Abstract
Authenticity and sincerity have been obsessions in the West since the late eighteenth century. Now, perhaps more than ever, mass media draws attention to the authenticity of politicians and other famous individuals (or, sometimes cynically, to how well they have been able to affect it). Historians have attributed the ascendancy of authenticity and sincerity to Enlightenment and romantic ideas—to what can be called, succinctly, the emergence of the individual as the most important repository of morality.1 Others have traced the preoccupation with authenticity specifically to capitalism and the advent of mechanical reproduction. As Walter Benjamin noted decades ago, issues of authenticity could gain widespread currency only when copies and reproduced commodities began to permeate everyday life.2 Sociologists like Rojek have complicated the discussion by turning our attention to celebrity culture as an important vehicle for both consumer desire and discourses of sincerity and authentic selfhood. They have argued that celebrities, by periodically falling from grace or giving us a glimpse of their imperfect everyday selves, perform authenticity itself and testify to the power of the human personality.3
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Notes
On notions of sincerity and personal authenticity in Europe and the United States, see, for example, John Martin, “Inventing Sincerity, Refashioning Prudence: The Discovery of the Individual in Renaissance Europe,” American Historical Review 102, 5 (December 1997): 1309–42;
Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self: The Making of Modern Identity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989);
Lionel Trilling, Sincerity and Authenticity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1972).
See Walter Benjamin’s famous 1936 essay, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” in Illuminations, ed. Hanna Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken Books, 1968), 217–51. On the role of “sincerity” in consumer capitalism, see
Colin Campbell, The Romantic Ethic and the Spirit of Modern Consumerism (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1989), esp. 173–201.
See, for example, Richard Dyer, Stars (London: British Film Institute, 2002);
and Chris Rojek, Celebrity (London: Reaktion Books, 2001).
See Trilling, Sincerity and Authenticity; Charles Taylor, The Ethics of Authenticity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991).
Theodor Adorno, “The Curves of the Needle,” October 55 (Winter 1990): 54.
In making this claim, I am inf luenced by Peter Brooks, who put forward similar ideas about the operations of melodrama during the French Revolution. See Brooks, The Melodramatic Imagination: Balzac, James, Melorama, and the Mode of Excess (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985), 15; and
Brooks, “Melodrama, Body, Revolution,” in Melodrama: Stage, Picture, Screen, ed. Jacky S. Bratton, Jim Cook, and Christine Gledhill (London: British Film Institute, 1994). See Chapter 5 for a more thorough discussion of melodramatic behavioral modes in fin-de-siècle Russia. On Soviet self- fashioning through confessional rituals, and auto-biographical and diary writing, see
Jochen Hellbeck, Revolution on My Mind: Writing a Diary under Stalin (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006);
Igal Halfin, Terror in My Soul: Communist Autobiographies on Trial (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003); and
Igal Halfin, Stalinist Confessions: Messianism and Terror at the Leningrad Communist University (Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2009).
In the early years of the recording industry, the term “phonograph” referred to Edison machines, which played cylinders only, while “gramophone” denoted disc-playing Berliner machines. In the 1920s, when cylinders were phased out, both terms were used to refer to record players. “Gramophone” was more common in Europe, where Emile Berliner’s company made significant inroads at the turn of the twentieth century, while “phonograph” was favored in the United States. Because the term grammofon (gramophone) was vernacularized earlier and employed much more frequently in Russia than patefon (phonograph), it will be used generically in this chapter. For a more detailed discussion of the terminology of early sound recording technology, and the links between etymology and marketing, see Marsha Siefert, “Aesthetics, Technology, and the Capitalization of Culture: How the Talking Machine Became a Musical Instrument,” Science in Context 8, 2 (1995): 418–19; and
Colin Symes, Setting the Record Straight: A Material History of Classical Recording (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2004), 18–22; also see
Jonathan Sterne, The Audible Past: Cultural Origins of Sound Reproduction (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003), 201–9.
Mark Katz, Capturing Sound: How Technology Has Changed Music (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004), 9–31. Katz identifies and analyzes seven characteristics of sound recording technology, or “phonograph effects”: tangibility, portability, (in)visibility, repeatability, temporality, receptivity, and manipulability.
