Silva, João, “Mechanical instruments and phonography: The Recording Angel of historiography”, Radical Musicology, no prelo.
Mechanical instruments and phonography: The Recording Angel of historiography
This article strives to examine the established historical narrative concerning music recording. For that purpose it will concentrate on the phonographic era of acoustic recording (from 1877 to the late 1920s), a period when several competing technologies for capturing and registering sound and music were being incorporated in everyday life. Moreover, it will analyse the significant chronological overlap of analogue and digital media and processes of recording, thus adding a layer of complexity to the current historical narratives regarding that activity. In order to address that set of events, this work will mainly recur to the work of both Walter Benjamin and Slavoj Žižek. Benjamin’s insight as an author that bore witness to and analysed the processes of commodification that were operating in the period in which this article concerns is essential in a discussion that focuses on aspects such as modernity, technology, and history. Furthermore, his work on history presents a space in which to address and critique the notion of historicism as an operation that attempts to impose a narrative continuity to the fragmentary categories of existence within modernity, a stance this article will develop when analysing the historiography of music and sound recording. The work of Žižek is especially insightful in tracing a distinction between historicism and historicity through a psychoanalytical approach, an aspect that will occupy an important place in the final part of this work. In his discussion of the Victorian era John Picker associates that period with the transformation of what was considered by the Romantics as a sublime experience ‘into a quantifiable and marketable object or thing, a sonic commodity, in the form of a printed work, a performance, or, ultimately, an audio recording.’1 Therefore, the process of commodification of music through several media was highly interconnected with industrial and scientific aspects (such as the dissemination of image and sound reproducing technologies) that were progressively integrated in the sociability habitus of several groups and articulated with a wider social and cultural panorama. Moreover, the incorporation of several of the aforementioned innovations in the market for cultural goods combined novelty with established business models, resulting in a complex dynamic between the old and the new, the 1 transnational and the national, between sound and music. Those innovations fall in two main categories: mechanical instruments and phonography, each of the strands requiring a specific analytical framework, an issue this article will address.
Mechanisation and digitisation: the player piano mechanisms
This section will discuss several issues associated with the development of various mechanical instruments and their incorporation in the habitus of several segments of the population. According to Ord-Hume,
Mechanical instruments are those instruments that produce their sounds automatically from a pre-programmed mechanical source and are operated either without human participation (by clockwork, water, wind or electricity) or with musically unskilled human aid (such as by turning a handle or pumping bellows to provide air for pressure, or exhausters for suction).2
The same author states that those devices had their heyday between 1890 and the early 1930s, thus overlapping with the period of the introduction of commercial phonography in the entertainment market.3 I will concentrate my discussion regarding mechanical instruments on the player piano, a device that, according to Taylor, played a key role to the commodification of music at the time.4 In that sense, the incorporation of that instrument in the domestic musical practices of the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries can provide valuable information regarding the process through which ‘a broad transformation of the ways that music was made and experienced, helping to constitute it as a commodity in the sense we know it in today's market.’5 Although the history of that mechanical instrument can be traced back to the late eighteenth-century, the basis of the player piano mechanism that several households possessed during the period in which this work focuses was mainly developed in the last two decades of the nineteenth century and the first decade of the twentieth.6 In his comparison between the piano player and the phonograph, Taylor argues that the former, a ‘seemingly less sophisticated technology provides a better site to address the question of the commodification of music.’7 This view is shared with Suisman, to whom ‘even more than the piano and the phonograph, it is the player-piano that best symbolizes the close relation between music machines and industrial manufacturing – and not just by homology.’8 Taylor’s main argument to reinforce his statement relates to the penetration of the
2 player piano in American households and its rapid incorporation in everyday life, contrary to the slow integration of phonography as a form of domestic entertainment:
For one thing, since the original player piano was a machine that attached to a piano, it had an easier time of becoming part everyday life since as many as half of all American homes already contained pianos by the mid-1920s. The phonograph, on the other hand, was slow to catch on; there was some debate about its usage, even whether or not it should be used for music; and its poor fidelity prevented it from becoming popular until well into the twentieth century.9
