Music – Records – Radio - Observatoire interdisciplinaire de

Music – Records – Radio
in French-speaking countries, 1900-1950
International conference
Organized by the research group “Musique française 1870-1950: discours et idéologies”
[French music, 1870-1950: Discourses and ideologies]
Laboratoire musique, histoire et société
Observatoire interdisciplinaire de création et de recherche en musique (OICRM)
Montreal, 20-22 October 2016
Call for papers
In the space of a few decades, from 1900 to 1950, musicians’ and listeners’ relationship to music was transformed with
the advent of records and then the radio. Although the means of engraving sounds onto cylinders and then onto records
first appeared in the 1870s, records would become an extraordinary method of circulating music only after the turn of
the twentieth century and the development of recording technologies. Radio entered the home in the early 1920s and,
within a decade, provoked a new media revolution, fueled in part by the record industry. Music was henceforth
circulated via records and the radio to an increasingly wide public.
Several extensive French-language studies have since explored these two forms of media. Sophie Maisonneuve’s work
on records 1 and the writings of Cécile Méadel, 2 Pierre Pagé, 3 and Philippe Caufriez 4 on the radio have produced
revealing portraits of an evolving musical world. However, fewer studies have examined the music in circulation and
the relationships that emerged between composition and new media before 1950 (in other words, before the radio
broadcasting bureaus of Paris, Cologne, and Milan became sites of experimentation in electronic music and musique
concrète). Some scholars have, nevertheless, begun to explore this field of research: examples include studies by
Christophe Bennet5 and Karine Le Bail.6
In French-speaking countries, records circulated rapidly; however, the radio took root more slowly than in other
countries such as England, the United States, and Germany.7 But despite radio’s somewhat protracted establishment,
the invasion of radio waves and record sales soon became strategic issues for European as well as American companies
that, within a context of large-scale commercialization, adopted a business model that privileged certain genres, wellknown artists, and the more famous composers and musical works. In compensation, the pedagogical potential of the
radio was quickly recognized by the main actors involved, including artists and governing bodies that sought to
regulate radio broadcasting by exerting increased control through the creation of “national” radio stations. Music is
obviously a central concern of the recording industry and radio, and has been since the development of radio
broadcasting. However, technological issues, the economic context, and sociopolitical objectives impose methods and
models that had a direct impact on musical production. What exactly was this impact?
Scholars engaging in research in this field have a growing number of sources at their fingertips. Digitization
technology has provided access to an ever-increasing number of recordings from the period (encompassing both
records and the radio). Radio archives and the specialty press also comprise an impressive amount of documents that,
until now, have rarely been explored. The sheer vastness of this field of research perhaps explains why there has not
yet been a comprehensive study of the subject.8
The conference seeks to provide researchers an opportunity to explore collectively the relationship between music,
records, and the radio by examining the following issues: 1) the interactions between different forms of media and
intermedial transfer; 2) the ways in which composers and performers adapted to the new means of dissemination; and
3) the social, economic, and aesthetic consequences on musical activity with the arrival of records and the radio.
Restricting the context to French-speaking countries will make it possible to establish comparisons as well as
connections between various record “markets” and the radio networks that developed during the period. In addition, the
circumscribed context will help scholars call attention to the new means of circulation of artists and works within a
linguistic community confronted with the imperatives of an internationalization of musical production. In conjunction
with the conference, there will be a workshop entitled “Mémoire musicale et résistance dans les camps [Musical
memory and resistance in the camps],” organized by Marie-Hélène Benoit-Otis and Philippe Despoix.
1
Presentations can be given in French or in English and should not exceed 20 minutes; papers may examine the
subject through different lenses (archival, historical, aesthetic, analytical, sociological, or geographical). Proposals for
sessions comprising several papers are also welcome. Proposals must contribute to at least one of the following six
overarching research axes that the conference seeks to investigate:
1) Technology
Technological progress: The relationship between art and technique
Recorded sound: The quality of recording and the quality of listening/reception
The artifice of recording
2) Audiences
Educating the nation through radio and records
The contributions of records and the radio to mass culture
The effects of record circulation and radio broadcasting on collective musical memory (e.g., music on war
fronts and in concentration camps, etc.)
