| From its earliest days, mechanical reproduction has affected how we see and hear music. In the 1910s and 1920s, a group of composers, performers, and theorists, inspired by recent innovations in mechanical musical instruments and the phonograph, began describing the classical performer in technological terms. Envisioning a future where all music would be performed by machines, these theorists—Stuckenschmidt, Ernest Newmann, Schoenberg, and especially Adorno—argued that the live performer, as a kind of phonograph, would disappear both in theory and practice. This understanding of the performer as a form of mechanical reproduction has deeply influenced how we see modern performance. By looking at how people “played” the phonograph and player piano from the 1900s to the 1930s, one can see how recording technology has influenced the visual ethos of classical music, its stage presentation, and gestural theatrics. The ways in which the modern performer looks at and touches an instrument, and how, in turn, the audience looks at the performer, symbolically suggests how the domestic listener “plays” a stereo system. Recording technology has not only influenced performance, however. How composers quote and reappropriate other musics and styles has also been affected by recording technology. Neoclassicism, in a way, “samples” and “reproduces” other works, and the reception history of mechanical music and the phonograph informs the work of Ravel, Stravinsky, and Ives. Likewise, modern technologies such as the tape recorder inform how later composers—Cage in particular—quote other works. In this dissertation, theories of mechanical reproduction also influence the author's own oeuvre and especially its live performance. A piece, Tone Test, is discussed, which creates a new performance style based on the early twentieth-century “tone tests”—highly publicized concerts in which performers would lip-synch to, and “play” the phonograph.*; *This dissertation includes a CD that is compound (contains both a paper copy and CD as part of the dissertation). |
