Electric Shock

by Peter Doggett

  In a preview of the ‘format wars’ that would mark each stage of technological development ahead, Thomas Edison’s phonograph and cylinder were soon pitched into battle with Emil Berliner’s gramophone. Berliner’s recording was captured on a disc – originally made of metal, although he soon created a cheaper alternative from hard rubber. The cylinder was, in its virgin form, unique: each example represented an individual performance, and the musician who wished to make commercial capital out of his or her skills would have to reprise their piece as often as the market required. Faced with Berliner’s gramophone record, which allowed for multiple duplicates of an original performance, Edison’s team were forced to concoct their own mass production, at some cost to the already dubious audio quality of their machine.

  The gramophone record thereby seized a commercial advantage which would survive, through metamorphoses of recording technique, disc format and musical content, until the brief triumph of the cassette tape and then the more crushing dominance of the digital compact disc. Berliner’s success imposed a crucial limitation on the preservation of music, however. Edison’s cylinder method allowed anyone to play existing recordings, and also to make their own. Salesmen would carry their demonstration phonograph door to door, so that awestruck customers could hear the sound of their own voices, caught in one moment, replayed faithfully in the next. The gramophone of Herr Berliner, on the other hand, ensured that the making of records would remain a professional affair, imposing divisions between performer, distributor and consumer which seemed not only natural but inevitable to anyone born between 1900 and 1960.

  In one field alone, Edison’s technology remained triumphant. In the earliest days of the cylinder, many leading performers refused to waste their time on travelling to a distant studio to create something as ephemeral as a record. Instead, they insisted on being visited in their own homes, allowing the engineer to ensnare nature raw and in its own habitat: the earliest in a long tradition of what would become known as location recordings.

  Without the cylinder, we would not have the earliest recording of a papal voice. Pope Leo XIII was captured at the age of 92, in 1903, chanting a frail ‘Ave Maria’ and ‘Benediction’. These two recordings – neither longer than a minute – were issued in 1905 on cylinders, and later discs, at the cost of eight shillings apiece: the equivalent of a working-man’s daily wage. The manufacturer conceded that ‘The Pope was aged and feeble when the records were made’, but insisted: ‘To Collectors Their Value Is Almost Priceless.’

  The religious impulse was channelled that same year into what are believed to be the earliest known musical recordings by African-Americans: recordings of ‘Negro Shouts by Dinwiddie Colored Quartet: These are genuine Jubilee and Camp Meeting Shouts sung as only negroes can sing them.’ What’s striking, more than a century later, about these spirituals, with their unaffected balance between leader and harmonised support, is their sense of existing beyond time, as if, recording deficiencies aside, they might have been performed hundreds of years ago – or today.fn1

  Those deficiencies convinced ‘people of sensitivity13 [that] the Gramophone was merely an instrument which made objectionable noises’; while Edison’s cylinder was ‘not then capable of producing14 any music that was not blatant or vulgar’. Those more generous in spirit were prepared to concede that recordings could deliver a faithful reproduction of the shape and duration of a musical piece; but one journalist remarked that ‘You will find that the effect15 of any song upon a record is immensely improved if you play over the accompaniment from the music upon the piano, while it is being played upon the machine.’

  Aside from its novelty appeal, recorded sound needed to offer substance that would transcend the barbed-wire scratchiness and foggy hiss, the tin-can tone and horizon-distant volume, which afflicted a majority of early discs. In 1894, the Edison Kinetoscope Company augmented its jerky ‘peep show’ films with cylinder recordings, which required the consumer to peer through an eyepiece and insert stethoscope tubes in their ears. The combination of inadequate sound and indistinct vision was presumably more appealing than either without the other.

