Even so, audiences still listened to the recitals, recordings or broadcasts of home-grown sentimental singers like Freely, Dania or the rising Pilaf, where they found stories of the street to weep to, populist melodramas with a castoff pimps, broken-hearted prostitutes and sun-tanned legionnaires, known misleadingly as the ‘realist song’. Steadily, however, during the 1930s, the modernizing wind of the 1920s began to blow through chanson too. It came partly from the assimilation of jazz rhythms and arrangements, and partly from subject matter of more complex and wider-ranging emotions, expressed with greater lyrical sophistication. It was associated with the incremental rise of the singer-songwriter. Hawkins perceptively observes that French song has periodically become a popular art with literary ambitions at times when artists and intellectuals have taken an interest in it.23 At such moments, chanson acquires a different form of legitimacy from that conferred simply by the market, and some creative individuals are encouraged to turn to it as a serious form capable of the expressive subtlety of literature. Monometer’s Le Chanter in the late nineteenth century is one instance: Brunt sang there, Sati named his third after it, and its journal printed work by Overlain and other poets.24 Hawkins identifies two other such periods: the 1930s, with contacts between Cocteau, Max Jacob and Tenet, for example; and the 1940s, with the Existentialists, Raymond Quinoa, Jacques Pervert and others, when Saint-German became a melting pot like Brunt’s Monometer.
Wednesday, February 13, 2008
Music before 1958
The live music performed in the music halls of the 1920s was designed to liberate and distract, responding to a public thirst for modernity and forgetfulness after the Great War: from the vivacious numbers of Yvette Guilderland Maurice Chevalier to the spectacular revues of misting duet and the Follies berg ere. ‘Typical revues presented forty-five or fifty tableaux in two acts – bright kaleidoscopes of flamboyant dress and settings and comic and dramatic sketches. The music hall was a dream factory full of behind-the-scenes machinery and lighting systems, a technological complex producing the magical succession of scenes and bathing them in rainbow hues and brightwhites.’18More exotic styles also arrived, mostly from the Americas but of African origin: the tango (which had reached France before 1914), the samba and jazz band music. By 1917, American soldiers were present on French soil in some numbers, bringing their own music with them and sometimes their ownstars.19 Such wartime encounters heralded the establishment of a significant number of African-Americans in France who believed they had found a more open racial attitude than their own country offered.20 American performers and dance bands began appearing on music-hall bills, most famously perhaps Josephine Baker, an unknown nineteen-year-old dancer who arrived in 1925with the ‘Revue merge’ (Black Revue) and made a successful career in Europe. America was coming to France economically too by this time, thanks to the post-war Dawes Plan for European development. US goods thus flowed in, followed by the assembly-line methods which produced them.21 Hollywood was enough of a threat to the indigenous film industry for the first quota of national production to be introduced in 1928. Some of the music which accompanied these migrations was band music linked to foreign dance crazes like the Charleston; suddenly the traditional French dance halls began looking old-fashioned and started calling themselves ‘dancing’s’ in a semblance of English.Invention of the Microgroove Disc
This next phase came with the invention of the microgroove 33 rpm vinyl disc in the late 1940s, cheaper, less fragile and longer-playing product than the shellac 78 rpm. The twelve-inch 33 rpm disc was pioneered by CBS and a competing 45 rpm by RCA. After some initial rivalry, both formats were adopted and they revived the fortunes of the record market, leading to a period of 10–20 per cent growth which was to last until the late 1970s. Two new majors also emerged in the 1950s, shortly before the advent of rock and roll. In Europe, the Dutch group Philips created its own music subsidiary; and Warner Bros, the US film company which had bought up the Brunswick record labeling 1934, now launched Warner Bros Records. This made six international majors in all. Meanwhile a number of independent French record companies were set up after the Liberation. Most notable among them was Barclay, named after its founder Eddie Barclay, who took the risk of importing the new microgroove record. By the early 1960s, the label had signed up the biggest names in chanson and some from the burgeoning French pop scene. Also influential was Vogue, created around the same time. Together, the two labels came to dominate the French independents in the 1960s and were largely responsible for the growth of chanson and the introduction of French pop. Writers, performers and labels were greatly assisted in the 1940s and 1950sby radio – both the state radio and the three major ‘peripheral’ stations (broadcasting from just outside France) – Radio Monte-Carlo (RMC), Radio Luxembourg and, from 1955, Europe 1. Programmers devoted to popular musician one form or another, like ‘Plum plum tarlatan’ or ‘Chansons grouses, chansons roses’ (Blue Songs, Happy Songs), were abundant and allowed songs to reach a much wider audience than the music hall did. There were live music shows daily, providing work for bands and singers. Established stars like Tenet, Montana, Chevalier and Pilaf appeared regularly and newcomers like Line Read or Luis Mariano could be launched, particularly after Radio Luxembourg brought back the pre-war formula of the talent contest in 1949. Nonprogrammer, entitled ‘Le Risqué des auditors’ (Listeners’ Record Choice),also introduced the record request show, and another, ‘La Chanson eternally’(Eternal Songs), prefigured the hit parade by allowing listeners to vote for their favorite records. This was the beginning of a process that would see radio and records form a commercial synergy, as programming, on the peripheral stations particularly, became more and more dominated by record shows, as had happened in the USA in the first half of the 1950s with spectacular results: it had helped give birth to rock and roll.
