Mechanical Instruments and Phonography: the Recording Angel of Historiography”, Radical Musicology, No Prelo

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

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