Early Reception Histories of the Telharmonium, the Theremin, And

Electronic Musical Sounds and Material Culture: Early Reception Histories of the Telharmonium, the Theremin, and the Hammond Organ By Kelly Hiser A dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy (Music) at the UNIVERSITY OF WISCONSIN-MADISON 2015 Date of final oral examination: 4/21/2015 The dissertation is approved by the following members of the Final Oral Committee ` Susan C. Cook, Professor, Professor, Musicology Pamela M. Potter, Professor, Professor, Musicology David Crook, Professor, Professor, Musicology Charles Dill, Professor, Professor, Musicology Ann Smart Martin, Professor, Professor, Art History i Table of Contents Acknowledgements ii List of Figures iv Chapter 1 1 Introduction, Context, and Methods Chapter 2 29 29 The Telharmonium: Sonic Purity and Social Control Chapter 3 118 Early Theremin Practices: Performance, Marketing, and Reception History from the 1920s to the 1940s Chapter 4 198 “Real Organ Music”: The Federal Trade Commission and the Hammond Organ Chapter 5 275 Conclusion Bibliography 291 ii Acknowledgements My experience at the University of Wisconsin-Madison has been a rich and rewarding one, and I’m grateful for the institutional and personal support I received there. I was able to pursue and complete a PhD thanks to the financial support of numerous teaching and research assistant positions and a Mellon-Wisconsin Summer Fellowship. A Public Humanities Fellowship through the Center for the Humanities allowed me to actively participate in the Wisconsin Idea, bringing skills nurtured within the university walls to new and challenging work beyond them. As a result, I leave the university eager to explore how I might share this dissertation with both academic and public audiences. I’ve benefited enormously from the rich resources of the university’s libraries and Mills Music Library in particular. Special thanks to Tom Caw, Public Service Librarian at Mills, who helped ensure I had access to the resources I needed and was always willing to think through tricky research questions with me. Thanks also to archivists and librarians at the Smithsonian National Museum of American History, the Special Collections in Performing Arts at the University of Maryland, the Chicago History Museum’s Research Center, and the Holyoke Public Library. Many colleagues at UW-Madison and beyond have read and commented on portions of this dissertation, including Allison Bloom, Garreth Broesche, and James Bennett. Their feedback helped sharpen my work in its earliest stages. I am especially grateful to Ilana Schroeder and Danielle Sofer, who have read and responded to most of this dissertation and who spent countless hours discussing, debating, commiserating, and laughing with me. I count myself lucky to have such smart, kind, and witty friends and colleagues. iii This project has also benefited from a supportive and engaged dissertation committee. Ann Smart Martin provided valuable insight into material culture studies. Charles Dill encouraged me to engage deeply and critically with a broad range of ideas and texts that have shaped my own thoughts about music and, I hope, made me a more nuanced scholar and writer. I wrote my first theremin paper several years ago in a seminar on historiography—one of my favorite classes—taught by David Crook. I was and remain grateful for his thoughtful responses to my work. In a seminar on histories of twentieth-century music and in her feedback on this project, Pamela Potter has helped me situate my work in larger narrative contexts about music and history. Her insight aided me in reaching broader conclusions about my work and its place in musicology. Last, but certainly not least, I am grateful to my advisor Susan Cook, who consistently urged me to write more clearly and think with more complexity. She mentored me not only through this dissertation, but life events, career choices, and the usual graduate student struggles. She’s even encouraged me with song. Finally, many thanks to my incredible family. Graduate study can be a lonely and frustrating road—they’ve seen me through many years of it. My parents and brother have been constant sources of love and support. My partner and husband Walker has spent countless hours talking with me as I worked out ideas for this dissertation. He’s helped me in more ways than I can name, from encouraging me during difficult times to making sure that I ate and slept somewhat regularly. I am thankful beyond words to share my life with such a beautiful person. iv List of Figures Chapter 2 Figure 1. The Telharmonium Interface 41 Figure 2. Telharmonic Hall 72 Figure 3. Telharmonium Workers 78 Figure 4. “The Dinner From the Future” 88 Figure 5. Telharmonium Daily Program 103 Chapter 3 Figure 6. Photo of Termen 130 Figure 7. “The Symphony Orchestra of the Future” 140 Figure 8. RCA Theremin at Unidentified 1930 Radio Show 155 Figure 9. “Seek Mystery ‘Co-ed’ who Plays Theremin” 163 Figure 10. Clara Rockmore’s Theremin Debut, Program Cover 181 Figure 11. Robeson-Rockmore Program 186 Chapter 4 Figure 12. Diagram from “Sales Instructions” 207 Figure 13. “For Your Home – A New Miracle of Organ Music!” 