyde, “On Musical Telegraph Companies,” 309.

73 London Anecdotes, p. 20.

32 await the much later development of radio technology to come to fruition. But the

American telegrapher Elisha Gray (1835–1901), a rival to Alexander Graham Bell in the development of the telephone, also invented and tested several “Musical

Telegraphs” in the 1870s, before instead pursuing the telegraphic rather than musical applications of his technology.74

Embodying the telegraph

In overcoming distance, and in complicating the relationship between the physical and spiritual dimensions of communication, the telegraph raises fraught questions about the body, including the racialized body. In particular, the masters of telegraphy were uniformly white and its subjects diversely nonwhite.75 London stood as “the brain of the Empire,” with its telegraph wires forming the “all red line” around the globe in the likeness of the nerves of a global body.76 Telegraphy quickly became an essential tool in

74 Thom Holmes, Electronic and Experimental Music: Technology, Music, and Culture 3rd edn (New

York: Routledge, 2008), p. 6.

75 Paul Gilmore, “The Telegraph in Black and White,” ELH 69/3 (2002), 805–33. See also Carolyn

Marvin, When Old Technologies were New: Thinking About Electric Communication in the Late

Nineteenth Century (New York/Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988): “It is useless to scold nineteenth-century engineers for their failure to be twentieth-century feminists or champions of civil rights, but it may be useful to understand how electrical experts and their publics projected their respective social worlds onto technology in the late nineteenth century, and what justifications and fears motivated them in this. It is also important to notice that communications technologies that prepared the way for twentieth-century media were built to uphold a scheme of social stratification that has attracted sustained contemporary challenge. This, as much as anything else, is a measure of how we have changed” (p. 8).

76 John Tully, “A Victorian Ecological Disaster: Imperialism, the Telegraph, and Gutta-Percha,” Journal of World History 20/4 (2009), 569.

maintaining British control over remote colonies. Ironically, the gutta percha used to insulate submarine wires, a substance thus crucial to the telegraph’s power, was harvested by the subjects of British, American, and French colonies in Southeast Asia, though the telegraphs were manufactured in London.77

The London Anecdotes captures some of this ideology, entertaining its readers with accounts of stereotypically ignorant “niggers” who cannot comprehend the new technology.78 Paul Gilmore has identified an even more disturbing musical manifestation of the same mentality. In the seldom-heard second verse of “Oh

Susannah,” which originated as a minstrel song, we are to imagine a black (or blackface) narrator in whom the presumed incapacity of the black population to comprehend either the telegraph or electrical power becomes explicit: “I jumped aboard the telegraph / And trabbeled down the ribber, / De ‘lectric fluid magnified, /

And killed five hundred nigger.”79 It is beyond the scope of this paper to unpack the questions raised by this song; Gilmore does so very effectively. Instead, I want to consider a different kind of mind/body juxtaposition with more directly musical implications, by investigating how the telegraph captured the tension between transience and transcendence characteristic of art-music performance during the same period.

The notion that the telegraph permitted a new control of disembodied mind over body might be seen in Strauss’s Telegrafische Depeschen (ex. 1). The irregular clacks of the telegraphic imitation appeal directly to the intellect of the listener, while they unsettle and overrule the body, which is primed for dancing but constantly thwarted in its efforts to find the meter. At the same time, a pedal note is sustained in

77 Ibid., 559–79.

78 London Anecdotes, p. 23.

79 Quoted in Gilmore, “The Telegraph in Black and White,” p. 805.

the woodwind––perhaps in another imitation of the wind in the wires or the hum of

the electric apparatus. The sound makes sense in intellectual terms, but for the

player this too requires an overriding or disguising of the body to enable the note to

be sustained uniformly within a single breath. In the case of Kastner’s evocation of

the Aeolian harp (ex. 2), the necessity of suppressing the body in order to privilege

mind is more explicit, for in this imitation of performer-less music, the wind players

are required to sustain notes considerably beyond what is possible with a single

breath.

