The Phonograph and its Applications - Text 3
The device’s surface noise, “nasal” tone and distorted timbres mattered little. Far from being defects, they were the tangible “proof” that this sound truly was that of the phonograph. The materiality of the device, the ritualistic gestures of putting the cylinder and diaphragm in place and turning the crank all contributed to the wonderment of the listener, who was both a maker and a spectator. Here we find the performance quality of phonographic listening, something that did not escape playwrights. Very quickly they made use of the phonograph’s opacity: on stage, the sound of the cylinder was the sound of the phonograph. In this sense, it was not an effect but rather a presence whose ghost found its way into the heart of a variety of written texts even before it materialized in the device.[3] Patrick Feaster remarks that “the desire to record sound automatically was tied to the theatre even before it was carried out in practice.”[4] He quotes Théophile Gautier in particular, who as early as 1847 spoke of the need one day to succeed in recording the sounds of theatrical performance. Nadar himself dreamt of a “daguerreotype of sound... something like a box in which melodies would be recorded and stored, the way the camera obscura catches and records images.”[5] When the phonograph arrived, its prodigious creativity and “serious” role were welcomed by theatre performers and critics, among whom was Arnold Mortier, a journalist, dramatic author and librettist. In one of his “Parisian soirées” he told the story of his encounter with Edison’s phonograph on 22 April 1878:
Little to be found in the theatres... Luckily, an invitation for the first public experience of the astonishing Edison phonograph saves me from my predicament. Starting tomorrow the new instrument will operate for the paying public day and night in the Conférences room on Boulevard des Capucines. Today it was operated for members of the press only. People came out for its debut with as much haste as if it were a famous artiste... The phonograph – believe you me – is destined to play a serious role. And so as not to go beyond my speciality, I believe that it can, from a purely theatrical point of view, render immense services.[6]
Arnold Mortier then described a number of the device’s possibilities: it could record for all time the songs and declamations of performers which could serve as models for students at the Conservatory and even for members of the Académie-Française; it could record rehearsals in order to polish intonations; or it could simply be used to rehearse a role. The phonograph would thus be an “everlasting teacher.” Finally, the phonograph would make it possible to preserve the most remarkable premiere performances as examples to imitate when the work was staged again in the future. He concluded by predicting great success for the phonograph, for it was “within reach of every budget” and made it possible to hear great performers “simultaneously everywhere on earth using Mr Edison’s device.”[7]
The very first indications in stage directions for discs appeared after 1910. At the same time, the publishers of phonographic discs marketed to listeners the series “Le théâtre chez soi” (“home theatre”) and another called “Déclamations.” On stage, however, discs were used only very occasionally and were limited to creating effects, as in the plays L’enfant de l’amour by Henry Bataille (27 February 1911, Théâtre Saint-Martin) and Faisons un rêve by Sacha Guitry (10 March 1916, Théâtre des bouffes Parisiens), and later Les Deux “Monsieur” de Madame by Félix Gandera (7 October 1921, Théâtre des Mathurins).
Discs in theatre were used mostly for music, for which there were considerably more phonographic records on the market. With the device now concealed in the wings, out of sight from the spectator, discs were used for musical excerpts.
The study carried out by Sylvain Samson[8] on the connection between the musical repertoire and the phonograph disc in the theatre reveals that there existed practices with a mixture of discs and instruments, with indications in the stage directions for each. Beginning in the 1930s, the use of music discs in the theatre quickly became increasingly complex in keeping with the annotations for the sound in stage directions: in addition to musical excerpts discs now added stylized sound effects, in which sounds acquired aesthetic value.[9]
Along with traditional sounds (church bells, horse-drawn carriage, wind, thunder, bells, whistles, etc.) new sounds were added: telephones ringing, radios, buses, automobiles, factory engines, airplanes, ocean waves, rain and, especially, crowd noises.[10] With the electric disc and experiments in radio, the sounds reproduced in theatre clearly went from the background, to which illustration had relegated them, to being organized according to the plot and the stage space. But it is also true that, with this staging of sounds, the model of phonographic listening had become passé. The time had come for transparency!
Could one imagine, at the conclusion of this foray into the archaeology of the sounds reproduced in theatre, that when first the phonograph and then the gramophone entered movie theatres a few years later, at a time when the cinema was still seeking legitimacy, the theatrical performances of these devices would have been forgotten by viewers, and especially by the image makers? We could recall, as an example, that the theatre cylinder appeared in a context in which the monologue[11] was gradually becoming a model for the acts performed in cabarets and music halls to the point of becoming a true genre, initially associated with the phonograph and then with the kinematograph – in Gaumont’s “photo-scenes” for example. How not to connect the initial marked presence of sound devices and supports in the theatre, and then their abandonment in favour of the principle of transparency, with the change mentioned above with respect to the principle of seeming continuity in fiction films? The archaeology of the sounds reproduced in the theatre not only reveals similarities with cinematic practices; it also demonstrates theatre’s pioneering role in experimenting with sound technologies. In movie theatres, as in the theatre, the shift from the performative model to phonographic listening – visible, conspicuous – to that of transparency is riddled with anachronistic technical systems hanging onto tradition (the phonograph’s “seriousness”) and with others too far ahead of their time.[12] Their trajectory was in many respects similar; at the same time, what was specific to cinema was that these tendencies manifested themselves more in patented inventions that in film practices themselves, because these practices all shared the phonographic listening model.
