It has almost become a commonplace in the literature to describe the entry of the phonograph into Western music history as taking place in the parlour, or (depending on the decade of focus) the living room. ‘Americans’, we are told, ‘increasingly welcomed the phonograph into their parlors’ (Katz 2010, p. 62). People were ‘[a]t home with the phonograph’ (Gellatt Reference Gellatt1977, p. 69) already at the turn of the 20th century, since there was ‘[a] phonograph in every home’ (Millard Reference Millard1995, p. 37). With classical musicians such as Caruso, Toscanini and Heifetz on record, one can even speak of a ‘[d]omestication of the concert hall’ (Symes Reference Symes2004, p. 60). Yet although the writers quoted are much more nuanced than the brief phrases and headlines may indicate, one can nevertheless question the overall picture. Was there a phonograph (or gramophone; the terms are interchangeable in many contexts) in every home, even in the affluent parlours of the upper strata of society? And, if so, how common was the classical canon in comparison to popular song and dance music?
A cause for such doubt is the strong focus on, and rather limited sources in, commercial advertising of much research; the new recording industry worked hard to establish the technology as a ‘natural’ part of the prestigious milieus of the cultural elite, whereby an idealised picture of phonogram listening in the parlour was part and parcel of the marketing strategy (Frith Reference Frith1987/2007; Gauß Reference Gauß2009, p. 148ff.; Siefert Reference Siefert1995). Thus what the commercials picture cannot be taken at face value. A second reason is the different research once carried out in praesentia. At the end of the 1920s and the beginning of the 1930s, Stuart Chapin and colleagues researched the ‘socio-economic status’ of middle class homes in the USA. Inquiring into ‘living room equipment’ as an indicator of status, it is telling that, whereas a piano at home acquired the top score of 5 points, a gramophone only scored 2 points, records of classical music scored 0.1 each and a jazz record only scored 0.01. In comparison, an electrical sewing machine scored 3 points on Chapin's scale, and books 0.2 each (Chapin Reference Chapin1932, p. 581ff.).
Although Chapin's research hardly meets the standards of today's social sciences, if it tells us anything at all it is that ‘phonographs’ (listed by Chapin under ‘mechanical instruments’) and ‘phonograph records’ seem to have had a rather mediocre social status in the USA. A phonograph or gramophone was not the kind of equipment one boasted about with friends and neighbours.
To balance what can thus be described as a lop-sided picture, this inquiry deals with the role of phonography (here understood as the technology and the use of phonographs/gramophones) from a different perspective. Rather than looking at the economically prosperous east coast of the USA, which much previous research has done, the focus is on Sweden, a country with one of the lowest standards of living in Europe during the first decades of the 20th century – a condition which according to Life Magazine changed to its obverse in less than four decades.Footnote 1 The question thus is how phonography turned from being a scientific curiosity into becoming an everyday media technology, and how it thereby influenced culture and everyday musical communication (cf. Gauß Reference Gauß2009, p. 14ff.). The inquiry takes 1903 as its starting point, the year when the phonograph was already well established and the gramophone made its first entry in the country. It then continues up until 1945, which marks the end of World War II and a German-dominated economic and cultural era in Sweden, in favour of a radically new Anglo-American one that is beyond the scope of a single article.Footnote 2
Source material consists of newspapers and popular and semi-scholarly journals, together with catalogues of early housing and home exhibitions, as well as an ethnographic questionnaire from 1962, with national scope, asking for personal memories of the gramophone at the turn of the century. Commercial advertising is thus supplemented and compared with other kinds of journalistic, scholarly and semi-scholarly content, from news to short novels, and public policy plans to personal memory accounts.Footnote 3 By examining media that addresses the non-specialist and non-connoisseurship of recorded music (and, as it turns out, even the non-listener), focussing on the domestic life and space of the home, I hope to strike a balance between on the one hand the ordinary and prosaic, and on the other hand the desirable and prestigious – a broad spectrum over which the everyday is likely to be distributed for a large amount of the population. This perspectival widening also has the advantage of covering a European aspect (beyond the UK and Central Europe), which at the same time as it highlights a specific national case (peripheral Sweden), reflects on aspects of the mediatisation of music with relevance beyond the merely local.
The findings are sorted under separate headings according to five loosely knit themes, which are chronologically ordered, although with large temporal overlaps (approximate time frames are headlined within brackets). The first, introduced with a historical backdrop, reveals an ambivalence towards the phonograph and the gramophone during the first decade. The second looks for traces of the gramophone in the upper class salong (‘salon’), and ends up in the tedious complaints of the daily press. The third moves back in time, takes recording rates and advertisements as indicators of gramophone occurrence in the less cultivated corners of society, and discovers a utilitarian approach to phonography favouring dance and diverted music consumption. The fourth theme detects a change in attitude towards the gramophone and its recordings, as electronic technology becomes the norm and influences both performance and listening practices. Through the fifth theme we encounter the ideals behind the modern living room, as they were articulated and depicted from the mid 1920s on. The living room eventually becomes the place for recreation and solitary listening (emulating the acoustic conditions of the record stores’ listening rooms in favour of the new attitude towards recorded music), in what can be described as a solipsistic approach. However, in contrast to Life Magazine’s bold assertion, simple housing and accommodation statistics show that still at the end of the period examined this living room was but a pipe dream for the majority of the population. To the extent that the gramophone had a fixed place at all within the home – not stashed away in a box in a closet or under a bed – it was played, listened and danced to mostly in company with others.
