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

The University of Minnesota Press has been publishing a number of outstanding studies in its Commerce and Mass Media series, and this 12th title is certainly no exception. Tim Anderson, an assistant professor of communication

at Denison University, has tackled the recording industry and the reception of its products in the post-war United States from three different angles and gives us an entirely new understanding of the fundamental changes in the means of interaction between musicians and their audiences. Instead of looking at the recording industry as "bad guys" who are curtailing musicians' creativity, suppressing authenticity and individuality and turning music into a mass commodity, he emphasizes the material changes that took place roughly between 1948 and 1964—long before rock and roll became the dominant genre in the market. The central issue, of course, is the availability of affordable playback apparatus for affordable, robust records with acceptable sound quality and an extended lifetime (vinyl stereo LPs) and the gradual demise of sheet music publishing. Middle-class U.S. households gradually shifted from amateur performing stages where one or the other was banging out a tune on a honky-tonk piano to pseudo-theatres where would-be connoisseurs could enjoy "authentic" recordings in the quiet and comfort of their living rooms—in stereo!

Anderson focuses his analysis on three subjects: the recording process and post-war recording bans; production and reproduction in the case of My Fair Lady; and stereo, hi-fi and the birth of easy listening. The chapters on the strike of the American Federation of Musicians essentially illustrate what constitutes a change in labor relations following a change in the mode of production. In Marxist terms, this is a simple illustration of a generic process: As capital accumulates and technology advances, the way in which commodities are produced undergoes a qualitative leap—in this case from live performance of compositions to recordings of performances—and a massive laying-off of laborers follows. Anderson endeavors to explain the whole episode in non-Marxist terms and in my opinion falls a bit short of achieving a full grasp on the underlying dynamics of the strike and the issues at stake. This, however, is only a minor weakness.

In his analysis of the exploitation of the music of My Fair Lady, Anderson is at his best. He clearly describes the interplay between audiences, music, performers and genres and the way the recording industry instantly fills each and every niche of the market with pre-cooked and easily digested stuff. How music becomes a property and how this property is made to be profitable clearly is what he understands best. This is the section where one gets a glimpse of why popular music is popular music at all. For the first time, I find here a convincing discussion of the gradual but unavoidable shift between two hierarchies. Before, the concert or theatrical performance came first. Afterward, performances were reduced to promotional tools for the record—and this long before the worldwide promotional tours of the Rolling Stones or the merchandising of Kylie Minogue. A similar shift, by the way, has been happening with tunes from movies or TV series becoming number-one hits, and in a few years we will see how the Internet again changes the relationship between mode of production and mode of distribution of popular music.

In the last section, Anderson discusses roughly the changes brought about by the introduction of hi-fi and stereo technology in the marketing and the reception of music. Similar studies have already been done extensively and more fully by Colin Symes for classical recording and Peter Doyle for popular music (see reviews elsewhere in Leonardo Reviews); the benefit of Anderson's approach lies in the connections he makes between this aspect of American recording history and the two other themes...