"Popular Music: Critical Concepts in media and cultural studies" - Simon Frith (Vol. 1)

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POPULAR MUSIC

Critical Concepts in Media and Cultural Studies

Other titles in this series

Television Edited by Toby Miller

POPULAR MUSIC

Pelformance Edited by Philip Auslander

Critical Concepts in Media

Film Theory Edited by Philip Simpson

and Cultural Studies

Hollywood Edited by Tom Schatz

. Edited by Simon Frith

Volume I Music and Society

n Routledge !� Francis Group Taylor 60.

LONDON AND NEW YORK

-

VOLUME

I

MUSIC AND SOCIETY

AcknolVledgements

XIll

General Introduction

I

Introduction

8

PART A

First published in 2004 by Routledge 11 New Fetter Lane, London EC4P 4EE Simultaneollsly published in the USA and Canada by Routledge 29 West 35th Street, New York, NY 10001 ROlli/edge is all imprint of the Tay/or & Frallcis Group Editorial matter and selection It) 2003 Simon Frith; individual owners retain copyright in their own material

The making of popular music: meanings and values

I Conspiracies of meaning: music-hall and the knowingness

2 Frallcis James Child and the 'ballad cOllsensus'

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers.

4

ISBN 0-415-29905-5 (Set) . ISBN 0-415-33267-2 (Volume I)

43

DAVE HARKER

3

Library of Congress ClIIa/ogillg ;1/ Publication Data A catalog record for this book has been requested

IS

of popular culture PETER BAILEY

Typeset in IOIJ2pl Times NR by Graphicraft Limited. Hong Kong Printed and bound in Great Britain by TJ International, Padstow. Cornwall

British Library Cataloguing ill PubliclIIioll DlIIa A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

13

Classic blues

63

LEROI JONES [IMAMU AMIRI DARAKAI

Ring shout! Literary studies, historical studies, and black music inquiry

73

SAMUEL A. FLOYD, J R

PART D

The making of popular music: machines and media 5

95

A voice without a face. Popular music alld the phonograph in the 1890s

97

DAVE LAING

v

CONTENTS 6

The record industry: the growth of a mass medium

CONTENTS 108

PEKKA GRONOW

7

I:lART E

The early days of the gramophone industry in India. Historical, social and musical perspectives

130

17

The presentation of silent films, or music as anaesthesia

155

'Universal' music and the case of death

345

PHILIP TAGG

GERRY FARRELL

8

343

Music and everyday life

18

375

Adequate modes of listening OLA STOCKFEL T

GILLIAN B. ANDERSON

19

392

popular music

PART C

KAREN LURY

195

Being a musician 9

Chewing gum for the ears: children's television and

Making music together

197

VOLUME 2

THE ROCK ERA

ALFRED SCHUTZ

10

The professional dance musician and his audience

A cknolV/edgemenls

213

IX

HOWARD S. DECKER

11

Introduction

Music among friends: the social networks of amateur musicians

227

PART

ROBERT A. STEDDINS

12

245

PAUL TH EBERGE

13

5

Music and commerce

Musicians' magazines in the 1980s: the creation of a community and a consumer market

A

20

Between two worlds: art and commercialism in the record industry

7

JON STRATTON

Women and the electric guitar

270

21

MAVIS DAYTON

Between corporation and consumer: culture and conflict 24

in the British Record Industry KEITH NEGUS

PART D

283

Music, entertainment and dance 14

15

24

302

ALF DJ O RNDERG AND OLA STOCKFELT

16

321

DEN MALBON

I want my MP3: who owns Internet music?

105

25

Art vs technology: the strange case of popular music SIMON FRITH

VI

87

PART U

Music and technology

The dancer from the dance: the musical and dancing crowds of clubbing

62

A sweet lullaby for 'world music'

REEDEE GAROFALO

Kristen Klatvask fra Vejle: Danish pub music, mythscapes and 'local camp'

42

STEVEN FELD

285

LEWIS A. ERENDERG

Flexibility, post-Fordism and the music industry DA VIO HESMONDHALGH

23

'Everybody's doin' it': the Pre-World War I dance craze, the Castles and the Modern American Girl

22

vii

107

CONTENTS

CONTENTS 26

An intermediary between production and consumption: the producer of popular music

38

ANTOINE HENNION

27

373

MATS TRONDMAN

Rationalization and democratization in the new technologies of popular music

39 147 40

'This is a sampling sport': Digital sampling, rap music and the law in cultural production

The future of rock: discourses that struggle to define a genre

393

JOHAN FORNAS

ANDREW GOODWIN

28

Rock tastes - on rock as symbolic capital. A study of young people's music tastes and music-making

123

Rock aesthetics and musics of the world

412

MOTTl REGEV

169

THOMAS SCHUMACHER

VOLUME 3

POPULAR MUSIC ANALYSIS

PART C

191

Music and media 29

Radio space and industrial time: the case of music formats

193

Form and female authorship in music video

208 PART

LISA A. LEWIS

31

A postscript for the nineties

228

41

'1 hope you're enjoying your party'. MTV in war-torn Bosnia

241

Music and meaning in the commercials

5

A theory of musical genres: two applications

7

FRANCO FABBRI

LlDA HUlIC

33

A

Genres

lANE FEUER

32

1

Introduction

IODY BERLAND

30

IX

AcknolVledgements

42

253

36

Classical music as popular music JAMES PARAKILAS

NICHOLAS COOK

43

CHARLES HAMM

271

The ideology of rock

44 Why 1955? Explaining the advent of Rock Music

273

Reconstructing the Blues, reflections on the 1960s 65

Blues Revival

RICHARD A. PETERSON

35

55

Irving Berlin

PART D

34

Genre, performance and ideology in the early songs of

JEFF TODD TITON

Rock and Roll mythology: race and sex in 'Whole Lotta Shakin' Going On'

45 297

The dialectic of hard-core and soft-shell country music

87

RICHARD A. PETERSON

BERNARD GENDRON

36

Another boring day in paradise: rock and roll and the empowerment of everyday life

PART B

311

37

Forging masculinity: heavy metal sounds and images of gender

101

Rhythm

LAWRENCE GROSSBERG

343

46

ROBERT WALSER

The invention of 'African rhythm' KOFI AGAWU

VlIl

IX

-

103

CONTENTS 47

Motion and feeling through music

CONTENTS 118

58

48

350

NORMAN K. DENZIN

'Play it again Sam'. Some notes on the productivity of repetition in popular music

136

59

RICHARD MIDDLETON

355

Randy Newman's Americana PETER WINKLER

60

PART C

Rhythm, rhyme and rhetoric in the music of Public Enemy

385

ROBERT WALSER

171

Song 49

Problems in analyzing elements of mass culture: notes on the popular song and other artistic products

CHARLES M. H. KEIL

The dialogue of courtship in popular songs

VOLUME 4

173

MUSIC AND IDENTITY

DONALD HORTON

50

Why do songs have words?

ix

A cknolVledgements

186

SIMON FRITH

51

The Mise-ell-Seelle of Suffering - French ellallteuses Realistes

1

Introduction

213

GINETTE VINCENDEAU

52

The electro-acoustic mirror: voices in American pop

PART A

232

DAVID BRACKETT

61

PART D

249

Elvis Presley

62

251

Brass Bands

63

264

64

Bette Midler and the piracy of identity

Systems of articulation, logics of change: communities and 79

WILL STRAW

65

310

Place, exchange and meaning: Black Sea musicians in the 101

West of Ireland

JANE M. GAINES

MARTIN STOKES

PART E

PART B

323

Formal analysis 57

48

Pathways in urban living

scenes in popular music

279

SHEILA WHITELEY

56

32

RUTH FINNEGAN

Little Red Rooster v The Honky Tonk Woman: Mick Jagger, sexuality, style and image

Towards an aesthetic of popular music SIMON FRITH

BRIAN JACKSON WITH DENNIS MARSDEN

55

7

JOI·I N

HENR Y PLEASANTS

54

'Let all the world hear all the world's music': popular music-making and music education

Performance 53

5

Music and sociability

On the Fetish-Character in music and the regression of listening

Music, nationality and imagined community

325

66

THEODOR W. ADORNO

Honky Tonk: the music of the Southern working class BILL C. MALONE

x

Xl

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117 119

CONTENTS

67

Paul Simon's G"aceland, South Africa and the mediation of musical meaning

126

LOUISE MEINTJES

68

'My love is in America': migration and Irish music

164

A C KN O W L E D G E M E N T S

GRAEME SMITH

69

Sounds authentic: Black Music, ethnicity and the challenge 182

of a c!tanging same PAUL GILROY

PART C

207

Ethnomusicology 70

COllfando la Callla Vacia: love, sexuality and gender relationships in Dominican Rac/lata

209

DEBORAH HERNANDEZ PACINI

71

SIIIIIOS el Pel'll: 'Cumbia Andina' and the children of Andean migrants in Lima

231

THOMAS TURINO

72

Nationalism on stage: music and change in Soviet Ukraine

249

CATHERINE WANNER

73

Fantasies of home. The antinomies of modernity and the music of Ladysmith Black Mambazo

266

VEIT ERLMAN

PART D

Music, modernity and postmodernity

283

74

285

The search for Petula Clark GLENN GOULD

75

Modern music culture: on shock, pop and synthesis

293

GEORGINA BORN

76

Cruising around the historical bloc. Postmodernism and popular music in East Los Angeles

324

GEORGE LIPSITZ

77

A style nobody can deal with. Politics, style and the postindustrial city in Hip Hop

341

TRICIA ROSE

361

Index XII

The publishers would like to thank the following for permission to reprint their work: Oxford University Press for permission to reprint Peter Bailey, 'Conspiracies of Meaning: Music Hall and the Knowingness of Popular Culture', Past & Present, 144 ( 1 994): 1 38-170. Dave Harker for permission to reprint Dave Harker, 'Francis James Childs and the "Ballad Consensus''', Folk Music Journal, 1 4 ( 1 98 1 ): 1461 64. HarperCollins Publishers Inc. for permission to reprint Leroi Jones Imamu Amiri Barakal, 'Classic Blues', in Blues People: Negro Music in White America, 1963, pp. 8 1 -94. Copyright © 1963 by Leroi Jones. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers Inc. Center for Black Music Research, Columbia College, Chicago for permission to reprint Samuel A. Floyd, Jr., Ring Shout! Literary Studies, Historical Studies, and Black Music Inquiry', Black Music Research Journal, 1 1(2) ( 1 99 1 ): 265-287. Cambridge University Press for permission to reprint Dave Laing, 'A Voice Without a Face. Popular Music and the Phonograph in the I 890s', Popular Music, 1 0( 1 ) ( 199 1): 1-9. Copyright © 1 99 1 Cambridge University Press, reprinted with permission of the author and publisher. Cambridge University Press for permission to reprint Pekka Gronow, The Record Industry: the Growth of a Mass Medium', Popular Music, 3 ( 1 983): 53-75. Copyright © 1 983 Cambridge University Press, reprinted with per­ mission of the author and publisher. British Journal of Ethnomusicology for permIssIOn to reprint Gerry Farrell, The Early Days of the Gramophone Industry in India. Historical, Social and Musical Perspectives', British Journal of Ethnomusicology, 2 ( 1 994): 3 1-53. Xlll

A CK N O W L E D G E M E N T S

The Journal o f Musicology for permission t o reprint Gillian B. Anderson, 'The Presentation of Silent Films, or Music as Anaesthesia', Journal of Musicology, 5(2) ( 1 987): 257-295. Martinus Nijhoff for permission to reprint Alfred Schutz, 'Making Music Together' [ 1 9 5 1 ], in A Broderson (ed), Collected Papers, Volume 2: Studies in Social Theory. 1 964. pp. 1 59-178.

A CK N O W L E D G E M E N T S

Disclaimer

The publishers have made every effort to contact copyright holders of the material reprinted in Popular Music: Critical COllcepts in Media and Cultural Studies. However. this has not been possible in all cases and we would welcome correspondence from any rights holders that we have not been able to trace.

Howard S. Becker for permission to reprint Howard S. Becker. 'The Profes­ sional Dance Musician and his Audience'. American Journal of Sociology. 57(2) ( 1 95 1 ) : 1 36-1 44. Taylor & Francis Ltd. for permission to reprint Robert A. Stebbins, 'Music Among Friends: the Social Networks of Amateur Musicians'. International Review of Sociology. 1 2 ( 1 976): 52-73. Taylor & Francis Ltd. for permission to reprint Paul Theberge. 'Musicians' Magazines in the 1 980s: The Creation of a Community and a Consumer Market'. Cultural Studies. 5(3) (1991): 270-293. Routledge for permission to reprint Mavis Bayton. 'Women and the Electric Guitar'. in S. Whitely (ed) Sexing the Groove. Popular Music and Gender. 1997. pp. 37-49. Feminist Studies for permission to reprint Lewis A. Erenberg. 'Everybody's Doin' It'. The Pre-World War I Dance Craze. The Castles and the Modern American Girl'. Feminist Studies. 3 ( 1 /2) ( 1 975): 1 55-1 70. Cambridge University Press for permission to reprint Alf Bj6rnberg and Ola Stockfelt. 'Kristen Klatvask fra Vejle: Danish Pub Music, Mythscapes .. and "Local Camp· . Popular Music. 1 5(2) ( 1 996): 1 3 1-147. Copyright © 1 996 Cambridge University Press. reprinted with permission of the author and publisher. Routledge for permission to reprint Ben Malbon. 'The Dancer from the Dance: the Musical and Dancing Crowds of Clubbing' in Clubbing. 1 999. pp. 85-104. Blackwell Publishing Ltd. for permission to reprint Philip Tagg. ' ''Universal'' Music and the Case of Death'. Critical Quarterly. 35(2) ( 1 993): 54-85. University of Virginia Press for permission to reprint Ola Stockfelt. 'Adequate Modes of Listening'. translated by Anahid Kassabian and Leo G. Svendsen in D. Schwarz. A. Kassabian and L. Siegel (eds) Keeping Score, Music, Dis­ ciplinarity and Culture. 1 997. pp. 1 29-146. Cambridge University Press for permission to reprint Karen Lury. 'Chewing Gum for the Ears: Children's Television and Popular Music'. Popular Music. 2 1 (3) (2002): 291-305. Copyright © 2002 Cambridge University Press. reprinted with permission of the author and publisher. xiv

xv

G E N E R A L I N T RO D U C T I O N

Popular music studies

As an academic subject, the study of popular music occupies a relatively recent place on the university curriculum. Popular music scholars first defined themselves as such in 1 98 1 , when the International Association for the Study of Popular Music (IASPM) was founded at a conference in Amsterdam and the first issue of Popular Music (then a yearbook, now a journal) was published by Cambridge University Press. ' The importance of IASPM and Popular Music are apparent in this collection: the latter is the biggest single source of the articles reprinted ( 1 2 out of 77); more than 40 per cent of the authors here are or have been IASPM members. In part these volumes do reflect the development of a specific branch of scholarship then, and do focus attention on debates between a specific group of scholars. Popular music studies did not begin, though, with the formation of IASPM which was founded, indeed, to bring together scholars from a variety of perspectives who were already working on popular music - what they had in common was less a shared approach to popular music studies than a feeling of being isolated in their own disciplines. Nor did IASPM go on to mono­ polise popular music scholarship. It represented a particularly influential take on the issues that needed to be researched and understood, but there were certainly some important topics which it neglected and others which were studied in other forums, in other research traditions, following differ­ ent disciplinary lines. That said, in terms of the sociology of knowledge, lAS PM has been the key institution in the development of popular music scholarship and this has had significant consequences. First, there is no doubt that the most important impetus for IASPM (and Popular Music) was rock music. On the one hand, teachers in music depart­ ments found themselves having to respond to their students' interest in rock as a musical (and educational) practice. On the other hand, teachers in social science departments had to take increasing account of rock as a social (and political) practice. And, most importantly for both groups of scholars, rock was also the music they played and listened to as non-scholars, as it were. The rise of rock scholarship marked the arrival of a new generation of academics, the students of the sixties. The sociology of rock, for example, first emerged as an aspect of cultural studies (with a theoretical focus on

GENERAL I NTRODUCTION

youth and the popular} rather than being a new offshoot o f the sociology of music. It was inspired by Marx not Weber; its key concepts were developed in argument with Adorno and the Frankfurt School. There were obvious differences between musicological and sociological approaches to rock: the former concerned with textual analysis and what musicians did; the latter with contextual analysis and what listeners did. But there was also a significant consensus that rock was something that had to be understood from the bOl/om up. From a social science perspective the . pOint here was that rock was itself an unusually self-conscious, an unusually ideological musical practice. Rock defined itself against the mainstream of popular commercial music; its values and practices were articulated by a new generation of music writers and disc jockeys, musicians and fans. The sociology of rock, therefore, had to start from rock's account of itself. Musicologists, meanwhile, were working in an academic tradition that had not only been constructed as the study of a particular kind of serious Western music, 'high' culture, but also specifically to exclude popular music, 'low' culture, from its analytic concerns ' To engage with rock musical texts, then, again meant engaging with rock musicians' own accounts of what they did (rather than with the academy's dismissal), and developing analytic concepts accordingly. And what was striking, at least in IASPM's early days, was the consensus also that popular music studies were therefore a polit­ ical activity. Political not simply in the sense that popular music scholars were challenging academic orthodoxy, nor only because of the explicit use of Marxist theories, but because popular music studies were thought neces­ sarily to involve issues of policy - educational policy (what music should be taught and how), cultural policy (what music should be valued by the state and why), trade policy (what music should be state protected and promoted). In retrospect it can be argued that lAS PM was over-concerned with rock music. It is certainly true that some of the approaches and topics discussed at the 1 98 1 Amsterdam Conference and in the first issue of Popular Music were marginal to subsequent IASPM developments. Social historians' work on folk song and the music hall, on blues and jazz, on Tin Pan Alley and the musical and the chanson was mostly developed in other academic settings. The ethnomusicological study of non-Western music rarely featured prom­ Inently In IASPM events. The long-standing sociological interest in music and everyday life, in music-making as an occupation, in non-commercial musical activity, was for the moment put aside as researchers focused on stardom and subcultures and the meaning of consumption. Such non-rock concerns did feed into popular music studies but belatedly, as it were, when the end of the rock era meant the end of rock-focused scholarship. (And even now lacunae remain: jazz studies and popular music studies are still mostly distinct; dance studies have evolved quite separately; 'light' music is neglected completely.)

2

G E N E R A L I NTRODUCTION

IASP M's scholarly anxieties Given its origins, i t is not surprising that itself. The rock world's concern have so often echoed arguments within rock ericanisation of youth mUSIc about cultural imperialism and the Anglo-Am M debates about cultural worldwide, for example, was echoed in IASP of popular music scholarshIp. imperialism and the Anglo-Americanisation s of IASPM conferences to show And, in general, one could use the proceeding followers of fashIon as oth�r that popular music scholars are as dedicated and fall of scholarly Interest In popular music consumers (observe the rise it would, nevertheless, be wrong Madonna or house music or Eminem!). But in the development of popular to disparage the central role of rock scholars moment In the long hIstory of music studies. Rock may have been just one musicians may have meant a popular music, and the research focus on rock musician. But what matters here research neglect of other kinds of popular ry, its particular ideology, ItS is that rock - because of its particular histo ss - called forth a new kind of particular technology, its particular succe of dlsclpllllary approaches and scholarship, involving a remarkable range rock studIes too. ThIS IS most questions, which eventually affected nonular musIc'. 'pop of obvious today in the very definition DejillitiOllS

in a series of books on 'critical The first problem I faced in editing this title itself a critical concept! I t IS an concepts' was that 'popular music' is not meaning, and, as I have already everyday term that is particularly loose in est to a great varIety of academIc suggested, it is an academic term of inter reasons. A collectIOn of scholarly emic disciplines for a great variety of acad eived, cannot chart the clear conc well articles on popular music, however the steady refinement of even nor development of a disciplinary field to be IS a selectIOn of essays conceptual terms. All it can convincingly claim to have Illum mated the tOPIC from different perspectives that can be saId about It. Nonetheless III think le and influenced the way in which peop scholarly field (with the trickle of reading through what is now an extensive in consIderIng the way III whIch articles becoming a flow since 1 98 1 ), and about popular musIc generally, It writing about rock has influenced writing at least a baSIC scholarly consensus became clear to me that there is by now volumes then, 'popular music' is about the object of our study. In these defined as follows: Music made commercially, in a particular kind of legal (copyright) and economic (market) system. Music made using ever-changing technology, with particular reference to forms of recording or sound storage. Music which is significantly experienced as mediated, tied up with the twenti�th-century mass media of cinema, radio and television. 3

GENERAL INTRODUCTION

G E N E R A L I NT R O D U C T I O N

Music which is primarily made for pleasure, with particular importance for the social and bodily pleasures of dance and public entertainment. Music which is formally hybrid, bringing together musical elements which cross social, cultural and geographical boundaries. These assertions are hardly controversial but they do point to one para­ dox of popular music in analytic terms: any kind of music can feed into it and yet it remains categorically distinct. It is not the same as folk music (even if it is in some sense music of the people); it can be contrasted to art music (even if some forms of art music emerge from it, like jazz, or become popular music, like the Three Tenors); it should certainly not be equated WIth rock music (even if rock is the most important source of popular music dIscourse). At the same time it is different from what one might call every­ day functional music - religious music, military music, children's song although these are important sources of popular styles and sounds. Even from this summary definition at least some of the theoretical, conceptual and methodological concerns of popular music studies become apparent I think (and it is here that we can see the influence of rock studies). If popular music is taken to be by definition a commodity, for example, the analytic question becomes how this relates to other ways of understanding musIC - as an art form, as aesthetic expression; as a folk form, as social expression. Is popular music just a commodity? What does this mean? Similarly, if the history of popular music is necessarily also a history of technology, scholars still have to address the question as to how the rela­ tionship works. Is this indeed a case of technological determinism, machines shaping sounds and the meaning of sounds? Or has music technology itself been shaped by music makers' ambitions and listeners' needs? The cross­ cutting commercial interests of the music business and the radio business the music industry and the screen industries, record companies and advertis: ing agencies, music rights holders and Internet entrepreneurs are obvious. What is not obvious is the cultural consequence of such a complex trade in musical rights. What is the significance of the Hollywood or Bollywood film score for people's understanding of musical meaning? What is the role of the radio studio or the video clip in people's understanding of musical stard �m? If popular music dominates contemporary commercial activity, what IS now meant by musical pleasure? How is music actually used and heard in everyday life? Even to describe popular music as a hybrid form is to draw attention to its component parts, to raise questions as to how and why such musical mixtures work. Out of this cluster of concerns emerge the two concepts which, in various guises, lie at the heart of popular music studies: authenticity and identity. Both are concerned with the meaning of music; both problematise the relation­ ship between musical intention, musical form and musical interpretation; _

4

on the one hand, by questioning not just the possibility o f transparent musical communication in a world of packaging and hype but also the reasons why the supposed 'truth' of music should matter so much to people in the first place; on the other hand, by examining the ways in which the musical experience, authentic or not, works to give people a sense of themselves socially and individually. These issues are addressed, even if sometimes rather obliquely, by almost every article in this volume. And they suggest, too, the methodological issue that preoccupies popular music studies: how to get at the meaning of music. What is the relationship here between text and context, between sounds and settings, between composer, producer and listener? What is a popular music text? Is it just the music, the notes? What else should be considered in determining what that mUSIC means to people - culturally, emotionally, physically? What do we need to know about a pop song to interpret it? What is the relationship between the meaning-in-the-text - the immediate effect of sound and rhythm - and the meaning constructed, the pleasure felt, by its listeners? What counts as evidence in such analysis? What kind of historical knowledge do we need? What sort of understanding of social process? What kind of technical musical vocabulary? Again, all the essays that follow address these ques­ tions one way or another. Selection

These volumes bring together scholars from a range of academic discip­ lines and perspectives. There are essays from the humanities (primarily musicology and social history but also film and literary studies), the social sciences (primarily sociology but also law, business studies, political sci­ ence, geography), from perspectives that are themselves cross-disciplinary (ethnomusicology and cultural studies). The only disciplinary approach not represented here, I think, is psychology, which has a long-standing research interest in musical perception but only very recently in ways that also interested popular music scholars.' The point here is not simply to show that the study of popular music is essentially multidisciplinary but also to argue that the way its concepts best develop is through the juxtaposition of different methodological approaches to the same questions. These volumes are therefore ordered thematically rather than chronologically, with a kind of musical logic, the same themes reappearing in different settings; points and examples used in one context being echoed in another. I did not find such selection an easy task. Because popular music study is not itself a discipline, it has not really developed linearly or in any specific theoretical direction, with an agreed set of conceptual issues to be clarified or hypotheses to be tested or methodological problems to be resolved. At the same time, as a research topic popular music has been liable to what one

5

GENERAL INTRODUCTION

G E N E R A L I NT R O D U C T I O N

might call passing scholarly attention. Literary scholars, for example, take an occasional interest in lyrics as poetry; sociologists of youth an interest in musical taste groups as subcultures. Such work, however worthwhile, is not included here because I decided it was better understood in the context of debates about literary value or subcultural ideology than as a tributary of popular music studies ' I've excluded other important essays for a different kind of reason. I was pleased to be asked to edit this collection because it gave me the opportunity not only to show off popular music as a wonderfully rich field of study but also to make available articles which have inspired me and other scholars in the field but which are now very hard to find. The fact is that key research on popular music can appear in unexpected places, is more likely to be cited in footnotes than found on a university library shelf. Conversely, this has meant, for the most part, excluding work that is relatively easy to find. There are, for example, other popular music anthologies in print and some of the most significant popular music articles have already been much anthologised (Roland Barthes' essay on 'The Grain of the Voice' and Richard Dyer's 'In Defence of Disco' come to mind). I have not included these here and, more particularly, I've treated my previous anthology of key articles for the study of rock music, On Record, as complementary to this collection - only one essay appears there and here. ' I should also stress that some important thinkers in the development of popular music studies are not to be found here because their ideas are best developed in book form.' These volumes are designed to represent the state of scholarship in a field, and I hope they will become a basic reference work for everyone working on popular music. Article by article, though, my concern was not that a selection stand/or a particular approach, as it were. Many of the essays here are as hybrid conceptually as the music they discuss. What they have in common is an attention to detail (much of the best work in the field takes the form of a case study) and a sense of the problems involved in moving from musical text to social context to musical text again. And, like popular music itself, discussion of popular music has long crossed national as well as disciplinary boundaries, and the essays here reflect this, too. If nothing else, someone reading all four of these volumes would find themselves joining a celebration of the extraordinary diversity of popular music itself. There are articles here on music hall, the ballad and the blues; on church music, dance music, and the music of death; on jazz and rap and challson; on Jerry Lee Lewis and Elvis Presley, on the songs of Irving Berlin and Randy Newman, on Mick Jagger and Petula Clark; on rock'n'roll, country music, and heavy metal; on music on film and radio and television; on Irish music, Turkish music, Dominican bachata and cumbia andina in Peru; on the brass band, African rhythm, sampling and MTV; on a wonderful range of human endeavour! 6

Notes

�

ar MI�S;C Perspectives. P pers from See David Horn and Philip Tagg (eds), Popul ,MUSIC R�searc", Amstelda� , une ar Popul On e erenc Conf The First International rd MIddleton and Davl . . orn RIcha 1981 Goteborg & Exeter: IASP M, 1982; and . influences. Contmullles. ctions Distin ar? Popul 0,' lk � F J: (ed.) Popular Music , . Cambridge: Cambridge UIlIverslty Press. , 1981. . c singly Imprecise bl�t , h� pOint 1 m maklllg he� 2 The term 'classical music' is increa mUSIC o t refer to y simpl musIC ical , is ca tured by Julian 10hnson: 'I use "class ent or some other ancll �ary .or unctions as art as opposed to entertainm that � Music? Oxford: Oxford UllIverslty backgro und function Who Needs Classical Press, 2002: 6. ' this field see D. J. J:larg:eaves and A . C ' North 3 For a useful survey of the state of , 1997. Press rSIty Unive rd Oxfo d: Oxfor , Mllsic f The Social Psychology o of hterary academICS, led by Chnsto 4 I'm thinking here of such things as the work Dick Hebdige among others about by ents argum the or , pher Ricks, on Bob Dylan punk as a youth style. I Pop. Rock an(.I II1e (cds), On Recor(.: 5 See Simon Frith and Andrew Goodwin 1990. The �ss�y edge, Routl on: Lond Written Word New York : Pantheon and of courtship iO e g dialo 'The n's Horto ld � Dona is here from On Rec 'd included III On Record. ppear � b?th also s o uiar songs'. The Barthes and Dyer essay e Gillett, Sara Cohen, Lucy thinking of such people as Paul Oliver, Charh 6 . Green and Roger Wallis and Krister Maim

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I NTRODUCTION

Popular music as understood in these essays was constituted in the last decades of the nineteenth century and the first decade of the twentieth. I t was then that a recognisable commercial music industry was created and a mass music market took shape, that the phonograph and cinema (a musical medium even when 'silent') were invented. Popular music scholars have been interested in these years not just for their own sake but to establish the continuities in popular music practice between then and now. For all the pop emphasis on change and novelty and fashion there are ways in which this industry and its consumers are deeply conservative. The essays in this volume are all concerned with the underlying socio-historical framework within which 'popular music' as a modern, capitalist, global institution must be understood. The first section is focused on the most obvious precursors of twentieth­ century music: music hall, folk music, the African-American musical tradition. The most striking aspect of these essays is their emphasis on the significance of social class. In his essay on music hall, Peter Bailey describes the import­ ance of the halls for the development of a new English urban proletarian culture. Music-hall performers in their repertoire and performing styles articulated a new kind of class consciousness, a new sort of 'knowingness'. Dave Harker examines, by contrast, the bourgeois class consciousness of the nineteenth-century folk music scholars and collectors who used their social authority to determine what counted as 'folk music' in the first place (this was not something to be decided by the performers or their audiences). Both writers show incisively why the problem of authenticity is inextricable from popular music analysis. Bailey argues that music-hall stars had to develop a way of performing that simultaneously gave voice to a class community and acknowledged the commercial transaction involved. With a nudge and a wink these entertainers indicated, ironically, their sincerity - but only to those members of the audience who got the point (and the continuity between music-hall performers and a contemporary pop performer like Robbie Williams is clear enough). Meanwhile the folk scholars, on the trail of an untainted, uncorrupted form of popular music argued about the authenticity of one song compared

to another, one version of that song compared to another. Such arguments were settled by formal rather historical analyses, by aesthetic judgements of which singers sounded most like the ideologically imagined 'real' folk. The assumption here was that folk music was the direct, unselfconscious expression of a community's beliefs and experience, as opposed to the self-conscious - knowing - formal calculations of art and commerce. In pursuing this'argument, ballad collectors like Childs were not just creating a folk-music canon but establishing an academic approach to people's music that remains a significant strand of popular music studies. The arguments here about white British popular culture, about the knowingness of the commercial performer and audience and the ideological activity of the folk scholar/collector, have been just as important for analyses of African-American popular music. Amiri Baraka (then writing under the name Leroi Jones) addressed precisely these issues in his deeply influential book, Blues People. In the essay reprinted here, on 'Classic Blues', he adds race to the problem of the popular (race as constructed in the history of the USA), reflecting on the white audience for black music and asking what happens to the musical analysis of blues and jazz when it is approached from inside rather than outside African-American experience. This question is taken up in Samuel Floyd's exploration of the specifically African­ American concept of signifyin', 'a mode of enquiry grounded in blackness'. The knowingness of performers and audiences reappears here, and links contemporary practices like rap and sampling to early African-American musical forms like blues and gospel through the aesthetic of Call-Response. The second section of Volume I brings together essays on the ways in which machines and media have shaped the experience of popular music. Dave Laing considers what was new about the experience of music­ on-record - a voice without a face. Pekka Gronow provides an overview of the history of the music industry as a mass global medium (a medium still largely ignored in media studies). His essay points to the problem of sources for the history of music-on-record and is complemented by Gerry Farrell's detailed account of the impact of recording on Indian musical life in the early twentieth century. Farrell illuminates what was then meant by globalisation, in terms of cultural and industrial relations between India and the West, but also shows how the marketing of this new musical commodity did mean a concern for imagery, for the packaging of stars visually as well as aurally. Gillian Anderson, in the final essay in this section, turns this argument around, showing how the early 'silent' cinema used music to enliven and give emotional charge to its moving images, thus establishing the cinema as an important site for musical interpretation and providing a new kind of occupation for professional commercial musicians. The third section of Volume I is focused on what it means to be a musician. Alfred Schutz's famous essay, 'Making Music Together' is about chamber group musicians but the questions it asks about the social structure of

8

9

I NT RO D U C T I O N

Volume I

INTRODUCTION

INTRODUCTION

the music-making process and the nature of musical communication are relevant for the study of all kinds of musician. Howard Becker's equally famous essay here concerns musicians' relations with their audiences and their sense of themselves as musicians, and remains the definitive account of the lived tension between art and commerce (Becker's musicians played in dance bands). Robert Stebbins's essay analyses the experience of amateur music-making and its role in people's social identity. The difference between the amateur and the professional is blurred in popular music and, although Stebbins is interested in amateur classical musicians, his account of the social networks of such amateurs and the interplay of leisure, friendship and social structure is even more resonant for the study of popular music­ making. The final two essays in this section consider what it is to be a rock musician. Paul Theberge shows the importance of magazines for musicians in constructing rock musicians' sense of themselves as musicians and, in particular, suggests that in the world of contemporary music technology, the musician-as-creator is simultaneously the musician-as-consumer. Mavis Bayton writes about one particular musical instrument, the electric guitar and addresses a central question for popular music studies: why is there such a remarkable gender imbalance among popular instrumental musicians? The next section turns from music production to music consumption and the ways in which popular music has been shaped by particular ideologies of entertainment and leisure, by the regulation of physical pleasures and public gatherings. This is to approach the performance of gender, race and class from a different perspective. Lewis Erenberg looks at the beginnings of this regulatory process on the dance floors of the early twentieth century; Ben Malbon describes the dance experience on the late twentieth-century club scene. Both are concerned - Erenberg as a historian, Malbon as a geographer - with the meaning of musical pleasure, with the relationship of the particular time and space of dance floor to broader concepts of identity and place. Both are concerned with the ways in which popular dance poses threats of disorder and is, one way or another, made orderly. Alf Bjiirnberg and Ola Stockfelt's essay on contemporary live-music entertainment in a Danish seaside resort shows how knowingness and sincerity are still relevant for a working-class audience but points out that performers must now consider the tourist audience too (one aspect of globalisation) and play on and with national musical stereotypes. Even in this kind of local setting, musical entertainers have to take account of a variety of listeners with a variety of expectations. The final section in this volume brings together essays on music and everyday life. Philip Tagg addresses the question of music as a universal language by listening to music in different cultures associated with death. His conclusion is that the human response to death is itself culturally determined (and thus articulated in musically diverse ways) and that there

are very few musical elements which mean the same thing everywhere. There is no such thing as music which is universally happy or sad. Ola Stockfelt comes to a similar conclusion from a different direction, showing that the meaning of the same piece of music can vary even for the same listener according to its aural circumstances: Mozart in the concert hall is not the same as Mozart in the lift; it involves a different mode of listening. Karen Lury looks, finally, at a neglected area of popular music studies: children's acquisition of popular-music-listening skills (this is a research area in which psychologists of music are likely to have an impact). Echoing Gillian Anderson's work on film music, Lury shows that, for the contemporary child, pop sounds and images are inextricably linked. Television is the most important source of young children's sense of what popular music is and how they should respond to it.

10

\I

Part A THE M AK I N G OF POP U L A R M U S I C : M E A N I N G S A N D VA LU E S

..

1 C O N S P I R AC I E S O F M E A N I N G: M U S I C-H A L L A N D TH E K N OW I N G N E S S O F P O P U L A R C U LT U R E* Peter Bailey Source:

Pasl and �resenr 144 (1994):

138-70.

