The Impact of Recordings

Founded in 1900, the Berlin-based _Phonographische Zeitschrift_ was the leading German-language periodical devoted to the early sound recording business. Prior to the First World War, its house critic was the now little-remembered Max Chop (1862-1929), whose voluminous _PZ_ output included coverage of industry news, instructional consumer features, and weekly recording reviews. One subject to which Chop devoted special attention was the problem of the reproducibility of so-called "hypermodern" music-above all, that of Richard Strauss, whose _Elektra_ was then still new. In a series of columns discussing some of the earliest orchestral Strauss recordings, Chop went so far as to argue that his idiom precluded successful phonographic inscription. In a word, Strauss was not _plattenmöglich_ ("recordable").


Informed by recent scholarship on auditory cultures and the senses, this paper examines Chop's 1911-13 reviews of Strauss opera extracts, concentrating on the argumentative sleights of hand by which he made that claim. Though Chop framed the problem in terms of the "acoustic membrane" and its technical affordances, his reasoning often shaded unmistakably into aesthetic valuation. This licensed a revival of older tropes about Straussian _Nervenkunst_: given the shared "tympanic function" linking human ear and acoustic membrane (Sterne 2003), the "unhealthy" nerves Chop located in Strauss's scores were, I show, effectively displaced onto the latter. For Chop, the acoustic membrane thus proved a discursive-material arbitrator of pathology, and so, musical value. It was, to use Carolyn Abbate's (2016) label, a technological "fabulist"-but one, I argue, whose tall tales ought not to be dismissed as mere misguided ideology.


In excavating Chop's journalism, then, I contribute not only to Strauss reception history, as it pertains to the understudied collision between early modernism and early phonography. Above all, I indicate that Chop's curious ontology of the acoustic membrane is best understood as a symptom of the initial epistemic uncertainty surrounding the analog mediation of music. If subsequent technological advances would soon enough render Chop's complaints moot, his deployment of recording practice as aesthetic legitimizer reflected a moment in phonographic history when the ontology of musical reproduction was still up for grabs.

Between 1945 and 1952, the General Headquarters of Douglas MacArthur, Supreme Commander for the Allied Powers (GHQ/SCAP), promoted political and cultural reforms to demilitarize and democratize post-war Japan. The Civil Information and Education Section (CI&E) was established as a non-military staff section of GHQ/SCAP to disseminate democratic values to the Japanese people. The music section was created under the Motion Picture Branch of CI&E to address a wide range of issues, including music education of the general public. With the cooperation of the Library Branch, they offered a weekly record concert series at CI&E libraries in major cities in Japan. For these concerts, they must have adopted the policy of the United States Office of War Information, advocated by Henry Cowell during World War II: spread both American music and music performed in American concert halls and theaters. Seiji Choki (2010) discussed the impact of such concerts on young artists and composers who later created an avant-garde art movement called Jikken Kobo [experimental workshop]. Choki also argued that these concerts allowed the public to access Western music, although American contemporary music did not take root in Japan, as GHQ/SCAP had originally planned. Regarding the concert program, however, Choki consulted secondary sources such as journal articles which focus on the repertoire at CI&E library in Tokyo. In this study, I examine declassified GHQ/SCAP documents that reveal the concert program at CI&E library in Sendai, the largest city in the northeast region in the main island. Examining the program notes for their weekly concerts, which have never been studied, I demonstrate that their repertoire consisted of "music performed in American concert halls" rather than "American music," from Domenico Scarlatti to Dmitri Shostakovich. This differed from the situation at the library in Tokyo, where American contemporary music was frequently heard. After speculating the reasons for these differences, I discuss the impact of CI&E library record concert series on the Japanese musical landscape today.

The commercialization of the phonograph as a domestic "musical instrument" at the turn of the twentieth century assigned to the United States a new place in the world's musical map. If the country's longstanding reliance on the transatlantic import of music and musicians had created a sense of cultural inferiority toward Europe, U.S. recording companies leveraged the American origin of recording technology and the technical skills and methods associated with it to stake a claim in the definition of an autochthonous form of art. These nationalistic undertones especially emerged after World War I, when phonograph manufacturers like Victor Talking Machine Company and Columbia Records sought to demonstrate their contribution to American culture through their involvement in Americanization campaigns and community pageants describing the history of specific cities. 


As several music scholars (Katz, Leppert, Seifert, Suisman) have discussed, recorded music could be depicted as an authentic American product because it was put on an ontological level separate from that of live performance. This separation, in turn, has been described as the result of an aggressive marketing strategy planned by recording industrialists and implemented by distributors and dealers acting on the local level. Yet, at a time when the market for home phonographs had just begun to consolidate in the country, the success of such a strategy could hardly rely only on a top-down organizational model. Rather, it also depended on the personal investment of local actors in the recording business and on their "improvisational" capacity to seize profit opportunities (Ospina Romero) and communicate with the management of recording companies in a relationship of mutual exchange. 


In this paper, I investigate the personal stakes of record dealers and distributors in the nationalistic project crafted by American recording companies in the first decades of the twentieth century. Drawing upon archival resources and contemporary trade publications and building on previous contributions in sociology and developmental psychology, I argue that different individuals who entered the music business as record and phonograph dealers used this professional experience to integrate their own personal life stories into the narrative of the phonograph as an American cultural product.