Therefore, the positioning of the player piano as a device that could be attached to an already existing household good, the piano and its univocal function are key aspects for Taylor’s analysis. Moreover, the author situates the player piano as a transition between an age of piano-based domestic music making and an age of the primacy of phonography, an issue that will be addressed later in this article. Consequently, elements such as the embodiment of cultural capital associated with piano practice were significantly altered with the advent of mechanisation. Nevertheless, the possibilities of “regular” piano playing were not annulled by the attachment of the player piano mechanism, which allowed for the instrument to be performed by using both processes. According to Suisman, the progressive reconfiguration of human participation in music making from a position of direct performer to a role of machine operator points to a relocation of the expertise involved in that process to the inside of the mechanisms operating in the player-piano and in the phonograph.10 This position can be associated with the concept of delegation proposed by Latour that, in a general level, designates a transfer of responsibilities and competencies from one actor to another. According to Verbeek, most of the examples of that phenomenon presented by Latour involve delegation from human to non-human agents in a way that circumscribes the role of non- human agents exclusively to the execution of tasks assigned by them by human agents.11 However, Verbeek criticises the notion that the mediating role of artifacts is an intrinsic property, thus favouring a position in which a ‘technologically mediated intentionality’ can be perceived as a ‘mode of the intentional relation between humans and the world.’12 According to Jonson, early player pianos ‘consisted of what looked like a small cabinet which was wheeled up to the pianoforte, and from the back of which felt-covered hammers projected, which were adjusted to the keyboard.’13 On that account, the earliest type of those mechanisms was an external feature to the morphology of the instrument itself. In his
3 study on pianos, the same author argued that the subsequent improvement would be ‘the placing of the mechanism inside upright pianofortes, which had the great advantage that the pianoforte could then be used as an ordinary pianoforte and played by hand.’14 Within that framework, manufacturers devised strategies for the mechanism to be incorporated in the instrument itself, maintaining the aesthetic appearance of the piano as a furniture item. By preserving its morphology through the integration of the player piano mechanism in the instrument’s traditional form, the piano retained its status both as a musical instrument and as a piece of bourgeois furniture.15 Thus, the new strain of player pianos articulated the traditional role assigned to the piano and its late-Classical and Romantic heritage with “modern” tendencies embedded in the ability to domestically reproduce music through an automated mechanism. As in other coeval mechanical instruments that resorted to pneumatic mechanisms (such as the street or barrel organ), the music to be performed by the player piano was stored in a paper roll that contained the instructions for the automated device to perform a particular piece in the format of a sequential set of holes. Moreover, the mass production of music rolls that mainly contained tunes that had been previously popularised (through theatrical presentation, sheet music edition or sound recording) was symbiotically articulated with the trade of player piano mechanisms. The activities of creating and mass reproducing player piano rolls bears interesting similarities with the process of sound recording and dissemination. In that process, a master roll (or cylinder or disc) had to be initially produced and, in another stage, replicated through an industrial process. Before the dissemination of technologies that allowed for the direct perforation onto the master rolls, such as piano keyboard-operated punching machines, the preparation of master rolls was a manual process. The musical editor traced and punched the master roll based on the published sheet music edition of a particular piece (a process that displays the interconnection between several forms of commodified music at the time) and then produced its fair copies (known as stencils), that were subsequently replicated by automatic punching machines.16 Despite the development of several technological innovations designed to facilitate the automation of the production process of music rolls, this manual process was not entirely abandoned. Furthermore, various innovations associated with that process served two very distinct aims. On the one hand, the development of the piano keyboard-operated punching machine facilitated the process of mass production of music rolls. On the other hand, the emergence of the reproducing piano (a ‘development of the ordinary player piano which, with special reproducing music rolls, can
4 re-enact the original touch and expression of the recording pianist’) can be included in a framework of music recording devices.17 The development of the reproducing piano during the first decade of the twentieth century took place in Germany, namely through the action of the firms M. Welte & Söhne and Ludwig Hupfeld AG. Those companies developed the Welte-Mignon (in 1904) and the Masterspiel DEA (marketed in 1907), respectively and, in the following decade, the American manufacturers The Aeolian Company and The American Piano Company introduced in the market their own reproducing piano devices. Returning to the Welt-Mignon and the DEA, their manufacturers relied on several notorious pianists and composers to record the so-called hand-played rolls. Therefore, with the development of this new technology (that allowed for a more sensitive capture and reproduction of aspects such as tempo and dynamics) its became possible not only to flawlessly reproduce musical pieces in the piano parlour or living room but also to recreate a particular performance by a notorious pianist of the time in a domestic