Printed songs and recorded songs in the Belle Époque: Competition or complementarity?

Résumé 0

Two moments in the 19th century revolutionised the way songs circulated: in 1851 the creation of the SACEM, for one, pushed authors, whether songwriters or composers, into depositing their songs and their music in order to be paid for their use. The musical publishing world followed this movement by publishing more and more single songs and by inventing a format that served to identify songs until the 1960s: the “small format” offering the song’s stand-alone melodic line and its words. On the other hand, the invention of the phonograph in 1877 put the song on the path of music’s sound industry by strongly putting into question songs’ ephemeral nature not only for their listeners but also for all the agents of their production. It represented the equivalent not only of the mode of listening but also of the perception of these musical objects. This paper focuses on showing the diversity and the necessary complementarity of printed and recorded media for the study of song in the France of the end of the 1880s to 1914.