Knowingness might be defined as what everybody knows, but some know better than others. At once complicit and discriminatory, this popular mode of expression was frequently noted by middle-class commentators as a distinctive - and objectionable - feature of comic performance in nineteenth-century British music-halls. This essay argues that a more specific and articulated account of the phenomenon can contribute to a more satisfactory explanation of how music-hall engaged with its public. Treating knowingness as discourse and practice enables us to get inside the dynamics of this influential modern cultural form. It suggests too how spoken (and unspoken) language functioned as a prime resource in the "mobile infinity of tactics" that constituted everyday life. ' I

British music-hall or variety emerged in the 1 830s and 1 840s and grew rapidly to dominate the commercialized popular culture of the late nineteenth century. From the 1 890s its primacy was challenged by other musical and dramatic forms and by the successive rise of the phonograph, film, radio and, more terminally, television. Even so its influence continued to be considerable. The music-hall industry was killed off (though not till the 1 950s), but as a style of comic entertainment it made a successful piecemeal transition to the new media, and found continuing expression in something close to its original setting in the working-men's club circuit, as also in the more contrived revivalism of "Olde Tyme" music-hall. The term itself is still

IS

MUSIC AND SOCIETY

CONSPIRACIES OF MEANING

standard i n cultural commentary, and together with suet puddings and red pillar-boxes might be added to Orwell's list of the definitive components of the English national culture ' As such, music-hall has generated a huge literature in its celebration, and only recently has this been supplemented by more critical accounts. ' Since popular culture has found its way on to the scholarly agenda, social historians have been concerned to assess the role of the halls in the cultural formation of class and the politics of modern leisure, and scholars in music history, literature, theatre and cultural studies are subjecting music-hall to closer scrutiny as genre and text. Though newer work has begun to look at the wider range of its operation as industry and cultural form, scholarship continues to concentrate primarily on music-hall's most distinctive idiom, that of the comic song and its singer. Here, a major exercise has been the more precise inventory of content "What they sang about", as the subtitle of one of the first retrospective surveys of the territory put it ' The identification of principal motifs - booze, romantic adventure, marriage and mothers-in-law, dear old pals and seaside holidays, and so on - demonstrates a recurrent emphasis on the domestic and the everyday that supports the most broadly agreed reading of music­ hall song as a naturalistic mode that both documents and confirms a common way of life. The great popularity of the songs is said to come from the audience's recognition and identification with the routine yet piquant exploits of a comic realism that validates the shared experience of a typically urbanized, class-bound world seen from below ' Discussion of music-hall song is inseparable from that of its singers, for the distinctive style of the genre crystallized around individual performers and their acts. Given the apparent verisimilitude of music-hall's representa­ tions of common life, the appeal of the great stars has often been interpreted in terms of their ability to convey this to their audience in a singularly direct and authentic manner. Thus T. S. Eliot explained Marie Lloyd's success by her "capacity for expressing the soul of the people'" Today's scholars resist such idealization, but are still prone to the temptations of "essentialism" or the acid test of a putative authenticity, preferring, for example, Gus Elen over Albert Chevalier, the sardonic over the sentimental, in the two performers' depictions of the costermonger in the 1 890s. In more radical fashion, the Tyneside favourite, Joe Wilson, has been stripped of credentials as an authentic popular hero, for his songs and life-history are said to disclose a self-seeking moralizer distanced from the real working class by his bourgeois ideology.' The demythologizing of Joe Wilson is part of the larger preoccupation with music-hall's role in advancing or retarding the collective interests of its public as a subordinate class in a capitalist society. Is this culture "of " or "for" the people? Is music-hall song generated from within or supplied from

without, and with what consequences? The general verdict i s pessimistic. G. W. Ross's San! Hall, a revamped traditional ballad sung in the 1 840s as the defiant valediction of a chimney-sweep about to hang, is taken as exemplifying a combative prelapsarian class politics (though we may doubt that he really sang " Fuck you all"). ' Thereafter, commercialized produc­ tion in the hands of mostly pelil bourgeois hacks, writing for professional performers increasingly bent on embourgeoisement, feeds the music-hall audience with songs drained of any radical or oppositional content. In their highly selective realism, the conflict lines of class were elided and the site of its most direct struggles, the workplace, ignored. Tn the most influential account of this dilution of class consciousness, Gareth Stedman Jones identifies a new flight into escapism in the celebration of the small pleasures of plebeian life - "A little bit of what you fancy does you good", as Marie Lloyd sang. Thus from the 1 880s music-hall songs come to denote what he labels a "culture of consolation" that compensates for political and social impotence, a chronic disability wryly acknowledged in the Chaplinesque "little man" ro';Jtines of the other great contemporary star of music-hall's "golden age", Dan Leno ' In this first flush of scholarly attention there is much that is helpful, but the "culture of consolation" tag has achieved the finality of an epitaph, summing up a prevailing note of political disappointment that not only obituarizes a whole culture but abruptly foreshortens further critical enquiry. The growing understanding of the complexity of popular cultural forms suggests the likelihood of other explanations for the capture of one of the world's first mass-entertainment audiences besides those of market dominance and the play-back of consoling representations of a common way of life. The test of authenticity is a dubious one where its criteria are formally political, exclusively class-specific and framed from outside, rather than in terms of the specific determinants of situation and experience that typify this particular milieu.'o Music-hall was both more and less than a class mode of expression and has yet to be fully understood in terms of its participants' measures of significance and what its meaning was for them. For this we need to reanimate those features of music-hall still hobbled in cliche - its "live" form, the "sheer talent" of its performers, and their "magnetic hold" on audiences. Work on style and performance has advanced markedly, but the text has still too rarely been made to leave the page, and the actual dynamics of engagement in the stage form remain understudied." Though based on an extensive sampling of sources, the essay that follows is still largely speculative and impressionistic. It offers brief accounts of performance style and audience interaction, and relates the articulation of knowingness as popular discourse to the history of music-hall development and its circumstantial fit with broader social changes.

16

17

MUSIC AND SOCIETY

n

The solo singer in the pub concert-rooms and cheap theatres that were the proto-muslc-halls of the 1 830s to the 1 850s neces sarily adopted a robust vocal and physical style. " The performer had to capture the attention of a large and mcreasll1gly an nymous crowd otherw ise engaged in the rival � attractIOns of eatmg, dnnkmg, conversing, gazing, posing, lounging, flirting and promenadll1g. The most effective technique was a cross between singing and shoutmg accompanied by various forms of stage business and a high degree of physIcalIty, from "winks and gesticulatio ns", to "the jerk (of the . body) at the begll1ll1ng of each line, in true street style" ." Extravagan t or eccen tnc stag dress often completed the boldness of effect needed to � commandeer audIence attention in this milieu. Perfo rmance was thus heavily accented or presentatIOnal, m the sense that it was projected right out at the � udJe,�ce. Though tIllS was m contrast with a more stolid traditional or folk style where the song was left to tell its own story, yet it had its own lengthy hlstoncal antecedents. As the conte mporary comment suggests, pub-based perfO l man es from thIS era drew on the well-practised techniques � of the street ballad smger, whose craft of some centuries persisted among the hawkers or chaun ters still contesting the hubbu b of the modern street in . theIr assertJve appeals to a less than captive audience · 14 . Rdatively new to popular song performance and one of the more dis­ tmctlve mark� of the emer�ing music-hall mode was the growing practice . of appeanng , 111 character . By thIS convention , the singer impersonated the (mcreasmgly first person) subject of the song more fully by assuming his or her typICal dress and manner. Though the concern for the broad effect was sllll there, this was realism of a more convi ncing materiality than that offered 111 the "true to life" claims of the street ballad singer, while marking a further departure from traditional folk style. There is a considerable correspondence here with the closely observed comic naturalism pioneered on the theatrical stage in the first half of the century. To a degree, the mUSIc-hall followed the theatre, whose writin gs and stagings became yet . more markedly naturalIstIC from the middle years of the century with the domestJcated settll1gs of the box set. " But music-hall naturalism rarely extended to the stage set and was almost exclusively vested in the individual performer. There was, moreover, a distinct diverg ence from the legitimate . stage m the practICe of dIrect address with which it was twinned. . Whatever the increasing degree of artifice, professional room-singers mSlstently broke through the fictions of their imper sonations with an ad lib gagging commen �ary be�we n verses known as "patt er" or the "spoken". � Mostly extemponz d, thIS direct address of the audience (also practised in � the crossover ro utmes of the low comedian in the theatre) represented a . further assImIlatIO n of English street style and the typical exchanges of life m the street, those of the "cad" or horse omni bus conductor touting for 18

CONSPIRACIES OF MEANING

custom, of the butcher or mountebank shouting his wares, or the ritual contests of abuse known as "flytings" that still survived in the North. An ancient feature of popular culture, the direct address of the early music-hall is a more complex and engaging operation than yet generally allowed. " In breaking role, the performer becomes most obviously accessible to the audience as himself or herself. Yet far from destroying the song character to whom the performer returns, the characterization may be strengthened through the revelation of the self that is invested in the role. This is a more privileged implication in the act of performance than that of the theatre, where the audience is privy to the performance as auditor/spectator who overhears the action or looks through the "fourth wall" of the conventional stage set. In the music-hall, the shifts in and out of role and self, artifice and autobiography, allowed the audience to see, as it were, the joins in the performance. In the hands of the inept this was no doubt disastrous, but properly executed it secured a distinctive relationship with the audience by initiating them)nto the mysteries of the performer's craft and giving them a consequent sense of select inclusion. The content of a song or act was of course also important, but its resonance with an audience was inseparable from the manner of its performance, whose language, in the broadest sense, signalled a common yet inside knowledge of what was really going on. It was this particular province of language use and meaning that we compre­ hend as discourse, that contemporary commentators termed "knowing". " It was through knowingness that the skilled performer mobilized the latent collective identity of an audience. The basic appeal of music-hall is said to lie in its affirmation of a newly urbanized people settling into a common way of life, yet awareness of this shared experience had to be activated anew at every performance among the so many and various aggregations that were the specific audiences within this extensive public. Indeed, to use the term "audience" in this context begs the question, for it presupposes a degree of focused attention that could rarely have been the case in a large city hall whose volatile assembly might be better designated as a crowd, out of which the performer had to construct an audience. Even in those halls with a particularly stable and socially homogeneous attendance, the acknowledgment of a common ground had to be summoned up or signified beyond the obvious givens of place, occasion, appearance and a core constituency of habitues. Althusser's concept of "interpellation" is suggestive here as the form of ideological address or hailing that recruits individuals into a particular subject-role or identity." In some such way, the performer's knowingness activates the corporate subjectivity of the crowd, and calls an audience into place. In music-hall this was a rapidly shifting exercise that cast its audience variously or sectionally as men, women, husbands, lodgers, casters, swells, citizens, working men, Britons, and so on, but arguably the underlying subject position that informed them all was that of those "in the know". " 19

MUSIC

AND

SOC I ETY

A t the same time, this interpellation i s not just the calling into position of a particular subjectivity, but is morc in the nature of a transaction or co-production. " Where a performance takes, the crowd/audience registers recognition and identification, certainly, but it also asserts its own collective authorship/authority in the performance. This response is obviously not just conjured out of nowhere. As with any audience, there may be a consider­ able predisposition to give attention, according to previous acquaintance with the performer, word-of-mouth endorsement or the bait of publicity, yet these predispositions still have to be exploited. In this, however, the music-hall performer could count on the active engagement of an audience well practised not only in being hailed but in hailing back, for the language of the street and market-place that informed the exchanges with the audi­ ence was very much one of give as well as take. Consumers were used to answering back, for more generally the negotiations of buyer and seller were still relatively unconstrained by the fixed practice of modern retailing; indeed, in one of the more typical transactions of working-class life, that of the pawnshop, it was the customers who made most of the patter. " Yet the language of such exchanges was likely to be more compact and elliptical as the pattern of encounter in a period of accelerated urbanization grew more fleeting and discontinuous. Symptomatic of this was the rise of the catch-phrase, pronounced by one commentator in 1 84 1 as a typical manifestation of the "popular follies of great cities" and "the madness of crowds": "every street corner", he declared, "was noisy with it, every wall was chalked with it"." Catch-phrases were generated by the songs and dialogue of the popular theatre, and the pub concert-room or singing saloon was soon caught up in their circulation. Thus a song from the late 1 830s which tells of a concert-room romance, Don't Tell My Mother, She Don', KnolV I'm OUI! (see Plate)," would have played off or may have directly inspired the contemporary shouted enquiry "Does your mother know you're out?" Unlike the folk proverb, the catch-phrase often floats free from more obvious referents and depends for its meaning on an extra-textual know­ ledge." As such, it was prime material for the more allusive and abbreviated social dialect from which the comic song was constructed. Also significant for this new formation was a marked shift in structure from the narrative to the situational. The more leisurely story-line of the ballad gives way to an episodic emphasis which exploits some social predicament in a quick succession of scenes or actions whose common import is punched home in a tag-line or chorus. The new mode of comic song works therefore less as a story than as an accumulation of short jokes with a reiterated punch-line, which in turn might be recycled as a catch-phrase. Like the catch-phrase, the music-hall dealt in a new form of vocal shorthand, whose language operated like a cue or flash charge that needed the knowledge that was knowingness to complete its circuitry. When the circuit worked, as contem­ porary accounts show, the song went off like a rocket. " 20

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21

MUSIC AND SOCIETY

C O N S P I R A C I ES O F M E A N I N G

An example comes i n a report i n the improving press from 1 856 of songs sung "in character" at a "low house of amusement":

One written about 'Pine-apple rock', was the grand treat of the night, and offered greater scope to the rhyming powers of the author than any of the others. In this, not a single chance had been missed; ingenuity had been exerted to its utmost lest an obscene thought should be passed by, and it was absolutely awful to behold the relish with which the young ones jumped to the hideous mean­ ing of tlie words.28

It is to these flash songs that we take violent objection. By name, they are often the same as we see in music-seller's windows and on our own drawing-room tables; but they are garbled and interpolated here in a manner to defy description. They are sung, or rather roared, with a vehemence that is stunning, and accompanied with spoken passages of the most outrageous character. At the end of every verse the audience takes up the chorus with a zest and vigour which speaks volumes - they sing, they roar, they yell, they scream, they get on their legs and waving dirty hands and ragged hats bellow again till their voices crack. When the song is ended, and the singer withdraws, they encore him with a peal that seems enough to bring the rotting roof on their heads, as with frantic shouts, shrieks and catcalls they drag him back again so that they may gloat once more over the delectable morsel. 26

putting on a 'knowing look', [he] sang a song, the whole point of which consisted in the mere utterance of some filthy word at the end of each stanza. Nothing, however, could have been more successful. The lads stamped their feet with delight; the girls screamed with enjoyment. Once or twice a young shrill laugh would anticipate the fun - as if the words were well-known - or the boys would forestall the point by shouting it out before the proper time. When the song was ended the house was in a delirium of applause . . . There were three or four of these songs sung in the course of the evening, each one being encored, and then changed.

Ingenuity indeed, for after "cock", one muses, what else can there be, unless the rhyme fell elsewhere? Yet the scene grips the reader, as the singer gripped his audience. Here the shared knowledge that is knowingness is that of sexuality, in whose delights the young audience seem so precociously well-schooled that the singer's "knowing look" concentrates their attention instantly. There is immediate closure with the audience, some of whom run ahead of the singer to detonate the rhymes that cue the crowd in their response, and Ihe suggestion is that the words of the songs are recomposed at their prompting. Above all, there is the potent sense of collusion. Some­ times lyrics themselves could suggest this, as in the confidential appeal of Don't Tell My Mother, She Don't KnolV I'm Out! (in however declamatory a voice this had to be made). In Mayhew's account, the whole exchange is animated by a sense of complicit mischief that contributes considerably to his own acute discomfiture. Claiming and collusion provide a sharper sense of the specific operation and intensity of recognition in music-hall, yet "naming the parts doesn't show us what makes the gun go off" '9 While these and other responses can be discerned separately, in performance, as the above accounts suggest, they are telescoped or superimposed upon each other, fusing together dramat­ ically in the case of the successful act. It is knowingness that ignites this effect by pulling the crowd inside a closed yet allusive frame of reference, and implicating them in a select conspiracy of meaning that animates them as a specific audience. This flattering sense of membership is the more so since music-hall performance suggested that such privileged status was not so much conferred as earned by the audience's own well-tested cultural and social competence.30 A few words here about the history of the word "knowing" itself. The term is first noted in racing talk of the eighteenth century, when a "knowing one" was supposedly privy to secrets of the turf or other sporting matters. By the turn of the century the term also denoted up-to-date knowledge of what was smart and stylish. " Twenty years later, the theatre comedian John Liston was being critically commended for his "knowing style" in his naturalistic playing of cockney characters. Here it seems to identify a certain quality of conceit, whose accurate rendering gave Hazlitt as much cause for his exasperation with the original in the street as it did for his admiration at its portrayal on the stage. To Hazlitt, the knowingness of the cockney was

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Even with allowance for journalistic exaggeration, the emotional temper of the occasion is clearly a long way removed from most Olde Tyme music-hall singsongs. There is the vigorous delivery complete with "outrageous" interpolations, while the reworking of drawing-room songs provides a good example of the cultural appropriation typical of the music-hall repertoire. There is another form of appropriation in evidence as well, though that is too inadequate a term to describe what is going on here: in the chorus singing (a feature characteristic of a night out at the halls) the passage suggests the more highly charged sense of a possessive "claiming", both of the song and the singer, that goes well beyond the conventional reading of audience recognition and identification. " Further telling evidence of this performative relationship of singer and audience is provided in Henry Mayhew's mid-century account of a London penny gaff. Mayhew observed a crush of some two hundred juveniles respond to the "comic singer":

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the delusion of someone who, on the contrary, really knew noth ing: "He IS . . . a great man only in proxy . . . surcharged with a sort of seco . nd-h and, vapId, tmglmg, troublesome self-importance".32 This sense of somethi ng both absurd yet troubhng was to be repeated down the century by mid dle-class wItnesses confronted with the phenomenon of the comic sing er and h� s audIence. Inverted com mas became welded to the term, in a defe nsive dlstancmg of its contemptible pres umptions. What most disquieted May hew and other wItnesses was plamly its rogue sexuality, yet while sexu ality con ­ tmued to constItute much of the insid er's knowledge that was knowing ness other competencIeS fell within its ' discourse. For all its often brashly confide nt tone, knowingness spoke to the need for a new wariness in the more uncertain negotiations of everyda y urban hvmg. Songs from the late 1 830s alert the audience to the petty corr uptions of the pohce and tradespeople, the tricks of con men and prostitutes and the mcreasmg dIfficulty of reading stra ngers in the flux of big-city life. Ale rtne ss to the unknown other had no dou bt always been part of the urban sensibil­ Ity (Ehzabethan hterature on cozening is one example) but in the second quarter of the nmeteenth century there were more people who had to learn thIS, and there was more of it to be learned. In locating the form atio n of a new urban popular culture in these years, Louis James find s its mos t artICulate expression in a mas s of cheap literature which set out to compre­ hend tillS new hfe of the towns, . . to understand how it all worked " , "claiming �mmsclence " �rom a stance of "knowing intimacy",33 But if urban worldImess now aspIred to the encyclo paedic it had at the same time to be much more finely tuned, exercised not only as a matter of an extensiv e literary CUIIOSlty, but s a matter of more compacted, anonymous � and fleeting evelyday negotIatIons. To a criti cal degree, the world that had to be known had both expanded and contrac ted. Getting by in this milieu requ ired a new s,:t of responses, recorded here in Hazlitt's contemptuous but reve aling pIcture of the cockney: "He sees everything near, superficial, littl e, in has ty successIOn. The world turns rou nd, and his head with it, like a roundabout at a faIr . . . HIS senses keep him alive; and he knows, inquires and cares for nothmg further".34 What Hazlitt condemned as ignorance, music-hall applaud ed as a necessary form of self-protect ion and, in its knowing recognition of this, a cause for self-congratulatIOn of the kind that further irritated Haz litt in the cockney. Laughter helped dissipat e unease at the inherent hazards of city hfe, but knowmgness completed ItS rout. If the repertoire of Sam Cow ell, a leadmg smger o e penod, dId mdeed depict a world "overwhelmingly peopled by fools , It IS almost certam that the manner of his perf . ormance reassured IllS audIenc e that they weren 't among them . Perf orm ers, we may surmIse, were applauded not Just for their naturalistic re-c reat ion of a shared world but for their auth ority in the actual business of livin g in that world, an authonty perhaps mos t potently demonstrated in son gs of its

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CONSPIRACIES OF MEANING

many fallible inhabitants. This persona may have been more a matter of image than of substance, and certainly there were some notorious casualt­ ies among professionals themselves, yet Mayhew remarked on the obvIOus and particular intelligence of one tributary source of concert-room talent, . the street performer. "By intelligence", he noted, "I mean that qUIckness of perception which is commonly called 'cunning', a readiness of expres­ sion and a familiarity (more or less) with the topics of the day - the latter pick�d up probably in public houses",36 A cognate of "knowing", "cun ning" , raises associations of the "cunning man (or woman)", the local wlzard­

cum-counsellor of the traditional rural community, suggesting not only that this role could in part have been displaced on to the comic singer, but that, in a more atomized modernizing world, every urbanite who would cope must learn to be his or her own "cunning man".37 Another related and suggestive usage is the Northern dialect term of "canny", bestowed typIcally in celebration of the "canny lad", among whose many attributes lay a shrewd resourcefulness in reading situations and escaping the meshes of authority. " : One cannot plesume too much from such associations, but the case can be made that the knowingness of early music-hall was a largely new idiom, encoded from the dramatically transformed social realities of a critical era in modern urbanization.39 Yet while knowingness was undoubtedly effective in the collective interpellation of its audience, its broader functional value is questionable, for in the nature of its address its lessons are never spelled out. LIke the Joke with its similarly complicit engagement, its particular expressive bloom withers with explanation. What exactly is there to be known in knowingness? Its properties are at once self-evident and arcane. More than with the joke, a better analogy might lie with the confidence trick (against which mUSIc-hail song offered so many warnings). Through a confident and confidmg manner, the performer repeats its flattery of privileged ImphcatlOn, hIS or her credentials too winning to scrutinize further. But if, by this analogy, the audience are the knowing victims of the performer's benign manipulations, who or what - apart from mother - completes the classic triad of the con­ fidence trick, as the ultimate victim whom the other two parties conspire to defraud?'o Parents, spouses and the law are, as many songs suggest, there to be outwitted. In a broader sense, however, knowingness as popular discourse works to destabilize the various offical knowledges that sought to order common life through their languages of improvement and respectabil­ ity and the intensifying grid of regulative social disciplines that marked the period. These official languages are represented in various allusions in the songs and their performance, but are also acknowledged In more overt form in the mock sermons and lectures that were juxtaposed WIth the other comIc acts." Knowingness then is not a direct refutation of these languages, to which it remains inescapably subordinate in the larger systems of socIety; It is rather a countervailing dialogue that sets experience against prescription,

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and lays claim t o a n independent competence i n the business and enjoyment of living. There is a strong element of self-deception at work here that may have been both acknowledged and compounded by music-hall's love of parody and mock self-deprecation, yet knowingness emerges as a distinctive if slippery form of comic pragmatism. In typical knowing style it proclaimed its utility in the masthead of the Singer's Penny Magazine ( 1 835-6), which parodied that Whiggish engine of improvement, the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge, by advertising itself as the organ of the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Mirth."

From the 1 860s music-hall took on the full apparatus of commercialized production together with more elaborate amenities and greatly expanded premises. By the 1 880s the big proprietors were laying claim to a greater social and aesthetic respectability by advertising their halls as "theatres of variety", and the industry entered the period of its maximum prosperity and influence that peaked just before the Great War.43 While the move out of the pub concert-room produced a great flowering of songs and artists, it also brought new constraints on performance. These were dictated in part by the rationalization of operations in an increasingly complex institution, but there was also pressure from outside from middle-class moral reformers for whom the comic song and its singers were at best "a public nuisance" and at worst "the despair of civilization". Sensitive to the threat to their licences and to their heavy investments, managers moved defensively to censor singers and songs, yet the essential circuitry of music-hall's performative relationship remained intact, more deeply encoded in the resilient discourse of knowing­ ness. Broader social changes brought shifts in the constituency of both the knowing and the known, but knowingness continued its ironic counterpoint to the language of respectability, even as the latter became more firmly installed in the formal practice of music-hall as both business and profession. From its beginnings music-hall had been embattled with reform critics, but the particularly hostile attacks on the comic singer in the late I 870s led to a significant increase in in-house controls on performance. In 1 879, the foundation year of the Social Purity Association, the Middlesex bench petitioned the Home Secretary for legislation to eliminate indecency from the music-hall stage. Though no such legislation was forthcoming, the shock to the industry translated into the new house rules of the 1 880s.44 These proscribed vulgarity in general, listing official figures and institutions that were to be specifically protected from improper allusion, while audiences were invited to report breaches that escaped the manager's notice. In some cases, performance material had to be submitted in advance for vetting. I t was, however, the unscripted exchanges across the footlights that caused the most anxiety. Some contracts forbade the performer's direct address of the

audience, and audiences themselves were policed by uniformed officials whose duties included the discouragement of chorus singing. Together with limits set on the number of encores, such measures were meant to maintain the tighter timetabling of acts necessitated by the multiple engagements of artists across the city, twice-nightly performances and the matching of show times with suburban bus and train schedules, yet they were also aimed at reducing the· volatile spontaneity of the music-hall experience and its threat to propriety. Impromptu engagement with the customers seemed yet more diminished as halls grew larger and production more theatricalized, for the artist was put further beyond the reach of the audience, a separation signalled most dramatically by the end of the century with the growing practice of darkening the auditorium. It seems clear, however, that, for all the disciplining and distancing of artists and audience, the live connection between the two persisted, and it was in this period that a mature or classic style of comic singing achieved its sharpest and !'lost efficient definition." Though the bulk of the audience became stabilized in fixed seating facing the front and drinking was gradually confined to foyer bars, the audience was still restless by today's standards: "It was", said Arthur Roberts, "all uproar, whether they liked you or not"." Yet while some performers still relied on the shouting style and its forceful accessories of dress and manner, this was now done as much to establish a certain type of character - the naturalistic rendering of the boys on a spree - as to commandeer attention, and in general stage presence became less aggressive. Comic technique was still often strongly accented yet more conversational in tone and pace, while performance overall became more economical. Alfred "The Great" Vance did his share of emphatic body play and robust vocalizing with his "Slap-Bang" song-hits of the late 1 860s, but by the 1 880s he was noted for a more ingratiating style of address: "he treats his hearers as old familiar friends, and takes them into his confidence, a process that they like immensely"." A summation of the style in its heyday comes from an appraisal of Wilkie Bard in 1 9 1 1 which commended him highly for "The rigid spareness and economy of his method - a thing of suggestion, of hints and half spoken confidences, rather than of complete statement". Bard, the review continued, "has attuned himself to the new middle-class respectability without losing any of his artistic range and freedom" " The prime device lay in the "things of suggestion", and as controls tightened and actual time on stage contracted it was the compressed code of the double entendre and the innuendo that signalled complicity with an audience, investing language, tone and gesture with oblique but knowing conspiracies of meaning. While there was a long history of ambiguity and innuendo in popular culture, most typically of a sexual import, music-hall deployed such devices in ways that were not only new but afforded their audiences more complex gratifications than present accounts allow. Where older song forms had

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exploited the idioms o f a particular trade or region, music-hall spoke across a more generalized demotic range, investing orthodox address with its second-level meaning. "There was". said one observer in the l 8805, "an un­ written language of vulgarity and obscenity known to music-hall audiences, in which vile things can be said that appear perfectly inoffensive in King's English".49 In Glasgow in 1 875 a committee of protest enlisted shorthand writers and artists to provide an accurate record of "immoral performances", yet the impact of the offensive acts could not be inferred from the page alone, and witnesses were often bewildered by the audiences' convulsions over apparently pointless exchanges.50 The knowing language of music-hall sexuality was that of standard English, or rather an open modern vernacular, with little recourse to the grammatica jocosa that Bakhtin talks of in traditional forms or the "out-and-out" bawdy that had distressed Mayhew in the mid-century. Music-hall did not, therefore, generate an anti-language in the accepted sense of the term, but rather a resignification of everyday language which knowingly corrupted its conventional referentiality and required a certain competency in its decoding. " At the same time, there was a particular eloquence in what was left unsaid. The incompleteness of the performer's delivery left gaps for the audience; for their laughter, of course, but also for what that signalled of their ability to fill the gaps. An L.C.c. inspector's report of 1908 noted that George Robey left his audience "to fill in the details and therefrom to draw their own inferences" ." Not too demanding an exercise, it may be said, for in semiotic terms music-hall song is more a closed than an open text, a highly stylized and familiar genre playing within a limited horizon of audience expectations. But if we accept the claims of modern linguistic scholarship that it is the spaces more than the spoken that denote the norms of urban language use, " then we may allow that the suspense and instability of the spaces generated in live performance on the halls provided a running opportunity, on both sides of the footlights, for the kind of tactical surprise that could simultaneously confirm and confound the generic pattern of expectations, and delight an audience with its own palpable sophistication. The nature of such self-congratulation may be better appreciated by considering the conditions of popular discourse in other key cultural sites of the late nineteenth century. Arguably the regulations that sought to curtail popular expression in the music-halls were more severely employed in the spreading institutional regimes of the later modern factory, the big commer­ cial office and the state school-room - all variously obliging their subordinate inmates to speak less or to do so in standardized forms that echoed the official idioms of their bureaucratic authority figures." Together with the contractions imposed by urbanization, these controls would have further reduced popular communication, while concentrating it into yet more cryptic and elliptical forms. If then, to borrow Bernstein's formulation, the authentic popular code became perforce more "restricted",5S the conditions

of its limitations may have made its meanings more highly charged and its sub rosa competencies more satisfying. By engaging and flattering these skills, music-hall performers could continue to reassure an audience that they were nobody's fool or - more pertinently in this era - no teacher's dunce, no head-clerk's cipher, no foreman's stooge. As is well evidenced, music-hall delivery was, of course, far from being only "a thing of suggestion, of hints and half spoken confidences", for it could also be almost manically verbose. Significantly, the language i n which it indulged its prolixities was often a parodic echo of the formal language of officialdom and elite culture. These knowing conceits were as much enamoured as mocking, expressing a qualified reach for the power that these codes represented, while ventilating the anxieties that their use entailed.56 But if, like the innuendo and ambiguity, this was in large part another defensive exercise, the appropriation of "proper" English was also a form of retaliation in kind against the linguistic oppressions of the period. This creative misalliance between the vulgar and the pretentious not only nonpluss�d the outsider but aided the counter-attack of those singers who protested against the slurs on their profession. Arthur Roberts, whose allegedly indecent performance contributed to the loss of licence for Evans's music-hall in the al1nus immoralis of 1 879, retaliated with The HighLy RespectabLe Singer:

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Good gracious, said I, then are songs nowadays So shocking to hearer and reader? So very much worse than your funny French plays And your novels by modest Ouida?" Though performers were much concerned with establishing respectable pro­ fessional status for their calling, their protestations were often disingenuous. Yet they still professed to be taken by surprise by audiences who "manufac­ tured" their own meaning from texts they represented as wholly innocent. "

Proprietors were similarly compromised between the conflicting pulls of official values and the popular aesthetic, some maintaining that it was the latter rather than the comic singer that was culpable in a business yielding to demand from an audience that "wants dirt". " Certainly audiences did take over and rework material, and delighted in transgressions of official rectitude. The determinedly proper Victoria Coffee Music-Hall in London vetted all acts thoroughly before their appearance, but the popular voice still broke through: Yet, in spite of all these precautions, let there come a change such as an encore verse, such as some slip or stoppage in the stage machinery, and out will come something, not in the programme and never heard or seen before, which will bring down a thunder of 29

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enjoyment from the audience, and at the same time fill the manager's box with sorrow and humiliation.60 Audiences also continued to claim their traditional performing rights; even as their participatory role was threatened by the house regulations of the 1 880s, the musical construction of the songs gave greater emphasis to the entry of the chorus and the further thunder of the crowd." As in popular humour generally, sexuality was a pervasive motif of know­ ingness, yet it took on a particular inflection in music-hall from the presence of prostitutes in the audience, for they constituted a running subtext to the songs in a way that tested the competence of all who presumed to read the urban crowd with any sophistication. The reformers' attack on the halls in 1 879 had been directed at the prostitute as much as the comic singer, the offence of one allegedly compounding that of the other. In this regard, too, house rules became tighter. Among London's bigger and more notable halls, the Oxford, for example, forbade soliciting and denied entry to any unescorted woman "unless respectably dressed" '2 As prostitutes responded with ever more plausible impersonations of respectability, their identification became increasingly difficult, the more so since young middle-class women were making-up and dressing in a fashionable approximation of the demi-monde.63 Whatever the protestations of proprietors to the contrary, prostitutes were thus enabled to continue their business in the halls, though they canvassed their services more circumspectly. Crucially here, verbal address duplicated the particular register of music-hall song, inflecting the mundane and unre­ markable with sexual invitation. In a famous case in 1 896, a middle-class reformer who protested at the renewal of the Oxford's licence faltered in his accusation of prostitution: of the woman whose approach aroused his suspicions of soliciting, he could report only, but significantly, "It was not what she said, but the way in which she said it" ." Yet these hearings did demonstrate what the reformers failed to prove, that the presence of pro­ stitutes in the audience added an extra sexual resonance to music-hall song and the exchange of meaning between performer and audience. Another witness objected in particular to Marie Lloyd's song, I Asked Johnny Jones, So I Know Now! Dressed as a schoolgirl, Lloyd (a famously "knowing" star) nags her parents for enlightenment on a number of curious incidents of a sexual nature that defeat her immediate understanding, including her father being accosted. "What's that for, eh?" she demands in the tag-line, getting satisfaction only from her canny schoolboy friend, Johnny Jones " ' . . . so I know now' ''. "During this song", noted the witness, "the women looked more at the men". In the same month, a critic from the respectable musical press testing the modern music-hall's claim to improvement was distressed not only by the songs that continued to celebrate drink, but by "objectionable songs . . . that advertise another trade . . . and also serve to foment the atmosphere" . "

What obviously gave pleasure i n the music-hall world was the rich joke that such proceedings afforded at the expense of society's high moralism and its intrusive vigilantes. The mix of denial and connivance with which proprietors and police met the question of prostitutes' admission to the halls suggests how their undoubted presence could be represented as both fact and fiction. Prostitutes were there and yet not there, at once conspicuous and invisible, according to a kind of worldly hypocrisy which acknowledged things as they inevitably (and profitably) were as well as things as they should be. It was this capacity to operate at the very interface of the Victorian double standard that was central to music-hall's cultural and aesthetic strategy and gave knowingness its more than stylistic utility. At the Oxford hearings, the press reported constant laughter from the public gallery at the discomfiture of the reform critics as they failed in their charges of immoral­ ity, either in the songs or the traffic of prostitutes. The reform witnesses had read the codes correctly, but failed to translate them into a politically effective language in front of the licensing committee. Thus knowingness confounded k�owledge, to the great delight of its initiates. Which groups in particular could be said to be "in the know"? The most obvious aspirants were the numerous young people who remained a prom­ inent element in the music-hall audience. Mayhew's account suggests how greatly the sexual implications of knowingness were relished by a mixed crowd of working-class adolescents at the mid-century. These may have spoken to the direct experience of a generation credited with a considerable sexual precociousness; thereafter the likelihood is that the engagement of the young was more a function of the needs of ignorance than of affirma­ tion." The tightening controls on the sexual socialization of the young of all classes through the late Victorian period and beyond increased the need to know or, crucially, to appear to know. This would have been particularly so for the increasing number of young clerks and shopmen whose actual sexual experience was likely to be minimal. Reluctant to resort to prostitutes, they salvaged their masculine pride by identifying with the assertive sexuality of the lions comiques, the brashly tumescent generation of comic singers whose swell songs took the halls by storm in the I 860s and I 870s '7 The sexuality of the swell song was more narcissistic than predatory, yet it was full of intimations of conquest that flattered the audience as knowing accomplices after the fact. Such flattery was all the more precious for individuals in a group that was as much a target for parody as for validation, for the young "gent" was as likely to be mocked for his sexual naiVete or incipient effeminacy as he was to be congratulated in assumptions of his fully initiated manhood. The need to be identified in the latter role must have been sharpened by the presence of the prostitute as a palpable reminder of the tests of conventional masculine sexuality. Were women more or less knowing than men? Which ones were which, and in what ways? This is more difficult terrain. I t was particularly noted of

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ingness might appeal across t o its exclusive status. At the same time, know muster with more worldly pass the class divide to any youngster anxious to how a new boy, Ashby tells seniors. A public school story from the 1 890s by learl1lng a comic rites tion mino r, prepared himself for his school's initia must be raised and ow eyebr song complete with appropriate actions - "one on. He IS dumb­ so and ", down the opposite corner of the mouth turned ed Silence. Far rrass emba with founded when his performance is greeted of "putting .off, ing show of from ingratiating himself, he has been guilty genteel dl� In asIs emph ary contr ; on side"." The episode reminds us of the lllg here), gapp of s form rent (diffe ment rstate unde and int restra on course stylized signals of knowing­ while suggesting how wide a currency the more not Ashby minor alone was it ness had gained ," Other evidence shows that mix of cheek and ctive distin its among his class who was enamoured of insouciance. bid for a more respectab e Since its beginnings, music-hall promoters had ammes and the Industry s progr midd le-class public. By the I 890s, improved thing of this aim. E. M . some colonization of the suburbs were achieving l i n 1 896, providing an c-hal musi Forster took his mother and his aunt to a , a distinctly bourgeois Latin in account of his visit for his school magazine nce of these years prese ss le-cla form of knowingness ." But the growing midd was evidence of it than halls the was less a tribute to the new immaculacy of against itself. iracy consp in a dominant class learning how to enjoy being in the music­ ent elem rogue a Middle- and upper-class males had long been wife who and man eois bourg hall audience, as voyeurs and predators. The ghty") ("nau the of halls cated now took their reserved seats in the syndi but ures, pleas their in ive gress nineties were much less self-consciously trans s rmer' perfo the of ief misch ined were learning to savour the collusive but conta of ies etenc comp the er regist address, in whose exchanges they too could c-hall's knowingness was fast knowingness. By the turn of the century, musi music-hall itself became an as s, becoming a second language for all classe low other, and the defenders of agreeable national aller ego, a manageable other targets." moral and cultural purity were drawn to

