Note: this was first published in Black and Green Review #5
Tech enthusiast Kevin Kelly has often repeated a glib definition of technology as “anything invented after you were born.”i The flippant definition resonates because it is very close to how the word is used in casual conversation and in popular media. The iPhone is generally perceived as technology but a manual can opener is not. The tech section of a newspaper will readily feature an article on drones but not necessarily on dovetail joints. Moving back and forth between a casual definition and a more precise definition can yield a rhetorical advantage for technophiles like Kelly. If a new technology seems threatening, disruptive, or otherwise problematic it can be compared to an older technology which may seem safe and familiar. The new technology then becomes safe by association because it is alleged that to condemn one is to condemn the other (and who is going to blame the ills of the world or the corruption of youth on the can opener in their kitchen drawer?).
This strategy exploits the fact that anti-tech critics have a reputation for being a bit curmudgeonly; their arguments are often dismissed as nothing but a collection of these kids today!-type complaints. Their position is treated as an outgrowth of their own confusion and technical ineptitude: we are to believe that they are all old people who can’t manage to program their VCRs and drone on about “the good ol’ days.”
Given this caricature, it is important for serious critics of technology to dig deeper and make clear the problems with technologies that were invented long before they were born; to critique the technologies that are so commonplace that they often fail to even register as technologies. The point must be made that it is not simply that the new and the novel are threatening or confusing due to their unfamiliarity, but rather that even those technologies that are entirely familiar, wholly ubiquitous, and seemingly quite banal have often been, in many ways, quite detrimental to our overall well-being.
To overlook the damage done by technologies prior to our birth, those that are now ubiquitous, is akin to ignoring the damage to the environment carried out in earlier ages. It is a common mistake to treat the state of the natural world during one’s childhood as a sort of baseline from which to measure the damage done. But that baseline recedes with every generation; everyone alive today was born into an already devastated world. Likewise, we are all constrained, controlled, injured, and mutilated by the technologies that were introduced long ago.
Consider, for example, recorded music. This purported luxury that is so highly valued by so many of us has, in many ways, contributed to the widely felt emptiness of the modern experience. It is an inadequate substitute for something greater of which we have been robbed.
Recording Music
“Small-time musicians have become as obsolete as the Indian.”
-The Nation (1942)
For quite some time now, to make a record has been to make it as a musician. In the dominant culture, a recording contract imbues legitimacy and is a clear marker of success. Countless musicians have relayed the giddy experience of hearing themselves on the radio for the first time or of watching their record climb the pop music charts.
In his recent autobiography, Bruce Springsteen described the incredible feeling of being signed by Columbia Records: “I felt my heart rise up inside me, mysterious particles dancing underneath my skin and faraway stars lighting up my nerve endings.” Indeed, there is a significant difference in the status of one who is labeled a mere musician and that of a “recording artist”. Springsteen was a musician long before auditioning for Columbia Records but only became a recording artist when offered his first contract. His status changed and he marveled about his good fortune saying: “we’d climbed to the heavens and spoken to the gods who told us we were spitting thunder and throwing lightning bolts.”ii
It may therefore seem quite odd to learn that in 1942 the American Federation of Musicians (AFM) imposed a ban on recording music which was sustained until November 1944. The ban received widespread support within the labor movement. It was formally endorsed by the American Federation of Labor. International support came from the Musicians’ Union of Great Britain which supported the ban by refusing to export records to the United States and Canada.
The AFM and its members perceived recorded music as a threat to the livelihood of musicians who at the time relied primarily on live performances rather than making records. There was little or no profit to be made from records or radio play. Yet, as the sound quality of phonographs gradually improved, radio stations were dumping live acts and jukeboxes were displacing musicians in hotels, bars, and restaurants. From our present point of view, jukeboxes may seem fairly inconsequential, but in 1938 there were already half a million in use in the United States accounting for forty percent of record production.iii By 1950, “jukeboxes were everywhere” and in all manner of businesses and community spaces.iv By the time of the ban, theaters had already largely stopped employing orchestras as silent films were replaced with sound films. Prior to sound films, theaters employed a large portion of AFM members as pit musicians. As recorded music was embraced opportunities for working musicians seemed to be shrinking.