The concluding discussion suggests that the process uncovered, which involves both the utilitarian and the solipsistic approaches to phonography, be understood not simply in terms of a mediatisation of music – i.e. how the turning of sound-recording into an everyday media-technology influenced culture and everyday musical communication (cf. Krotz Reference Krotz and Lundby2009, p. 24) – but also more profoundly as a particular instance of the musicalisation of culture and everyday life (cf. Pontara and Volgsten Reference Pontara, Volgsten, Driessens, Bolin, Hepp and Hjarvard2017).
Early reception: the first decade (1903–13)
The phonograph had been introduced in Swedish newspapers already in early 1878 (shortly before it was patented in the USA). Later the same year it was exhibited to the public at the Academy of Science in Stockholm. Whereas the phonograph initially triggered scientific interest, by the turn of the century it had become a more or less common attraction at markets and fairs around the country (Franzén et al. Reference Franzén, Sundberg and Thelander2008, p. 8ff.; Boström Reference Boström, Ekström, Jülich and Snickars2006). The cylinders on which the sounds were recorded usually contained local or national productions. For instance, on his first acquaintance with the phonograph, the Swedish king Oscar II had recorded himself singing (the cylinder however was destroyed after first hearing). The king, keenly interested in industrial innovations, also recorded his own organ playing on the new Tonfonograf invented by the piano manufacturer Carl Wilhelm Nyström in 1891 (Anon. 1925, p. 18). On the other hand, the opening speech by the king at the Stockholm international industry fair of 1897 was recorded in multiple copies (by the king himself as well as by others) that circulated in the country for many years (Boström Reference Boström, Ekström, Jülich and Snickars2006, p. 198). A curious and early example of New World music on cylinder is the performance by the local military marching band Kronobergs Regementes Musikcorps of the cake-walk ‘At a Georgia Camp Meeting’, recorded in 1899 (Bruér and Westin Reference Bruér and Westin2006, p. 26).
Twenty years after its invention the phonograph, or talking machine as it was widely called, still seemed uncertain what content best to emit – verbal speech or music. As the machine entered into the 20th century it continued to capture the interest of the press, although public opinion was highly ambivalent. For instance, in a review of an ‘Opera-fonograf-konsert’ given in November 1900 at the Academy of science in Stockholm, the daily Svenska Dagbladet (SvD), which since 1897 had adopted an explicit ambition to cover cultural-aesthetic issues (Lundström Reference Lundström, Gustafsson and Rydén2001, p. 26), reported in sardonic tone, pleading for divine redemption (SvD 001119). However a review in the same paper of a following concert a few weeks later was more soberly treated (the epithet ‘concert’ signals not only a musical content but also the phonograph's ‘serious’ ambitions), noting the audience's enthusiastic applause, while also informing the reader about the Edison Phonograph Company's commercial aims behind the concert (SvD 001212).
Whereas the recording of sound by the phonograph was sensational news in the late 1870s, by 1903 the gramophone première was not. Squeezed between notices on real estate purchases and a newly patented chairbed, the gramophone nevertheless received positive judgements as unequalled in reproducing the human voice: ‘one could almost imagine seeing the vocalist’ (SvD 030415). This can be compared with the review (also in the same paper) of the ‘grammofon-konsert’ in the foyer of the Royal Opera in 1906, arranged by Grammofonaktiebolaget (‘the Gramophone Company’):
No matter how the invention may be further ‘perfected’, it is to be feared that it shall not be able to bestow real artistic enjoyment; the reproduced instruments and the human voices will inevitably sound dead and shrill, since apparently the inscrutable ‘overtones’, which provide for the distinctive timbre, will not make it onto the record. (SvD 060224)Footnote 4
However, there were also positive reviews. A similar event at a less fashionable retailer's store a year earlier arranged by the Lyrophone company received an unhesitatingly positive review in the journal Damernas Musikblad (The Ladies’ Music Magazine):
[A]lthough we have previously not been enthusiastic admirers of such devices, we must admit that our opinion in this matter has completely changed, since the Lyrophone discs we had the opportunity to hear reproduced with an unequally lifelike way with unusual strength and clear tone the songs performed. (DM 1905 issue 16)
Even the phonograph got the occasional good word in the press. The semi-scholarly Svensk Musiktidning (Swedish Music Journal), which had reported on the aforementioned phonograph concert in the winter of 1900 (issue 19), reports a gramophone concert in 1908 (issue 8), and in a 1912 issue it published an article on the reception of the phonograph by indigenous Greenlanders on an ethnographic expedition (issue 12–14). This ethnographic theme was repeated the following year, in a report on the phonograph as a recording device in the service of ethnographer Karl Tirén in his research on Sami yoiks (issue 7–8).
Interest here, quite obviously, is not in the phonograph per se, but in the field-recordings of music from distant cultures (e.g. SvD 120808, 121112, 121116, 130223, 130302, 131003, 140618). This is reflected further by the fact that, by 1912, phonogram concerts were given at the ethnographic museum in Stockholm (Boström Reference Boström2003, p. 30). This also indicates an interest in the reproduction of sound and in sound-fidelity, which the ethnographer shares with the reviewers of the early gramophone concerts, and which was also promoted by sellers (for instance, Lyrophon marketed its record player as ‘representing song and music with full natural fidelity’, SvD 050917). The phonograph would continue to appear in the press for many years to come, mainly in ethnographic contexts.Footnote 5 Yet when it comes to recordings of music for other than ethnographic purposes, the phonograph and the wax cylinder would soon be superseded by the gramophone and the shellac disc.
