Huzzahs for Mechanical Music

It has been a long time since the once-reviled "mechanical music" began making its inroads on our profession. Early in the 20th century, but with increasing frequency starting in the mid-1920s with the introduction of radio and electric recording, fewer and fewer people made music at home. Instead, they switched on the radio or put on a record. They were into mechanical music rather than the real, flesh-and-blood stuff. And that was a very good thing indeed.

Before then, if you wanted music at home, you made it yourself. The family string quartet was one such institution, or the family piano trio, or even the family duet. Or just the kid banging away on basic Czerny or sawing away on basic fiddle pieces. You did it yourself or you did without; the only option was to buy tickets and go to concerts and recitals. Which is all well and good, but at the same time, you can't have music all that often unless you're rich enough to have concert tickets all the time.

Most of that in-home music-making was absolutely horrible. Screechy violins, clunky piano, tons o' wrong notes, wrong rhythms, you name it.

So it's not the slightest bit surprising that "mechanical music" engendered the demise of most amateur music-making. It is, quite simply, a better mousetrap.

Compton MacKenzie, the original guru behind Gramophone magazine, had this to say in the February 1930 issue:

During the few weeks I was in London this autumn I was exposed in my bedroom to five kinds of noise:

1. To the atrocious singing of a Catholic school.

2. To a portable wireless set in the flat on one side.

3. To a portable gramophone in the flat on the other side.

4. To somebody in the flat underneath practising the piano.

5. To the footsteps of a child running about overhead.

   
   

Of these noises I have no hesitation in saying that the least irritating were those emitted by the gramophone and the wireless. For years half the pianos in use were active missionaries disseminating a hatred of music. If now in many homes the piano stands as silent as a German gun in a municipal park, it only proves that human vanity can be shamed, and that there was never any excuse for buying the instrument, because there was nobody in the house worthy to play it. ... Let us remember that the piano in the hands of nine children out of ten is as much of a menace as a fountain-pen in the hands of a chimpanzee, and to suppose that to be compelled to learn to "play" it is cultivating a love of music in the child is as ridiculous as it would be to suppose that by teaching a chimpanzee to scribble with his fountain-pen only on paper he could be coaxed into appreciating Shakespeare.

Good ol' Compton. Upper-class snobbery at its finest but also bang-on when it comes to the rapid changes that were sweeping over the music world in his day. He was absolutely right in not lamenting the demise of the amateur player. Nearly a century later, recordings rule the roost in their almost overwhelming variety of forms, and that's altogether a good thing. I'd much rather hear a great pianist play Beethoven than some kid whapping away on Für Elise or something equally ghastly. I'd say to said kid: get off the piano, and let's listen to Alfred Brendel play that piece, OK? I've got him right here on Tidal.