Making Easy Listening: Material Culture and Postwar American Recording (review)

The quarter-century following World War II was a remarkable period in the history of the American music industry. The rise of new technologies and new musical genres during the postwar years rendered old ways of making music obsolete and had a powerful effect on musicians and music consumers. This book by Tim Anderson helps us to see how material forces and organizational changes shook up the music business and musical culture. The book is theoretically informed and draws on a wealth of primary sources, including such nontraditional sources as advertisements and musical recordings. It examines three distinct areas of historical inquiry, each of which speaks to broad patterns and trends in the history of the music business.

Part 1 of Making Easy Listening focuses on the great struggle between the American Federation of Musicians (AFM) and major recording companies during the 1940s. Anderson argues that previous studies of the struggle (including my own) have not recognized certain dynamics at work within the world of music and the music business. He views the two strikes of the 1940s led by James Petrillo of the AFM not so much as manifestations of labor protest and militancy or a fight over how music was consumed as a battle over how music was produced. By World War II, Anderson stresses, business practices were already privileging the sale of recordings over the performance of live music. Musicians and their labor were becoming mere cogs in a new mode of musical production geared toward the making of durable products that were easy to control. As recording technologies and processes became more important than songs and musical talent, musicians and their unions gradually resigned themselves to a new institutional and technical regime. Anderson's study of these and related developments is sophisticated and edifying, but not as novel or controversial as he suggests. In a word, it largely reaffirms that by the 1940s musicians and their unions had entered a new world, one that was born out of sweeping technological and organizational changes of earlier times in which capital had more power than labor.

Part 2 offers a nuanced view of a clever business strategy in the new age of recorded music. Anderson shows that in the postwar years, record companies learned to maximize the value of their property rights in music by producing multiple versions of the same songs. The practice of "versioning" explains why many recordings were "lost," only later to be "found," and why record companies so often "re-released" music in new formats. To make his point, Anderson demonstrates how companies exploited songs from the popular 1964 film, My Fair Lady. Companies produced one variant after another of songs from the film, from Spanish and Hebrew versions of the original soundtrack to renditions of songs by famous singers. This middle section of the book helps readers understand how the making of music involved more than the capture and reproduction of sound—it also involved the manipulation of commodities and consumers.

Part 3 is especially informative and interesting. In the final chapters of the book, Anderson explains that the triumph of recorded music went hand-in-hand with the rise of high-fidelity stereo systems. Increasingly precise methods of sound reproduction promised music consumers renditions of songs free from the extraneous "noise" associated with live performances. In short, they made listening to music "easier." But the high-fidelity movement held still greater significance. By associating new methods of recording and reproducing sound with notions of progress, it simultaneously portrayed people who listened to live performances as old-fashioned and even irrational. It also implied that engineers and producers were the real music-makers of modern times, not musicians. The sales of records featuring the sounds of birds, railroad trains, and even stranger things only bolstered such claims. So, too, did new recordings made primarily by manipulating amplifiers and mechanical devices.

The study of music, technology, and society remains in a fledgling...