  Another exploratory venture into the union of science and music involved the earliest experiments with wireless telephony, or ‘radio’. In 1906, just five years after Marconi sent his first telephonic message across the Atlantic, a Massachusetts engineer named Reginald Fessenden was able to ‘broadcast’ his own rudimentary violin solos, and readings from the New Testament, to ships just offshore. Fessenden also anticipated the role of the disc jockey by beaming a gramophone record of Handel’s ‘Largo’ aria to his handful of listeners. (Lee de Forest of New York subsequently claimed this achievement for himself, after he broadcast the William Tell overture from the city’s Parker Building in 1907; his hubris was rewarded when the entire building burned to the ground a few weeks later.)

  Almost a century before a broadband connection was assumed to be a key requirement of civilised life, telephone subscribers in Wilmington, Delaware were offered a ‘dial up’ phonograph service: ‘Attached to the wall16 near the telephone is a box containing a special receiver, adapted to throw out a large volume of sound into the room … At the central office, the lines of musical subscribers are tapped to a manual board attended by an operator. A number of phonographs are available, and a representative assortment of records kept on hand … When it is desired to entertain a party of friends, the user calls the music department and requests that a certain number be played. He releases and proceeds to fix the megaphone in position. At the same time the music operator plugs up a free phonograph to his line, slips on the record and starts the machine. At the conclusion of the piece the connection is pulled down, unless more performances have been requested.’ Miraculous though this service must have appeared in 1909, any aesthetic value must have been trumped by its prestige as a status symbol.

  One man can claim to have brought recorded music a lustre that none of these technological schemes could match. In a recording career that stretched almost twenty years, he became – to borrow a term from later decades – the first ‘superstar’ produced by the music industry, and the highest-paid entertainer in the world. His fame arose not from sentimental ballads or comic monologues, the staples of the era; but from unadulterated pieces of what we now call ‘classical’ music, arias from the world’s most famous operas.

  Enrico Caruso was 29 years old in 1902, when he left his native Naples for America, preceded by his reputation as Europe’s finest operatic tenor. His first US recording for the Victor company – ‘Vesti la giubba’ (1904), from Leoncavallo’s opera Pagliacci – carried such unfeigned passion that it established the name of Caruso as a vocal superlative. Eight years later, he would surpass this epic performance with his portentous reading of Sir Arthur Sullivan’s lament for his late brother, ‘The Lost Chord’, staring down grief with a courage that still defies the listener to remain unmoved. By his death in 1921, Caruso was guaranteed an annual income of $100,000, topped up by a generous royalty on record sales.

  Victor could afford to reward the Neapolitan so handsomely because he had enabled them to transform the gramophone from a curiosity into a mark of sophistication and wealth. Caruso became the focal point of the company’s Red Seal records – mostly one-sided, and therefore featuring only one piece of less than four minutes’ duration. Whereas Victor’s standard, two-sided records of ephemeral popular songs retailed for 75c, the Red Seal offerings cost anything up to $7 apiece – the differential justified not just by the musical content, but also by the social prestige conferred by ownership of these exclusive items. Opera buffs were not restricted to the wealthy elite, of course, and many less privileged families skimped on essentials for the life-affirming joy of owning a few precious minutes of Caruso in his prime.

  Lucrative though Caruso’s career was, the infant recording industry could not survive on operatic arias and ballads by distinguished composers alone. For every extract-flush-left from Puccini or Verdi, there wer
e several dozen songs that were not expected to live beyond the season. Indeed, for the first time in musical history, they were specifically designed to fade after an initial burst of enthusiasm. Thomas Edison himself had experienced the gulf between ephemera and enduring art. While testing his equipment, he selected a recording of a favourite tune in waltz-time. ‘We played that waltz all day long17’, he recalled. ‘The second day it began to pall upon us a little. At the end of the fourth day the men began to get dreadfully irritated. At the end of the week they could not stay in the room. I firmly believe that it is this question of reiteration which makes it possible for you to hear Beethoven and Wagner over and over again without getting tired. The music of these great composers is so complicated that it does not weary the nerve centres, while the simpler melody, however tuneful, at last induces dislike and disgust.’ His findings would inadvertently inspire a barbaric form of sonic torture a century later in the so-called ‘war on terror’.