209 Figure 14. “Every Church Can Now Afford Fine Organ Music” 210 Figure 15. Partial List of Participants in the FTC Hearing on the Hammond Organ 239 Figure 16. Charts 21-A and 21-E 245 1 Chapter 1 Introduction, Context, and Methods Electronic musical sound has been part of American musical life for over a century. In the first decade of the twentieth century, thousands of restaurant- and concert-goers in New York City heard popular songs, Strauss waltzes, and familiar “classical” melodies played on the Telharmonium, an enormous early synthesizer that broadcast music over telephone wires. Logistical and technical problems prevented the Telharmonium from making a sustained or geographically broad impact on American musical life, as the Hammond organ and theremin would do three decades later. The concertizing of inventor Lev Termen and performers like Clara Rockmore brought the sound of the “touch-less” theremin to tens of thousands of listeners across the United States in the 1930s and 40s through concerts and radio broadcasts. Beginning in the mid 1930s, thousands of church organists played the Hammond organ in weekly services in Catholic, Protestant, and Evangelical churches across the country, even as supporters of the pipe organ decried what they called the new electronic organ’s “dead” and “monotonous” sound as unsuitable for sacred music.1 Music historians frequently use these three instruments—the Telharmonium, theremin, and Hammond organ—as examples of early technology that presaged, but were not part of, electronic music history. The communities, traditions, practices, and meanings that coalesced 1 Differences in commercial success and ongoing manufacturing among the three instruments account for discrepancies in capitalization. Single interests controlled the manufacturing of the two capitalized instruments, the Hammond organ and the Telharmonium. The Hammond remained the exclusive property of the Hammond Organ Company until its sale to Suzuki in 1978, while Thaddeus Cahill oversaw the construction of the only Telharmoniums ever produced. In contrast, RCA declined to renew the theremin’s patent in 1931, and since then the instrument’s relatively simple operating principles have allowed a variety of industrial and individual producers to design, build, and sell their own models of the instrument. Thus, “theremin” denotes an instrument rather than a brand whereas “Hammond” and “Telharmonium” (roughly) signify both. 2 around these instruments and their sounds are rarely mentioned in mainstream accounts of this history. Historians such as Nick Collins and Peter Manning tend to obscure the Telharmonium’s use as a tool for performing and broadcasting popular music, instead emphasizing its qualities as a machine—its massive proportions and its complex and inventive design.2 Meanwhile, the more familiar popular instrumental traditions of the Hammond and theremin appear in these histories only as foils to the ostensibly non-commercial pursuits of art-music composers whose music dominates the narratives. Collins, for example, claims that early electronic instruments like the theremin, “did nothing to change the nature of musical composition or performance,” while Manning writes that the Hammond organ “contributed very little to an appreciation of the artistic potential of this new [electronic] medium of sound production.”3 The devaluation of popular electronic instrumental practices in these narratives is a symptom of a set of aesthetic and social ideologies that dominate the mainstream version of electronic musical histories. These ideologies are grounded in traditional musicological biases about the physical labor of performance and the intellectual work of composition as well as the popular masculinization of technology and the concomitant feminization of consumption.4 2 Nick Collins and Julio d’ Escrivan Rincón, eds., The Cambridge Companion to Electronic Music (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007); Peter Manning, Electronic and Computer Music, 4th ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013); Christoph Cox and Daniel Warner, eds., Audio Culture: Readings in Modern Music (New York: Continuum, 2004). Also see: Peter Shapiro, ed., Modulations: A History of Electronic Music: Throbbing Words on Sound (New York: Caipirinha Productions, 2000); Mark J. Prendergast, The Ambient Century: From Mahler to

Load more