The past as repeatable presence: How phonography changed music from ephemeral event to ever accessible object (a comparison between Sweden and Italy during the interwar years)
The aim of this project is to investigate an important condition for music production, distribution and listening in today’s digital world. More specifically it asks the question: How did music change from being regarded as an ephemeral event to becoming an ever-accessible object?
The question betrays a historical perspective. Not only was music regarded as an event, a collective and communal activity, since ancient times; its change into an ever-accessible object to be listened to at will, even in solitude, only came about over a course of several years. Although recorded sound played a major role, this “turn” did not occur automatically. Previous research has located it to the interwar years of the 20th century and the project will investigate important areas affecting the changing status of music, such as music poetics, copyright, radio broadcasting, and record reviews.
This investigation raises a virtually unrecognized question. Whereas different ideas about what music “is” are widely acknowledged in ethnological comparisons of different cultures (music taken broadly), such differences are hardly noticed in historical research (which rather dwells on changes in compositional styles, genres, performance and listening).
By contrast, this project will put the change in the Western view of music at center stage. In doing so it will contribute to music history, mediatization research and to sound and technology studies, with findings and with new research questions.
Final report
Final Report, RJ Project P20-0062
"The past as repeatable presence: How phonography changed music
from ephemeral event to ever accessible object (a comparison between Sweden and Italy during the interwar years)"
Project Leader: Ulrik Volgsten, Professor, Örebro University
Project Participants: Benedetta Zucconi, PhD, Università degli Studi di Cagliari
1) Purpose and Development of the Project: Demarcations and Developments
The purpose of this project has been to clarify a central condition for music production, distribution, and listening in today’s digital culture. More specifically, the following question has been posed: How did music change from being regarded as an ephemeral event to becoming an ever-accessible object?
The question is based on the historical assumption that music, at least since antiquity, was not only seen as an event, a collective and communal activity; its transformation into an ever-accessible object that could be listened to at will, even in solitude, was a complex process involving both cultural and technological factors.
Drawing on the participants' previous research, it was decided to focus on the period between the two world wars (the so-called interwar period), within the countries of Sweden and Italy. Four areas were specifically chosen for examination:
I. Composition techniques and aesthetic trends (poetics)
II. Copyrights
III. Record reviews in the daily press
IV. Radio
Although the development of sound recording technology during the early 20th century played an important role—especially its electrification at the end of the 1920s—the change did not happen automatically, nor according to any technological determinism. The four areas were therefore explored as arenas for the norming and normalization of mediated music creation and listening through the new technologies of the time.
An initial “development” of the project’s starting points was the recognition that the medium of radio (Area 4) was too broad and inclusive to be studied alongside the other three more specific areas (the latter could, for example, all be conveyed through the radio medium as “content”).
Furthermore, after identifying the differences and similarities between Swedish and Italian conditions, it was noted that explanations for these differences and similarities required a broader international perspective than one limited to a comparison between two countries. With the conference that was organized within the project during its third and final year, an opportunity arose to emphasize such a perspective together with a larger number of international researchers. The conference—titled “Neue Sachlichkeit North and South: Transforming Music during the European Interwar Years (and Beyond)”—has also led to an international research network centered around a book project. A contract has been signed with Palgrave Macmillan for the publication of an anthology, for which Volgsten and Zucconi are editors.
The project has developed in such a way that the research originally limited to two countries (Sweden and Italy), and a comparison between them, now covers the entire European cultural area during the given historical period. What was initially a question for two researchers now involves 13 researchers from the following countries: Sweden, Norway, Denmark, Germany, Austria, Hungary, Slovakia, Spain, Portugal, France, and Italy.
2) Implementation of the Project: Research, Publication, and Consolidation of a Network
The project has largely been carried out according to plan with respect to its content. As communicated in the project’s mid-term follow-up, the order of the studies regarding the different areas has changed. The reasons have been practical, particularly concerning access to materials during the pandemic years. Articles have been written and published in books and journals, and results have been presented and discussed at international conferences. In terms of conferences, special mention should be made of the 21st quinquennial congress of the International Musicological Society (IMS), Athens, Greece, 2022, where the project participants led and took part in a roundtable discussion with two media scholars on the relationship between past (interwar) and present media usage. The “Neue Sachlichkeit North and South” conference has already been mentioned. It was organized by the project participants and took place at the Italian Institute in Stockholm in April 2024. As a follow-up for the book publication with contributions from both conference participants and additional invited scholars, a final workshop was held at the Swedish Institute in Rome in December 2024.
