What's missing? Besides the elision of consumption and buying (phonographs and records are played, after all), such accounts limit the definition of production to the activities of inventors and entrepreneurs. What if that kind of production were only a tiny part of the story, granted its singular importance by the same cultural norms and expectations that construe technology as a male realm? The very meaning of technology might be at stake. The spring motor phonograph "worked" in homes around the world, but would it have been described as "working," if it did not already make sense somehow within the social contexts of its innovation? For that matter, would the nickel-in-the-slot phonograph have worked in just the way it did if the women who were

disparaged as "nickel-in-the-slot stenographers" by the North American Phonograph Company executives had embraced rather than resisted the dictation machine? Questions like these get women (and other "end users&quo t;) back into history. "Recorded sound," burbles one historian, "is surely one of the great conveniences of modern life."[3] Yet we know from Ruth Schwartz Cowan's important More Work for Mother and a few other feminist histories of technology just how vested the definition of "convenience" can be within the gendered, social and economic constructs of a time and a place. [4] It must be that homemakers helped make home phonographs to the complicated extent that they "made" "homes," once we acknowledge that technological change is not a laboratory event or a corporate strategy but a fully social practice.

I am suggesting that phonographs and phonograph records had rich symbolic careers, that they acquired and possessed meanings in the circumstances of their apprehension and use, and that those meanings, many and changeable, arose in relation to the social lives of people and of things. Perhaps because they are media in addition to being technologies and commodities, phonographs and records seem to have possessed an extraordinary "interpretive flexibility," a

range of available meanings wherein neither their inventor nor the reigning authorities on music possessed any special authorial status. [5] Thomas Edison's intention for the machine was largely confounded, while composers and musical publications left the phonograph virtually unnoticed until its immense popularity forced them into addressing its role as a musical instrument. Instead, the machine was authored by the conditions of its sale and use, acquiring its cultural heft as it acquired its range and circulation among human hands and human ears as well as among other media and other goods. [6]

Though largely ignored by cultural theorists and cultural historians who tend to emphasize the extensive qualities of mass culture, phonographs and phonograph records suggestively exhibited intensive qualities to accompany those extensive ones. [7] While they came to possess extensive, mass appeal and notably to rely upon the consumption of public taste as such, -- in the form of fads, hits, and stars, -- phonographs and records also made sense according to intensive uses, at first by customers at public phonograph parlors and later by listeners at home. I will begin by introducing this intensity and by drawing a comparison between phonograph records and another contemporary medium, the mass circulation monthly magazine, which is seen by some as the cardinal form of American mass culture, at least before the nickelodeon. I will then address the discursive definition of the phonograph as a form of mechanical reproduction and as a musical instrument dependent upon women as agents and as subjects. I conclude by alluding to the ways in which the norms and habits of shopping helped to define the home phonograph.

Many Americans first experienced recorded sound as part of public demonstrations or in public parlors. Whether it was seen as more edifying (in the demonstrations) or more amusing (in the parlors), recorded sound from the beginning involved public participation, collective accedence to its existence as one or several among the curious, the remarkable, the novel, the entertaining, and the worth-between-a-nickel-and-a-quarter. Such participation importantly accompanied further, tacit participation in the conventions of recording as a medium, offering ways for the listeners of records to make and remake themselves as moderns, as part of an imagined community that was both familiar with the phonographic mediation of sound and constituted in the availability and circulation of phonograph records. The first nickel-in-the-slot machines were located at train stations, then at hotels and drug stores, where such an imagined community would have been both diffuse and masculine. A few years later brightly lit arcades promoted as "parlors" were located along busy shopping streets, pedestrian thoroughfares where the imagination could dilate, as it must have at country fairs and summer resorts, where showmen plied among women, children, and men. Customers listened to records through ear tubes, so that this public experience was in another sense a profoundly private one. The modest volume of the early records made ear tubes preferable, and so (like the nearly contemporary necessity of watching projected motion pictures in the dark) the medium itself helped devide customers from one another even as it drew them into crowds and helped imagine them as communities. Photographs that survive show phonograph parlor patrons standing together yet listening by themselves, their eyes vacant as their ears enjoy.