Salongen revisited, or the mystery of the missing music machines (1913–30)
The Ladies’ Music Magazine, which was published from 1902 to 1913, contained sheet music, journalistic material and commercial advertisements. It was primarily aimed at the female, bourgeois, amateur musician, offering ‘every home, wherein music is played, a collection of popular and pleasing salon- and dance pieces’ (DM issue 1, 1902; Edin Reference Edin2017). Around 1900, the salon in Sweden – salongen – had two major variants, the semi-public and the familial. The semi-public salon was hosted by the families of the haute-bourgeoisie and often served as showcase for young and promising musicians, as well as trials for newly composed musical works. Whereas the semi-public salon often presented both national and international musical celebrities, the familial salon was a sheltered space for the family and its closest friends, wherein the daughters of the house were the prime performers (Öhrström Reference Öhrström2007).
The Swedish salong, in both its versions, was a long-standing import from the continent (Germany and France), and as such it showed similarities to the parlor in the USA as described in the quoted sources above. Against the background of the reports in The Ladies’ Music Magazine, The Swedish Music Journal and the dailies, it would be quite justified to envision the place of the gramophone in the midst of the musical salong. However, as noted already, there is also significant reason to doubt this. A well-informed cicerone to settle the case is the journal Svenska hem i ord och bilder (Swedish Homes in Words and Pictures), issued monthly from 1913 to 1955. The journal is devoted to home reports from the upper class, consisting of literally thousands of photographs of interiors and detailed comments on the exquisite taste exhibited therein. One can assume that the readers of the journal belonged to the segment portrayed, i.e. the aristocracy, haute bourgeoisie, and on occasion, well-known artists and cultural celebrities, but also that it occasionally included members of the lower classes who found the interiors desirable, inspiring and worth striving for.
During its first decade and a half, the journal brought the reader along on visits to several musical homes. Almost a half of the visited homes display a grand piano in the salon or living room (the two terms occur interchangeably already from the start: salong and vardagsrum). From famous sculptor Carl Milles, who keeps a 16th century Salzburger organ in his ‘Grand room’ (August 1913), to Cavalry Captain Thure Bielke's Clementi piano from the 1780s in ‘the salon’ (March 1916), to Prince Eugen's residence Waldemarsudde, where the grand piano is seen not in the salon, but in the adjacent ‘music room’ (November 1915). None of the instruments are commented upon in the text, which treats the home explicitly as ‘an expression of its owner's personality’ (June 1914). Take, for instance, the case of Nobel laureate Selma Lagerlöf's home, described as having ‘organically grown around an original kernel, upon which annual layers are added one after the other’ (February 1918). Nevertheless, in spite of a horn gramophone being shown (without further comment) in the very first issue of the journal, in the salon of Chamberlain Carl Lagerberg (March 1913), there is quite surprisingly no sign whatsoever of gramophones in any issue during this period, not even in the homes of symphonic composers Hugo Alfvén (July 1914) or Wilhelm Peterson-Berger (September 1915). It took up until 1930 before a gramophone was even commercially advertised (March 1930), and until 1932 (p. 196f.) before a gramophone showed up in the editorial material of Svenska hem i ord och bilder. Until then the gramophone was virtually non-existent: a non-issue in matters of prestigious culture and display.
The striking absence of phonographs and gramophones in Svenska hem should be seen in the light of two parallel tendencies in the Swedish cultural climate during the period. These can be described as a twofold criticism against what Norbert Elias (Reference Elias1994) later described as culture and civilisation. In the case of Sweden the two critical tendencies often occur intertwined (Stolare Reference Stolare2003, p. 27). Such is the case with, for instance, the conservative philosopher Vitalis Norström, who in his widely read essay Masskultur, argues that civilisation should be understood as the ‘mastering’ of material nature, and in itself only a condition for the existence of culture, but never equal to it. Culture is spiritual and moral and stands over the materialist foundations of civilisation. Modern society, ‘our culture's civilisation’, according to Norström, is an ‘apparatus’ for communication which ‘overwhelms’ our senses and becomes a ‘strait-jacket’ for our souls, a hindrance for cultural development (Norström Reference Nortsröm1910, pp. 6, 10f., 14, 20f.). As a consequence cultural forms and expressions are being replaced by the ‘anaesthetics of pleasure’ (njutningens narkos) ultimately serving escapism and oblivion, a culture in the service of the uniform masses of civilisation (Norström Reference Nortsröm1910, p. 26).
Norström was influenced by German thinkers such as Friedrich Nietzsche and Georg Simmel (Hansson Reference Hansson1999, p. 119), and it is no coincidence that many of the themes that appear in his critique would turn up also in the writings of the Frankfurt School a few decades later, albeit in a diametrically opposite political garb. Yet whereas for various reasons Walter Benjamin and Theodor Adorno were in the end positive to the mechanical reproduction of art and the long-playing record (and would more or less invert the value hierarchy between spirit and matter), Norström was symptomatically silent on the subject. Nevertheless it is reasonable to assume that Norström's culture-and-civilisation critique was a flagship of a widespread tendency in Sweden, which when it came to such specific matters as the phonograph and the gramophone resulted in negative perceptions. As a machine and technological innovation, the gramophone was a sign of civilisation gone astray. That the salongsgrammofon (common name for luxurious cabinet gramophones) was marketed as such by the Stockholm retailers already in 1917 did not matter much (SvD 170903, 221108). As to its content, the cylinders and discs were too obviously carriers of mass-cultural expressions – anaesthetics of pleasure, to use Norström's phrase – to be represented in the fine milieu of the musical salong.