3) Results: Answers to Research Questions and Overall Conclusions
I. Regarding composition techniques and aesthetic trends (poetics), the project has been able to confirm an emerging critique of the established historiography of music in the interwar period. While this historiography has predominantly emphasized the importance of the “Second Viennese School” (which has led, for example, to music creation in a country like Sweden being dismissed as peripheral and insignificant), the project shows that music production during this period was stylistically much more diverse, both in terms of Central European and other international (Swedish, Italian, etc.) contexts. Additionally, the project demonstrates that despite differences, there are common denominators that connect various national and genre-based directions, especially objectivism and formalism. Thus, the project contributes to a revision of 20th-century Western art music history by suggesting that it should be seen as a more complex web of parallel currents.
II. Musical copyrights—which, during the interwar period, expanded to cover phonograms—did not only affect economic conditions. Based on specific assumptions about the “ontological nature” of the music work, the normative rigidity and durability of these laws over time (ars brevis, lex longa) contributed to particular ways of both creating and listening to music, with objectivism and formalism being central.
III. Through recurring record reviews in the daily press, primarily of classical music (popular music became relevant only after 1945), the specific ways of hearing music in line with copyright norms (see above) were able to reach a much wider audience than traditional concert-goers.
IV. Taken together, the project’s findings demonstrate how technology and culture in interplay, since the interwar period 1919–1939, have changed the view of music from being seen primarily as an event and activity, to being increasingly perceived as an object, or “work” defined by formalistic criteria. Central to this process is, not least, the solitary listening made possible by recording technology, and which is both implicitly and explicitly disciplined through the recurrent record reviews in the daily press. An important observation, however, is that the change has not been total. Music as an event and activity persists alongside a new objectifying approach. This is also evident in music creation and production during the interwar period, which manifests as tensions between, on the one hand, so-called Gebrauchsmusik and communal music-making (choral singing), and, on the other hand, formalist tendencies in the reaction against late 19th-century expressionism and national romanticism. In addition to requiring a theoretical expansion of the project—shifting from a "mediator" perspective (which proved to be overly reductive and limiting in terms of the listener’s role and function) to a perspective integrating phenomenology, hermeneutics, and discourse theory—the project has fulfilled its purpose by highlighting critical connections (genealogies) between past and present music production, distribution, and listening.
5) Dissemination and Collaboration
The project’s findings have been disseminated to researchers, students, and the general public through publications, conferences, and lectures. These have targeted both fellow researchers and the wider public. For example, several of the published articles have been used in teaching, and one article has been specifically written with students as the intended audience (Volgsten: “Music, Power, and Copyright”). Additionally, the conference organized within the framework of the Italian Institute's regular program – “Neue Sachlichkeit North and South” – was aimed directly at the public, making it open to a wide audience. The attendees included researchers, interested laypeople, and a group of students from Stockholm University.
"The past as repeatable presence: How phonography changed music
from ephemeral event to ever accessible object (a comparison between Sweden and Italy during the interwar years)"
Project Leader: Ulrik Volgsten, Professor, Örebro University
Project Participants: Benedetta Zucconi, PhD, Università degli Studi di Cagliari
1) Purpose and Development of the Project: Demarcations and Developments
The purpose of this project has been to clarify a central condition for music production, distribution, and listening in today’s digital culture. More specifically, the following question has been posed: How did music change from being regarded as an ephemeral event to becoming an ever-accessible object?
The question is based on the historical assumption that music, at least since antiquity, was not only seen as an event, a collective and communal activity; its transformation into an ever-accessible object that could be listened to at will, even in solitude, was a complex process involving both cultural and technological factors.
Drawing on the participants' previous research, it was decided to focus on the period between the two world wars (the so-called interwar period), within the countries of Sweden and Italy. Four areas were specifically chosen for examination:
I. Composition techniques and aesthetic trends (poetics)
II. Copyrights
III. Record reviews in the daily press
IV. Radio
Although the development of sound recording technology during the early 20th century played an important role—especially its electrification at the end of the 1920s—the change did not happen automatically, nor according to any technological determinism. The four areas were therefore explored as arenas for the norming and normalization of mediated music creation and listening through the new technologies of the time.
An initial “development” of the project’s starting points was the recognition that the medium of radio (Area 4) was too broad and inclusive to be studied alongside the other three more specific areas (the latter could, for example, all be conveyed through the radio medium as “content”).