Nickel-in-the-slot machines and public phonograph parlors enjoyed great popularity for several years in the mid-1890s without, I think, becoming a genuinely "mass" phenomenon. The number

of machines playing in public could usually be easily counted. One source notes 140 machines in Washington, D.C., in 1892, when a best-selling record might mean a sale of 5000 copies over two years. [8]By contrast print media already enjoyed a mass audience of long standing, though print forms too underwent dramatic change during the mid and late 1890s. In Selling Culture Richard Ohmann argues specifically that American mass culture arrived in the pages of magazines like Munsey's, McClures, and Cosmopolitan. Starting around 1893 a growing number of monthly magazines such as these integrated additional illustrated advertisements into their feature pages and started to profit more on the sale of ad revenue rather than on the sale of issues and subscriptions. Both the timing and the scale of the modern monthlies make them helpful yardsticks. Simply in terms of numbers, the aggregate circulation of monthly magazines shot from 18 million in 1890 to 64 million in 1905. In terms of content, scholars generally agree that the magazines helped map the social spaces of American life in which "women were usually singled out as the trainees for participation in the commodity-laden modern world." -- Advertisers

pitched to women in the women's and the general circulation magazines, so that the vague category of "consumption" itself became gender-typed. [9]Indeed, the National Phonograph Company advertised in Munsey's as early at 1900, while the Victor Talking Machine Company had begun its lavish advertising campaigns in Cosmopolitan and the Saturday Evening Post by 1902. In 1906 the Victor company boasted that its "advertising campaigns reached some 49 million people every month," more than half the U.S. population, while Edison's reputedly less aggressive National Phonograph Company advertised its wares by placing full page ads in more than a dozen national circulation magazines each month, including Cosmopolitan, Munsey's, Good Housekeeping, Everybody's, and Outlook. [10]

More than simply a platform for advertising home phonographs, the modern monthlies helped enable and were enabled by some of the very social, economic, and cultural conditions that helped make home phonographs a success. If the "big three" phonograph companies, Victor, National, and Columbia, started their meteoric rise roughly three years after the new Munsey's, McClures, and Cosmopolitan, they nonetheless joined the modern monthlies as, in Ohmann's

terms, a "major form of repeated cultural experience for the people of the United States." By 1909 the phonograph industry was producing a steady 27.2 million records a year, still a fraction of the aggregate circulation of the magazines. [11] Yet while monthly issues had a shelf life of one month, phonograph records individually survived on a logic of repetition. Even more than print media of the time, records were repeated cultural experiences, literally played again and again and again. This distinction seems central to the meaning of the home phonograph as an element of mass culture: When a woman took down a box of Uneeda or opened a package of Sapolio, the brand name was familiar and the biscuit or the soap was continuous with the contents in previous tins or packages. All Uneeda biscuits looked the same, and that sameness formed part of the magic of standardized mass production. It was "magic" in part because as much as the biscuits looked the same, they really were different. By contrast the phonograph introduced the intensity of true repetition to the performance of mass markets.

When American consumers went mad for the best-selling novel Trilby, for example, (serialized by Harpers in 1894) they entered a world of mass consumption characterized by the apparent seamlessness of connections enacted between fiction, advertising, illustration, drama, and dry goods: Trilby hats, Trilby dolls, Trilby shoes, and more. [12]This was just when the amusement phonograph was earning its appeal, and, as the recording engineer Frank Gaisberg recalled,

Americans could eat ice-cream versions of the character Trilby's shapely feet (her feet are important in the novel), but they could also, as Gaisberg did, actively reproduce the strains of Trilby's love lorn suitor, Little Billie. Each of these acts of consumption -- eating ice-cream feet, wearing your Trilby shoes or wearing down your record of "Ben Bolt" -- produces its own meaning, according to the mode, the frequency, and the reproducibility of its experience. Gaisberg's "Ben Bolt" and his phonograph made sense of each other, over and over again, in the context of Gaisberg's home. Such intensity, such repetition had previously been more a feature of musical education ("Practice, practice, practice") than of musical reception. It was reminiscent of the literacy practices surrounding devotional texts, for instance, or literacy in situations of particular scarcity, when a single newspaper or a mail order catalogue got read intensively, again and again, and by many readers. To day we have gotten used to the way in which small children play the same video cassettes over and over again, or the way some idiosyncratic cultural forms seem to elicit idiosyncratic repetitions (Rock Horror Picture Show, The Wizard of Oz, e.g.), but adult American culture consumes and discards, reads and recycles, buys extensively and buys some more. Phonograph records, tapes, CDS, and video cassettes all counter that trend; part of their logic as possessions is repetition and reenactment, rewind and replay.