British women burlesque stars whose imports o f risque dance and comedy routmes took New York by storm in the I 860s that they were "aware of their own awarishness"." Among music-hall performers, Marie Lloyd certainly appeared to relish the suggestiveness of the situations she sang about, includ­ mg her keenly observed imitation of soliciting techniques among Regent Street prostitutes," and other reporters besides Mayhew recorded a knowing response to this kind of material from women in the audience. "Do you think It IS only the males who revel in this talk?" asked a Glasgow reform witness rhetorically.70 One prominent (and well-researched) type of music-hall song represented young working women as accomplished social actors with a knowing edge over their gentish suitors 'l With the increase in public roles for women in the late century, the opportunities for sexual encounter multiplied. If, as the songs suggest, some women knowingly exploited these opportunities, their knowingness may also have functioned in scouting the nsks of these ambiguous new freedoms. Knowingness for women may have signalled a defensive competence that gave a different ring to their laughter.72 There were other concerns besides sex. For the bachelor subculture in the halls, knowingness also monitored standards of dress and style as a further test of masculine competence. The aspiration here was to nothing less than gentility, personified again by the lion cOl17ique. Contemporaries descnbed the halls as "makeshift lounges" and "modern schools of manners" where "an immense number of lads . . . learn how to become gentlemen, under . the tUltron of the Great Dunce, or some such celebrity". Instruction was "by means of symbols" - the acting out of genteel behaviour through the stnkIng of poses and the manipulation of the accessories of dress whose implications were signalled in the music-hall shorthand of tone and esture including the knowing wink ." The quasi-aristocratic self-assurance of � Champagne Charlie offered a compelling identity to members of a socially indeterminate group with little cultural capital of their own. Yet induction was far from easy, for while the real swells on stage might readily admit the . nov :�e llltO the mysteries of the freemasonry by "letting him into a thing or two , they pilloned those who were manifestly inept in carrying off their new role, much to the delight of other sections of the audience. Thus know­ ingness fed publicly off its more fallible aspirants, marking out lines of inclUSIOn and exclusion with some acerbity, perhaps justifying Beerbohm's contentron that people went to the halls to feel superior to someone. Middle-class commentators continued to suspend knowingness in inverted co nmas as an indication both of contempt and unease. " Knowingness", r: . obJ;cted one wltness, was a pathetic form of self-conceit that left its subject In , SUICidal Ignorance of hiS utter meanness and insignificance", yet such dismissals continued relentlessly as though the malaise could never be sufficiently purged " However pathetic the exercise, pelit bourgeois youth was clearly treadlllg too closely on the heels of the true bourgeois, making a mockery of the apparatus of gentility and of the latter's own aspirations

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knowledge in an urban world Knowingness encoded a reworked popular m and often strong sense .of which, for all the continuing force of custo sive and unknowable. UnlIk e community, was increasingly populous, exten the conceptually artrculated and the discourses studied to date, it was not specialist, but the refinement of literate knowledge of the professional or consciousness. \V hlle the comic a strongly oral and pragmatic everyday tion to the routrl1lzed conduct of realism of music-hall song gave close atten perplexities. The participatory popular life, it also traded in its recurrent knowll1gness offered audiences style of performance and its implications of

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a test o f their competence i n negotiating these perplexities i n a language of their own triumphant devising - "the quick, clever tact by which one vulgar mind places himself en rapport with a number of other vulgar minds", as one witness put it.so In this way, knowingness projected a sense of identity and membership as the earned return on experience, which engaged more than a simple generic literacy or the recognition in common of a particular way of life. Its potency lay in its capacity both to universalize and select out a popular cognoscenti in a fluid and variously collective drama of self­ affirmation that punctured official knowledges and preserved an independent popular voice. Thus music-hall engaged its public in a more complex set of meanings than that proposed in the compensation model - the relish in knowingness suggests strongly that this was a culture of competence more than a culture of consolation. Yet however authentic the satisfaction for its initiates, it would be quite wrong to triumphalize knowingness. Readings of present-day popular culture have begun to employ the term as a measure of resistance to hegemonic values in the negotiation of a "creative consumerism" which, with due allowance for historical specificity, suggests considerable continuity in its operation as a popular resource." Yet the counter-discourse of music-hall knowingness was limited to the infraction rather than the negation of the dominant power relationships and, as its echo of official idioms demon­ strated, it was compromised between challenge and collaboration." (At times it comes close to Gramsci's disabling "common sense" .83) Nor is it very encouraging to assess its operational or street value, once we move beyond the commercial canniness of Hazlitt's cockney, for this could be as much a form of ignorance as of knowledge. By its very presumptions, knowingness disallowed precise instruction, while in the volatile exchanges across the footlights its reassurances could be instantly betrayed, its privileged status collapsed. None the less, its code may have been useful for combatting the more extensive surveillance of employers, policemen, schoolteachers and other officials. In politics, too, the corrosive glee of knowingness may have fuelled the radical populist cause in such confrontations as the Queen Caroline and Tichborne affairs " But its complicit tone could also turn its cutting edge inside out, as in its co-option by the mass press and other self-styled friends of the people, generating what Hoggart later labelled "scepticism without tension" and the evasion of real issues " Also significantly, from the end of the nineteenth century, knowingness and its characteristic inter­ pellations were recruited for the confident, unproblematic voice of modern advertising." Again, however, the point is not just to register further dis­ appointment, but to understand more fully how such disregarded strands of popular discourse work - for and against the interests of their bearers in the structuring of social action and consciousness ') Not that knowingness is an exclusive province of the popular, for high discourse has an informal or performance element that signifies competence

beyond the formal demonstration o f its particular knowledges. This refine­ ment of mutual implication seeks to confer an extra gloss of distinction on specialist fractions in the dominant culture, and on bourgeois life in general. The appropriate manner here is one of cultured allusion, of what Pierre Bourdieu notes as "analogies endlessly pointing to other analogies" which never have to justify themselves by any explicit reference to first principles." As we nod sagely together at the mention of another heavyweight cultural critic we acknowledge our own variant of this higher knowingness, while I exit stage left with no more than the merest suggestion of the comic singer's knowing wink.

34

Notes * I thank the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada for their support of this research as part of a larger project on the social history of music�hall. This paper was originally a more vulgar, performance-oriented piece entitled "Did Foucault and Allhusser Ever Play the London Palladium?", but has been revised in the interests of academic probity. I thank several audiences for their encouraging response to the original, especially the Society for the Humanities at Cornell Univer­ sity, February 199 1 . For further encouragement and advice in the revision I thank, among others, J. S. Bratton, Chris Waters, Patrick Joyce, Rohan McWilliam and Joseph Donatelli.

I Michel de Certeau, The Practice oj Everyday Life ( Berkeley, 1 988), p. 4 1 . 2 George Orwell, The Lion and the Unicorn: Socialism and the English Genius (London, 194 1 ; repr. London, 1 982), p. 37. 3 The history and historiography of the halls is reviewed in Peter Bailey, "Making Sense of Music Hall", in Peter Bailey (ed.), Music Hall: The Business of Pleasure (Milton Keynes, 1986), pp. vii-xxiii. This collection of essays and its companion volume, J. S. Bratton (cd.), Music Hall: Pelformance and Style (Milton Keynes, 1986), contain the most recent specialist scholarship on many aspects of the halls, including song. See also Ulrich Schneider, Die Londoller Music Hall und illre Songs. 1850-1920 (Tubingen, 1984); Dagmar Kift, Arbeiterkultur im gesellschaft­ lichen Konflikt: Die englische Music Hall im 19. lahrhundert (Essen, 1991). For an invaluable bibliography, see L. Senelick, D. Cheshire and U. Schneider (comps.), British Music Hall. 1840-1923: A Bibliography alld Guide to Sources (Hamden, 1 98 1 ). 4 Christopher Pulling, They Were Singing. and What They Sang AboUl (London, 1 952). In similar though more perceptive vein, see Colin Macinnes, Sweet Saturday Night (London, 1 967). 5 See variously Peter Davison, Songs of the British Music Hall (New York, 1971); Martha Vicious, The Industrial Muse: A Study of Nineteenth Century Working­ Class Literature (London, 1974), ch. 6; J . S. Bratton, The Victorian Popular Ballad (London, 1 975), ch. 6; Richard Middleton, "Popular Music of the Lower Classes", in Nicholas Tempcrley (cd.), Music in Britain: The Romantic Age, 18001914 (London, 1 9 8 1 ), pp. 63-91; Bernard Waites, "The Music Hall", in The Historical Development of Popular Culture in Britain (Open Univ. course booklet, Milton Keynes, 198 1 ), pp. 43-76; Penelope Summerfield, "The Effingham Arms and the Empire: Deliberate Selection in the Evolution of Music Hall in London", in Eileen and Stephen Yeo (cds.), Popular Culture and Class Conflict, 1590-1914

35

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6 7 8

9

10

( Hassocks, 1981), pp. 209-40; Michael J . Childs, Labollr 's Apprelltices: Workillg­ Class Lads in LlIIe Victorian and Edwardian England (Montreal and Kingston, 1 992), pp. 1 1 8-32. See also, for the cafe-concert and music-hall in Paris, Charles Rearick, "Song and Society in Turn of the Century France", Jf Social His!., xxii ( 1 989), pp. 46-63. T. S. Eliot, Selected Essays (London, 1 9 5 1 ), pp. 456-9. Dave Harker, "Joe Wilson: 'Comic Dialectical Singer' or Class Traitor?", i n Bratton (ed.), Mllsic Hall, pp. I I 1- 30. Such is the (unsubstantiated) contention of Ronald Pearsall, Victorian Popular Music (Newton Abbot, 1973), p. 24. On songs and politics, see Laurence Senelick, "Politics as Entertainment: Victorian Music-Hall Songs", Victorian Studies, xix ( 1 975-6), pp. 149- 80; Waites, "Music Hall"; Ian Watson, Song am! Democratic Culture in Britain: An Approach 10 Popular Clilture in Social Movemellls (London, 1983), PI'. 49-52; Penelope Summerfield, "Patriotism and Empire: Music Hall Entertainment, 1 870- 1 9 14", in John Mackenzie (ed.), Imperialism alld Poplllar CullUre (Manchester, 1986), pp. 1 7-48; Dave Russell, Popular Music ill England, 1840-1914: A Social History (Manchester, 1987), chs. 6-7. Gareth Stedman Jones, "Working-Class Culture and Working-Class Politics in London, 1 870-1 900: Notes on the Remaking of a Working Class", JI Social Hist. , vii ( 1 974), pp. 460-508, repr. in his Languages of Class: SllIdies in English Working Class History, 1832-1982 (Cambridge, 1 983). For the germ of this char­ acterization, see Richard Hoggart, The Uses of Literacy (Harmondsworth, 1958), p. 140; for Hoggart on popular song, see ibid. , pp. 1 56-66. For a recent critique of Stedman Jones's formulation, see David Mayfield and Susan Thorne, "Social History and its Discontents: Gareth Stedman Jones and the Politics of Language", Social History, xvii ( 1 992), pp. 165-88. On the pitfalls of authenticity in other contexts, see Simon Frith, "Towards an Aesthetic of Popular Music", in Richard Leppert and Susan McClary (cds.), Music and Society: The Politics of Composition, Pel/ormance and Reception (Cambridge, 1987), pp. 1 33-49; Richard Middleton, SlIIdying Poplliar Mllsic (Milton Keynes, 1990), pp. 1 39-40. See also Stuart Hall, "Notes on Deconstructing 'the Popular"', in Raphael Samuel (ed.), People's History and Socialist Theory (London, 198 1 ), p. 233; Morag Shiach, Discourse on Popular Culture (Cambridge,

1 4 The street ballad was despised i n older scholarship. which privileged a less vulgar­

15

16 17

1989). I I See Raymond Williams's injunction "to get right inside the form itsel f " : Stephen Heath and Gillian Skirrow, "An Interview with Raymond Williams", in Tania Modleski (ed.), Studies in Entertainment: Critical Approaches to Mass Culture (Bloomington, 1 986), p. xiii; on "the problem of popularity, the pleasure or the use value of subjective forms", see Richard Johnson, "The Story So Far: And Further Transformations?", in David Punter (ed.), Il1lroductioll to COl1lemporary CullUral Studies (London, 1986), p. 307. 12 There is no systematic history of performance styles in the halls. The editor's introduction and several contributions to Bratton (ed.), Music Hall, make the best point of departure. For treatments of the later stand-up comic and his continuities with the halls, see John Fisher, Fllnny Way To Be A Hero (London, 1973); Peter Davison, Contemporary Drama and the Popular Dramatic Tradition in Englalld (London, 1 982), ch. 2. The missing dimension is that of the music itself, a greatly underdeveloped field. But see Middleton, Studying Popular Music; Anthony Bennett, "Music in the Halls", in Bratton (ed.), Music Hal/, pp. 1-22. 13 Hugh Shimmin, Liverpool Life (Liverpool, 1 856), p. 37; Blanchard Jerrold, London: A Pilgrimage (London, 1872; repr. New York, 1 970), p. 167.

36

18 19 20

21

ized folk tradition. For a reconstruction of the form, its context and perform­ ance, see Natascha Wurzbach, The Rise of the English Street Ballad, 1550-1650 (Cambridge, 1 990), esp. pp. 39- 1 04, 24 1 . Wurzbach suggests that the street ballad was incorporated and/or displaccd by the new commercialized entertainments and media of the eighteenth century. For street seller performers in the music­ hall era, see Vicinus, Industrial Muse, pp. 20-1. On theatre,o see Raymond Williams, "Social Environment and Theatrical Envir­ onment: The Case of English Naturalism", in his Problems ill Materialism and Clliture: Selected Essays (London, 1 980), pp. 125-47. Most helpful here is Davison, Contemporary Drama, ch. 2. See also Wurzbach, English Street Ballad, ch. 3. Though Foucault has made the concept an academic commonplace, he provides no single definition. His passing identification of " 'illicit' discourse, that is, dis­ courscs of infraction" comes closest to what I have in mind here: Michel Foucault, The History of Sexllality: All Introduction ( New York, 1980), p. 18. I note, how­ ever, with others, that Foucault and his followers have been almost exclusively concerned with discourse in the practice of professional or specialist knowledges. neglecting those subjected to such practices and the potential of discourse the­ ory for the study of popular culture and everyday life. Gareth Stedman Jones, "The 'Cockney' and the Nation, 1780-1 988", in David Feldman and Gareth Stedman Jones (eds.), Metropolis London: Histories and Representations since 1800 (London, 1 989), pp. 272-324, is one turn in this laller direction, but the most important work of this kind is Patrick Joyce, Visions of the People: Indus­ trial Ellgland and the Qllestion of Class. 1840-1914 (Cambridge, 1991). Joyce's extensive analysis of the role of language and representation in popular identities coincides at points with the argument of this essay, though our different focus in terms of evidence and place throws up somewhat conflicting readings of urban mentality. For historians' new attention to language, see Peter Burke and Roy Porter (cds.), The Social History of Lallguage (Cambridge, 1987), and its sequel, Language, Seif and Society (Cambridge, 1991); P. J . Corfield, "Introduction: Historians and Language", in P. J. Corfield (ed.), Language, History alld Class (Oxford, 1991), pp. 1-29; Mayfield and Thorne, "Social History and its Discontents". For a stimulating critique of such work, especially of historians' reliance on intui­ tion more than on systematic analysis and their continuing neglect of language as social action, see Lorna Weir, "The Wanderings of the Linguistic Turn in Anglophone Historical Writing", JI Hist. SOCiology, vi ( 1 993), pp. 227-45. Louis Althusser, "Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses (Notes towards an Investigation)", in his Lenin and Other Essays (London, 1 97 1 ), pp. 170-7. On audiences, see Dagmar Hoher, uThe Composition of Music Hall Audiences, 1850- 1900", in Bailey (cd.), Music Hall, pp. 73-92. Suggestive here is reception and reader response theory, though this is mostly applied to literary texts with little regard for social context. For relevant applications, see Marco De Marinis, "Dramaturgy of the Spectator", Drama Rev., xxxi ( 1 987), pp. 100-14; Marvin Carlson, "Theatre Audiences and the Read­ ing of Performance", in Thomas Postlethwait and Bruce A. McConachie (eds.), Interpreting the Theatrical Past: Essays in the Historiography of Pelformance (Iowa City, 1989), pp. 82-98. Susan Bennett, Theatre Audiences: A Theory of Production and Reception (London, 1 990), is a useful general text. Fred Willis, LOlldoll Gelleral (London, 1953), pp. 14 1-2. Political meetings were also characterized by a good deal of active audience response: see, e.g.,

37

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22 23

24 25

26 27

28 29 30

Paul A. Pickering, "Class without Words: Symbolic Communication in the Chartist Movement", Past and Present, no. 1 1 2 (Aug. 1986), pp. 150-1. We are dealing with a still vigorously oral culture whose psychodynamics remain close to those of primary oral societies, particularly in its agonistic tone: see Walter J. Dng, Orality and Literacy: The Teclmologizing of the Word (London, 1 982), pp. 43-5. On the persistent drama of the markets, see Andrew Davies, Leisure, Gender and Poverty: Working-Class CU/lure in Salford and Manchester, /9001939 (Buckingham, 1 992), pp. 130-8. Charles Mackay, Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions (London, 1 84 1 ; repr. New York, 1 980), pp. 619-3 1 . London Singer's Mag. [1838-9?J, p. 1 6 1 . There are no dates for the individual (monthly?) issues, but their continuous publication is some index to the growth of concert-room activity. Cf. James Obelkevich, "Proverbs", in Burke and Porter (cds.), Social History of Language, pp. 43-72. The image, both apposite and irresistible, is borrowed from Bennett, "Music in the Halls", p. 20, and his analysis of the propulsion imparted by the rhythmic interaction of words and music. Sir Richard Terry also noted the development of a more concentrated song-form, with a distinctive "snap" that "knocked the audience every verse", though he places this in the 1 880s: R. Terry, "Old Music Halls", John O'London Weekly, 6 Dec. 1 924. See also Vic Gammon's work on early music-hall repertoire, principally that of Sam Cowell: V. Gammon, " 'Not Appreciated in Worthing?'; Class Expression and Popular Song Texts in Mid-Nineteenth Century Britain", Popular Music, iv ( 1 984), pp. 5-24; Bratton, Victorian Popular Ballad, pp. 200-1 . Anon., "Amusements of the Mob", Chambers' JI Popular Lit., I I Oct. 1856, pp. 225-9. For similarly proprietory sentiment in a theatre audience, see Douglas Reid, "Popular Theatre in Victorian Birmingham", in David Bradby, Louis James and Bernard Sharratt (eds.), Pelformance and Politics in Popular Drama (Cambridge, 1980), pp. 87-8 n. 53. The feeling is also manifest in the audience response to Frank Randle, the great Northern favourite of the 1 930s and beyond, celebrated as the carbuncular eponymous hero of Jeff Nuttall, King Twist (London, 1978). For a similar phenomenon among rock fans today, see Frith 011 "owning" in "Towards an Aesthetic of Popular Music", p. 143. Henry Mayhew, London Labour and the London Poor, 4 vols. (London, 1 85 1 ; repr. New York, 1 967), i , pp. 40-2. More combustible analogies, this one from Molly Mahood, Shakespeare's Word­ play (London, 1979), cited in Walter Redfern, Puns (Oxford, 1 984), p. 5. While "competence" is routinely used in semiotics and literary theory to denote the reader's knowledge of a particular genre and its conventions, what I have in mind here is the additional, more dynamic sense of the living out of this knowledge. John Fiske identifies both a cultural competence and a social competence - " how people are likely to act, feel or react within such conventions" - which together make for what he terms the "producerly" activity of the modern consumer: J. Fiske, Understanding Popular Culture (London, 1 989), p. 148. See too the sug­ gestive essay by Bernard Sharratt, "The Politics of the Popular? From Melodrama to Television", in Bradby, James and Sharratt (eds.), Pelformance and Politics, pp. 275-95. His identification of the "expertise" of popular life has, 1 realize, been subterraneously prompting me to this reading of knowingness for several years; what he terms the "intimacy" of popular response has strong affinities with what 1 describe above as "claiming".

38

CONSPIRACIES OF MEANING

3 1 O.E. D., 2nd edn, s. v. "knowing (3)". 32 Quoted in Jim Davis, 10hn Liston, Comedian (London, 1 985), pp. 25, 26. 33 Louis James, Fie/ion Jar the Working Man, 1830-1850 (Harmondsworth, 1 974), pp. 20-1. Such periodicals were most numerous in London, but there were equivalents in most big provincial cities of the period. For a new wariness towards the city and its representation in literature, see Deborah Epstein Nord, "The City as Theater: From Georgian to Early Victorian London", Victorian Studies, xqi ( 1987-8), pp. 1 59-88; and for Mayhew's treatment of stree! people as an imaginative metaphor for a new cosmopolitan sensibility of mobility and alertness, see Richard Maxwell, "Henry Mayhew and the Life of the Streets", 1/ Brit. Studies, xvii, pt 2 (Spring 1978), pp. 87-105. While the population of London nearly doubled between 1 82 1 and 1 8 5 1 , the rate of increase in cities in the North and Midlands was higher still. While I acknowledge the preponderance of London sources used here, this and other evidence supports the contention that knowingness was a general urban phenom­ enon of the period and not, as might be objected, specifically and only metro­ politan or cockney, though undoubtedly there would have been different regional inflections. For a work that departs substantially from the metrocentric bias of most music-hail studies, see Kift (formerly Hoher; see n. 19 above), Arbeiterkulfllf im gesellschaftlichen Konflikt. 34 As quoted in Davis, John Liston, p. 25. 35 Gammon, "Not Appreciated in Worthing?", p. 23. 36 Mayhew, London Labour and the London Poor, iv, p. 209. 37 Keith Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic (Harmondsworth, 1973), ch. 8; Robert Malcolmson, Life and Labour in England, 1 700-1789 (London, 1981), pp. 88-92. 38 See, e.g., Robert Coils, The Collier's Rant: Song and Culfllre in the Industrial Vii/age (London, 1977), esp. p. 5 1 . 39 Raymond Williams, Drama in a Dramalised Society (Cambridge, 1975). And compare Benjamin, who famously locates the onset of modernity and its aes­ theticization of everyday life in these decades: Walter Benjamin, "Paris, the Capital of the Nineteenth Century" ( 1 935), repro in his Reflections, ed. Peter Demetz (New York, 1978), pp. 146-62. 40 Edwin M. Schur, "A Sociological Analysis of Confidence Swindling" , JI Criminal Law, Criminology and Police Science, xlviii (1957), pp. 296-304. Dan Leno described London as a "large village on the Thames where the principal industries are music halls and the confidence trick": quoted in Davison, Songs of the British Music Hall, p. 3. 41 Compare the burlesque legalism that flourished in traditional artisan culture: Robert Darnton, The Great Cat Massacre (New York, 1985), p. 85. 42 Published in 1835 and 1836, the Singer's Penny Magazine was an antecedent, via the British Pocket Vocalist, of the London Singer's Magazine (see n. 23 above). 43 In North America, however, where similar developments took place, usage was different, for it was "variety" which signified the unimproved original now superseded by a would-be more refined "vaudeville" theatre: see Robert Snyder, The Voice of the City: Vaudeville and Popular CullUre in New York (New York, 1989). 44 A review of the controversies of this climacteric from the London proprietors' perspective is given in Regulation 0/ the Music flails (London, 1 883); for the contested imposition of the new controls, see Peter Bailey, "Customs, Capital and Culture", in Robert Storch (ed.), Popular Culture alld Custom in Nineteenth Centllry England (London, 1982), pp. 1 80-208.

39

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45 For a strong element of interaction i n a closely allied form, sec Lois Rutherfor d,

'''Harmless Nonsense': The Comic Sketch and the Development of Music Hall Entertainment", in Bratton (cd.), Music Hall, pp. 1 3 1-5 1 . 46 Arthur Roberts, Fifty Years of Spoof (London , 1 927), p . 28. 47 Era, 31 Jan. 1 885. 48 G. H. Mair, "The Music Hall", Ellg. Rev., ix ( 1 9 1 I), pp. 1 22-9. 49 F. Freeman, Weekly Despatch, 4 Feb. 1883. 50 GlasgolV Daily Herald, 6 Mar. 1 875; Era, 7 Mar. 1875. These records have not survived. 5 1 An anti·language is defined in terms of an invented vocabulary, often of a semi­ technical and oppositional kind. that serves a particular minority group: see M. A. K. Halliday, Lallguage as Social Semiotic (London , 1 978), pp. 1 64-82. Though music-hall its own trade talk ("parJary"), and a keen appetite for slang, in general it was a powerful agent in the standardization of language that was accelerating everywhere in the late nineteenth century. This is not to ignore the considerable popularity of dialect acts in this period, but it can be argued they were as much a corollary of the main trend as a resistance to it. In music-hall, as in the onset of mass culture generally. standardization intensifie d differentiation. On the continuing significance of dialect, see Joyce, Visions o/ the People, ch. 12; P. J. Waller, "Democracy and Dialect, Speech and Class", in P. J. Waller (cd.), Politics alld Social Change in Modem Britain ( Brighton, 1 987), pp. 1-33. 52 G. A. Blackwell on the Oxford, 2 Oct. 1 908: Greater London Record Office, Presented Papers, Theatre and Music Hall Committee, London County Council. 53 M. A. K. Halliday. "Language in Urban Society", in Halliday , Ltmguage as Social Semiotic, pp. 1 54-63. 54 The plainest case is that of education: see David Vincent, Literacy and Popular Culture: Englalld, 1 750-1914 (Cambridge, 1 989), ch. 3. Another powerful ly restrictive regime in this respect was, of course, domestic service. 55 Basil Bernstein's comparison was with a more explicit, intellectualized or "elab­ orated" (middle-class) code, a controversial thesis most readily sampled in his essay "Social Class, Language and Socialisation", in P. P. Giglioli (cd.), Language and Social Context (Harmondsworth, 1 972), pp. 2 1 1-34. 56 Cf. Ross McKibb in, "Class and Poverty in Edwardian England ", in his The Ideologies of Class: Social Relations in Britain, 1880-1950 (Oxford, 1991), pp. 1 82-3. 57 Sir Lewis Fergusson, Old Time Music Hall Comedians ( Leicester , 1941), pp. 1216; Roberts, Fifty Years of Spoof, pp. 54-6. 58 Era, 18 Nov. 1877. 59 /:.1"r'acle, 1 2 Apr. 1879. 60 J. Humphreys to The Times, 16 Oct. 1883. 61 Bennett, "Music in the Halls", p. 1 2; see also management complain ts from twenty years later that the chorus seized on and amplified offensive phrases: Rutherford, " Harmless Nonsense", p. 144. 62 Era, 1 9 Oct. 1 879. 63 E. Lynn Linton, "The Girl of the Period", in her The Girl of the Period and Olher Social Essays (London , 1883), pp. 1-9 (first pubd in 1 868 in the Sall/rday

65

66 67

68 69 70

Oxford case, see Morning Adverliser, 1 5 Oct. 1896, a copy o f which is filed with the licensing proceedings: Greater London Record Office, Presen�ed Papers, Theatre and Music Hall Committee, London County CounCil (Ox�ord Music Hall, 1 896). The most controversial case of this kind, over the notonous promenades at the Empire, was three years earlier. Frank Merry, "Music Hall and its Music", Music (Nov. 1 896), pp. 385-6; l owe this reference to Kate McCrone. On the gleeful sexual hteracy of middle-class males in reading cues that played off a sub rosa knowledge of pornograp� y . and prostitution in the West End, see the parallel findlllgs of Tracy C. DavIs, Actresses as Working Women: Their Social Identity in Victorian CullUre (London, 1991), ch. 5. . . For the changing pattern among the young, see John Gillis, For Beller, For Worse: British Marriages, 1600 to the Presenl (Oxford, 1985),.pp. 1 64, 268. The cross-cutting engagement of singer and audience in this contex� is analysed in Peter Bailey, "Champagne Charlie: Performance and Ideology 111 the Swell Song", in Bratton (ed.), Music Hall, pp. 49-69. . Robert C. Allen, Horrible Prellilless: Burlesque and Amencan Culture (Chapel Hill, 1991), p. 129. Era, 30 Apr. J 892. . GlasgolV Daily Herald, 6 Mar. 1 875. See also the observat �ons on f�male respon�e . . . by the critic William Archer in his account of the knowlllgl�ess ( , apos�opesls ) of the allied genre of musical comedy: W. Archer, The Theafrlcal World for /896 (London, 1 897), pp. 298-305. . . . . Jane Traies, "Jones and the Working Girl: Class Margll1ahty 111 MUSIC Hall Song, 1860-1 900", in Bratton (cd.), Music Hall, pp. 23 :-48. . Peter Bailey, "Parasexuality and Glamour: The Vlctonan �armald as �ultu �al Prototype", Gender alld Histmy, ii (1990), pp. 148-72; JudIth Walkowltz, Cay ,

71 72

0/ Dread/ul Delight: Narratives 0/ Sexual Danger in Lale- Vlctonan l:ollclon (Chicago, 1992), esp. pp. 45-52. Hoggart, Uses of Literacy, treats knowmgness very much as a male mode; see n. 85 below. 73 Anon., "Our Music Halls", Tinsley's Mag. (Apr. 1 869), pp. 2 1 6-23. , 74 Ibid. ' see also Anon., Life, Career alld Adventures of a Genl 'Or Any Olher Man ( Lo don, 1862); Stedman Jones, '' 'Cockncy' and the Nation", pp. 290-4, on the

�

ncw " 'Arry-stockracy". 75 Talbot Baines Reed, The Cock House at Fellsgarth (London, n.d.), pp. 21-7,

34. 76 On examples of upper-class and other styles, see � olm Cliv�, In (f Manner o, r Speaking (Kenneth B. Murdock Lecture, Harvard UIlIV., Cambndge, Mass., 1979), K. C. Phillipps, Language and Class in Victorian England ( London, 1 98 ). 77 Ashby minor might have learned the formula from F. Ans�ey, Mr. Punc�l s Mod�1 Music Hall (London, 1 890), though, for all its conventional mannensms, thiS

�

�

could be an elusive and highly nuanced mode.

78 P. N. Furbank, E. M. Forsler: A Life, 2 vols. ( London, 1 977), i, p. 5 1 . 79 George Orwell, "The Art of Donald McGill", i n his Collected Essays, 3 vols. (London, 1 968), ii, pp. 1 61-2. Nonetheless, music-hall humour of t /S penod

?

continued to evince considerable class tension; see Rutherford, , H �rmless Nonsense", p. 149. It would be interesting to pl ? t the later course ofknowmgncss and other comic modes in registering class distance even as they were shared with a middle-class audience, testing Hoggart's claim that "the consensus of critical laughter is a great British tradition"; Richard Hoggart, "The Future of Teievision", Guardian, 1 3 Sept. 1982. 80 Anon., "Our Popular Amusements", Dublill Ulliv. Mag. (Aug. 1 874), p. 1 99.

Revielv).

64 The title for Susan Pennybacker's essay on the London County Council and its long-running campaign to purify the halls, in Bailey (ed.), Music Hall, pp. 1 1 940. See also Chris Waters, "Progressives, Puritans and the Cultural Politics of the Council, 1 889-191 4", in Andrew Saint (ed.), Politics alld the People of LOlldon: The Londoll COllllly Council, 1889-1965 (London, 1 989), pp. 58-62. For the

40

41

..

MUSIC AND SOCIETY

8 1 See, e.g., John Fiske, "British Cultural Studies and Television", in Robert C. Allen (cd.), Channels of Discourse: Telel'l'sion and Contemporary Criticism (Chapel Hill. 1987) . pp. 276-7 (on Madonna). For a critique of such positions. see John Clarke, "Pessimism versus Populism: The Problematic Politics of Popular Culture", in Richard Butsch (ed.), For FUll and Profit: The Trails/ormation of Leisure into Consumption (Philadelphia, 1 990), pp. 28-44. 82 On the limits of comic forms generally, see Umberto Eco, "The Frames of Comic .. ·Freedom in T. A. Sebeok (ed.). Carnival (Berlin. 1 994). pp. 1-9. 83 cr. "good sense": Sue Golding, Gramsci's Democratic Theory (London, 1992), pp. 1 10. 1 80-1 n. 78. 84 See lain McCaiman, Radical Underworld: Prophets, Revolutionaries and Porno­ graphers ill Londoll. 1795-1840 (Cambridge. 1988). pp. 162-77; Anna Clark. "Queen Caroline and the Sexual Politics of Popular Culture", Representations, 11 0 . 3 1 ( 1 990). pp. 47-68; Christopher A. Kent. "Victorian Self-Making. or Self­ Unmaking? The Tichborne Claimant Revisited", Victorian Rev., xvii, no. I (1991), pp. 1 8�34; Rohan McWilliam, "Radicalism and Popular Culture: The Tichbornc Case and the Politics of 'Fair Play''', in E. Biagini and A. Reid (cds.), Currents of Radicalism (Cambridge. 1991). pp. 44-64. 85 Hoggart, Uses of Literacy. eh. 9; and on press "ventriloquism", Hall, "Decon­ structing 'the Popular''', p. 232. In keeping with his more wholesome values, Hoggart is informing but judgemental on the latter-day knowingness he observes flourishing - festering? - amid "the doggy communion of the bars": Hoggart, Uses of Literacy, pp. 235-6. This does, however, suggest something of its specifically male properties. The ultimate pathology of knowingness is wincingly caught in the Monty Python sketch, 'Nudge, Nudge, Wink, Wink": Graham Chapman et al., Monty Python's Flying Circus: Just the Words, 2 vols. (London, 1 990). i. pp. 40-1 . 86 See Richard Ohmann, "History and Literary History: The Case of Mass Culture", in James Naremore and Patrick Brantlinger (eds.), Modernity and Mass Cullure (Bloomington. 1 991). pp. 24-41 . 87 One such strand that has received passing historical attention is "camp", the argot of the homosexual subculture. Derived from parlary, the theatre and showbiz slang (see n. 51 above), camp has obvious affinities with knowingness, and its similarly ambiguous inflections heavily colour more recent comic wit. See Jeffery Weeks, Sex, Politics and Society: The Regulation of Sexuality since 1800 (London, 1 98 1 ), p. I I I ; Susan Sontag, "Notes on 'Camp' ", in her Against Interpretation (New York, 1966), pp. 275-92. At present, however, pioneering work on popular discourse tends to privilege more formalized modes, notably melodrama. 88 Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste (London, 1 984), also notes a "knowing silence" as a particular bourgeois bluff employed in playing the culture game (pp. 43. 52-4 . 89). Discussion of the present paper by North American audiences has been directed at national rather than class or gender variations, with suggestions that knowingness is absent from some modern cultures. ••

2 F R AN C I S J A M E S CH I L D A N D TH ,E ' B A L L A D C O N S EN S U S '* Dave Harker Source: Folk Music JOIIl'll01 14 (1981): 146-64.

