In 1906, John Philip Sousa worried about what would happen when the band no longer needed to be there.
Sousa was an American composer and touring bandleader, famous for marches: music organized around a strong, regular pulse that could accompany people moving together. In an essay called “The Menace of Mechanical Music,” he imagined the village band disappearing, teachers losing pupils, and families allowing a machine to do the singing. He even worried about dance musicians' pauses. A machine could continue indefinitely; the exhausted human players had supplied an interval in which everyone else could rest and talk.1
This is a useful place to begin because the complaint is about more than the quality of sound. The interruption has a social function. The event contains obligations and accommodations that an uninterrupted musical product does not need. A machine could improve the consistency of the music and alter what people did together while it played.
Sousa's forecasts became extravagant. He imagined the decline of amateur music and wondered what would happen to the nation's throats and chests when people stopped singing. His fear outran his evidence. Yet beneath the forecast was a recognizable concern about the occasions on which people acquired a skill and found someone who wanted them to use it.
The distinction will matter throughout this book. Music has repeatedly changed the relationship between a capacity and a place: who can make it, who can hear it, who can earn from it, who can participate in the occasion, and who controls the passage between them. There is no single direction of travel. A recording can remove the need to hire someone and become another person's teacher. A machine built to replay a finished performance can become an instrument for an unfinished one.
I hear part of my own experience in grunge, the music associated with bands such as Nirvana and with the late twentieth-century Pacific Northwest. I am Generation X, and its distrust resonates with me. I want to understand that attachment within a longer history of people finding and losing a place through music.2
Before reaching those guitars, it helps to listen to the argument around the earlier machines.
Source notes
- John Philip Sousa, “The Menace of Mechanical Music,” Appleton's Magazine 8 (September 1906): 278–284, complete public-domain essay, transcription provided by MIT OpenCourseWare, https://ocw.mit.edu/courses/21m-380-music-and-technology-contemporary-history-and-aesthetics-fall-2009/18ab3aba9fe7aa1502a55cd049333659_MIT21M_380F09_read02_sousa.pdf. All ten transcription pages plus course notice read. Sousa's predictions and description of his contemporary legal dispute are attributed to him, not treated as settled outcomes or current law. No song lyrics reproduced. ↩