by Greg D'Alessio
It is always a strange thing to read accounts of the popular advent of new technologies: the first time someone saw a skyscraper or road on a train, talked the phone or logged onto the Internet. We have the momentary awareness of the enormity of difference between our lives as they are and those other lives “back then,” before there was…. This is particularly true in reading about the advent of the gramophone as a household “appliance.” Previous to that time—the 1910’s and 20’s –the “talking machine,” as it was sometimes called, was to be found mainly in big city arcades along with other cheap diversions where, for a nickel, one could hear a brief rendition of some popular ditty of the gay 90’s while waiting for a train or something like that. In this way, it wasn’t a remarkably different experience for people from listening to a brass band on the street corner or any other of the myriad” live” musical performances that made up the sonic landscape of the day.
As the gramophone moved into the households of millions of people around the world though, some previously unencountered taboos had to be confronted. For instance, the formerly impossible act of someone listening to a piece of music all alone. It is hard for us to imagine the social resistance to this now completely ordinary act. But at the time, coming upon someone sitting by themselves, perhaps in a darkened room, listening to Fritz Kreisler, or Caruso all by themselves was considered unseemly, and quite embarrassing. As though they were sneaking a drink or a pull on an opium pipe. There were even articles on the subject in the new periodicals of the day, trying to allay the apprehensions and discomforts of the new class of gramophone listener that such an activity as solo listening was not as outré and mortifying as all that, and might even have its admirable aspects.
Another disconcerting possibility of the new machine was that one could choose to listen to a piece of music at any time of the day. One could finish breakfast, read the paper and then listen to music, in the morning! Well! It simply wasn’t done. It smacked of decadence, and eccentricity, and the world gone all topsy-turvy—which, of course, it had.
Consider now that our basic social model for listening to music these days is of one person alone, with earphones on, with their own private play-list of individually selected music—music that others couldn’t hear even if they were in the same room. This means we have totally inverted the expected social positioning of music in the 80-odd years since the use of the gramophone became widespread. Music has gone from being a necessarily public experience, to a largely private one; from being something like attending the theater to being something like reading a book.
Well, so what? What difference does it really make how many other people are listening to the same piece at the same time as we are? After all, doesn’t the real event of the act of listening always take place within the heads of individuals, whether or not they sitting in a room alone or in a crowded concert hall?
The answer to this depends, of course, on what we think the “real event” of listening is. We have become so used to conceiving of ourselves as autonomous individuals and of society as no more than a common space for ourselves and other autonomous individuals—with no sensible demands of its own other than to provide freedom for people to live as they choose (with some basic laws thrown in for the protection of life and property). This is the real triumph of consumerist democracy, and in so many ways it is a good thing.
The story of the last 8o years has been the falling away—like the unnecessary rocket stages in a moon launch—of the constraints and demands of society. We can hardly imagine now the totality with which it governed people’s lives in earlier times. What one could wear or, say, how one could gesture, the people one could talk to, each and every moment was laced around with social codes that we have quite cheerfully chucked onto the ash-heap of history. These days, billionaires and indigents alike wear the same tracksuits, talk in the same happily inarticulate slang, watch the same TV shows and yes, listen to more or less the same music.
One of the results of this leveling of the cultural topography, it seems to me, is that the possible sign of music has been narrowed considerably to accommodate the essentially one-man/one-meaning aspect of commodity culture. Which is to say, we no longer much view music as a symbol or as an expression of communal values or social structure—much less as “progress.” The belief in a culture, wide evolution to a finer, more sophisticated state, has to be one of the most thoroughly dispensed with ideas in history. It simply couldn’t stand the trial of world wars, social science and Gilligan’s Island. These days, “progress” is every single person getting to act as close to they do in their own living room as often, and in as many places as possible, with no one raising a peep.
Music used to cause riots and herald social revolts. The Italians staged a revolution to Verdi’s music and a man was knifed at the premier of Berg’s Altenberg Lieder. Music could cause such intense reactions then because people believed that it actually contained within it the emotional core of all that was most significant about their society. With that belief, of course, came an enormous constraint, a stultifying conservatism that was a constant torment to artists well into the 20th century. Along with the torment, however, was a goad to profound expression: most of the great works of the 18th through early 20th century were formed in opposition to the forces of societal demands.
With the loss of social constraint came the loss of possible meanings for art. This is something seen recently in the Communist bloc countries where people used to memorize banned poems and risk imprisonment to hear forbidden music; but, after the political system liberalized, re-runs of Kojak and second-generation ABBA knock-offs suddenly seemed sufficient. It is one of the more perplexing aspects of human behavior that we need to be a bit miserable to appreciate beauty.
Truth be told I wouldn’t really want to go back to those times, even with the intensity and the profundity they inspired—at least, most the time I wouldn’t. I love stepping off into that private world of my own little musical kingdom as much as anybody. And, as a culture, I would wager that we generate more happiness hours (or at least contentedness hours) per individual than any in history. But we’re kidding ourselves if we think that something hasn’t been irrevocably lost in getting rid of all that social super-structure. Something was lost, too, when the first gramophone user closed the door and softly, discretely, hungrily, set the needle into the groove.
