Skivspeldosan som ett nytt musikmedium i Norge cirka 1890

Abstract

This article shows how the two-part mechanical instrument culture, here represented by the disc musical box, was established in Norway fairly immediately after its innovation and emerged throughout the country. At first, non-specialized actors – department stores, minute dealers etc. – without any direct connection to music culture, imported and distributed the new instruments. Gradually, music & instrument dealers dominated the advertisements for disc musical boxes. Advertising was at its most intense for a short period in the mid-1890s. The disc musical box inherited distribution channels that had emerged through the music industry a generation earlier: publishers, retailers, traders, repair shops, etc. Behaviors and concepts were also taken over from the piano playing tradition. The disc musical box’s repertoire was genre-wise similar to the contemporary piano scores, although the international titles dominated the former. Possibly this contributed to consumers encountering a partly new repertoire through the boxes. By dividing the jukebox into two arenas of use, home use and the public market, a few different areas of use can be sensed for it: as aesthetic enjoyment and symbolic representation and as entertainment, but also as a contribution to continuity and stability within the culture. In the article it is also shown numerous examples of the ingenuity of advertisers in terms of potential uses. The music analysis shows how music arranged for record jukebox was skillfully adapted to the instrument’s idiom, in terms of tonal properties, new possibilities for articulation and dynamics as well as limited time frames (temporality) and tonal range, which also explain the deviations from the sheet music. In all this contributes to an argumentation that the disc music box is an early example of mediatization.