Democracy of Sound: Music Piracy and the Remaking of American Copyright in the Twentieth Century

by Alex Sayf Cummings

  Piracy and the Hi-Fi Mind

  In the 1950s and 1960s, many guides to the technology of magnetic recording were published in the United States and Europe. Some explained the science for people who wanted to build their own equipment, while others focused on the uses to which tape recorders could be put.36 “Tape recording is fun!” promised one guidebook. The technology could be used for taping sound from radio and television, making original recordings, and backing up fragile disc records.37 The author also recommended making an “up-to-date reel of the latest hits” by collecting musical selections on tape for a party—one of the earliest examples of “mixing,” the practice of arranging songs in an original sequence, which would become popular with the cassette and, later, the compact disc.38

  Tape users could also convert their recordings into disc form. Since tape recording was still a relatively new technology, one could not expect that others would have compatible equipment to play a tape recording. Exchanging a record with friends often required putting the sounds on the widely accepted format of a phonograph disc. “The outstanding advantages of a disc recording is that it is permanent and it can be played back on any phonograph,” the Rek-O-Kut company told consumers. “Because of this, most tape recordings ultimately end up on discs.”39 However, the Rek-O-Kut disc recorder carried a price tag of $459.95 in 1955—beyond the means of all but the most affluent hobbyist, although perhaps affordable for a small company or club. If buying a recorder was out of the question, record companies and professional studios offered “transcription services,” which would press discs from tape recordings. (Dante Bollettino had used the custom-pressing division of RCA to make his jazz bootlegs in the early 1950s.) “If you can dispose among your friends and relatives and associates, of from fifty to a hundred copies of a standard-type LP record that may be of as fine a quality as anything on the market, yet at a price not more, but considerably less than the usual retail price—then you’re ‘in business,’” choral director Edward Tatnall Canby observed. He recommended taping glee clubs, church concerts, and speeches at special gatherings—any activity that involved a large number of people, who could be counted on to buy enough records to make the pressing practical.40

  For Canby, making records was a way of being involved with music for those who could not play an instrument professionally or even sing in the choir. Musicians, music teachers, and musicologists often mocked the collector for being a passive recipient of sound, he said: “We can be active, too, on the technical side and plenty of us are ‘doing,’ most actively, in the building of better and better high fidelity outfits.”41 Home recording lent an active, almost artisanal aspect to collecting. For middle-class men in the 1950s, the appeal of an expensive hobby that could reaffirm the masculine virtue of practical expertise was significant. Tinkering with all manner of sound equipment to squeeze out the most precise and perfect Debussy could allow a man to feel both sophisticated and skillful. As Canby said, “The increment of pleased pride and heightened morale is incalculable.”42

  High-fidelity hobbyists saw recordings as documents of reality, and it was the job of men and their machines to make that reflection as accurate as possible.43 Reviews in periodicals such as High Fidelity (founded 1950) and Stereo Review (1958) emphasized the clarity and balance of a recording and the quality of both the performance and the sound engineering in technical terms.44 To be beautiful was to be “lifelike,” and without distortion.45 The Dutch, an ad for Philips humbly suggested, made such good sound equipment because they were obsessed with order and detail, as shown by their “meticulous rows of tulips.” Their Norelco sound equipment could convey the “full tone wealth” of the music, with “all the glow, all the color the composer intended.”46 Even a snack food could be subject to this mentality of exactness. “Rye-Krisp is the only cracker with the high-fidelity crunch,” a television commercial boasted in 1955. “When you break a Rye-Krisp in two, you hear all the highs and lows that you do not hear with any other crackers. Rye-Krisp gives you the full fidelity of eating enjoyment.”47

  Although High Fidelity magazine did devote some of its pages to jazz, the hobbyist literature focused overwhelmingly on classical European music. This genre seemed a natural fit for a discourse based on the refinement of presentation as much as that of performance. Moreover, its cultural cachet contributed to the self-image of consumers of both the music and the equipment, which were marketed to the “connoisseur” and “the man of discernment”—a man frequently presented in dressy clothes, his home always decorated with spare, modernist flair. A wine glass was often present.48 “No home pretending to any degree of artistic cultivation is complete today without those precious discs containing in such small space so much of the world’s priceless heritage of beauty,” one guide to high fidelity asserted, recalling earlier claims that the phonograph would democratize access to the finest sounds of high civilization.49 As Roy F. Allison reminded his readers, a great deal of technical knowledge separated the “layman” from the “high fidelity initiate.”50

  As with the jazz collectors of the 1930s and 1940s, the hi-fi world was by and large a boys’ club. Writers on hi-fi discussed music in terms of “battles” and “tournaments” between different symphonies and even models of instruments, while further improvement in the fidelity of recording to real sound was described as a sort of triumph.51 Men also wrote frequently of their wives’ frustration with the noise, clutter, and unsightliness the hi-fi hobby generated, not to mention their husbands’ obsession with it. As Dana Andrews admitted, his neighbors were none too pleased by the crystal-clear sound of Bartok blaring in the middle of the night, and his wife did not appreciate that massive amounts of sound equipment had taken over their home. “If I find her on a picket line along with the neighbors,” he wrote, “I’ll probably have to blame it on the irony of her bedroom being directly over the den, which houses an imposing battery of speakers.”52

