The World's Din: Listening to records, radio and fllms in New Zealand 1880-1940
288
The World's Din: Listening to records, radio and fllms in New Zealand 1880-1940
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Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781988531496 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Otago University Press |
| Publication date: | 10/31/2019 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 288 |
| File size: | 15 MB |
| Note: | This product may take a few minutes to download. |
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CHAPTER 1
EXHIBITING SOUNDS
* * *
Only a few hardy souls braved the bad weather to gather at Blenheim's Lyceum Hall on 15 April 1879. They were there to watch a display put on by the entrepreneur and showman C.J.W. Griffiths. As the rain beat on the roof, the audience members listened intently to a recitation of 'Old Mother Hubbard', followed by 'a line or two from a song, barking, crowing, a cooey and other sounds'. Even on a wet night in Blenheim, this was hardly the stuff of grand entertainment, but these sounds were made by a phonograph that Griffiths was touring around the country. A sonic revolution had arrived in New Zealand.
Not all of Griffiths' exhibitions went as smoothly as that in Blenheim. A public display in Wellington at the Athenaeum Hall had some teething troubles. There was great amusement when the recorded words 'Victoria by the grace of God' were heard as 'a dismal wail'. But if technical hitches like this undermined the advertising ballyhoo that described the phonograph as 'science and mystery, the greatest marvel of the age', the machine aroused interest wherever it was displayed.
The startling effects of recorded sound permanently transformed the ways in which New Zealanders heard themselves and the world. This chapter examines the first few years of this aural revolution by exploring the phonograph exhibitions that toured the country during the last two decades of the nineteenth century. Initially presented as scientific marvels, machines such as the phonograph and the gramophone soon became credible sources of musical entertainment and education, in many cases replacing the piano. They became normalised and accepted through a combination of humour and scientific explanation that demystified the marvel of 'talking machines'. The phrase 'talking machines' itself points to an important factor in their acceptance. The revolution in listening brought about by these machines was initially built on a paradoxical emphasis on their imagined and metaphorical humanity. Just as the piano was used to express the human soul of music, the canned music machines came to be heard as serious musical instruments that repaid attentive listening.
New Zealanders heard the world through their phonographs and gramophones. They became familiar with the sounds of internationally famous performers without seeing and hearing them on stage. Local publications such as New Phonogram and the N.Z. Record Herald and Kinetoscope News, along with the manufacturers' manuals, pamphlets, newspaper articles, magazine stories and advertising, supplied information and gossip about recording artists and new developments of the technology. These international sonic connections have been ignored by local historians who have concentrated on a later period, when a 'national' sound was recorded. But a focus on the early years of recorded sound, and a recognition of its imported nature, offers an opportunity to respond to Peter Gibbons' call for scholars to become less preoccupied with 'New Zealand's place in the world' and to pay more attention to 'the world's place in New Zealand'.
People develop uses for technology that suit their lives, rather than shaping their lives around the innate qualities of any given technology. A prime example is that other acoustic technology of modernity, the telephone. Originally intended as a tool for the commercial world, it rapidly became a source of pleasure and fun as users explored the new possibilities of communication it offered. Unexpected uses were likewise found for the phonograph and gramophone. Like listeners elsewhere, New Zealanders were quick to take up these new acoustic technologies because they could find meaningful and pleasurable uses for them in their lives.
* * *
The phonograph was seen and heard in New Zealand just 18 months after its development by Thomas Edison and a team of technicians at Menlo Park, New Jersey, in 1877. Driven by hand or a clockwork engine, the phonograph stored sounds on strips of tinfoil. The machine was difficult to operate and the recordings could be played back only three or four times before disintegrating. C.J.W. Griffiths, the entertainment promoter and impresario who toured the device throughout New Zealand, followed the pattern of his counterparts in the United States, Great Britain and Australia. His exhibitions were part of a sophisticated international publicity campaign engineered by Edison to draw attention to the latest product of his research facility.
For those who attended the 1879 exhibitions, the word 'phonograph' and the existence of audio technologies were not entirely surprising. New Zealand ears were primed. 'Phonograph' and its derivatives – 'phonographer', 'phonographist' and 'phonography' – were already used to describe those who followed Isaac Pitman's system of shorthand. The phonautograph, a device developed by L.M. Scott that made images of sound waves on glass covered in carbon blacking, had been described in the New Zealand press. And press accounts of the invention and exhibition of the tinfoil phonograph prior to Griffiths' tour had framed the device as further proof of Edison's genius and the general onward march of science and progress.
The demonstrations began with a brief description of the machine, its invention and its functions. Audience members were then invited to make recordings that were played back to them, and also heard recordings made prior to the show. The phonograph was presented in the context of a lecture rather than as part of a carnival entertainment, which emphasised the serious nature of the technology. But the wonder of a machine that could reproduce sounds – talk and sing – was always emphasised as well. American audiences typically displayed a mixture of enthusiasm and amazement when they first heard Edison's invention, marvelling at the idea of a machine that spoke. New Zealanders were similarly impressed.
