Collecting
and Phonographia
One
Collector's Perspective
By
Doug Boilesen 2018
My
phonographia
collection began when I purchased a Victrola at age twelve with
money from my paper route. Auctions and antique stores were early
sources for adding to the collection but I didn't pursue many
machines and certainly not rare ones.
Through
the years my collecting interests took some turns but collecting
always revolved around phonographs and its related ephemera.
Why
this fascination with talking machines, recorded sound and phonograph
ephemera?
Here
are three possibilities.
First,
the phonograph is based on a very simple technology yet what it
did was revolutionary and almost magical. It was revolutionary
because it changed human's perception of sound. It was a wonder
and magical because it was initially an early example of Arthur
C. Clark's adage known as his Third Law, i.e., "Any
sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic."
As the phonograph moved into the home, however, it became part
of everyday life and lost its magic.
Victor Advertising
Brochure 1906 - "Does daily experience yield anything
more wonderful than this?"
Second,
the phonograph is an interesting example of how one invention
can produce so many popular culture ripples and connections --
and not just for one generation. In fact, the phonograph has played
in every decade since its invention and still plays music from
its grooves today by the vinyl enthusiasts of the 21st century.
The phonograph's advertising themes likewise have been repeated
each decade up to the present. Descendent home entertainment devices
continued the phonograph's advertised promise of offering personal
entertainment to anyone, anytime and as often as you wanted.
And
third, early phonographs such as morning-glory horn machines and
stately Victrolas are icons of recorded sound and home entertainment
with its story told by museums, social and cultural historians,
and collectors. (5A)
As
part of consumerism promoting the home is your castle the
phonograph offered everyone in the family the "best seat
in the house." That theme has been in home entertainment
ads since the mid-1890's and never stopped.
Every
new home entertainment device since the phonograph has promoted
that "best seat" message in one way or another - the
phonograph with its multiple record speeds and hundreds of millions
of records; the radio; the television; the tape recorder; VCRs,
CDs, Laserdiscs and CED Video Discs, DVDs, audio books, music
streaming services, etc. -- each of these sound and entertainment
providers continued the phonograph's revolutionary promise
that your home could be your own "Stage of the World"
-- entertainment experiences of the world were available to you
as if you were a king, or a millionaire or the possessor of Aladdin's
Lamp.
"Seventh
row, center. Forever."
And
what about collecting?
Lorenz
Tomerius wrote that some objects become different or more interesting
based on use and ownership:
"This
refutes Gertrude Stein's claim 'a rose is a rose is a rose': that
it has become a different object if Napoleon wore it on his uniform.
A key is no longer a key if it belonged to the Bastille. A knitting
needle is an object with a special aura if Marie Antoinette made
it rattle, and a shaving kit will evoke horrible associations
if it was once owned by Danton." Lorenze Tomerius, 'Das
Glück, zu finden, Die Lust, zu zeigen' (2)
Finding Marie Antoinette's
needle in the haystack would explain one aspect of collecting.
But there is also the more general practice of collecting where
the goal is to have all or subsets of the whatever such as stamps,
coins, beanie babies, baseball cards, etc.
My collecting has never
been about owning all the models of phonographs made by Edison
or acquiring objects with a special provenance related to ownership
or use. Caruso didn't previously own the Victrola in my collection
and I don't own Andy Kaufman's record player with its Mighty Mouse
record that he used in the premier episode of NBC Saturday
Night Live, October 11, 1975. (3)
Andy Kaufman's phonograph
playing the Mighty Mouse theme song. (Courtesy NBC and
Saturday Night Live.) (1975)
Instead, each object
is a "rose is a rose is a rose" in my collection of
phonographia.
But how many roses
does a collector need and what is to be done with them after they
are acquired?
Regardless of that
number the constant for me has been the relationship each 'rose'
had to popular culture. Phonograph connected advertisements, postcards,
greeting cards, Valentine's cards, jokes, cartoons, art and record
album cover art each exemplify how the phonograph's revolution
was seen in popular culture and daily life.
Collecting objects
and ephemera is like cutting out newspaper clippings or saving
ephemera to go into a personal scrapbook. Each selection has its
own identity and its own meaning. Ownership of phonographia is
not required to find and follow phonograph connections but for
me the collecting was the catalyst to see the connections and
create phonographia.com as an on-line scrapbook.
Caruso standing next
to his Victrola Queen Anne XIV
I believe phonographia
bridge time and that we can glimpse and hear fragments of other
eras because relevant objects and stories and sounds have been
collected.
Researchers tell us
that recognition, one of the two primary forms of accessing memory
"is a simpler and more reliable process" than recall.
"It is the association of a physical object with something
previously encountered or experienced. This could be because tangible
memories utilize all five senses, evoking emotional triggers and
transporting us back to a precise time, place or moment."
(3A)
Although historical phonographs cannot be encountered by us in
their own time period, collected objects and stories and sounds
related to the phonograph can still transport us to a time that
we personally didn't experience.
In a 1995 Syracuse
University address about the Belfer Audio Archive, John Harvith
said that the Belfer Archive was important because it
"allows us to feel this sense of history even more vividly,
because we can hear what musicians, artists, authors, actors,
statesmen, politicians, and other historical figures actually
sounded like. This is emotional, visceral communication that goes
far beyond the power of the printed page. (3B)
Seeing a phonograph
in a period piece movie is another example of how time traveling
to the past can be triggered. Watching a movie set in 1903 and
seeing a gramophone with its open horn sitting on the parlor room
table is a time period encounter and that experience can become
part of your memory. You associate a gramophone with a time and
place. Hearing music on that gramophone further enhances that
memory and as Harvith summarized in quoting musicologist James
Hepokoski, "Music
of the past tells us what it felt like to live during the period
when it was created." (3C)
The interest in talking
clocks, however, still begs the question: What resources and how
much attention do we give something because it is interesting?
(8)
It depends.
In Marilynne Robinson's
"Gilead," her narrator says in a letter to his son, "This is an
interesting planet. It deserves all the attention you can give
it."
And as Robinson makes
clear "All the attention you can give" contains the
key word: "All."
I believe we must repeatedly
ask, like a broken record,
if what we are doing is harmful to ourselves and our planet. It
begins with a re-examination of our needs and our relationships
with the earth. The pursuit of a sustainable planet for every
sentient being and life-form is what the "all the attention
you can give" requires if the human experiment is going to
survive.
I also believe what
Emily St. John Mandel wrote in her novel Station Eleven
that "survival is not sufficient."
"Objects"
will continue to be made, collected, conserved and preserved because
they are part of the human story and can themselves be interesting
and important.
I believe collecting
in its best form understands its role and that acquisition and
preservation of "things" is done because those things
have stories. One of those stories shows that consumerism and
unsustainable acquisition have created problems for our survival
with their respective collected objects and ephemera becoming
evidence of some of those excesses. Visit any landfill to see
the rest of that story.
Conservation
and preservation of 'things' can be reminders of our relationship
with planet Earth, and perhaps lead us to a refocus on the conservation
and preservation of the world.
"In wildness is
the preservation of the world" wrote Henry David Thoreau.
"Conservation
is not merely a question of morality, but a question of our own
survival" wrote The Dalai Lama (9)
Prioritize.
Preserve.
Conserve.