To find any explicit expressions in the press of either of the two strains of this criticism – of civilisation and of culture – levelled at the gramophone, we must turn from Svenska hem and look elsewhere. Svenska Dagbladet provides a plentiful case here, although the two types of criticism are often crudely articulated and entangled with each other. For instance, the gramophone is frequently characterised in terms of the way it (supposedly) sounds. The gramophone clatters, honks, gargles, spews, rattles, bellows and breaks loose, it bawls, blares, screams, crashes and whines, grinds, roars, rails and disturbingly yells out of tune. On occasion the gramophone is used to characterise thoughtless persons (100622), repetitious politicians (180729) and teetotallers (200801), saucy women (140510), brainless Bolsheviks (240724), and even a composer such as Max Reger is likened to a gramophone, when his music is found too monotonous (180130).
In further cases the gramophone is characterised – sometimes in passing, other times as the focal topic – by all the bad that it (supposedly) is or does. It puts musicians out of business (090318), it outcompetes the piano in the home (241115), and wears out any good melody (231112). It is accused of effacing the regrowth of musicians (190128) and of exterminating the authentic fiddler tradition (200530, 220526). It is dismissed as a surrogate for real music (210925), and as a means for fraud, magic and bogus spiritualism (220128, 220223, 230225, 231207). It is the factotum of the spiritual subclass (200620), shallow and unnecessary (191125), and a luxury for the rich and wasteful (190328). It is an instrument of torture (210908) and ultimately the tool of the devil himself, as in the reviewed trilogy by Vernon Lee, Satan the Waster (201003). The point is variously but clearly stated: the gramophone is a sign of the uncultivated (251110), it is but a toy (251129), and it certainly is not art (111112). In the worst case: ‘the line of taste cultivated by the means of … gramophones, causes a spiritual industrialism, which is way worse than its material counterpart’ (140224).
Music for the many (1903–25)
In spite of all the negative publicity, the gramophone had come to stay. During the first decade of the 20th century it superseded the phonograph as the major record player (not just in Sweden, but globally), mainly as a result of the ease of mass-producing gramophone discs as compared with the individually recorded phonograph cylinders (Gelatt 1977, p. 158ff.; Gronow and Saunio, Reference Gronow, Saunio and Moseley1998, p. 6f.). In 1899, forming the first part of an international expedition to record national artists and repertoires for local markets, the Gramophone Company visited Stockholm to record as many as 119 Swedish song titles (among the other stops are cities as distantly apart as Porto and Istanbul). Another 156 songs were recorded in 1903, and by 1925, annual recording visits had produced more than 5400 music recordings (Gronow and Englund Reference Gronow and Englund2007, p. 284), adding up to a total of 12,696 titles when accounting for competing labels (Englund and Gronow Reference Englund, Gronow, Gronow and Hofer2011, p. 172, import not included). The singers on the earliest recordings were well-known artists from the Royal Opera and various theatres in the capital, as well as popular artists like ballad singer Delsbostintan, and later accordionist Calle Jularbo and revue artist Ernst Rolf (Gronow and Englund Reference Gronow and Englund2007, p. 282ff.). Given that in 1899 there were hardly any gramophones in the countryFootnote 6 – it was reported as a technical innovation in the Stockholm dailies in conjunction with the 1903 recording sessions – one can assume that the early records were pressed in small numbers for demonstration purposes, as the main incentive was to market the new gramophone players.
In 1903 an early version of the jukebox was also exhibited to the public, the Telefonografautomat (Dahlqvist Reference Dahlqvist, Ekström, Jülich and Snickars2006, p. 186), but it never caught on in Sweden the way it did in the USA.Footnote 7 In the same year, 1903, Skandinaviska Grammophone AB was founded in Stockholm as a subsidiary of the Gramophone Company, and it soon faced competition by other companies recording Swedish artists, such as Columbia, Lyrophon and Pathé (Gronow and Englund Reference Gronow and Englund2007, p. 286ff.). The most serious competitor for many years was Carl Lindström AG, a German company founded by a Swede in 1904, manufacturing its own low-priced record players and controlling labels such as Parlophon and Odeon (Englund Reference Englund, Gronow and Hofer2009, p. 73f.).
In line with the production rate, gramophones and records were regularly advertised in many papers and journals, even when there appeared to be limited editorial interest. Interestingly, during the first two decades of the century gramophones often appeared in advertisements for music instruments, as in the journals Arbetarens vän (The Worker's Friend), the protestant Hem och Ungdom (Home and Youth) and the unbound Vi och vårt (We and Ours). The latter also hosted advertisements for records, which were repaired, as well as swapped (issues 2 and 3, 1910). Following these publications came the more long-lived Hemmets Journal (The Home's Journal), issued weekly from 1921 up to this day. In several issues from 1921 to the mid 1930s it hosted advertisements both by instrument retailers, such as A.Th. Nilsson's music store in Norrköping, boasting ‘Violins, guitars, brass instruments, Italian accordions, talking machines and records, harmonicas, sheet music for sextet, and more’, and by record labels such as Pathéfon, and Grammophon. On a rare occasion, Grammophon promoted His Master's Voice records with an advertisement displaying not only the company's familiar logotype, but also a picture of two women talking at the side of a luxurious gramophone cabinet, the one telling the other, that ‘[y]ou can't imagine, but I have put together such a nice program for our next dance evening!’ (1923, issue 3). More common, however, was the type of advertisement by retailer Ernst G. Olin, for ‘Suitcase sized Gramophones’ (1923, issue 19).
