Mechanical instruments and everyday life: the player piano in Portugal

This paper examines player pianos in Portugal between the 1890s and the 1930s. In a small European country with few production facilities, mechanical music developed in a particular way since a local recording industry was expanding rapidly and radio was not yet disseminated. Despite the local market's reliance on imported goods, the music business concentrated on Portuguese pieces. The mechanisation of the piano and its display as a product that embodied modernity illustrates the transformations that took place in Portugal at the beginning of the 20th century. These were reflected in new forms of entertainment, such as cinemas and nightclubs that incorporated new music genres. At the dawn of the century, the leisure market relied on the popular music theatre, which was dominated by Portuguese, French and Spanish music. In the interwar period, English and American pieces made their way into people's lives, transforming the music business.

When Squawkies Became Talkies: The Musicians' Union, Mechanical Music and British Cinemas, 1927–33

The technical, commercial and cultural aspects of the advent of sound in the cinemas of several nations have been widely researched in work on that epoch. This article focuses on another facet of that history, namely its impact on musicians employed in British cinemas. Much of the evidence is based on the records of the Musicians' Union and chronicles that organisation's attempts to resist the introduction of the new technology and to ameliorate its impact on its members. The musicians' side of the story is complemented by information drawn from, among other sources, The Bioscope, a trade paper that revealed the eagerness of the Cinematograph Exhibitors' Association (whose members comprised the managers and owners of British picture houses) to dismiss their orchestras as soon as practicable. The effect of this course of action was to increase the unemployment already resulting from the Great Depression in the British entertainment industries. This in turn weakened the Musicians' Union, forcing a severe contraction in its ability to support its members.

OK for Sound? The Reception of the Talkies in Britain, 1928–32

The arrival of the talkies in Britain evoked mixed responses. While popular audiences enthusiastically embraced Hollywood musicals like the Al Jolson hit The Singing Fool (1928), the literati were often scathing of ‘mechanical’ music and dialogue. Hollywood dictated the speed of change and economics and public demand soon forced the British film industry to convert to sound, but critics, intellectuals, educators, artists, literary figures and musicians were openly hostile to the new art form, opening a chasm between popular taste and intellectual response. The cacophony of dissenting voices was joined by various official reports from bodies like the Trades Union Congress and the Federation of British Industries who predicted the deleterious effect of the talkies on everything from British jobs in manufacturing to diminishing Britain's influence across its colonies and dominions. This article will map these discourses and examine attitudes to the introduction of the talkies in Britain between 1929 and 1932 as the new technology gathered momentum across the UK and film criticism developed as a distinct discipline.

Keeping the Song Alive in Mechanical Music Collections of New York and New Jersey

Music boxes, musical clocks, nickelodeons and similar objects are commonly referred to as mechanical music or musical automata. New York and New Jersey have rich histories of manufacturing and archiving these objects. Often enclosed in display cases, curatorial attention has not always been paid to the music historically central to these objects. Therefore, this study examined how museums connect the materiality of these objects with their associated music. By synthesizing perspectives from museum studies, music history, and the history of design, five collections of musical automata in New York and New Jersey were examined: The Buffalo History Museum, The Herschell Carrousel Factory Museum, Thomas Edison National Historical Park, The Guinness Collection at the Morris Museum and the Cooper Hewitt Museum. Specifically, this project explored how musical automata produced between 1770 and 1930 have been archived, displayed and interpreted. By interviewing curators and analyzing museum collections, it ultimately appears that the curatorial strategies for mechanical music objects in New York and New Jersey are greatly varied. Additionally, a correlation was found between the proportion of a museum’s collection dedicated to mechanical music and how interactive it is for the public.

Anxieties over technology in Yugoslav interwar music criticism: Stanislav Vinaver in dialogue with Walter Benjamin

In Paris in late 1935, the exiled German-Jewish philosopher Walter Benjamin completed the first version of his well-known 'artwork essay', The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility. In that essay, Benjamin famously welcomed the loss of 'aura' in art, the mystique, quasi-religious quality of unique, original, authentic, and aesthetically autonomous works of art, due to the advent of mass reproduction of artworks on an industrial scale, especially in the new arts of photography and cinema, rendering many of those quasi-religious qualities of 'auratic' art obsolete. Benjamin welcomed this in accordance with his leftist, anti-fascist political agenda, hoping that the loss of 'aura' would open art to politicization, communism's (or, at any rate, Benjamin's) response to fascism's aestheticisation of politics. That same year, 1935, in Belgrade, the capital of what was then the Kingdom of Yugoslavia, the Serbian-Jewish poet, intellectual, and literary and music critic Stanislav Vinaver wrote an essay titled Mehanička muzika (Mechanical Music). In his essay, Vinaver focused on the advent of technical reproduction in and its effects on music, an art largely ignored by Benjamin. Unlike his more famous contemporary, Vinaver was alarmed by the new technologies of radio and the gramophone record and their perceived negative impact not only on traditional music, performed live on traditional, acoustic instruments, but on organic life in general, replacing it with a mechanical surrogate carried by the waves of a dehumanizing technology. Vinaver's views were probably shaped by his passionate championing of modernism in Serbian and Yugoslav literature and music alike, which is evident not only in Mehanička muzika, but also in his criticism in general. Two more important factors may have also been the influence of the French philosopher Henri Bergson, Vinaver's one-time professor at the Sorbonne, and his valorisation of intuition in thought and artistic creativity, as well as Vinaver's somewhat nostalgic view of music as the only true and self-referential art, a view reminiscent of the re-conception of music in the early German Romantics such as E. T. A. Hoffmann, F. W. J. Schelling, and Arthur Schopenhauer, later taken up and elaborated by such disparate figures as the German music theorist Eduard Hanslick, English essayist Walter Pater, and Vinaver's own modernist hero Arnold Schönberg. Ironically, although Vinaver shared much of Benjamin's leftist politics, he did not see such a positive potential in the mechanical reproduction of music, but, perhaps, only another sign of humanity's headlong March toward self-destruction in a total war, on the wings of an aestheticised technology and instrumental reason run amok, no longer serving humanity but turning against it.

Impulsive Synchronisation: A Conversation on Military Technologies and Audiovisual Arts

Stemming from their common interest in media archeology and the idea of the air as a medium of encrypted signals, Satz and Parikka explore the themes emerging from Satz's film installation 'Impulsive Synchronisation' (2013). Satz has used various technologies as the subject of her work, including the Chladni plate, mechanical music, phonograph grooves and optical sound, looking at how such objects tap into ideas of knowledge and communication in their use of notation systems, languages or codes. Satz is also interested in bringing to the fore key female figures largely excluded from mainstream historical discourse in an ongoing engagement with the question of women’s contributions to labour, technology and scientific knowledge. The starting point for ‘Impulsive Synchronisation’ was a 'Secret Communication System' patented during World War II by Hollywood star Hedy Lamarr and American composer George Antheil. This invention of 'frequency hopping', designed to protect radio-controlled torpedoes from enemy disruption by distributing the signal over many frequencies and synchronising the transmitter and receiver in rapidly changing patterns, has become the basis for today's spread-spectrum technology. In Satz’s work, these technologies are referenced to explore visual, musical and data notation, as well as its encryption, synchronisation and decipherment.