The Player Piano and the Edwardian Novel

Cecilia Bjorken-Nyberg

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317021216
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literatur
• Subtopic: Literaturkritik für Vergleichende Literaturwissenschaft

In her study of music-making in the Edwardian novel, Cecilia Björkén-Nyberg argues that the invention and development of the player piano had a significant effect on the perception, performance and appreciation of music during the period. In contrast to existing devices for producing music mechanically such as the phonograph and gramophone, the player piano granted its operator freedom of individual expression by permitting the performer to modify the tempo. Because the traditional piano was the undisputed altar of domestic and highly gendered music-making, Björkén-Nyberg suggests, the potential for intervention by the mechanical piano's operator had a subversive effect on traditional notions about the status of the musical work itself and about the people who were variously defined by their relationship to it. She examines works by Dorothy Richardson, E.M. Forster, Henry Handel Richardson, Max Beerbohm and Compton Mackenzie, among others, contending that Edwardian fiction with music as a subject undermined the prevalent antithesis, expressed in contemporary music literature, between a nineteenth-century conception of music as a means of transcendence and the increasing mechanisation of music as represented by the player piano. Her timely survey of the player piano in the context of Edwardian commercial and technical discourse draws on a rich array of archival materials to shed new light on the historically conditioned activity of music-making in early twentieth-century fiction.

Chapter 1
Storing Music in Edwardian Fiction

The Literary Machine

H.G. Wells’s When the Sleeper Wakes (1899) tells the story of the 30-year-old Graham¹ who, due to fatigue, falls into a heavy sleep that lasts for 203 years. He wakes up in the year 2100 to a world of electricity, airplanes and tailoring machines. However, it is not until he finds himself in a room ‘with no books, no newspapers, no writing materials’ that he realises that ‘the world has changed indeed’ (SW, 129). Studying the room more closely, he notices objects that puzzle him:

He observed one entire side of the outer room was set with rows of peculiar double cylinders inscribed with green lettering on white that harmonized with the decorative scheme of the room, and in the centre of this side projected a little apparatus a yard square and having a white smooth face to the room. A chair faced this. He had a transitory idea that these cylinders might be books, or a modern substitute for books, but at first it did not seem so.

The strange books Graham finds are videos. He then examines the ‘apparatus’, inserts the cylinders and ‘bec[omes] aware of voices and music, and notice[s] a play of colour on the smooth front face’ (130). Despite the attempt to make the cylinders blend unobtrusively with ‘the decorative scheme of the room’, it is hard not to think about the place as one primarily meant for storage, a kind of media library. The general impression of Wells’s futuristic world on a twenty-first-century reader is that it is surprisingly cluttered with various kinds of mechanical apparatuses. The cinematic projector that is so intriguing to Graham seems at first to be highly sophisticated as it synchronises sound and moving pictures: ‘Not only did they move, but they were conversing in clear small voices’. However, the impression of instantaneous effect is directly undermined when Graham focuses on the material means of achieving it as much as on the effect itself: ‘It was exactly like reality viewed through an inverted opera glass and heard through a long tube’. This way of approaching new technology from a mechanistic perspective is characteristic of Graham’s outlook throughout the novel.

Having established that the cylinders must belong to the category of books, he tries to discern individual titles and is again bewildered:

The lettering on the cylinders puzzled him. At first sight it seemed like Russian. Then he noticed a suggestion of mutilated English about certain of the words. ‘Θi Man huwdbi Kiη’, forced itself on him as ‘The Man who would be King’. ‘Phonetic spelling’, he said. He remembered reading a story with that title, then he recalled the story vividly, one of the best stories in the world. But this thing before him was not a book as he understood it. He puzzled out the titles of two adjacent cylinders. ‘The Heart of Darkness’, he had never heard before nor ‘The Madonna of the Future’ – no doubt if they were indeed stories, they were by post Victorian authors. (SW, 129)

Books in the sense that Graham understands them are not only paper volumes to be read from cover to cover but also physical objects linked with habits of processing sound as encapsulated in the letters. According to Friedrich Kittler, such a ‘system of twenty-six letters’ is intended to store sound and ‘exclude noise sequences’² but the phonetic spelling of the title of Rudyard Kipling’s book has a counter-productive effect and ‘arrests’ sound, thus rendering the title unintelligible. Moreover, it is implied that memory is intimately associated with the traditional reading process through Graham’s ability to conjure up the contents ‘vividly’ at will. It is also suggested, however, that accessing the same material through another medium would put an end to the hallucinatory capacity of the book, since the separate sense impressions can no longer be fused into a seamless whole through the reader’s imagination. Liberating the book in this way from the yoke of memory means that it no longer functions as a satisfactory surrogate for the human sensorium.

What Graham realises may be summed up in Marshall McLuhan’s much-quoted statement that ‘the medium is the message’.³ One may also explain Graham’s experience by drawing attention to the statement made by Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari that ‘a book itself is a little machine … [and] the only question is which other machine the literary machine can be plugged into, must be plugged into in order to work’.⁴ The ‘post Victorian’ books Graham finds are not only unfamiliar to him but also unreadable unless accessed through another medium. Conversely, in a 1913 issue of the Piano-Player Review, the music lover and player piano enthusiast Bertram Smith explained how a book may be produced out of music material. The musically illiterate Smith discovered that he ‘[could] reach out and grasp the treasure’ of inaccessible canonical music that was previously hidden behind ‘barriers’.⁵ This magical effect was achieved with the aid of a machine that turned music into a printed book to be enjoyed and handled as such. Smith expressed his enthusiasm by exclaiming that ‘now I can read a symphony as I read a book. I may repeat as often as I wish, I may hunt out the different subjects, trace the whole complex process of development, pause where I will, turn back where I will’.⁶ There is no mistaking the genuine enthusiasm that the new music technology evoked in Smith; its revolutionary influence was like ‘the perfect knowledge of a new language’.⁷ Ironically, though, he construed its newness in the old form of the printed page. Thus, while Bertram Smith was admittedly more open-minded than Graham to new technology, their way of making sense of it is essentially the same, since neither can escape the tyranny of the printed page which, as McLuhan phrases it, makes us ‘unable to read the language of technological forms’.⁸

