This week: Sousa's Lament Edited by: Max Griffin 🏳️🌈  
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The purpose of art is washing the dust of daily life off our souls.
--Pablo Picasso
The profession of book writing makes horse racing seem like a solid, stable business.
--John Steinbeck
There is nothing permanent except change.
--Heraclitus
One change always leaves the way open for the establishment of others.
--Niccolo Machiavelli |
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Sousa's Lament
In 1906 when John Philip Sousa testified to the US Congress about the dangers of recorded music he said
These talking machines are going to ruin the artistic development of music in this country. When I was a boy...in front of every house in the summer evenings, you would find young people together singing the songs of the day or old songs. Today you hear these infernal machines going night and day.
In the last century, we’ve gone from wax cylinders—the “infernal machines” of his lament—to vinyl, radio, CDs, DVDs, to MP3s, and YouTube. The infernal machines have morphed beyond recognition.
Sousa believed the technology was destroying the musical culture of his youth. It would be easy to dismiss Sousa’s words as the Luddite ravings of someone terrified of change. An alternative view is that technology more often is an advance that makes things better. Realistically, change is both inevitable and a mixed bag of benefits and challenges.
What Changed
There can be little doubt about the benefits of audio technology. For one thing, it has given more people more access to more kinds of music than ever before in human history. This dynamic commingling of musical traditions gave rise to an explosion of new sounds and forms. `From hip hop to synth, from Philip Glass to Freddie Mercury, from Yo Yo Ma to Celine Dione, humanity is richer musically today than ever. More access, more diverse music, and more innovation in music are all benefits of the technology.
In fact, Sousa personally benefited from this technology, taking advantage of it to widely disperse his music. By 1892, when he left his post as conductor of the US Marine Band, the Columbia Phonograph Company had released over sixty recordings of the band and established Sousa’s national reputation. He was one of the first musical stars to achieve fame in this way.
In contrast, prior to the “infernal machines,” composers and performers like Stephen Foster, Frederick Chopin, or Franz Liszt made a modest income by selling sheet music, or survived by catering to wealthy patrons. The advent of Sousa’s “infernal machines” made him a wealthy man, expanded his audience, his fame, and, not incidentally, his income enormously.
But there is something about the culture of Sousa’s youth that changed in the twentieth century. Music became more diverse and more widely available, but there was a definite trend toward music becoming a consumer affair, where we received music rather than participated in creating it. Some popular songs are not accessible to even talented amateurs—consider the three-octave range of “Take On Me.”
Read/Write or Read/Only?
In the parlance of Sousa’s lament, he grew up in a world of “Read-Write” music, where a song was both something to listen to and something to sing. Singing was a way to participate in music. By the end of the twentieth century, music had become laergely a “Read-Only” event: a song was something to listen to. By the time of the Digital Millenial Copyright Act, this transition was complete and solidified in law: you could no longer even listen without paying.
Don’t get me wrong. The rights of creators must be protected, and sites that make money off pirated material are stealing from the creators. More on that in a bit.
But it’s also true that participation in music in fact continued in the twentieth century. While we no longer had to provide our own music by singing it ourselves, but we never entirely stopped singing or playing. I certainly played in my high school band and all-state orchestra. My high school, like most in the US, had vibrant vocal and instrumental music programs. Even my small high school featured three home-grown rock bands. At least a few of those aspiring musicians went on to become professionals who continue to perform to this day.
Today, venues like YouTube provide a virtual concert hall where amateurs of all ages can showcase their art. Note I said “amateur” and not “amateurish.” An amateur does it for love of creating art, not for fame or money. There are countless videos featuring amateurs with amazing talents.
Technology has even given rise to new art forms like remixes. For an hilarious example, see
Jonathan Swift would have loved this new form. This is a non-commercial use of the song in question. It still violates the DCMA, but does so by adding something entirely new and creative. No one will listen to this video instead of a licensed version of the song, so it doesn’t harm those sales. Indeed, it might even improve them. We should somehow find ways to accommodate this kind of creativity.
Another example is this discussion of quantum mechanics to the tune of Bohemian Rhapsody.
Sousa wasn't entirely worng: the old world was indeed gone, replaced by a new and different one. The new one is far from perfect. It’s almost surely the case that fewer people participate in music today, although technology is just one of a myriad of other cultural and political changes that have contributed to this change.
Connection to Short Stories
So, what does this have to do with fiction authors? The advent of the internet and ebooks has given rise to similar laments about publishing. There’s little doubt that the market for short stories has diminished. Once upon a time, as recently as the 1950s, one could make a reasonable, middle-class living as an author of short stories. Roald Dahl, Shirley Jackson, and Flannery Oconner are all examples of talented authors whose primary output was the short story. Those days are gone.
But people still produce amazing stories—the form isn’t dead, even if vulture capitalists haven’t (yet) found a way to monetize it. We are in a transition period, from the old to the new, just as Sousa was when he testified to Congress. Indeed, the interval between these kind of transitions is ever shortening as the pace of change increases. The publishing industry is still adjusting, and will continue to adjust. People won’t stop writing short stories, and people won’t stop reading them.
One of the adaptations started in 1950s with the advent of television. Indeed, one could argue that today people who might once have earned a living writing for The Saturday Evening Post, Argosy, or Amazing Stories are today screenwriters for television. But even that market is evolving, and becoming harder to break into.
Enter YouTube.
Enter YouTube, one of the most recent responses to Sousa’s “infernal machines.” It’s a stage anyone can mount and where anyone can perform. Visual and audio artists, professional and amateur, have YouTube, where they generate amazing content. Some of it is funny, some tragic, and some uplifting, but it’s there for the taking in enormous variety.
Anyone with the urge to create visual or vocal art has a public place to perform, and a potential audience of millions. Or just a few friends. Most do it for the sake of creating something, not for fame and certainly not for fortune.
The written word needs a place like YouTube, a YouWrite if you will. A place where people can post short fiction, and where people can go to find and read it. The average length of a YouTube music video is less than seven minutes, so the stories need to be short, in bite-sized chunks.
There are various places that come close to this idea, but none have yet crystalized with the exact mix of presentation and content. Certainly, there is Amazon self-publishing, but that commercial site is probably too borad and too profit-oriented to serve the need. Similarly, Good Reads focuses on already published fiction. Substack is an effort that might fit, although it seems more of a response to a different transition taking place in journalism and the to the demise of Twitter X (or Xitter, as I’ve seen it called—you can infer the
pronounciation).
Writing.Com is almost the perfect site for a YouWrite. It’s already organized into genres, has countless talented authors, and is freely accessible. Except that the whole site is organized around authors and writing, rather than around readers and reading. A companion site, similarly organized but focused on readers and reading, might work.
The Future.
The point is not to predict the future but that writing fiction isn’t dead just because the publishing industry is changing. People need to read good stories, and creative people need to write them. At one time, stories were passed down by word-of-mouth and in verse because it was easier to remember them that way. They were told by blind poets over campfires. Later, they were written on scrolls. Then Gutenberg and the printing press changed everything. But these changes didn’t mean that people stopped writing stories or that people stopped wanting them.
We discover and reveal our souls in the stories we tell. Telling stories is part of what makes us human., We can’t stop. Technology will change how we tell stories. It might even change some of the stories we tell. But we’ll never stop telling stories. As Nietzsche said, art is the lie that makes reality bearable. |
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