CHAPTER 7 | BAND MUSIC AFTER THE CIVIL WAR 171
What were Sousa’s qualms about recordings? For one thing, recording tech-
nique around 1890, when Sousa was fi rst involved, was so primitive that little
thought could be given to artistry. With the invention of the electric micro-
phone still more than three decades in the future, musicians had to crowd
around a horn that directed sound to a needle that cut grooves in the record-
ing disc or cylinder—a purely mechanical (nonelectric) process, more or less the
reverse of the playback process. Recordings might do a fair job of capturing a
solo singer or instrumentalist, but the sound of a full band was beyond the lim-
its of the era’s technology. Besides, the reproduction of multiple copies from
one master recording was a process still under development. A photo of the
Marine Band making cylinder recordings shows ten Graphophone machines
arranged in front of the band. After an announcer shouted the title of the
selection, the band would perform the work in an abridgement that lasted
about two minutes. New wax cylinders were then placed on the machines, and
the process was repeated. In this way, ten recordings of a march could be made
every few minutes.
Sousa mistrusted an enterprise that placed music in the service of tech-
nolog y. He also deplored the record companies’ refusal in those early days to
pay composers for the use of their works, and he lobbied hard for a change in
copyright law that would be more favorable to composers. The 1909 copyright
revision included new language granting composers rights to “mechanical” roy-
alties for the reproduction of their music in player piano rolls and phonograph
records—a term, still in use today, redolent of a time when people listened to
music played on a wind-up contraption.
But more than that, Sousa considered recordings an assault on the ecology of
musical life. He testifi ed at a congressional hearing in 1906 that the phonograph
was discouraging many Americans from doing their own singing and playing, a
trend that could “ruin the artistic development of music in this country.” Sousa
remembered growing up in Washington at a time when “in front of every house in
the summer evenings you would fi nd young people together singing the songs of the
day or the old songs.” But now, he complained, “you hear these infernal machinesK Published in 1891, this
photograph shows the U.S.
Marine Band recording in
the Washington studio of
the Columbia Phonograph
Company. Note the multiple
recording horns.early recordings’
limitationsthe 1909 Copyright Act172028_07_162-182_r3_ko.indd 171 23/01/13 10:19 AM