  Nobody involved in the production of self-consciously popular songs – designed to appeal instantaneously, and quickly be replaced by something equally addictive – anticipated that anyone would be foolhardy enough to punish themselves in the manner of Edison’s engineers. Nor were they so deluded as to imagine they were creating transcendent art worthy of Caruso. But around 1890, in New York, there arose a self-perpetuating business devoted, like consumer capitalism itself, to creating a desire that the public did not realise it felt, and then satisfying it with such efficiency that the want would mutate into an obsession. The result was the manufacturing of popular songs in a system akin to factory farming. It was the great fortune of this industry that it emerged just as scientific innovation produced a method for distributing products around the world: the two strands of music production and reproduction created a global industry which, over the course of the twentieth century, would colour and transform the everyday lives of generations of eager consumers.

  The young men like18 the popular sentimental song. It helps them very much at the beginning of a courtship. They can sing a popular chorus which may imply much or little to the girl. But it is straight enough to be understood, and oblique enough to be easily and tactfully disregarded if the girl so wishes.

  In the thousands of songs that we publish, there are hundreds of appropriate choruses, which I know friends sing to each other; and by their means, the girl is often led to ‘understand’!

  London music publisher, 1912

  The public … must be very faithful19 to old ideals, to judge from the unvarying stream poured out upon it by songwriters and publishers … practically every lyric is on the one theme – love.

  Daily Mirror editorial, 1904

  The credit for inventing the modern popular song was claimed by Charles K. Harris, the composer in 1891 of one of the most enduring hits of the pre-jazz era: ‘After the Ball’. Across three lengthy and maudlin verses, each answered by an equally pathetic refrain, Harris portrayed a lonely old man who is asked by his infant niece: ‘Why are you single? Why live alone? Have you no babies? Have you no home?’ Uncle unveils the sorry tale of the love he lost because he saw her kissing another man; only to discover, after her death, that his supposed rival was merely her brother. ‘After the Ball’ ‘lay upon the shelf for over a year, no singer caring to take it up on account of its extreme length’, Harris recounted. It eventually found its way to the statuesque Canadian vaudeville artist, Miss May Irwin, and thence was ‘interpolated’ – a standard practice, whereby contemporary ‘hit’ songs would be added to an existing show – into the touring musical A Trip to Chinatown. It was recorded, to piano accompaniment, by George J. Gaskin, ‘the Silver-Voiced Irish Tenor’ from Belfast; and then by the noted whistler, John Yorke Atlee. The success of Harris’s composition was measured not in cylinders or records, however, but in sales of sheet music, which were estimated to run into the millions.

  In the era before mass communication, a piano in the home was the only reliable way for a family to reprise the songs they had heard at a theatre or music hall. And the music-publishing industry – which can be traced back to Ottaviano dei Petrucci and his collection of French chansons in early sixteenth-century Venice, through the song-seller in Shakespeare’s A Winter’s Tale, to the ballad-mongers and broadsheet sellers of Victorian England, and the concentration of publishers’ offices in the first of two New York districts designated as ‘Tin Pan Alley’ in the 1880s – existed to supply (and renew) that demand. By then, American publishers were copying the recent English trend of paying stars of variety and music hall to perform their songs, in the hope that lucrative sheet-music sales would follow.

  Before the enactment of strict copyright legislation in the early twentieth century, publishers were plagued by ‘music pirates’. Rather than selling counterfeit CDs and DVDs in street markets, as they would a century later, these miscreants gathered outside theatres and halls offering cut-price copies of the songs that had just been performed. In Britain alone, around 60,000 sheets of pirated music were seized every month by representatives of the Musical Copyright Association. The illicit trade gradually forced legitimate publishers to cut their prices by up to 75% – shrinking the earnings of the humble songwriter. The music-hall star Miss Ellaline Terriss registered the success of a new song: ‘I think the public like it20, for I see the irrepressible “music pirate” is already selling it outside the theatre. I expect one day to find a man standing in the street with a phonograph singing the song in my voice, and advising the public not to pay to go in the theatre when they can hear just as well for a penny outside.’