James Petrillo was president of the AFM at the time of the recording ban and explained:
“Nowhere else in this mechanical age does the workman create the machine which destroys him, but that’s what happens to the musician when he plays for a recording. The iceman didn’t invent the refrigerator, the coachman didn’t invent the automobile. But the musician plays his music into a recorder and a short time later the radio station manager…says…we don’t need you anymore.”v
Petrillo was a high-powered labor leader who proved himself in union battles as president of AFM Local 10 in Chicago during the 1920s and 30s. His first major accomplishment in Chicago was forcing radio stations to actually pay musicians. Note that this was not paying musicians for use of recordings but paying musicians for performing live on the radio from the station. Radio stations had always argued that publicity alone was sufficient compensation for such performances. Two years later, possibly as a response, Petrillo’s home was bombed. He would eventually begin traveling in a bullet-proof car equipped with bullet-proof windows.vi
Punching up or punching down, Petrillo was known for an aggressive style that frequently got results. When an Italian jubilee was set to use nonunion musicians in Chicago he sent a cable of complaint directly to Mussolini. Likewise, when a high school band was set to perform at the mayor’s inauguration, Petrillo threatened the radio station that was going to broadcast it with a strike and consequently the high schoolers were replaced with union musicians.vii
By the time he became president of the national AFM, he already had his sights set on tackling the threat represented by recorded music—or as he frequently called it, “canned music” or even “dehumanized music.” He became president in 1940 and the ban was put into effect in 1942.
The principal concession won by the AFM via their recording ban was the creation of the Recording and Transcription Fund which directed a royalty from the sale and manufacture of recordings and transcriptions directly to the union for use in creating work for unemployed musicians and offering free concerts to the public. Prone to hyperbole, Petrillo declared it “the greatest victory ever achieved by a labor organization.” In any event, it was a short-lived victory as the Fund was dissolved in 1947 with passage of the Taft-Hartley Act.
This prompted a second recording ban in 1948. The Recording and Transcription Fund was soon replaced with a fund that served a similar function. This new fund was not under the exclusive control of the union and was thereby within the bounds of the new law.
The touted victory underscores the point that the AFM was never explicitly against recorded music as such despite some of Petrillo’s heated rhetoric. “For the union, its primary objections were not about the record but about the unlicensed duplication of artistic labors.”viii Consequently, what they sought was not the abolition of any particular technology, but rather a mechanism for musicians to be compensated for their work and share in the profits made from such recordings.
But the impact of recorded music extended far beyond the immediate financial concerns of working musicians who struggled to cope with shifting technology. The act of recording music changed how music is made, how it’s performed, how it’s consumed, and how it is sold.
Producing and Consuming Music
“Music is what people do on their own.” -Tom Vanderbilt (2016)
Once music is recorded, reproducible, and effectively commodified it creates a situation where “[m]usic escapes from musicians.”ix The role of the musician isn’t simply financially uncompensated as was the chief concern of the AFM, but music itself is diminished in significant ways for both the musician and the audience.
First, the ability to repeat a song at will (and often ad nauseam) alters how it is experienced and what gets produced. In Innovation and its Enemies, Calestous Juma effectively makes this point:
“Recorded music introduced [an] element that didn’t exist with live performance. Recorded music could be played repeatedly at will…The ability to repeat elevated the role of the sound technician and made the musician subservient to technology and, by extension, to those who controlled the sound production…”x
On the surface level, this mirrors a concern expressed by Petrillo and the AFM. They saw and were concerned that disc jockeys, broadcasters, and other non-musicians were ascending in influence at the expense of their membership. Non-musicians stood to profit to a much greater extent than the musician who actually performs on the record. Musicians were paid once for a performance that was recorded whereas non-musicians profited each time the recording was played.
On a deeper level it also mirrors a concern put forward by many critics of technology. Records are presented as a means of making music more accessible and giving the listener greater control—greater control is effectively what all technology promises. But what is given with one hand is surreptitiously taken, with considerable interest, by the other. Listeners can repeat a song if they wish, but the fact that music that is increasingly controlled by corporate executives, experts, and technicians shrinks the role of the musician and limits what gets produced and distributed. The distance between musician and audience is magnified as the listening experience is increasingly mediated. The musician’s overall contribution to the final product shrinks as an increasingly intense division of labor is imposed via the recording process.