In the daily Svenska Dagbladet gramophones were advertised both by retailers and private sellers. The brands vary, as do the types of gramophone. The retailers generally advertised small players, whereas more exclusive types of cabinets occur when private owners want to dispose of them for some reason or other (such as upcoming ‘travels’, etc., SvD 200921). Cabinet models become more frequent only in the 1920s, alongside the popular portable gramophone, or ‘travel-gramophone’ as it was called (resegrammofon, see Björnberg Reference Björnberg, Bjurström, Fredriksson and Werner2012). All in all this indicates a rather multifaceted and burgeoning market for gramophones and discs,Footnote 8 and as usual with markets, it is not limited to producers and sellers, but also connects buyers and consumers. In the nationwide questionnaire ‘När grammofonen kom’ (‘When the gramophone came’), compiled by Nordiska Museet in 1962, it is possible to read the recollections of (some of) those who were present at the time. The questionnaire explicitly asks for early memories of what was played on the gramophone, by whom, who owned it, where it was played (and heard), and which types, manufacturers and labels there were. The recollections span the first three decades of the century, but some go as far back as the 1890s.
The responses often consist of colourful personal memories, such as queuing to listen to some popular song through tubes at a fair (around 1905): ‘it was mostly drunk labourers, half-drunk farmers, and us young lads’. Another recollection tells of the local priest's warning of the ‘devil's voice in the horn’, whereas yet another tells about a missionary meeting and the pastor winding the gramophone. A significant proportion of these reminiscences are of private gramophones. For instance, one informant remembers hearing music on gramophone as a child at her cousin's home around 1910, after which she doesn't get the opportunity until many years later when working as a house-maid and hearing the family's daughter playing popular music. In addition to private listening at home, two other types of occasion appear in several reports. One is that of borrowing a gramophone to play for dance, either with a group of youngsters or for engagement or wedding parties (the earliest around 1905, the latest in 1928). The other recurring type of remembered occasion is hearing gramophone music at the local café (responses dating mostly from the 1910s).Footnote 9
To see what characterises these three categories – private listening with others at home, the private dance party and the public café – in terms of the listeners’ relation to the gramophone and the music recorded, a fourth type of occasion can be added as heuristic contrast: the public dance-event of the 1930s and 1940s. Viewed from the perspective of the musicians the public dance-event was a cause for alarm. In an article in Svenska Dagbladet in 1940, Eric Westberg, head of the Swedish copyright agency (STIM) warned against what he described as ‘giant gramophone cabinets’ that would ‘kill all dance orchestras’ in the country. Moreover, the situation was as bad for the café and restaurant orchestras (SvD 400906). The musicians’ union's reaction to the situation appeared quickly and their complaint was clear: mechanical music is dead, humanly performed music is alive and should therefore be the primary choice on any occasion (Fleischer 2012, pp. 139ff., 192ff.). The claim of the musicians lay solidly on the strand of familiar civilisation criticism. As put in the journal Musikern (The Musician):
The machine, the gramophone, in improved shape, has wiped out human, living manpower. We stand in parallelism with the setters … the weavers, telephone operators and all the other groups of manual labourers that have been displaced by the machine. (Musikern, issue 12 1930, quoted in Fleischer 2012, p. 171)
Yet a further contrast appears when the recording industry faced one of its many crises just a few years earlier.Footnote 10 This caused the record producers to claim that their recordings were more than mere copies of performances: music recordings were original creations in their own right, the producer being akin to the photographer (Fleischer 2012, p. 229). Here the argument does not depend on civilisation criticism, but claims for music recordings authentic cultural value like any other work of art: the recording business could not and should not be blamed for the musicians’ misfortunes.
However, in contrast to both record-producer spokesmen and musicians, we find nothing of this rhetoric among gramophone users and record listeners. Concerning the early decades of the century, there are hardly any signs at all in the source material of any civilisation or culture criticism (as in the musicians’ complaint). Neither are there any signs of exclusive ‘work’ aesthetics, or any anxiety of authenticity or originality (as in the record producers’ claim). When it comes to dancing at private parties or hearing music in the background privately at home or publicly at a café, there is no demand for audio-fidelity in any technical sense (or scholarly, like the ethnographer's demand for accurate reproduction). Instead, functional efficacy is the only quality that matters. What counts as ‘sounding good’ according to this utilitarian media practice is that the music played on the gramophone should be good to dance to, and that the records play the songs the socially gathered like to hear.Footnote 11 In this respect the gramophone came to be considered not only as a mechanical instrument, as many of the advertisements in the press indicate;Footnote 12 it is a mechanical musician. This seemingly incongruous attitude among the consumers will not vanish, even when the gramophone and its records begin to gain a different status among a new group of listeners.
Electronic recordings, cultural value and an emerging media-aesthetics (1920–45)
It took until about 1920 before a change in attitude towards the gramophone could be observed in Svenska Dagbladet. Already in 1919 it appeared as a prop in a short novel to signal modernity (191126), and as such the gramophone would continue to function (e.g. 240730). During the first half the 1920s discussions of new improved gramophone models also occurred (230413), along with what is possibly one of the earliest record reviews in the country, of Tchaikowsky's Symphonie Pathétique with The Royal Albert Hall Orchestra, conducted by Sir Landon Ronalds on His Master's Voice (231202). It was also noted that Italian composer Ottorini Respighi had recorded birdsong on a disc to be included in one of his compositions (250103).Footnote 13 Yet another article describes how gramophone music can be broadcast through the new radio medium (240107), while one article stressed the importance of the then 10-year-old gramophone archive, which had not yet found a housing institution for its many recordings (250719). There is even a causerie about the gramophone as a future degree-subject in school (240405).