One reporter who attended a Wellington exhibition described the playback of his own voice as 'very uncanny' and added that a cornet solo made in Dunedin was 'reproduced with capital effect'. Another commentator remarked on the faithfulness of the recordings of a barking dog, as well as of people laughing, singing and reciting nursery rhymes. In Christchurch, the phonograph was said to be capable of capturing 'every trick of a speaker's voice and the notes of some gifted singer'. This reporter went on to stress that the machine was capable of storing the sounds and reproducing them with 'startling fidelity' either in a moment or some years afterwards for 'the delight of a new generation'. The phonograph was 'an acoustic wonder' and its ability to reproduce sounds aroused 'surprise and astonishment'. Sound had been made permanent, portable and repeatable.
But the seriousness and success of these demonstrations were often undermined by the unreliable nature of the phonograph. In New Zealand and elsewhere, there was much hilarity when at some of the performances the technology failed. The sounds made by a malfunctioning phonograph at one demonstration at the Athenaeum Hall in Wellington caused gales of laughter that disrupted both a prayer meeting and a lecture, leading to 'much tearing of hair and muttering of curses'. On this occasion, it is likely to have been the noises of the phonograph's listeners rather than the machine itself that led to such acoustic confusion. When the machine malfunctioned, which seems to have happened regularly, the results could also be amusing. At a public exhibition in Wellington, technical glitches led to some recorded lines from Othello being described as 'wonderful noises, not at all Shakespearean'. One reporter at a private Wellington show wrote that the sound of the machine was 'of a peculiar character and more like the echo of a voice' and that it repeated words 'in a very drunken manner'. Anthropomorphising the phonograph was a typical response to this wondrous, sometimes bewildering technology. Another was the use of the term 'talking machine'. Humanising the technology made it comprehensible, as did the sober scientific explanations and the humour it provoked when it malfunctioned.
While the science behind the machine was admired, many people initially viewed the phonograph as an entertainment rather than a serious and useful scientific device. There was little or no speculation in the New Zealand newspapers about its potential uses for business, education, scientific research or domestic entertainment. It was a curiosity that embodied the power of contemporary science and technology.
After the 1879 tour, recorded sound seems to have languished in New Zealand, as it did elsewhere. The Australian-based entertainer J. Kohler toured New Zealand with a variety and waxworks show that included an Edison phonograph during 1880–81. A lecturer named C.A. Edwards gave some talks in Wellington on scientific topics that included a demonstration of a phonograph in 1887. By then Edison had turned his attention to different projects, and other researchers struggled to find a more durable recording medium than tinfoil. Emil Berliner demonstrated the disc-based gramophone in 1888, an event that was noted in New Zealand. Then, in that year, Edison returned to the science of sound with the development of a reliable phonograph he dubbed the 'Perfected Phonograph', along with the durable wax cylinders that marked the dawn of commercial recording. Three years later, Douglas Archibald gave a series of exhibitions that created huge interest and began to transform New Zealand's sonic cultures.
Archibald had demonstrated Edison's Perfected Phonograph in Britain in 1889. He visited Edison in 1890 and bought the latest model before touring the machine through Australia. After astounding audiences there, he sailed for New Zealand and gave exhibitions throughout the country, beginning in Dunedin in December 1890 and continuing during the first half of 1891. He returned to Australia, then sailed for Britain in 1892, giving more exhibitions as he went in Burma, India and Sri Lanka. For him, New Zealand was just another listening post in an international network of phonographic shows. In publicity for the events, Archibald was presented as a serious, trustworthy and sober man of science as opposed to a vaudeville showman. Listeners were promised music from Britain and from Edison's own laboratory, and a demonstration that would electrify them with the 'wonders of modern science'. This was a seriously fun rational recreation.
Archibald's New Zealand tour, under the auspices of the trans-Tasman entertainment promoter William MacMahon, took in most parts of the country, attracted large crowds and was covered extensively in the press. In contrast to Griffiths' exhibitions of 1879, Archibald presented carefully planned and smoothly executed shows that combined not only high seriousness with amusement but also new sonic and visual technologies. Each demonstration began with a lecture accompanied by magic-lantern slides that explained the machine, its development and its potential. Archibald then played a series of cylinders, most of which had been made overseas by internationally famous performers. He also played recordings of New Zealand performers such as Salvation Army bands from Christchurch and Napier, and the Wellington Garrison Band. His final act was to invite audience members and musicians to come onto the stage to make recordings on the spot. These were then played back, much to the audience's delight.
