In Praise of Commercial Culture by Tyler Cowen

Author:Tyler Cowen [Cowen, Tyler]
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
ISBN: 0674445910
Publisher: Harvard University Press

The Rise of Recording and Radio

The compositional innovations of Schoenberg and Stravinsky were accompanied by technological revolutions in the musical world. Musical recording began in the late 1870s and phonographs were widely available after 1910. Record companies sprung up quickly, and by 1909, over 27 million phonograph records and cylinders were manufactured yearly. In the 1920s, radios first became a common household item.37Recording and radio helped finance and disseminate new genres of music. The advent of electronic reproduction—the ability to copy a performance and distribute that performance to a large audience—caused high-brow and popular music to split drastically. At the same time that traditional composition had broken free of the family music market and turned towards the esoteric, entirely new popular music forms arose that could be reproduced and sold en masse.

The rise of recording and radio enabled performer-based musical genres to displace composition-based genres as the center of musical innovation. A performer-based genre, like rock and roll or country and western, transmits its musical and aesthetic vision through personalities and talents of specific music-makers. The specific interpretation is paramount.

Electronic reproduction is required for performer-based genres to flourish. Our fascination with the Queen song, “Bohemian Rhapsody,” lies in the particular production and presentation of that piece. These features cannot be replicated at home, on paper, or by another group in the studio. Queen even closed its concerts by walking off stage and playing a tape of the recorded song. They could not reproduce their creation accurately on stage.38

Classical music is a composer-based genre. Its greatness is captured by markings on the printed page, that is, by the composition. Without access to electronic reproduction, earlier composers were required to emphasize those musical elements that can be transmitted through notation. Classical music, based on these visual representations of melody and harmony, rose hand-in-hand with paper production, the book trade, and the printing press.

Performer-based genres took off when electricity provided a new means of communicating ideas. Recording and radio broadcast increased the rewards for musicians who entertained listeners through their performance and through their personality. Nascent forms of the blues had been around since the late nineteenth century, but only when recording became commonplace did they take off. Recording gave bluesmen the means to preserve and market their unique creations.

The relative eclipse of “classical” music by “popular music” is really a shift towards performer-based music. Whether we like it or not, most customers prefer performer-based music when it is available at low cost. It is well suited to products that are accessible, direct, and tied to a charismatic personality. Recording has consigned classical music to be a minority taste. The classics now account for about 4 percent of all compact disc purchases in the United States, and this state of affairs shows no signs of reversing itself.

The renowned British “punk violinist” Nigel Kennedy represents the dilemma of classical music today. Kennedy has consciously tried to make the classics more appealing to the consumer. He supplements his recordings with a star persona—dressing up in flamboyant costumes, making scandalous remarks, and cultivating groupies.

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