This is part 2 of a 4 part serialisation of an analysis on the current state of not just the music industry but music itself by Bill Drummond of the KLF. It is transcribed from an original radio broadcast on BBC Radio 3. You will find part 1, here.
From around the turn of the century up to the first world war there were three towering composers from the western classical school making their greatest work. These three were Sebelius, Stravinsky and Shoenberg. If you were to read the historical achievements of these three you would learn that they, in completely different ways took apart how music was made and put it back together using scales, sounds and methods never before heard by western ears. On a personal level I have been a great fan of recordings of the music that they composed in those years. The same time as Sebelius, Stravinsky and Shoenberg were being revolutionary geniuses there was an Itlaian tenor who sang no new ground breaking music, but stuck to the tried and tested cannon of popular operatic arias. Unwittingly this singer was far more revolutionary than my three heroes.
He was Enrico Caruso and between 1902 and 1921 when he died at the age of 48 he had made over 260 recordings. These recordings sold in millions around the globe. Caruso was the first superstar of the new century. What Caruso did was change of how vast swathes of the human population related to music. In every continent, people were buying Gramophones and records and listening to them in their homes, in their own homes. This was changing all the rules that music had lived by since whenever music was first created thousands and thousands of years ago. People could listen to their Caruso day and night or at least until the neighbours complained. They could take the Gramophone into any room in the house, they could even take it out into the garden if they had one. For all the revolutionary genius of Sebelius, Stravinsky or Shoenberg they changed nothing. The way their music existed and was communicated to its audience could have been done in 1876. Enrico Carruso left them all standing.
Record breaking new ground
From here on in all forms of music that existed anywhere in the world were helpless to the charms of evolving recording technology. Suddenly any music from any era could be recorded and these recordings could be played whenever the owner of the Gramophone liked. Music that previously would only be heard at coronations or marching into war or on a bandstand in the park or in a Parisian nightclub could be heard wherever. People began to collect records, to have an almost fetish like relationship with the physical objects. All around the developed world our relationship with music was completely and utterly changing. And the vast majority of us thought this was fantastic. From a political point of view, it was total democratisation of the art. We could all hear the greatest performances of the century in our front rooms. No need to be at La Scala or the Bolshoi or a whore-house in New Orleans to hear the greatest music the world had to offer. It did not seem to matter that we could never relate to music again in the way people had done only a few decades earlier.
Workin' on the chain gang
In the 1930s John Lomax the American musicologist and folklorist started to criss-cross the United States with a portable recording machine in the back of his car. Everywhere he went he would record the folk songs being sung by the poor, the imprisoned, the outcast. Music that no one in cultured society would have ever bothered with before. Music that had been here today and gone tomorrow or passed down from generation to generation was captured for eternity on Lomax’s recording device. This music would be collected as treasure for the Library of Congress. Now that people had Gramophones or radios to hear recorded music on nobody needed to create their own folk music any more. The irony was this machine that was responsible for folk musics slow death was going around the country to record it in its death throws. I for one am eternally grateful for Lomax and that he did what he did, even though it marked the end of a line that had gone on for thousands of years. By now the musicians union were becoming fearful that the fast developing recording technology would make working musicians jobless. They were right to be fearful.
More and more people were choosing to listen to professionally performed recorded music, rather than the shoddy and amatuerish live performances of local musicians. Fast forward a couple of decades to the mid 1950′s. A teenager walks into a small recording studio in Memphis, Tennessee. He wanted to have himself recorded singing some songs for his mother. This lad had only ever sung in public a few times and even then it was as an amateur. Any aspirations he had to being a professional singer would have been mere daydreams. The owner of the studio heard the boy sing and thought he had something so signed him to a recording contract. I guess, you’ve already guessed that the teenager in question was Elvis Presley arguably the most influential musician of the 20th century. The difference between Carruso and Presley was that Carruso was already a highly regarded opera singer before his voice was recorded. Before Elvis had walked into the Sun Recording Studio he was a nobody with no obvious talent.
To be continued…