I will return briefly to this question of repetition and the role that almost ritualized repetition seems to have played in the social construction of the home phonograph, amid the magic and the desires of the modern marketplace. First, however, it is necessary to think more directly about the domestication of mechanical reproduction. The phonograph was a reproductive technology. It is possible to call it this with assurance because one crucial part of every phonograph was its "reproducer" (containing a "diaphragm"), a term which of necessity entered the vocabularies of many phonograph owners at the turn of the century. And if phonographs thus provoked little changes or additions to the semantic lives of Americans, it likewise came to have meaning within and against existing "discourse" more broadly defined. The vocabulary with which the phonograph was introduced and the symbolic terrain it occupied were all part of its definition, its coming into focus, first as a novelty and eventually as a familiar within American homes, right near where the radio and then the TV would sit further on into the century. Like the discursive lives of those later media, the discourses making sense of recorded sound formed a matrix of

heterogenous, changing, and even contradictory messages. These messages were registered in part within promotional representations,-- advertising, trade brochures, published accounts, and the habits of retail establishments handling the products. Also like radios and televisions, part of the discursive life of the phonograph emanated from the design and use of machine itself. [14] The japanned surface of an early table-top machine or the mahogany finish of an enclosed-horn Victrola (1906) were each suggestions of the way a machine might fit into home decor, while musical records were also representations of music in the home, two-minute versions of a genre, a composition, and a performance, packaged materially and acoustically for domestic consumption. -- Early Columb ia and Edison records started with recorded announcements, and not a few of the earliest records had ended with recorded applause.

What happened in part was the displacement of personification and its gradual replacement with richer figurative identifications of the phonograph within the existing discourses surrounding music and home in American life. Although the earliest phonographs and those promoted for office use were routinely represented according to metaphors of embodiment and gyno/ anthropomorphism, the home phonograph was not. That makes it unusual. Cars and boats remain "she," while many early domestic appliances, including home electrification, were frequently represented in terms of domestic servants or even slaves. When Edison unveiled his invention at the New York offices of Scientific American, he and witnesses alike anthropamophized the device. A decade later, a programme distributed later at Worth's Palace Museum in New York urged novelty seekers, "Before leaving the museum don't fail to interview the wonderful EDISON PHONOGRAPH." Americans stood ready to personify new technology. Among the widely anticipated applications for the machine were talking dolls and talking clocks, cyborgs with mechanical bodies and women's voices. (Both dolls and clocks were attempted, without much commercial success.) Meanwhile the dictation phonograph was promoted as a businessman's "ideal amanuensis," at first gendered male. A few years later, when women made up more of the nation's office workforce, the cover of one National Phonograph pamphlet made a simple equation by picturing a phonograph beside the words "Your Stenographer." In other representations it was the tubular wax record that formed "The Stenographer That's Always

Ready," while corporate propaganda assured wives that their businessmen husbands were dictating to a phonograph, "instead of talking to a giddy and unreliable young lady stenographer." Yet somehow these metaphors did not follow the phonograph into American homes. Playback did not elicit the same personifications that recording did. [15]

Instead, catalogues and advertisements for amusement phonographs and related supplies indicate that claims of more literal verisimilitude dominated representations of the machine. As they had in the imagination of talking dolls and clocks, women's voices continued to form a kind of standard, in this case because they were particularly hard to record well. Columbia proved unsuccessful at recording women's voices as late as 1895, when Lilla Coleman's records were admitted in their catalogue to be "suitable only for use with the tubes -- NOT ADAPTED FOR HORN REPRODUCTION." The Boswell Company of Chicago offered its "high grade original" records in 1898 with the assurance that "At last we have succeeded in making a true Record of a Lady's voice. No squeak, no blast; but natural, clear, and human." The Bettini Phonograph Laboratory in New York similarly claimed "The only diaphragms that successfully record and reproduce female voices." Just as Boswell records were reputedly "original," Bettini's were "autograph records," the telling expressions of unique human voices. (Bettini was fond of mixing his metaphors; in 1900 his slogan was "A True Mirror of Sound.") Both terms meant to indicate that these records were recorded from human voices rather than duplicated from preexistent recordings, a common practice in 1898. It was a distinction between records that may have confused consumers, who were necessarily more mindful of the broader distinction between live music and recorded sound.

