Format Friction: Perspectives on the Shellac Disc
by Gavin Williams
Published 2024
Paperback, 208 pages
ISBN 9780226833262
University of Chicago Press 

During a recent visit with my mother, our conversation twisted around various topics as typically occurs, when a particular word set off a recollection from her childhood in Chile. Suddenly, she told me, she conjured before her eyes the old “vitrola” that once sat in her parents’ living room. Light music instrumentals by Vicente Bianchi, a pair of opera arias sung by Ramón Vinay, tangos by Carlos Gardel, a single disc containing two songs sung by Guadalupe del Carmen backed by the folk-comedy duo Los Hermanos Campos—they all rang forth from the great brass horn of her parents’ gramophone, helped along by my mother who, still a child then, gleefully turned its crank. By this point, in the late 1950s, the 78 RPM format had been abandoned in most countries, including Chile. Nevertheless, the family gramophone continued to occupy pride of place in my mother’s childhood home for years to come, an outcome she attributed to the great expense her parents reputedly made in acquiring the device, long before she was born.

“Today you can own anything, people don’t say anything at all”, recalled one of the Singaporeans whose testimony was recorded as part of the city-state’s efforts to preserve its national heritage. “Everybody has the same things nowadays”. These remarks, quoted by Gavin Williams in his Format Friction: Perspectives on the Shellac Disc, are an illustration of how the gramophone was both an object of its socially and economically stratified time, as well as a harbinger of the egalitarian, globalized 21st century to come. Along a complex, interlacing global network of aural roads paved with shellac, the gramophone and its attendant industry connected the peoples of far-flung locales that had previously been mutually difficult to access: London and Los Angeles, Berlin and Bombay, Vilnius and my mother’s native Valparaíso.

Accompanying their travels was the “bacon fry” that is the inevitable trait of all recordings pressed on shellac. Rather than a hindrance, Williams instead suggests that this potentially “eco-positive” attribute should be heard as a vestigial reminder of the labor and natural resources involved in the creation of music and performance, and the making and dissemination of the disc itself. His proposition is a worthy consideration for listeners of the present day, who on a daily basis are awash in music conveyed via streaming services – media that are the result of exploitative social, economic, and environmental practices concealed from the listener in digital silence – to say nothing of the perverse reductiveness it encourages. It is not for nothing that countless millions today regard the achievements of the human spirit as mere “content”.

Williams provides an early anticipation of this phenomenon by way of Edmund Wheeler Scripture, who attempted to distil the essence of Enrico Caruso’s artistry into a mere waveform on a graph. The international renown of the Italian tenor, as is well known, was helped along considerably by the gramophone. He was among the first musicians to be known as a “celebrity”, or what in social media parlance is referred to as a “brand”: somebody whose fame is fueled not only by achievement, but by fame itself. His records not only encoded his voice, Williams informs his reader, but transported a cult of personality wherein their grooves betokened a “celebrity” that ignited in the hearts of its listeners their own desire to aspire to that status. This perhaps most fascinating chapter shows how Caruso not only manipulated the gramophone industry to his advantage, but how it and the politics of his time resulted in a fracturing of his image, with each shard vying with the other for attention and authenticity; his recordings of “Vesti la giubba” are auricular synecdoches of the celebrity masks he wore.

Another early winner of the nascent record industry was The Gramophone Co. Ltd., an entity that Williams describes as a progenitor of the modern multinational conglomerate. (How poetic, then, that over a century later, the same company, by then known as EMI, would itself be cannibalized by other, bigger conglomerates.) Already by 1909, an internal memo made it clear that the company had to diversify if it was to continue thriving:

The big markets of Europe are too closely competed for us to expect big profits. It is in small countries in Central Asia, Malay Straits, Persian Gulf, North African countries, Dutch Indies, Siam, Caspian and Black Seas [to which we should look]. These countries in their own native way are extremely musical and pleasure-loving, and if the recording is carefully watched, it means business with a profit.

Similar to the captains of the Internet who much later succeeded them, men like Theodor Wangemann and Fred Gaisberg were “techno-theocrats” who walked the earth and preached the gospel of their new technology to anybody with ears to listen and funds to invest. Although on one hand they, arguably, “knew little, at least at first, about the languages, music, and culture in which they moved”, it was their efforts that also “indigenized” music catalogs and the culture of listening in the various African and Asian countries that markets for the gramophone were being established.

In other words, “no rose is without its thorn”, a theme that Williams repeats throughout his book. Yet like many contemporary scholars, he ignores the flip side of this dusty homily that aptly summarizes the Faustian bargain that is modernity: every thorn also has its rose. Throughout the book, Williams is eager to excoriate the past for sins actual and often imagined. Those whose voices are now stilled by timeless eternity could have scarcely imagined that they would sit in judgment by a posterity they would never know and to whom they are unable to respond. Ramshackle bands manned by striking Welsh miners in 1926, for example, are admonished by Williams for “appropriation” of African American vernacular culture. But would he or any academic similarly criticize musicians of African heritage for engaging with musical genres developed by and historically associated with Europeans? Moreover, how could acceptance of the Other ever occur if these early steps, however tentative and puerile they may seem to us now, had not been taken in the first place? There is also something else that is palpable and, perhaps, unsettling in Williams’ denunciations: an implicit wish to right the wrongs of the past by resorting to authoritarian means that the author and his milieu would rightly decry if pursued in other contexts.

Elsewhere in the same chapter devoted to the Welshmen and their “gazookas” (a cheaply produced instrument that could be described as an ancestor to the vuvuzela), Williams teasingly touches upon the growing global power of American consumer culture that the gramophone facilitated, but frustratingly does not further explore its hegemonic and destructive implications. This is a process I observed for myself at the turn of the century, when the traditional folk-derived idioms and romantic ballads that had once dominated Latin American pop music were suffocated and relegated to the margins within a span of a few years by the mass exportation of American music; its cultural colonialism, ironically, enabled by urban genres that arose from the very “oppressed” groups that Williams wishes to avenge.

At its best, Format Friction: Perspectives on the Shellac Disc offers the reader a Sebaldian reflection on how the intersections of art, commerce, and technology in the early 20th century shaped and deformed the way we think of music and the act of listening today. Would that the author’s scholarly instincts kept his inner scold at bay. Tilting at windmills long vanished is hardly the best use of his energies—or his reader’s.

Néstor Castiglione

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