Mechanical images of the orchestra, in which the individuality and physicality of

players are subordinated to a machine, have long been recognized.80 However, the

telegraph corresponds more closely to the electrical metaphor that Marshall

McLuhan, in Understanding Media, sees as having succeeded the mechanical

metaphor during the nineteenth century. Whereas mechanism suggests

specialization, with tools such as musical instruments functioning as extensions of

individual body parts and senses, the electrical metaphor posits a synthesis of

individuals into a single external nervous system:

This peculiarity about the electric form, that it ends the mechanical age of

individual steps and specialist functions, has a direct explanation.

Whereas all previous technology (save speech, itself) had, in effect,

80 See, for example, John Spitzer, “Metaphors of the Orchestra - The Orchestra as Metaphor,” The

Musical Quarterly 80 (1996), 247–8; and Dolan, The Orchestral Revolution, p. 214.

extended some part of our bodies, electricity may be said to have outered

the central nervous system itself, including the brain.81

The idea of the electric organism was sometimes taken quite literally. In 1853, the

American Spiritualist John Murray Spear, inspired by communications from the spirit world, proposed the creation of a giant machine––a “perfect earthly home”–– composed of wood, metal, and magnets but powered by the “personal magnetism” of the human beings living within it.82 The machine was perceived as a reflection of “the living human organism,”83 and we might also see in the image a metaphor for the orchestra, whose wood and metal are animated by the players within it. In orchestral terms, it is the composer-conductor who is the “brain” controlling this biological- electrical circuit, and whose “personal magnetism” is seen as sparking that of the players. Berlioz himself seems to have subscribed to this view, as evidenced in his

Orchestration Treatise when he describes the conductor as releasing the electric charge that animates the musicians.

Another useful suggestion by McLuhan is that the electrical metaphor is tactile. Electricity is felt first, and only secondarily manifests itself to the ears or eyes:

“Electricity offers a means of getting in touch with every facet of being at once, like the brain itself. Electricity is only incidentally visual and auditory; it is primarily tactile.”84 Several scholars have recently expanded upon McLuhan’s observation and

81 Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, Critical Edition, ed. W. Terrence

Gordon (Corte Madera, CA: Gingko Press, 2003), p. 332.

82 Quoted in Sconce, Haunted Media, p. 39.

83 Andrew Jackson Davis, “The New Motive Power,” Telegraph Papers 5 (1854); quoted in Sconce,

Haunted Media, p. 40.

84 McLuhan, Understanding Media, p. 334.

36 explored the haptic dimension of telegraphy in ways that may bear on the “fleshy bond” of musicians with their audience, instruments, or each other.

As Colette Colligan and Margaret Linley observe, “The introduction of the electric telegraph in the middle of the century not only revolutionized communications, it also retuned the ear and retooled the sense of touch. Similarly the introduction of the solo piano recital trained audiences to listen for the sound of the musician’s touch.”85 Christopher Keep directly counters the notion that the electric telegraph might primarily be understood as an emblem of disembodiment; to the contrary, Keep suggests, whereas visual semaphores had enacted a communication that created distance between bodies, communicating from mind to mind via the eye, the electric telegraph “re-embodied” communication, giving the receiver of telegraph messages the uncanny sense that the sender was physically present in the room, the minds of each connecting through a single nervous system suggestive of telepathy.86 Ivan Raykoff extends the haptic element directly to music, exploring the relationship between sound and touch in the piano keyboard, electric telegraph, and typewriter. As Raykoff demonstrates, “Placed in historical context alongside the nineteenth-century piano, these writing instruments can be seen as comparable technologies of the fingers: by physically touching their keys, one produced expressive messages that could also ‘touch’ a reader or listener through something like the ‘language’ of music.”87

85 Colligan and Linley (eds.), Introduction to Media, Technology, and Literature in the Nineteenth

Century, p. 4.

86 Christopher Keep, “Touching at a Distance: Telegraphy, Gender and Henry James’s In the Cage,” in Media, Technology, and literature in the Nineteenth Century, ed. Colligan and Linley, pp. 239–56.

87 Raykoff, “Piano, Telegraph, Typewriter,” p. 159.

Raykoff concludes his argument with a consideration of the Lisztian piano

recital, but he does not explore how the relationship between the telegraph and

music might be embodied in actual musical works by Liszt or other composers. That

embodiment might open up new avenues of “carnal musicology,”88 as manifested in

the works performed as well as in the context of performance. We might consider in

this light some compositions by David Edward Hughes himself. Renowned as an

inventor who “thought with his hands,”89 Hughes as a child prodigy was admired for

his ability to identify notes blindfolded, to transcribe music played to him, and to then

reproduce the music on his harp.90 He was thus well placed to engage with a

“telegraphic” music in which the haptic rather than visual dimension is central.

