Wednesday, September 19, 2007

THAT'S JUST THE BESTEST BAND WHAT AM: For most of the 19th century, popular music revolved around the piano in the Victorian parlor. As mass production allowed more middle-class families to buy their own pianos, the sheet music industry emerged during the 1880s and 1890s to provide more tunes for those families to play. Up and down "Tin Pan Alley" (a stretch of 28th Street in Manhattan), songwriters and publishers banged out hit after hit, most of them cheerful waltzes and sentimental ballads like "After the Ball" and "In the Good Old Summertime." Many of you probably sing a classic Tin Pan Alley song on a regular basis during the spring and summer (and even into the fall, if your team does well).

Yet some consumers demanded music with more rhythm and excitement than the lilting melodies of Tin Pan Alley. For a few years in the 1890s, this demand was met through the bizarre fad of "coon songs," jaunty but outrageously racist tunes that drew on the worst elements of blackface minstrelsy. (Ironically, one of the most disturbing yet successful of these songs, "All Coons Look Alike to Me," was written by Ernest Hogan, an African-American performer and composer.) Coon songs did, however, prepare the way for ragtime, that brilliant piano genre exemplified by Scott Joplin's million-selling "Maple Leaf Rag" (1899). Ragtime, in turn, pushed Tin Pan Alley to appropriate a few superficial stylistic features from African-American music -- syncopated melodies, a marching left-hand part -- and market this more "exotic" yet still respectable product to white middle-class consumers. Irving Berlin proved a master at this technique of cultural skimming, as heard in "Alexander's Ragtime Band" (1911).

This vogue for "ragtime songs" soon sparked "dance madness" among young working-class audiences, a craze described vividly by historian Kathy Peiss in her book Cheap Amusements, excerpted in our textbook. Here again, though, any potentially uncouth or disreputable elements of the new dances were quickly contained, as ballroom dancers like Irene and Vernon Castle taught Americans to spurn the vulgar "bunny hug" and "grizzly bear" in favor of the more refined "fox trot."

But the crucial moment in the birth of a full-blown popular music industry came with the development of recording technology. Beginning with Thomas Edison's phonograph cylinder and continuing through Emile Berliner's gramophone records and the RCA-Victor Victrola, by the early 1920s recordings had completely revolutionized the production and consumption of popular music. No longer did the music business focus on composers and parlor piano players; now the spotlight shone most brightly on the recorded performer. Where older songs could meander through several verses and choruses, the limited capacity of cylinders and records required that popular songs last no more than three or four minutes. Perhaps most significantly, recording made popular music an essentially passive consumer experience. No need to go to a concert hall or learn a new piece of sheet music -- just put a record on the Victrola, sit back, and enjoy.

While I doubt any of us would want to go back to a time before recording technology, it's worth thinking about the profound differences between making music yourself, hearing a live concert, and listening to a recording. Yes, recording offered democratic access to a whole world of musical production -- but did it also lead to standardization, commercialization, and a declining appreciation for live performance and composition? If video killed the radio star, did recording kill (or at least wound) the singer and the songwriter?

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