entertainment context. The recording process of both the Welte-Mignon and the DEA was not made by directly punching holes in the master roll. Instead, the pianist’s performance was initially recorded with a system that traced ink on a music roll and the corresponding holes were subsequently punched by using the previously mentioned manual process.18 Even before having developed the DEA, Hupfeld had already experimented with recorded piano rolls towards the end of 1905. Moreover, its Künstlermusikrollen (Artists’ Music Rolls) were readily available for both the Phonola (a player piano mechanism manufactured by that firm) and the Phonoliszt (‘an expression piano powered by an electric suction pump, with three levels of automatic dynamics, and variable speed crescendos between the levels’), which might indicate a complex interpenetration between the market for player piano rolls and other forms of musical commodities, especially recorded sound, during the period of in which this article focuses.19 Several interesting issues raised by the analysis of mechanical music instruments of the time are associated with both the process of encoding of information and with the storage medium itself. The player piano rolls can be analysed as a sequential and digital set of instructions for the instrument to play a specific piece of music. Sequential because the notation perforated in the continuous roll has a direct chronological correspondence with the musical piece itself (the instructions are interpreted in strict order as the roll moves) and digital due to its use of mutually exclusive and discontinuous values (on or off, in the case of the aforementioned mechanisms). According to Benson, the information recorded in a sheet of
5 paper is binary because there are only two possible, discontinuous, and exclusive conditions: ‘the surface of the paper in any given area is either solid or not.’20 This interpretation of that type of technology situates the music roll for the player piano in the realm of the digital storage media of the time. Furthermore, the use of that system, in which the medium surface stores a binary code, is also present in Charles Babbage’s planned (although never built) Analytical Engine, a nineteenth-century calculating machine in which the input of data would be made by using punched cards. To reinforce the association between the player piano and the history of early computing, both Percy Ludgate in the 1910s and Vandevar Bush in the 1930s attempted to project machines in which the digital data would be stored in perforated paper tape, a similar medium to the one used by player pianos.21 However, there is an important distinction between the player piano and the aforementioned machines: the former used a ready-made unchangeable routine that was perforated in a specific roll while the latter were intended to perform multiple and programmable operations. Therefore, the music roll acted as a sequential read-only memory (because, under normal circumstances, the recorded information could not be altered) and the player piano as a reproducing device for that specific routine.
Phonography and the commodification of sound
Up to this point, this article has dealt with processes regarding the role of the player piano in the complex process of commodification of music during the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century. However, the development and dissemination of sound recording and reproducing technologies in the last fourth of the nineteenth-century introduced relevant modifications in that process. One of the most significant of those changes was that, with phonography, the commodification of music is paralleled by the commodification of sound itself.22 Furthermore, ‘for most people under the sway of the phonograph, music could become both entertainment and part of the background noise of everyday life.’23 I would like now to introduce this matter by recurring to Barthes’ discussion on the photographic image and its relation with the realm of language in order to transpose that discussion to the realm of recorded music. According to that author:
From the object to its image there is of course a reduction – in proportion, perspective, colour – but at no time is this reduction a transformation (in the mathematical sense of
6 the term). In order to move from the reality to its photograph it is in no way necessary to divide up this reality into units and to constitute these units as signs, substantially different from the object they communicate; there is no necessity to set up a relay, that is to say a code, between the object and its image. Certainly the image is not the reality but at least it is its perfect analogon and it is exactly this analogical perfection which, to common sense, defines the photograph. Thus can be seen the special status of the photographic image: it is a message without a code; from which proposition an important corollary must immediately be drawn: the photographic message is a continuous message.24
Moreover, the same author depicts language as a digital code that translates reality into a system of signification.25 Therefore, for Barthes, the main distinction between the analogue and the digital realms is the presence or absence of an operative code of signification (and mediation) between reality and its representation. In that sense, it is possible to produce an analogy regarding photography and phonography (cultural processes that experienced parallel developments towards the end of the nineteenth century), moving the focus of Barthes’ assumptions from the visual sphere to the auditory realm. If the author considers photography as a visual analogue of reality, it is thus conceivable to interpret phonography as an auditory analogue of reality. In that sense, the development of sound recording technologies can be framed as the attempt to capture the acoustic analogon to reality. To reinforce this assumption, for Rothenbuhler and Peters, ‘because analog recording is an indexical trace of a phenomenon, the analogue storage medium will contain whatever information is allowed by the physics of the situation.’26 The novel type of stored information is also a relevant aspect regarding the study of the phonographic phenomenon and will be key in establishing the historical narrative of sound recording. For authors such as Kittler, technological developments played a key role in the reshaping of discourse networks, ‘the network of technologies and institutions that allow a given culture to select, store, and process relevant data,’ between 1800 and 1900.27 In his discussion regarding several technological innovations developed in the last third of the nineteenth century stated, the author stated:
Machines take over functions of the central nervous system, and no longer, as in times past, merely those of muscles. And with this differentiation – and not with steam engines and railroads – a clear division occurs between matter and information, the real and the symbolic.28
7 In that sense, the phonograph performed the functions of the central nervous system by recording and storing information. Therefore, as Hogg argues, phonography can be framed as a prosthetic form of memory.29 Furthermore, the relationship between memory and technology is addressed by Burton in his work regarding memory.30 For that author, comparisons between technological processes that involve the impression and deletion of traces on a substrate and the functioning of human memory have been especially pervasive in Western culture.31 Within that framework, a direct analogy between the process through which a phonograph inscribes and stores information on a cylinder and the working of human memory can be made. Moreover, the cultural assumption that external recording technologies can be used to supplement, expand, and enhance human memory is based on the idea that those technological apparatuses work in similar and, at least compatible ways with the mechanisms of the human mind.32 The working of mnemonic processes also occupies a privileged space in historiographical narratives. According to Walter Benjamin ‘memory creates the chain of tradition which passes a happening on from generation to generation.’33 Therefore, the construction of a history of recording can be read too as a history of the processes of remembering and archiving, constituting a rich substrate for historiographical analysis. In addition, a relevant point in the study of phonography is the nature of those new storage media and the identification of their content with a supposedly unmediated (thus objective or scientific) reality, a symptom of a shift from a Romantic perspective of music fruition as a sublime experience to a position in which music had been converted to ‘a quantifiable and marketable object or thing, a sonic commodity’ (to use Picker’s terms).34 This issue has been discussed and developed by several authors, such as the aforementioned Picker, Hogg or Weidman. For Hogg, the growing focus on objectivity and experimentation in the Victorian period is associated with a historically delimited intensification of what Lacan designated by the ego’s era.35 In that process, the use of technological mechanisms for collecting data played a key role in guaranteeing an intended objectivity as a consequence of the reduction of human intervention (equated with subjectivity) made possible by the introduction of those innovations.36 In that sense, technological apparatuses were perceived to gather exclusively quantifiable and empirical data (presented as facts), functioning as prostheses that extended the capacities of its users.37 By relating the rise of an ideology of objectivity with Kittler’s discussion regarding technologies that perform the functions of the central nervous system (thus acting as prosthetics of memory), Weidman argues:
8 At issue was not simply that new technologies expanded the possibilities of storage, but that what was stored by these new technologies was thought of as fundamentally different from what was stored by writing in the nineteenth century; this new stored material came to be experienced as the “real.”38
Moreover, in discussing the complex relation between oral tradition and the introduction of sound recording and reproducing technologies in Karnatic music, the same author makes an important statement on the relation between the status of the phonographic object and the processes of musical transmission.39 In her article, Weidman associates the development of phonography with the emergence of a ‘new kind of real in which the purity of hearing alone was distilled,’ a mechanism that tended to circumscribe the auditory process to sound itself and to relegate aspects such as gestural postures or inaudible traits to the background.40 In that sense, phonography cannot be perceived as a reduction without transformation (to use Barthes’ terminology) of the musical phenomenon, an issue that adds a new layer of complexity to the analogy between photography and phonography previously discussed in this work. However, a technological determinist approach to phonography proves to be highly problematic and reductionist. On the one hand, the technical possibility for the recording and reproduction of sound was essential to its commodification. Conversely, the processes that shaped that technology into media (and facilitated their incorporation in everyday life) played a key role in the establishment of a market for recorded sound. Sterne sustains that the introduction of phonographic technologies was a part of a more complex process through which the social and institutional establishment of a network based upon those new technologies interacted and transformed the cultural frameworks associated with the phenomenon of hearing.41 Moreover, that author developed a theory on phonography that was centred on the human ear and on the auditory process:
The key element, the defining function, in these early versions of sound reproduction technologies is the diaphragm – a simple mechanical principle, a principle that connects ear to machine through analogy, imitation, or thumbscrews. This construct of the ear as a function that can be abstracted from the human body, transposed across social contexts, produced, proliferated and mutated through technique and technology, suggests that the ear (and specifically the diaphragm) does not simply come to be a representation of sound reproduction in this period; the ear – its tympanic character – becomes the diagram of sonic reproducibility. The ear, as a mechanism, becomes a 9 way of organizing a whole set of sounds and sonic functions; it is an informal principle by which a practice is organized.42
In that sense, the development of what Sterne designates by ‘audile techniques’ predates the dissemination of sound recording technologies and was especially associated by that author with two professional fields (situated as middle class activities): medicine and telegraphy. ‘Medicine and telegraphy were two fields where techniques of listening provided professional ethos and prestige’ and ‘both the stethoscope and the telegraphic “sounder” were technologies that crystallized already-extant techniques of listening.’43 Moreover, classifying as tympanic several sound reproducing technologies ‘is to understand them as all functionally related, as sharing a set of common operational and philosophical principles, and, most important, as embodiments and intensifications of tendencies that were already existent elsewhere in the culture.’44 I would now like to return to the analogue/digital dichotomy presented by Barthes and relate it with the established narratives of recording. On the one hand, phonography is able to capture an unmediated (and continuous) analogue to reality. Conversely, the digital code operating in the mechanisms of the player piano, a mediated system of signification that represents notes and dynamics instructing the mechanism to perform specific gestures that will subsequently produce sound, can be considered as homologous to language. In their analysis of the phenomenon of early analogue sound recording, Rothenbuhler and Peters state that the process of phonographic recording involves the inscription of the music’s ‘acoustic being in time,’ thus stressing the existing break between the music’s materiality (the sound waves themselves) and previous storage media in which an operative communication code was present (such as the conventions associated with written music notation, for instance).45 Therefore, ‘phonography captures not the code but the act, not the script but the voice, not the score but the performance.’46 This theoretical stance bears striking parallels with Barthes’ theory of photography. By using the aforementioned analytical framework, it is thus possible to situate the complexities of the early recording of music within the wider context of the main historiographical narratives regarding sound. According to Suisman,
If both the player-piano and phonograph were forms of inscription, they diverged in what they inscribed – and this divergence illuminates the complementary ways the two technologies contributed to the underlying constitution of modern society. The phonograph inscribed and conveyed sound-in-time – that is, sound as the ephemeral
10 vibrations in the air produced by a specific instance of musical labor (or other sound- making activity). The player-piano, by contrast, represented a system of sound-in- knowledge – that is, information and instructions on how to make music. It inscribed and conveyed how to perform, over and over, the labor required to produce certain predetermined sounds.47
Therefore, sound recording history from 1877 onwards can be interpreted, although in a simplistic manner, as a sequential (and almost teleological) transition from analogue to digital technologies. However, due to the overlapping of both analogue and digital music storage media during a significant part of the twentieth century, a phenomenon that becomes very clear by analysing the coexistence of the so-called hand-played piano rolls with cylinders and flat records, the narrative regarding recorded music can only be multilayered and complex. Moreover, it complicates the placement of the player piano mechanisms solely as an intermediate stage in a binary segmentation between the age of domestic amateur music making (still associated with the embodiment of vocal and instrumental technique) and the age of phonographic reproduction (associated by authors such as Adorno with ‘an atomised and passive form of musical experience’).48 In addition, the coexisting music storage technologies (whether analogue or digital) retained a significant relevance in the market for domestic entertainment during the period of that concerns article and were symbiotically articulated with each other and with other music commodities, establishing themselves as a constitutive part of the sociability routines for several social groups at the time. Returning to Suisman, the technologies associated with the mechanical reproduction of sound and music (materialised in the player piano and in the phonograph) encapsulated two contrasting, yet complementary aspects that were connected with the process of modernity.49 On the one hand, the author associates the player-piano with the rationalisation of aspects such as culture, labor, and knowledge by displaying a progressive trend towards ‘quantification, mechanization, automation, and digitization.’50 Conversely, the phonograph marked and contributed to the reorganisation of the sensory perception of both space and time, a process that encapsulated a metaphysical transfiguration of human experience under the sign of modernity.51
Historicism and historicity in sound and music recording