Furthermore, after identifying the differences and similarities between Swedish and Italian conditions, it was noted that explanations for these differences and similarities required a broader international perspective than one limited to a comparison between two countries. With the conference that was organized within the project during its third and final year, an opportunity arose to emphasize such a perspective together with a larger number of international researchers. The conference—titled “Neue Sachlichkeit North and South: Transforming Music during the European Interwar Years (and Beyond)”—has also led to an international research network centered around a book project. A contract has been signed with Palgrave Macmillan for the publication of an anthology, for which Volgsten and Zucconi are editors.
The project has developed in such a way that the research originally limited to two countries (Sweden and Italy), and a comparison between them, now covers the entire European cultural area during the given historical period. What was initially a question for two researchers now involves 13 researchers from the following countries: Sweden, Norway, Denmark, Germany, Austria, Hungary, Slovakia, Spain, Portugal, France, and Italy.
2) Implementation of the Project: Research, Publication, and Consolidation of a Network
The project has largely been carried out according to plan with respect to its content. As communicated in the project’s mid-term follow-up, the order of the studies regarding the different areas has changed. The reasons have been practical, particularly concerning access to materials during the pandemic years. Articles have been written and published in books and journals, and results have been presented and discussed at international conferences. In terms of conferences, special mention should be made of the 21st quinquennial congress of the International Musicological Society (IMS), Athens, Greece, 2022, where the project participants led and took part in a roundtable discussion with two media scholars on the relationship between past (interwar) and present media usage. The “Neue Sachlichkeit North and South” conference has already been mentioned. It was organized by the project participants and took place at the Italian Institute in Stockholm in April 2024. As a follow-up for the book publication with contributions from both conference participants and additional invited scholars, a final workshop was held at the Swedish Institute in Rome in December 2024.
3) Results: Answers to Research Questions and Overall Conclusions
I. Regarding composition techniques and aesthetic trends (poetics), the project has been able to confirm an emerging critique of the established historiography of music in the interwar period. While this historiography has predominantly emphasized the importance of the “Second Viennese School” (which has led, for example, to music creation in a country like Sweden being dismissed as peripheral and insignificant), the project shows that music production during this period was stylistically much more diverse, both in terms of Central European and other international (Swedish, Italian, etc.) contexts. Additionally, the project demonstrates that despite differences, there are common denominators that connect various national and genre-based directions, especially objectivism and formalism. Thus, the project contributes to a revision of 20th-century Western art music history by suggesting that it should be seen as a more complex web of parallel currents.
II. Musical copyrights—which, during the interwar period, expanded to cover phonograms—did not only affect economic conditions. Based on specific assumptions about the “ontological nature” of the music work, the normative rigidity and durability of these laws over time (ars brevis, lex longa) contributed to particular ways of both creating and listening to music, with objectivism and formalism being central.
III. Through recurring record reviews in the daily press, primarily of classical music (popular music became relevant only after 1945), the specific ways of hearing music in line with copyright norms (see above) were able to reach a much wider audience than traditional concert-goers.
IV. Taken together, the project’s findings demonstrate how technology and culture in interplay, since the interwar period 1919–1939, have changed the view of music from being seen primarily as an event and activity, to being increasingly perceived as an object, or “work” defined by formalistic criteria. Central to this process is, not least, the solitary listening made possible by recording technology, and which is both implicitly and explicitly disciplined through the recurrent record reviews in the daily press. An important observation, however, is that the change has not been total. Music as an event and activity persists alongside a new objectifying approach. This is also evident in music creation and production during the interwar period, which manifests as tensions between, on the one hand, so-called Gebrauchsmusik and communal music-making (choral singing), and, on the other hand, formalist tendencies in the reaction against late 19th-century expressionism and national romanticism. In addition to requiring a theoretical expansion of the project—shifting from a "mediator" perspective (which proved to be overly reductive and limiting in terms of the listener’s role and function) to a perspective integrating phenomenology, hermeneutics, and discourse theory—the project has fulfilled its purpose by highlighting critical connections (genealogies) between past and present music production, distribution, and listening.
5) Dissemination and Collaboration
The project’s findings have been disseminated to researchers, students, and the general public through publications, conferences, and lectures. These have targeted both fellow researchers and the wider public. For example, several of the published articles have been used in teaching, and one article has been specifically written with students as the intended audience (Volgsten: “Music, Power, and Copyright”). Additionally, the conference organized within the framework of the Italian Institute's regular program – “Neue Sachlichkeit North and South” – was aimed directly at the public, making it open to a wide audience. The attendees included researchers, interested laypeople, and a group of students from Stockholm University.