The recordings Archibald brought to New Zealand also included speeches by famous people. One of these, by William Gladstone, 'excited great curiosity, many of those among the audience, born and bred in the colonies, naturally evincing a desire to hear the voice of the great English statesman'. Messages from local dignitaries were recorded too. Robert Stout, lawyer and statesman, was recorded live on the stage and then directly played back to great amusement in Dunedin. Archibald's recordings of former Governor George Grey in Auckland included messages to Edison and to the people of New Zealand, and were played to great acclaim during the rest of his tour. Contemporary accounts described how audiences listened with 'keen attention' and 'earnest attention', and were 'greatly astonished'. When the Gladstone recording was played in Dunedin, 'a dead silence reigned, then loud applause followed'. Hearing a machine reproduce sound that had been made months before on the other side of the world, or minutes before on the stage, was both a marvel and an enjoyable audio experience in its own right. New Zealanders enjoyed the sounds of their masters' voices.
Audiences were also enthralled and impressed by the clarity and quality of Archibald's recordings. Press commentary was admiring, too, despite some initial scepticism. 'Orpheus', the music and drama critic for the Sporting Review, was at first uncertain: 'I am fired with a burning curiosity in respect to the phonograph. We are promised the voices and ipsissima verba [the very words] of great orators, singers, and humourists, but will the reality come up to the expectations excited?' After the exhibitions in Auckland, a clearly delighted 'Orpheus' wrote: 'My vocabulary fails to supply epithets to fit the case of that bewildering Phonograph; strange, unique, marvellous, wonderful, are all inadequate – miraculous is perhaps the best word.' Despite the meticulous explanations provided by Archibald in his lectures, the ability of the machine to reproduce sounds remained uncanny and somewhat baffling.
In the advertising for his displays, Archibald's name was always followed by 'MA, Oxon.', enhancing both his and the phonograph's credibility. Edison's name was already a byword for genius and a rugged, individualistic 'can do' attitude that embodied the Victorian ideals of self-sufficiency, self-reliance and self-advancement. Now Archibald's smooth, authoritative lectures placed the machine in the mainstream of contemporary scientific development and progress. In his lectures and in interviews, he stressed the business and scientific applications of the device. These included its uses in office dictation and as a form of postal communication. This emphasis on utility was in keeping with the list of potential uses of the phonograph that Edison outlined in the North American Review of June 1878. Of the 10 ideas he mentioned, only one, 'Reproduction of music', was concerned with leisure.
For many New Zealand listeners, however, the phonograph displays and the glimpse they offered of the machine's fanciful possibilities were a pleasure in themselves. A cartoon from the New Zealand Observer, for example, showed the governor as a human/phonograph hybrid repeating the same things over and over. In the top left corner was the British singer John Sims Reeves, famous for the longevity of his career and his never-ending sequence of farewell concerts. Journalists recording a fiery speech were depicted with phonograph horns instead of mouths. A bashful suitor made his marriage proposal by phonograph. Anthropomorphised machines delivered messages to stereotypical wives and mothers-in-law.
Such depictions were designed to allay fears about the phonograph's unnatural ability to reproduce human sounds. They also aligned the phonograph with communication technologies such as the telephone and the telegraph. Edison had envisioned the machine as a substitute for letter writing, and Archibald discussed the establishment of Phonograph Bureaus that would allow people to make recordings that could be posted.
Other New Zealand commentators echoed these light-hearted responses to the machine but also acknowledged some fears. A writer from the New Zealand Graphic and Ladies' Journal imagined the machine being miniaturised so it could be concealed and used to entrap suitors and spouses by 'the recording of testimony of the most incriminating kind – the testimony of one's own voice'. What was previously ephemeral – the spoken word – had now become as permanent as the written word, and might even become as binding as a permanent legal document. The article went on to quell those fears: 'Many a phonograph studiously regulated and concealed by an astute mother on her daughter's person will incomprehensibly get deranged and return giving no echo of Lothario's vows, possibly owing to the maiden's complicity or the indiscreet pressure to which it has been subjected.' Another cartoon depended on a similar gag, with the cunning father pretending to be deaf while the all-hearing phonograph captures the young man's words as well as he does. The cruel humour relies on the phonograph as a trap to get a man for the 'homeliest daughter'.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "The World's Din"
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Copyright © 2018 Peter Hoar.
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Table of Contents
Acknowledgements 6
Preeace: Hearing the Past: A Sound History of New Zealand 7
Overture: Listening to Recorded Sound 11
Part I Records
Chapter 1 Exhibiting Sounds 21
Chapter 2 Selling Sounds 34
Chapter 3 Domesticating Sounds 44
Chapter 4 Teaching Sounds 53
Chapter 5 Moving Sounds 67
Part II Radios
Chapter 6 Receiving Radio 87
Chapter 7 Military Radio 104
Chapter 8 Hearing Radio 119
Chapter 9 Organising Radio 136
Part III Films
Chapter 10 Living Pictures 155
Chapter 11 Orchestrated Pictures 171
Chapter 12 Talking Pictures 184
Conclusion 200
Notes 207
Bibliography 244
Index 278