Democratizing Music

Just as content is king on the internet today, so it was when high tech In the 1920s was the phonograph. Competing companies scoured the world for music no one in America had access to, and of course the jazz and blues of the US south. It brought fado from Portugal, tango from Argentina, raga from India, and jazz from New Orleans from the lowest street music to the highest socio-economic classes in the west, making stars out of performers in their own countries and in the USA.

We now have music on demand, but until the phonograph, music happened at a specific time and place. And it only happened once. There was no album to listen to a hundred times until you knew all the words. If you were lucky enough to hear Mendelssohn’s Violin Concerto even once, you had to internalize as much of it as possible that night alone. The odds were overwhelming you would never hear it again. Much of Bach was only performed once. Phonographs changed all that, as they popped up everywhere around the world, from coal mines to brothels to cafes and doctors’ waiting rooms. The ubiquity of the phonograph led some to criticize the noise, suffering a kind of early future shock. More controversial was American jazz, which, like American English today, was accused of corrupting native music around the world.

It not only made names for the performers, but certain dive bars became famous worldwide. The music inside them was not the traditional folk music of the land, but new “vernacular” reflecting lower class life in the major port cities of the world, which were the places musicians could make (something resembling) a living.

Unintentionally, colonizers brought along the seeds of their own destruction in the phonograph. National pride spread and swelled with the circulation of native street music. Protests and uprisings incorporated songs that could never have spread so far and wide without technology. This was not lost on colonial governments, which moved in to suppress the music wherever it popped up, arresting musicians and dancers on any convenient charge, usually noise or vagrancy, but even attempted loitering – in a public park.

Denning’s book is foremost an attempt to register everything for posterity. It is packed with performer names, instrument descriptions, critics’ comments, references and label histories. There are chapters on reverse engineering the music itself, the advent of World Music in the 70s, and copyright wars today. For me, the socio-political impact is the most interesting. Like any ecosystem, there are untold quantities of parts in history we have yet to even account for, let alone understand.

David Wineberg ( )