Digital technology exacerbates this situation—despite promising even greater control of one’s experience—as the repeat function relies on just the push of a button. I have encountered numerous people who profess a great love for music, maintain a large digital collection, and yet are seemingly unable to listen to a song in its entirety. Their listening experience seems to consist largely of playing a song for perhaps a minute or so and then anxiously clicking to find a different one. For example, someone recently wanted to share what they described as their “favorite song” with me, but we only listened to about twenty seconds; in response to my confusion, I was told that that was “the good part” of the song. Even one’s favorite song isn’t worth listening to in full. It is perhaps related to the phenomena of people watching television shows on fast-forward to get through more shows in less time. Even one’s recreation must be rationalized and made efficient.
Second, while live performances obviously haven’t disappeared, recordings have altered their meaning and content. Juma again explains:
“As time progressed, live performances were judged on how they compared with the recorded versions. This was often detrimental to musicians as fewer people attended live shows. Musicians often felt pressure to record a perfect version of a song because they knew it would be mass-produced and repeatedly played.”xi
George Harrison made a similar point in 1965:
“[The Beatles] used to improve at a much faster rate before we ever made records. You’ve got to reproduce as near as you can, the records, so you don’t really get a chance to improvise or improve your style.”xii
Upon first reading, this seems an odd statement coming from someone like George Harrison given that the Beatles’ most artistically significant work came only after they stopped touring and entered the recording studio full time. But the point is that they only circumvented the trap of mimicking their records by giving up on live performances altogether. In their case, the need to make records didn’t simply alter their performances but put a stop to them. The biggest musical act in the world effectively conceded that recordings were now primary and performances derivative and dispensable. But this strategy only worked for so long as eventually “they felt like prisoners of the studio” according to producer George Martin.xiii Their famous rooftop concert was a prison break, as was the ultimate dissolution of the band.
Closer to the present—half a century after the 1948 recording ban—the fiercely independent Ani DiFranco included these lyrics in her song “Fuel”:
“People used to make records /
As in a record of an event /
The event of people playing music in a room”
If this was ever how and why “people used to make records”, it was for a very short window of time. As explained above, recordings are rarely simply records of “people playing music in a room”; far more often people in a room are trying to mimic what they heard on a record (even if they are the ones that made the record in the first place they are then compelled to mimic themselves).
Writing a full fifteen years before DiFranco’s song, Brian Eno explained how thoroughly disconnected records had become from performance:
“There’s been a break between the traditional idea of music…and what we now do on records…It’s now possible to make records that have music that was never performed or never could be performed and in fact doesn’t exist outside the record.”xiv
The record became primary, thus making both the musician and the performance derivative. The situation has been paradoxically summarized: “a disc recording is generally considered to be a live performance, while a live performance attempts to reproduce the recording.”xv Music critic David Hadju shares what I suspect is a widespread intuition:
“When I thought of pop songs as a young music fan…I thought of records. The music seemed inextricable from and even in some ways subordinate to the thing that contained it. A song I didn’t know of as a record—a chant from the kids on the playground, a tune my mother hummed while she cut pie pieces—seemed as if it were not really a real song.”xvi
While music has largely been an ephemeral experience, recording technology has provided the means to capture it and fix it in place. Yet, the fact that live performances remain extremely popular suggests that people still value the ephemeral experience and perhaps even the lack of control that necessarily comes with it. Indeed, there are whole genres and musical subcultures that have actively resisted the trend of pop music by maintaining the primacy of performance and shown little interest in recording and packaging their music.
Third, the very notion that music was even the kind of thing that could be consumed was itself a radical conceptual shift which brought significant consequences. The song that David Hadju’s mother would hum while slicing pie didn’t count as fully real, in part, because it existed outside of a commercial space. “It wasn’t touchable, holdable—possessable,” nor was it “sellable, buyable—consumable.”xvii
Prior to the widespread availability of high-quality (technically, not necessarily artistically) recorded music, people primarily experienced music rather than bought music. In fact, people were initially more apt to buy sheet music to facilitate their own amateur performance rather than recordings from professionals.
But music scholar Tim Anderson reports that by the time of the second AFM recording ban in 1948, sales of sheet music were plummeting and sales of records were soaring. People were transitioning from actively making their own music to purchasing recordings:
“listening habits surrounding popular music were changing from live amateur and professional performances to electronically rendered recordings of compositions which were typically allied with ‘name talent’”xviii
The calculated move toward “name talent” should not be overlooked. It is the bolstering of celebrity culture where a small number of musicians are zealously promoted and extravagantly rewarded while the vast majority are ignored and impoverished. That small number of musicians could then be within the control of an even smaller number of record companies. Four companies controlled 75 percent of the record sales market in 1948 and “name talent” was essential to their economic dominance.xix
This is not incidental but almost necessarily the case when music is distributed via a mass media.
