>With the advent of the press, the economic bottleneck around reproducing
>texts virtually disappeared, so that a) more people could afford texts (and
>thus found it worth their while to be able to read them). Partly from the
>cheapening of reproduction, and partly from the democratizing effects of
>(a), a greater variety of texts came into printed circulation (notably
>broadsheets), fulfilling functions that had previously been taken care of
>by oral culture. Surely there are creaky points in this historical sweep.
>But to hold the pieces together...
>
>Rock and roll is not an outgrowth of western classical music. It *is* and
>outgrowth of European and African (or Euro-American and African-American)
>folk musics--and its availability as cheaply reproducible and consumable
>mass culture renders it analogous to the early modern broadsheet--a piece
>of popular culture appropriated and transformed by capital and reproduced
>for mass consumption.

Peter --

Think, though, of the typical way that common people (such as my grandfather in London) experienced music in, say, 1935 (or 1895). New, popular music, of a folk or non-classical variety (though it was actually enjoyed by virtually all classes) appeared on the radio, and yet was simultaneously published as printed sheet music (thanks to the printing press). It cost next to nothing to have an evening at home full of hours of music, provided that there was a piano, and a player, and a singer. Even in the working class London of leather tanners, which is where I'm drawing my knowledge from, there were always all three. From what I gather, many, many people from all walks of life spent a tremendous amount of their evening time reproducing popular music for themselves, in groups or singly.

There was, basically, no bottleneck that would restrict people's access to music and musical culture (they were, in fact, up to their eyeballs in the stuff). However, the way that the musical sound was _delivered_ and _shaped_ was quite different from what prevailed twenty years later.

By contrast, your printing press analogy relied on the distinction between mass oral culture and mass written culture -- the latter of which basically was _invented_ once the presses got going. Before that, oral culture was it.

So what I'm interested in is, yes, the Clement Greenberg angle (though I'm not sure who he is) which wants to speculate about the formal and social shifts occurred in popular musical culture when the performance system completed its transfer across the living room from the piano bench to the Victrola. (And kept going, up the stairs, into the kids' bedrooms.)

So my question of "What did records do to music?" does look, I think, much like the problem of "what did photography do to painting"? People had a visual culture by whose lights they interpreted, enjoyed, learned from, collected, coveted, and despised various painted artifacts. But by 1850, one aspect of the use of painting -- its capacity to represent a potential visual stimulus, of a similar grain and tenor to that of actual ocular experience -- was up for grabs. Photography was claiming the same terrain. Photographs had a very similar size and shape to paintings and drawings. All were equally distributable.

Visual culture already existed, and it accepted the photograph eagerly -- and then was changed by it. Other branches of visual culture grew (emotional or expressive applications of painting) or shrank (journalistic drawing).

Thus, I'm saying, musical culture existed, and accepted the idea of recording as a no-brainer. The "new" music took the same amount of time as the old, was played at a similar loudness, for similar reasons, and overall provided a very similar experience. The "same" songs could be played live or from a record. So why should things ever change?

But they did change. The genie that was in the flat black bottle turned out to have its own strange force.

And I think you're right that timbre became one of the big elements in the new music that came out of the bottle. Would it be wrong of me to suggest that timbre is analogous, in painting, to color? We would arrive at the Impressionists and Expressionists fairly quickly that way, which makes my job easy. ;)

Brandon