Metal Mechanical Music

DANGER!

The AFofM speaks:

Joseph N. Weber, president of the American Federation of Musicians, said in the March 1931 issue of Modern Mechanix,

The time is coming fast when the only living thing around a motion picture house will be the person who sells you your ticket. Everything else will be mechanical. Canned drama, canned music, canned vaudeville. We think the public will tire of mechanical music and will want the real thing. We are not against scientific development of any kind, but it must not come at the expense of art. We are not opposing industrial progress. We are not even opposing mechanical music except where it is used as a profiteering instrument for artistic debasement.

The campaign to keep “real” music and “real” art in theaters was vicious. The robot represented everything that was artificial and threatening to the establishment of musicians who played live music. The campaign called out for the public to join in the fight. They were to save the art of music from “debasement.”

An advertisement in the June 5, 1930, Bradford Era of Bradford, Pa., decried the Hollywood movie machine that an established industry is now trying to protect: “300 musicians in Hollywood supply all the ‘music’ offered in thousands of theatres. Can such a tiny reservoir of talent nurture artistic progress?” The irony, of course, is that today the music industry is battling to protect recorded music. Protectionist policies to save the old business models of newspapers, movies, and recorded music mimic those of history.

So it goes.

Magnus, Robot Fighter?