[78-L] "Selling Sounds" reviewed

[David Weiner]

This sounds like a good book!

Dave W.

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 "Selling Sounds" reviewed

Music and Money 

>From Tin Pan Alley to RCA Victor: shaping musical taste, profiting from it.

"Selling Sounds." By David Suisman (Harvard University Press, 356 pages,
$29.95). 

by Ken Emerson 
Wall Street Journal, May 12, 2009

In 1888, the music publisher M. Witmark and Sons opened an office near Union
Square in New York, not long after the fledgling company had enjoyed success
selling sheet music for a song penned by one of the Witmark boys, "President
Cleveland's Wedding March." Witmark would go on to play a major role in the
commodification of music from the late 19th century to the Depression -- the
subject of David Suisman's "Selling Sounds." As the author notes in an
epilogue, the Witmark building was just a few doors away from a contemporary
bastion of what the commercialization of music wrought: a Virgin Megastore.
Now, in an epilogue to his epilogue, Virgin's music emporium will soon
become a thing of the past: Like so many other retail music stores of late,
it has announced that it is going out of business. The story of "Selling
Sounds," then, is especially timely.

Just as there is still a robust market for news though not for newspapers,
people have not lost their appetite for music. Why else would "American
Idol" flourish or a Dutch company spend an estimated $200 million for the
catalog of Rodgers and Hammerstein? What has changed is our custom of paying
for music when we can gain access to it so easily on the Internet. Neither
the news nor the music industry has come to terms with the digital
technology that makes their products freely available or cost next to
nothing.

Mr. Suisman begins his narrative of how things used to be with the emergence
in the 1880s and 1890s of that hive of music publishers, Witmark among them,
known as Tin Pan Alley. The origin of Tin Pan Alley's name has never been
pinned down, and its address was never fixed, either, as it gradually crept
uptown from Union Square to 28th and 29th streets and eventually beyond
Times Square.

Although Tin Pan Alley played a crucial role in bringing music to a mass
audience, Mr. Suisman emphasizes its importance at the expense of other,
earlier influences. He tends to play down, for instance, the music
business's origins in blackface minstrelsy, parlor ballads and Stephen
Foster's songs before the Civil War. It is not true, for instance, that
before the late 1890s publishers of sheet music issued only one arrangement
of a song. Many of Foster's songs were published in arrangements not only
for piano but, subsequently, for guitar and, occasionally, for vocal quartet
and brass band. And Foster aggressively promoted his songs by giving the
popular Christy Minstrels first crack at them, even ascribing authorship of
"Old Folks at Home" ("Way Down Upon the Swanee River") to the blackface
troupe's leader.


But Foster had nothing on a later generation of song-pluggers described by
Mr. Suisman. Hoping to catch the public's fancy, they would play or sing a
tune in public parks, department stores and nickelodeons, at prizefights,
political rallies and even, on at least one occasion, a nudist colony. By
one account, songwriter and publisher Charles K. Harris paid 50 performers
$5 to $50 a week in 1892-93 to include in their vaudeville acts "After the
Ball," the doleful ballad widely credited as the first song deliberately
conceived and aggressively marketed with the aim of making the sheet music a
million-seller. This, nearly half a century before Variety coined the term
"payola."

Sheet music was soon superseded by the phonograph -- rather than performing
music or listening to others perform it in their parlors, Americans could
now simply buy and play a record. "Selling Sounds" excels as it describes
how Eldridge Johnson's superior command of marketing enabled his Victor
Talking Machine Co. to outpace Thomas Edison's National Phonograph Co.
Victor appropriated from its English partner the trademark image of a fox
terrier named Nipper listening to "His Master's Voice," and the company
adopted, from a record-seller in pre-revolutionary St. Petersburg, Russia,
the prestigious "Red Seal" that adorned its classical releases. In short
order, Victor became one of the world's most highly recognized corporate
"brands." Edward Bernays, the father of modern public relations, and Raymond
Rubicam, who would co-found the advertising firm bearing his name, played
bit roles in Victor's ascendancy.

Although Mr. Suisman's research draws heavily on Victor's archives,
advertising and in-house publications, one of his most intriguing chapters
concentrates on the short-lived Black Swan Records, which Harry H. Pace, a
protégé of NAACP founder W.E.B. Du Bois, launched in 1921 to promote the
cultural and economic development of African-Americans. Pace preferred music
that offered racial uplift; he abhorred lowdown blues. Thus he missed a
chance to sign up Bessie Smith, who interrupted her audition to say: "Hold
on, let me spit." Smith went on to make hits and history with white-owned
Columbia Records, where she would be billed as the Queen, later the Empress,
of the Blues, while Black Swan soon expired, a victim not just of racism but
of Pace's high-mindedness.

Black Swan's cautionary tale runs counter to the argument woven throughout
"Selling Sounds." Big is bad in Mr. Suisman's book, and commercialism
inevitably crass and coercive. The "soundscape of modernity" -- the
formation of which he chronicles in engrossing detail -- is, in the author's
view, inimical to democracy. "Consumers relished the greater range of
choices," he writes, "but insofar as musical activity was linked to
consumption, the boundaries of music came to depend increasingly on what the
industry decided to market."

Yet the Victor Talking Machine Co., later RCA Victor, actually stretched the
boundaries of music by popularizing not only opera with Enrico Caruso but
also country music with the Carter Family and Jimmy Rodgers. Jazz giants
Louis Armstrong and Jelly Roll Morton as well as Bessie Smith recorded for
major, white-owned labels whose only motive was money. If music often seems
in the doldrums today, it may be in part because people are having a hard
time figuring out how to turn a profit from it.
_____

Mr. Emerson, whose most recent book is "Always Magic in the Air: The Bomp
and Brilliance of the Brill Building Era," is editing a collection of
19th-century popular song lyrics for the Library of America.