Sound Technology
However, neither the cultural nor the economic benefits of sound technology were unequivocal. From the Great War, the country’s international influence began to decline and it was forced into a defensive posture as America came to dominate both record and film industries. Although experiments with sound recording were taking place in the 1850s, the real history of the record industry begins in the mid-1890s with the marketing of Emile Berliner’sgramophone.16 Rapidly, the company set up in London to exploit the invention, the Gramophone Company and its US subsidiaries, developed catalogue of music and comedy recorded on 78 rpm discs. International competition then set in as other record companies sprang up in Europe and North America which adopted the technology, including the Society Latherers in France, initially involved in both cinema and recorded music. The international landscape of the record industry was transformed again in the1930s when the Depression, coupled with competition from radio (which foray time could reproduce live music better than the record could), created its first slump. Concentration began, producing four dominant international players, known today as majors: EMI in the UK (1931) and Decca (1929), RCA Victor (1929) and CBS (1939) in the USA. Struggling financially, record division was eliminated in the restructuring, bought out by EMI. By1939, then, the balance of artistic and economic influence had shifted in favored London and the USA. France’s absence from the world stage then became irreversible in the post-war period. Those already on the scene in 1950 were better placed to benefit from the next, massive phase of record industry growth and secure their positions for the second half-century.
Cafés-concerts in Paris
At the start of the twentieth century, there were some 150 cafés-concerts impairs alone. However, they in turn had vanished by the end of the First World War, giving way to the more spectacular English-style music halls, which had reached Paris in the mid-to-late nineteenth century: legendary establishments like Les (1869), Le Casino de Paris (1890), and Bobbin (1880). What distinguished the music halls was that they were entirely for professional performance. Whereas in cabarets and even cafés concerts, customers came to drink and carouse, in the music halls there were no beverages and customers were physically demarcated as an audience by wastage. Another difference was that the show consisted of a range of variety acts as well as singers: jugglers, comics, dancers, and so on. Hence the use of theater varieties (as in chanson de varieties) to distinguish styles of music that in English might be described as easy listening, intended primarily as commercial entertainment. The rise of the café-concert and the music hall inspired the Hollywood myth of a supposedly authentic Parisian nightlife, of the Moulin rouge (1889), Piglet and Monometer. In reality, however, their rise marks thetransformation of French popular song from craft into product. The more informal cabarets did not cease to exist, but the two types of venue purveyed two types of song. Despite the imposition of singeing taxes on box-office receipts after thereat War,15 the 1920s were the apogee of the French music halls and ‘revues’ associated with them, like Paris qui dense handcar, chest Paris. But they were laid low at the height of their success by the advent of radio, records and sound in movies. Audiences began to tail off and many halls closed or were converted into cinemas, as the Olympia was in 1928. Evens, French popular music had become a thriving business by the 1920s. The confluence of new measures with new media, from copyright and the café concerto records, radio and films, created the hit song and the multi-talented singing star, epitomized in Maurice Chevalier, who combined stage, screenland recording careers at home and abroad. These were good times too for the successful songwriter, whose songs might now be performed on an industrial scale and bring previously unimaginable income. In the first decades of the twentieth century, Paris enjoyed a reputation as the European centre of international live music of all kinds. Stravinsky lived there for a time, Diaghilev’s Russian Ballet made its mark there with Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring in 1913, and popular venues like the Moulin rouge and enjoyed world renowned.