“The increasing differentiation between performers and receptors can be understood as a mark of a high musical culture: thus the irrevocable gulf without the least possibility of mutual contact between performers and receptors is a consequence of presentation through the mass media”xx
The dominance of celebrity culture undercuts the frequently made point that recorded music allows for access and appreciation of a much wider variety of music than would otherwise be possible. The point is true as far as it goes, but as it turns out, it doesn’t go that far. Almost all of recorded music is now simply a click away, but studies have found that when presented with such expansive access people’s listening actually becomes narrower and less diverse.xxi In 2013, the top one percent of musicians earned 77 percent of all recorded music income; digital services exacerbated this disparity rather than helped level it. This is partially explained by “consumers being overwhelmed by a Tyranny of Choice in which excessive choice actually hinders discovery.”xxii
This is a particular example of a much broader phenomenon documented by Barry Schwartz in The Paradox of Choice—regarding how people respond when presented with an exceedingly large number of choices or options. In many cases it proves debilitating, people will often refuse to make any choice or accept whatever happens to be the default option even if it is not in their interests. Having more choice isn’t necessarily empowering and isn’t always better.
David Sax, author of The Revenge of Analog, relays his own first-hand, experience of the paralysis resulting from the burden of too many musical choices in the now digital age:
“I frequently found myself opening the app, only to become paralyzed with indecision. My options were infinite, literally every single album and song ever recorded…It was as though the ease and convenience of digital music had sucked the very fun out of listening to it. The entire world of music was just a click away, but I couldn’t even be bothered to do that.”xxiii
It is the same institutions that make services such as Spotify, Rdio, and iTunes possible that foster celebrity culture; this means that while listening to a wide range of music is technically possible people are still being pushed toward “name talent.” The technology was alleged to have a democratizing or leveling effect, but almost everyone is still listening to Taylor Swift and Beyonce. Again, there are, of course, those who have recognized the artistic cost of relying on distribution via the mass media and have essentially refused to participate. This is most evident in anti-establishment, anti-mass society music scenes such as anarchist punk rock.
Fourth, prior to recorded music, music happened largely in public spaces and was enjoyed in the company of others. It was almost inherently social. In contrast, the contemporary consumption of music is described by Tom Vanderbilt in his 2016 book You May Also Like. Vanderbilt writes: “Music is what people do on their own: in the car, with their headphones, via their playlists and customized stations.”xxiv
Music, arguably from its origin, has been capable of fostering community and even mending social relations, but is now, to a large extent, used to facilitate and maintain one’s isolation. Making music together is a cooperative activity that has been used to resist social stratification. It was something that people did together and is now something to be consumed alone. We may all be listening to Taylor Swift and Beyonce, but we are largely doing so alone. Raising one’s headphones is now a widely recognized symbol for cutting off a conversation. Where the technology has been successfully resisted, such as in many indigenous contexts and communities, music remains a bonding rather than an isolating force.
Finally, Petrillo often referred to recorded music as “dehumanized music”, but it would be equally accurate to call it “disembodied music.” Musicologist John Blacking has said “music begins…as a stirring of the human body,” but when music was severed from performance it was also severed from the human body.xxv Music now seems to emerge from machines and devices rather than from people. Even when attributed to people it is often from celebrity figures who exist across an “irrevocable gulf without the least possibility of mutual contact.”
Perhaps more importantly, music has almost always been associated with dancing. But as music becomes something that is increasingly being consumed alone this changes. Just as people don’t often laugh out loud when alone, people don’t often dance when alone.
Mass Culture Requires Mass Media
“Recording has always been a means of social control” -Jacques Attali
The AFM was a powerful union by the time of the 1940s recording bans. They had weathered the Depression years and even Prohibition which was a particular threat for a musicians’ union. The recording bans were an ambitious and controversial tactic but were carried out in the service of fairly modest goals and reforms. This is evident in some of the compromises that were offered by the union prior to the recording bans.
