THE EXPEDITIONS of the VICTOR TALKING MACHINE COMPANY THROUGH LATIN AMERICA, 1903-1926 a Dissertation
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RECORDING STUDIOS ON TOUR: THE EXPEDITIONS OF THE VICTOR TALKING MACHINE COMPANY THROUGH LATIN AMERICA, 1903-1926 A Dissertation presented to the Faculty of the Graduate School of Cornell University in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy By Sergio Daniel Ospina Romero May 2019 © 2019 Sergio Daniel Ospina Romero ii RECORDING STUDIOS ON TOUR: THE EXPEDITIONS OF THE VICTOR TALKING MACHINE THROUGH LATIN AMERICA, 1903-1926 Sergio Daniel Ospina Romero, PhD Cornell University, 2019 During the early twentieth century, recording technicians travelled around the world on behalf of the multinational recording companies. Producing recordings with vernacular repertoires not only became an effective way to open local markets for the talking machines that these same companies were manufacturing. It also allowed for an unprecedented global circulation of local musics. This dissertation focuses on the recording expeditions lead by the Victor Talking Machine Company through several cities in Latin America during the acoustic era. Drawing from untapped archival material, including the daily ledgers of the expeditions, the following pages offer the first comprehensive history of these expeditions while focusing on five areas of analysis: the globalization of recorded sound, the imperial and transcultural dynamics in the itinerant recording ventures of the industry, the interventions of “recording scouts” for the production of acoustic records, the sounding events recorded during the expeditions, and the transnational circulation of these recordings. I argue that rather than a marginal side of the music industry or a rudimentary operation, as it has been usually presented hitherto in many histories of the phonograph, sound recording during the acoustic era was a central and intricate area in the business; and that the international ventures of recording companies before 1925 set the conditions of possibility for the consolidation of iii media entertainment as a defining aspect of consumer culture worldwide through the twentieth century. Furthermore, by focusing on the interactions between Victor’s traveling recording agents and multiple performers and intermediaries in Latin America, I question top-down narratives of the international dimension of recording companies and offer, instead, a complicated picture of improvisation, untidy imperialism, intercultural misunderstandings, colonial desire, sundry sound recordings, and multimedia entanglements. iv BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH Sergio Ospina Romero grew up in Bogotá, Colombia, where he studied music with emphasis on piano performance, anthropology (B.A. 2004) and history (M.A. 2013). In the United States he completed a masters (2017) and a PhD (2019) in Musicology at Cornell University, where he was also a Don M. Randel Teaching Fellow. His research activities deal primarily with sound reproduction technologies, mechanical reproduction, transnationalism, popular music, and jazz in the early twentieth century. He is the author of Dolor que canta: La vida y la música de Luis A. Calvo en la sociedad colombiana de comienzos del siglo XX (ICANH, 2017) and of various book chapters, articles, and reviews about Latin American music, published in the United States and Latin America. Between 2010 and 2014 he was a lecturer in historical anthropology at the Universidad Nacional de Colombia, in Bogotá. He is member of the American Musicological Society, the Society for Ethnomusicology, the Latin American Studies Association, and of the Latin American branch of the International Association for the Study of Popular Music. In the fall of 2021, he will start a tenure-track position as Assistant Professor of Music at the Jacobs School of Music at Indiana University. He is the director and pianist of Palonegro, an ensemble of Latin American music and Latin jazz. v ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Two years ago, I published a book about Luis Antonio Calvo, a Colombian composer popular during the first half of the twentieth century. In a way, this dissertation is a sequel to that book. But not the kind of sequel that picks up where the previous book (or movie) ended. This is more like when a particular scene, situation, or character in the first story is granted a story of its own; a sequel that branches from an undeveloped theme or detail in the original plot. One day, while studying the registers of what used to be the Encyclopedic Discography of Victor Recordings, I discovered that, over the course of three days, Calvo played the piano in 21 different recordings when Victor “sent” a portable machine to Bogotá in 1913. At that point in my research, it was merely another interesting