To many people. Child's The English and Scottish Popular Ballads has the immobility of a monument. Its sheer bulk. wealth of detail and apparently exhaustive critical apparatus do. indeed. present a formidable appearance; yet a closer inspection of the theoretical foundations of Child's edifice will reveal not only a circularity of argument but also. ironically. a distinct lack of self-confidence.' Bert Lloyd was one of the first to challenge the notion of an 'unquestioned aristocracy' of so-called 'Child ballads', which can only refer to a limited selection of ballads. if at all. And whatever the literature dons might think. not all these nobles are in Francis ]. Child's English and Scoltish Popular Ballads, nor can all the items in that great compilation be numbered among the peers of the folk song realm. The majority of Child's selection represents but one stage of the ballad. a middle stage lying between the old form of epic song and the newer form of domestic ballad. journalistic ballad. street song and the like.' So. when Walter Hart noted in 1906 that 'the significant fact is that for at least forty years Professor Child retained without essential change his conception of the traditional ballad as a distinct literary type' (,PCB'. p. 800). he pointed to the basis of the theoretically incestuous process which underpins the formation of what I propose to call the 'ballad consensus'. *

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We still do not have a full-length critical or biographical study of Child. There are sketches available.' but the US folklore industry has yet to grasp

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the nettle o f coming to terms with its founding father. Only a brief outline is possible here. Child was born in Boston in 1 825, the third child of eight in a , smlmaker s famIly. He went to state schools, but was 'discovered' by the headmaster of the town's Latin School, and encouraged to prepare himself for Harvard. He entered the college when he was seventeen, his fees being paId for hIm, and he quickly excelled in classics, English and mathem atics. He graduated in 1 846, and was appointed college tutor in mathematics, then 111 hIstory and political economy (,FJC', pp. xxiii-xx iv). Between 1849 and 1 8 5 1 , he travelled in Europe, returning to become Professor of Rhetoric and Oratory. He was 'at home in the best methods and traditions of German l nivclsities', a ld was later awarded an honorary doctorate from G6tting en ! � ( FJC: , pp. XXIV-XX V) . Above all, he was influenced by the ideals of Ger­ manic philology:

o f the series' (ESB ( 1 8 6 1 ), I, x). Only in 1 872 did the two scholars begin to correspond, and it was Grundtvig who wrote first (BBBM, p. 242). Their early letters underline the marginality of ballad study both to their academic careers and to their material concerns (BBBM, pp. 242 and 245). We also learn that Child's basic ideas and assumptions about balladry were well established twenty-five years before the appearance of his magnum opus. Child knew what he meant by the term 'true popular ballads' (ESB ( 1 86 1 ), I, vii), by 1 8 6 1 , though he claimed not to have decided finally until a few

The ideals of erudition and of a large humanity were not even suspected of incompatibility. The imagination was still invoked as the guide and illuminator of learning. The bond between antiquity and mediaevalism and between the Middle Ages and our own century was never lost from sight. ('FJC', p. xxv) Kittredge felt that Child's 'greatest contribution to learning' �nay even, in a very real sense, be regarded as the fruit of these years Germany. Throughout his life he kept a picture of William and James Grimm on the mantel over his study fire-place. 111

(,FJC', p. xxv) For twenty-five years, Child's interests in literary and linguistic study had to be subordll1ated to the demands of teaching, administration and examina­ tions. His publications, from Four Old Plays, through the general editorship of a senes of one hundred and fifty volumes of British Poets to his own com­ pilation, Eng/ish and Scottish Ballads of 1 857-9, were essenti� lIy by-products, almost a leIsure-tIme pursuit, for it was not until 1 876 that he was appointed to the more congenial chair of English at Harvard (,FJC', pp. xxiv-xxv). In later years, Child downgraded his first ballad collection, above all to the great DanIsh ballad scholar, Svend Grundtvig, to whom he wrote that

•

years later:

These volumes have been compiled from the numerous collections of Ballads printed since the beginning of the last century. They contain all but two or three of the ancient ballads of England and Scotland, and nearly all those ballads which, in either country, have been gathe�ed from oral tradition, - whether ancient or not. .. (ESB ( 1 86 1 ), I, VII) Yet when we probe this apparently unimpeachable criterion, we find that Child is quick to qualify, especially with regard to the broadside ballad: No words could express the dulness and inutility of a collection which should embrace all the Roxburghe and Pepys broadsides. (ESB ( 1 86 1 ), I, viii) If such slurring fails to convince us, we must trust Child's subjective value-judgments: Widely different from the true popular ballads, the spontaneous products of nature, are the works of the professional ballad-maker, which make up the bulk of Garlands and Broadsides. These, though sometimes not without grace, more frequently not lacking in humour, belong to artificial literature - of course to an humble department. (ESB ( 1 86 1 ), I, vii)

And because it was important to make the book 'tolerably saleable' (BBBM, p. 255), the necessary comparative ballad study was sacrificed to 'the progress

Such couplets - popular/professional, spontaneous/artificial, nature/art - beg the key questions. Did broadside-makers really try to make 'art', but fail; or were theirs different criteria? Was there only one literary tradition - the current custodians of which included Harvard professors - or were there several? But instead of historical evidence about the nature of majority culture in medieval Britain, Child offers his own opinion, backed up by that of other litterateurs and literature scholars; and in the end, he fudges his previous confident assertions with two catch-all riders:

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The collection was made as a sort ofjob - forming part of one of those senseless huge collections of British Poets.

(BBBM, p. 246)

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This distinction is not absolute, for several o f the ancient ballads have a sort of literary character, and many broadsides were printed from oral tradition. (ESB ( 1 8 6 1 ), I, vii, note)

For the Texts the rule has been to select the most authentic copies, and to repri �t them as they stand in the collections, restoring all readings that had been changed without grounds, and notlllg deviations from the originals, whether those of prevIOus edItors or of this edition, in the margin. Interpolations acknowledged by the have editors have generally been dropped. [n two instances only previous texts been superceded or greatly improved. (ESB ( 1 861), I, x)

Later, to Grundtvig, he confessed that he had felt obliged to include everything the English [sic] had been accustomed to call a Ballad, at least in specimens. It is true that I might have separated the proper Volksballade from the others: and I wish that I had done so.

(BBBM, p. 262) The 'English', of course, were still the literary mediators, not the people at large. What focused Child's theory and practice was the appearance of . Grundtvlg's Danske Folkeviser. Though he saw it 'quite late' (BBBM p. 262), he spent the est of his life adapting himsel f to Grundtvig's ideas � and apologlZlIlg for hIS Own earlier efforts, such as the inclusion of longer pIeces III hIS first ballad collection, because they were 'not of the nature of ballads' (ESB ( 1 857), I, xi note). In his second edition, Child set about a radIcal restructuring:

:

Certain short romances which formerly stood in the First Book have been dropped . . . in order to give the collection a homoge�eous character. (ESB ( 1 86 1 ), I, xii) And in the 1 86 1 edition, he wrote of the 'popular ballads' that Many of the older ones are mutilated, many more are miserably corrupted, but as long as any traces of their originals are left, they are worthy of attentIon and have received it. When a ballad is e�tant in a variety of forms, all the most important versions are gIven.

(ESB ( 1 86 1 ), I, viii)

Yet by relying on his own untheorized assessment of the 'best' previous , editors and mediators in what he terms 'The Pnnclpal CollectIons , ChIld was simply underwriting his own methods and assumption� and ignoring other, differing criteria completely, writing off some collectIOns arbltranly as 'of slight or no importance' (ESB ( 1 86 1 ), I, xiii). Child evidently despaired of matching Grundtvig's edition, for 'the material is not !o be had', though 'schoolmaster and clergyman' in those retired nooks where tradition longest lingers, have been very active in taking down ballads from the mouths of the people. (ESB ( 1 86 1), I, xi)

( 1 861), A large number of manuscripts had been placed at his disposal (ESB Percy Manuscnpt, there was I , xi); but, apart from the pUblicat ion of the little to be done, for Civilization has made too great strides in the island of Great Britain for us to expect much more from tradition. (ESB ( 1 86 1 ), I, xi-xii) 'Civilization' in other words, is defined as being antagonistic to 'tradition'. And for all his avowed reverence for that abstraction, 'the people', Child had but little respect for real workers in country or in town. [n 1 857 he wrote: One uncommonly tasteless stanza, the interpolation of some have nursery-maid, is here omitted. Too many of Buchan's ballads vulgar. and prolix both become have and way, this in suffered (ESB ( 1 857), I, 306 note)

Deference apart, Child knew what an 'original' ballad looked like, and so understood when It had been 'corrupted'. More, he already had a hierarchy �f what was to be esteemed 'important', and felt no qualms in relegating all those pIeces whIch are wanting in general interes t' to an appendix for the benefit of 'readers for pleasure' (ESB ( 1 86 1 ), I, viii). Already, � self-produced aura of scientificity surrounded his work, supported by his undoubtedly high editorial standards:

In such asides we discover the hidden criteria, most of them negative, which were used to 'define' the 'true popular ballads'. Unsurprisingly, such cntena were those of contemporary bourgeoist taste, which sometimes required the suppression even of 'true' pieces, because of the objectionable nature of their subjects (BBBM, p. 264). The interested reader was referred to the

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general index for the sources of pieces like The Bonny Hynd and The BaJJled Knight, which threatened to offend ears polite (ESB ( 1 8 6 1 ), I, vii, note); yet, as Gershon Legman remarks, when we consider that Child's chosen ballads silently condone sadism, butchery, murder and any amount of physical violence, it is curious that sexual relations had either to be apologized for or silently omitted.' The whole process of the 'refining definition' was, of course, circular. Exceptions were shanghied to 'prove' rules. If the ballad was fundamentally inimitable, then Sir Patrick Spence,

those terms are always and must be the valuations, the selections and omissions, of other men. ('FLG', p. 7)'

if not ancient, has been always accepted as such by the most skilful judges, and is a solitary instance of a successful imitation, in manner and spirit, of the best specimens of authentic minstrelsy. ('PCB', pp. 796-7) However, his appeal to authority was by no means a blanket one:

[ cannot assent to the praise bestowed by Scott on The OutlalV Murray. The story lacks point and the style is affected - not that of the unconscious poet of the real (raditional ballad. (ESB ( 1 857), VI, 22) By implication, of course, we are being asked to accept that 'traditional' balladry consists of stories lVith a point, in an unaJJected style, and not written by a poet conscious of his or her role. And, in general, it never seems to have struck Child as crucial that, while challenging the dubieties of some previous ballad mediators, he was effectively underwriting the mediating practices of the remainder, though they were as innocent of theorizing as could well be. Underpinning Child's apparently objective empirical scholar­ ship, and making it possible, is the prior assumption that there are such 'permanent forms' as 'ballad' and 'folksong', just as in literature it is assumed that 'epic' and 'romance' exist, and then all our active study is of variations within them, variations that may be admitted to have proximate causes, even a social history, but that in their essential features are taken in practice as autonomous, with internal laws.'

In the production of The English and SCOllish Popular Ballads, the chief of the 'other men' was Grundtvig, to whom Child all but disowned his previous edition: 'J never pretended that the arrangement was founded on a deeper principle than convenience' (BBBM, p. 254); and though 'In general, I suspected everything that was not vouched for by some other [sic] collector of credit', he admitted that 'I certainly ought to have proceeded upon a clearer principle' (BBBM, p. 270). However, his misgivings did not prevent him from defining 'ballad' for Johnson's Universal Cyclopaedia, but he soon wished the article 'to be neither quoted nor regarded as final' ('PCB', p. 756). There, too, what is most noticeable is the almost complete absence of positive statements, after the standard dictionary definition of a 'ballad' as 'a narrative s9ng, a short tale in lyric verse' (,PCB', p. 7 8 1 ) . Other than that, he adds a Social Darwinist dimension to the place of the 'popular' ballad in cultural history. This 'distinct and very important species of poetry' has a 'historical and natural place', anterior to the appearance of the poetry of art, to which it has formed a step, and by which it has been regularly displaced, and, in some cases, all but extinguished. ('PCB', p. 756) Hence, in part, the attempt at chronological arrangement in the first compilation: hence, also, the need to dissociate the largely literate cul­ ture of nineteenth-century British workers from that of their own ancestors. Necessarily, Child does violence to any rational (or even empirical) conception of history, resorting instead to the authority of the brothers Grimm, or to the unmitigated romanticism of his favourite editor, William Motherwell:'

is seen not as it is, an active and continuous selection and re­ selection, which even at its latest point in time is always a specific choice, but now more conveniently as an object, a projected reality, with which we have to come to terms on its terms, even though

Whenever a people in the course of its development reaches a certain intellectual and moral stage, it will feel an impulse to express itself . . . The condition of society in which a truly national or popular poetry appears explains the character of such poetry. It is a condition in which the people are not divided by political organization and book-culture into markeqly distinct classes, in which consequently there is such community of ideas and feelings that the whole people form an individual. Such poetry . . . will always be an expression of the mind and heart of the people as an individual, and never of the personality of individual men. The

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So, as in normative literary criticism, tradition

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fundamental characteristic o f popular ballads is therefore the absence of subjectivity and of self-consciousness. Though they do not 'write themselves', as William Grimm has said, though a man and not a people has composed them, still the author counts for nothing, and it is not by mere accident, but with the best reason, that they have come down to us anonymous. (,PCB', pp. 756-7)

by the majority British population, are condemned out o f hand. In this way does Child seek to impose his own, essentially static, conception of cultural development. After each literary 'species' has reached its Darwinian apogee, its status is that of a delicate fossil:

This alleged cultural homogeneity, before the cultural watershed of the appearance of 'art' (as reinforced by literacy and print), is implicitly contrasted with the cultural variety and individualism of Child's Own society, against which he and other liberal intellectuals strove gamely, wIllIe forgetting the underlying divisive nature of the capitalist mode of production. Working people's role in even the transmission of balladry is systematically minimized: The primitive ballad, then, is popular not in the sense of something arising from and suited to the lower orders of a people. As yet, no sharp distinction of high and low exists, in respect to knowledge, desires, and tastes. An increased civilization, and especially the introduction of book-culture, gradually gives rise to such a division; the poetry of art appears; the popular poetry is no longer relished by a portion of the people, and is abandoned to an uncultivated or not over-cultivated class - a constantly diminishing number . . . The popular ballad is not originally the product or the property of the lower orders of the people. Nothing, in fact, is more obvious than that many of the ballads of the now most refined nations had their origin in that class whose acts and fortunes they depict the upper class. (,PCB', p. 757) _

The role of 'the lower orders' is merely instrumental. By contrast, what 'the lower orders' preserved is seen as a positive acquisition for Child's own class culture, in one of its romantic, populist modes; while the products of the broadside publishers, from the sixteenth century to the later nineteenth century, are stigmatized as a different genus; they are products of a low kind of art, and most of them are, from a literary point of view, thoroughly despicable and worthless. (,PCB', p. 757)

ballads which have been handed down by long-repeated tradition have always departed considerably from their original form. If the transmission has been purely through the mouths of unlearned people, there is less probability of wilful change, but once in the hands of professional singers there is no amount of change which they may not undergo. (,PCB', pp. 757-8) Change equals corruption: professionalisation of a social role equals individualism; the absence of formal education is all but a precondition o f accurate transl1)ission, and the only effect o f 'unlearned people' o n balladry is a deleterious one. Having read the minds of the makers of the 'original form' of the ballad, Child has no need of any further understanding o f the complexities o f medieval culture. Instead, he is content t o underwrite the cultural expropriation of the majority, historically, and in his own day (,PCB', p. 758). *

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The relationship between Child and Grundtvig was fundamentally a commercial one. The Danish scholar had to ask for money, 'painful and disgusting' though it was (BBBM, p. 245), in order to help with The English

and Scottish Popular Bal/ads: Though my assistance is not to be bought, yet it must be paid for, or else, I am sorry to say, it cannot be given. The fact is, that as a professor of the university I have only a small salary, and all my spare hours therefore must be turned to profit, not only in an ideal, but also in a material point of view. . . . To speak plainly, I must value the time it would take me to give you all the information I could wish, to the sum of 500 American dollars. (BBBM, p. 245) Child's response was matter-of-fact, unsurprised and even grateful:

So, manuscript sources get precedence over printed ones; and the whole range of alternative, often commercially oriented institutions, made and used

Your cooperation I regard, I need not say, as beyond any money value, and the very small sum you mention it would not be out of my power to advance, in expectation of receiving it back finally from the profits of the work. Unfortunately professors all the world

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over are for the most part far from independent in their circum­ stances, and I belong to the great majority, though I fancy I am much better paid than much superior men at Copenhagen. (BBBM, p. 247)

stupid) that it will be very hard, and to me a t this moment looks impossible, to draw a line. (BBBM, p. 254)

In the event, Grundtvig's cash didn't reach him until almost five years later

(BBBM, p. 272); though Child's weather-eye for the chance to 'drop the

Ballad Society' and to 'seek for a publisher' with a view to getting royalties, indicates that he was well aware of the commercial possibilities of exploiting Grundtvig's reputation and scholarship (BBBM, p. 247). Grundtvig's advice and example was crucial, not only to the contents of Child's magnum opus, but even to its structure. Every problem Child had encountered was gone over thoroughly in their correspondence, with the Amencan placing himself explicitly in the posture of a willing disciple: 'With your help I feel sure that I could do the work somewhat as it ought to be done' (BBBM, p. 247). Thus, when the Dane praised Child's first edition, and criticized Hales and Furnivall as 'dilletantes, not scholars', because of their inclusion of 'many insignificant or utterly worthless late transcripts of old metrical tales and romances', compounded by an ignorance of 'corresponding foreign literature' (BBBM, p. 243), Child humbly agreed, even though he had been responsible for pushing Furnivall and the Ballad Society into producing the edition of the Percy Manuscript in question (BBBM, p. 246). In response to his master's invocation of 'genuine popular ballad lore' (BBBM, p. 243), Child claims to have pressed Furniva/l for the inclusion of 'the genuine national ballad', which the latter had 'half consented' to do (BBBM, p. 247):

I told him that not even the stolid patience of a book-collector, a most useful though often well nigh imbecile creature, would suffice for twenty years of Roxburghe Ballads. (BBBM, p. 247) And so as to reassure his mentor, Child reiterated his position on broadsides:

His solution was to draw on Grundtvig's advice for the problems of 'compass' and 'arrangement' which still gave a 'great deal of trouble', even in 1 872 (BBBM, p. 253): We cannot of course exclude all ballads which have not been taken from the mouths of the people - nor perhaps include all such. The oldest Robin Hood ballads are derived from MS., and very many others of the best and oldest, and on the other hand some ballads written in comparatively recent times, especially historical ones, are found in the mouths of the people . . . It is not easy always to distinguish a ballad and what we should call a short romance . . . The Horn 9/ King Arthur J incline to exclude, and yet J fear that my reasons are vague . . . It is a pity one can't consistently insist on the lyrical, or singable, character as a criterion. (BBBM, pp. 253-4) He was still puzzled, two years later, and asked Grundtvig's view on the

criterion of a popular ballad, the distinction between ballad and tale, /abliau, and between genuine national or people's ballads and

all varieties of base kind . . J should like to have you try to express the more subtle characteristics of an old popular ballad in words. (BBBM, p. 268) .

Both men shared a form of romantic, populist nationalism; and Grundtvig not only believed firmly in what he termed 'the Angloscotic department of the common Gothic Middleage Ballad Poetry' (BBBM, p. 249), but even suggested that Child should call his new work The Popular Ballads 0/ the English Race (BBBM, p. 252), allowing some autonomy to the developmg culture of each European nation-state: is there is no doubt that the ballad poetry of the Gothic nations r characte neous homoge a of upon the whole contemporary and form and poetry of style nt, both with regard to its contents, treatme of verse, but nevertheless each department has its own peculiarities. (BBBM, p. 276)

The immense collections of Broadside ballads, the Roxburghe and Pepys, of which but a small part has been printed, doubtless contain some ballads which we should at once declare to possess the popular character, and yet on the whole they are veritable dung­ hills, in which, only after a great deal of sickening grubbing, one finds a very moderate jewel. Some of the later Robin Hood ballads J have scarcely patience or stomach to read: but the declension is so gradual from the freshest and raciest to the thoroughly vulgar (by whIch J mean always the essentially vulgar, the absolutely mean and

Child seems to have accepted this view without demur, given that he had taken Danske Folkeviser 'for a model from the beginning', determining, 'if J ever saw the way to another edition, to make your work my pattern'

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(BBBM, p . 262). I n fact, so implicit was Child's faith that he told Grundtvig he dId not 'esteem it necessary to search in any place where you have passed' (BBBM, p. 255), because 'Every time you edit a ballad which occurs in English you do a large part of my work for me' (BBBM, p. 282). Only on the mediations of Peter Buchan does Child have qualms. Grundtvig responded:

When his employer persisted in picking his brains, Grundtvig back-tracked:

what you [namely Child] term the 'vulgarity' of the Buchan texts is to me the best proof of their material authenticity. For it must be remembered - and is well known to the ballad collectors of the old world, where the tradition of bygone days still lingers on, that in the recent traditions of the common country people (peasantry) the old ballad cannot always appear in a stately and knightly form and apparel, but must in many instances exhibit the traces of a long dwelling in humble company. _

(BBBM, p. 249) All Child could do was to try to rationalize his remaining doubts: They exhibit an artificial vulgarity, it seems to me, and as I have said, there is no variety to this, which makes me fear that it comes from a man and not from a class of people . . . The vulgarity that 1 mean consists in a tame, mean, unreal style of expression, far from volksmassig [popular].

(BBBM, p. 264) Implicitly, then, Child claims to understand the nuances of both medieval and contemporary British workers' speech and syntax, on the basis (so far as we can judge) of an extremely limited and predominantly literary know­ ledge of medieval courtly culture. An apparent humility barely hides a breathtaking pretentiousness. The problem of arrangement dragged on for years: Outlaw ballads separate themselves pretty well . . . My Tryl/evi ser wIll make a natural class, and I have no doubt that this class should come first. But what to put second I wot not.

(BBBM, p. 254) Because he did not wish to do aI/ Child's work for him, Grundtvig stressed beforehand you must have formed your plan and fixed upon the order of contents, which I think ought to be something more systematic than in your former editions, and I should say without any appendices. _

(BBBM, p. 249) 54

any In fact I do not think that the question of arrangement is of edlllon the that is point great weight or consequence. The chief all that contains every bit of genuine ballad lore, and consequently so. been has may be genuine, and I might say, all that (BBBM, p. 260) his pupil to Instead of bothering about niceties of form, Grundtvig urged demurred ChIld Yet 266). p. start publishing - this was in 1 874 (BBBM, (BBBM, p. 269): ready. I shall he reluctant to begin until I have got most of the matter not a IS There ngly. The question of arrangement puzzles me exceedi n. dIVISIo le ptIOnab sufficient criterion for me to make an unexce but recent; and later I might make three divisions of the earliest some of course they would be called arbitrary, and would be SO lll Hood Roblll the of degree. I should have to separate a great mass ly ballads from the few really early ones. This is what I shall probab n. opinio your do, however. I shall be very glad to have (BBBM, p. 257) Of course, a chronological order would have been more problematical than he admits: indeed, he later asked Grundtvig if he had 'formed any vIew as to the time when the English ballads were produced' (BBBM, p. 278). In any event, by 1 875 he name, decided to make only two divisions, 'Romantic', stretching the the to as ly precise and Historical. I have not made up my mind first. ' Ballads r order of individual pieces, but shall put the 'Wonde (BBBM, p. 269) The cash nexus (he had yet to be paid) obliged Grundtvig to produce what was to be the rationale for the arrangement, though he had mlsglvlllgs too: is [sic] Upon the whole I think the subject, the theme,. the contents English the for no rational or natural principle of classIficatIOn another Ballads, and ought not to be the ruling principle here, if . be found may more suitable and scientifically warrantable This is what I have tried to find, and which I now fiatter myself meter to have found, in making not the subject, but the form, . the the of subject the . . of the ballad the ruling principle of division . ement. arrang the ballad should be made only a secondary help in (BBBM, p. 277)

55

MUSIC AND SOCIETY

FRANCIS JAMES CHILD AND THE 'BALLAD CONSENSUS'

Child immediately appr opriated the formula, forgetting to acknowledge Its SOurce un III Grundtvig remarked on his apparent discourt esy (B8BM, pp. 290, 292). Indeed, he aske d the Dane to 'go on with the arra ngement wIth a reason now and then in difficult cases' (BBBM, p. 278), as though Grundtvlg were the eqUIvalent of a present-day research assistant. In fact, there may have been more than a touch of irony in Grundtvig's apparent pleasure in having his ideas ado pted wholesale by 'the very best men of the present day' (BBBM, p. 284)! Even in the 1 870s, Child won ·ie about what he termed 'the chemistry of the Enghsh and Scotllsh ballad , whICh seemed to him to be 'mostly, as Indetermlllable as that of Gre ek myths' (BBBM, p. 272). Thi s diffi culty dId not pl event hIm from asse rting that 'The Sources . . . may be regarded as sealed or dned up forever', or from trying to collect 'such ballads as may be left with the people' in Sco tland (BBBM, pp. 248, 255).

�

I have endeavored by a con siderable amount of correspond ence and by the circulation thro ughout Scotland of an 'Appea l', two thousand copIes of whICh wer e dispersed, so that every cler gym an and schoolmaster in the cou ntry was reached, both to asce rtain how much IS left of traditional ballads in the memory of the people and to get, whatever there is, collected. Several gentlem en hav� taken � warm interest in the matter, and some have pushed their enquiries very zealously. The fruits, however, are sma ll. I hav e not receIved one ballad that has not before been printed, and the cop ies taken down from recitatIOn are In general much inferior to thos e that have already been prin ted.

_

(BBBM, p. 256)

This was in 1 873 : fou r years later, he felt that he had 'got all the manu­ scnpts that are to be had', and had 'no reason to wai t long er' for what mIght arise from h,s friends ' collecting in Aberdeenshire (BB BM , p. 271 ), gIven that most collected text s were 'recollections of modern prin t, a most undeSIrable aftergrowth of ora l tradition' (BBBM, p. 263). Apart from the general pro blems arising from using peo ple from one class to collect cultural produc ts from another, in 1 880 Chi ld came across other matenal blockages in a postal blitz amongst the 'gen tlemen' of Shetland: I had s � pposed that, as the Sco tch had been 300 years in pos session of the Islands, enough of them might have gone there to plan t ScottIsh ballads. But that seem s dou btfu l; at any rate, an inte lligent correspondent says that the Sco tch clergy as a class have don e their best to destroy any relic of antiquity in the shape of trad itio n or ballad. Some Norse traditions of value may remain, and the Norse

56

popUlation are said to be much more amenable to appeals i n behalf of traditional remains. (88BM, p. 283) Still he persisted with his 'gentlemen' amateurs, though by 1 8 8 1 he had evidently abandoned Great Britain in favour of his own country. I have issued circulars (there are to be 1 ,000) inviting students throughout the country to unite in gathering ballads from the Irish American popUlation. (B8BM, p. 288) And, disclaimers apart, that circular ;pecifies what Child meant by a ballad he gives instructions for the proper recording of ballads, burdens, and airs, ,\nd prints copies of The Cruel Sister and of Sir Hugh by way of specimens of the sort of thing desired. (BBBM, p. 288 note) In just this way were Child's followers to harden up his collection of ballads into the effective definition of 'popular balladry' in general. •

•

•

The English and Scottish Popular Ballads began appearing in 1 882. Child justified the 'unrestricted title' by 'having at command every valuable copy of every known ballad' (ESPB, I, vii). In fact, he had 'not found one unknown ballad since the Percy MS was printed' in 1 867-8 (BBBM, p. 274): and, compared with his first collection, of the three hundred and five ballads in the new edition, only ninety are new; and these are, for the most part, unimportant additions to the body of ballad literature . . . The main addition of the later collection is thus rather in the way of new versions of important ballads, or of more authentic versions based directly upon the manuscripts; in the citation of a larger number of foreIgn par­ allels; and, generally, in the matter contained in the introductions. (,PCB', pp. 792-3) One hundred and fifteen ballads had been excised from the first collection (,PCB', p. 793), most of which would not have appeared there, had Child been clearer as to his criteria (,PCB', p. 796). Even in the later work, those criteria (though present) are never systematically argued through in the promised (and perpetually delayed) 'elaborate introduction'. Instead, we 57

MUSIC AND SOCIETY

have scribbled notes, a set o f extracts from other scholars, and the obiler dicla sprinkled through his works (,PCB', p. 755, and 'FJC', p. xxix). The debt to Grundtvig is acknowledged, but only sparingly (ESPB, I, ix); yet Hustvedt believed that not only the plan but even the COlllenls of the work published by Child were attributable to Grundtvig, especially to his Index of English and Scottish ballads, which itself changed over the years. For example, the second Index seems to have been pruned according to specific criteria: the following have been excluded, out of different reasons, partly because they were of too local a character, as the Border ballads, partly as decidedly political pieces, some also while they seemed to be of too recent a date or were of a doubtful antiquity. (BBBM, p. 3 0 1 ) Child asked Grundtvig for a recommended list for the new edition, in the later 1 870s, and several items were then restored to favour (BBBM, p. 302). ThIs thIrd Index, Hustvedt is sure, 'exercised a considerable influence on the fo �mation of the canon of English balladry' (BBBM, p. 303);' though Child rejected the book-based chronology offered to him, in favour of a chrono­ logy of his manuscript sources (BBBM, pp. 303-4) ' The hierarchy of those sources is made explicit: Of hitherto unused materials, much the most important is a large collection of ballads made by Motherwell. (ESPB, I, vii)

F R A N C I S JAMES C H I L D AND THE ' B A L LA D CONSENSUS'

None the less, Iradition remained the keystone o f the new collection, supple­ mented by the notion of 'oral transmission', at every stage of whIch we must suppose that some accidental variations from what was delivered would be introduced, and occasionally some wilful variations. Memory will fail at times; at times the listener will hear amiss, or will not understand, and a perversion of sense will ensue, or absolute nonsense, - nonsense which will be servilely repeated, and which repetition may make more gross. (ESPB, V, 309) Ironically, Child elsewhere claimed that the wilful, servile, forgetful and . generally unintelligent people who sustained this process often transmItted accurately. Indeed, he believed that the ballad was 'at its best' ion, yet even so when it ha$ come down by a purely domestic tradit much depends and ure; literat d printe it is sometimes influenced by their varying on and s, reciter the of on the experience and selection its tenacity. for kable remar rily ordina memory, which is, however, (,PCB', p. 805) Thus his earlier statements notwithstanding, the broadside ballad 'may . . . b�come tradition' ('PCB', p. 805), and it is certain that 'old tradition does not come to a stop when a ballad gets into print' (,PCB', p. 760). One of his versions of Queen Eleanor's Confession was probably one of the 'traditional variations of printed copies': The ballad seems first to have got into print in the latter part of the seventeenth century, but was no doubt circulating orally sometime before that, for it is in the truly popular tone. (ESPB, III, 255)

Next came items from K inloch's collection, followed by the ballads sung by the professor's daughter, Mrs Brown of Falkland, to which 'No Scottish ballads are superior in kind' (ESPB, I, vii).10 But Child also relied on the collecting work of other English amateurs, like Frank Kidson and the Rev. Sabine Baring-Gould (ESPB, II, v, and IV, v), whose reliability has lately been questioned . " Robert White, the Newcastle antiquarian who had pur­ chased John Bell's collection of manuscript songs, allowed Child to look through his collections in 1 873, and subsequently made 'a copy of such thlllgs as 1 needed' (ESPB, I, viii). In this case, the 'copy' which appeared in the American's edition is not the same as the version which appears in the manuscript collection." Because Child was for the most part mediating the mediations of other collectors, it was all but inevitable that he believed that

Child seems to have been coming to believe that, because the ballad 'suffers in transmission' it will be 'at its best when it is early caught and fixed in print' (,PCB', p . 805-6). Yet Hart found that Child's later collection

The gathering from tradition has been, as ought perhaps to have been foreseen at this late day, meagre, and generally of indifferent quality. (ESPB, I, vii)"

The advantage to Child of the broadside was its minimization of the human element in the process of transmission; and, if anything, his contempt for those agents seems to have increased. Hind Elill, in one version, 'has been

58

59

�

is much more chary of the admission of broadsides or sheet-ballads: in many cases they are relegated to introductions or appendices; in many more, omitted. (,PCB', p. 793)14

MUSIC AND SOCIETY

F R A N C I S JAMES C H I L D AND THE ' B A L LA D CONSENSUS'

not simply damaged by passing through low mouths, but has been worked Over by low hands' (ESPB, I, 360); while the very idea that Richard Sheale, the Tamworth minstrel, could have written a version of The Hunting of the Cheviot 'is preposterous in the extreme' (ESPB, III, 303). No evidence is adduced: the piece is at most 'part of his stock as minstrel' (ESPB, III, 303). Child knows better than the very agents in the culture what is and is not traditional (ESPB, I, 3 1 7). Other acts of faith are required of Child's disciples. Apparently, the 'lyrical quality' of a piece 'is to be regarded as no less significant than plot as the trait of a true ballad' (ESPB, II, 204 note):

o f departure from the popular matter' (,PCB', p . 766). Intuitively, Child feels himself possessed of the essence, the 'idea', and he builds up a kind of negative photo-fit picture, with only an occasional positive detail on the 'face'. The 'English ballad', apparently, is characterized by 'innocuous humour' (ESPB, III, 258). A change of nationality is 'accompanied by change of the scene of action'; and ballads have a tendency to 'combine' ('PCB', p. 798). Ballad style is 'artless and homely' (,PCB', p. 785); and ballads have their own conventions, the most striking of which is the use of 'commonplaces' (,PCB', p. 788). But then we return to the shadows around the face, to the things which the ballad is not. 'Learned words do not occur in ballads' (ESPB, v, 309). Extravagance, exaggeration, cynicism, sophistica­ tion, over-refinement, moralizing, and triteness of plot, are 'not character­ istic' (,PCB', pp. 779-8 1 ). Ballad subject-matter is not 'horrible', and ballad style is 'not feeble in execution, not prolix and vulgar, and not affected' (,PCB', p. 800). Neither was a ballad historically accurate: 'A strict accordance with history . . ; would be almost a ground of suspicion' (ESPB, II, 19). Such a web of arbitrary assertion should give pause to those people inclined to fetishize Child's The English and Scottish Popular Ballads, and is the reason why he was not only unwilling but unable to theorize his assump­ tions. Having disowned his article in the Universal Cyclopaedia (,PCB', p. 755), and with no contemporary scholar having what Kittredge termed the 'hardihood' to do his job for him (,FJe', p. xxix), later generations have been left to struggle as best they can with the whole mass of information. We have to try to tease out underlying principles from insufficient data; but we can fairly conclude that Child's magnum opus is simply its own definition - a product of a particular stage of academic scholarship. And so long as we are careful not to confuse its underpinning ideology with science, or to take at face value its comments on the cultures from which the ballads came, and through which they passed, we may continue to use the texts as highly mediated examples of the kinds of songs described by late nineteenth cen­ tury English-speaking literary scholars as 'ballads'. About the lives, interests and general culture of the people who made, remade and used these songs, however, a compilation such as Child's can tell us almost nothing."

A simple but life-like story, supported by the burden and the air, these are the means by which such old romances seek to produce an impression.

(ESPB, II, 204 note) Either we agree, with Child, that Johnie Cock really is a 'precious specimen of the unspoiled traditional ballad', or we don't: he does not deign to argue (ESPB, III, I ). And, i n general, we must subscribe to a long list of criteria, almost all of them negatives, which effectively constitute Child's ballad 'idea'. Hart summarized these 'litmus tests' thus: Necessary as the story is . . . it is seldom completely told in the ballad . . . Transitions are usually abrupt . . . These abrupt transitions do not, then, result . . . in incoherence, which accompanies corrup­ tion and is a sign of degeneracy . . . Coherence, on the contrary, is a characteristic of the true ballad, an important phase of ballad excellence. (,PCB', pp. 782-3) Brevity, apparently is a ballad characteristic; but then come more negatives: Introductions, not closely connected with the ballad story, are not characteristic . . . The action is seldom carefully localized . . . In dealing with the supernatural the way of the true ballad is to omit description or explanation . . . Ghosts, though not thought . sufficIently strange to demand special treatment, should, nevertheless, 'have fair reason for walking'. (,PCB', pp. 783-5) Chipping and peeling away at the whole body of song, so as to get at (or at least near) the kernel of the 'true ballad', Child is able to make that imagin­ atIve leap ahead of the evidence, operating on the principle that, as Hart put It, there are 'degrees of departure from the popul ar style', and 'degrees 60

Notes * This essay is the first part of a study of the 'ballad consensus'. A second es�ay w�ll deal with the development of the 'consensus' up to the 1930s, and a thIrd will examine its influence up to the present day. t This term, and all other terms associated with marxist analysis. will be used here strictly in their scientific meanings.

N.B. In order to minimize repetition, each source will be given in full when first mentioned but will then be referred to in the text in parentheses by the initials of the title (whicl are given after the first full reference to that title), and the edition, where necessary.