Ibid., xiii. See also William H. Kenney, Recorded Music in American Life: The Phonograph and Popular Memory, 1890–1945 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999). For a brief account of the emergence of sound recording, as well as a discussion of the responses to and effects of new media, see
Friedrich A. Kittler, Gramophone, Film, Typewriter, trans. Geoffrey Winthrop-Young and Michael Wutz (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999), 1–114.
Evan Eisenberg, The Recording Angel: Music, Records, and Culture from Aristotle to Zappa (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2005), 38.
For a concise history of both foreign and domestic gramophone companies in Russia and a catalogue of vocal recordings made by the Russian branch of The Gramophone Company (1899–1915), see P. N. Griunberg and V. L. Ianin, Istoriia nachala gramzapisi v Rossii: Katalog vokal’nykh zapisei rossiiskogo otdeleniia kompanii ‘Grammofon’ (Moscow: Iazyki slavianskoi kul’tury, 2002). For brief discussions of early advertisements in Russian newspapers for the Gramophone Company and gramophone records, see
Sally West, I Shop in Moscow: Advertising and the Creation of Consumer Culture in Late Tsarist Russia (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2011), 128–29, 134, 200–1.
On the link made by Russia’s intellectuals and music professionals between the “gramophone epidemic” and pornography (and debased commercial culture more generally), see James Loeffler, The Most Musical Nation: Jews and Culture in the Late Russian Empire (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2010), 153–56, 171–72.
Johnson considered the horn attachment “an affront to people of refined taste.” E. R. Finemore Johnson, His Master’s Voice Was Eldridge R. Johnson: A Biography (Milford, DE: State Media Inc., 1974), 73. Cited in Symes, Setting the Record Straight, 25.
Shapka-Nevidmika (pseud.), “Shutki dnia,” Peterburgskaia gazeta 46 (February 16, 1911): 4.
A. Emte, “Vnimaniiu chitatelei,” Novosti grammofona 1 (1907): 3. Contrary to its assertion, Novosti grammofona was not the first specialized magazine in Russia devoted to sound recording. It was preceded by the St. Petersburg monthly Grammofon i fonograf (Gramophone and Phonograph, 1902–04), the title of which changed in 1905 to Svet i zvuk (Light and Sound) and then to Grammofon i fotografia (Gramophone and Photography, August-September 1906).
Sergei Prokofiev, Selected Letters of Sergei Prokofiev, ed. and trans. Harlow Robinson (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1998), 7–8. July 26, 1909. Prokofiev’s letter and Isaac Babel’s short story “Gedali” (see later) are also cited in Eisenberg, The Recording Angel, 57, 25.
Isaac Babel, “The End of St. Hypatius,” in The Complete Works of Isaac Babel, ed. Nathalie Babel, trans. Peter Constantine (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2002), 127. The story was first published in Pravda, August 3, 1924, under the heading “From My Diary.”
On the regimentation of leisure, see Gary Cross, Time and Money: The Making of Consumer Culture (London: Routledge, 1993); and
Chris Rojek, Leisure and Culture (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 1999).
Symes, Setting the Record Straight, 178. On advice literature in Russia in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, see Catriona Kelly, Refining Russia: Advice Literature, Polite Culture and Gender from Catherine to Yeltsin (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 156–229.
Grammofonnyi ded, “Grammofonnyia igolki,” Novosti grammofona 1 (April, 1907): 5–6.
Diadia Sasha, “Besedy,” Novosti grammofona 2 (May, 1907): 24.
Diadia Sasha, “Besedy,” Novosti grammofona 5 (August, 1907), 72–73.
On the delineation of other forms of masculine consumption in late imperial Russia, see West, I Shop in Moscow, 145–51, 163–71. And on masculine retailing practices, see Marjorie L. Hilton, Selling to the Masses: Retailing in Russia, 1880–1930 (Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2012), 110–31.
