In 1926: living at the edge of time - Monoskop

GRAMOPHONES 111
duet GARDEL-RAZZANO"-appear alongside drawings or photographs
of the gramophones. But less than a week later, on September 23,
the Columbia Phonograph Company publishes a huge ad in the New
York Times which focuses exclusively on the "marvelous" sound quality
provided by the new technique of electronic recording:
ELECTRICAL recording is the one great advance in the recording art
in twenty years. Columbia New Process Records, with Viva-tonal Recording,
are absolutely the same as the voices and instruments that
make them. All the beauty, brilliance, and clarity of the original rendition
and all the volume, too. The human voice is human-undistorted,
natural. The instruments are all real. The violin is actual. The guitar is
a guitar and nothing else. Each of the different woodwinds is unmistakable,
each of the brasses genuine. Even the difficult piano is the
piano itself-no less. And besides all this is the marvelously smooth
surface of the record made possible by the Columbia New Process-no
sound of the needle, no scratching noise. You hear nothing but the
musiC.
In the world of music, as in the worlds of fashion and dance, bodily
gestures and their effects (that is, playing and singing) are associated with
a smooth surface. [see Dancing, Gomina] Even more important, the
advertisement for the Columbia Phonograph Company catches the
reader's attention with multiple tautologies that try to deny any difference
between the original sound and the technically advanced reproduction.
Taken together, this praise of "electrical recording" and the performers'
new awareness of their distance from their audience add up to
a strange paradox: the more the artists become visually aware of their
auditors' absence, the less these auditors realize that the performers'
absence has acoustic consequences. In other words, the more the musicians'
bodies are absent, the more their music is present. This is the very
effect which the player-piano has been foreshadowing for years. Its
mysteriously moving keys point to a body which is simultaneously absent
and present.
Quite regularly, the gramophone becomes associated with death-and
sometimes even with murder. This association can be made intuitively,