�

61

MUSIC AND SOCIETY

2 3

4 5 6

7 8 9 10

11 12 13 14 15

The chief sources are Sigurd Bernhard Hustvedt's Ballad Criticism in Scandinavia and Great Britain during the Eighteenth Centwy (BCSGB) (New York: American­ Scandinavian Foundation, 1 9 1 6), and especially his Ballad Books (llId Ballad Men (BBBM) (Cambridge Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1930), which contains the Child-Grundtvig correspondence during the years 1 872-83, and the Jndex com­ piled during the preparation of The English and Seollish Popular Ballads (ESPB) (Cambridge Mass.: Houghton, Mimin and Company, 1 882-98) which has been reprinted (New York: Dover, 1965). Additionally, there is Walter Morris Hart's 'Professor Child and the Ballad' ('PCB'), which contains Child's obiter dicta rrom the article in the Universal Cyclopaedia and from the editions of English and Scollish Ballads (ESB) (for example Boston Mass.: Little, Brown and Company, 1 857-9, and London: Sampson Low, Son and Company, 1 861). Hart's article may be found in the Dover reprint of Child ESPB ( 1 965), v, and in the Publications of the Modern Languages Association 0/ America, 2 1 ( 1 906), 755-807. A. L. Lloyd, Folk Song in England (FSE) (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1 967), p. 135. For example G. L . Kittredge, 'Francis James Child' ('FJC'), in Child ESPB ( 1 965), I, xxiii-xxxi. See, for example, G. Legman, The Horn Book (New York: University Books, 1 964), pp. 343-52. Raymond Williams, 'From Leavis to Goldman' ('FLG'), New Left Review, 67 ( 1 97 1 ), 7. Compare David Ian Harker, 'Popular Song and Working-Class Consciousness in North-East England' (unpublished Ph.D. thesis, University of Cambridge, 1 976), pp. 5-14. Compare William Motherwell, Minstrelsy Ancient and Modern (Glasgow: J. Wylie, 1 827), Introduction passim. Compare Child, ESPB, v, 182. Interestingly, almost 5 1% of Child's main texts came from printed sources (including broadsides), while the remaining 49% came from either manuscript or oral sources. A preliminary survey reveals that of the 1 700 and more texts used by Child in ESPB (excluding appendices, but including major additions, and using the first-given source for each variant), Motherwell's MSS, note-book, and published texts account for almost 1 2%, Buchan's for almost 9%, and Kinloch's and Scott's for 7% apiece. Together with Herd and Percy, the work of six individuals accounted for approximately 43% of the texts used. See, for example, A. E. Green's 'Foreword' to Frank Kidson, Traditional Tunes (Wakefield: E. P. Publishing, 1 970), pp. v-xviii. The Bell/ White Manuscript Song Collection, edited by David Ian Harker and Frank Rutherford (Durham: The Surtees Society, forthcoming). Only about 5% of Child's texts seem to have come from such sources, directly. Some 15% of Child's main texts seem to have come from broadsides and garlands, and especially those which have to do with Robin Hood. See, for example, David Buchan, The Ballad and the Folk (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1 972), and the critiques of that work which are now appearing - for example, Bob Munro, 'The Bothy Ballads', History Workshop JOllrnal, 3 (Spring 1977). 1 84-93. For an analysis of the mediating work of Cecil Sharp, see the early article by the present writer, 'Cecil Sharp in Somerset: Some Conclusions', Folk Music Journal, 2 (1 972), 220-40, and the development of that work, which will include a brief analysis of the connections between Sharp's work and that of A. L. Lloyd, 'May Cecil Sharp be praised?', His/ory Workshop Journal (forthcoming).

62

3 C LA S S I C B LU E S Leroi Jones {lmamu Amiri BarakaJ Source: L. Jones (1963) Blues People. New York: William Morrow and Company, 8 1-94.

What has been called "classic blues" was the result of more diverse sociolo­ gical and musi�al influences than any other kind of American Negro music called blues. Musically, classic blues showed the Negro singer's appropriation of a great many elements of popular American music, notably the music associated with popular theater or vaudeville. The instrumental music that accompanied classic blues also reflected this development, as it did the Negro musician's maturing awareness of a more instrumental style, possibly as a foil to be used with his naturally vocal style. Classic blues appeared in America at about the same time as ragtime, the most instrumental or non­ vocal music to issue from Negro inspiration. Ragtime is also a music that is closely associated with the popular theater of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Although ragtime must be considered as a separate kind of music, borrowing more European elements than any other music com­ monly associated with Negroes, it contributed greatly to the development of Negro music from an almost purely vocal tradition to one that could begin to include the melodic and harmonic complexities of instrumental music. Socially, classic blues and the instrumental styles that went with it repres­ ented the Negro's entrance into the world of professional entertainment and the assumption of the psychological imperatives that must accompany such a phenomenon. Blues was a music that arose from the needs of a group, although it was assumed that each man had his own blues and that he would sing them. As such, the music was private and personal, although the wandering country blues singers of earlier times had from time to time casual audiences who would sometimes respond with gifts of food, clothes, or even money. But again it was assumed that anybody could sing the blues. If someone had lived in this world into manhood, it was taken for granted that he had been given the content of his verses, and as I pointed out earlier, musical training was not a part of African tradition - music like any art was the result of natural inclination. Given the deeply personal quality of

63

MUSIC AND SOCIETY

blues-singing, there could be n o particular method for learning blues. As a verse form, it was the lyrics which were most important, and they issued from life. But classic blues took on a certain degree of professionalism. It was no longer strictly the group singing to ease their labors or the casual expression of personal deliberations on the world. It became a music that could be used to entertain others formally. The artisan, the professional blues singer, appeared; blues-singing no longer had to be merely a passion­ ately felt avocation, it could now become a way of making a living. An external and sophisticated idea of performance had come to the blues, moving it past the casualness of the "folk" to the conditioned emotional gesture of the "public." This professionalism came from the Negro theater: the black minstrel shows, traveling road shows, medicine shows, vaudeville shows, carnivals, and tiny circuses all included blues singers and small or large bands. The Negro theater, in form, was modeled on the earlier white minstrel shows and traveling shows which played around America, especially in rural areas where there was no other formal entertainment. The Negro theater did not, of course, come into being until after the Civil War, but the minstrel show is traceable back to the beginning of the nineteenth century. White performers using blackface to do "imitations of Negro life" appeared in America around 1 800, usually in solo performances. By the 1 840s, however, blackface was the rage of the country, and there were minstrel shows from America traveling all over the world. It was at least thirty more years before there were groups of traveling entertainers who did not have to use burnt cork or greasepaint. It is essential to realize that minstrelsy was an extremely important sociological phenomenon in America. The idea of white men imitating, or caricaturing, what they consider certain generic characteristics of the black man's life in America to entertain other white men is important if only because of the Negro's reaction to it. (And it is the Negro's reaction to America, first white and then black and white America, that I consider to have made him such a unique member of this society.) The reasons for the existence of minstrelsy are important also because in considering them we find out even more about the way in which the white man's concept of the Negro changed and why it changed. This gradual change, no matter how it was manifested, makes a graph of the movement of the Negro through American society, and provides an historical context for the rest of my speculations. I suppose the "childlike" qualities of the African must have always been amusing to the American. I mentioned before how the black man's penchant for the supernatural was held up for ridicule by his white captors, as were other characteristics of African culture. Also, I am certain that most white Americans never thought of the plight of the black man as tragic. Even the Christian Church justified slavery until well into the nineteenth century. 64

CLASSIC B LUES

The "darky" a t his most human excursion into the mainstream o f American society was a comic figure. The idea that somehow the slavery of the black man in America was a tragic situation did not occur to white Americans until the growth of the Abolition movement. But it is interesting that minstrelsy grew as the Abolition movement grew. I would say that as the "wild savage" took on more and more of what New England Humanists and church workers considered a human aspect, there was also more in his way of life that Americans found amusing. (As who has not laughed at the cork-faced "Negro" lawmakers in D. W. Griffiths' Birth of a Nation? It is a ridiculous situation, ignorant savages pretending they know as much as Southern senators.) As the image of the Negro in America was given more basic human qualities, e.g. , the ability to feel pain, perhaps the only consistent way of justifying what had been done to him - now that he had reached what can be called a post-bestial stage - was to demonstrate the ridiculousness of his inability to act as a "normal" human being. American Negroes were much funnier than Africans. (And I hope that Negro "low" comedy persists ;ven long after all the gangsters on television are named Smith and Brown.) The white minstrel shows were, at their best, merely parodies of Negro life, though I do not think that the idea of "the parody" was always present. It was sufficiently amusing for a white man with a painted face to attempt to reproduce some easily identifiable characteristic of "the darky." There was room for artistic imprecision in a minstrel show because it wasn't so much the performance that was side-splitting as the very idea of the show itself: "Watch these Niggers." Among the typical "Negro" material performed by the white minstrels are these two songs which perhaps indicate the nature of the parody white minstrelsy proposed to make of Negro life:

The Traveling Coon Once there was a traveling coon Who was born in Tennessee. He made his living stealing chickens . . . And everything else he could see. Well, he traveled and he was known for miles around, And he didn't get enough, he didn't get enough, Till the police shot him down.

The Voodoo Man I've been hoodooed, hoodooed Hoodooed by a negro voodoo; I've been hoodooed, hoodooed, Hoodooed by a big black coon. 6S

MUSIC AND SOCIETY

A coon for m e had a great infatuation; Wanted for to marry me but had no situation. When J refused, that coon he got wild. Says he, "I'm bound for to hoodoo this child." He went out and got a rabbit's foot and burned it with a frog Right by the road where J had to pass along. Ever since that time my head's been wrong. I The black minstrel shows were also what might be called parodies, or exaggerations, of certain aspects of Negro life in America. But in one sense the colored minstrel was poking fun at himself, and in another and probably more profound sense he was poking fun at the white man. The minstrel show was appropriated from the white man - the first Negro minstrels wore the "traditional" blackface over their own - but only the general form of the black minstrel show really resembled the white. It goes without saying that the black minstrels were "more authentic," and the black shows, although they did originate from white burlesques of Negro mores, were given a vitality and solid humor that the earlier shows never had. The minstrel shows introduced new dance steps to what could then be considered a mass audience. The cakewalk was one of the most famous dance steps to come out of minstrelsy; it has been described as "a take-off on the high manners of the white folks in the 'big house . ' " (If the cakewalk is a Negro dance caricaturing certain white customs, what is that dance when, say, a white theater company attempts to satirize it as a Negro dance? J find the idea of white minstrels in blackface satirizing a dance satirizing themselves a remarkable kind of irony - which, I suppose, is the whole point of minstrel shows.) Early Negro minstrel companies like the Georgia Minstrels, Pringle Minstrels, McCabe and Young Minstrels, provided the first real employ­ ment for Negro entertainers. Blues singers, musicians, dancers, comedians, all found fairly steady work with these large touring shows. For the first time Negro music was heard on a wider scale throughout the country, and began to exert a tremendous influence on the mainstream of the American entertainment world; a great many of the shows even made extensive tours of England and the Continent, introducing the older forms of blues as well as classic blues and early jazz to the entire world. Classic blues is called "classic" because it was the music that seemed to contain all the diverse and conflicting elements of Negro music, plus the smoother emotional appeal of the "performance." I t was the first Negro music that appeared in a formal context as entertainment, though it still contained the harsh, uncompromising reality of the earlier blues forms. 66

C LASSIC B LUES

It was, in effect, the perfect balance between the two worlds, and as such, it represented a clearly definable step by the Negro back into the mainstream of American society. Primitive blues had been almost a conscious expression of the Negro's individuality and equally important, his separateness. The first years after the Civil War saw the Negro as far away from the whole of American society as it was ever possible for him to be. Such a separation was never possible again. To the idea of the meta-society is opposed the concept of integration, two concepts that must always be present in any discussion of Negro life in America. The emergence of classic blues indicated that many changes had taken place in the Negro. His sense of place, or status, within the superstructure of American society had changed radically since the days of the field holler. Perhaps what is so apparent in classic blues is the sense for the first time that the Negro felt he was a part of that superstructure at all. The lyrics of classic blues become concerned with situations and ideas that are recog­ nizable as havi.ng issued from one area of a much larger human concern. Classic blues is less obscure to white America for these reasons, less involuted, and certainly less precise. Classic blues attempts a universality that earlier blues forms could not even envision. But with the attainment of such broad human meaning, the meanings which existed in blues only for Negroes grew less pointed. The professionalism of classic blues moved it to a certain extent out of the lives of Negroes. It became the stylized response, even though a great many of the social and emotional preoccupa­ tions of primitive blues remained. Now large groups of Negroes could Sit quietly in a show and listen to a performer re-create certain serious areas of their lives. The following blues was written by Porter Grainger and sung by Bessie Smith:

Put It Right Here or Keep It Out There I've had a man for fifteen years, give him his room and board; Once he was like a Cadillac, now he's like an old, worn-out Ford; He never brought me a lousy dime and put it in my hand; So there'll be some changes from now on, according to my plan: He's got to get it, bring it, and put it right here, Or else he's goin' to keep it out there; If he must steal it, beg it, or borrow it somewhere, Long as he gets it, r don't care. I'm tired of buyin' porkchops to grease his fat lips, And he has to find another place for to park his old hips; He must get it, and bring it, and put it right here. Or else he's gain' to keep it out there. 67

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The bee gets the honey and brings it to the comb, Else he's kicked out of his home sweet home. To show you that they brings it, watch the dog and the cat; Everything even brings it, from a mule to a gnat.

C LASSIC BLUES

The "separate society" was moving to make some parallels with the larger world. An idea of theater had come to the blues, and this movement toward performance turned some of the emotional climate of the Negro's life into artifact and entertainment. But there was still enough intimacy between the real world and the artifact to make that artifact beautiful and unbelievably moving. Classic blues formalized blues even more than primitive blues had formal­ ized earlier forms of Negro secular music. Just as the wandering primitive blues singers had spread a certain style of blues-singing, the performers of classic blues served as models and helped standardize certain styles. Singers like Gertrude "Ma" Rainey were responsible for creating the classic blues style. She was one of the most imitated and influential classic blues singers, and perhaps the one who can be called the link between the earlier, less polished blues styles and the smoother theatrical style of most of the later urban blues singers. Ma Rainey's singing can be placed squarely between the harsher, more spontaneous country styles and the somewhat calculated emotionalism of the performers. Madame Rainey, as she was sometimes known, toured the South for years with a company called the Rabbit Foot Minstrels and became widely known in Negro communities everywhere in America. It was she who taught Bessie Smith, perhaps the most famous of all the classic blues singers. Both these women, along with such performers as Clara Smith, Trixie Smith, Ida Cox, Sarah Martin, Chippie Hill, Sippie Wallace, brought a professionalism and theatrical polish to blues that it

had never had before. They worked the innumerable little gin towns with minstrel shows. By the turn of the century there were hundreds of tiny colored troupes, and some larger ones like The Rabbit Foot, Silas Green's, Mahara's. There were medicine shows, vaudevilles, and circuses when minstrel shows finally died. By the early twenties there were also certain theater circuits that offered tours 'for blues singers, jazz bands, and other Negro entertainers. One of the most famous, or most infamous, was the old T.O.B.A. (Theatre Owners' Booking Agency), or as the performers called it, "Tough On Black Artists" (or "Asses"). Tours arranged by these agencies usually went through the larger Southern and Midwestern cities. While the country singers accompanied themselves usually on guitar or banjo, the classic blues singers usually had a band backing them up. They worked well with the jazz and blues bands, something the earlier singers would not have been able to do. Classic blues was much more an instru­ mental style; tilough the classic singers did not lose touch with the vocal tradition, they did augment the earlier forms in order to utilize the more intricate styles of the jazz bands to good effect. It is valid to assume that ragtime developed from the paradox of minstrelsy insofar as it was a music the Negro came to in imitating white imitations of Negro music. Ragtime (which is not to be confused with the verb rag, which merely meant syncopation) moved so far away from the vocal origins of Negro music that it was easily popularized and diluted, and its purer forms disappeared. It was a composed music - going that far toward the European, or "legitimate," concept of musical performance. It was perhaps the most instrumental, or more precisely, the most pianistic, of any Negro music. The piano was one of the last instruments to be mastered by Negro performers, and it was not until the advent of boogie woogie that Negro musicians succeeded in creating a piano music that was within the emotional tradition of Negro music. Unlike ragtime piano, the earlier blues piano styles were not really pianistic, Negro blues pianists tended to use the piano in a percussive and vocal fashion, almost never utilizing or, almost never able to utilize, the more florid "hundred-finger'd" approach. I mention ragtime here because it seems to me important to consider what kind of music resulted when the Negro abandoned too much of his own musical tradition in favor of a more formalized, less spontaneous concept of music. The result was a pitiful popular debasement that was the rage of the country for almost twenty years. The great classic blues singers were women. Ma Rainey, Bessie Smith, and the others all came into blues-singing as professionals, and all at comparatively early ages. (Ma Rainey started at fourteen, Bessie Smith before she was twenty.) Howard W. Odum and Guy B. Johnson note from a list of predominantly classic blues titles, taken from the record catalogues

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The rooster gets the worm and brings it to the hen; That oughta be a tip to all you no-good men. The groundhog even brings it and puts it in his hole, So my man is got to bring it - dog gone his soul. He's got to get it, bring it; and put it right here, Or else he's goin' to keep it out there. I f he must steal it, beg it, borrow it somewhere, Long as he gets it, chile, I don't care. I'm goin' to tell him like the Chinaman when you don't bring-um check, You don't get-um laundry, if you break-um neck; You got to get it, bring it; and put it right here, Or else you goin' to keep it out there.

MUSIC AND SOCIETY

C LASSIC BLUES

of three "race" companies. "The majority o f these formal blues are sung from the point of view of woman . . . upwards of seventy-five per cent of the songs are written from the woman's point of view. Among the blues singers who have gained a more or less national recognition there is scarcely a man's name to be found.'" However, the great country blues singers, with exceptions like Ida May Mack or Bessie Tucker, were almost always men. But the country blues singers were not recorded until much later, during the great swell of blues and "race" recordings when the companies were willing to try almost any black singer or musician because they were still ecstatic about their newly discovered market. The first recordings of blues were classic blues; it was the classic singers who first brought blues into general notice in the United States. There were several reasons why women became the best classic blues singers. Most of the best-known country singers were wanderers, migratory farm workers, or men who went from place to place seeking employment. In those times, unless she traveled with her family it was almost impossible for a woman to move about like a man. It was also unnecessary since women could almost always obtain domestic employment. Until the emergence of the Negro theater, Negro women either sang in the church (they were always more consistent in their churchgoing) or sang their own personal sadnesses over brown wood tubs. In the slave fields, men and women worked side by side - the work songs and hollers served both. (Given such social cir­ cumstance, one must assume that it was only the physiological inequality of the black woman, e.g. , not infrequent pregnancies, that provided some meas­ ure of superiority for the male, or at least some reticence for the female.)

Dark was de night an' cold was de groun' On which de Lawd had laid; Drops of sweat run down, In agony he prayed. Would thou despise my bleedin' lam' An' choose de way to hell, Still steppin' down to de tomb, An' yet prepared no rna'? 1 love Jesus,

I love Jesus, 1 love Jesus, o yes, 1 do, Yes, Lawdy 3

Only in the post-bellum society did the Christian Church come to mean social placement, as it did for white women, as much as spiritual salvation. (Social demeanor as a basic indication of spiritual worth is not everybody's idea. Sexual intercourse, for instance, is not thought filthy by a great many gods.) It was possible to be quite promiscuous, if it came to that, and still be a person capable of "being moved by the spirit." But in post-bellum Negro society, Christianity did begin to assume the spirituality of the social register; the Church became an institution through which, quite sophisticatedly, secular distinction was bestowed. The black woman had to belong to the Church, even if she was one of the chief vestals of the most mysterious cult of Shango, or be thought "a bad woman." This was a legacy of white American Protestantism. But the incredibly beautiful Jesus of Negro spirituals is so much a man of flesh and blood, whether he is sung of by the church women or those women who left the Church to sing the "devil songs."

Minstrelsy and vaudeville not only provided employment for a great many women blues singers but helped to develop the concept of the professional Negro female entertainer. Also, the reverence in which most of white society was held by Negroes gave to those Negro entertainers an enormous amount of prestige. Their success was also boosted at the beginning of this century by the emergence of many white women as entertainers and in the twenties, by the great swell of distaff protest regarding women's suffage. All these factors came together to make the entertainment field a glamourous one for Negro women, providing an independence and importance not available in other areas open to them - the church, domestic work, or prostitution. The emergence of classic blues and the popularization of jazz occurred around the same time. Both are the results of social and psychological changes within the Negro group as it moved toward the mainstream of American society, a movement that tended to have very significant results. The Negro's idea of America as the place where he lived and would spend his life was broadened; there was a realization by Negroes (in varying degrees, depending upon their particular socia-economic status) of a more human hypothesis on which to base their lives. Negro culture was affected: jazz is easily the most cosmopolitan of any Negro music, able to utilize almost any foreign influence within its broader spectrum. And blues benefited: it was richer, more universal, and itself became a strong influence on the culture it had depended upon for its growth. Ragtime, dixie/and,jazz are all American terms. When they are mentioned anywhere in the world, they relate to America and an American experience. But the term blues relates directly to the Negro, and his personal involve­ ment in America. And even though ragtime, dixieland, and jazz are all dependent upon blues for their existence in any degree of authenticity, the terms themselves relate to a broader reference than blues. Blues means a

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I'm a big fat mama, got the meat shakin' on my bones I'm a big fat mama, got the meat shakin' on my bones And every time I shake, some skinny gal loses her home.

M US I C A N D SOCIETY

Negro experience, i t is the one music the Negro made that could not be transferred into a more general significance than the one the Negro gave it mltIally. Classic blues differs a great deal from older blues forms in the content of its lyrics, its musical accompaniment, and in the fact that it was a mUSIC that moved into its most beautiful form as a public entertainment, but It IS stili a form of blues, and it is still a music that relates directly to the Negro expenence. BessIe SmIth was not an American, though the experien ce she relates could hardly have existed outside America; she was a Negro. Her mUSIC stIli remallled outside the mainstream of Ameriean thought , but It was much closer than any Negro music before it. Notes From Newman Ivey White, ed., The Frank C. Brown Collection of North Carolina Folklore (Durham, Duke University Press, 1 962), pp. 88-89. 2 Negro Workaday Songs (Chapel Hill University of North Carolin a Press, 1926), ' p. 38. 3 From Negro Workaday Songs, p. 196.

4 R I N G SH O U T ! L I T E R A RY S T U D I E S , H I S T O R I C A L STUD I E S, AND B LA C K M U S I C I N Q U I RY Samuel A. Floyd, Jr Source: Black Music Research )01lI'llaI 11(2) (1991): 265-87.

Over the past ten years, black scholars in the field of English literature have identified a black literary tradition and developed critical strategies for study­ ing that tradition from within black culture. And black historians have also been writing black history and American history from a black perspective. In the field of history, their works include Sterling Stuckey's Slave Culture: Nationalist Theory and the Foundations of Black America ( 1 987) and Mary Berry's and John Blassingame's Long Memory: The Black Experience in America ( 1 982), and in literary criticism, Houston Baker's Blues, Ideology, and Afro-American Literature: A Vernacular Theory ( 1 984) and Modernism and the Harlem Renaissance ( 1 987) and Henry Louis Gates, Jr.'s The Signifying Monkey: A Theory ofAfrican-American Literary Criticism ( 1 988). By taking an insider's view of black cultural and literary traditions, these books offer insights that cannot be achieved through more conventional means. The success of an Afrocentric perspective in these fields invites black music scholarship to move beyond the standard approaches of musicology and ethnomusicology, by learning from the theoretical insights of black historians and literary scholars and applying that knowledge to the study of black music. For a glimpse of what existing theories of Afro-American history and letters offer to black music scholars, I will examine the hypothesis of Stuckey and the theory of Gates with musical implications in mind. In doing so, I will use Stuckey and Gates to read black music, Stuckey to read Gates, and Gates to read Stuckey, while recognizing that although literature, history, and music are all different things, certain aspects of black experience may be seen as common to all three. 72

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R I N G S H O U T ! L IT E R A R Y S T U D I E S , H I S T O R I C A L S T U D I E S

What I will propose here i s a mode o f inquiry that is consistent with the nature of black music, that is grounded in black music, and that is more appropriate than other, existing modes for the perception, study, and evaluatIOn of black musical products.

of a religion, expressed through song, dance, and priestly communication with the ancestors, were organic to Africans in America[;] and their movement in a counterclockwise direction in ancestral ceremonies was a recognizable and vital point of cultural convergence" (Stuckey 1 987, 23). What Stuckey does not say, but which will be clear to readers familiar with black culture, is that from these burial ceremonies, the ring straightened itself to become the Second Line of jazz funerals, in which the movements of the participants were identical to those of the participants in the ring­ even to the point of individual counterclockwise movements by Second Line participants, where the ring was absent because of the necessity of the participants to move to a particular remote destination (the return to the town from the burial ground). And the dirge-to-jazz structure of the jazz funeral parallels the walk-to-shout structure of the ring shout, where "the slow and dignified measure of the 'walk' is followed by a double quick, tripping measure in the 'shout' '' (Gordon [1 979] 1 9 8 1 , 449). Today, the ring shout has practisally disappeared from rural black culture, but remnants of it persist in black churches in solo forms of the dance. I should point out here that this "straightening" of the ring into the Second Line does not affect the integrity of the shout. Krehbiel tells us, in what can be considered explanation of this contention, that "The 'shout' of the slaves . . . was a march-circular only because that is the only kind of march which will not carry the dancers away from the gathering place" (Krehbiel [ 1 9 1 4] 1 967, 95). And Courlander reinforces Krehbiel's support as he tells us that the dance is what defines a shout; for, shouting was in reality dancing (Courlander 1 963, 1 95-1 97), whether, I might add, it is or is not in a ring. It seems, however, that the ritual aspects of the shout are enhanced in the ring, because of symbolic implications that had their origin in Africa. Stuckey regards the Negro spiritual as central to the ring and foundational to all subsequent Afro-American music-making. He noticed in descriptions of the shout that, in the ring, musical practices from throughout black cul­ ture converged in the spiritual. These included elements of the calls, cries, and hollers; call-and-response devices; additive rhythms and polyrythms; heterophony, pendular thirds, blue notes, bent notes, and elisions; hums, moans, grunts, vocables, and other rhythmic-oral declamations, inteljections, and punctuations; off-beat melodic phrasings and parallel intervals and chords; constant repetition of rhythmic and melodic figures and phrases (from which riffs and vamps would be derived); timbral distortions of various kinds; musical individuality within collectivity; game-rivalry; hand­ clapping, foot-patting, and approximations thereof; and the metronomic foundational pulse that underlies all Afro-American music.' Consequently, since all of the defining elements of black music are present in the ring, Stuckey's formulation can be seen as a frame in which all black-music analysis and interpretation can take place-a formulation that can confirm the importance of the performance practices crucial to black musical expression.

The ring shout: the foundation of Afro-American music

One of the central tenets of Stuckey's Slave Cullur e is that "the ring shout was the malll context in which Africans recognized values common to them­ the values of ancestor worship and contact, comm unication and teaching through storytellmg and tnckster expressions, and of various other symbolic devIces. Those values were remarkable because, while of ancient African provenance, they were fertile seed for the bloom of new forms" (Stuckey 1 987, 1 6). The shout was an early Negro "holy dance" in which "the circling about . m a CIrcle IS the prune essential" (Gordon [ 1 979] 1 9 8 1 , 447). From contem­ poraneous descriptions of the shout we learn that the participants stood in a rIng and began to walk around it in a shu me, with the feet keeping in �ontact ,,::th or close proximity to the floor, and that there were "jerking," hltchlllg motIOns, particularly in the shoulders. These movements were usually accompanied by a spiritual, sung by lead singers, "based" by others III the group (probably with some kind of responsorial device and by hand-ciapplllg and knee-slapping). The "thud " of the basic rhythm was contmuous, WIthout pause or hesitation. And the singing that took place in the shout made use of inteljections of various kinds , elisions, blue-notes, and call-and-response devices, with the sound of the feet against the floor servmg as an accompanying device. ' The shout has been identified as an African survival by Courlander ( 1 963). The earhest on record in the United States dates from 1 845 (Epstein 1 977 232), but the practice in this country clearly antedates that record . As Epstei� ( 1 977), Courlander ( 1 963), and numerous other schola rs have shown all ring shouts had essent ially the same elements, with variations manifes�ing themselves here and there depending on locale and other factors. From all accounts, the shout was an activity in which music and dance commingled, merged, and fused to become a single distinctive cultural ritual m whIch the slaves made music and derived their musical styles. Stuckey pomts partIcularly to the origin and function of the spirituals in the nng, contendlllg that they should therefore be studie d in relation to their ceremonial, slave-ritual context rather than strictl y frolll the standpoint of ChrIstIan rehglous IIlslttutions. Early O? , the shout was central to the cultural conve rgence of African tradltlon � m Afro-America. In New Orleans, for example, the ring became an essentIal part of the burial ceremonies of AfrOAmericans, in which "from the start of the ceremonies in the graveyard, comp lementary characteristics 74

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Because the ring shout was a dance in which the sacred and the secular were conflated (Gordon (l 979J 1 98 1 , 45 1 ), I must note here the similar conflation-indeed, near-inseparability-of Afro-American music and dance in black culture, both in the ring and outside it. Indeed, the appreci ation of black music and its traits, elements, and practices depend s upon our understanding these features (outlined in the previous paragraph) as accom­ paniments to and ingredients of black dance. For our initial strategies must accept black music as a facilitator and beneficiary of black dance. The shuffling, angular, off-beat, additive, repetitive, and intensiv e unflagging rhythms of shout and jubilee spirituals, ragtime, and rhythm and blues; the less vIgorous but equally insistent and characteristic rhythm s of the slower "sorrow songs" and the blues; and the descendants and derivat ives of all these genres have been shaped and defined by black dance within and without the ring, throughout the history of the tradition. In th� movements that took place in the ring and in dances such as the breakd own, buck dance, and buzzard lope of early slave culture, through those of the Virginia Essence and the slow drag of the late nineteenth century, on through those of the black bottom, Charleston, and lindy hop of the previou s century's early years, to the line dances of more recent days can be seen movements that mirror the rhythms of all of the black-music genres. It was in the ring that these terpsichorean and sonic conftations had their origin and early development and from the ring that they emerged and took many different forms. From their basis in the ring, the sonic practices in these conflations remained singular to the development of all forms of black music. For in moving outside the ring, these musical practices retained the features that made them central to the ring and its expressive values, particu larly the elements of call-and-response, the unflagging and off-beat rhythm s, and the vocal production techniques. Throughout the history of black music, its black listeners have also been dancers. Having emerged from the ring, black music, in the words of Albert Murray, "disposes the listeners to bump and bounce, to slow-d rag and steady shuffle, t? grind, hop, jump, kick, rock, roll, shout, stomp" (Murray 1 978, 144). ThIs relatlonslup between black music and black dance has implica­ tIons for the readmg of Gates's hermeneutics, as we shall see. For in his stress on the material aspects of black cultural practices, there are significant implications for a cultural-studies approach to inquiry into black music.

RING SHOUT! LITERARY STUDIES, H ISTORICAL STUDIES

The inspi �ation for Gates's hermeneutics, as developed in The Signifying Monkey, IS Esu-Elegbara (Nigeria), or Legba (Benin), the mythic al "clas­ Sical figure of mediation who is interpreter of black culture ," "guardian of the crossroads," "master of style," connector of "the gramm ar of divina­ tion with its rhetorical structures," and trickster, all rolled into one. This

figure o f African myth possesses many traits: "individuality, satire, parody, irony, magic, indeterminacy, open-endedness, ambiguity, sexuality, chance, uncertainty, disruption and reconciliation, betrayal and loyalty, closure and disclosure, encasement and rupture," and a host of others (Gates 1988, 6). The symbolism of Esu, this guardian and inspirer of the art of interpreta­ tion, is profound and has significant metaphors in the black music tradition. Legba (the devil) here appears as guardian of the crossroads and grantor of interpretive skills; as trickster, he is embodied most obviously in the gladiatorial improviser of the jazz tradition. Esu's Afro-American descendant, for Gates, is the Signifying Monkey of Afro-American vernacular culture. In black America, the Signifying Monkey is a symbol of antimediation, as Gates puts it. The Monkey's use of language in the well-known tales inverts the status of the Lion "by supposedly repeating a series of insults purportedly uttered by the [tale'sJ Elephant about the Lion's closest relatives (his wife, his mama, and his grandma, too!)" (Gates 1 988, 56). These insults proceed through a series of events, with the Mon key emerging triumphant, escaping the Lion's revenge, and living to continue Signifying on later occasions (see Gates 1 988; Abrahams [ 1 963] 1 970). The tale is filled with sexual innuendo, intimations of abuse and violation, bragging, and put-downs that constitute "versions of day dreams" and "chiastic fantasies of reversal of power relationships" based in vernacular speech, with colloquial, monosyllabic vocabulary and phrasing (Gates 1 988, 59, 60). "To signify," Gates tells us, "is to engage in certain rhetorical games" (Gates 1 988, 48). "Signification luxuriates in the inclusion of the free play of . . . associative and semantic relations" (Gates 1 988, 49). After differentiating the black concept of "Signifyin(g)" from the Standard English meaning of "signifying" and tracing its origins to the Signifying Monkey tales of Afro-American vernacular culture, Gates describes Sig­ nifyin(g) as "the black trope of tropes, the figure for black rhetorical figures" (Gates 1988, 5 1 )-a point to which we shall return later. Signifyin(g) is figurative, implicative speech; it is a complex rhetorical device that requires the possession and application of appropriate modes of interpretation and understanding on the part of listeners (something the Lion did not possess). Signifyin(g) is an art, in itself, to which anyone who has the ability has the right-but a right that must be earned through contest and conquest. (Some individual masters of the art of Signifyin(g) have been H. Rap Brown and Muhammed Ali.) As "source and encoded keeper of Signifyin(g)," the Signifying Monkey is Afro-America's functional equivalent to Esu-Elegbara, his Pan-African cousin (Gates 1988, 75). The Signifying Monkey uses the hermeneutics suggested by the myth of Esu­ Elegbara and the Signifying Monkey poems to present a theory of literary inquiry. The theory proposes the "reading" of (i.e. the criticizing of the works of) the black literary tradition by means of the meanings and implications of the myth of Esu and the rhetoric of the Monkey narratives, exploring

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On interpretive strategies

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"the relation of the black vernacular tradition to the Afro-American literary tradition" (Gates 1 988, xix). I n Gates's theory, Esu-Elegbara is central to interpretation strategies and "stands for discourse upon a text," and "his Pan-African kinsman, the Signifying Monkey, stands for the rhetorical strat­ egies of which each literary text consists"-"the rhetorical principle in Afro­ American vernacular discourse" (Gates 1 988, 2 1 , 44). Together, this duality, of Esu and the Signifying Monkey, serves as the basis for Gates's theory. Gates uses the vernacular to examine the formal, assuming that the vernacular contains within it the very critical principles by which it can be read, that "the vernacular informs and becomes the foundation for black formal literature" (Gates 1 988, xxii). For Gates, "the vernacular tradition Signifies upon the tradition of letters" (Gates 1 988, 22). He assumes that the black tradition has a "fundamental idea of itself, buried or encoded in its primal myths-ambiguous, enigmatic, profoundly figurative, complex rhetorical structures" that can be used for the development of its own critical strategies (Gates 1 988, 23). Gates's theory implies that the musical practices of Stuckey's ring can provide the means for discourse on the musical performances of which they came to be a part. By the same token, they can also serve as Signifiers on and rhetorical strategies of the black music tradition. I n vernacular oral culture the black rhetorical tropes subsumed under Signifyin(g) include "marking, loud-talking, testifying, calling out (of one's name), sounding, rapping, playing the dozens, and so on" (Gates 1 988, 52). In the same way, in music, calls, cries, hollers, riffs, licks, overlapping antiphony, and the various rhythmic, melodic, and other musical practices of the ring serve as Signifyin(g) musical figures and are used as such in musical compositions and performances. These musical figures, as well as others, are used to comment (Signify) on other figures, on the performances themselves, on other perform­ ances of the same pieces, and on other and completely different works of music. Moreover, genres also Signify on other genres: ragtime Signifies on European and early Euro-American dance music, including the march; blues on the ballad; the spiritual on the hymn; jazz on blues and ragtime; gospel on the hymn, the spiritual, and the blues; rhythm and blues on blues and jazz; rock 'n' roll on rhythm & blues; soul on rhythm and blues and rock; funk on soul; rap on funk; bebop on swing, ragtime rhythms, and blues. And the Negro spirituals were Signifyin(g) tropes in their day, with the slave community using their texts to Signify on other ideas, through indirection, in the surreptitious communication so necessary in slave culture. Musical Signifyin(g) is not the same, simply, as the borrowing and restat­ ing of pre-existing material, or the performing of variations on pre-existing material, or even the simple reworking of pre-existing material. While it is all of these, what makes it different from simple borrowing, varying, or reworking is its transformation of such material by using it rhetorically or figuratively-through troping, in other words-by trifling with, teasing,

or censuring it in some way (Wentworth and Flexman 1 960; Major 1 970). Signifyin(g) is also a way of demonstrating respect for, goading, or poking fun at a musical style, process, or practice through parody, pastiche, implication, indirection, humor, tone- or word-play, the illusions of speech or narration, and other troping mechanisms. As Gates ( 1 988, 48, 49) puts it, "To Signify . . . is to engage in certain rhetorical games . . . through the free play of associative rhetorical and semantic relations." It "luxuriates . . . in free play." Signifyin(g) shows, among other things, either reverence or irreverence toward previously stated musical statements and values. A twelve-bar blues in which a two-measure instrumental "response" answers a two-measure sung "call" is a classic example of Signifyin(g): here, the instrument performs a kind of sonic mimesis, creating the illusion of speech or narrative conversation. And when performers of gospel music begin a new phrase while the other musicians are only completing the old one, they may be Signifyin(g) on what is occuring and what is to come through implication and anticipation. The implication is that "I'm already there"; when soloists hang back, hesitating for a moment to claim their rightful place in the flow of things, they're saying "but I wasn't, really." This kind of Signifyin(g) is a way of being in both places at the same time. Signifyin(g) is an essential element of the "Toast" of Afro-American culture. These "long oral epic poems," with their "complex metrical arrangements," varying meters, and swing, whose tellers are "entitled to make [their] own modifications or additions," recall jazz improvisation (Labov et al. ( 1 979] 1 98 1 , 3 3 1 ; Mitchell-Kernan ( 1 979] 1 9 8 1 , 34 1 ). And jazz improvisations are toasts-metaphoric renditions of the troping and Signifyin(g) strategies of Afro-American oral toasts (which include "The Signifying Monkey," "The Titanic," "Stackoiee," "Squad Twenty-Two," "The Great MacDaddy," and others). The theatrical recitations of these narrative poems by black toast­ tellers, which can be heard on street corners, in barbershops, and in pool halls throughout Afro-America, allow great freedom within the restrictions of their form and are characterized by ironic comment; oppositional bal­ ance, e.g., "Hand full of chives, pocket full of herbs" (Abrahams [ 1963] 1970, 99); quick, fluid, and dramatic rendition; situational and textural variation; and what Abrahams calls " /ropisl11s, those elements toward which the per­ formers of the group are attracted" (Abrahams [1 963] 1 970, 1 74). Toasts make use variously of all of the six techniques and strategies of black talk, as identified by Kochman: "running it down, rapping and capping, shucking and jiving, gripping and copping a plea, signifying, and playing or sound­ ing" (quoted in Baker 1 972, 1 1 4). Contests are based around these toasts and are akin to-perhaps led to-the cutting contests that were so prevalent in early jazz and ragtime music. Such Afro-American musical contests metaphorically trope these characteristically Afro-American toasting con­ tests, reflecting the mutability of the expressive structures and strategies that exist in various aspects of Afro-American culture.