The union proposed that phonographs be produced for private, home use only and not available for use on radio. They proposed that if phonographs were to be used on radio that there be a limit to how many times a particular recording could be played before being discarded or otherwise destroyed. Despite legal challenges, they engaged in a practice known as “featherbedding” whereby an employer would be required to hire union musicians as standbys whenever non-union musicians were used or a recording was used. The union wanted its members to be given jobs as “platter turners”; that is, they wanted their members to be the ones to put the records on the turntables at the radio stations and receive pay in accordance with union wage scales; after all Petrillo explained: “we feel that if there is music on the record, that the man who puts the record on the machine should be a member of the musicians’ union.”xxvi
The goals were more employment opportunities and greater compensation; the same goals as almost any other mainstream labor union. Despite the modesty of these goals. The bans were certainly perceived as a serious threat. Indeed, as a threat to national security.
The AFM recording ban was seen to be of such national significance that President Franklin Roosevelt attempted to intervene and broker an end to it albeit without success. Roosevelt considered the lack of recorded music a threat to national morale during World War II.
The Justice Department offered an even more extreme statement: “We regard a handicap on industrial progress by preventing the use of improved mechanical equipment in an industry as an attack upon industrial production.”xxvii
An attack upon on industrial production! There’s something worth paying one’s union dues for if only it was the case. The hostile reaction was at least in part explained by the fact that media was in the process of becoming mass media and the recording bans were not conducive to that transition.
Private enterprise was hostile to the recording bans not only because using recordings was obviously far less expensive than continually hiring musicians but also because recordings allowed for greater flexibility when scheduling and distributing programming. With recordings came “the ability to propagate and move significant amounts of information across large portions of geography, both national and international, in smaller and smaller amounts of time.”xxviii In other words, they made mass media possible and practical.
The U.S. government was hostile to the recording bans in part because it was depending on the existence of mass media to effectively shape public opinion regarding the ongoing war:
“given that most American broadcasters needed musical recordings to retain their audiences and profit, a void of new musical recordings would endanger the ability of the Office of War Information to communicate to the nation about wartime goings-on.”xxix
The stated virtues of recorded music—the promises of the technology—are the very values of modern, mass society.
“for the first time, music did not depend on the physical presence of performers in specific settings, or the simultaneous presence of an audience. Music was freed, so to speak, from the social context of its production.”xxx
“Just as spatial restraints have been removed, so have temporal ones”xxxi
Music is freed. Restraints are removed. This is the rhetoric and these are the promises that mask the harm of the technology.
Compare this with sociologist Wilhelm Weber’s definition of mass musical culture:
“This is not just a matter of brute numbers of people buying music or going to concerts. What has characterized mass musical culture primarily has been the impersonality of relationships between listeners and performers and the active exploitation of a broad public by the music business.”xxxii
Mass society frees us from the inefficiency of personal relationships and of feeling connected to particular people and particular places. Mass musical culture frees music from constraints of time and place making everything available but nothing worth any effort. We used to dance and now we might tap our toes. Fringe and countercultural music scenes persist, in part, because they embrace rather than discard personal relationships. They eschew and deflate the purported virtues that the technology offers.
Conclusion: Music Without Recording
“[M]any industrial societies have taken away from people much of the
practice and pleasure of music making.” -John Blacking (1973)
Recorded music is now ubiquitous and so it is quite difficult to imagine life without it. For consistent critics of technology to suggest that recorded music is less than a godsend—that it comes with a steep cost—may seem as strange as musicians refusing to make records. Even the phrase “recorded music” is somewhat awkward as it borders on redundancy for many of us; it calls attention to something so obvious that it very often escapes serious scrutiny. Recorded music? Is there any other kind?
But music predates the recording industry and will outlast the recording industry. Within the self-absorbed cocoon of civilization, such plain statements of fact often need to be said out loud. It is a banality that cannot be argued but nonetheless seems to possess a radical edge. Music has not always been a commodity, it’s not always been recorded, and participation hasn’t always been restricted to a narrow, special class of persons.
When the recording industry presents itself as the very source of where music itself originates it promulgates a dangerous and self-serving lie that diminishes our humanity for it tells us that we are less than what we are. In truth, “men [and women] are more remarkable than most societies ever allow them to be.”xxxiii
Again, music predates the recording industry and not to insignificant extent. The earliest known instruments date back 36,000 years. These were flutes found in a cave in southern Germany; they were crafted from the hollow wing bones of large birds. In the Pyrenees, pipes crafted from bird bones have been found that are nearly just as old. These would have relied on the insertion of a reed and were carefully crafted with finger holes placed in depressions to ensure a full seal when fingers were applied to the instrument. Furthermore, it is widely assumed—and stands to reason—that music made with the human body and found objects significantly predates the deliberate creation of actual instruments such as bone flutes and pipes.xxxiv
“So whereas we now visit painted caves in a hushed reverence, they probably once reverberated with the sounds of pipes, stalagmite xylophones, singing and dancing.”xxxv
In communities that existed prior to or apart from recording technologies, attitudes toward music were often drastically different from our own.