Graham and Bertram Smith struggle to express their experiences of technological change. They both serve as illustrative examples of the transition between two media paradigms. Technological innovations and a developing media network gave rise to what Kittler terms ‘the discourse of 1900’. In Discourse Networks, 1800/1900, he deals with the tension caused when the classical-romantic discourse of 1800, with its emphasis on the inscription in literature of a Romantic subject and what it said, was challenged by the new discourse of 1900 with its focus on the exterior and the often noisy fact that something was said at all. He argues that throughout the greater part of the nineteenth century, the book was the only form of media: ‘Around 1800 the book became both film and record simultaneously – not, however, as media technological reality, but only in the imaginary of readers’ souls’.⁹ Due to universal alphabetisation and the silent reading of print, the media machine, safely lodged within the book, ran smoothly and noiselessly for almost a century. Then, in the last two decades, technical inventions for recording, storing and reproducing text, images and sound became reality, thus rendering the hand, eye and ear autonomous. By the turn of the twentieth century, the printed page had therefore ceased to have a privileged and exclusive relation with the human sensorium, and external technologies had partly taken over its function. Wells captures this paradigmatic shift neatly in the two paragraphs quoted above. The recently awakened sleeper intuitively senses that, as John Johnston observes when summarising Kittler’s media theory, literature is neither ‘an autonomous discourse’ nor a universal one but ‘requires the support of other discourses’ and reflects on ‘historical variables’.¹⁰ In short, literature becomes media transcription.

Such a media approach to literature may seem incongruous with a focus on materiality and the mechanistic dimension. As Lisa Gitelman notes, though, media is a ‘slippery’¹¹ subject because in any given period they ‘become naturalized’ due to their ‘dematerialization’.¹² As I have suggested, Wells does not succeed in naturalising the new media system in When the Sleeper Wakes. In fact, the reader is constantly reminded how very present it is through the many references to its materiality. Neither does electricity seem to have the magical, instantaneous effect that Kittler regards as a revolutionary feature of the electronic age and instrumental in making the leap from the discourse network of 1800 to that of 1900.¹³ Instead, Graham conceptualises his new technological surroundings by anchoring them in the mechanical world of well-known Victorian apparatuses. Even though the futuristic machines he comes across all run on electricity, the new energy source is more of an abstract idea than an everyday reality for him.¹⁴ This becomes clear when he watches with fascination as the tailoring apparatus is set in motion through electricity:

The crop-headed lad handed the tailor a roll of the bluish satin and the two began fixing this in the mechanism in a manner reminiscent of a roll of paper in a nineteenth century printing machine. Then they ran the entire thing on its easy, noiseless bearings across the room to a remote corner where a twisted cable looped rather gracefully from the wall. They made some connexion and the machine became energetic and swift. ‘What is that doing? … Is that – some sort of force – laid on?’ (SW, 107–8)

What is foregrounded is the familiar bulky materiality of nineteenth-century machinery rather than its smooth, electrified running. However, despite their failure to produce an instantaneous effect, machines like this one are interesting in a media context. In my opinion, they allow us ‘to catch a glimpse of slipperiness in itself’ because they belong to ‘a specific moment of media transition, when things seemed particularly contingent and far from inevitable or natural’.¹⁵ Gitelman makes the important observation that the media and communication narratives of both the electronic age and the information age tend to be ‘technically false’ because they so totally eliminate any signs of physicality such as keys and screens, for instance.¹⁶ This blindness to materiality may not be a conscious lapse, though, as McLuhan observes when admitting the mistake he himself made in The Mechanical Bride of using old lenses for a new media context: ‘It is easy to reveal mechanism in a postmechanical era’.¹⁷ At the time, McLuhan failed to see that society had moved from the mechanistic to the electronic age, and ‘it was this fact that made mechanism both obtrusive and repugnant’.¹⁸

Lisa Gitelman diagnoses the slipperiness of media and draws the conclusion that a media system in transition is more appropriately classified as being ‘under negotiation’: ‘Moments of media transition are periods in which the perceptual and semiotic patterns, the technological forms, social practices, economic structures, and legal constructions later defining a particular medium within a dominant media system remain unsettled and under negotiation’.¹⁹ The concrete example she gives, and which will serve as a bridge to my discussion of music, media and literature, concerns the material aspects of piano rolls and the copyright conflicts this new form of music technology caused around the turn of the twentieth century. More specifically, she argues that prior to the information age, paper was a material that could produce a synergy effect similar to that created by modern communication media. Incidentally, it may be mentioned that Graham in When the Sleeper Wakes figures out how the tailoring machine works by observing that rolls of fabric are being fixed ‘in a manner reminiscent of a roll of paper in a ninetee...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgements
• List of Abbreviations
• Introduction
• 1 Storing Music in Edwardian Fiction
• 2 The Engineer
• 3 The Performer
• 4 The Composer
• Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Index