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To recapitulate, the Signifiers we observed in the ring-call-and-response, blue notes and elisions, pendular thirds, etc.-became part of the black­ idiom-informed musical genres that emerged from the shout, so that all Afro-American musical products become models to be revised through a continuing Signifyin(g) process, as also do some European genres. It is through this musical troping and Signifyin(g) that the more profound mean­ ings of black music are expressed and communicated. As Gates ( 1 988, 8 1 ) tells us, "the ensuing alteration of deviation of meaning makes Signifyin(g) the black trope for all other tropes, the trope of tropes, the figure of figures. Signifyin(g) is troping." And when used in works composed for the con­ cert hall, it informs that music with Afro-American vernacular meanings, as is evident in works by black composers such as William Grant Still, Florence Price, William Dawson, and T. J. Anderson, and in some works by white composers such as Aaron Copland, Morton Gould, Charles Ives, and others. A word should be said here about the concept of "swing" in Afro­ American music, for it is an essential element and a most elusive quality of black music. Most commentators ignore it or assume that to try to explain it is futile; others provide overly elaborate explanations of it (Schuller 1 986, 5; 1 989, 222-225). From the perspective of the interpretive strategies I am proposing here, however, swing is a natural and perfectly explicable pro­ duct or by-product of the tropings of black music. When sound-events Signify on the time-line, against the flow of its pulse, making the pulse itself lilt freely-swing has been effected. This troping of the time-line by the placement of events against its flow creates the slight resistances that result in the lilt that, while common to all black music, is most pronounced, evident, and persistent in jazz, where this driving, rhythmic persistence in a relaxed atmosphere is typical. Swing is an essential quality of black music. Swing is a dance-related legacy of the ring shout. And the effectiveness of the Signifyin(g) tropes of black music can be measured in part by the extent to which they create and contribute to it. The power of swing is such that even in the absence of motivic and thematic ideas, its presence creates a sense of eventful continuity in a work of music. The relationship of Signifyin(g) to the presence and relationship of dance to music in the ring must be considered. Gates makes the point that Signifyin(g), by redirecting attention from the signified to the signifier, places the stress of the experience on the materiality of the signifier: "the importance of the Signifying Monkey poems is their repeated stress on the sheer materiality, and the willful play, of the signifier itself" (Gates 1 988, 59). There is a strong relationship between Gates's point and the physical presence of the body in the ring shout (clapping, shurning, jerking of the shoulders, etc.) and in subsequent music/dance derivatives of black music. Such dance movements are material signifiers in the music/dance experience, joining the Signifyin(g) musical tropes, discussed above, as material clements

that should be the focus o f our perceptual and analytical attention. For in Signifyin(g), the materiality of the signifier becomes "the dominant mode of discourse" (Gates 1 988, 58). It is this materiality and its solid cultural grounding that prove the impropriety and futility of applying to black music, as aesthetic determinant, the European notion of transcendant, abstract beauty (which leads to formalist analysis and criticism in which "good intonation," "ensemble blend and balance," "proper harmonic pro­ gressions," "precise attacks," and other such concerns take precedence over the content of what is expressed and communicated), and that therefore suggest, or demand, a cultural-studies approach to black music-that is, the ring shout itself contains within it the very basis for inquiry from within the tradition. For it is in this way that black culture understands itself. In sum, I believe that the frame of the ring, the interpretive strategies of Esu-Elegbara, and the Signifyin(g) figures derived from the Monkey tales can coalesce to form the background for a mode of musical inquiry that can expand blac� music scholarship's intellectual reach. The critical approach introduced below is based on two assumptions: that inquiry into the music of black Americans, including all genres from spirituals to Afro-influenced, Europe-oriented concert works, should engage perceptions, beliefs, and assumptions from within Afro-American culture, and that the expressive values of the ring provide the best means of achieving that goal. The test of this approach will lie in its power to produce culturally and musically meaningful evaluation and criticism.

Gates and Stuckey in their work have identified black vernacular traditions that can be effectively examined for their analytical and interpretive implications. And Gates, together with others, has identified a canon-a tradition-of black literature. Through their works, these scholars and those from other disciplines invite us to "step outside the white hermeneutical circle into the black" (Gates 1 988, 258) and to invent other modes of inquiry that reveal the distinctive qualities of the black music tradition. Explanations of musical works and performances as realizations of "ideal form," achievements of "organic unity," or as functional artifacts are insufficient for black music inquiry because they all separate the works from their cultural and aesthetic foundations. And conventional musical analysis is in itself inadequate for the demands of black music scholarship and criticism. In its concern for recognizing previously sanctioned and favored harmonic progressions, melodic contours, rhythmic conventions, formal struc­ tures and their implications and deviations (recognitions that merely stand and substitute for musical evaluation and judgment), traditional musicology has given little attention to the development of judgmental criteria and has ignored fundamental cultural concerns, having found both areas of concern

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to be subjective and speculative, and the latter t o be "social, not musical." Therefore, it is imperative that music scholarship develop criteria for the aesthetic evaluation of works and for the fundamental cultural concerns of every repertory. The key to effective criticism lies in understanding the tropings and Signifyin(g)s of black music-making, for such practices are criticism­ perceptive and evaluative acts and expressions of approval and disapproval, validation and invalidation through the respectful, ironic, satirizing imitation, manipulation, extension, and elaboration of previously created and presented tropes and new ideas. For our purposes, therefore, criticism may be seen as the act of discovering, distinguishing, and explaining cultural and musical value in works of black music through the identification of the elements that captivate our attention and mediate our perceptions and reactions. Attention to this task implies the responsibility of explaining how well or, indeed, whether composers and performers have succeeded in capturing and mediating our perception. As culture-based and culture-wise observers respond to poorly done oral­ verbal Signifyin(g) with such disapproving comments as "That's phoney" and "That's lame" (Mitchell-Kernan [ 1979] 1 98 1 , 324) and to well-done Signifyin(g) with positive comments and expressions-recognizing the effectiveness of the intended witty put-downs and other poetic constructions of oral Signifyin(g) artists-such observers of black music-making respond similarly to musical Signifyin(g) tropes. Whether in verbal or musical ans, this responding customarily often takes place during rather than after per­ formances, creating as a counterpoint to them a variety of call-and-response events. Tn this way, the black-music experience is, to a large degree, self­ criticizing and self-validating, with criticism taking place as the experience progresses. Comments such as "Oh yeah," "Say it," "He's cookin'," and "That's bad," (in response to Signifyin(g) musical events) show approval of those events and, as Murray would say, their extensions, elaborations, and refinements. Musical Signifyin(g) by the performers elicits response and interaction from a knowledgeable and sensitive audience, which participates by responding either vigorously or calmly to the performance. The musical "toasting" that is improvisation is particularly noted by black-music audi­ ences. To paraphrase Mitchell-Kernan ( [1 979] 1 9 8 1 , 325), a Signifyin(g) act that surpasses another in an excellent performance is particularly treasured, while incompetent performances are "likely to involve confusion, annoyance, boredom, and . . . indifference" (Murray 1973, 87). Those who know the culture know when the notes and the rhythms do not fit the context and when the idiomatic orientation is wrong. So must critics. Tf they are to be taken seriously within the tradition they are criticizing, they must recognize their duty "to increase the accessibility of aesthetic presentation . . . . [It isJ primarily a matter of coming to terms with such special peculiarities as may be involved in a given process of stylization" (Murray 1978, 196).

(The self-criticizing process operates spontaneously where performers sing and play in contact with their cultural base. But it cannot function the same way when, for example, blues, jazz, or gospel music are performed for audiences whose behavior is governed by the customs of the European concert hall.) All of this implies that Signifyin(g) tropes must be decoded before they can be appreciated and explained (Mitchell-Kernan [ I 979J 1 98 1 , 327). Indeed, decoding and explaining are what I have tried to do below in my analyses of the Morton and Still pieces. Such decodings and explanations are the stuff of interpretation, and they will vary somewhat from critic to critic. Therefore, we must not eschew differing interpretations of a par­ ticular work; but we can insist that they result in warrantably assenible statements of value-perception.

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"Call-Response": the musical trope of tropes

' The musical practices present in the ring (see page 75) are all musical tropes' that can be subsumed under the master musical trope of Call­ Response,' a concept embracing all the other musical tropes (as the black literary concept of Signifyin(g) embraces the rhetorical tropes of the dozens, rapping, loud-talking, etc.).' The term Call-Response is used here to convey the dialogical, conversational character of black music. Its processes include the Signifyin(g), troping practices of the early calls, cries, whoops, and hollers of early Afro-American culture, which themselves were tropes from which evolved-through extension, elaboration, and refinement-varieties of the subtropes: call-and-response, elision, multimeter, pendular and blue thirds, and all the rest, including interlocking rhythms, monosyllabic melodic expressions, instrumental imitations of vocal qualities, parlando, and other processes that have a kind of implicative musical. as well as semantic, value. The lyrics of a work of black music obviously have semantic value-value whose meaning can easily be understood by informed auditors. And for those familiar with black musical culture, the semantic value of instrumental music is equally evident. Such non-verbal semantic value is explained by Albert Murray in The Hero and the Blues, where he contends that the musi­ cian is concerned with "achieving a telling effect" (emphasis mine, Murray 1 973, 10). Murray describes how the solo instruments in Ellington's band, for example, state, assert, allege, quest, request, and imply, while others mock, concur, groan, "or signify mis-givings and even suspicions" (Murray 1973, 86). But this semantic meaning, this telling effect, is not external to the music. In one sense, at least, Murray's "telling effect" is synonymous with Gates's "semantic relations" (see Gates 1 988, 48); and both concepts can account for and intellectualize what black vernacular musicians feel and assume as they nonchalantly claim that when they play they are "telling a story." Another aspect of semantic value is the exhortative potential of such 83

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instrumental music: the tropes, Signifyin(g)s, and other constructions can exhort soloists to create ever more exciting improvisations and riffs, these exhortations carrying the semantic values of urging, beseeching, and daring. What is being asserted, implied, mocked, exhorted-indeed, Signified-here are the musical tropes of Call-Response: tropes that carry with them the values, sensibilities, and cultural derivatives of the ring. Call-Response-this master trope, this musical trope of tropes-functions in black music as Signifyin(g) functions in black literature and can therefore be said to Signify. It implies the presence within it of Signifyin(g) figures (Calls) and Signifyin(g) revisions (Responses, in various guises) that can be one or the other, depending on their context. For example, when pendular thirds are used in an original melodic statement, they may constitute a "Call"; when they are used to comment upon, or "trope," a pre-existing use of such thirds, they can be said to constitute a "Response," or Signifyin(g) revision. This concept of Call-Response, although suggested by Gates's rhetorical trope of Signifyin(g), is implied by and derived from the musical processes of Stuckey'S ring, as described on pages 74 and 75 above; it is subject to the hermeneutical strategies of Gates's Esu. The theory implied here assumes that works of music are not just objects, but cultural transactions between human beings and organized sound­ transactions that take place in specific idiomatic cultural contexts, that are fraught with the values of the original contexts from which they spring, that require some translation by auditors in pursuit of the understanding and aesthetic substance they can offer. With this in mind, I turn now to the application of this approach to two recorded performances, building in the first instance on Gunther Schuller's analysis of Jelly Roll Morton's "Black Bottom Stomp" and then on Orin Moe's provocative analysis of William Grant Still's Aim-American Symphony. "Black Bottom Stomp"

The performers in "Black Bottom Stomp" are Morton, piano; George Mitchell, trumpet; Kid Ory, trombone; Omer Simeon, clarinet; Johnny St. Cyr, banjo; John Lindsay, bass; and Andrew Hillaire, drums. Together they form the typical New Orleans ensemble: trumpet, clarinet, and trombone fronting a rhythm section. The recording was made on September 1 5, 1926, as Victor 2022 1 . For my analysis here, I used the Smithsonian Institution's reissue in the Smithsonian Collection 01 Classic Jazz set. Gunther Schuller's analysis, illustrated on a chart in his Early Jazz ( 1 968), divides the perform­ ance into thirteen "structural divisions" in which he notes the instrumenta­ tion and number of bars in each and points out other matters of structural interest such as "breaks," "stop-time" events, and modulations. (Since, by press time, permission to reproduce Schuller'S chart had not been forthcom­ ing, I am compelled to refer readers to page 1 57 in Early Jazz.) Schuller's 84

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narrative reveals "at least four different themes and one variant," "a brilliantly stomping Trio," the usual key relationships and chord progres­ sions, the appearances of solos, varieties of rhythm, metric fragments, and use of instruments (Schuller 1968, 1 55-1 6 1 ). Schuller's analysis, as usual, is perceptive, revealing, and informalive. I would like now to expand upon it from the perspective established in the preceding pages. In "Black Bottom Stomp" the "exuberance and vitality," the "unique forward momentum," and what constitutes those "Morton ingredients," all mentioned but not explained by Schuller, are the very derivations from the ring lhat are basic to Afro-American music. The performance is governed by the Call-Response principle, relying upon the Signifyin(g) elisions, responses to calls, improvisations (in fact or in style), continuous rhythmic drive, and timbral and pitch distortions that I have identified as retentions from the ring. At every point, "Black Bottom Stomp" Signifies on black . dance rhythms. Underlying it all is the time-line concept of African music: as rhythmic fo,!ndation for the entire piece, but kept in the background for the most part and sometimes only implied, there is a continuous rhythm that subdivides Morton's two beats per bar into an underlying rhythm of eight pulses. This continuous, implied, and sometimes-sounded pulse serves the function of a lime-line over which the foreground two-beat metric pattern has been placed, and it serves as the reference pulse for the two-beal and four-beat metric structures and the cross-rhythms and additive rhythms that occur throughout the performance. The clarinet and the banjo frequently emphasize this time-line with added volume, thereby bringing it into the foreground as a Signifyin(g) trope, as in, especially B' and B', respectively, but also throughout the performance. At B' the clarinet revises and em­ phasizes the "stomp" rhythm introduced in A ', as well as the time-line, with cross-rhythms derived from African performance practices; in B' the banjo does the same. This is accomplished by these instruments' filling in the quarter-note values and the eighth-note rest of the A ' pattern with repeated eighth notes in which the accents expected on beat three of each measure are anticipated by a half beat. I t is against and around the time-line that all other rhythmic organization and activity take place. The four-beat rhythm that occurs in B 1 , B' , and B', the breaks that occur in B' and B' and the stop-time of B', the accented cross-rhythm of the drummer in B' and B', the "stomp" rhythm highlighled in A' (clarinet) and B', and the after-beats on the tom-toms in B' all signify on and serve as enhancements of the time-line. The activity in B' that Schuller calls "partly 4-beat" is particularly effective, and the breaks serve effectively as goal-delay devices that Signify on the goal-directedness of the piece's melodic, harmonic, and rhythmic structures. It is within this rhythmic and structural frame that improvisation takes place-improvisation that Signifies on (I) the structure of the piece itself, (2) the current Signifyin(g)s of the other players in the group, and (3) the players' own and others' Signifyin(g)s in previous performances. These 85

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Signifyin(g)s take place at the same time the performers are placing within the frame and including within their improvisations timbral and melodic derivations from the ring-the trombone's smears (elisions) in A', the trom­ bone's Signifyin(g) smear on the clarinet's note in B', the muted trumpet with its elided phrase endings in B4, the cymbal break in B ', the trombone smears (cries) and the new tom-tom timbre in B'. Highlighting the entire structure is the string of solos that occur between B ' and B ' and then the out-chorus (B'). Like Martin Williams ( 1 963) and unlike Schuller, I hear the exchange between the trumpet and the full band in A' as a call-and­ response structure, albeit composed (the calls change, the response remains the same), as I do the exchanges in the modulatory interlude following A'­ revising tropes that extend and elaborate, or update, the call-and-response device, which operates on many different structural levels. I also hear the trombone's held-notes in the out-chorus (B') as evocative "shouts" that Signify black religious shouting and its counterpart expression in secular life-calls, cries, and hollers-and I hear Morton's solo in B' as Signifyin(g) on ragtime, which itself Signifies on the foot-patting, hand-clapping after­ beats of the shout (with a "pretty" and embroidered version of the style) and on the stomp rhythm by playing on the time-line while introducing a four-beat rhythm (i.e., the bass player or drummer plays on every beat instead of every other one). The banjo's strummed solo (B') does not repeat the melody that preceded it but Signifies on it and on the accompanying harmony. And the out-chorus Signifies on all that has gone before it. The entire performance, of course, Signifies on the stomp rhythm first heard in A', a troping that validates the title of the piece. Throughout the performance, the breaks, riffs, four-beat tropings, and trombone smears serve as exhortations to the soloists, exciting and incit­ ing them to create more inspired solos, as for example, in B' (four-beat), B' (additive accents), B4 (stop-time and turn-around), B' (four-beat and additive accents), and B' (trombone smears and break). And the performance swings-exhibiting that essential quality of products of the ring-with the normal tropings of the time-line throughout the performance. This quality is pronounced at points where off-beats, back-beats, cross-rhythms, and four-beat rhythms occur-sometimes subtle, sometimes pronounced-such as in the interlude; at B', B4, and B', where the bass and the drums trope the time-line and the banjo's phrasings; and in the last three measures of B] The back-beats of the out-chorus (B') are particularly effective in this regard. Related to this quality is the constant filling of the musical space by the banjo as it tropes the time-line by sounding all its notes, when the other instruments lay out, except in stop-time passages, as at A'. Swing is particu­ larly pronounced in the sections for full band, where several instruments trope the time-line together, in different ways, and at different points. The elisions (smears), call-and-response devices, meter changes, accented cross-rhythms, after-beats, breaks, stop-time tropes-indeed, all the shuckin'

and jivin' Signifyin(g) figures i n the piece (particularly those o f the clarinet and piano)-are rhetorical Call-Response figures that Signify on the musical values and expressions of the ring and its musical derivations; each improvisation Signifies on Morton's melodies and on the inventions of some of the other musicians; and the structure of the piece Signifies, most immediately, on ragtime and, though perhaps indirectly, on European social dance music (which, by the way, includes the compositions of the black composer Frank Johnson who, a century earlier, also improvised on and added inventions to the form with rhetorical tropes, as in his Voice Quadrilles and some of his marches). "Black Bottom Stomp" is fraught with the referentiality that Gates describes as "semantic value," exemplifying ( I ) how performers contribute to the success of a performance with musical statements, assertions, allega­ tions, questings, requestings, implications, mockings, and concurrences that result in the "telling effect" Murray has described and (2) what black performers me&n when they say that they "tell a story" when they improvise. Much more could be said about this piece along similar lines, but my goal in discussing it has been simply to suggest that, heard in this way, the Morton band's performance of "Black Bottom Stomp" is fraught with funded meanings from the Afro-American musical tradition, and its grounding in the ring is unmistakably evident. The expression and communication of the performance, in other words, is fully and deeply rooted in black culture. Like the descendants of Esu-the tricksters of Afro-American culture-its performers combine the ritual teasing and critical insinuations of Signifyin(g) with self-empowering wit, cunning, and guile.

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Afro-American Symphony

Orin Moe-like Schuller, not an Afro-American (as are Stuckey, Gates, and Murray) but sensitive to both the cultural and musical values of both the European and Afro-American traditions-shows an understanding of the dual lineage of black music in two articles: "William Grant Still: Songs of Separation" ( 1 980) and "A Question of Value: Black Concert M usic and Criticism" ( 1 986). Moe's work is superb, as far as it goes, and as with Schuller's analysis, I want to usc it as the basis for my own inquiry. In "A Question of Value: Black Concert Music and Criticism," Moe discusses William Grant Still's A}i'o-American Symphony as a "long blues meditation," a "blues-dominated symphony rather than symphonically dominated blues" in which "the black materials fundamentally alter the inherited shape of the symphony" as the composer "bends the forms to control much of the musical flow." Moe hears Still's intended four move­ ments as five-"two faster outer movements, with two slow movements surrounding a central scherzo," sections "one, three, and five . . . unmistak­ ably black in inspiration," "two and four . . . predominantly American."

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Moe finds Still emphasizing "flow and sectionalization, the variation structure of the blues over the architectonic structure of the symphony" (Moe 1 986, 62-64). Moe's brief analysis is revealing and provocative. It is also a good starting point for more detailed investigation and interpretation from the perspective of our new mode of inquiry. Afro-American Symphony begins with the Afro-American trope of the blues. Following a brief, six-measure introduction in '!. time, a twelve-bar blues is presented as the first theme of the sonata form under which it is structurally subsumed. The first chorus is accompanied by a three-notel two-note riff in the horns and trombones, the second by a steady "walking" rhythm in the strings and riffing figures in the woodwinds in call-and­ response dialogue with the clarinet's melody. This is followed by a modulat­ ing transition passage that Signifies on figures from the two blues choruses by their loving and approving repetition and revision first through upward transpositions then by turning the repetitions downward again; this trans­ ition leads to a second theme area of thirty-two measures, with the second eight measures, and more, being Signifyin(g) revisions created by melodic embellishments and timbral variations. The latter Signifies on the Afro­ American spiritual and possesses many of the characteristics and qualities of that genre, including call-and-response between oboe and flutes/clarinets. This is followed by a brief but vigorous and unusual "development" section that Signifies on the second theme and its figures-actually a song-like section in which the themes-unlike those of development sections in the traditional European symphony-remain intact. Then the second theme recurs in revised form in a different key, with a different instrumentation and accompaniment Signifyin(g) on itself and on the activity that took place in the development section. A four-bar vamp with a two-note riff signals the return of the first theme in muted trumpets, this time over a Signifyin(g) walking accompaniment in the strings and Signifyin(g) comments by the bassoon, horns, and woodwinds. The section features muted trumpets; and accompanying the blues theme are two-note riffs in the French horns and Signifyin(g) figures in the strings and woodwinds. In the truncated second chorus we hear overlapping call-and-response between the clarinet, which carries the theme, and the answering flutes, over a "walking" accompani­ ment in the strings. A brief troping coda, featuring lower woodwinds and Signifyin(g) on the blues theme, brings the movement to a close. The second movement begins with a six-measure introduction that tropes fragments from the blues theme of the first movement. A primary theme of eight measures is stated twice, followed by extensions and elaborations of it in a brief transition that leads to a second theme-a Signifyin(g) revision of the blues theme of the first movement. This second theme, four measures long, is repeated and then is itself extensively elaborated. The first theme is then Signified upon with extensions and elaborations and then is restated. As Moe suggests, this movement is more American, or European, than

Afro-American i n character, showing little of the troping and Signifyin(g) of the black cultural tradition (in spite of the blue notes and modal tinges and the timpani's suggestions of dance-beats). But this does not reflect on the value of the movement; it simply means that the application of Call­ Response criteria to formulations based in the Western European tradition is as invalid as the reverse application. Such application trivializes our criteria, just as the methods of traditional musicology, when applied to Afro-American music, have tended to seem trivial and ineffective to those familiar with black culture. The third movement, a scherzo in '14, tropes Afro-American secular dance and dance music, employing the banjo-an African retention-playing idiomatic, Call-Response back-beats as accompaniment to the movement's single melody. (What Haas [ 1 975, 30] hears as a second theme I hear as a variation of the initial statement.) In the rhythmically free introduction, the rhythmic and intervallic structure of the theme is foreshadowed suc­ cessively by th� lower winds, horns, trombones, strings, and trumpets. Then enters the complete melody, recalling the shout spiritual, with its banjo accompaniment. Call-and-response figures occur throughout the movement, particularly in transition and development passages. The back-beats of the banjo (a Call-Response instrument par excellence) and the cross-rhythms that result from the syncopations in the melody trope the underlying time­ line of sixteen pulses per measure, creating a swinging environment that is a Signifyin(g) revision of the polyphony of Western European lineage. The work's fourth movement-slow, in triple meter-opens with a brand new theme, which is followed first by an extended elaboration of itself and then by a second theme that Signifies on the blues theme of the first movement. The latter theme then receives extensions and elaborations that lead to a variation of the movement's first theme. These appearances of the themes and their variations occur at several different speeds and key centers, Signifyin(g) on tempo and tonal stability. What Moe hears as a fifth movement and others bear as further variation (Haas 1 975, 38), I hear as an extended troping coda that Signifies on the work as a whole, summing up the composer's Signifyin(g) revisions of the romantic symphony and Afro-American folk song. Melodic rhetorical tropes in the form of the falling and pendular thirds that characterize Afro-American melodic expres­ sion are prominent throughout the complete movement; muted trumpets Signify on classical trumpet timbre and on the black expressive practice of timbral distortion. Murray's "telling effect" is strongly evident in the Afro-American Symphony, particularly in the first and fourth movements-two of Moe's "Afro-American" sections-and the third movement suggests dance, is a dance movement, with its flirtatious, stomping, and shouting implications; but even here, the melody is a "telling" one, carrying significant semantic value in its call-and-response construction, statements, and assertions.

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In the first and fourth movements, the semantic value o f the statements, assertions, and allegations made in the expositions are transformed in the development sections of those movements into Murray's suspicions, mis­ givings, questings, and requestings, together resulting in extended dialogical, rhetorical tropes. This analysis of Still's Afro-American Symphony confirms, I believe, the contention that there can be-and in this case there is-a significant relationship between the black vernacular tradition and that of black concert music, and that the use of the vernacular to examine the formal is a productive and revealing approach to musical analysis and interpretation.

The approach offered here is intended to address directly these issues in a way that will allow students of the music to recognize, explain, and judge the drama of the progression, juxtaposition, and Signification of the idiomatic tropes of black music-making. Perhaps this beginning will lead to increasing refinement of this mode of inquiry, with the expectation that it will increas­ ingly illuminate black music as a much more complex and richly textured art than has been made clear by more traditional and inappropriate analytical procedures.

Summary and conclusions

Jelly Roll Mortoll's Red Hot Peppers. Black bottom stomp. RCA Victor 1649. (Available in the Smithsonian Collection of Classic Jazz.) Still, William Grant. Afro-American symphony, London Symphony Orchestra. Columbia M-32782. Black Composers Series. (Available from The College Music Society.)

"Analysis" is an activity that emerged and matured as a way of examining chiefly European works of music, and it can shed some light on works from the African-American tradition also, as evidenced by Schuller's treatment of "Black Bottom Stomp." But there are many elements of African-American music that it will not uncover. For those, an Afrocentric approach is indis­ pensable-an approach that must be based on the following elements: ( I ) a system of referencing, here called Signifyin(g), drawn from Afro-American folk music; (2) a tendency to make performances occasions in which the audience participates, in reaction to what performers do, which leads in turn to (3) a framework of continuous self-criticism that accompanies performance in its indigenous cultural context; (4) an emphasis on competitive values that keep performers on their mettle; and (5) the complete intertwining of black music and dance. All these elements combine to create, foster, and define what I have called here Call-Response. Perhaps continuing application of this theory, together with its refine­ ment and additional research, will tell us more about its efficacy and its limits. But my preliminary analyses suggest that the mode of inquiry intro­ duced here can be applied successfully to music as diverse as Bessie Smith's "Empty Bed Blues," Thomas A. Dorsey's "Precious Lord, Take My Hand," Oily Wilson's AklVan, and T. J. Anderson's Variations on a Theme by M. B. Tolson. The relationship of black music and dance is evident in the very existence and character of "Black Bottom Stomp," which is unadulterated Signifyin(g) black dance music, and in the expressions of the Afro-American Symphony, where the themes have been modeled on blues and spiritual melodies and where the rhythmic character of the music could support dancing, particu­ larly the slow drag of turn-of-the-century black culture. Our awareness of this interdependence, which had its genesis in the ring, will enhance our understanding of the nature and character of the music and its Signifyin(g) revisions. And our critical interpretations should take into account this relationship, as I have tried to do in the cases of the Morton and Still pieces. 90

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5

Some of the best descriptions of the shout can be found in Gordon ( (I 979] 198 I), Epstein ( 1977). and Courlander ( 1 963); and there are numerous descriptions in the WPA Slave Narratives. Certainly. antiphonal, heterophonic, and motivic devices, as well as unflagging rhythm and other such processes, are used in European music. Nevertheless, it is the idiomatic nature and character of these devices and the idiomatic way in which they function in Afro-American music that validate them as definers of the black music tradition. For one of the most recent and perhaps the most thorough discussion of the devices as they have been treated by scholars over the decades, see Reisser ( 1 982). The term trope, originally a literary expression, "denotes any rhetorical or figurat­ ive device" (Cuddon 1979, 725); it was later used to refer to "a newly composed [literary1 addition . . . to one of the antiphonal chants," usually as a preface to or interpolation to a chant (Grout 1980, 52-53). The term is used here in its original meaning, but it is applied in this instance to a purely musical device and thus is distantly related to the trope of the Middle Ages known as "sequence." Musical troping, as I have used the term here, is morc properly understood as a rhetorical or figurative musical device-a Signifyin(g) musical event. Call-Response must not be confused with call-and-response. The latter is a musical device, but Call-Response is meant here to name a musical principle a dialogical musical rhetoric under which arc subsumed all the musical tropological devices, including call-and-response. I am grateful to Bruce Tucker for putting me onto this idea early in the development of my ideas, when he stated to me that something like the Afro-American musical process of call-and-response, metaphorically speaking, might be considered as the musical trope of tropes. Call-and-response seemed to be too limited a concept to embody all of the black musical tropes, but Bruce's statement carried the necessity of a dialogic and descriptive terminology for this all-important, all-encompassing concept. So, in trying to remain as close as possible to the spirit of Bruce's statement and to the dialogic nature of the music, I coined the term Call-Response.

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References Abrahams, Roger. [1963] 1970. Deep down ill the jungle: Negro narrative folklore /rom the streets of PhiiadelpJda. Hawthorne, N.Y.: Aldine Publishing Company. Baker, Houston. 1972. Long black song: Essays in black American lileralllre and culture. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press. , 1 984. Blues, ideology, and Afro-American literature: A vernacular theory. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. --. 1 987. Modernism and the Harlem Renaissance. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Berry, Mary Frances, and John Blassingame. 1982. Long memory: The black experience in America. New York: Oxford University Press. Courlander, Harold. 1963. Negro folk music, U S A. New York: Columbia University Press. Cuddon, J . A. 1979. A dictionary oj literary terms. Rev. cd. New York: Penguin Books. Epstein, Dena J. 1977. Sinful tunes and spirituals: Blackfolk music to the Civil War. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Floyd, Samuel A., Jr., and Marsha J. Reisser. 1 984. The sources and resources of classic ragtime music. Black Music Research JoumaI 4:22-59. Gates, Henry Louis, Jr. 1988. The signifying monkey: A theory of African-American literary criticism. New York: Oxford University Press. Gordon, Robert Winslow. [ 1 979] 1 98 1 . Negro "shouts" from Georgia. In Mother wit Jrom the laughing barrel: Readings in fhe interpretation of Afro-American folklore, Alan Dundes, ed. New York: Garland. Grout, Donald J., and Claude Palisca. 1980. A history of Western music. 3rd ed. New York: W. W. Norton. Haas, Robert Bartlett, ed., with Paul Harold Slatery, Verna Arvey, William Grant Still, and Louis and Annette Kaufman. 1975. William Grant Still and the Jusion of cullUres in American music. Los Angeles: Black Sparrow Press. Krehbiel, Henry Edward. [ 1 914] 1 967. Afro-American folksongs: A sllldy ill racial and national music. New York: Frederick Unger. Laboy, William, Paul Cohen, Clarence Robbins, and John Lewis. [1979] 198 1 . Toasts. In Mother wit from the laughing barrel: Readings in the illlerpretatioll oj Afro­ Americanfolklore, Alan Dundes, ed. New York: Garland. Major, Clarence. 1970. Dictionary oj Afro-American slang. New York: International Publishers. Mitchell-Kernan, Claudia. [ 1979] 198 1 . Signifying. In Mother wit from the laughing barrel: Readings in (he interpretation oj Afro-American folklore, Alan Dundes, ed. New York: Garland. Moe, Orin. 1980. William Grant Still: Songs oj separation. Black Music Research Jouma/ l : 1 8-36. --. 1 986. A question of value: Black concert music and criticism. Black Music Research JoumaI 6:57-66. Murray, Albert. 1973. The hero and the blues. Columbia. Miss.: University of Missouri Press. --. 1978. Stomping tlte billes. New York: Doubleday.

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Reisser, Marsha J. 1982. Compositional techniques and Afro-American ml� sical traits . in selected published works by Howard Swanson. Ph.D. diss., Ulllverslly of Wisconsin. Schuller, Gunther. 1 968. Early jazz: Its roots and musical development. New York: Oxford U niversity Press. . 1986. Musings: The musical worlds oj Gunther Schuller. New York: Oxford U niversity Press. --. 1989. The swing era: The development afjazz, 1930-1945. New York: Oxford University Press. Stuckey, Sterling. 1987. Sialle cullure: Nationalist theory alld thefoundatiol1s oJblack America. New York: Oxford University Press. Wentworth, Harold, and Stuart Berg Flexman, comps. and cds. 1 960. Dictionary of American slang. New York: Thomas Y. Crowell. Williams, Martin. 1963. Jelly Roll Morton. Kings of Jazz series. New York: __

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Part B THE M AKI N G O F POP U L A R M U S I C : M AC H I N E S A N D M E D I A

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5 A VO I C E W I T H O U T A FAC E . P O P U LA R M U S I C A N D T H E P H ON O G R A P H I N T H E 1 8 9 0 S Dave Laing Source: Popu/(II" Music 10(1) (1991): 1-9.

While the rock'n'roll era, dance bands, country and the blues have been the subject of detailed and analytical histories, the 1 890s, those formative years of music-recording, still await adequate and rigorous scrutiny. The standard (and only) history of the recording process remains Roland Gelatt's The Fabulous Phonograph, whose first edition appeared in 1955. But while Gelatt's foreword promisingly notes that 'the history of the phonograph is at once the history of an invention, an industry and a musical instrument', his book seldom rises above a journalistic narrative. It is also marred by an ill­ concealed bias towards the classical repertoire and against popular musics. A substantial scholarly return to the last part of the nineteenth century when the outlines of today's record industry took shape is overdue. And among contemporary sociological/culturalist authors, there is something of a consensus that the approach to the history of communications technolog­ ies put forward by Raymond Williams as the best place to begin (Williams 1974). Richard Middleton has recently given an admirable summary of the early years of sound recording in Williamsite terms: The 'phonograph' and 'gramophone' were at first seen as poten­ tially useful more for commercial activities (office dictation), and pedagogical and archive purposes, than for the reproduction of music. But they also fitted into a nineteenth-century history of the development of instruments for mechanical reproduction: musical boxes, barrel pianos and organs, orchestrions, piano las; and once the embryonic businesses saw the possibilities of mass dissemina­ tion, the necessary mass production technology, cheap playback 97

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equipment, and a global distribution network were developed with remarkable speed. (Middleton 1 990, p. 84)

Meanwhile hardware became both more sophisticated and cheaper as the decade progressed. Alongside its records, Berliner's United States Gramo­ phone Co marketed three models, including the bargain-priced, manually­ driven seven-inch hand gramophone. In the cylinder business, spring-motors were attached to phonographs by Edison and clockwork mechanisms by Columbia. The volume level was raised by replacing rubber horns with metal. Prices dropped as well - to under ten dollars by the turn of the century. While the United States remained the centre of the music-recording business, the industry took root in Europe and Japan during the last years of the century. The world's first purpose-built record factory was opened in Hanover, Germany in 1 898. And perhaps emblematic of the era was the famous incident when the painter Louis Barraud sold his portrait of a dog and a gramophone to Alfred Clark of the London Gramophone Co in 1 898. As 'His Master's Voice' it was to become the most ubiquitous trademark of the twentieth century record industry. Described like this, the 'birth' of a cultural form (recorded popular music) which has sinc� reached 'maturity' seems unproblematic: there is repertoire (performances of an ever-growing range of discrete compositions) and there is the ever-improving technology needed to record and then reproduce it. The pattern makes a neat fit with the rationality of the Williams/Middleton model, which posits the emergence of records at the nexus of developments in technology and in musical instrument design. But a century ago, the emergence of recorded music was surely all but unproblematic. In this essay, [ want to look at some other aspects of that emergence, which are all but ignored in the existing histories. These include the characteristics of sound-recording as a nascent cultural industry and the modes of listening and identification - the construction of the 'listening subject' - associated with recorded sound.