Film theorist Richard Dyer has explained the way that film lighting historically normalized white skins, making the filmic reproduction of non-white complexions the special or "abnormal" case. Recorded sound provides something of a related (if inverted) case, in which recorded music was

normalized in relation to women's voices, particularly the soprano. Victor advertisements soon assured readers that "The living voices of the worlds' greatest artists can now be heard, whenever you choose, in your own home." Edison records were "the acme of realism." [16]

Slippage in terms like "original," "true," "natural," "living," and "real," served to emphasize rather than to contradict the apparent power of mechanical reproduction to appeal and entrance: Everywhere Victor's trademark dog, Nipper, sat listening for "his master's voice." The pleasures of that slippage, the contiguity and contestation of imitation and reality, are evident in the mass circulation of Nipper's image as well as in the records themselves. The earliest records were marketed without identifying the recording artists who preformed them. A few years later some of Columbia's recording artists were each sold under many different names. Bettini, who did identify well known bel canto singers of the day, also offered records of "Lady X," coyly represented in his catalogue with her back turned to conceal her identity. Because recordings displaced the visual norms of performance (you couldn't see the stage) they hinted at imitation or ventriloquism in new ways, just as mimicry was becoming so popular in American vaudeville, the particular

province of comediennes like Cissie Loftus, Elsie Janis, and Juliet Delf. Their mimicry and its reception helped open "questions about the relationship between self and other, individually and reproducibility" that proved both provocative and timely. [17] As Susan Glenn, Miles Orvell, and others have described, American culture was deeply engaged with questions of authenticity and artifice, realism and illusion, at the turn of the century. There were celebrations of certain imitations as potently "true," while in literature and the other arts, "the real thing" proved an elusive category, pleasurably attended. In the marketplace rhetoric was hardly as nuanced: manufacturers urged us to "Accept no imitations." Even in the music trades, record companies were beset by pirates, and more than half of the pianos sold were reportedly the infamous "stencil" instrument s, labeled and sold by companies that had not manufactured them (the particular bugaboo of Steinway, Chickering, and the other famous makers). Of course the preeminent claim of verisimilitude available to phonograph promoters and listeners alike was the

surprisingly pliable notion of acoustic fidelity. Recordings sounded exactly like the sounds they recorded, although the quality of sounding "exactly like" has continued to change over time and according to available technology, most recently from the standard of analog to that of digital recording. [18]

In addition to tapping the varied discourses of American realism, home phonographs gradually came to make sense against (and eventually within) the musical practices of the day. To give a complete summary would be impossible, but there are certain "givens" regarding American musical life at the turn of the century, among them the association of home, woman, and piano, and the complimentary though perhaps less portentous association of outdoor public space, man, and band music. -- Both were to be tested by the immense popularity of recorded band music for home play. -- Music literacy rates were high. Among the middle and upper classes some level of musical literacy was expected of all women, and those talents were freighted with the sanctity of home and family. Hundreds of companies made pianos to feed these expectations, and the industry managed to produce 170,000 pianos in 1899 alone. Meanwhile, there were more than 80,000 bandsmen at the turn of the century, some professionals but most amateurs , their gathering, practicing, and playing evidence of community identities fostered by geographic, ethnic, or institutional association. Towns with populations as small as 2000 supported amateur bands, composed primarily of lower and middle class male workers. Music of all kinds had recognized social functions, gendered relations, and moral valences. Opera, in

particular and somewhat like Shakespeare, was both the subject and the instrument of (high/low) cultural hierarchy. Pianos were both the subject and the instrument of (middle) class aspiration. Ragtime was both the subject and the instrument of quickening markets and (racialized) play. [19]