On collecting as masculine consumption, see Leora Auslander, “The Gendering of Consumer Practices in Nineteenth-Century France,” in The Sex of Things: Gender and Consumption in Historical Perspective, ed. Victoria de Grazia and Ellen Furlough (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), 79–112. Also on collecting, see
John Elsner and Roger Cardinal, eds., Cultures of Collecting (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994);
Paul Martin, Popular Collecting and the Everyday Self: The Reinvention of Museums? (London: Leicester University Press, 1999); and
Susan Pearce, ed., The Collector’s Voice: Critical Readings in the Practice of Collecting (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2000).
On hobby magazines as disseminators of the meanings and values of consumer capitalism, see Richard M. Ohmann, Selling Cult ure: Magazines, Markets, and Class at the Turn of the Century (London: Verso, 1996); also see
Matthew Schneirov, The Dream of a New Social Order: Popular Magazines in America, 1893–1914 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994).
On the St. Petersburg monthly Grammofonnyi mir (Gramophone World, 1910–17) and the colorful life and ideas of its editor Dmitrii Bogemskii, see L. I. Tikhvinskaia, “Fragmenty odnoi sud’by na fone fragmentov odnoi kul’tury,” in Razvlekatel’naia kul’tura Rossii XVIII–XIX vv.: Ocherki istorii i teorii, ed. E. V. Dukov (St. Petersburg: Dmitrii Bulanin, 2000), 430–63.
Frederick W. Gaisberg, Music on the Record (London: Robert Hale Ltd., 1946), 15.
On Walter Legge (1906–79) see Timothy Day, A Century of Recorded Music. Listening to Musical History (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2000), 40–43.
Patti’s reaction was documented by Landon Ronald, her piano accompanist on the Gramophone recordings. Landon Ronald, Variations on a Personal Theme (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1922), 103–4. Cited in
John Frederick Cone, Adelina Patti: Queen of Hearts (Portland, OR: Amadeus Press, 1993), 243.
Katz, Capturing Sound, 39. On the use of the Stroh violin in the recording studio, see also Timothy Day, A Century of Recorded Music: Listening to Musical History (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2000), 11.
On the diversification of dachas and their dwellers (dachniki) in the 1890s and 1900s, and the advent of dacha “hygienic” advice literature, see Kelly, Refining Russia, 182–88. For an in-depth study of the dacha as a cultural space and competing notions of dacha living in the early twentieth century, see Stephen Lovell, Summerfolk: A History of the Dacha, 1710–2000 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2003), 86–117.
Samuil Marshak, “Dacha,” Sobranie sochinenii v vos’mi tomakh, vol. 5 (Moscow: Khudozhestvennaia literatura, 1968–70), 475–76. The poem first appeared in Solntse Rossii 28, 1911, under the pseudonym D-r Friken. “At the human race by his feet” and “And the Satan leads the dance” are lines from Mephistopheles’ Song of the Golden Calf. The line “Aren’t you dancing, Lenskii?” belongs to Onegin in act 2, scene 1 of Tchaikovsky’s Eugene Onegin. The “Hymn to Hymen,” or Epithalamium, is sung by Vindex, prince of Aquitania, in act 1 of Anton Rubinstein’s opera Nero. Multiple recordings of these arias with Shaliapin, Shevelev, and other singers were made by Gramophone between 1901 and 1914. For other examples of satire published in the 1910s relating to dacha gramophone culture, see Kelly, Refining Russia, 183; and Tikhvinskaia, “Fragmenty odnoi sud’by,” 452.
Slavoj Žižek, citing Adorno, has suggested that the voice-as-object displays a “spectral autonomy” and can be experienced as undead, traumatic. Slavoj Žižek, On Belief (New York: Routledge, 2001), 44–46, 56–58; see also,
Žižek, Enjoy Your Symptom! Jacques Lacan in Hollywood and Out (New York: Routledge, 2001), 116–21. Certainly a disembodied, “natural sounding” recorded voice, severed from a subject, bearing no traces of technological intervention or other evidence of material life, might seem, paradoxically, machinelike. Crackling and other distortion metonymically evoked human warmth and imperfection, reat-taching the object-voice to an external reality.
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© 2013 Anna Fishzon
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Fishzon, A. (2013). Authenticity in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, or, How the Gramophone Made Everyday Life Operatic. In: Fandom, Authenticity, and Opera. Palgrave Studies in Cultural and Intellectual History. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137023452_5
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