- Samantha Silver – “Ordinary Ghosts in the Radio Archive: Major Bowes’s Original Amateur Hour”
Since
American Idol and the advent of YouTube, the figure of the amateur— the ordinary American poised for stardom— has resounded in the soundscape. This paper traces the figure of the amateur back to radio’s
Major Bowes’ Original Amateur Hour (1935-1945). Touted as ‘democracy on the airwaves,’ this show invited listeners to participate through voting for acts by telephone, and through auditioning themselves.
This paper takes seriously the sonic connections and affective bonds formed and sustained as musical intimacies reverberate across time and space. An archive of moments, the recordings contain emotionally charged interactions between the host and the amateurs as they were actively gendered (the ingénue, the neighborhood boy), and racialized (the Chinese-American crooner, the African-American quartet). Scandal ensued in 1936 when a fan magazine revealed these off-the-cuff interactions to be scripted. What was at stake for listeners in these debates? The spontaneity of live performance created the conditions of possibility for speaking out and pushing back, as the “scriptedness” revealed the dominance of the culture industry producers to define what was ordinary.
With attention to ongoing MoPop discussions about recovering the role of those marginalized in music history, this paper centers the “ordinary” and the “marginal” performers who were given air time in great numbers. The ghosts in the archive linger in the sounds of nervousness and refusal of the performers. Based on recordings at the Library of Congress, radio fan magazines, and original archival research on the show’s 7,000 contestant files, this paper listens to the broadcasts as a series of idiosyncratic performances, using performance studies and affect theory to offer new approaches to radio history.
- Matt Payne - “Living Music, Dead Labor: Sound Reproduction and Cultural Politics of ‘Liveness’”
Towards the end of his life, jazz bassist Charles Mingus said in his characteristically dark humor, “I can’t even presently afford to die with the comfort of knowing that I have beaten the jackals who prey on dead musicians.” This paper explores the conditions of possibility of such a statement: What are the implications of the fact that sound reproduction has transformed musical labor to the point that, as Mingus suggests, industry exploitation of musicians can carry on into the afterlife?
Using Mingus’s observation as a prompt, my paper explores the recent phenomenon in which consumer interest in the music of superstars such as David Bowie, Prince, and Aretha Franklin seems to spike at the time of their passing. I will follow Mingus’s lead and skeptically approach the celebratory narratives surrounding these musical deaths: Should we consider the increased interest in these musicians as honoring the dead or as exploitation of dead labor? What does it mean for
living musicians to increasingly have to compete with the dead for the attention of listeners who have unprecedented ease of access to vast archives of music through platforms such as Spotify and Apple Music?
- Theodore Gonzalves – “Walking Through the Graveyard of Guitars”
As a curator at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History, one of my jobs is to help care for the nation’s most precious objects, including musical instruments as diverse as Stradivarius violins, Dizzy Gillespie’s upturned trumpet, a nineteenth century banjo made in Annapolis, and Prince’s yellow cloud guitar. This presentation takes you behind the scenes to the non-public storage unit that is just a few feet from my office—where a reproduction of Eddie Van Halen’s Frankenstein guitar sits next to a Paul Reed Smith model decorated with the image of a multicolored dragon. Nearly all of these instruments were played by men. One of my current projects involves helping to tell the story of rock pioneer June Millington, co-founder of Fanny, the first all-female band to land a major record label release in 1970. In this paper, I’ll talk about the private tour I gave to June through this graveyard of guitars and how American musical history is haunted by her absence.