fact in Calvo’s biography. I had read about that portable machine and similar recording incursions in a few music histories, but in most of them those incidents were treated generally as historical anecdotes or as passing references to account for the moment when local musics made their way, for the first time, into the realm of sound recordings. Victor’s machines, or the hardly ever mentioned employees who managed the recording equipment, were like ghostly actors who suddenly appeared and abruptly vanished. As my doctoral studies took off, I began to dig into the vestiges of such transnational recording ventures and found a fascinating and unexplored research path—the branch towards another scholarly expedition of my own. And here I am, with a whole new story to tell. I am profoundly grateful to all the people and institutions that have, in one way or another, supported me and contributed to the successful completion of this project. My doctoral studies and my research were funded by the generous aid of vi multiple organizations and programs, including Fulbright, the Colombian Ministry of Culture, and at Cornell University, the Graduate School, the Department of Music, the Westfield Center for Historical Keyboard Studies, the Mario Einaudi Center, the Latin American Studies Program, the Department of American Studies, and the Cornell Council for the Arts. Likewise, I benefited greatly from archival collections in the United States and Latin America, especially those of the University of California in Santa Barbara, the Library of Congress, Stanford University, SONY Corporation of America, the Biblioteca Nacional de Colombia, the Biblioteca Nacional de Chile, and the Instituto Moreira Salles, as well as from materials and sources generously shared by David Seubert, Carlos Alberto Echeverri, Juan Fernando Velásquez, John Bolig, and Wilmar Galindo, and other people across the hemisphere. To say that my dissertation committee was exceptional in every conceivable way, and that their mentorship inspired me and propelled my career beyond my expectations would be an understatement. Thanks to Alejandro L. Madrid for being a remarkable interlocutor, for providing the best possible example of what outstanding scholarship truly means, and for his unswerving support—mucho más allá de lo que dicta el deber; to Benjamin Piekut for his detailed revisions and for making me aware of so many blind spots: if academia is like a highway, your advice helped me avoid countless accidents; to Steve Pond for his candor, truthfulness, and unforgettable teachings, and for Palonegro-ing with me so many times with such fervent musicality; and to Roberto Sierra for offering such a sophisticated perspective in my affairs around composition, arranging, and music theory. In many ways, David Suisman, Karl H. Miller, Anaar Desai-Stephens, and Fritz Schenker were almost like additional members of my committee. I am glad I had the opportunity to meet them, share my work with them, receive their feedback vii and encouragement, be alerted about many other blind spots, and ultimately, count them among my close intellectual interlocutors and friends. At Cornell I found an ideal environment to thrive. My deepest gratitude goes to the faculty and students in the Department of Music and across campus who nourished my academic and personal ventures in multiple and meaningful ways, including Trevor Pinch, Roger Moseley, Annette Richards, Jeremy Braddock, Paul Merrill, Judith Peraino, David Yearsley, Ernesto Bassi, Raymond Craib, Catherine Appert, Rebecca Harris-Warrick, Xak Bjerken, Andrew Hicks, Neal Zaslaw, Christine Bacareza Balance, Jordan Musser, Dietmar Friesenegger, Matthew Hall, Max Williams, Zoe Weiss, Becky Lu, Can Bilir, Jonathan Schakel, Ji Young Kim, Carlos Ramirez, David Miller, Elizabeth Lyon, Mackenzie Pierce, Aya Saiki, Annalise Smith, Lee Tyson, Rafael Torralvo, Carlota Aguilar, Andrew Zhou, Morton Wan, Sergio Cote Barco, Daniel Hawkins, Thomas Cressy, Juan Carlos Melendez- Torres, Josh Savala, Susana Romero, Sebastián Díaz Ángel, and Tanvi Solanki. Beyond Cornell, the advice, encouragement, ideas, and informal mentorship of many colleagues and friends have been crucial and absolutely opportune for the development of my own ideas. A big thank-you to Andrés Felipe Manosalva, Marysol Quevedo, Eduardo Herrera, Ana Alonso-Minutti, George Brock-Nannestad, Ana María Ochoa Gautier, Juan Fernando Velásquez, Jaime Cortés, Carlos Miñana Blasco, Carolina Santamaría-Delgado, Juan Sebastián Ochoa, Juliana Pérez González, Carlos Páramo, Michael Birenbaum Quintero, Patricia Vergara, Chelsea Burns, Morgan Luker, Jacky Ávila, Susan Thomas, Marina Cañardo, Beatriz Goubert, Jairo Moreno, Juan Carlos Castrillón, Daniel Castro-Pantoja, Ireri Chávez-Bárcenas, Natalia Bieletto, Robin Moore, Javier León, Julianne Graper, Ruben López-Cano, Juan Francisco Sans,