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  • Player Piano:Poetry and Sonic Modernity
  • Tim Armstrong (bio)

The problem addressed in this essay is that of the poetic impact of recorded sound; and more specifically the connection between recorded sound, music, and poetry. This is not, according to one way of thinking, an inevitable connection, for in the phonograph and its successor devices the modern world has a way of recording not just the discrete tones of music but all sounds, the messy glissandi and dissonances of the natural world. In Douglas Kahn's account of the move towards sonic transcription—and this is also implicit in the work of Richard Leppert, Friedrich Kittler, and other recent media theorists—devices like the gramophone and Edouard Léon Scott's earlier phonautograph (1857) means that the musical model for sonic reception which runs from Aristotle to Helmholtz must be rejected in order to open up the regime of sonic modernity, characterized by what Kahn calls "all sound" including noise:

Beginning in the late eighteenth and pervading the nineteenth century, three new inscriptive practices as applied to sound—graphic techniques in general, visible sound techniques, and automatic recording instruments as represented by the phonautograph and phonography—contributed to a loosening up of the reliance of acoustics on music. A plethora of lines made sound tangible and textual by making the invisible visible and holding the time of sound still.1

For Kittler, in a parallel fashion, this is the shift from the note to the frequency; from the arts to media.2 But that seems to me a premature judgement, or at least one which ignores the possibility that music itself already carries the notion of redeemed time later attached to the gramophone. This essay aims to examine that [End Page 1] possibility—in which music is already a technology—and its metaphoric location in the player piano, a device which might be approached in the spirit of Walter Benjamin's suggestion that technologies become most interesting at the point of their obsolescence.

We can begin with three moments. Our first stop is a study in Wandsworth, South London, in the summer of 1878. A man suddenly rises from his desk and dashes out. In a sentence which comes as a mechanical rush of syllables, he later recalled that

he had heard a street barrel-organ of the kind that used to be called a "harmoniflute," playing somewhere near at hand the very quadrille over which the jaunty young man who had reached the end of his time at Hicks's had spread such a bewitching halo more than twenty years earlier by describing the glories of dancing round to its beats on the Cremorne platform or at the Argyle Rooms, and which Hardy had never been able to identify.3

Thomas Hardy, for it is he, goes on to describe how that haunting dance tune was brought down to Dorset around 1860 by the "jaunty young man"; when Hardy moved to London he searched for the music, without success. Now here it is outside his door, albeit in a flattened guise—the organ-grinder has little English and can only point at the marking on the organ: "Quadrille."

Our second stop is again in London, the Silenus beer-hall, that hangout of suspicious characters—two of whom, a small shabby man and a younger yellow-haired man, are plotting over their ale. In the corner an "upright semi-grand piano" suddenly lurches into life, its playerless keys moving up and down to a variety of popular tunes—mazurkas, airs. This is the player piano of Conrad's The Secret Agent (1906), an obscurely potent symbol for evacuated meanings and automaticity which returns at the novel's end as a suitable chorus for Ossipon's derangement of memory, his obsessive repetition of that journalistic phrase about the "impenetrable mystery" surrounding Winnie's suicide.4

Our third stop is an old poet, meditating in his study in Hartford, Connecticut in the dark days of the Second World War on those "times of inherent excellence" when the world collects itself. This is the formula he arrived at:

       incalculable balances, At which a kind of Swiss perfection comes And a familiar music of...

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