  Andrews was not unique in his penchant for such “imposing” consumer goods. Indeed, this domestic struggle reflected the differing aspirations of men and women to acquire and flaunt the trappings of abundance. “The family home would be the place where a man could display his success through the accumulation of consumer goods,” historian Elaine Tyler May has written. “Women, in turn, would reap the rewards for domesticity by surrounding themselves with commodities.”53 Like homesteaders who brought all their pots and pans and furniture out to be photographed in front of sod houses, suburbanites aspired to create a tableau of their material achievements in the home. Male readers of High Fidelity might like to show off their financial and technical prowess by owning an “imposing battery of speakers,” but this commodity might not suit the vision of the home held by their wives. Electronics companies geared their ads to men’s desire for respectability and masculine mastery, while the postwar boom and the ideology of consumerism provided the necessary conditions for gadgets like reel-to-reel tape recorders and disc cutters to flourish in the market, setting up new possibilities for copying sound.

  Rarely did the topic of copyright or piracy arise in the early literature on home recording. When it did, the author offered a cursory warning about some recorded material being subject to copyright, before moving on to other aspects of the technology. (“Look out for copyright and union restrictions,” Canby suggested.)54 Joel Tall addressed legal issues in Techniques of Magnetic Recording, but only the potential for wiretapping and similar unethical acts. These books nearly always suggested recording music from the radio or television, but it was only one of many applications, along with speech correction, language learning, slide-show commentaries, leaving messages and so on. The copying and use of broadcast music seemed innocuous enough, useful for a teen’s dance party if nothing else. Many of the compositions classical music buffs recorded had long been in the public domain, and federal law did not yet recognize any separate ownership of a recorded performance itself. However, the 1950 Metropolitan case maintained that selling records of a symphony’s perf
ormance could amount to unfair competition, even if the compositions were not under copyright.

  Perhaps the boosters of magnetic recording, a consumer technology still in its infancy, were reluctant to play up its potentially illegal uses. However, the increasing popularity of the medium made this prospect unavoidable. The amount of prerecorded material available on tape had been limited, and not everyone was going to practice a speech or record his own violin recital. Many hobbyists used the idle capacity of their tape recorders to copy material from radio, television, and concert performances.

  A poignant symbol of this yen to document everything was Joe Gould, hobo and Harvard-educated fixture in Greenwich Village from the 1920s to the 1950s. New Yorkers remembered Gould wandering the streets of Manhattan, continually scribbling everything he heard in the city.55 He promised to compile the notes into a massive volume called The Oral History of the World, arguing that such a chronicle would offer a far greater truth than the work of any historian. Reflecting on Gould’s work in 1970, James Goodfriend argued that a great social history could be extracted from that manuscript, if anyone would take the time to sort through it. “The same problem will face another committee,” Goodfriend said, “the one finally appointed to decide what to do with the huge archive of unauthorized recorded music—tapings of broadcasts, concerts, operatic performances, salon recitals, and commercial records of which the original masters have been lost.”56

  Like Joe Gould, the people who captured this music over the years were recording their times—making “An Aural History of the (Musical) World in the Twentieth Century.”57 Recordings captured evidence of reality, and every additional record provided additional information about the human experience. Thus, it made sense to document a particular performance of the Metropolitan Opera in concert or of Duke Ellington on the radio. Whereas disc recording had always been a delicate and difficult operation, tape recording opened the possibility, if in the imagination only, that everything could be recorded all the time.58 Like Boris Rose, an amateur technologist could tape a vast number of radio broadcasts, providing raw material for a future historian who wants to know what was going on at the time.

  Like the Hot Record Society, the hi-fi copiers also worried about important recordings slipping into obscurity. “Does a record company have the ‘right’ to withdraw (and therefore make unavailable) a recorded performance because its sales were not up to whatever standards the company might want to apply?” Goodfriend asked. Major record companies could not afford to provide audiences with every recording they desired, nor could they keep everything in print. A record had to be produced in large enough numbers to justify the effort of the sales staff to promote it to the public. “Hits,” after all, rarely happen on their own; the music industry had long indulged in practices of plugging and payola, paying vaudeville artists to popularize new written compositions or bribing radio stations to give new records airplay.59 Even with the added boost of advertising and organized bribery, men in the music business insisted that only one recording turns a profit for every nine that fail to break even. (This claim appears throughout the literature.)60 If the firm added marginal or “historic” recordings to its already risky business model, the failure rate would be worse than 90 percent—at least for centralized, mass-production enterprises like Decca or Columbia Records in the mid-twentieth century.61 Meanwhile, a “huge archive” of recorded music had accumulated for which only small demand existed, making the music impractical to produce for the companies that originally recorded and sold it.62

  Goodfriend suggested that the government step in to help. Pirates might freeload off the efforts of artists and record companies, but they still put out recordings that no one else would make available. This need could be met by the government, which would collect all recordings that had been out of print for ten years or more and appoint a committee to determine what to keep. Citizens could then order the recordings in tape form for their own personal use, and educational institutions could draw from the immense catalog too. The recordings should cost twice the going rate for the typical album in the present day, he said, in order not to inflict unfair competition on the record companies. In other words, the government should not become music pirate number one.63