This section will focus on the discussion of aspects such as historicism and historicity in the narratives regarding sound recording and will attempt to problematise their reading as a
11 teleological process grounded on continuity. For that purpose, it will draw on the work of Walter Benjamin and Slavoj Žižek (for reasons stated in the beginning of this article) in order to propose a counter-narrative that strives to complement historicist accounts by introducing the notion of a discontinuous historical time. One of the central tenets that permeate Walter Benjamin’s work on history is an unremitting critique of historicism. Despite never providing a clear definition for that concept, it is possible to ground the Benjamin’s view of historicism as the working of three different perspectives of history.52 According to the analysis of Benjamin’s historiographical work undertaken by Vardoulakis, historicism can be perceived as the establishment of history as a teleological process, as an operation that attempts to identify ‘independent historical disciplines’ (such as history of music, for example), and as an endeavour of cumulatively collecting facts and portray them as self-evident.53 Vardoulakis argues that aspect shared by all the aforementioned modes of historicism is the presence of the notion of time as a continuous entity, therefore presupposing ‘a linear chronological development, which is always dependent on empathy with the rulers who determine that linearity.’54 A similar point is made by Osborne, who reads Benjamin’s historicism as a ‘functional replacement within the time-consciousness of modernity for the continuity of historical time previously established by tradition.’55 Furthermore, Vardoulakis argues that, according to a Benjaminian perspective, historiography is underpinned by an operation of temporal discontinuity, therefore shifting its object from a philosophy of history towards a philosophy of time.56 The idea of historiography as a philosophy of time is also present in Žižek’s analysis of the works of Benjamin, focusing on issues such as time, history and truth. In that discussion, Žižek traces an incompatibility between truth (that, according to his reading of Benjamin, stands alongside an anhistorical stasis) and history (presented as an always false narrative that legitimises the victor), an aspect Žižek will further develop in his theorising on historicity and historicism.57 One of the main ideas of Žižek’s discussion on those issues is the development of a distinction between historicism and historicity. For that author, ‘historicism deals with the endless play of substitutions within the same fundamental field of (im)possibility, while historicity proper makes thematic different structural principles of this very (im)possibility.’58 Moreover, historicism ‘obfuscates concrete historicity qua the change of the very global structuring principle of the Social.’59 In that sense, ‘historicity proper involves a dialectical relationship to some unhistorical kernel that stays the same – not as an underlying Essence but as a rock that trips up every attempt to integrate it into the symbolic order.’60 Therefore, the 12 main distinction the author draws between historicity and historicism lies in the presence of an unhistorical kernel in the former, an argument that can be related with Žižek’s reception of Benjamin’s positioning of truth on the side of an anhistorical stasis.61 Furthermore, Žižek presents historicity as a contested space:
historicity is not the zero-level state of things secondarily obfuscated by ideological fixations and naturalizing misrecognitions; historicity itself, the space of contingent discursive constructions must be sustained through an effort, assumed, regained again and again.62
Conversely, Žižek defined historicism as the product of a historicist move that was unable to incorporate the ‘unhistorical traumatic kernel of the Real’ in its matrix, a statement that points to the author’s affiliation with the theories of Jacques Lacan.63 Lacan’s proposal of the existence of a triad of orders (the Imaginary, the Symbolic, and the Real) that constitute the basic fabric of human experience occupies a strategic place in Žižek’s thought, a stance that is reflected in the author’s discussion of historicity and historicism. In Žižek’s reading of Lacan,
“Imaginary” is the deceptive universe of fascinating images and the subject’s identification with them; “Symbolic” is the differential structure which organizes our experience of meaning; “Real” is the point of resistance, the traumatic “indivisible remainder” that resists symbolization.64
Furthermore, in Lacanian theory the constitution of the subject as a separate entity is marked by its entering the Symbolic order, a realm that may be defined as ‘the collection of codes and distinctions embodied in language and culture.’65 In that process, the subject is placed between the symbolic order (in which digital systems of signification are operating, to use Barthes’ terminology) and the traumatic Real that resists symbolisation altogether. Nonetheless, ‘the Real cannot be signified not because it is outside, external to the symbolic order, but precisely because it is inherent to it, its internal limit.’66 Relating this theory with the processes of narrating history, Žižek interprets historicisation as a process of symbolisation, an operation to which the re-enactment of ‘the gap between the inertia of the prehistoric Real and the domain of historicity, of multiple and shifting narrativizations’ is inherent.67 Therefore, it is possible to reinforce the argument that, in its entry into the symbolic order, historicity proper is able to retain an unhistorical core of the Real whilst 13 historicism fails to integrate that kernel. To return to Benjamin’s ideas, one of the reasons for that failure might be historicism’s constitutive reliance on the notion of a continuous time, thus failing to