Hughes’s Lizzie Polka and Rhodora Waltz, discussed below, are conventional

dances for popular consumption. Those looking for direct evocations of the telegraph

will be disappointed. However, the very conventionality of Hughes’s compositions

may serve to reveal how the telegraph, especially in the form subsequently

developed by Hughes, interacted with aspects of Western art music more broadly.

In his manual on the Hughes telegraph system, Louis Borel suggested that

the operator of Hughes’s telegraphic keyboard was required to possess certain traits

also cultivated by training at the piano keyboard, including “agile fingers” (“l’agilité

des doigts”) and “a musical ear” (“l’oreille musicale”), traits that could be enhanced

through repetitive finger exercises.91 Telegraphers were trained to operate the

88 Le Guin, Boccherini’s Body, 2005.

89 Hughes and Evans, Before We Went Wireless, p. XIII.

90 Ibid p. 10.

91 Louis Borel, Étude du télégraphe Hughes: Cours théorique et pratique à l’usage des télégraphistes

et agents spéciaux (Paris: Louis Borel, 1873), p. 375.

38 keyboard by touch, as evidenced by plate 4 in which the keyboard is covered by a cloth.

[Insert near here:

Plate 4 Training the operator of a Hughes telegraph; image kindly supplied by Ivor

Hughes]

Musical models for this approach to playing “by touch,” a clear forerunner of “touch typing,” are apparent in Hughes’s Lizzie Polka.92 Played at a lively polka tempo, the dotted sixteenth notes of the main theme and the triplet and thirty-second note ornaments certainly require “agile fingers,” and the coordination of the dotted notes against regular sixteenth notes necessitates a strong metrical control also demanded by the Hughes telegraph apparatus, where letters had to be typed in at a careful and regular but rapid pace in order to be picked up by the rotating pin of the mechanism

(see ex. 4). At the same time, the leaps of the left hand at a rapid polka tempo demonstrate the need for the keyboard performer to play by touch, the tempo not allowing many opportunities to glance down at the fingers. When the melody repeats up an octave (mm. 5–8), a further challenge is added to the sensation of playing by touch, for some of the upper notes of the left-hand chords are now positioned on the treble staff, including in some cases pitches that were written on the bass staff at the first statement of the melody. Although the sound is identical, the pianist may “feel” the chords differently, the eyes having to process quickly the semantics of the chord, and the thumb now seeming to reach upwards after the right hand.

92 David E. Hughes, Lizzie Polka in G. W. Brainard & Cos Collection of Waltzes Polkas &c (Louisville:

G.W. Brainard, 1852).

[Insert near here: Example 4 David E. Hughes, Lizzie Polka, mm. 1–16]

The implications of this emphasis on touch become fuller when we recall that

Hughes was employed for two years as a teacher of music and natural sciences at a women’s college. Playing telegraphically requires the pianist to mobilize touch, long considered a feminine sense, on behalf of labor, or in other words to maintain femininity within a public space from which femininity had regularly been excluded.

Telegraphy and typewriting would subsequently become prominent occupations for women, perhaps for similar reasons.93 And gender was thought to be audible, as the

Western Electrician magazine revealed in 1891: “Ordinarily an operator can tell a woman the moment he hears her working the wire. […] He tells by her touch on the key. Women as a rule, telegraphers say, do not touch the key of their instrument as firmly as men do. Occasionally, however, there is one without this characteristic distinction in style.”94

In Hughes’s Rhodora Waltz the slower tempo and smaller leaps of the accompaniment would challenge none but the most amateur pianist, but the relationship between sound and touch is evoked more subtly. Towards the end of the

93 Keep, “Touching at a Distance,” p. 242; Friedrich Kittler, Gramophone, Film, Typewriter, trans.

Geoffrey Winthrop-Young and Michael Wutz, (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999), pp. 183-7,

193-8 . Steven Connor suggests that typing suited women not because they were transmitters rather than originators of messages, but because they were biologically better suited to activities that coordinate both hemispheres of the brain. See “Modernism and the Writing Hand,” http://www.stevenconnor.com/modhand.htm [accessed 17 November 2014]. His argument could be extended to piano-playing, and to typing on the Hughes telegraph keyboard.