With its self-proclaimed mission to cover cultural issues, November 1928 marked a turning point for Svenska Dagbladet in its coverage of phonography. This was when one of its foremost music critics, composer Moses Pergament, began a series of comprehensive record reviews titled Grammofonmusik under kritik (‘Gramophone music under criticism’). The series was introduced programmatically, referring to the technical improvements of the gramophone, as well as cultural and entertaining advantages of both serious and popular repertoires (SvD 281109). The series rounded off a few months later with an educative description of the new electronic recording and playback technology (290208). The technology itself had been introduced internationally already in 1925 and electronically recorded discs were commercially advertised in Svenska Dagbladet in early 1926 (e.g. 260214).Footnote 14
This embracing of technical innovation reveals a more modernist stance vis-à-vis the otherwise widespread civilisation criticism, a stance that goes strategically hand-in-hand with a tendency to tie phonography to established cultural values. A telling instance is when the daily's other critic, musicologist Kajsa Rootzén, mentions Igor Stravinsky's interest in the gramophone and mechanical instruments (330813, 390528). Likewise an interview with Sergei Rachmaninoff works to the same effect (350208). This tendency can also be detected in comments on the utility of the gramophone in education (321128, 340904, 350228, 360903, 400211, 400909, 420823, 421007, 431017, 440423), and in the regular record reviews that for a couple of years would follow under the headings Grammofonrevy (1933–34) and Inspelat och avlyssnat (1938–39).
Whereas Inspelat och avlyssnat (Recorded and Monitored) is almost exclusively dedicated to classical music, Grammofonrevy (Gramophone Review) reviews a more balanced mix of both classical and popular genres, although with the proviso that there is a crucial difference between the good and the bad in popular music. Only once is jazz discussed under either heading (340401, 380424), although jazz on record did not lack positive comments in the paper. Both Pergament and Rootzén published lengthy essays on jazz (250815, 440701), with Rootzén also specifically writing on Duke Ellington and his recordings (350811), as well as an obituary of George Gershwin (370725).Footnote 15
Alongside reviews of dance music on disc (e.g. 340805), one particularly interesting case of celebrity journalism appears in Svenska Dagbladet in an article that compares the different styles and personalities of Swedish vocalist Zarah Leander and Viennese Greta Keller: the first dramatic and spectacular, the other intimate, soft and whispering through the microphone, getting even closer to the listener with the recordings than in a live performance – as the reviewer notes: ‘Isn't this a paradox?’ (360913). The legible media-aesthetics manifested in this article reveals a radically different way of listening to recorded music than the utilitarian approach exemplified by the questionnaire cases, buttressing instead the artistic claims by the record producers. Keller, especially, demonstrates a vocal technique made famous in the USA through Bing Crosby's so-called crooning style. In Sweden the foremost representative of the technique was singer Sven-Olof Sandberg, who pioneered electric recording in 1927 (Strand Reference Strand2003), and whose ‘lovesick’ baritone bestowed upon him nicknames such as ‘the gramophone enchanter’, ‘the microphone voice’ and ‘S.O.S.’ (SvD 281109, 300409, 360112, 400112). Moreover, in the aforementioned review, both Keller and Leander also exemplified various degrees of authentic personality mediated through the recordings, which would not be possible were the gramophone serving merely as a mechanical musician (cf. Pontara and Volgsten Reference Pontara and Volgsten2019).
Serious or popular, the review sections in Svenska Dagbladet would eventually disappear as the daily entered the atrocious 1940s. Advertisements for gramophones and records remained, now coupled with appeals to hand in used discs for recycling, owing to the wartime scarcity of shellac (e.g. 441129).Footnote 16
The seizing of domestic space (1923–45)
As noted above, it would take until 1932 before a gramophone appeared in the editorial material of Svenska hem i ord och bilder. The home depicted was a radical exception, belonging as it did to the famous functionalist architect Sven Markelius (the player pictured is portable, rather than a salongsgrammofon). Markelius, trained by Walter Gropius of the Bauhaus school in Germany, was one of the authors of the pamphlet acceptera! (‘accept!’) that followed The Stockholm Exhibition of 1930. Among other things, the pamphlet displays a photo of a gramophone, with the statement: ‘Luxury is for us the highest degree of quality, not of splendour’ (Asplund Reference Asplund1931, p. 124). In other words, the aversion for non-functional ornamentation did not reject the possibility of owning a mechanical and mass-produced gadget such as the gramophone as long as it was well made and fulfilled its function.
The Stockholm Exhibition focussed on urban planning, architecture and design, and is generally regarded as a breakthrough in Sweden for modernist ideals. With the slogan acceptera! it stood in diametrical contrast to the conservative civilisation criticism, and with its functionalist aesthetic ideals it came to serve as ideological basis for the national housing policy for decades to come (Sydhoff Reference Sydhoff1980).Footnote 17 The Stockholm Exhibition had been preceded since the early 1920s by annual housing exhibitions, ‘Bygge och bo’ (‘Building and Dwelling’), which in 1928 promoted the modern living room as opposed to the old bourgeois salong (or finrum, as it was also called). Whereas the salong was accused of being overloaded and dysfunctional, the modern living room was said to give ‘the richest possible impression through the smallest means’ (quoted in Perers Reference Perers2001, p. 90). Two years earlier, in the 1926 exhibition, a gramophone had even made its way into the very plan for a 40 m2 flat, designed for a family of four persons (Bilder och blad 1926, p. 42f., repeated the following year p. 28). And later the exhibition ‘Vi bo’ (‘We Live’) in Malmö would likewise reserve space in one of its apartment plans for a ‘radio-gramophone’ (Vi bo i Ribershus 1938, p. 34), as the exhibition ‘Bo bättre’ (‘Live Better’) similarly did in Gothenburg in 1945 for a ‘gramophone cabinet’.