incorporate the unhistorical (what was ‘suspended of the historical continuum’) in that process.68 What is interesting when situating recording in the position of the Lacanian subject entering the symbolic order is that, in order to constitute itself as a separate entity, the repressed core of historicity will be precisely the media and processes that were already integrated into the Symbolic realm (such as the digital operating codes of the player piano roll, for instance). This process can be perceived as an operation of a specific strand of historicism that attempts to depict sound recording as a technology of the Real (to use Kittler’s terminology), as the means to access and record a supposedly unmediated (thus objective or scientific) reality, thus repressing all other forms of music recording due to their ontological integration in the symbolic order. Therefore, the equation of sound recording with music recording can be interpreted as an operation that glosses over (or represses) what was already symbolised in its constitution as subject, which complicates a Lacanian reading of that phenomenon. Nevertheless, pursuing that line of thought proves to be useful. If that analysis is taken one step further, it becomes possible to shift the historical narrative regarding the development of digital media and processes of sound recording as a new development in a linear (and teleological) continuum of technological innovations towards an interpretation that perceives that set of events as a break marked by the return of what was repressed in the process of constitution of the symbolic network of recording. In that sense, that suspension can be interpreted as a tear in the membrane of the symbolic order that makes possible for the subject to acknowledge the presence of the unhistorical kernel of the Real. Moreover, the pursuit of this idea introduces the possibility of distantiation from a narrative that presupposes a continuous time (perceived as a product of historicism) in order to embrace a Benjaminian framework in which historical discontinuity is favoured. Returning to Benjamin’s critique of historicism, the establishment of a history of sound and music recording can be framed as a move towards the identification of independent historical disciplines, one of the modes of historicism that was previously mentioned in this article. Furthermore, the presence of both digital and analogue media and processes in the studied period complicates a historical narrative that places the type of recorded information (the sound itself) as its central object. In that sense, a presentist reading informed by the primacy of recorded sound in contemporary societies contributed to the establishment of a
14 discourse that can be framed in a Benjaminian historical framework as ‘a narrative of the victor who legitimizes his victory by presenting the previous development as the linear continuum leading to his own final triumph.’69 Thus, the establishment of a chain of tradition that begins with Edison’s invention of the phonograph and privileges recorded sound over recorded music can be framed as an operation of legitimation the victors through the lens of historicism. To conclude, in the narrative concerning music recording Walter Benjamin’s Angel of History has been many times represented as The Recording Angel (the logo of one of the earliest trade marks belonging to The Gramophone Company), etching the groove into the gramophone record and in the historical fabric of human memory.70 In this case, perhaps historicity proper needs salvaging from the grips of historicism, from a reified perspective based on the assumption that history is a continuous process that ‘offers the “eternal” image of the past,’ in order to allow for the possibility of struggling for the redemption of the oppressed (or repressed) past.71
Notes 1 John Picker, Victorian Soundscapes (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 10. 2 Arthur W.J.G. Ord-Hume, ‘Mechanical instruments’, in John Shepherd, et al., Continuum encyclopedia of popular music of the world, vol. 2 (Performance and production) (London/NY: Continuum, 2003), 323. 3 Ord-Hume, ‘Mechanical instrument’, Grove Music Online, ed. L. Macy, http://www.grovemusic.com (21 July 2010). 4 Timothy D. Taylor, ‘The commodification of music at the dawn of the era of “mechanical music”’, Ethnomusicology, 51/2 (2007), 281–305. For a 1911 overview on player pianos see Alfred Dolge, Pianos and their makers (Covina, CA: Covina Publishing Company, 1911), 131-162. 5 Taylor, op. cit., 283. 6 Ord-Hume, ‘Player Piano’, Grove Music Online, ed. L. Macy, http://www.grovemusic.com (21 July 2010). 7 Taylor, op.cit., 284. 8 David Suisman, ‘Sound, knowledge, and the “immanence of human failure”’, Social Text 102, 28/1 (2010), 19. 9 Taylor, op.cit., 284-285. 10 David Suisman, op. cit., 22. 11 Peter-Paul Verbeek, What Things Do: Philosophical Reflections on Technology, Agency, and Design (University Park, PA: Penn State University Press, 2005), 169. See also Bruno Latour, Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005). 12 Peter-Paul Verbeek, ibid. 13 G. C. Ashton Jonson, ‘Mechanical Piano-Players’, Journal of the Royal Musical Association, 42/1 (1915), 17. 14 Jonson, ibid. 15 Theodor W. Adorno, ‘The Curves of the Needle’, October, 55 (1990), 51. 16 See ‘History of the Pianola - Music Roll Manufacture’, The Pianola Institute (2008), http://www.pianola.org/ history/history_rolls.cfm (2 August 2010). 17 Frank W. Holland and Arthur W.J.G. Ord-Hume, ‘Reproducing Piano: 1. History and technical development’, Grove Music Online, ed. L. Macy, http://www.grovemusic.com (10 August 2010) and Dolge, op. cit., 57-58. 18 See ‘The Reproducing Piano – Welte-Mignon’, The Pianola Institute (2008), http://www.pianola.org/ reproducing/reproducing_welte.cfm (2 August 2010). 19 See ‘The Reproducing Piano – Hupfeld DEA’, The Pianola Institute (2008), http://www.pianola.org/ reproducing/reproducing_dea.cfm (2 August 2010). 