Mechanized Voices and Machinic Bodies: The Music Box in US Popular Media Stephanie Gunst Rotterdam, NY B.A., Music, SUNY at Stony Brook, 2009 M.A., Music, Tufts University, 2011 A Dissertation presented to the Graduate Faculty of the University of Virginia in Candidacy for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy Department of Music University of Virginia May 2019 ii Ó Copyright by Stephanie Gunst All Rights Reserved May 2019 iii ABSTRACT The music box, an automatic musical instrument, was developed by watchmakers in the early nineteenth century. Using a musical comb made of metal, each tooth would be tuned to a specific note that was struck by a metal pin, giving it its classic metallic, resonant sound. Before the phonograph and the rise of the recording industry at the turn of the twentieth century, music box manufacturers strove to make their machines the primary method of listening to and enjoying music in the home. This dissertation explores the music box’s emergence in United States popular media and its relationship to contemporary discourses on gender, race, and voice. I argue that these discourses helped turn the music box into a pop cultural trope, in which it acquired traits that aligned it with femininity and otherness. As one of the earliest commodified musical machines, the music box set a precedent for how mechanization elided with contemporary notions of feminization. Because its sound was described in terms of the human voice, it sounded marginalization as much as it connoted it. Newspapers and literary magazines established and perpetuated the music box as a gendered and racialized cultural trope in the mid-nineteenth century, which has persisted into today’s media. The first two chapters outline how mid-nineteenth-century writers used the music box to describe voices and bodies, respectively, that were considered machine-like. Mechanized voices and machinic bodies, as I call them, were marked by gender and/or racial difference. The third chapter considers these tropes with respect to the phonograph in literature, which had the unique ability to record and play back the human voice. In the final iv chapter, I consider how the music box trope shifted in silent film and early sound film examples. v TABLE OF CONTENTS Abstract .................................................................................................................................... iii List of Figures and Musical Examples .................................................................................... vii Acknowledgements ................................................................................................................ viii Introduction .............................................................................................................................. 1 1. Opera, Divas, and the Mechanization of Voice in “Euphemia’s Music-Box”................... 19 Effie’s Longing: The Romanticized Music Box ......................................................... 23 Ralston’s Disapproval: Italian Opera and the Racialized Voice ............................... 33 The Music Box Voice: The Diva and Instrumentality .............................................. 41 Luigi’s Song: Power and Racial Coding in Norma .................................................... 54 2. Machinic Bodies: The Music Box and Racialized Freakery in “The Story of Agee Sang Long” ....................................................................................................................................... 67 White Authors: The Music Box and Fascination with the Other ............................ 69 Racial Freakery and the Machinic Body .................................................................... 83 The Marginalization of Agee Sang Long .................................................................... 98 3. Uncanny Voices: The Phonographic Voice in Nineteenth Century Fiction..................116 Olimpia as “Uncanny Woman” and the Phonographic Voice ...............................120 The Professor’s Uncanny Daughter .........................................................................132 The Phonographic Voice as Metaphor in Dracula ..................................................141 4. Memory and Erasure: The Re-Codification of the Music Box Trope in Film ................157 The Music Box in Decline ........................................................................................160 vi The Music Box Trope in Silent Film: Comparing An Alpine Echo and On the Stroke of Five.............................................................................................................................165 Reframing Romanticism: The Ambivalent Return of the Music Box in The Shop Around the Corner .......................................................................................................169 Dreaming of Desire: Restoring the Music Box’s Power in Kathleen .......................178 Memories of Love in Wartime: Since You Went Away and Going My Way ..............187 Appendix: Known Titles of Films Featuring a Music Box ..................................................207 Bibliography ..........................................................................................................................209 vii LIST OF FIGURES AND MUSICAL EXAMPLES Figures Figure 1: Cylinder music box .................................................................................................. 12 Figure 2: Disc music box ......................................................................................................... 13 Musical Examples Example 1.1: Excerpt from Bellini, “Mira, o Norma” ........................................................... 60 Example 4.1: Ferraris, Ochi Tchornya, opening motive ........................................................175 Example 4.2: Edens and Brent, “Around the Corner,” chorus ..........................................185 Example 4.3: Excerpt of “Around the Corner,” heard on the music box ..........................187 Example 4.4: DeSylva, Brown, and Henderson, “Together,” chorus..................................190 Example 4.5: Shannon, “Too-ra-loo-ra-loo-ral (That’s an Irish Lullaby)” ............................198 viii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Thank you to my committee—Bonnie Gordon, Karl Hagstrom Miller, Noel Lobley, and Lawrie Balfour—for their insights and feedback throughout the dissertation process. I feel privileged to have been able to work with and learn from such an estimable group of scholars. I am grateful to the Arts, Humanities, and Social Sciences (AHSS) committee within the Graduate School at UVa for granting me a Summer Research Award to view the collection at the UCLA Film and Television Archive, which provided the necessary foundation for my fourth chapter. Thanks also to Amy Coddington and Aldona Dye for providing feedback and much-needed copyediting in the final stages, and to Kevin Davis for engraving all the musical examples. And of course, thank you to everyone I talked with along the way about this project. In big ways or small, every conversation helped me clarify and develop my ideas expressed herein. Of course, any errors are solely my responsibility. Now for something a bit more personal. It’s no secret that grad school is challenging on its own. If possible, I’d recommend not having cancer while jumping through the necessary educational and bureaucratic hoops. But if, for some reason, you can’t avoid it, then I hope you have as strong a support network as I did through it all. Thank you to everyone who visited me in the hospital, sent gifts, attended appointments, and showed up when I needed you most: Linnea Barklund, Bess Brooks, Gretchen Carlson, Amy Coddington, Craig Comen, Joseph Conerty, Ian Coyle, Kevin Davis, Michael D’Errico, Andrea Di Cocco, Stephanie Doktor, Jarek Paul Ervin, Ana Escalante, Liza Flood, Emily Gale, Bonnie Gordon (and Things One through Three), Matthew Jones, Courtney Kleftis, Jean Maroun, Christopher Peck, Stephan Pennington, Elizabeth Perten, Victor Szabo, Paul Turowski, Max Wagenblass, Kristina Warren, Richard Will, and my former colleagues at the Luzerne Music Center. If I’ve forgotten anyone, please forgive the drug-induced haze I was in at the time. When I was diagnosed with anaplastic large cell lymphoma in the summer after my first year at UVa, I knew two things: that I wanted to stay in school, and that I was too sick to do so full time. A lot of behind-the-scenes work happened to make sure my accommodations could be met and wouldn’t put me in debt. For this, I wish to thank Deans Edward Barnaby and F. Aaron Laushway, Arlyn Burgess, Bonnie Gordon, and Richard Will. Thanks also to Tina Knight and Kim Turner for keeping everything running smoothly. ix I also want to shout out the Turtle Power and Friends trivia team—Kyle Chattleton, Craig Comen, Aldona Dye, and Matthew Pincus—for the fun times (and many wins) at several locations over the years; and the fellow members of my string quartet—Margaret Grant, and Bev and Ray Van Ausdal—for rekindling my love of chamber music through their warmth and talent. This dissertation is dedicated to my family, for their love and support; to the Family, for literally everything; and to Luna and Selina, my fuzzy therapists for six years (and counting). 1 INTRODUCTION The film Ex Machina (2015) stars “Ava,” a humanoid automaton that/who has been designed in the form of a woman. Nathan, Ava’s creator, has potentially created the first true artificial intelligence with sentience, an act that echoes the