The modernist ideals of The Stockholm Exhibition were expressed to a wider public in journals such as Nutidens hem (The Contemporary Home) and Hemkultur (Home Culture). Nutidens hem, whose leader explicitly promoted ‘democratisation of ways of thinking and living’, opened its first issue in 1935 with an article on the new living room. A later issue, similarly, discussed ‘Music in the home’, wherein the supposed dangers of gramophone listening were dismissed, although it was claimed that ‘passive’ listening could never reach the cultivated heights of ‘active’ playing (issue 4). The more middlebrow Hemkultur offered regular record reviews, which usually started with classical recordings, presenting popular novelties towards the end. For instance, one article referred positively to ‘England, where the gramophone had a more than usual noble position’, and rhetorically asked the reader ‘Do you take care of your records?’ (1935, issue 1). Although both journals were short lived, the ideals promoted were not (cf. Perers et al. Reference Perers, Wallin and Womack2013).Footnote 18 Even the trusty Svenska hem continued to expose the gramophone in the editorial material (e.g. issue 2, 1936, showing a ‘bachelor's flat’ with a ‘hat-box gramophone’, and issue 10, 1940, showing ‘in every respect an exemplary radio gramophone … a piece of furniture not attempting to be anything it is not’). Furthermore, in the advertisement sections (e.g. issue 10, 1939), a ‘parchment coated’ gramophone box from the posh design store Svenskt Tenn was also advertised, and a report from a flower exhibition disclosed the more ideological implications behind the growing interest in the gramophone: ‘Leisure time will create harmonious people’ (issue 7, 1936, italics in original).
However, leisure time requires leisure space. If there is no place to relaxingly spend one's free time, it will lose its recreational worth. An interesting but unacknowledged and hardly intended model for the particular space required for the gramophone and its music can be observed in advertisements for gramophones starting in 1923, and a few years later for records (SvD 230317, 231209, 290419, 430926). In these advertisements, retailers boasted specially designed listening rooms (or closets) in their stores. Yet the significance of these listening rooms was not primarily that they allowed the listener to appreciate the fidelity of the sound reproduction technology (that the quality of sound production be a ‘natural’ condition for aesthetic output had by the 1920s become a common selling point, cf. Siefert Reference Siefert1995). Rather, the crucial point was the affordance of a shielded space where the listener was able to hear music while being both unobserved and undisturbed. This differs from the salong as well as the phonograph attractions at the countryside fairs, both of which were collective displays. In the salong the music was played and listened to in company with others, and even when the recorded sounds at the fairs were audible only through tubes, the listening act and reactions of the listeners were part of the spectacle (the case resembles the American phonograph parlors of the 1890s, cf. Kenney Reference Kenney1999, p. 26). A more apposite precursor is the telephone booth, where hearing is separated from ‘the proximal auditory environment’ while ‘the act of communication itself’ is ‘separated from the surrounding physical environment’ (Sterne Reference Sterne2003, p. 158). For the new media-aesthetics described in the previous section to come to full fruition, a secluded space was to be preferred, and this was arguably also the case for the sound experience behind the growing amount of reviews of classical music recordings (cf. Gauß Reference Gauß2009, p. 314; Pontara and Volgsten, Reference Pontara and Volgsten2019). Taken together, the new kind of media-oriented listening and its localisation to the (potentially solitary) living room were justifiably described as a solipsistic approach (cf. Bull Reference Bull2007).
Intimate encounters with caressing crooners, like penetration of the spiritual depths of classical works, thrives in undisturbed solitude.Footnote 19 Nevertheless, although the gramophone to an extent (however small, as judged from the housing plans) was part of the definition of the modern living room, for many a solitary space at home was, at best, wishful thinking. In 1945, 30 per cent of the Swedish population shared each room in their homes, excluding kitchens, with at least two others (Perers et al. Reference Perers, Wallin and Womack2013, p. 71). The contrast is striking when one turns from the well-off milieus depicted in journals such as Svenska hem i ord och bilder and Nutidens hem, to those addressed in Vår bostad (Our Home), the journal of the members of the National Tenants Association. Vår bostad, issued from 1924 on, covered current and important issues of accommodation and everyday home-matters (such as ‘vacation for housewives’, January 1937), as well as entertainment sections. When it came to record playing, which frequently occurred in the tenement houses concerned, it was by no way a sign of ‘harmonious’ neighbours getting together, but a serious environmental noise problem in want of strict regulation (issue 3 1932; the problem, which by this time also included the radio, cropped up frequently as brief notes and comments in the daily Svenska Dagbladet). Gramophone playing was considered a nuisance that could and should be dispensed with. To the extent that the editorial material was concerned with cultural issues, it promoted traditional piano playing, while parents were simultaneously advised to keep their children away from ‘that Hydra, which is called jazz music’ (December 1925). Among its many depicted home interiors, a gramophone did not show up in Vår bostad until May 1945, when the journal paid a visit to the home of famous musician Carl Jularbo Jr, observing that ‘In the combined bed and living room stands a lovely radio-gramophone’.