15 20 Richard Benson, The Printed Picture (NY: Museum of Modern Art, 2008), 274. 21 Brian Randell, ‘From Analytical Engine to Electronic Digital Computer: The Contributions of Ludgate, Torres, and Bush’, Annals of the History of Computing, 4/4 (1982), 327-341. 22 Picker, Victorian Soundscapes (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 117. For an overview of phonography during the period of mechanical recording see Michael Chanan, Repeated takes: A short history of recording and its effects on music (London/NY: Verso, 1995), 1-36. 23 Eric W. Rothenbuhler and John Durham Peters, ‘Defining Phonography: An Experiment in Theory’, The Musical Quarterly, 81/2 (1997), 244. 24 Roland Barthes, ‘The Photographic Message’, in Roland Barthes, Image-Music-Text (NY: Hill and Wang, 1978), 17. 25 Barthes, “Rethoric of the Image”, in Roland Barthes, op. cit., 41. 26 Rothenbuhler and Peters, op. cit., 252. 27 Friedrich A. Kittler, Discourse Networks, 1800/1900, (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 1992), 369. 28 Kittler, Gramophone, film, typewriter (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999), 16. The direct association between specific technologies and Lacanian terms in Kittler’s work is very problematic. According to Hogg, ‘Kittler attempts to ground his reading of the three technological developments in the title of his book in Lacanian terms – typewriter as Symbolic, film as Imaginary and gramophone as Real, but though apparently elegant, these mappings are not convincing for a number of reasons, not least of which is a drastic misunderstanding of the Lacanian Real itself, and a disregard of the essential contribution of the Symbolic order in film reception.’ See Bennett Hogg, The cultural imagination of the phonographic voice, 1877-1940, PhD thesis (Newcastle University, 2008), 148. Nevertheless, the association of sound recording with the real (in lowercase) was a cultural trope during the first years of recorded sound, crystallised in notions such as fidelity or authenticity. 29 Hogg, op. cit., 143-147. 30 James Burton, ‘Bergson’s non-archival theory of memory’, Memory Studies, 1/3 (2008), 321-339. 31 Burton, op. cit., 322. 32 Burton, ibid. 33 Walter Benjamin, “The Storyteller”, in Hale, Dorothy J (ed.) The Novel: An Anthology of Criticism and Theory 1900-2000 (Malden, MS: Blackwell Publishing, 2006), 371. 34 Picker, Victorian Soundscapes (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 10. 35 Hogg, op. cit., 200-201. 36 Hogg, op. cit., 201. 37 Hogg, op. cit., 201. Regarding the ego’s era see Teresa Brennan, History after Lacan (London/NY: Routledge, 1993), 26-74. 38 Amanda Weidman, ‘Guru and Gramophone: Fantasies of Fidelity and Modern Technologies of the Real’, Public Culture, 15/3 (2003), 462. 39 Weidman, op. cit., 464. 40 Weidman, ibid. 41 Jonathan Sterne, The Audible Past: Cultural Origins of Sound Reproduction (Duke University Press: Durham, NC/London, 2003), 84. 42 Sterne, ‘A machine to hear for them: On the very possibility of sound’s reproduction’, Cultural Studies, 15/2 (2001), 284-285. 43 Sterne, The Audible Past: Cultural Origins of Sound Reproduction, 98. 44 Sterne, op. cit., 34. 45 Rothenbuhler and Peters, op. cit., 243. 46 Rothenbuhler and Peters, ibid. 47 David Suisman, ‘Sound, knowledge, and the “immanence of human failure”’, Social Text 102, 28/1 (2010), 23-24. 48 Max Paddison, ‘The Critique Criticised: Adorno and Popular Music’, Popular Music, 2 (1982), 206. However, several authors have critiqued this view, pointing out that this “passivity” to music is actively constructed by the subject. See, for example, Emilie Gomart and Antoine Hennion, ‘A Sociology of Attachment: Music Amateurs, Drug Users’, The Sociological Review, 46/S (1998), 220-247 and Tia DeNora, After Adorno: Rethinking Music Sociology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 91-93. 49 Suisman, op. cit., 24. 50 Suisman, ibid. 51 Suisman, ibid.
16 52 Dimitris Vardoulakis, ‘The Subject of History: The Temporality of Parataxis in Benjamin’s Historiography’, in Andrew Benjamin (ed.), Walter Benjamin and History (London/NY: Continuum, 2005), 122. 53 Vardoulakis, ibid. 54 Vardoulakis, op. cit., 122-123. 55 Peter Osborne, The Politics of Time: Modernity and the Avant-Garde (London/NY: Verso, 1996), 116. 56 Vardoulakis, op. cit., 123. 57 Slavoj Žižek, Enjoy Your Symptom! (London/NY: Routledge, 2008). 92-93. 58 Žižek, ‘Class Struggle and Postmodernism’, in Judith Butler, Ernesto Laclau, and Slavoj Žižek, Contingency, Hegemony, Universality: Contemporary Dialogues on the Left (London/NY: Verso, 2000), 112. 59 Žižek, ibid. 60 Žižek, The Metastases of Enjoyment: Six Essays on Women and Causality (London/NY: Verso, 2005), 199. 61 Žižek, Enjoy Your Symptom!, 94. 62 Žižek, The Plague of Fantasies (London/NY: Verso, 1997), 53. 63 Žižek, ibid. 64 Žižek, Jacques Lacan, (London/NY: Routledge, 2003), 2. 65 Lewis A. Kirshner, ‘Rethinking Desire: The objet petit a in Lacanian Theory’, Journal of the American Psychoanalytical Association, 53/1 (2005), 86. 66 Žižek, The Plague of Fantasies, 217. 67 Žižek, The Plague of Fantasies, 53. 68 Žižek, Enjoy Your Symptom!, 80 69 Žižek, Enjoy Your Symptom!, 92-93. 70 Benjamin, ‘On the Concept of History’, in Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings (eds), Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, 1938-1940 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press), 389-400, and Richard Middleton, ‘“Last Night a DJ Saved My Life”: Avians, Cyborgs and Siren Bodies in the Era of Phonographic Technology’, Radical Musicology, Vol. 1, 2006, http://www.radical-musicology.org.uk (17 January 2011), par. 25. 71 Benjamin, The Arcades Project (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), 474 and Benjamin, ‘On the Concept of History’, in Eiland and Jennings (eds), op. cit., 396.
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