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The little town of Main Street was a musical wasteland. Parlor pianos gathered dust, violins moldered in their cases. Students joylessly rehearsed solfege, keenly indifferent toward music-making. Inept organists left worshipers cringing in their pews. The town band was a disgrace. Then suddenly, after what came to be known as the "Great Event," everything changed. Families organized string quartets, children eagerly studied music in school, and the community established an orchestra and revived caroling.
What was this great event? Simply this: one day the town barber, Mr. Robinson, or "Pa" as he was known to all, bought a phonograph for his wife and four children. This one purchase set Main Street's musical renaissance into motion. After tiring of their dance records the Robinsons began listening to classical music-"good music," as it was called. Soon, however, simply listening no longer satisfied. The Robinsons, unearthing forgotten instruments, started making music themselves. Before long the whole community was involved, performing and enjoying the best music. A remarkable civic harmony ensued. Neighbors stopped feuding. Troubled children found discipline. Rowdyism and public drunkenness waned. Even Democrats and Republicans socialized.
Unfortunately for the future of bipartisan cooperation, Main Street never existed. Robert Haven Schauffler created the fictional town in 1927 to illustrate the promise of a formidable force in American musical life: the phonograph.1 While Schauffler's Main Street may seem far-fetched, it in fact reflected the widespread and seemingly boundless enthusiasm for the machine in early twentieth-century America. The phonograph's proponents were numerous and varied, comprising teachers, critics, activists, patrons, performers, and "average" phonograph owners. Yet they all shared the belief that this technology would, as Etude magazine claimed in 1922, "help America become a truly musical nation."2
Sound recording, now ubiquitous, is no longer a symbol of American optimism, and the zeal for musical meliorism has passed. Yet this forgotten facet of American life deserves our attention, for it illuminates attitudes toward the role of music in society and provides a window into the ambitions and insecurities of a country struggling to find its musical identity.
Why was the phonograph valued so highly as a means of musical progress? To answer this we must recognize two perceptions widely held in the United States during the first decades of this century:...