3) Creation
The birth of radio genres
Technological constraints and the composer
Versions of performance for records
The technical demands of the studio and the performer
Stars and the media
The relationship between a success in concert and a recording on record
4) New professions
The actors involved in music technology: Technicians, producers, presenters, speakers, and record dealers
Eyewitnesses during a time of change: Journalists, music critics, record reviews, specialized journals
5) Aesthetics
The novelty of repeated listening and its influence on aesthetic perception
The concept of “radio engineering”
Legitimization of the new forms of media
6) Record and radio programming
The shape and content of a repertory or a canon
The mixing of genres
Speaking about music: Presentations, pre-concert talks, radio lessons
Propaganda and the radio
Paper proposals (max. 4,000 characters, including spaces) should be submitted by 1 April 2016, by completing the
online form available at: http://goo.gl/forms/zwfE52j4tI
For further information, please contact: [email protected]
Organizational committee:
Michel Duchesneau (Professor, Université de Montréal, director of the OICRM)
Federico Lazzaro (Postdoctoral fellow, McGill University/OICRM)
Liouba Bouscant (Postdoctoral fellow, Université de Montréal/OICRM)
Administration:
Christine Paré (coordinator of the OICRM, Université de Montréal branch)
Judy-Ann Desrosiers (coordinator of the Équipe Musique française, Laboratoire Histoire, musique et société,
OICRM)
Program committee:
Christophe Bennet (Paris-Sorbonne)
Marie-Hélène Benoit-Otis (Univ. de Montréal)
Liouba Bouscant (Univ. de Montréal)
Philippe Despoix (Univ. de Montréal)
Michel Duchesneau (Univ. de Montréal)
Federico Lazzaro (McGill University)
Sylvia l’Écuyer (Univ. de Montréal)
Karine Le Bail (CNRS)
Pascal Lécroart (Univ. de Franche-Comté)
Marie-Thérèse Lefebvre (Univ. de Montréal)
Sophie Maisonneuve (Univ. Paris Descartes)
2
Notes
1
Sophie Maisonneuve, L’invention du disque, 1877-1949. Genèse de l’usage des médias musicaux contemporains (Paris:
Éditions des archives contemporaines, 2009).
2
Cécile Méadel, Histoire de la radio des années trente. Du sans-filiste à l’auditeur (Paris: Anthropos/INA, 1994).
3
Pierre Pagé, Histoire de la radio au Québec (Montréal: Fides, 2008).
4
Philippe Caufriez, Histoire de la radio francophone en Belgique (Brussels: Crisp, 2015).
5
Christophe Bennet, La musique à la radio dans les années trente. La création d’un genre radiophonique (Paris:
L’Harmattan/INA, 2010); idem, “Musiciens de l’entre-deux-guerres. Du clavier au micro,” Cahiers d’histoire de la
radiodiffusion, no. 124 (2015): 9-120.
6
Karine Le Bail, Musique, pouvoir, responsabilité. La politique musicale de la Radiodiffusion française, 1939-1953 (PhD
diss., Institut d’études politiques de Paris, 2005); idem, Musique et “drôle de guerre.” Histoire de l’Orchestre national de la
Radiodiffusion française (Paris: CNRS Éditions, forthcoming); Myriam Chimènes and Karine Le Bail (eds.), Henry Barraud,
Essai autobiographique. Un compositeur à la tête de la Radio (Paris: Fayard/BnF, 2010).
7
On the history of the Anglo-American and German record industry and radio during this period, see Leon C. Hood, The
Programming of Classical Music Broadcasts Over the Major Radio Networks (Ph.D. diss., New York University, 1955);
William Glock, The BBC’s Music Policy (London: BBC, 1963); Nanny Drechsler, Die Funktion der Musik im deutschen
Rundfunk, 1933-1945 (Pfaffenweiler: Centaurus, 1988); Louis E. Carlat, Sound Values: Radio Broadcasts of Symphonic
Music and American Culture, 1922-1939 (Ph.D. diss., John Hopkins University, 1995); Bryan Dewalt and John Vardalas
(eds.), Sound Recording in Canada: An Historical Assessment (Ottawa: National Museum of Science and Technology, 1995);
Michael Stapper, Unterhaltungsmusik im Rundfunk der Weimarer Republik (Tutzing: Schneider, 2001); Allan Sutton,
Recording the ’Twenties: The Evolution of the American Recording Industry, 1920-29 (Denver: Mainspring Press, 2008).
For a study of music on the radio from a European perspective, see Angela Ida de Benedictis and Franco Monteleone (eds.),
La musica alla radio, 1924-1954. Storia, effetti, contesti in prospettiva europea (Rome: Bulzoni, 2012).
8
For a selection of sources that provide a more general overview within this field of cultural and music history, see Jack
Bornoff and Lionel Salter, Music and the Twentieth-Century Media (Florence: Olschki, 1972); Hugh W. Hitchcock (ed.), The
Phonograph and Our Musical Life (New York: Institute for Studies in American Music, 1980); Michael Chanan, Repeated
Takes: A Short History of Recording and Its Effects on Music (London: Verso, 1995); Jonathan Sterne, The Audible Past:
Cultural Origins of Sound Reproduction (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003); Marc Katz, Capturing Sound: How
Technology Has Changed Music (Los Angeles and Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004); Jean-Yves Mollier, JeanFrançois Sirinelli and François Valloton (eds.), Culture de masse et culture médiatique en Europe et dans les Amériques,
1860-1940 (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 2006); Nicholas Cook et al. (eds.), The Cambridge Companion to
Recorded Music (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009); Pierre-Henry Frangne and Hervé Lacombe (eds.), Musique
et enregistrement (Rennes: Presses universitaires de Rennes, 2014).
3