Concluding remarks: mediatisation, musicalisation and the phonography of everyday life
Contrary to existing literature, in Sweden the arrival of the phonograph did not take place in the living room, and neither did the gramophone. It rather occurred at fairs, dance events and in cafés and restaurants. The phonograph's role during the first decades of the 20th century seems mainly to have been as a device for recording and displaying ethnographic research. To the dismay of the adherents of culture and civilisation criticism, records were danced to and heard on occasions and events not particularly designed for attentive music listening. So-called gramophone concerts were exceptional, and were economically supported by promotional incentives. The gramophone was played like a mechanical instrument, or (considering the anger it would cause in the musicians’ union) it appeared as a mechanical musician. In either case it needed no particular training or skill on the part of the player (in the way ‘real’ instruments do), which led its detractors to denounce the gramophone as an inhumane machine or as a mere toy.
Considering the records of this early period, they were not particularly regarded as representing any artistic performance or as conveying any aesthetic content to be extracted by the listeners. Musical recordings were not primarily regarded as media, but as integral to the record players (the early manufacturers provided their own record labels). It is not until the 1920s that a change in aesthetic attitude can be observed. Interestingly, this change went hand-in-hand not only with electrification and the rebuttal of the civilisation criticism, but with a change in the spatial localisation of the gramophone, from public cafés and the undefined locales of private dance events, to the intimate and – yet only for a few – solitary privacy of the modern living room.
A picture hereby emerges of how phonography turned from being a scientific curiosity into becoming an everyday media technology. We can also detect some important contours of this mediatising influence on culture and everyday musical communication. During the first decades of the 20th century the most significant aspect was what may be described as a de-professionalising of musical communication and performance, which the gramophone afforded. Anyone could now play a piece of dance music, a ballad or even an entire symphony privately at home or in public. From the 1920s on, it was the increasing solitary listening that constituted the most significant change.
Both aspects are quite reasonably explained in terms of a mediatisation of music, i.e. a long-term process by which the new recording technology affects musical communication and interaction (cf. Krotz Reference Krotz and Lundby2009, p. 24). Yet considering that the epithet talking machine was more or less discarded in the daily press after 1920, and considering that music became the dominating content of the recordings, it is as much the increasing social presence of music as the increasing presence of gramophones that calls for explanation. Likewise, to the extent that the living room was successively becoming a reality in an increasing number of homes, the process was as much an instance of mediatisation of music as it was an instance of musicalisation – not only of the medium, but also of culture and everyday life (cf. Pontara and Volgsten Reference Pontara, Volgsten, Driessens, Bolin, Hepp and Hjarvard2017).
Seemingly inconspicuous though important aspects of this musicalisation are the record review and the listening room. Not only does the record review add a serious dimension to the music (the record is worthy of qualified discussion); the review itself also adds to the discursive definitions by which ‘music is constituted as what it is’, and thus diffuses music beyond the immediate encounters of those already in possession of a record, to a wider mass public (Pontara and Volgsten Reference Pontara, Volgsten, Driessens, Bolin, Hepp and Hjarvard2017, p. 252; the radio also adds to this aspect of musicalisation, see Björnberg Reference Björnberg1998, pp. 36–9, et passim). In contrast, the listening room conveys the more centripetal attitude that listening to music on gramophone is best done in solitude in a room specially furnished for its purpose (an attitude turned into a necessity by the practice of the record reviewer). Or, put differently, that the living room is best furnished so as to facilitate an undisturbed listening to music. And of course, this musicalisation of everyday life becomes even more evident as the gramophone takes part in the very definition of what kind of space the living room is (and by extension also what recreational leisure time is).
Thus we seem to end up with two mutually excluding approaches to phonography during the first half of the 20th century. One is more anarchic – what I have called the utilitarian approach – involving the gramophone as a mechanical instrument portable to more or less unforeseeable locales, with dance and diverted listening to popular music. The other – the solipsistic approach – demands the preset solitary space that only a modern living room can afford, in the service of a listening that acknowledges a represented content of the records.
However, that the two approaches are not diametrically exclusive becomes evident when considering that the solipsistic approach does not dictate any particular mode of listening. To the extent that a focussed listening is afforded alongside a distracted listening, the former may be ‘disinterestedly’ directed towards the formal aspects of classical music, as much as towards the grain of any crooner's voice. And, of course, being alone in no way precludes distracted listening, letting one's train of associations get carried away (cf. Szendy Reference Szendy2008). As such the solipsistic approach is not only well suited for the popular styles represented by singers such as Bing Crosby, Greta Keller and Sven-Olof Sandberg, it may also prove to be a requisite for popular styles in the wake of The Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper's and Frank Zappa's Freak Out!.
On the other hand, using the gramophone as a mechanical instrument portable to whatever location suitable for the occasion was a utilitarian approach that would remain even when stationary gramophone-cabinets had made themselves comfortable in the new living rooms. It would enable future uses such as the portable teenage-room player, movable sound-systems, modern dance music of every kind and new styles mixing live and pre-recorded sound and music. And as the Walkman mapeds the territory for future digital devices towards the end of the century, new vistas of listening to classical music also opened up.
What the focus on phonography in a peripheral country such as early to mid-20th century Sweden brings to the fore, then, is nothing less than an analytically distinctive picture showing two intertwined but irreducible outcomes of the mediatisaton of music – utilitarian and solipsistic gramophone playing – which as sedimented layers in contemporary technologies lie at heart of today's unprecedented musicalisation of culture and everyday life.
Acknowledgements
This investigation was supported by the Swedish Research Council.
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