94 Quoted in Standage, Victorian Internet, p. 127.

40 central section of the da capo, the lower octave of the right-hand melody converges with the upper notes of the left-hand chords at the end of each of two consecutive bars, causing one voice to effectively vanish from the texture––or to be “felt” by the pianist rather than heard (see ex. 5). The fact that the pianist must here align the information of the score with the sense of touch rather than with hearing suggests again the richness of the haptic dimension of the keyboard for Hughes’s subsequent development of the telegraph.

[Insert near here: Example 5: David E. Hughes, Rhodora Waltz, excerpt ]

It is not only the piano keyboard and Hughes’s telegraph that provide suggestive haptic analogies. Examined from the perspective of tactility, our earlier orchestral examples also yield interesting results. Kastner’s use of string harmonics to invoke the Aeolian harp was based on sonority, but consider also how the finger resting lightly on the string might thrill to the vibrations of the wire (as Hughes himself could have experienced in his early career as a harpist). Similarly, in Berlioz’s La

Nonne sanglante, the dull regular thud of the pizzicato of the double basses is not easily identified as a telegraphic sound, but the imaginary sympathy of fingers on double-bass strings might evoke that tactile element of the electric telegraph in the context of sound passing from one side of the concert stage to the other.

La Nonne sanglante also illustrates the way in which performers’ bodies inevitably reassert their authority and presence within the collective circuit. When the student orchestra at my institution rehearsed the duet, the bass players instinctively coordinated across orchestral space by listening to and watching each other (not the conductor) and by slightly exaggerated gestures. It is easy to imagine their

41 predecessors in Berlioz’s orchestra having done the same. By contrast, in the subsequent great festival performances coordinated by the electric metronome, or in the case of off-stage forces, the players were often out of sight or earshot of their colleagues and were increasingly reliant upon the conductor’s beat, relayed through the wires and batons of the subconductors.

The physicality of the players, the sight of fingers upon wires, would increasingly come under challenge, particularly in opera, as the lights were dimmed and then Wagner sunk his players into the pit, with his singers submerged in steam.95 This was a step towards the complete removal of the visual, physical nature of musical performance evidenced by the listening booths at the 1889 international exhibition, where visitors listened to live transmissions from the Opéra in solitary cubicles, isolated from each other and from the performers much like telegraph operators (whose technology anticipated the telephone by decades).96 From here it was only a short step to the disembodied listening of sound recording, which as

Sterne points out, often takes an unjust share of the credit for this transformation in musical practice.97

Indeed, the telegraph anticipates many facets of the transformation of music usually attributed to sound recording––most notably, the separation of sound from its physical source. However, it in some ways represents the more radical reconceptualization of sound in musical terms. The telegraph raised questions about universal language in both sound and transcription; it evoked associations with the

95 Kreuzer, “Wagner-Dampf.”

96 Annegret Fauser, Musical Encounters at the 1889 Paris World’s Fair (Rochester, NY: University of

Rochester Press, 2005), pp. 281–97.

97 Sterne, Audible Past, p. 27.

Romantic images of creativity of the Aeolian harp and the metaphysical realms of the afterlife; it suggested the possibility of communicating sound across nations and across time; and offered or revealed paradigms for new relationships between conductors, instruments, and players’ bodies. In all these ways, the telegraph might be seen to have reflected and even shaped new thinking about the identity of

European art music and musical works that were taking hold during the same period.

New technologies would eventually supplant the telegraph, exploring ever improving ways of removing live bodies from musical performance altogether. However, the telegraph also leaves us with a rather different legacy. By attending to how it intersected with musical works, we are we able to construct new, historically informed readings of a Strauss waltz, an incomplete Berlioz opera, an unperformed

Kastner cantata, or obscure works by David E. Hughes. By opening our ears to the transmissions of the nineteenth-century telegraph, we can explore anew the communications between mind and body, work and performance. In other words, the telegraph helps us to communicate across the temporal as well as physical divide, encouraging us to discover new ways of understanding the ideals and ideology underpinning some of the music transmitted from then to now.