Clearly the arbiter of musical activity within the home was woman, while the most direct arbiter of musical activity at large tended to be an uncalculated combination of sheet music publishing houses, musical periodicals, instrument makers, urban performance institutions, and an army of roughly 80,000 music teachers of both sexes. Professionalization on the civic and national levels was applauded, while the professionalization of women was usually condemned. Musical periodicals carried chastening stories of popular divas and their harrowing lives, while mass circulation monthlies like Good Housekeeping lamented when any young woman, suffering from too much talent or too much ambition, returned from Conservatory and denied "to her father and mother the simple music that they love and understand," ("She has learned that Beethoven and Chopin and Schumann are great, but she has not realized that simpler music has not lost its charm. . . Perhaps she has caught Wagneritis. . ."). To so me observers, women were simply condemned to amateurism. James Huneker, a writer fond of sorting European composers into

masculine and feminine types (Bach and Beethoven vs. Hydan, Chopin, and Mendelssohn), summed up, "Enfín: the lesson of the years seems to be true that women may play anything written for the piano, and play it well, but not remarkably." [20]

It helped not at all that the most successful popularizer of "good" music in the era, band leader John Philip Sousa, was both prone to a noticeably "feminine" fastidiousness, and explained his often popular repertoire as an act of redeeming the fallen. Played by Sousa and his men, a "common street melody" became a respectable woman:

Thus Sousa popularized good music and made popular music good. In his several perorations on the "menace of mechanical music" Sousa deployed similar metaphors to equal effect. The pianola and the phonograph, he was sure, would reduce music to "a mathematical system of megaphones, wheels, cogs, disks, cylinders, and all manner of revolving things, which are as like real art as the marble statue of Eve is like her beautiful, living, breathing daughters." To use these devices was to subvert nature in a world where naturalness and womanliness coincided with seeming ease; "The nightingale's song is delightful because the nightingale herself gives it forth." Sousa warned that these machines were like the recent "crazes" for roller skates and bicycles, but that they might do more damage, like the English sparrow, which "introduced and welcomed in all innocence, lost no time in multiplying itself to the dignity of a pest, to the destruction of numberless native song bir ds." Here were Sousa's metaphors adrift amid gender and national categories in their allusion to birds and description of musical culture. Women amateurs have "made much headway" in music, he wrote approvingly, but the mechanical music will make them lose interest, and "Then what of the national throat? Will it not weaken?" -- Sousa's American amateur loses some of her gender definition directly in his next question: "What of the national chest? Will it not shrink?" His rhetoric was extreme, but Sousa foresaw the deminishment of amateur music with great perspicacity.

In all of its modalities, -- performance, instrumentation, composition, education, -- the sounds, subjects, and spaces of American music were shot through with assumptions of moral and aesthetic value that remained inseparable from active categories like tradition, class, race, gender, domesticity, and professionalism. What interests me here are the translations that appeared available between categories around 1900, which might indicate points of contestation or of change in the mutual discourses of music and home. Among them there were public, performative translations, of course, like Sousa's play across the Popular and the Good, like the adaptive traditions of blackface, or like the success of a few "lady" orchestras. But there were other translations as well, and the home phonograph became party to many. Victor advertisements asked, "Why don't you get a Victor and have theatre and opera in your own home? The Victor is easy to play . . ." (1902), while National Phonogr aph assured that its

product "calls for no musical training on the part of any one, yet gives all that the combined training of the country's greatest artists give" (1906). Both appeals resemble contemporary advertisements for pianolas and player pianos, which stressed ease of play along with salutory musical production, good for the soul, good for the family. [22] At work was a partial translation between amateurism and professionalism that tended to enforce the amateurism of home listeners, not just in the subsequent withering away of live home music making, as Sousa recognized, but also in the celebrated availability of professionally produced music in the home. -- Records and piano rolls were professional in the dual sense that they reproduced the work of professional, paid musicians, and that they were the standardized, mass products of purposeful corporate concerns with which listeners engaged in commercial relations.

Even as home-based amateurism was enforced, the possibility of professional reproductions in the home seemed empowering. In Britain, where similar conditions pertained, Virginia Woof

recalled, "We opened one little window when we bought the gramophone; now another/ opens with the motor [car] -- I was going to say, but stopped." Woolf's image of "one little window" is from her diary, that most private of public documents. [23] Like her hesitant analogy to the automobile, it suggests the role that the home phonograph played as a translation device between private and public spheres. Playing recorded music at home mediated between at home and in public in ways that seem to have offered its listeners a sense of autonomy, however fleeting, that was greatly in contrast with later, Adorno-like assessments of the media as an instrument of social control or collective torpor.

