"I Sing the Body Electric": Music and Technology in the Twentieth Century (review)

"I Sing the Body Electric": Music and Technology in the Twentieth Century. Edited by Hans-Joachim Braun. Hofheim, Ger.: Wolke, 2000. Pp. 253. $29.

Historians of technology have become increasingly interested in the realm of sound, in music and audio technology. Hans-Joachim Braun's volume offers a rich collection of essays by an international roster of historians and musicologists who explore manifold relationships between technology and music in the twentieth century. Originating in presentations at the 1996 conference of the International Committee for the History of Technology in Budapest, the essays focus on two primary themes: musical depictions of technology and the relationship of technological change to the production and aesthetics of music.

Topics range from Tatsuya Kobayashi's exploration of the reverse engineering of Western musical instruments by Torakusu Yamaha to establish a Japanese piano and organ manufacturing industry at the turn of the twentieth century, to Braun's survey of the representation of transportation technologies in modern jazz and classical music, to Alexander Magoun's revisionist examination of the origins of the 45-rpm record. Many of the nineteen essays additionally offer valuable references, and readers intrigued by these brief studies will do well to pursue literature cited in the notes.

One significant theme that recurs in several essays by historians of technology is the fluid nature of the cultural distinction between machines and musical instruments. Trevor Pinch and Frank Trocco's examination of the social construction of the synthesizer highlights the practical implications of this seemingly semantic issue. When Robert Moog first demonstrated his synthesizer on the Today Show in 1969, the electricians' union and the musicians' union argued about responsibility for setting up and operating the strange new device for the television broadcast. Susan Schmidt Horning's case study of the Cleveland Recording Studio documents the critical role of sound technicians in shaping the sound of popular music through their design and operation of studio equipment, and Andre Millard describes how rap artists of the 1970s turned the machines of music reproduction--turntables, microphones, tape decks--into instruments of music production.

Other authors focus on the aesthetic perspective of musical composers and performers. Their studies offer a rich new resource for exploring the social meaning of technology, and they further our understanding of the complex range of interactions between artists and new technologies. Barbara Barthelmes and Karen Bijsterveld examine the writings and musical compositions of early-twentieth-century avant-garde artists in order to understand the myth of the modern metropolis and the different cultural meanings attributed to machines during the Machine Age. Mark Katz surveys the rise of vibrato in violin performance and perceptively ties it to the new musical conditions and requirements introduced by the process of phonographic recording. Rebecca McSwain finesses the idea of reverse salients to understand how the feedback squeals of the electric guitar were transformed from noise into music by artists like Jimi Hendrix.

A number of the essays by musicologists may prove less useful to readers of Technology and Culture. Braun's collection emphasizes work in the more formalist tradition of systematic musicology and neglects important work on sound and aural culture that is being done by ethnomusicologists such as Steven Feld and Jonathan Sterne. Also missed is recognition of the rich work on sound technology that has been carried out by film scholars such as Rick Altman and James Lastra. Although many of the phenomena explored in this volume, particularly sound mixing and editing, have their origins in the motion picture industry, Helga de la Motte-Haber and Martha Brech are the only contributors to note this important precedent.

A more historiographically oriented introductory essay might have articulated what systematic musicology has to offer historians of technology. Instead of mapping out the intellectual traditions and trajectories of the different disciplines, identifying the challenges and opportunities that each field presents to the other, Braun chose to open with...