American Towns Were Once Isolated Like African Villages: The Local Sounds
When Americans became more passive with music
December 17, 1890
Standing with 10 other young men on the stage of the town opera house, arms and body relaxed, Dan Brown sings “Jingle Bells.”
His extraordinary eyes blazed and glowed. His mouth, curved into an big smile, opens with the song’s energetic lyrics . His voice, merged with his fellow singers, produced a resonate, uplifting voice that makes their audience smile and listen.
Ten songs later the performance ends. The audience, a crowd of 600 townsfolk, cheers with massive applause. Being the last performance of the year, it’s a big accomplishment for John and his singing society, Apollo House. It’s also their biggest performance of the year.
Apollo House had twelve concerts a year and practiced every Sunday with an instructor. But this concert was especially important. It celebrated the fortieth anniversary of the Apollo House. Dan’s dad, a member in his younger days, was proud to see his son continue his tradition.
After hearing performances from six other singing societies (took three hours), the Brown family and friends walked home to celebrate. Once home, they come together in spontaneous songs as Mr.Brown plays the piano while Dan’s sister, Susie, plays the flute. For hours and hours, they sing.
Music Crossed Borders
Until the radio and phonograph, Americans actively and spontaneously made music the way the fictional Browns did.
In the 1800s, most Americans were members of fraternal and sorority singing societies like Apollo House. Men and women of all economic classes and ages participated and met every week to sing with each other.
Families sang in evenings together. At gatherings, guests and hosts spontaneously erupted in song. According to Middletown: A Study in Modern American Culture, a 1923 sociological study of American towns, remarked:
When a family reunion was held it began with prayer and ended with the inevitable address and singing; at the lawn fetes of the day some of those present would sing or play while the others sat in the windows or on the porch rail and listened.
It‘s why in many pre-World War II movies you see characters sing together around pianos at bars.
Americans made their own music because they had no choice. Music couldn’t travel far without a radio or phonograph. You had to make your own music or attend the nearest performance.
Then recorded music displaced local music performances. With the radio and the phonograph, you could listen to Frank Sinatra without ever seeing him.
According to Middletown:
“Mechanical inventions such as the phonograph and radio are further bringing to Middletown more contacts with more kinds of music than ever before. Thirty-five years ago diffusion of musical knowledge was entirely in the handicraft stage: today it has entered a machine stage.”
In the past, what’s made in New York City wasn’t popular in your town. Unlike today, a singer in a New York City theater couldn’t as easily be more famous than an singer in your town. The only way to hear music was to be near the performer.
This has to do with the “scalability” of information, a concept articulated by Nassim Taleb. Under the concept, a creator crowds out his local competitors because mass media technologies preserves and distributes his work over far distances.
Taleb illustrated the concept with an example in his world famous book Black Swan:
Consider the fate of Giaccomo, an opera singer at the end of the nineteenth century, before sound recording was invented. Say he performs in a small and remote town in central Italy. He is shielded from those big egos in La Scala in Milan and other major opera houses. He feels safe as his vocal cords will always be in demand somewhere in the district. There is no way for him to export his singing, and there is no way for the big guns to export theirs and threaten his local franchise. It is not yet possible for him to store his work, so his presence is needed at every performance, just as a barber is (still) needed today for every haircut.
You had to make do with the music around you. Mass communication technologies brought music to you. Distance no longer restricted sound.
Now consider the effect of the first music recording, an invention that introduced a great deal of injustice. Our ability to reproduce and repeat performances allows me to listen on my laptop to hours of background music of the pianist Vladimir Horowitz (now extremely dead) performing Rachmaninoff’s Preludes, instead of to the local Russian emigre musician (still living), who is now reduced to giving piano lessons to generally untalented children for close to minimum wage. Horowitz, though dead, is putting the poor man out of business. …If you ask me why I select Horowitz, I will answer that it is because of the order, rhythm, or passion, when in fact there are probably a legion of people I have never heard about, and will never hear about—those who did not make it to the stage, but who might play just as well.
Not only does the winner take all, he stays on top. Even after he died, his fans can chose his performance over local ones and access it whenever he wanted.
The impact of radio was so big that parents worried music lessons for their children were pointless. Middletown researchers made an accurate prediction on the future of music lessons:
The mothers of the present generation of children were brought up in a culture without Victrola [phonograph] and radio when the girl in the crowd who could play while the others sang or danced was in demand. In their insistence upon music lessons for their children they may be living a world that no longer exists. Today when great artists or dance orchestras are in the cabinet in the corner of a one’s living room or ‘on the air,’ the ability to ‘play a little’ may be in increasingly less demand. It seems unlikely that, within the next generation, this habit of taking music lessons may become more selective throughout the entire population as music is made available to all through instruction in the schools and wide diffusion of Victrolas, radios and other instruments in the home, while other abilities supplant it as the ritualistic social grace is o often is today.
In this new world, singing societies like Apollo House declined in popularity, to the point that they were almost nonexistent by the mid 1920s. “The popular singing societies of the nineties disappeared,” the Middletown researchers reported.
Everyone’s relationship with music changed. As Taleb said, music became accessible at any time and place. With one switch, you fill your house with Sinatra while you do the dishes or other activities. Americans found it easier to enjoy their music passively.
“We are music-soothed and music-encompassed as we go about our business. Now the appropriate music for any occasion is that which need not be followed but can simply be followed,” wrote historian Daniel Boorstin in his The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America.
December 17, 1925
In a big living room, Dan, sitting in his soft arm chair, reads a newspaper. He’s deep into a story important to him: Apollo House, after experiencing dwindling attendance and membership for decades, has formally disbanded once and for all. The corners of his mouth fall. He’s in a meditative state.
David, his son, rushes to the living room, sits in front of the radio and turns the nob. “Jingle Bells” fills the room and reaches Jodie, Dan’s wife, as she washes the dishes.
Dan puts away the newspaper and listens to the performance with his son.
All is well.