concert halls. Now recordings carry the man from Bonn to the corners of the earth, summoning the throng hailed in the “Ode to Joy”: “Be embraced, millions!” Glenn Gould, after renouncing live performance in 1964, predicted that within a century the public concert would disappear into the electronic ether, with a largely beneficial effect on musical culture.
Having discovered much of my favorite music through LPs and CDs, I am not about to join the lamenting party. Modern urban environments are often so soulless or ugly that I’m grateful for the humanizing touch of electronic sound. But neither can I accept Gould’s slashing futurism. I want to be aware of technology’s effects, positive and negative. I want a pragmatic theory that mediates between live performance and reproduction, without either apocalyptic screeching or corporate hype. Fortunately, scholars and critics have been methodically exploring this terrain for many decades, trying to figure out exactly what happens when we listen to music with no musicians in the room. They have reached no unshakable conclusions, but they give us most of the conceptual tools we need in order to listen with the alertness—and the ambivalence—that this magical medium demands.
The principal irony of the history of recording is that Edison did not make the phonograph with music in mind. Rather, he conceived of his cylinder as a business gadget, one that would supersede the costly, imperfect practice of stenography and have the added virtue of preserving in perpetuity the voices of the deceased. In an 1878 essay titled “The Phonograph and Its Future,” Edison or his ghostwriter proclaimed that his invention would “annihilate time and space, and bottle up for posterity the mere utterance of man.” “Annihilation” is an interestingly ambiguous figure of speech. Recording opened lines of communication between far-flung worlds, but it also placed older art and folk traditions in danger of extinction. With American popular culture as its house god, it brought about a global homogenization of taste, the effects of which are still spreading.
Although Edison mentioned the idea of recording music in his 1878 article, he had no inkling of a music industry. He pictured the phonograph as a tool for teaching singing and as a natural extension of domestic music-making: “A friend may in a morning-call sing us a song which shall delight an evening company.” By the 1890s, however, alert entrepreneurs had installed phonographs in penny arcades, allowing customers to listen to favorite songs over ear tubes. In 1888, Emile Berliner introduced the flat disc, a less cumbersome storage device, and envisioned with it the entire modern music business—mass distribution, recording stars, royalties, and the rest. In 1902, the first great star was born: the tenor Enrico Caruso, whose voice remains one of the most transfixing phenomena in the history of the medium. The ping in Caruso’s tone, that golden bark, made the man himself seem viscerally present, proving Edison’s theory of the annihilation of space and time. Not so lucky was Johannes Brahms, who, in 1889, attempted to record his First Hungarian Dance. The master seems to be sending us a garbled message from a spacecraft disintegrating near Pluto.
Whenever a new gadget comes along, salespeople inevitably point out that an older gadget has been rendered obsolete. The automobile pushed aside the railroad; the computer replaced the typewriter. Sousa feared that the phonograph would supplant live music. His fears were excessive but not irrational. The Victor Talking Machine Company, which the engineer Eldridge Johnson founded in 1901, marketed its machines not just as vessels for music but as instruments in themselves. In a way, Victor was taking direct aim at the piano, which, around the turn of the century, dominated domestic musical life, from the salon to the tavern. The top-selling Victrola of 1906, a massive object standing four feet tall and weighing 137 pounds, was encased in “piano-finished” mahogany, if anyone was missing the point. Ads showed families clustered about their phonographs, no piano in sight. Edison, whose cylinders soon began to lag behind flat discs in popularity, was so determined to demonstrate the verisimilitude of his machines that he held a nationwide series of Tone Tests, during which halls were plunged into darkness and audiences were supposedly unable to tell the difference between Anna Case singing live and one of her records.
Each subsequent leap in audio technology—microphones, magnetic tape, long-playing records, stereo sound, transistors, digital sound, the compact disc, and the MP3—has elicited the same kind of over-the-top reaction. The latest device inspires heady confusion between reality and reproduction, while yesterday’s wonder machine is exposed as inadequate, even primitive. When, in 1931, the composer and critic Deems Taylor heard a pioneering example of stereophonic recording, he commented, “The difference between what we usually hear and what I heard was, roughly, the difference between looking at a photograph of somebody and looking at the person himself.” Twenty years later, Howard Taubman wrote of a long-playing record on the Mercury label: “The orchestra’s tone is so lifelike that one feels one is listening to the living presence.” (Mercury promptly adopted “Living Presence” as its slogan.) A high-fidelity ad of the 1950s offered users “the finest seat in the house”—an experience not simply equal to the concert hall but superior to it, cleansed of the inconvenience of “audience distraction.” A television commercial of the seventies, starring Ella Fitzgerald, famously asked, “Is it live or is it Memorex?” Compact discs promised “perfect sound forever.”
Just as inevitably, audiophile happy-talk leads to a backlash among listeners who doubt the rhetoric of fidelity and perfection. Dissenters complain that the latest device is actually inferior to the old—artificial, inauthentic, soulless. Greg Milner has documented this never-ending back-and-forth in his book Perfecting Sound Forever, a smartly skeptical account of the ideology of audio progress. Some enthusiasts of the Edison cylinder felt that no other machine gave such a faithful sensation of the warmth of the human voice. When electrical recording came in, a few stalwarts detected nothing but fakery in the use of microphones to amplify soft sounds and invent a sonic perspective that does not exist for human ears. “I wonder if pure tone will disappear from the earth sometimes,” a British critic wrote in 1928.
Magnetic tape led to the most crucial shift in the relationship between recordings and musical reality. German engineers perfected the magnetic tape recorder, or Magnetophon, during the Second World War. Late one night, an audio expert turned serviceman named Jack Mullin was monitoring German radio when he noticed that an overnight orchestral broadcast was astonishingly clear: it sounded “live,” yet not even at Hitler’s whim could the orchestra have been playing in the middle of the night. After the war was over, Mullin tracked down a Magnetophon and brought it to America. He demonstrated it to Bing Crosby, who used it to tape his broadcasts in advance. Crosby was a pioneer of perhaps the most famous of all technological effects, the croon. Magnetic tape meant that Bing could practically whisper into the microphone and still be heard across America; a marked drop-off in surface noise meant that vocal murmurs could register as readily as Louis Armstrong’s pealing trumpet.
The magnetic process also allowed performers to invent their own reality in the studio. Errors could be corrected by splicing together bits of different takes. In the sixties, the Beatles and the Beach Boys, following in the wake of electronic compositions by Cage and Stockhausen, constructed intricate studio soundscapes that could never be replicated onstage; even Glenn Gould would have had trouble executing the mechanically accelerated keyboard solo in “In My Life.” The great rock debate about authenticity began. Were the Beatles pushing the art forward by reinventing it in the studio? Or were they losing touch with the rugged intelligence of folk, blues, and rock traditions? Bob Dylan stood at a craggy opposite extreme, turning out records in a few days’ time and avoiding any vocal overdubs until the seventies. The Dylan scholar Clinton Heylin points out that while the Beatles spent 129 days crafting Sgt. Pepper, Dylan needed only 90 days to make his first fifteen records. Yet frills-free, “lo-fi” recording has no special claim on musical truth; indeed, it easily becomes another effect, the effect of no effect. Today’s neoclassical rock bands pay good money to sound old.
The advent of digital recording was, for many skeptics, the ultimate outrage. The old machines vibrated in sympathy with their subjects: the hills and valleys on a cylinder or a flat disc followed the contours of the music. Digital technology literally chopped the incoming vibrations into bits—strings of 0’s and 1’s that were encoded