But the home phonograph was more than just a transparent divide, a pane of glass between public and domestic space, in part because neither the public nor the domestic sphere were

homogenous or unchanging. The middle and upper-class parlor with its piano was becoming a "living room," as American homes became more expressive of the personalities of their inhabitants. [24] Public space evolved as well, as an increasingly urban population and a growing number of women in the workforce helped forge what historian Kathy Peiss calls "the shift from homosocial to heterosocial culture." [25] The shift was evident in the consumption of public amusements, as well as in the tissue of outdoor, public advertising, in changes to the patterns of retail, and in changes to the habits of outdoor recreation.

Consider the chaotic social spaces where people shopped. The Victor Talking Machine Company erected a huge electric sign above Broadway at Thirty-seventh Street in New York City in 1906. Visible from Madison Square three quarters of a mile away and illuminated at night by 1000 light bulbs, the sign read "VICTOR" above the usual picture of Nipper. Below the caption, made plural in this instance -- "His Masters' Voice," -- the sign continued in seven-foot letters, "The Opera At Home." The company boasted that 800,000 men and women saw the sign each day. The sign loomed two blocks north of the new Macy's at 34th Street and two blocks from the old Metropolitan Opera House on Seventh Avenue at 36th. It is illustrative in several respects. The "Opera" advertised in gigantic letters "At Home" could not but evoke and resemble the more sedate "Opera" between "Metropolitan" and "House" a few steps away. Stars at the Metropolitan were alr eady cutting records, to be sure, yet there was no simple conversion of Opera House into Home Opera, in large part because the terms of such a conversion were contested by the public and commercial nature of its suggestion. "Opera" seen by 800,000 moving people already violated a central precept of opera as a taste category or as a performance of status definition for a comparatively select few. This "Opera" had as much to do with Macy's, which aggressively sold Victor goods, as it did with the Metropolitan. And it had plenty to do with popular music, which remained a staple at all of the record companies, despite commercial paeans to opera and Classical. Likewise, the gigantic "Home" could not signify a family abode, a refuge from urban chaos, without calling upon the public spaces which served to inscribe if not to jeopardize that sanctum, among them the workplace, street, and store. Then the image of Nipper, as difficult to parse as it was apparently compelling, loomed all the more confusing in the plurality of his "Masters'" unitary "Voice." Was Nipper at "Home"? Who were his "Masters" there? And how was their one "Voice" reproduced on the record player that sat beside him? These unasked and unanswerable questions at once recall the slippage in descriptive terms like "real" and "live" as

they were applied to recorded sound, and demonstrate the extent to which the translation from public to private remained shot through with power relations, indeterminate evocations of taste hierarchies, social superiority, mastery and seduction, all tied intricately to the immense power of mimesis and mechanical reproduction. [26]

The same translation(s) were necessarily evoked inside stores like Macy's, where the "dream world" of mass consumption beckoned. [27] Department stores were not the only stores to sell phonographs and records, however. They were sold in music stores, from the gigantic Lyon & Healy firm in Chicago to small town shops specializing in sheet music, lessons, and instrument repair. And they were also sold in stores where hardware, sporting goods, or dry goods were the main articles of trade. In each of these venues, phonographs and records helped theatricalize the point of sale. Without radio to familiarize listeners with new songs and recordings, phonograph demonstrations were a necessary part of every shopper's curiosity and desire. So called "pluggers" (and payola) tried to influence sheet music sales in music stores and at the music counters of the big department stores. Demonstrations were a recent if familiar part of selling everything from Fuller brushes to cosmetics. Phonographs and re cords put the two together, helping to ensure that home play was re-play, the repetition of a public and commercial desire

and its translation into related, private, personal reenactments. Lyon & Healy offered "concerts" every day, free and open to the public; a live pianist performed, but most of the music came from a Victrola, playing to tired women shoppers and lunch-time idlers in the Loop. Smaller stores sometimes organized "recitals" but were also prepared to play sample records upon request. [28]