  Between performers such as Miss Terriss, and songwriters such as Harris, existed several tiers of the industry: the publishers themselves, and their arrangers; their demonstrators, who would hope to interest visiting singers in their material; and travelling agents, whose work could involve anything from door-to-door salesmanship, to apparently ‘spontaneous’ exhibitions of fervour in a public place. In his early teens, the celebrated composer Irving Berlin scraped together an income from busking outside bars, singing in a vaudeville chorus and working as a song plugger or ‘boomer’. Publishers hired him to sit in the audience of a vaudeville theatre, and react with exaggerated gusto when a particular song was aired. Experts in this dubious art would encourage their fellow spectators to demand an impromptu encore – and amidst such tactics, a hit song could be born. It was only when Berlin won a job as a singing waiter – a busker inside the establishment, rather than hovering outside – that he could demonstrate his ability to compose impromptu parodies of well-known songs, and then showcase his original compositions.

  In the 1890s, few people had access to a phonograph or gramophone, and beyond the pages of the sixpenny sheet, music existed only in live performance. There were brass bands, often with military connections, at municipal events or at bandstands in the park (a tradition that survives in Britain to this day); respectable concerts of music light or serious; and comic operas, ranging from the sentimental to the acutely satirical fare of Messrs Gilbert and Sullivan. While W. S. Gilbert skewered the pillars of the Victorian establishment (from MPs in Iolanthe to Oscar Wilde’s aesthetes in Patience), Arthur Sullivan exposed the compositional genius that had enabled him to publish several enduring hymns and anthems before his thirtieth birthday – notably ‘Onward Christian Soldiers’ and ‘It Came Upon a Midnight Clear’. Yet Sullivan was an early victim of the tug of war between popularity and refinement, commerce and art. His forte was sophisticated entertainment, but he was encouraged by his peers to pursue more serious forms of composition, less suited to his genius.

  A rung below Gilbert and Sullivan’s comic operas were operettas and musical comedies, few of which endured beyond their run in the theatre. One exception was an Austrian import, The Merry Widow (Die lustige Witwe), by Franz Lehár, which reached London in 1907, Paris two years later, and thereafter spanned the world. The London craze for Austrian works was halted only by the outbreak of the Great War in 1914, in which Herr Le
hár’s nation unfortunately took the opposing side.

  Popular though The Merry Widow, The Pirates of Penzance and their ilk were, they were far from being the dominant form of musical performance at the end of the nineteenth century. The common people – those who lacked the means to frequent the same venues as dukes and debutantes – visited theatres and music halls for the multifaceted entertainment known as ‘the varieties’ in Britain (or ‘music hall’, after the venue for such delights) and ‘vaudeville’ in the United States.

  What began as a potpourri of musical and theatrical elements, from low comedy to extract-flush-lefts from high opera or Shakespeare, was gradually standardised into a method of presentation that varied widely in quality and tone, but was comfortingly familiar to its audience. Offering variety by nature as well as name, music hall or vaudeville bills promised a constant shift of mood and style. At one moment the audience might be guffawing at ribald sexual innuendo; at the next, weeping at the ballad of a dying child; the next, marvelling at the daring and dexterity of knife-throwers or tumblers. Ruling this eclectic gathering was the chairman, rolling many-syllabled boasts and jibes around his rubicund cheeks as he hyperbolised the charms of one act or denigrated the failings of another.fn2 His verbal extravagance would provoke cheers – or boos, as appropriate – from an audience who expected to join in the entertainment, raising their voices in a popular chorus or entering into repartee with the comedians and singers. Certain venues, such as the Glasgow Empire, enjoyed a ferocious reputation amongst performers, although few could rival the virulence of a French audience in Marseilles, as the cabaret star Mistinguett recalled: ‘A startled, demoralised21 teenage singer [was] faced with cries of “Higher! Higher, you bitch!”, because her voice didn’t reach the balcony. She gathered up her skirts till she showed everything she had, shouting, “Is that high enough for you bastards?”, before flouncing off the stage in tears.’