PHONOGRAPH.

During the last half of the nineteenth century the idea of recording sound waves began to develop on both sides of the Atlantic. In France on 25 March 1857 Edouard-Leon Scott de Martinville (1817–1879) received a French patent for the "phonautograph," which made a visual image of sound waves on a cylinder, but did not play or reproduce any sounds. On 30 April 1877 another Frenchman, Charles M. Cros (1842–1888), deposited with the Academy of Sciences in Paris a description of a process for mechanically reproducing spoken words. On 24 December 1877 the American inventor Thomas Alva Edison (1847–1931) patented in the United States a machine that actually reproduced sound. Edison thus won the battle with Cros by inventing and then commercializing an actual "talking machine" that used cylinders. He was convinced that neither abstract ideas nor patent law alone would assure to inventors the fruits of their work. As a result, he and other American inventors quickly moved from invention to manufacturing and marketing.

From an early date Europeans made major contributions to recorded musical styles, provided influential recording artists, eagerly purchased recorded-sound products, patented and marketed their own inventions, and made financial investments that helped to create manufacturing plants in their countries. For example, Emile Berliner (1851–1929), a German inventor who emigrated to Washington, D.C., developed the microphone, the flat recording disc, and the gramophone player. His flat-disc recordings eventually replaced the more fragile and unwieldy Edison cylinders. In 1898 Berliner created the Deutsche Grammophon Gesellschaft, a company that pressed discs in Hanover, Germany, for the European market. He also organized the Berliner Gramophone Company of London, which marketed spring-driven playback machines in Britain and on the Continent.

American recording engineer/talent scouts such as Fred Gaisberg (1873–1951), who worked for Berliner, crisscrossed Europe recording such great opera singers as Enrico Caruso (1873–1921) and Nellie Melba (1861–1931). In this way and others, American inventors/entrepreneurs of recorded music vastly expanded their business, first through their affiliate companies and then through multinational conglomerates. As early as 1888 Edison marketed a phonograph through his Edison Phonograph Co. of the British Isles; the same organization re-exported them to Europe.

In the 1880s and 1890s the three leading American companies that came to control most of the important patents—Edison's National Phonograph Company, the Victor Talking Machine Company, and the Columbia Graphophone Company—set up affiliates in London, Paris, Hanover, St. Petersburg, Vienna, and Madrid. The Big Three, as they were known, dominated the recorded music business through their European affiliates until World War I seriously disrupted business. Nevertheless, from an early date, the influential French firm les Phonographes Pathé, founded in Paris in 1894 to demonstrate and market Edison products, subsequently manufactured its own cylinders, records, and playback machines. Pathé's records and machines were successful throughout Europe. It established offices from St. Petersburg to Madrid and New York City during the years between 1912 and 1929. So too, the German Carl Lindstrom Company established factories in Germany, France, Spain, Italy, Russia, Poland, Britain, Argentina, and Brazil.

The ingenuity and business acumen of American phonograph/record companies played a central role in bringing the Jazz Age to France on 78-rpm discs during the 1920s. Many French people who would never have heard jazz in a nightclub or dance hall purchased imported jazz records for enjoyment at home. Jazz recordings became a key staple in left-bank bohemian circles, and Charles Delaunay (1911–1988), son of the famous modernist painters Robert (1885–1941) and Sonia Delaunay (1885–1979), compiled the first jazz record discography.

The commercialization of radio in the 1920s, the growing economic crisis of the 1930s, and the outbreak of World War II again created serious setbacks for recorded-sound industries, especially in France. The factories of PathéFrères, for example, had been turned to the war effort so that the company was unable to adopt the new technology of electrical recording; its diminishing markets exposed it to absorption in 1931 into the British conglomerate EMI (Electric and Musical Industries) the first of the global music corporations.

The triumph of the Allies in World War II, as well as the defeat of Germany, set in motion an intense period of growing American cultural influence in Europe, one that became particularly controversial among some intellectuals in France. American technology introduced the long-playing, 33?-rpm record in France in 1951; the twelve-inch disc with micro-grooves provided running times six times longer than the old 78-rpm records and at half the price. As in the 1920s jazz was once again the major style preferred by French purchasers of American records. In the 1950s Edouard Ruault (1921–2005), a jazz pianist, changed his name to Eddie Barclay and founded Barclay Records, issuing both American and French albums that made his company the top music-production enterprise in France during the 1950s and 1960s. The "electrophone" and imported American LPs (les disques noirs) of the Vogue and Barclay labels became major consumer items of the postwar French Baby Boomer generation, who preferred them to the automobile, motor scooter, radio, and television set.

THE PHONOGRAPH AND ANTI-AMERICANISM

Claims by some left-wing French intellectuals, particularly communists, that post–World War II American media expansion amounted to cultural imperialism have been disputed by historians on both sides of the Atlantic who see the phonograph as one of several different elements in a broader process of modernization of French life, a movement that included urbanization, new patterns of industrialization, technology, media, and consumer society. Moreover, the phonograph and recordings have often been lumped into anti-American generalizations actually focused on the film industry. In fact, the export business of recorded sound was not in itself an overwhelming economic force and relied upon radio play to increase its sales. Moreover, compared to Hollywood films, records and record players were far less obviously American since conglomerates recorded French, American, French-influenced American, and American-influenced French music on nationally ambiguous labels such as Vogue.

The 12-inch vinyl 33?-rpm LP record enjoyed twenty-five years of astounding growth in Europe before declining markedly in 1978 when it first encountered competition from the cassette tape. The compact disc, or CD, invented in the United States in 1982, arrived in Europe one year later, soon triumphing over the cassette. Like the LP before it, the CD then enjoyed soaring sales from 1983 to the turn of the twenty-first century, when the downloading of digital music files to computers, a revolutionary new technology for listening to recorded music, presently used by eight million French citizens, and their transfer to digital audio players, most using the MP3 format, began to take hold.

As the number of multinational conglomerates in the business of recorded music has fallen, the number of independent recording companies has risen in Western countries, and they have taken over the recording of specialized tastes in music. The biggest companies now tend to market only the most famous popular artists. As of 2006, recorded music in Europe and the United States struggles with complex issues of copyright law in a period of rapid technological change.

See alsoComputer Revolution; Jazz; Leisure; Popular Culture; Technology; Television.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Grnow, Pekka. "The Record Industry: The Growth of a Mass Media." Popular Music 3 (1983): 53–75.

Lefeuvre, Gildas. Le Producteur de Disques. Paris, 1994.

Millard, Andre. America on Record: A History of Recorded Sound. Cambridge, U.K., and New York, 1995.

Tournes, Ludovic. "L'Americanisation de la Culture Francaise, ou la recontre d'un Model culturel conquerant et d'un Pays au Seuil de la Modernite." Historiens et Geographes (juillet/aout 1997): 65–79.

——. "Jalons Pour une Histoire Internationale de l'industrie du Disque: Expansion, Declin et Absorption de la Branche Phonographique de Pathe (1894–1936)." In Histoire des Industries/Culturelles, edited by Jacques Marseille and Patrick Eveno. Paris, 2002.

William Kenney