Phonograph Monthly Review, Vol. 4, No. 8 (1930-05)

260 The Phonograph Monthly Review May, 1930 pend on more than its entertaining powers alone for suc- cess ; also that merely as an entertainer the phonograph is restristed to a small and comparatively insignificant role. It is the cultural or educative aspects of the phonograph and recorded music that give rise to an actual art—phonography —and that ensure it a vital significance in contemporary life. It is inevitable that the phonograph qua entertainer. has been paid most attention in the past, and indeed will un- questionably continue to receive the strongest emphasis, I pass over it rather lightly here, not because I underestimate it (upon it the financial success of the phonograph industry depends at present and probably will depend for a good many years), but because it has never suffered for lack of advertisement. The leading entertainment stars of the day all make records and their disks are indefatigably pushed by the manufacturers. This branch of recorded music was never better equipped to take care of itself. A Phonography Consciousness It is when we approach the cultural facts of phonography that we find the general public—especially in this country —sadly Uninformed. Even the name of the art itself is scarcely known. What is needed is the development of a phonography consciousness. Just as aviators are endeavor- ing—with considerable success—to make people “air-mind- ed,” we must endeavor to make them “phonograph minded.” The terms seem awkward now, but as one of our corres- pondents remarks, the time will come when it will be as customary to refer to a person as “well heard” as it is now to speak of one as being “well read.” It is up to us, as the advocates of phonography, to bring about the general acceptance of the cultural significance of recorded music. And that significance must not be merely accepted, it must gradually come to be assumed. In England, and to nearly equal degree in France and Germany, the phonograph has already entered quite deeply into the consciousness of the educated classes. The con- temporary literature of these countries is rich in a thousand and one references to the phonograph. And even the most passing mention of the instrument or of records serves to indicate the extent and influence of phonography, and also to assist in its further growth. The younger genera- tion grows up not only familiar with recorded music itself, but accustomed to hearing it discussed in conversation and print, and accustomed to the phonograph’s playing a part in the social and cultural life of the people with whom they come in contact and those depicted in contemporary fiction. Records come to be taken for granted—quite as books and concerts and paintings are taken for granted— as indispensable entertainment and educative factors of civilized life. This is a far cry from the phonograph’s part in Ameri- can literature and journalism in the past. When it has entered at all it has almost invariably by reason of its mechanistic rather than its artistic qualities. It is a novel- ty, an oddity, a convenient tool in a plot. Its appearance in S. S. Van Dine‘s mystery, “The Canary Murder Case,” is characteristic. Such references indicate that the phono- graph has been up to the present a talking machine, a rather elaborate toy, rather than a musical instrument. A Little History Four years ago, when the Phonograph Publishing Com- pany had just been founded and plans were being laid for the first issue of The Phonograph Monthly Review, pho- nography was at a low ebb in America. The golden days of the acoustical era and the enormous sales of recorded operatic excerpts had faded with the advent of the radio. Electrical recording was just beginning to reveal its pow- ers ; it had virtually pushed the vast treasure of the acous- tical repertory into the ash barrel and as yet had displayed only a promise of what it would substitute in its place. A scattering handful of somewhat fanatical “enthusiasts” were the only ones to have implicit confidence in the future of the phonograph. If the magazine had been started a year or more earlier it would have been regarded purely as a crank journal and given scant attention. A year or two later and it would have been difficult or impossible for it to assume authority as the spokesman and leader of the serious record buying public. But in the fall of 1926 it came at the perfectly chosen time. Whether it started the great phonographic wave or just succeeded in riding it is an unessential point. Its significance was that it caught up and united the various struggling groups who for one reason or another had the interests of recorded music at heart, and that for the first time in this country it made the phonograph movement articulate. The change that has taken place in a little more than three years and a half is almost incalculable. Not only are the great works of the musical repertory being recorded —and recorded well—in the greatest profusion, and their public expanded from a few connoisseurs to include a steadily increasing proportion of concert goers—the music lovers of the country, but the phonograph has now begun to work its way into the social consciousness. The person who devotes a definite sum each month to the purchase oi records is no longer considered a mild lunatic. Qne hears fewer and fewer references to “canned music.” The public is beginning to understand the relationship between the phonograph and the radio, and 1 to realize that they complement rather than rival each other. And the instru- ment of today is ca/nclusively accepted to be the electrical phonograph-radio combination. Most significant of all the phonograph is at least getting a fair break in the way of publicity. Lawrence Gilman’s en- dorsement and the inauguration of his and many other record review columns have been often mentioned in these pages, but their importance cannot be too strongly em- phasized. As long as newspapers and family periodicals maintained an impenetrable silence regarding the advance of phonography, the general public necessarily remained largely in complete igmorance of it. And as long as the leading music critics of the country held sternly aloof, the majority of musicians and concerts goers was bound to be suspicious of the phonograph’s assumptions of musician- ship. But Mr. Gilman’s article virtually commits the whole critical fraternity to at least an observant attitude toward recorded music. One section of his article is so particular- ly noteworthy that I cannot resist quoting, even though I realize that many of my readers have already read it, either as originally published in the New York Herald-Tribune, or in one of the several re-prints. The Critics* New Attitude “. . . The manner in which important music is recorded or broadcast has become musical news. It has become musical news not only because the subject is of interest to innumerable music lovers, but because the quality of the recording and of the broadcasting is vitally important to all those who have at heart the betterment of public taste, and who are anxious that the integrity of musical master- works be preserved. “No matter what we may think of the degree of excel- lence attained by the new arts of recording and distributing music (and many cultivated music lovers are unequipped to hold opinion on the subject because they have never taken the trouble to investigate it for themselves), we can no more ignore the situation than observers in another field can ignore the talking film. It is here; it confronts us; we have got to reckon with it, or be willing to consider ourselves irrelevant to the world in which we live.” I am sure that I am not alone in the opinion that this is perhaps the most far-reaching statement concerning the phonograph that has yet appeared in the press. Its force depends net only upon Mr. Gilman’s personal authority and repute, but in its irrefutable logic. The die-hards among professional musicians and critics have been able to pretend to ignore phonography for a long time, but that pretence is no longer possible. Already we have the beginning of an active phono-mu- sical press, and each new record review column in a news- paper or magazine gives it added strength and discovers new audiences. Many of these columns are as yet some- what experimental and the views of their authors often over-tentatively or over-dogmatically expressed. It must also be remembered that while the practicing concert critic gives us a new and valuable point of view on recorded mu- sic, the critic who is both musically and phonographically experienced is able to estimate the merits of a recorded