The Gramophone: Recorded Music and the Cultivated Mind in Britain between the Wars

LeMahieu, D. L.

doi:10.2307/3104484

Cited by 24 publications

(4 citation statements)

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“…The hard-core, audiophile (male) collector, with his arcane, exacting phonographical knowledge, only appeared (as a recognisable type) in the interwar period (Maisonneuve 2009; Day 2000; Le Mahieu 1982), a crucial turning point in the making of the modern (musical) consumer across Europe and North America 9 . This is not to say that records were unimportant for listeners before the 1920s, simply that they enjoyed a more ephemeral and haphazard existence; this is notably because recordings made in the acoustic era were ‘extremely fuzzy snapshots, blurred round the edges, in parts indistinct and out of focus’ (Day 2000, p. 33).…”

Section: First Plateau: Early Phonography and The Rise Of Perishable mentioning

confidence: 99%

‘Total trash’. Recorded music and the logic of waste

Roy

2020

Pop. Mus.

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This article introduces three situated moments – or plateaux – in order to partially uncover the particular affinities between popular music and the ‘logic of waste’ in the Anthropocene Era, from early phonography to the present digital realm (with a focus on the UK, United States, and British India). The article starts with a ‘partial inventory’ of the Anthropocene, outlining the heuristic values of waste studies for research in popular music. The first plateau retraces the more historical links between popular music and waste, showing how waste (and the positive discourses surrounding it) became a defining element of the discourse and practices of early phonography. It aims to show how recorded sound participated in (and helped define, in an emblematic manner) a rapidly expanding ‘throwaway culture’ at the turn of the 20th century. The second plateau presents a more global panorama of the recording industry through a focus on shellac (a core, reversible substance of the early recording industry). Finally, the third plateau presents some insights into the ways in which popular music may ‘play’ and incorporate residual materialities in the contemporary ‘digital age’. I argue that the logic of waste defined both the space and pace of the early record industry, and continued to inform musical consumption across the 20th century – notably when toxic, non-recyclable synthetic materials (especially polyvinyl) were introduced.

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Section: First Plateau: Early Phonography and The Rise Of Perishable mentioning

confidence: 99%

‘Total trash’. Recorded music and the logic of waste

Roy

2020

Pop. Mus.

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“…13–16). For individual listeners, this transition took on a particular meaning in relation to the recording's temporal logic: ‘The eclipse of acoustical recording’, says LeMahieu (1982, p. 379), ‘accelerated the trend whereby old records were traded in, destroyed, or forgotten in favor of more current performances. By the late 1920s … the records of many opera singers from the earliest days of the gramophone became distressingly rare’.…”

Section: Plasticmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…One response to that distress came in the form of a new Gramophone column: ‘Collector's Corner’, which ‘during the 1930s defined the art of collecting historic recordings’ (LeMahieu 1982). What's more, this Gramophone column emerged alongside related commentary in venues such as Melody Maker and Down Beat , as well as a new literature in collector guides and discographies (Shuker 2010, pp.…”

Section: Plasticmentioning

confidence: 99%

Decomposed: a political ecology of music

Devine¹

2015

Pop. Mus.

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IntroductionModern development, consumption and waste have strained the environment to the point of crisis -and music is part of the problem. Consider the poisonous petrochemicals used to manufacture LPs, the non-biodegradable plastics in CDs, the energy-guzzling server farms that power streaming MP3s, and the toxic graveyards of obsolete consumer electronics around the world. But these earthy and potentially ugly material realities typically go unnoticed in musical discourse, probably because they clash with a longstanding but mistaken belief that music is somehow an immaterial phenomenon.Indeed, even though we are accustomed to the accusation that certain types of music are 'disposable', we rarely think about what happens to recordings when they are actually disposed of. And while commonsense tells us that the 'music industry' is in the business of making records, we rarely think about what those recordings are actually made of. Correspondingly, the environmental impact of recorded sound is almost completely 2 unaccounted for in cultural studies of music and media, which treat the musical commodity principally as a product of musical labour, an object of capitalist exchange, or a text for audience consumption. Questions about the actual material composition and decomposition of the musical commodity -about what happens to music before production and after consumption -have been largely ignored. Yet without confronting the relationship between music's cultural and economic value, on the one hand, and its environmental cost, on the other, the field of music studies forfeits the opportunity for a fully interdisciplinary engagement with -and a holistic democratic ethics of -its object of study. One step toward achieving that goal is to formulate a political ecology of the evolving relationship between popular music and sound technology since 1900.This article inscribes a history of recorded music in three main forms of materiality:shellac (1900-1950), plastic (1950-2000) and data (2000-present). These three broad phases in the material history of recorded music correspond to this article's three main sections. They also encompass the five most prevalent recording formats since 1900: 78s (shellac); LPs, cassettes and CDs (plastic); and MP3s (data). I subject these three materials to a double-headed investigation, examining the dynamics of manufacture and obsolescence that mark the shifts between them. As a backdrop to the sections on shellac,

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“…63 Is such a reaction valid, or merely perverse, especially at a time when, as D. L. LeMahieu succinctly expressed it, 'consumers replaced critics as the arbiters of success'? 64 To consider this, we need to introduce a different sort of critical approach; one that looks at how well the Sinfonietta fosters and deepens cultural debate about the art it is helping to bring into being.…”

Section: Concertsmentioning

confidence: 99%

The London Sinfonietta 1968–2004: A Perspective

Wright¹

2005

Twentieth-Century Music

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The London Sinfonietta’s reputation as a contemporary music ensemble comes from the continuing commitment by its players and artistic directors to its quality of performance. The ensemble also developed a sense of its musical identity by generating a repertoire of commissioned works. This article looks at some of the ways that the Sinfonietta defined its musical ideology and has functioned as a performance-centred art world in which composers are invited to collaborate but are not there by right. It examines the Sinfonietta’s strategies for audience building, the ensemble’s contribution to the development of London’s concert life since its foundation in 1968, and looks at the ways that it has sought to renew itself in response to the different funding and aesthetic environments it has encountered in its history. The Sinfonietta’s venture into Broadway repertoire is discussed in terms of social identity. The article argues, after Jürgen Habermas and T. W. C. Blanning, that one of the most significant contributions of the Sinfonietta has been its continued commitment to the concert event as a forum for critical engagement and cultural debate.

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The Gramophone: Recorded Music and the Cultivated Mind in Britain between the Wars

Cited by 24 publications

References 0 publications

‘Total trash’. Recorded music and the logic of waste

‘Total trash’. Recorded music and the logic of waste

Decomposed: a political ecology of music

The London Sinfonietta 1968–2004: A Perspective

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