The 1 890s was the decade in which the phonograph industry began its transformation into the recorded music business, though Middleton's 'remarkable speed' came later. Through Edison and others the technology of sound-recording had been developed in the late 1 870s. But it was only in the I 890s that the prehistory of sound-recording gave way to the first phase of recorded music. Although the end of the 1 880s had seen the distribution of items such as a recitation of the Lord's Prayer (released in Britain by Emil Berliner's company), the 1 890s saw the rapid growth of music recordings on cylinder and disc. The decade began with the Columbia Phonograph Co of Washington DC initiating commercial recording in the USA. Most of its sales of pre-recorded cylinders were to coin-in-the-slot phonograph operators such as Louis Glass of San Francisco. During 1 89 1 he reported that his machines were in use for up to ten hours daily, each bringing in up to $ 1 ,000 per annum. In the year Columbia issued a catalogue which contained numerous marches by John Philip Sousa and the United States Marine Band plus items by John Y. Atlee, a government clerk who was also a famed 'artistic whistler' (Gelatt 1977, p. 48). Edison, too, had a top whistler under con­ tract. In an early piece of A&R activity, he came across the black siffteur George Washington Johnson on a ferry from New York to Newark. Johnson was marketed as 'the Whistling Coon', while Edison's team also created dramatic vignettes such as 'Row At A Negro Ball'. According to a recent biographer of the inventor, 'the action started with the playing of a fiddle and banjo, progressed to whiskey drinking and an altercation over a girl, and ended with the drawing of razors, the sound of pistol shots and the arrival of police' (Conot 1 979, p. 3 1 0). By 1 894, the first seven-inch gramophone records, known as 'plates' were available from Berliner in the USA. The star performer was comic monologuist Russell Hunting while many other releases were anonymous performances of well-known songs by such writers as Stephen Foster (Gelatt 1 977, p. 65). During the 1 890s, too, methods of recording large numbers of copies were improved. At the end of the decade, Edison's engineers had perfected a method whereby each performance of a title was recorded onto five master cylinders. In turn, each of these could produce twenty-five duplicates before it was worn out. This method, however, was far inferior to the multiple serial production techniques by which copies of discs could be swiftly manufactured. 98

Talking machine or musical instrument?

While writers over the centuries had foreseen, proposed or fantasised such a development, the arrival of a practicable sound-recording technology brought with it a problem of categorisation. How was this equipment and its activity to be comprehended, conceptualised? Was it an extension of telegraphy, of mechanical musical instruments (the barrel organ, music box, etc.) or was it some kind of automaton, a machine assuming human faculties? Did it copy sound or write it (the terms 'phonograph' and 'gramophone' both derive from the Greek for sound-writing)? According to Conot, Edison developed the first successful sound­ recording mechanism under the pressure of 'four problems' he had to solve: One, the most pressing, a speaker for the telephone; two, a copy­ ing machine based on the electromographic principle; three, the 99

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technology and the devices for autographic telegraph, t o be used for transmitting facsimiles of drawings and of handwriting; and four, how to employ the telephone in Western Union operations. (Conot 1979, p. 97) No mention of music, or even of sound-recording as such. Apart from the first (which involved amplification), Edison's 'problems' were concerned with extending the telephonic transmission principle to visual elements (in essence, our modern facsimile technology) and with the storage of telegraph messages. This last was the Western Union connection. Edison's first use of the term 'phonograph' was in connection with the question of recording the human voice at the receiving end of a telephone line. As the technology based on tin foil wrapped around a cylinder emerged from Edison's laboratory in 1 877, he refined the definition of the new invention. It was to be 'an apparatus for recording automatically the human voice and reproducing the same at any future period'. The definition significantly broadened the field of application of the phonograph and crucially underlined the revolution in the relationship between present and future time implied by the fact of recording. Writing is a form of recalling elements of the present for the benefit of the future. But to record sound, like taking photographs, was to somehow freeze a moment in time and move it into the future. A humorous piece in Punch in 1 888 described a mediocre singer 'Signor Foghorni'. 'By applying his ear to this marvellous instrument immediately after singing into it', wrote the humorist, 'he not only hears his song echoed back to him out of the dim future, but he also hears the rapturous applause of unborn millions!'. What is indicated here, albeit in facetious form, is a phenomenology of recording, the kind of issue which has been explored by such commentators on photography as Sontag ( 1 978) and Barthes, who wrote ( 1 9 8 1 , p. 4):

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- to make Dolls speak, sing, cry and make various sounds - & also apply it to all kinds of Toys such as Dogs animals, fowls, reptiles, human figures; to cause them to make various sounds - to Steam Toy Engines exhausts and whistles - to reproduce from sheets music both orchestral instrumental & vocal, the idea being to use a plate machine with perfect registration & stamp the music out in a press from a die or punch previously prepared by cutting it in steel or from an Electrotype or cast from the original or tin foil - a family may have one machine & 1000 sheets of the music thus giving endless amusement - I also propose to make toy music boxes & toy talking boxes playing several tunes - also to clocks and watches for calling out the time of day or waking a person - for advertisements rotated continually by clockwork . . . (Co not 1979, p. 107)

Change one character in the word 'Photograph' and this is what early listeners to the phonograph had to fit into their world view. And there were more prosaic aspects to the new relation between present and future. ' I hoard music and speech', wrote the Reverend Horatio Nelson Powers, in an ode to Edison composed in 1 888, linking the power of the phonograph with that of the speculator who could acquire commodities, save them and then sell at the most propitious time (Conot 1979, p. 270). Very soon after his first successful demonstration of sound-recording, Edison scribbled down in a notebook a list of potential uses for the 'phonograph principle':

Although an article written for publication in the next year ( 1 878) provided a more orderly list of uses for the phonograph (including the office and business aspects that Edison would first strive to develop), here we are close to the unconscious of the phonograph, its psychopathology. Essentially, Edison's musings envisage two contrasting identities for the new technology: as a talking machine or as a musical instrument. Talking dolls or toys, the clock that calls out, all envisage a machine that interpellates, that hails a human individual. On 1 8 April 1 888, Edison gave a demonstra­ tion to the National Academy of Sciences in Washington. It began with a 'metallic voice' saying 'The Speaking Phonograph has the honour of pre­ senting itself to the Academy of Sciences'. During the presentation audience members fainted and one onlooker remarked 'It sounds more like the devil every lime'. This response to the phonograph as diabolical is echoed in later accounts. The ethnomusicologist Christian Leden collecting songs among Eskimos is said to have received the response 'if the demon in the white man's box steals my soul, 1 must die'. The young Prokoviev wrote in 1 908 that 'One of the peasants has bought himself a gramophone. And now every evening this invention of the devil is placed outside his hut, and begins to gurgle its horrible songs' (Eisenberg 1 987, pp. 47, 57). Another twist to this supernatural dimension of the phonograph was given in 'The Phonograph in Africa' a New York Times article of 1 885. Reporting that two scientists planned to cross Africa in order to collect specimens of different languages, the author speculates that they could use the talking machine as a means of control and domination:

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The travellers could describe the phonograph as a new and improved portable god, and call upon the native kings to obey it. A god capable of speaking, and even of carrying on a conversation, in the presence of swarms of hearers could be something entirely new in Central Africa, where the local gods are constructed of billets of wood and are hopelessly dumb. (Quoted in Pietz 1 987, p. 269)

The phonograph did not seriously begin to displace the piano until two decades later. In the 1 890s, it had to find a role alongside but distinct from the piano in the American home. That distinctness would seem to be based on a contrast between the 'musica practica' of piano-playing and actual singing in the family circle and, on the other, the passivity of simply listening to phonograph recordings. However, Alan Durant has pointed to a subtle elision between piano and phonograph. He argues that musical notation, as it developed in the nineteenth cen­ tury, becomes increasingly

This power of the phonograph to be a 'talking machine' was rooted in its nature as a recording medium as well as a playback one. As originally consti­ tuted, the machine's essential commercial value was to reproduce on a blank cylinder whatever sounds its operator put there. During the I 890s, advertising campaigns for Columbia's Graphophone slighted playback-only gramo­ phones which were 'limited by their mechanism to imperfect reproductions of specially prepared records'. In contrast, 'the Graphophone does much more; it repeats your voice; your friend's voice; songs sung to it or stories told to it'. I n this version, the machine becomes a kind of mechanical echo. During the l 880s, this awesome 'talking machine' was domesticated for the business market as an early dictaphone. For a variety of technical and economic reasons it was not a success. When the revival of sound-recording occurred it was primarily through the disc, a format incapable of facilitating homemade recordings, but a more effective instrument for relaying music and light entertainment. Edison had earlier written of the manufacture of 'sheets' containing recorded music which could be purchased by 'the family'. I t was in this form that the technology became a success in the I 890s.

a set of definitions of aesthetic intention in accordance with which precise execution can be attained . . . notation led to an increasing emphasis on reproduction, as against creative, collaborative perform­ ance. Indeed, the term 'reproduction', when used of music, seems to have itself encroached, during this period, upon senses previously attached to lhe word 'performance'. (Durant 1 984, pp. 1 00, 1 0 1 )

How to account for this victory of the limited 'playback' variant over the cylinder that could also be used to record? Here the literature on phono­ graph history is silent - as if pre-recorded music has so much become the norm that nothing else can be imagined. One striking aspect, though, is the similarity to the early development of radio. That, too, was a technology capable of operating as a two-way means of communication. Cultural and political pressures created a way of living called by Raymond Williams 'mobile privatisation' (Williams 1 974, p. 26). This entailed 'broadcasting', a 'technology of varied messages to a general public'. Allowing for the other differences in the two media, this could equally be a description of the phonographic communication process. One factor continually stressed in contemporary advertising was the value of the new machine as home entertainment. There was a clear resemblance to the status already achieved by the piano. I t had become a fixture in American middle-class homes from the 1 860s and sales of the instrument reached their height as late as 1 899 when they achieved 365,000.

To test Durant's observation it would be necessary to analyse the modes of notation and of presentation used by publishers of the bestsellers among the vast number of sheet-music titles and songbooks aimed at this domestic market, but certainly 'reproduction' is a key term in much phonograph advertising. An 1 897 Columbia machine was sold on its ability to 'bring into the home all the pleasures of music, reproducing the performances of bands, orchestras and operatic choruses, as well as of vocal and instrumental soloists . . .' (Gelatt 1 977, p. 70). Durant's argument that 'reproduction' is a defining feature of domestic music is clinched by a discussion of the pianola 'an ambiguous musical instrument, suspended between assisted performance or instruction, and reproduction for more passive listening'. The pianola and other machines using perforated rolls to reproduce performances contributed to this emphasis on replicating the 'precise execution' of an ideal performance of a work. However, sound-recordings cannot simply be assimilated to this trend among domestic musical instruments. For one thing, the phonograph pre­ dated the pianola, which only began to achieve popular acceptance towards the end of the 1 890s, in parallel with recorded music. But, more crucially, the pianola - and the sheet music which fed the family piano - enabled the reproduction only of an abstract ideal version of a song or tune. In contrast, the phonograph provided the trace, the evidence of a specific performance by a specific artist: although some of the earliest commercial releases were anonymous renditions of well-known pieces, these were soon replaced by named singers, band leaders and monologuists. Much of this range of performers precisely mirrored that of the vaudeville show, which by the 1 890s had replaced the minstrel show as the most popular form of

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musical theatre in America. Thus the catalogue o f recordings offered the same range and often the same names as a live concert or music hall show, but in the home. In this sense, recorded music combined the apparent polar opposites of the domestic interior and the vaudeville stage.

over the publishing business. As early as 1 905 the Victor Talking Machine Company had its own copyright department, seeking to buy the rights to songs and tunes recorded by its artists. Today, all but a handful of the leading music-publishing companies are owned by record labels. There was one aspect of piano rolls, cylinders and discs which did attract the sustained attention of publishers and songwriters: the opportunity for copyright payments. Because of the strength of the Swiss musical-box manufacturers lobby, the 1 886 Berne Convention ruled that the mechanical reproduction of music was not an infringement of copyright (Peacock and Weir 1 975, p. 49). But the arrival of pianolas and phonographs in large numbers alerted publishers in the USA and Europe to the size of the poten­ tial income they were losing. In France a conflicting series of court judgements began with an 1 886 case which went in favour of pianola manufacturers and concluded in 1 905 with a Parisian judge holding that recording was 'a mode of performance per­ fected by perfonTlance, and that the rules of plagiarism are applicable to it' (Attali 1 985, p. 98). In London, the Appeal Court dismissed the case brought by the music publishers in 1 899, while a US Senate committee of 1906 pro­ posed that copyright owners should control the mechanical reproduction of their works. Finally, international pressure combined to ensure that the 1 908 revision of the Berne Convention required national governments to protect composers against reproduction of their music by mechanical means.

Recording and the music industry

It did so, however, in an almost total isolation from the established institu­ tions of the music industry. No music publishers rushed to invest in record­ ing technology. Nor did the Aeolian Organ and Music Company which by the 1 890s had come to dominate the pianola business. Instead, the fledgling record industry was controlled by inventors like Edison and Berliner plus a variety of venture capitalists. Notable among these was Jesse Lippincott, the millionaire owner of the Rochester Tumbler Company. Curiously, though Lippincott had previously backed Broadway musicals, he saw the phonograph only as a business machine. When the attempt to market phonographs as stenographic equipment failed and Lippincott himself fell ill in 1 890, Edison took back control of much of the cylinder recording business. Why the music-publishing and musical-instrument industries took little or no interest in recording is a subject crying out for research. Was it because both were at the height of their success and profitability in the final years of the century? Certainly, this was the period when Tin Pan Alley took shape, as a new breed of publishers emerged, concentrating solely on single hit songs, not shows or songbooks or hymnals. And although severely hit by the depression of 1 893 - prices dropped by 20 per cent - the sheet music business had reached an estimated $4 million by 1 900, equivalent to sales of well over 10 million units. This was the era of such fabled multi-million sellers as Chas K. Harris' 'After The Ball' 'which quickly reached sales of $25,000 a week, sold more than two million copies in only several years, eventually achieving a sale of some five million' (Hamm 1 979, p. 285). However, total record sales in US were then 2.75 million discs and cylin­ ders, but increasing swiftly. Some publishers did note the fledgling record business, but saw it primarily as another means of advertising their products (Sanjek 1 988, p. 4 1 7). Since the I 860s, leading singers had been given royalties on sheet-music sales of ballads they promised to feature on stage. Now, recording artists were offered financial inducements to cut new songs by some publishers. One of the earliest pluggers in this field was Len Spencer, himself a prolific recording vocalist. He was the first to sing George M. Cohan's 1 899 ' I Guess I'll Have To Telegraph My Baby'. The only publisher to enter the record business on its own account was Stern and Marks in 1 897. But this label collapsed when Edison, fearing the competition, withdrew the supply of cylinders. U ltimately, what could be seen as a failure of the publishers to recognise the importance of a new branch of the music industry, led to the dominance of record companies 104

Ear and eye

Popular music in this century has been so dominated by records and radio that we are in danger of overlooking what must have been a vital shift in the experience of listening to music: the replacement of an audio-visual event with a primarily audio one, sound without vision. Unlike vaudeville performances or family recitals, the phonograph offered a disembodied voice. In Freudian terms, the invocatory (listening) drive was separated from (or privileged over) the scopic (looking) drive. Interestingly, Edison's first breathless list of outlets for the phonograph included numerous ideas for putting those two drives back together again: the dolls, toy dogs, clocks and so on. Ten years later, Edison met Eadweard Muybridge, the English photographer most famous for his work in capturing motion in series of pictures. Inspired by this, Edison began work on what he called a kinetoscope (moving view), writing in 1 888: 'I am experimenting upon an instrument which does for the Eye what the phonograph does for the Ear, which is the recording and reproduction of things in motion . . .' (Conot 1 979, p. 323). Initially, Edison's team attempted to coordinate sound and moving pictures, but came up only with a few seconds of a man bowing, smiling and taking off his hat while a nearby phonograph repeated his voice. When the 105

MUSIC AND SOCIETY

A VOICE WITHOUT A FACE

kinetoscope was first exhibited in coin-in-the-slot form i t showed filmstrips of boxing matches without sound. The phonograph was therefore condemned to provide sound without an accompanying visual. How did its earliest listeners respond, and does this privileging of the invocatory in the recording process represent a mutation in the character of popular music? There was a technological precedent in the telephone, but there (at least), a source for the invisible speaker in space and time could be identified. The very name 'talking machine' suggests an equivalent need to provide a source for the recorded sound, but as we have seen this source could only be extrahuman. The conjectured Africans and the actual Americans were equally discomfited by a machine that took on human attributes. Nevertheless, within a few years of those reactions, the phonograph and gramophone were taking their place in the drawing-room. How did each listener adapt to the voice without a face? One answer is simply that the question is misplaced. [n an article on 'Meaning and the Listening Subject' Sean Cubitt argues simply that it is 'the voice which typically, if not in every case, provides the level of the song which engages our desire most directly' (Cubitt 1 984, p. 2 1 1 ). I f this view is accurate, the presence or absence of the visual dimension is irrelevant. There is a famous picture of Feodor Chaliapin listening attent­ ively to his own voice issuing from a gramophone. His eyes are closed, presumably to exclude anything which could interfere with the impact of the sound itself. But Cubitt's argument was itself developed in an era when the dominance of the invocatory has become the norm. Before the 1 890s it would have been inconceivable to hear music without seeing it, and seeing it in the process of being produced. One way of comprehending what happened with record­ ing is to posit that the scopic drive was displaced from the body of the singer, the musician and the instrument onto a new physical object, the phonograph or gramophone itself. The central feature of all early models was the horn, rising majestically from the disc turntable or from the cylinder. The horn is a virtual archetype or genotype of one stream of 'Dionysian' musical instruments, reaching back to the syrinx or pan pipe and aulos mentioned in Plato's Republic (Dallas 1 974, p. 96). In the Edison cylinder phonograph, the horn acted both as the means by which recordings were made, and the route from which sound issued. It was an ear (to sing and speak into) and also a mouth. Many early photographs or drawings show listeners with their eyes fixed on the phonograph or gramophone itself. The hornlmouth provided a focus for the scopic drive, but a different kind from that provided by a performer in propria persona. (However Eisenberg comments that 'you can stare into a horn and know that at some vanishing point beyond the visible concavity there is something breathing' (Eisenberg 1 987, p. 64).)

There is a n opening here into questions of 'identification' between listener and singer's voice and issues of modes of address in the lyrics of recorded music. In the growing literature concerned with these matters, a constant theme has been what Alan Durant calls the 'density of second-person pro­ nouns and imperatives' in rock songs - though the same is true of many ballads (Durant 1984, p. 203). [s there a connection between the voice without a face of the disc or radio broadcast and these complexities and ambiguities of desire and pleasure which the listening subject can map onto it?

106

107

References Altali, J. 1 985. Noise: The Political Economy Of Music ( Manchester). Barthes, R. 1 98 1 . Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography (New York). Conot, R. 1979. A Streak 01 Luck ( New York). Cubitt, S. 1984. 'Maybellene: Meaning and the Listening Subject' , Popular Music, 4, ' pp. 207-24. Dallas, K. 1974. 'The roots of tradition', The Electric Muse, ed. D. Laing, K. Dallas, R. Denselow and R. Shelton (London). Durant, A. 1984. Conditions OJ Music (London). Eisenberg, E. 1 987. The Recording Angel (New York). Gelal!, R. 1 977. The Fabulous Phonograph ( London). Hamm. C. 1979. Yesterdays. Popular Song In America (New York). Middleton, R. 1990. Studying Popular Music ( M ihan Keynes). Peacock, A. and Weir, R. 1975. The Composer In The Market Place ( London). Pietz, W. 1987. 'The Phonograph In Africa ' , Post-Structuralism and the Question of History ed. D. Attridge, G. Bennington and R . Young (Cambridge). Sanjek, R. 1988. American Popular Music And Its Business, vol. 2: From 1 790 to 1909 (New York and Oxford). Sontag, S. 1978. On Photography ( New York). Williams, R. 1 974. Television, Technology and Cultural Form ( London).

T H E R E C O R D I N D U S T R Y : T H E G R O W T H OF A M A S S M E D I U M

6 T H E R E C O R D I N D U S T RY: T H E G RO W T H O F A M A S S M E D I U M Pekka Gronow Source: Poplllar Music 3 (1983): 53-75.

I am particularly interested in how these changes have influenced access to recording technology. Which companies, individuals and even countries have been able to make recordings at various times? I am also interested in the recorded messages, the content of the recordings. A full analysis is far beyond the scope of this study, but I shall attempt to show how the number of recordings issued can be used as an indicator of the variety of contents available and the general development of the medium. The following, then, is an attempt to summarise the development of sound recording as a mass medium. In particular, I shall attempt to summarise all available information on the growth of record sales throughout the history of the medium. The other aspects mentioned above will be illustrated by examples, with an emphasis on the early years of the medium. The relation­ ship between records and other media, in particular radio and film, will have to await further study. Before the breakthrough

Common sense tells us that sound recording - that is, records and cassettes - is a mass medium just like newspapers, films or television. In industrialised countries, listening to records is just as much part of everyday life as reading the newspaper or listening to the radio. A Swedish survey made in 1976 (Anon 1979, pp. 85-8) indicates that, on average, Swedish adults spent thirty-five minutes daily reading newspapers, thirty-three minutes listening to records or cassettes and one minute watching films. Watching films on television was not included, but neither was listening to records on the radio. A glimpse at standard textbooks on mass communication makes us doubt Olll' common sense. Records are seldom mentioned at all, and certainly not considered as a medium comparable to film or radio. The problem is in the message. The message of records is usually music, and communications research does not know how to deal with music. But musicologists have been equally blind to music as mass communication, and, as a consequence, the relatively few studies on the record industry which are available usually fail to consider this aspect. If records are a mass medium, as we suppose, we will want to know things about this medium that are already known about the other media. For instance, how large is the audience for records? How many homes have record or cassette players? How many records are sold annually? How much time is spent playing records? Many of these questions are difficult to answer even for the present, and almost impossible when we go further back in history. But I am going to suggest that the growth of record sales is a fairly good indicator of the influence of the medium. Recording technology and the structure of the record industry have changed considerably during its hundred-year history - although many aspects have remained surprisingly similar since the beginning of the century.

The world record market in the 1 890s has many parallels with home video in the 1 970s. Sound recording had been promised a great future many times since its invention in 1 877. Edison's phonograph had been demonstrated all over the world in the early 1 880s. It was used with varying success as an office dictating machine, a scientific instrument, a toy and a coin-slot amuse­ ment machine, but in the mid-1 890s success was still around the corner. Edison's phonograph played wax cylinders, and owners of the instruments could make home recordings, but pre-recorded cylinders could not yet be mass produced. Since coin-slot phonographs created a demand for recorded entertainment, Edison and his distributors had to start supplying pre­ recorded cylinders, which were first produced individually, then by a primit­ ive duplicating process which limited the number of copies available from a single recording to about 200. The recordings were mainly intended for coin-slot phonograph operators, but some may already have found their way into private homes. Meanwhile, Emile Berliner had introduced the gramophone, which played mass-produced discs but could not be used to make recordings. Berliner gramophones and records began to be regularly obtainable around 1 895. No statistics are available, but it seems that Berliner issued a few dozen discs annually, each selling a few hundred or at most a few thousand copies (see Gaisberg 1 942, p. 44). Although the impact of the discs was limited at first, sound recordings were now being mass produced for home entertainment. In 1 896 the first phonograph models explicitly aimed at the home enter­ tainment market were introduced by Edison and by Columbia. The Edison Home Phonograph, selling for $40 and reduced to $30 in 1 897, was announced as a 'machine for the millions'. It did not reach the millions yet, but in 1 899, 1 5 1 ,000 phonographs were made in the United States, and

108

109

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T H E R E C O R D I N D U S T R Y : T H E G R O W T H OF A M A S S M E D I U M

there was a steady i f limited supply of discs and pre-recorded cylinders (US Bureau of the Census 1975, p. 696). Statistics from other countries are not available, but by the turn of the century the new mass medium was already well established in England, France, Germany and Russia, and had even made some impact in countries such as India, Egypt and Japan.

through networks of subsidiary companies and agencies, the companies covered practically the whole world. By 1 9 1 0 there were hardly any coun­ tries in the world where the record industry had not established itself, and German and British gramophone companies fought just as bitterly as any other branch of industry in the years preceding the First World War. Although exact figures are not available, it seems likely that the two biggest companies of this era were the Victor Talking Machine Co. of Camden, New Jersey, and the Gramophone Co. of Hayes, Middlesex, England. The latter was fifty per cent owned by the former, and in order to further their mutual interests, the companies agreed to divide the world between them. Victor operated in the Americas and the Far East, while Gramophone had the rest of the world. Figure I illustrates the international operations of these companies, which established the pattern for major companies in the record business. Before the First World War, Victor concentrated manufacturing in the United States. Factories in South America and China were first opened in ' the 1 920s, but recording engineers were sent on regular tours in these areas to record local artists in cooperation with the company's local agents. The recordings were then processed and pressed in the United States and shipped back to their countries of origin. The Gramophone Company's operations were somewhat more decentral­ ised. By 1 9 1 0, the company had built local factories in Britain, Germany, Austro-Hungary, France, Spain, Italy, Russia and India, and the factories were operated by subsidiary companies registered in these countries. Local companies were also set up in other important markets such as Denmark and Sweden. Minor markets, such as Finland, Norway, Bulgaria, Portugal, etc., were supplied by local agents, but the entire operation was closely watched from Hayes. For instance, Otto Brandt, the Finnish agent of the Gramophone Co., obtained his recordings from Skandinavisk Grammophon AS in Copenhagen. The recordings were usually pressed at the Riga factory, as this offered favourable customs treatment, but contracts with Finnish recording artists were made by the Copenhagen office, subject to the approval of the headquarters. Operating in this fashion, the company could offer its products in every possible market place from London and Paris to the bazaars of Central Asia and the northern Caucasus. A recording engineer on his way through the Caucasus mountains in 1 9 1 0 could report that

From the turn of the century to the First World War

The record industry took off around the turn of the century. The establish­ ment of the Gramophone Co. in the UK in 1 898, Deutsche Grammophon in Germany in 1 898, and Pathe Freres in France in 1 897 marked the beginning of a new era. In the United States, legal complications curbed the development of the new industry in 1 899-190 1 , but after 1 902 the industry progressed rapidly. The Victor Talking Machine Co., founded on 3 October 190 I, took over the Berliner interests. The Columbia Phonograph Company produced both discs and cylinders. Edison remained faithful to the cylinder, which could now be mass produced by a moulding process. By the outbreak of the First World War, the industry was established world­ wide, and many of its present characteristics were already evident at this time. The record industry today consists of about ten large multi-national con­ cerns, which produce about half of all records sold in the world, and thou­ sands of smaller companies, which produce the other half. Several of today's leading record companies can trace their ancestry to companies that were founded before or around the turn of the century. In the USA the industry remained almost completely in the hands of Victor (today's RCA), Columbia (CBS) and Edison, into the mid- 1 9 1 0s. In Europe, competition was stronger and legal constraints fewer, but the British Gramophone Co., the German Lindstrom concern and the French Pathe company had very strong positions. The leading companies owed a considerable part of their success to tech­ nological innovation. They were not just record companies, they had to produce complete systems of recording technology. For the consumer, they offered both recordings and the equipment to play them on (and a critical observer of the cabinet phonographs of the 1 9 1 0s might say that records were a sideline to help the sale of furniture). For the industry itself they had to develop recording equipment, mastering processes and presses. I t is not surprising that initially there were several competing systems of recording technology. Edison's cylinder and Berliner's disc were followed by two dif­ ferent types of vertical-cut disc (Pathe and Edison); and even some of the small companies attempted to introduce their own systems, including such oddities as the World record, which could only be played with a variable­ speed World record player. Berliner's familiar lateral-cut disc became domin­ ant in the 1 9 1 0s, but the competitors did not give up until the late 1 920s. The leading companies set their goals internationally from the very begin­ ning. Local factories were built up in the most important markets and, 1 10

In the Caucasus mountains the talker can be heard in every one of the multitudinous villages; the records are played unceasingly and are therefore soon worn out, causing a result which is not particu­ larly pleasing to other than the Cossacks themselves who will never buy another record of the same title until one is actually broken. Even then they retain the pieces and in some cases decorate their

III

THE RECORD INDUST R Y : THE GROWTH OF A MASS MEDIUM

MUSIC AND SOCIETY

I

1 12

huts with them. There i s a fair amount of business done i n the Caucasus; there is a population of seven millions excluding three million Russian people. The talking machine is the only means of amusement and therefore in demand. (Noble 1 9 1 3, p. 65) None of the competing firms could quite match the Victor-Gramophone empire, but they were not far behind. The German Lindstrom concern had factories in Germany, France, Spain, Italy, Russian Poland, Britain, Argentina and Brazil, and in the mid- 1 9 1 0s they were beginning operations in the United States. Pathe had factories in France, Belgium, Austro-Hungary, Russia and the United States. Edison concentrated production in the United States, but organised a fairly effective sales network in Europe. Columbia has been little studied and the company's history is difficult to follow because of frequent changes in ownership, but before the First World War the company's ,worldwide operations seem to have been directed mainly from New York and London. As the demand for records and talking machines grew, new companies were eager to enter the market. In countries such as Germany, with a long tradition in the manufacture of musical instruments, clockwork machines and the like, there soon sprang up small companies producing gramophones or gramophone parts. Record production was not as simple. In the United States, Columbia and Victor controlled the main disc-recording patents until the mid- 1 9 1 0s, and would-be competitors were relegated to the marginal fields of cylinders or vertical-cut discs. In Europe, the basic patents seem to have expired at the beginning of this century, and German manu­ facturers were soon offering complete recording and pressing installations for interested businesses. New record companies sprang up in England, Germany, Russia, Italy and even Turkey, Egypt and Japan; and in 1 9 10, thc Russian trade paper Grammofollny Mir wrote disdainfully about a certain Josele Grinschpur, who was pirating the recordings of other companies in a three-press factory set up in his apartment in Odessa. However, Grinschpur must have been a talented mechanic; ten years later, the first attempt to set up a pressing plant in Sweden failed miserably when the new technology proved too difficult to handle (Anon 1 9 1 0; Englund 1967). The Swedish factory ended in the hands of the Lindstrom concern. The same thing happened to many German independent companies around 1 9 10. But there was an alternative way to independent production which required far less investment. Most major companies seem to have accepted custom recording and pressing orders, and many music dealers and other small entrepreneurs used this opportunity. Liliedahl (n.d.), for instance, lists twelve such labels in Sweden alone in the period before 1 9 1 8. Most of these com­ panies were satisfied with recordings made by the major company, reissued on their private label, but there were also original recordings, with performers 113

MUSIC AND SOCIETY

T H E R E C O R D t N D U S T R Y : T H E G R O W T H OF A M A S S M E D I U M

ranging from individual cabaret artists to the Swedish Salvation Army. Custom pressing explains the existence, even in the period before World War I, of numerous small labels which could not possibly have had their own studios and pressing plants. By the war, then, the record industry had already conquered most of the globe. But recording and pressing technology was rare outside the main industrialised countries, and the total number of record companies in the world was very limited. How large was the record market? As can be expected, there is pitifully little information available. Tim Brooks ( 1 977) estimates total US record (cylinder and disc) sales in 1 900 at about 3 million copies. In 1 92 1 , the value of US record sales was $ 1 06 million, representing approximately 140 mil­ lion records. If we use data on phonograph production (US Bureau of the Census 1 975, p. 696) as a guide:

discographers have given us several methods by which new releases can be estimated, and we know, for instance, that the Gramophone Co. alone issued about 200,000 titles in the period extending from 1 898 to 1920. If this figure appears unexpectedly large, it must be remembered that average sales were low. Reports of Caruso's recordings selling millions of copies must be taken with a grain of salt, although it seems quite likely that some records did sell hundreds of thousands. However, record companies seem to have been quite satisfied with sales of a few thousand copies, and in order to open up new markets, sales of a few hundred may have been quite acceptable. Table I shows the Gramophone Company's sales and numbers of new releases in Scandinavia from 1 899 to 1 925. In the early years, the company had an almost total monopoly of the market; at the end of the period it was still the market leader but, even at its peak, the total Scandinavian market must have been below one million copies. The large number of releases seems to have been motivated by a clear awareness of existing musico-social groups. The in

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·Si>HllOllth period, 1 July to 3 1 December 1 920. Norc.\': Recordings made are titles (sides) recorded; early recordings were single-sided, later issues double-sided (two titles pcr disc). More than 14,000 titles were recorded during this period in Scandinavia; Ihe above figures include 5,300 Swedish, 4,800 Danish, 2,350 Norwegian, 750 Finnish and a handful of Icelandic tilles, as well as abolLt a thousand 'Pan-Scandinavian' (usually instrumental) items. In addition to Scandinavian recordings, the Gramophone Co. also sold other, international recordings in Scandinavia, and these are included in the sales figures. Record sales refer to twelve-month periods from 1 July to 30 June. The Copenhagen branch includes Norway and Finland in addition to Denmark. Sources: Anon 1 92 1 ; Liliedahl 1977.

relative: throughout the twenties, annual US record sales remained above 100 million copies, and the late 1 920s saw another turn upwards. Tn impov­ erished Europe, the industry took several years to recover, but by 1 926 business was definitively expanding: 1 929 was a boom year everywhere. The industry was well established in Europe, Asia and the Americas, but now it also expanded to Africa south of the Sahara. Table 2 summarises available statistics from this period. Although the number of countries included is small, we can make less accurate estimates for many other countries. 1 16

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Notes:

The completeness of the figures given varies somewhat. In many countries, direct imports, sales by small record companies not belonging to IFPl, etc., are not included, but the sources do not usually specify this. A horizontal line ( ) indicates a probable change in the definition of the figures quoted. One record counts as one unit (LPs as well as singles). _

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Figures for 1970-1980 are from the IFPl (International Federation of Phonogram and Videogram Producers), for tbe earlier years from Billboard, with the following exceptions. Eastern Europe: these are not genuine sales figures but production figures (records and cassettes manufactured) from UN industrial statistics and Billboard. However, in these countries most records sold are locally manufactured; for some sales figures from recent years, see Billboard. France before 1970: Ministry of Culture (production, not sales). Finland: Finnish branch of IFPI. Germany before 1960: Blaukopf 1977, pp. 26-27; 1949-58: production figures. UK: Harker 1980, p. 226. Japan: estimated sales, based on production. Canada 1964-7: production; 1968-9: record sales (tape not included). USA: RIAA.

Cl " o

=mHGI> occurring 32 times during the first 1 6 bars - the main statement of the main theme. I have played the Aeolian pendulum at difTerent speeds in all keys using all built-in voices on a Yamaha DX7S and am still unable to locate any usage of the device in my tactile and auditive memory apart from in rock music recorded in 1 966 or after." Using mainly Bj6rnberg's ( 1 984: 3 8 1 ,ff) list of rock recordings in which the Aeolian pendulum (with or without major triad of VI! in between) plays an important part, we choose to mention the following: " I . The Kinks: 'Dead End Street' ( 1 966)

2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10.

I I.

12. 1 3. 14. 15. 1 6.

