Skill-estate from a different angle
American Radio History has added a 1925 book on music in broadcasting by Percy Scholes.

Broadcasting was new territory in 1925, relatively unexplored. Wireless started around 1895, with the original purpose of replacing telegraph cables and emergency communication. The idea of using radio to distribute 'copies' of text and music wasn't part of the original purpose, and began outside of official circles.

Scholes understood the concept completely in '25:

The introduction of Broadcasting seems to me to be comparable with the introduction of printing. Less than five hundred years ago the Classics, the Holy Scriptures, the legends and poetry of Europe existed only in manuscript and could be studied only by the tiny class of literate men. There were no novels and no newspapers. Ideas were preached from the pulpit, and news passed from mouth to mouth. Amongst the people at large there was a literary stagnation. Then came the invention of printing. A great extension of education naturally followed, and nowadays the whole of the world's literature is open to anyone who cares to read it.

To some extent the gramophone has already done for music what printing did for literature. But Broadcasting will do far more, for it makes fine musical performance easier to come by, and dirt cheap.

Scholes on music itself, showing a clear understanding of nature vs nurture:

Music has its times of exaltation as of depression. It passes, in imaginative interpretation, through all the phases and moods of running water. It is light and sparkling as a stream on a sunlit height. It flows placidly between grassy banks and under overhanging willows in happy pastureland. Sometimes we hear it thunder among the rocks; but it may please us best when it glances softly in the moonlight. The ability to hear the message is not possessed by all, and it is the privilege of those so equipped, whether by endowment or endeavour, to lead others to a higher appreciation. Effort is involved before the significance of music is revealed, but the study is not laborious and the reward is ample.

Scholes lays down a principle that holds true for all sorts of combinations, whether music or text or work or food:

The principle of musical form is very easy to grasp. It rests on the psychological fact that fatigue comes from overmuch repetition of anything we do — whether it be chopping wood or listening to conversation. Change is a sort of repose, so that some people, exaggerating, of course, declare that "change of work is as good as a holiday."

You cannot listen forever to music. You want conversation and reading and games and other occupations as your "change." And when listening to music you cannot listen all the time to the same pieces. You want a varied programme if you are to listen for so long as one whole evening.

And in listening to each piece in that programme, you would soon get tired if it consisted of mere repetitions of the same Tune. So just as the programme is made up of a number of pieces, each piece is made of two or more Tunes, generally designed as foils to one another, and repeated at intervals with some sort of intervening matter.

Scholes worked for BBC, assembling those programs with narration, so this was his specialty.

= = = = =

Copyrights and patents have always missed this middle territory of combiners and builders. Copyrights only applied to the text itself, or the music itself as registered on music paper.

The way of printing a text, or the style used by a conductor or narrator or chef or researcher, is not copyrightable.

Scholes's publisher nicely illustrated the importance of performance style in printing:



The choice of a typeface full of ligatures creates an artistic impression that can't be copyrighted.

With patents, the invention itself may be patented, but the tricks and tools and workflow of a craftsman or factory when building the invention are not patentable.

In a stable culture where human souls have value, the PROPERTY of performance has value. Unions and guilds and lodges formerly preserved and protected the PROPERTY of performance in a more rigorous way.

Now all culture is gone, all contact is forbidden, all communication must pass through the official Five Eyes channels, all guilds are gone, and all written laws are gone. The ever-changing sadistic cruelty of demons is all we have.

Even if this year's extreme and perfectly unprecedented cruelty gradually fades away in some places, culture and human souls have been permanently broken.

= = = = =

Footnote: Unsurprisingly, none of Scholes's broadcasts have been preserved. Even though Dictaphones were common in the '20s, radio was very rarely recorded until around '32. The definitive Goldindex of old radio has nothing by Scholes. There are a couple of snarky parody recordings on Youtube. The voice is clearly recorded live on modern equipment; I can't tell if he's reading from Scholes books or writing his own parody.

Labels: Entertainment, skill-estate, Trinity House

  ¶ 1:13 AM