  This proposal for public access to musical history may not have been radical, but it was rooted in exactly the same notion of cultural preservation that motivated the Hot Record Society and the jazz journalists of the Record Changer, who could not bring themselves to condemn bootlegging outright. “A musical performance … is something more than an item of commerce,” Goodfriend wrote. “It is that, but it is something more too: it is an artistic document, and the public has an interest in its preservation, and perhaps in its availability as well.”64 He presupposed that a group of wise men could determine what is worth preserving, but this attitude was in keeping with the general cast of mind of both jazz and classical aficionados. “The current theory on such matters is to keep everything,” Goodfriend said, touching on the collectors’ instinct to document and hoard any piece of information, but he believed someone would have to separate the essential from the extraneous.65

  The idea of a mail-order government music library went nowhere, of course, but many Americans had been working on a kind of decentralized version for years. The bootlegging of classical music performances was, after all, the stimulus for Goodfriend’s proposal. Beginning in 1901, Lionel Mapleson, called the “Father of Bootlegging,” produced some of the earliest live recordings at New York’s Metropolitan Opera House, capturing two or three minutes of music at a time. Mapleson had to place his wax cylinder phonograph on the catwalk after audience members complained that the horn blocked their view of the stage.66 The cylinders were the sole remaining documents of several artists who never recorded commercially. The New York Public Library and the Library of Congress made them available for study in the early 1940s, and librarian Phillip L. Miller offered copies of the records at $1.75 a piece.67

  Pirates were often the first to issue recordings of many classical pieces. Recording, for instance, Richard Wagner’s Ring cycle was such an epic undertaking that no major label had attempted it. Such a project was nearly impossible before the commercial introduction of the LP in 1948. Before then, each side of a disc contained only a few minutes of music, meaning that operas and symphonies were prohibitively expensive and cumbersome to produce. When they were attempted, these symphonies consisted of a string of abrupt fragments of the greater whole; the recordings were sold as a set of individual discs, which is why the term “album” was coined.68 The greater capacity of the LP format and tape recording made the production of long classical works much cheaper and easier.

  Eli Oberstein’s Record Corporation of America (which cleverly bore the same initials as his ex-employer, the giant Radio Corporation of America, or RCA) entered the fray in 1954 with the first full recording of Wagner’s Ring des Nibelungen. Issued on the Allegro label, it consisted of eighteen discs and claimed to have been recorded at the Dresden Opera House. The attribution was a clever ruse, since few in America had access to the concert halls of East Germany and other communist nations in the early 1950s. No one knew the names of any of the listed soloists, until soprano Regina Resnik realized it was her own voice on the recording. The concert had actually occurred at the Bayreuth Festival in West Germany, and after the Festival’s lawyers pressed Oberstein’s Record Corporation of America about the matter, the set was removed from the market.69

  Similar antics occurred throughout the 1950s and 1960s. In 1951, at almost the same time that the more famous RCA got in trouble for printing bootleg copies of its own jazz records for Dante Bollettino, the public learned that the company had also manufactured unauthorized recordings of Verdi’s A Masked Ball for an outfit called Classic Editions. The record jacket of A Masked Ball claimed that it had been recorded in Italy. However, Irving Kolodin of the Saturday Review revealed that the concert had been taped from a radio performance by the Metropolitan Ope
ra in 1947. To make matters worse, RCA had exclusive contracts with two of the performers on the record.70 (Of course, the company was technically manufacturing records by its own artists.) In 1965, the Period label issued sets of Mozart’s Entführung aus dem Serail and two Verdi operas. The recordings had supposedly been made at the Patagonia Festival, where Ralph de Cross was said to conduct soloists like Claudia Terrasini and Magda Walbrunn. Again, the intrepid Saturday Review, which had defended jazz bootleggers in earlier years, accused Period of copying the concerts from European radio broadcasts and, in the case of Verdi’s La Traviata, from a recording on the Deutsche Grammophon label. However, no one was sued. Indeed, Livingstone commented, “The whole thing was so funny that nobody did anything about it.”71

  These cases of deception raise serious questions about how and why people bootlegged music. Classical music buffs, who made up a large part of the audience for high-quality sound equipment, were both perfectionists and collectors. They wanted to document everything, including performances that established manufacturers were either unwilling or unable to provide. If this is true, then what is the value of a recording that is misrepresented as a performance by a made-up person in a made-up place? Shadowy firms like Allegro and Period tried to cover their tracks by using the techniques of disguise that had served pirates of sheet music and sound recordings for years, making up plausible names for unauthorized products. What collector wants to add a vintage Claudia Terrasini to his library if Terrasini never existed? One answer is that the first-ever full recording of Wagner’s Ring was worth having, regardless of its provenance. Another is that a classical music listener in the know may have been able to spot a fake and make an educated guess about which performance it actually contained. These operas were not performed every day, and the people at Saturday Review had little trouble figuring out what was what.