Bob Dylan, Jimi Hendrix: 'All Along The Watch-tower' ( 1 968) Derek and the Dominoes: 'Layla' ( 1 970) Wishbone Ash: 'Phoenix' ( 1 970) Jcffrcy Cain: 'Whispering Thunder' ( 1972) Pink Floyd: 'Money' ( 1 973) David Bowie: ' 1 984' ( 1 974) Nationalteatern: 'Barn av vAr tid' ( 1 977) Dire Straits: 'Sultans of Swing' ( 1 978) Flash & The Pan: 'California' ( 1 979) Police: 'Message In A Bottle' ( 1 979) Frank Zappa: 'Why Does It Hurt When I PeeT ( 1 979) Ted Gardestad & Annica Boller: 'Ut solen varma dig' ( 1 980) Phil Collins: 'In The Air Tonight' ( 1 98 1 ) Kim Carnes: 'Voyeur' ( 1 982) [rene Cara: 'Flashdance' ( 1 983)

MUSIC AND SOCIETY

' U N I V E R S A L ' M U S I C A N D T H E C A S E OF D E A T H

Without going into the verbal details o f these songs, it is possible to sum­ marise some important areas of connotation for the lyrics of each title as: ( I) pointlessness of always being 'second best' in the dreary everyday of 'Dead End Street'; (2) waiting, resignation, 'apocalyptic vision'; (3) painful separation; (4) mythical rising from the ashes; (5) distant but immanent threat; (6) the absurdity of economic greed; (7) dystopia; (8) teenagers hardened by cold, grey, soulless concrete tower blocks; (9) trad jazz band playing for inimical audience one cold and rainy night; ( 1 0) sick general presses button by mistake and nukes California; ( I I ) loneliness and aliena­ tion; ( 1 2) YO problems; ( 1 3) love/sun parallels, worrying about the future; ( 1 4) waiting for something unknown, possible imminent showdown; ( 1 5) loneliness by the video; ( 1 6) sadness and fear in a world of steel and stone.

I t is nevertheless just as probable that the continuous use of Chopin's 'Marche funebre' as funeral music No. I in our culture had so funda­ mentally established the Aeolian pendulum as a sadness-death-and-destiny archetype by 1968 that rock music, having reached a mature age and an experimental period, was able to integrate it into its own store of connotat­ ive symbols and change its meaning. For not only do the death, darkness and sadness connotations undergo a slight shift from gloom, sadness and death (Chopin) towards eternity, alienation and impending doom (rock); the Aeolian pendulum's accompanimental function also changes; it is louder, faster, provided with rhythmic figuration so as to acquire riff status, while many of the melodic lines, vocal and instrumental, acting as figures set off in relief against this accompaniment, are not only obviously far more 'up front' than Chopin's funereal tune but also more assertive in relation to their own already assertive accompaniments." The clearest example of this shift in the meaning of the Aeolian pendulum can be found in Irene Cara's rendering of 'Flashdance' ( 1 983). The title sequences to Flashdance show the film's young heroine cycling to work through the streets of Pittsburgh one inhospitably grey and rainy morning. She is a welder and the scene is that of industrial decay with unfriendly streets, wires, puddles in the asphalt, stone and metal. The lyrics say: 'first when there's nothing' . . . 'fear seems to hide deep inside' . . . 'All alone in a world made of steel, made of stone'. Still at 90 b.p.m., with no more than synthesiser accompaniment marking onbeat chord changes in the bass and straight quaver movement in simple triadic arpeggios, the voice of the heroine sings: "

A remarkable number of these lyrics deal with such subjects as fascination with and fear of modern technique and civilisation, uneasiness about the future and the threat of war, alienation in general and in particular situations, static moods of waiting and premonition, historical or mystical events. As a whole the lyrics circumscribe a relatively uniform field of associations which might be characterised by such concepts as 'modernity', 'cold', 'waiting', 'uncertainty" 'sadness', 'stasis', 'infinity in time and space'.37 How these pieces of rock music with their Aeolian pendulums came to have such inhospitable, sad, static, uncertain and almost fatalistic con no ations and why these connotations are so close to those enumerated as typical for Northern European funeral music are both questions requiring far more research. One small observation should nevertheless be made. At least two highly popular pre- I 966 rock tunes contain Aeolian pendu­ lums. It is possible that the quasi-apocalyptic '(Ghost) Riders In The Sky' (Ramrods, 1 96 1 ) and the 'Indians on the plain' character of 'Apache' (Shadows, 1 960) owe much of their 'serious movement and dark destiny in the wide open spaces of the West' to renderings of such Western theme classics as Tiomkin's 'Rawhide' by Link Wray and his Ray Men ( 1 958) and Frankie Laine ( 1 959). Remembering the tendency for Western themes to use archaic folk modes - either 'New World Symphony' major pentatonics (e.g. Shalle, Gunsmoke) or minor mode (Aeolian or Dorian) tonal vocabu­ lary (e.g. The Virginian, RalVhide, The Good The Bad And The Ugly) - and that these archaisms owe much to North American folk harmonic practices as well as to 'classical' harmonisations of British folk song (e.g. Aeolian cadences in 'Kingsfold' ( 1 933» , it is possible that the Aeolian pendulums of post- 1 965 rock have acquired their connotations of 'serious and implacable timelessness' by reference to Western theme music's use of British folk modes which in the US American context in turn refer to olden times. 358

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Conceived within the general framework of the rock idiom (instrumenta­ tion, miking, etc.), the music referred to in this citation is slow (90 b.p.m.), low (vocal register), quiet (volume) and intimate (mike distance, vocal 359

MUSIC AND SOCIETY

' U N I V E R S A L ' M U S I C A N D T H E C A S E OF D E A T H

timbre, especially at 'alone', 'cried', 'tears', 'world'). I t also refers to the 'serious' by referring to 'serious' music (no anticipated downbeats in melody or accompaniment) and the singer delays accentuated downbeats (bars 3-4, 6-7), thus adding an effect of personal reluctance or heaviness.40 At the end of the second eight-bar verse just quoted, the 'Western' half cadence (Ap�F I p VII�V I SS�D) marks the entry of full rock-disco accompani­ ment (drums, bass guitar, rhythm guitar, etc.) at a sudden and regular 120 b.p.m. Another eight-bar verse is rendered with this accompaniment and at that tempo before we reach the main hook of the song. The words here - 'What a feeling seems to be then' and 'Take your passion and make it happen' are set to the Aeolian pendulum GmHEp. Counting also the melodic continuation of this example with the almost ecstatic fervour of 'r can have it all, now I'm dancing for my life' (reaches with gospel orna­ mentations), average vocal pitch has been raised almost an octave" and downbeat anticipations are in clear melodic evidence. The only common denominator between the total sound of the hook lines in 'Flashdance' and Chopin's 'Marche funebre' is the Aeolian pendulum. If Bjornberg's and my interpretation of verbal (and visual) connotations in Aeolian rock songs from the seventies and early eighties is correct and if our understanding of melodic or harmonic oscillation between minor sixth and perfect fifth is not totally wild," we can presume that the Aeolian pendulum in 'Flashdance' still holds at least some degree of rock's 'gloom and doom' connotations. I f this is so, the chorus of 'Flashdance' represents the victory of the gospel-ecstatic and dance-crazy subject over her 'gloom and doom' environment, just as she wins her own self-confidence and defeats th'taliena­ tion and depression of her nine-to-five job in the film narrative. I f the process of semiosis in the case of the Aeolian pendulum can be considered as in any way exemplifying how feelings of threat and alienation might be handled musically by young people in industrialised capitalist societies, an important parallel issue to raise is: how can the first-hand experience of death, destruction, terror and oppression in its crudest, most brutal and blatant forms be handled in a musically - and politically meaningful way? Victor Jara's words, smuggled out of the football stadium in Santiago de Chile, were:

i n sad and quiet laments that we would recognise as such toO. 44 However, although Chileans and Salvadoreans put the experience of bereavement into music more or less in accordance with our own society's norms of what is proper in connection with death, this is not enough on its own. Whereas bereaved Northern Europeans are only immediately obliged to work through their own sorrow in order to manage their future tolerably from an emotional viewpoint, those living under continuous threat of death in their immediate vicinity have both to work through their own sorrow and express anger, defiance and bitterness and promote behavioural strategies that will contribute to removing the causes of that recurrent sorrow, anger and bitterness. The latter requires a collective effort and behavioural connota­ tions of the collective are, as we have suggested, not provided by funeral music ritualising only the ideal affective state of the bereaved next of kin. It is therefore not surprising that one of the best-known pieces associated with the struggle to overthrow the terrorist and fascist government in Chile was 'EI pueblo unido', written hastily one evening in July 1 973, when it was clear that the disunity of the left, the treachery of the military - not to mention ITT, the US government and reactionaries inside the country would bring about the demise of Unidad popular, i.e. not long before Jara had to write the words cited above. 'EI pueblo unido' was never recorded before the fascist coup and was really only used as a song of defiance and determination from the 'valley of the shadow of death'."

Canto que mal me sales cuando tengo que cantar espanto! Espanto como el que vivo, como el que muero, espanto. De venne entre tanto y tantos momentos del infinito en que el silencio y el grito son las metas de este canto. Lo que veo nunca vi, 10 que he sentido y 10 que siento hani brotar el momento . . .43 Latin Americans face to face with death in the guise of tortured and 'dis­ appeared' comrades, friends or family members have ritualised their loss

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It should be clear from the arguments presented above that death is anything but universal when considered as a cultural phenomenon. We have seen not only how behaviour and attitudes towards death vary radically from one society to another but also how such attitudes vary inside our own cultural sphere. For these very reasons we have also been able to offer evid­ ence suggesting that there is little or no structural correspondence between music associated with death in one culture and that of another. In 'Flashdance' we were able to see the socia-historical relativity (and death?) of our culture's 'museme of death' while with 'El pueblo unido' we saw a more overtly collective musical treatment of the problem. I n both cases it is the collective subjectivity, based on experiences shared of the same objective circum­ stances - such things as alienation in work and education for 'Flashdance', for 'El pueblo unido' fascist terror and oppression - that bring about a need on the part of those making or using music in those contexts to find more adequate forms of musical expression than those offered hitherto. This means that musical as well as other symbolic relationships to such matters as death, destruction, injustice and alienation - or any other important reality to which humans must relate as individuals and collectives in order to sur­ vive - will change as much and as frequently as the social factors (including ourselves) interacting in the formation (or deformation) f that reality. If matters are in fact as culturally relative as they are presented here, how, the reader may well ask, was it possible for the respondents in the small experiment accounted for earlier to agree, even to a small extent, on some vague connotational characteristics of each piece from the foreign music cultures? Let us look more closely at this final issue. Returning shortly to the responses reported on, it will be remembered that the symposium participants, although wide of the mark as far as connotative competence was concerned in all the examples taken from for­ eign music cultures and intersubjectively contradictory about the Senufo and Kampuchean burial musics, did seem to agree about something in the other pieces. What is that 'something'?46

This music, written in dark times and sung by millions of Latin Americans in even darker moments, retains a sense of dignity and sorrow through its traditional use of the minor mode, descending bass line, tonal circle of fifths using chords of the seventh, etc. At the same time, within this general connotative framework, the piece allows for loud singing, includes both

no. 1 (Massongo) had an epic or heroic profile; no. 2 (Ba-Benzele) and no. 5 had quite a few energetic connotations; no. 6 (Turkish) was slow; no. 8 (Csang6) had a profile of slow, perhaps sad and lonely but tender, intensity.

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MUSIC AND SOCIETY

' U N I V E R S A L ' M U S I C A N D T H E C A S E OF D E A T H

Before discussing the more 'obvious' connotative universals ('slow', 'energetic'), we should state that the H ungarian solo song of German origin (no. 8) uses melodic material, metre, periodicity and, most import­ antly, a vocal timbre that are all highly familiar to any indigenous inhabitant of Central or Northern Europe. It might, so to speak, have been our own mother singing to us. The vocal quality is slightly 'thin' but the obvious care the old lady has taken with pitching the notes right and the sensitive slurs with which she slightly bridges certain intervals create an ambience of con­ siderable intimacy. This is further enhanced by the fact that the song has been recorded in a small room (no extraneous noises, little or no reverberation) with the singer quite close to the microphone (no cheap 'heavy breathing' tricks here, though!). This might throw a little light on the 'lonely' or 'tender' connotations. However, the connotation of sadness, probably caused by para­ meters of vocal expression, is dirficult to analyse." Moreover, since vocal techniques and melodic vocabulary seem to be clearly compatible with traditional and popular forms of musical expression used in practically any part of Europe, it seems wiser to treat responses for this tune as intracultural rather than cross-cultural musical competence. Possible reasons for remaining intersubjective agreement between respond­ ents can be summarised as follows:

those mentioned here, we suggest four main categories o f general cross­ cultural similarities of relationships between musical sounds and their paramusical contexts or areas of connotation. We call such cross-cultural similarities of relationship 'musical universals' " The relationships thus designated are those:

'Slow' is almost certainly related to the slow tempo of the pieces eliciting the response. 'Energetic' can be related not only to tempo and rhythm (more speed needs more energy) but also to volume (more sonic energy meanS'l ouder), to tessitma (more tension to produce high notes), to ambitus and melodic contour (large intervallic leaps suggest larger gestures, which in turn require more energy to execute than small ones, and larger space, which takes more energy to cover in sound or on foot than small space). At least two of these parameters have been clearly 'energised' in the examples that produced the energetic connotations. For the delivery of a text or song to be judged as 'epic' or 'heroic' it must be steadily mezzo forte or forte (epic 'a long narrative poem recounting in elevated style the deeds of a legendary hero'), unwavering, controlled and clear. Bearing also in mind the acoustic facts of epic delivery (one person's voice in front of many people, frequently in a ritual situation), it is clear that fast, slurred, whispering or frenetic yelling would not fit the bill. However, although we might agree within our own culture about the characteristics of 'epic', this does not mean that the same sort of vocal delivery need necessarily have the same connotations in every culture.48 =

Expanding slightly on this discussion and using general observations made from a far wider range of musical expression from many more cultures than

364

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between (a) musical tempo (pulse) and (b) heart beat (pulse), breathing pace, walking or running speed, etc. (Nobody sleeps in a hurry or hurries while sleeping);'" between (a) musical loudness and timbre (especially attack, envelope, decay) and (b) certain types of physical activity. (Nobody caresses by strik­ ing, nobody yells jerky lullabies at breakneck speed, nobody uses legato phrasing and sort or rounded timbres for hunting or war situations); " between (a) speed and loudness of tone beats and (b) the acoustic setting. (Quick, quiet tone beats are not discernible if there is a lot of echo, and slow, loud, long ones are dirficult to produce acoustically if there is little or no reverberation); between musical phrase lengths and the capacity of the human lung. (Few people can sing or blow and breathe in at the same time: this means that musical phrases tend to last between one and ten seconds). "

It should be observed that the general areas of connotation just mentioned - acoustic situation, movement, speed, energy and non-musical sound - are all in a bio-acoustic relationship to the musical parameters cited - pulse, volume, general phrase duration and timbre. These general bio-acoustic connotations may well be universal but this does not mean that emotional attitudes towards such phenomena as large spaces (cold ilnd lonely or free and open?), hunting (exhilarating or cruel?) or hurrying (good or bad?) will also be the same even inside one and the same culture, let alone between cultures. One reason for this could be that the musical parameters mentioned in the list of 'universals' (pulse, volume, general phrase duration and certain aspects of timbre) do /lot include most aspects of rhythmic, metric, timbric. tonal, melodic, instrumentational or harmonic organisation. Such musical organisation requires some kind of social organisation and cultural context before it can be created, understood or otherwise invested with meaning. In other words: only extremely general bio-acoustic types of connotation can be considered as musical 'universals', The main points of this article can be summarised as follows: The universal phenomenon of music associated with the universal phenomenon of death does not give rise to the same music. Music understood as sad or associated with death in one culture is not necessarily understood as sad or associated with death by members of another musical culture.

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MUSIC AND SOCIETY

There are very few universally understood aspects o f musical expression. These establish no more than extremely general types of bio-acoustic connections between musical structure and the human body and its acoustic and temporo-spatial surroundings. All evaluative and affective musical symbols are culturally specific. If we agree with the gist of these points and with the general drift of the descriptions and argumentation preceding them, we may well ask ourselves how people can even conceive of calling music a 'universal language'. Yet statements to that effect are still to be heard, not so much in serious contemporary writings on musics3 as in the catch phrases and slogans bandied about like self-evident maxims and items of gen­ eral consensus by the music and media industries. MTV's update of the 'Ein Yolk, Ein Reich, Ein Fuhrer' motto into 'One World, One Music' is one such example, the Eurovision Song Contest another, with its annual reminder that even though we don't speak each others' languages, we do at least understand each others' music - a lie if ever there was one, seeing how Mediterranean, not to mention Turkish, entries are more or less consistently outvoted by Northern European nations. In such contexts it would not be unreasonable to ask in whose interests such untruths are uttered. It was our aim to do no more than suggest the ideological character of the misconception 'music is a universal language'. If it is true that the misconception is in less favour with academics and classical buffs these days than with the media business, and if we consider which and who'te music is labelled 'universal' in such contexts, we start to approach an attitude resembling that of the Pentagon National School of War: On this ever-smaller globe of ours, all cultures are engaged in an inevitable competition for predominance and survival. Those who will fashion tomorrow's world are those who are able to project their image (to exercise the predominant influence and a long range influence) . . . If we want our values and our life style to be triumphant we are forced to enter a competition with other cultures and other centers of power. For this purpose the multinational company offers considerable leverage. Its growing business arsenal with its foreign bases works for us 24 hours a day. I t is a fact of osmosis which does not only transmit and implant entrepreneurial methods, banking techniques and North American commercial relations, but also our judicial systems and concepts, our political philosophy, our mode of communication, our ideas of mobility, and a way of contemplating literature and art appropriate to our civilisation.54

366

Notes

2 3

4 5 6 7 8

9

10 II 12 13 14 15

This article is a total rewrite and elaboration of the Swedish text 'Musiken spraket som alia fOrstar?' in Tviirkulwrell Kommunikation, ed. J. Allwood (Goteborg: Papers in Anthropological Linguistics. \985). That text is in turn based on notes for a talk given at a symposium on Cross-Cultural Communication, held in Goteborg in November 1 983. Organised by the Department of Linguistics at the University of Goteborg in November 1983. There are not necessarily thirteen separate responses to each music example because some respondents left blanks for some examples while others mentioned two or three associations for certain pieces. Multiple occurrences of the same association (e.g. 'ritual', 'Africa') are not taken into account in this summary and nor are blanks. Besides, the number of respondents is so small that there is no point in making a big statistical-empirical scene about this unpretentious little experiment. Names in brackets after the title of each example refer to the alphabetically ordered 'Discography'. The Massongo inhabit parts of Gabon and the Congo Republic. 'Vandring' (Swedish) translates as 'wandering, way [through life], migration [of peoples, animals, souls}, walk or excursion on foot (long1, travelling [mostly on , foot, not by vehicle] . The Ba-Benzele pygmies inhabit areas in Cameroon, Congo and the Central African Republic. The Senufo inhabit areas of the Ivory Coast, Mali and Burkina Faso. The Hungarian lyrics mean: The sweet Virgin Mary years ago sang to her little child: Sleep my little son, my rose, sleep in the hay. I hug you to my heart and I kiss you. I love you with all my heart and J put you to sleep with my heart. Sleep my little one. By 'compositional framework' is meant the musical, structural and aesthetic norms which determine whether a musical event can be considered by members of a culture as belonging to that culture or not. The concept is similar to, but more general than, the term 'style' and refers to such phenOlpena as the melody­ accompaniment dualism plus equal tone temperament of 'Western' music (i.e. what Haydn and AC/DC have in common) or to the polyrhythmic structures of Nilo-Sudanic music or to such basic compositional principles as the maqamliqa or raga/lala of Arabic and Hindu classical musics respectively. Klevor Abo of the Department of African Studies, University of Ghana (Legon, Accra). The encounter described in this section took place in my kitchen on 2 November 1983. The Ewe people are mainly found in Togo and eastern Ghana. I have noted, with question marks, groupings of 5/8+7/8, 7/8+5/8 (2/8 and 318 sub-groupings in both orders) as well as some 'bars' in 3/2, 3/4 and 6/8 'metre'. The Ewe word kpoo seems to be pretty close in connotations to adverbial sense of piano in Italian. Thanks to Anahid Kassabian for reminding me of an important exception: the US American folk song 'The Streets Of Laredo' (Owens). Unless we count the octave upbeat at the very start of the 'Funeral March of the Revolutionaries' (Ikonnikov). 'Mainstream' is used here not in the sense of 'mainstream jazz' (between traditional and modern) but to denote a commonly shared set of musical rules and practices into which other musics feed and from which other musics can derive certain (structural, symbolic) practices. ' Mainstream music' generally

367

MUSIC AND SOCIETY

16

17 18

19

20 21

22

implies a much greater degree of socia-cultural heterogeneity of populations involved in its production and reception than is the case for culturally more specific musics (e.g. subcultural, regional, ethnic). 'Mainstream musics' (e.g. (a) European classical music 1 730-1 9 1 0 including off-shoots such as operetta, parlour songs, film music and brass band music, (b) Afro-Euro-American middle-of-the-road rock and disco) tend also, in relation to their constituent genres, to take on the character of musical lingua Jranca for a much wider cross­ section of cultural communities. As part of the experiment, participants were only asked to write down associ­ ations for examples 1-8. Arriving later in the presentation at example 9, four examples were played in succession (nos 9-12) and the connotations given orally were 'death', 'sorrow', 'tragedy', 'lament'. There was total unity about 'death' and 'funeral' for nos 1 2 and 13. Excluding the octave upbeat at the very start of Ikonnikov's 'Funeral March of the Revolutionaries' (example 14). Apart from small variations in the degree of introversion, gloom and grief expressed in these few short examples - most of them have a section in the major key or played forte (otherwise there is nothing to be gloomy about!) - it would be interesting to know how and why the slow, minor third and minor sixth saturated sections of masses and requiems - the Kyrie eleisol1s, Miserere meis and Agnus Deis rather than the Dona nobis/eis pacems, Benediclllses, Libera mes or Dies iraes of this world - came to be considered as appropriate for our deaths in the form of Chopin's ' Marche funebre'. European discussion of minor modes and the affect of melodic descent using small intervals probably date back to at least the pre-Baroque and its notions of music's rhetorical devices like katabasis - a fitting concept in the context of sadness and death! Definitions from The New Collins English Dictionary (1982). It would probably be necessary to go at least as far back as Zarlino's /stitllzioni armoniche ( 1 558) (Strunk, 1952: 228-61) or Gallilei's Dialogo della rnus"lta antica ' e della moderna ( 1 5 8 1 ) (Strunk, 1952: 302-22) to find the start or explicit discussions of affect of what we call 'major' and 'minor keys'. Kepler, in his Harmonices mllndi ( 1 6 1 9) (Walker, 1 978: 64, cited by Ling, 1983: 559), described the minor third as 'passive and wanting to sink to the ground like a hen ready to be mounted by the cock'. Cooke ( 1 959: 54-80) offers many examples of differences of affect in the European classical tradition between major and minor thirds, sixths and ninths/seconds. Particularly gloomy examples of minor thirds are olTered by Cooke in his sections on 1-(2)-3-(2)-1 (minor) (Cooke, 1959: 140-3) and 8-7-6-5 (minor). Many examples cited are pre-Baroque, suggesting that it might even be necessary to look for the roots of the major-minor affective dichotomy as early as pre-Renaissance times. This notion of 'archaism' and 'lack of modernity' in connection with minor modes in Central Europe might also date back to the middle ages, at least if we are to give some credit to Cooke's theory ( 1 959: 5 1 -2, in connection with a quote from a decree issued in 1322 by Pope John XXII), suggesting 'the Ionian mode belonged to secular music - as is obvious from its prevalence in the trouba­ dours' songs - but the church preferred to adhere to the sterner modes'. The reader should also bear in mind that 'Mood Music' catalogues (Tagg, 1 980), basing their practices on traditional film music which in turn largely bases its com­ positional practices on European classical traditions, frequently categorise, group or cross-reference 'sadness' with 'religious', 'old times' ('archaic'), 'nostalgia', 'purity', 'quietude', etc.

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23 Marin Mersenne, in Harmol/ie universelle ( 1 636) (Walker, 1978: 64, quoted by Ling, t 983: 559), describes small intervals in these terms: 'Whether they rise or fall, they are like children or the elderly or people who have recently been ill for a long time and who cannot walk with large steps and who take a long time to cover short distances'. 24 For connections between high pitch and light, see Tagg ( 1 979): 107- 2 1 . The symbolism o f light/dark and black/white seems obvious t o us Northern Europeans whose nature (including ourselves) Jives less intensively (or dies completely) during the long, dark winters than during our short, light summers. However, it is clear that death, illness, sadness, etc. can be white or pale under other natural and cultural conditions. White is the colour of mourning in some African cultures or in Vietnam, and my Ghanaian colleague's little nieces hiding under the bed in fright the first time they saw me because I was pale enough to be a ghost will serve as examples of this point. 25 We choristers must have had natural tendencies to slack off and make many descending phrases into simultaneous diminuendi. I remember being told to take care with singing phrases that went down into chest register and to ensure that there was neither audible change of vocal timbre nor any unintended diminuendi. Pre-Baroque musical rhetoric figures included the anabasis for 'ascendit in coelis' and katabasis for 'descendit' (just before 'homo factus est') in the Credo. Katabasis was also good when humbling oneself (Ling, 1983: 558). Cooke (1959: · 1 62-5, 1 46-50) presents convincing examples of more depressing connotations for descending than other minor key melodic contours. 26 It is both beyond the bounds of my anthropological knowledge and outside the scope and intentions of this article to give a general account of Ghanaian funerals. However, since the object of this discussion is to clarify concepts of 'universality' in musical meaning, using music's relationship to death as a start­ ing point, some cultural comparison is obviously necessary. This means that the Ghanaian funerals and their music described here are no more than examples of actual practices observed or reported by ear-and-eye witnesses. In one case (Paa Gyimah) I actually attended one evening of the funeral celebrations myself. The other reports have been delivered orally by Klevor Abo (Accra) who has taken part in the events recounted. 27 Conversation with Klevor Abo, 2 November 1 983. During a phone call (5 November 1988), Abo said that funerals in Ghana seemed to him to be becoming sadder occasions. He also mentioned that speech, music and gestures tend to become louder and 'ruder', the further you move from the body of the deceased and the immediate family circle. 28 IASPM (International Association for the Study of Popular Music), 4th Conference, Accra July-August 1987. 29 John Collins, British-Ghanaian guitarist and producer, living and working in and around Accra. 30 Koo Nimo (Dan Amponsah), who has created 'a fascinating combination of traditional Ashanti Palm-Wine music, classical guitar techniques and Jazz' (Collins, 1985: 46-7), is also President of the Musicians' Union of Ghana. 3 1 I remember two funerals for Swedish communist party veterans where the bereaved strongly felt it would be in keeping with the personality and beliefs of the deceased to mark the idea that the struggle goes on by playing the lnternationale as the closing voluntary. 32 Quiet and slow non-dissonant major key pieces whose beginnings and ends have restricted melodic phrase (not total melodic) ambitus and generally low accompanimental pitch, like Handel's 'Largo' or Schumann's 'Andante Pathetique

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No. I ' (cf. Rapee's 'Funeral' section, Rapee (1924): 1 61-2), would usually be considered suitable. At one communist burial I was asked to play 'The Evening Bell' (Russian folk song arrangement), whose large melodic ambitus in E flat major was counterbalanced by very slow tempo and thick, sluggish, consonant chordal sonority. In all these pieces, minor key 'archaic' sadness is replaced by what might be called major key 'nostalgic beauty' , 33 For definition of 'museme', see Tagg ( 1 979): 70-3. 34 Term borrowed from Bjornberg ( 1 984). 35 The only (modern) classical piece I could readily call to mind was a setting of Rimbaud's mystical and existential words ' J'ai seul la clef de celie parade sauvage' from Benjamin Britten's Les IlIumi"lIlions. However, if my memory serves me correctly . the pendulum there is between the major, not minor, tonic and flat submediant triads. If readers can help me with blank spots where Aeolian pendu­ lums might possibly occur (e.g. Mahler, Sibelius, Vaughan Williams), I would be very grateful. 36 For a much more thorough account of Aeolian harmony in rock music, see Bjornberg ( 1 984). 37 My translation of Bjornberg ( 1 984): 382. 38 For more detailed account of connotative meaning in rock music melody­ accompaniment dualism, see Tagg ( 1 987). 39 The singer - Irene Cara - is of course not the heroine - Alex Owens, played by Jennifer Beals - but the music and its lyrics are phenomenologically the heroine's by the process of figure-ground/melody-accompaniment identification between music and picture. 40 Of course, delaying downbeats can also give positive combinations of ease or idleness, e.g. Frank Sinatra's 'You Make Me Feel So Young' (Myrow, Gordon) ( 1 956). 41 I was advised by a Greek comrade to raise my voice an octave when shouting slogans in political demonstrations. This helped the sound carry much better in the street and did not strain the voice so much as producing the same � ' Iume at a lower pitch. 42 One of the most convincing pieces of evidence in Deryck Cooke's The Language , oj Music ( 1 959) is the section entitled '(5)-6-5 (Minor) (pp. 1 46-50). Although 5-6-5 (Minor) is the only semitone change and therefore the most harmonically directional element in the Aeolian pendulum, Chopin's funeral march docs not figure amongst Cooke's examples. However, some other connotatively very relevant pieces cited by Cooke are ( I ) opening - Josquin des Prez: Deploratioll sur la morl de Ockeghem; (2) 'Maria' . . . 'weinel drauf3en' - SchuLZ: Au/el'stehungs­ Historie; (3) Donna Anna discovers her dead father - Mozart: Don Giovanni; (4) 'Quantus tremor est futurus' - Mozart: Requiem; (5) Florestan languishing in the dungeon - Beethoven: Fidelio; (6) 'By the waters of Babylon' - Walton: Belshazzar's Feast; (7) Lucretia the day after - Britten: The Rape Of Lucretia; (8) 'Vous qui tremblez' - Berlioz: Les r/'oyells; (9) Lament over the future fate of Russia - Mussorgsky: Boris GodwlOv; (10) ' M'hai legato al croce!' - Verdi: Otello. For falling semitone grief motifs in Wagner's Ring, see Donnington ( 1 976): 278-3 15. 43 Jara ( 1973). 'How hard it is to sing when I must sing of horror. Horror which I live, horror which I die. Seeing myself among so much and so many moments of infinity in which silence and screams are the end of my song. What I sec I have never seen. What I have felt and what I feel will give birth to the moment . . .' 44 e.g. 'Canci6n para Juanito' - Karaxtl ( 1 98 1 ), 'Companero' - Banda Tepeuani ( 1979).

45 Please excuse the mixed metaphor. 'EI pueblo unido' is composed by Sergio Ortega ( 1 973) with lyrics by Quilapyun and Ortega. Thanks to Pedro van der Lee and Coriun Ahronian for help with the background to this song. See also Joan Jara ( 1 984). I first heard this song in the version transcribed here at the tenth Festival for Political Song in Berlin (GDR) in February 1974. after which it was sung at almost every Latin American solidarity rally or meeting I attended for at least six years afterwards. 46 We will ignore the connotative agreement on no. 7 (Rebeliki) in this discussion about musical universals because that agreement concerns touristic connota­ tions (geographical or national localion, cafes), i.e. phenomena to which we have a direct relation from our own experience of leisure. This makes both the phe­ nomena connoted and the music itself part of our own culture, not in the sense that Swedes or Brits are competent in Greek urban proletarian culture but that it can, from inside our own cultural reference sphere, be recognised as Greek or Mediterranean. Agreeing on this implies anything but cultural competence inside the culture recognised as not being ours. To suggest otherwise would be like crediting connotative musical competence in our tradition to unwesternised Africans or Asians who say 'Europe', 'cold rain' and 'immigration offices' on hearing both the Bridal Chorus from Lohengrill and Chopin's ' Marche funebre'. 47 One of the reasons for choosing this song as one of the test pieces was because 1 personally found the old lady's voice tenderly and nobly sad. The actual vocal qualities that had this effect on me may be partly attributab�e to personal experi­ . . ences but this would not explain why other respondents, with personal hlstones probably quite different from my own, also found the example sad but tender. It just seems that we happen to read the singer's vocal timbre and inflections in similar ways. Barthes's pioneering essay on the grain of the voice notwithstand­ ing, if we can consider the analysis of semantic aspects of musical dis�o � rse in general still to be in the cradle, we would have to say that the descnptlon of relationships between acoustic and phenomenological aspects of voice quality i� particular has yet to see the light of day. My Ewe colleague can assure n:te unt" . he is blue in the face - and I believe him - that his voice is sad when he slllgs hiS 'bury me softly' song and yet I still find his voice quite cheerful without being able to give him any real indication of what it is in his voice that sounds cheerful to me. 48 What, one might wonder, becomes of epic speech and vocal delivery when singers and rhetoricians all have mikes pinned to their lapels and when meeting halls, streets and squares turn into everyone's sofa in front of the TV? Do Star Wars, Ronald Reagan and Iron Maiden constitute new forms of epic expression? 49 Apart from European classical traditions (espe�ially Tud r, Baroque, tO �le poems, programme music, film music), we are chiefly referrmg to rock m� slc, some Latin American and West African musics and a small part of the Hmdu classical music tradition. Although intellectually understanding most of what one reads about other musical cultures, it seems rash to claim lhat it has been under­ stood musical/y. Sonic ana phones (musical onomatopoeia) and musical stylisations of I�alural human, non-human or mechanical sounds have been excluded from the list not only because they frequently vary drastically in their stylisation, but also because the vocabulary of available noises varies both inside one music culture and between cultures. Would you recognise wind or know what it stood for if you heard it in Mongolian music? Would you recognise the cry of the jackal sung by a Masai herder and get the real feel of what jackals mean to him? Would he heal' Schubert's various brooks or get the right associations hearing computer beeps

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or laser flashes if he were able to identify them in disco music? I f the answer to any of these questions is 'no', it is safer to keep these anaphones out of the 'universals' section. According to my Swedish neighbour's 'Home Doctor Encyclopaedia' (Bra Bockers Liikarlexikoll. vol. 5: 1 45-6), a highly trained athlete's pulse rate can, if measured during sleep or deep rest, be as low as 40 b.p.m. and the pulse of a small child or baby in a state of excitement can exceed 200 b.p.m. This coincides perfectly with the range of pulses on a normal metronome, i.e. from 40 (/argol/ento) to 2 1 2 ( prestissimo). It should of course be remembered that musical volume must be considered also as a culturally relative concept, in that variations between societies in the loudness of the soundscape (Schafer, 1973, [977) will require concepts of 'loud' and 'soft' to adapt to what is actually audible above the noise of the soundscape (Tagg, 1987). Roland Kirk can of course inhale through a nose flute and blow through his sax, while there are also all sorts of bellowed (e.g. bagpipes, organs), mechanical, electromechanical and electronic instruments that can make melodies without being hampered by the restrictions of the human lung. Some people even sing while breathing in. More importantly, no percussion instrument (including mbiras, pianos, xylophones as weJl as drums) is at all dependent on inhalations/exhalations to measure its phrases. Nevertheless, studies of rhythmic or melodic recurrence (reiterative, sequential, varied, etc.) in any music will almost certainly show that most rhythmic/melodic statements can be divided into motifs or phrases seldom occupying more than ten seconds. Even the dijeridu player, who inhales while chanting into his eucalyptus trunk, measures his constant flow of sound with rhythmic and timbric motifs that also fit in with phrase durations. e.g. Gorbman ( 1 987: 12-1 3), in her otherwise useful book on narrative film music, states 'If we listen to a Bach fugue, independently of any other activity, we are listening to the functioning of pure musical codes, �enerating musical di�ourse'. Wallis and Maim. ( 1 984: 7), citing J. Collins, 'Etats-Unis et transnat)onales; americaines; retour a I'envoyeur', in Politique d 'aujollrd'hui, 1-2, January­ February 1975.

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'Leggere i suoni', MusicalRealui, 25: 1 45-60 (1987). Walker, D. P., Studies in Musical Science in the Late Renaissance (London, 1978). Wallis, R. and Maim, K., Big Sounds from Small Peoples (London, 1 984).

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Discography

Bjornberg, A., 'There's Something Going On - om eolisk harmonik i rockmusick', Tvlirspel, 37 1 86. Bra Bockers Liikarlexikoll, vol. 5 (H6ganas, 1982). Collins, J., Africall Pop Roots (London, 1985). Cooke, D., The Lallgllage of Mllsic (London, 1 959). Donnington, R., Wagner's Ring and its Symbols (London, 1 976). Gorbman, C., Unheard Melodies (Bloomington, 1987). Jara, Joan, Victor: en sang om livet (Stockholm, 1984). Ling, J., Ellropas mllsikhistoria - 1 730 (Uppsala, 1983). Schafer, R. M., 'The Music of the Environment', Cllllllres, 1 1 1 973 (1973). The Tllning of the World (Bancroft, 1977). Strunk, 0., Source Readings in Music History (London, 1952). Tagg, P., Kojak - 50 Seconds of Television Mllsic (G6teborg, 1979). 'Film Music, Mood Music and Popular Music Research', Stencilled Papers from the Gothenburg University Musicology Department, No. 2 8002 ( 1 980).

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