Steven Mithen writes:
“The appreciation of music is a universal feature of humankind; music-making is found in all societies and it is normal for everyone to participate in some manner; the modern-day West is quite unusual in having significant numbers of people who do not actively participate and may even claim to be unmusical.”xxxvi
In contrast, John Blacking reports that the Venda people believe “all normal human beings are capable of musical performance.”xxxvii It’s a sentiment that would likely be echoed by many punk rock musicians and folk singers who can still see music and something larger and more fundamental than what appears in pop music charts.
The consequences of recorded music go beyond the ability to amass a highly-tailored and extensive playlist or maintain a vast record collection. In evaluating the technology, one must consider music as an industry and not merely an art form, the development and propagation of celebrity culture, mass media and mass communication writ large, and the passive role that most of us were assigned when music became a commodity.
Recorded music is a palliative for one of the many mutilations inflicted on us by civilization. Like any palliative, the fact that we make use of it shouldn’t blind us to the original injury that has made it necessary. Soon, we’ll need to kick the habit.
i Kevin Kelly, What Technology Wants (New York: Viking, 2010), p. 235.
ii Bruce Springsteen, Born to Run (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2016), p. 172.
iii Peter J. Martin, Sounds and Society: Themes in the Sociology of Music (New York: Manchster University Press, 1996), p. 239.
iv Ed Ward, The History of Rock and Roll, Volume One: 1920-1963 (New York: Flatiron Books, 2016), p. 43.
v Harvey Mars, “The Silence Was Deafening,”(July 2016) http://www.local802afm.org/2016/07/the-silence-was-deafening
vi Robert Leiter, The Musicians and Petrillo (New York: Bookman Associates, 1953), p. 43.
vii Ibid., p. 46.
viii Tim Anderson, “’Buried under the fecundity of his own creations’: Reconsidering the recording bans of the American Federation of Musicians, 1942-1944 and 1948,” American Music 22.2 (Summer 2004, 239-269) p. 247.
ix Jacques Attali, Noise: The Political Economiy of Music (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985) p. 115.
x Calestous Juma, Innovation and its Enemies: Why People Resist New Technologies (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016), p. 210.
xi Ibid., p. 210.
xii Quoted in Steve Turner, Beatles ’66: The Revolutionary Year (New York: HarperLuxe, 2016), p. 11.
xiii Quoted in David Hadju, Love for Sale: Pop Music in America (New York: Farrar, Strauss, and Giroux, 2016), p. 44.
xiv Martin, p. 257.
xv Quoted in Ivo Supicic, Music in Society: A Guide to the Sociology of Music (Stuyvesant, NY: Pendragon Press, 1987), p. 187
xvi Hadju, p. 13.
xvii Ibid, p. 13.
xviii Anderson, p. 253.
xix Martin, p. 248.
xx Quoted in Supicic, p. 182-183.
xxi Tom Vanderbit, You May Also Like: Taste in an Age of Endless Choice (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2016), p. 92.
xxii Mark Mulligan, “The Death of the Long Tail,” Music Industry Blog (March 4, 2014) https://musicindustryblog.wordpress.com/2014/03/04/the-death-of-the-long-tail
xxiii David Sax, The Revenge of Analog: Real Things and Why They Matter (New York: Public Affairs, 2016), p. x.
xxiv Vanderbilt, p. 92.
xxv John Blacking, How Musical is Man? (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1973) p. 111.
xxvi Marina Peterson, “Sound Work: Music as labor and the 1940s recording bans of the American Federation of Musicians,” Anthropological Quarterly 86.3 (Summer 2013, 791-824), p. 795.
xxvii Anderson, p. 239.
xxviii Ibid., p. 249.
xxix Ibid., p. 238.
xxx Martin, p. 20.
xxxi Ibid., p. 20-21.
xxxii Quoted in Supicic, p. 155.
xxxiii Blacking, p. 7.
xxxiv Steven Mithen, The Singing Neanderthals: The Origins of Music, Language, Mind, and Body (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2006), p. 269.
xxxv Ibid., p. 270.
xxxvi Ibid., p. 1.
xxxvii Blacking, p. 34.
Uncivilized Animals 