Faced with a legal challenge to its sales rights in New York State, Edison's National Phonograph Company did a survey of its upstate dealers in 1906. It was a boom year for cylinder

phonographs, and the survey offers a rare look at local sales operations. Out of 133 dealers visited (some of them also wholesale jobbers), it was notable when one, like William Harrison in Utica, devoted his or her business to phonographs and records exclusively. [29] In Watertown (pop. 27,787) there were seven dealers, one specializing in "stoves and household goods," and another in "wallpaper, mouldings, etc." Many music stores carried phonographs, though some were notably discouraged "that it affects the piano and musical end of their business." In Buffalo there was a drug store selling phonographs out of a back room; in Elmira the Elmira Arms Company was doing well; and in Syracuse a furniture store was struggling. In Oneonta one tiny dealership "keeps Edison phonographs and records to accommo date his customers who are mostly farmers"; "He says when they come to his place for records they are liable to purchase

other goods that they might require." Most carried very small stocks of machines and records, and all save the one dealer in Cobelskill (pop. 2,800) had competition from other Edison dealers in the same town, plus the dealers pushing Columbia and Victor goods. [30] One common situation was a bicycle or sporting goods store that specialized in phonographs during the winter. There was the Utica Cycle Company, the Rome Cycle Company, as well as George W. Johnson of Rochester, who "May first of each year takes his phonographs from the windows and puts in bicycles and on October first each year he takes his bicycles from the window and puts in phonographs and records." The association of phonographs and these other goods unavoidably suggests context for recorded sound. The seasonal equilibrium between bikes and phonographs, in particular, offers a reminder that such goods cir culated amid an economy in a modest sense determined by cultural conversations about New Women and about middle-class domesticity.

Ellen Gruber Garvey has demonstrated persuasively the ways in which bicycles became the subjects and the instruments gender definition, according to which advertisers represented women's bodies and helped construct their roles as consumers. [31] By 1906 the bicycle "craze" had largely subsided, but I wonder just how distant the craze for ragtime and jazz records really was, in social as well as commercial terms.

I have been suggesting that "inventing" or "producing" recorded sound cannot be narrowed to the activities of Thomas Edison or to the efforts of corporate entities invested in the manufacture, advertisement, or sale of phonographs and records at the turn of the twentieth century. To my mind the phonograph provides an exemplary instance of cultural production snatched from the hands of putative producing agents. Understanding its social construction suggestively complicates our notions of technological and media change at the same time that it provides an opportunity to add a little more context to two well studied loci of modern mass culture, the department store and the monthly magazine. In this light, casting mass culture as a shift from a tactile, craft-oriented world to a visual, mass-production one, as Simon Bronner has, seems simplistic at best. Our readings of cultural history must also include the squeaks and noises of change. We must be prepared to explain the intensity of mode rn cultural experiences as well as their extensive range and appeal. Far from simply transferring public music into private homes, the popular success of the amusement phonograph formed part of a profound transformation in the public sphere, signaling new subjectivities and continued developments in the categorization of gender, class, and other relevant parameters of identity and community.

A bit like newspapers or like photographs and other print media, phonographs relied upon a logic of transparency, of pure mediation, that was as chimerical as it was accessory to the imagination of self and community, to a sense of location amid social spaces and forces. As much as their promoters seemed to invoke the possibility, records could never be transparent windows between musical experiences at the concert hall and in the home. There were differences in sound quality, of course, the lacking "aura" of performative origination, differing commercial and emotional investments, differences in arrangement, instrumentation, and so on, as well as the tacit participation that all such differences required of audiences. This tacit participation is that part of media and mediation that invisibly unites us, even as we "all" want to hear the latest recordings by our favorite artists, even as "everybody" knows who the stars are and have been. In the case of recorded sound, mediation seems cl early to have involved assumptions regarding women and their roles in society. It is not just that women were represented and reproduced (Think of the comparable inquiries: blacks in radio, gays and lesbians on television), rather that modern forms of mediation are in part defined by normative constructions of difference, whether gender, racial, or other versions of difference. Women's voices early provided a standard for both the desire and the accomplishment of recorded sound. -- Gender colored distinctions between work and play, recording and playback, business and amusement. Gender infused contemporary experiences of reality and imitation, performance and mimicry. And gender flavored the pursuits of middle-class self-improvement and self-indulgence. -- Phonographs only "worked" when they got women's voices right, just as home phonographs only "worked" according to the ways they interlocked with existing tensions surrounding music and home, with ongoing construction s of shopping as something women do, and with the ways in which users of all sorts wanted, heard, and played recorded sounds.