Music by Telephone, 1891

I spotted this charming short story in the December, 1891, issue of “The Etude” magazine. This is not about payphones, but it comes from a time when the telephone was still considered mysterious and magical, and the lines lightly used.

Worthy of Comment. Music by Telephone.

It is well known that the phonograph will record the playing and singing of the artist and thus give the teacher a model rendition for his pupils to work up to, and we can also hand down to posterity a record of the artists’ style by this means. But no less wonderful is the following account of the capabilities of the telephone:—

Says the writer: “I once spent a large share of the night with a telephone operator at Worcester, and know that there are many pleasant things connected with the business. Generally after twelve o’clock the calls are few and far between, coming chiefly from the newspapers and doctors. It is the custom of some of the operators to make the circuit of several places and tell funny stories, but the pleasantest part of it is when Worcester, Fall River, Boston, Springfield, Providence, and New York are connected by the long-distance wire. Most of the boys of these places are musicians. The operator in Providence plays the banjo, the Western operator a harmonica, and generally the others sing. Some tune will be started by the players and the others will sing. To appreciate the effect, one must have a transmitter close to his ear. The music will sound as clear as though it were in the same room. It is a very hard thing for a person to believe unless he has heard it.”

Every musical person has a still more wonderful way of hearing music, but one not enough appreciated or cultivated. It is the ability to hear by the inner ear the music he has before enjoyed. Memory and imagination can recall and picture past music to the mind so vividly that we can experience over and over again the delights of music heard in the past.

The account of disparately-located musicians forming an ensemble over idling circuits reminds me of lonely nights of my mid 20s, nights spent clutching a telephone listening for conversations on pay-per-minute chat lines. These lines did not seem expensive — I seem to remember paying less than 10¢ per minute — but I sometimes listened down the wire for hours, racking up surprisingly huge bills that punished my $10/hour income.

I seldom said anything, preferring to listen and lurk. The conversations were usually mundane but the innocuousness of the communication did not bore me. I found a strange comfort in the sound, playing it over my speakerphone and treating it as aural wallpaper.

After weeks of silence while listening in on one of these lines I decided to say something. To my surprise the other people welcomed me to this telephonic space, to this electrical bouquet of sound. I had assumed that seniority would rule this place, and newcomers would be ridiculed or ignored, but I was wrong.

The good-natured conversation went around and around, with occasional male interlopers floating through to ask if any women wanted to talk privately. “Any women here?” “Any ladies?” These plaintive questions were ignored, as far as I could tell, but the floating lonesomeness of the voices haunted me. This was in 1992 or 1993, and at the time I guess I had no idea what phone sex was. It would not be until a few years later when the Internet entered my living space that I discovered the realm of sex as it occurs only in the mind. Those years later I remembered that chat line, and the passing voices of men asking if any women wanted to talk privately. Suddenly it made sense to me.

That night I finally decided to enter the conversation was the night I got kicked off the chat line, never to be allowed back. I spoke into the gentle maelstrom of conversation for a couple of hours, honestly enjoying the experience, even if the happiness felt a little turgid and the experience was assayed from such a strangely discrete distance. The people were nice, and I seemed to have piqued the fancy of one woman in particular, a woman named Lisa who kept saying “I really want to meet you!” The slow but certain coming-together of all parties on the call was almost magical. To borrow a phrase from the above-cited story from “The Etude”: “It is a very hard thing for a person to believe unless he has heard it.”

I mentioned that I was classical pianist. In response everybody in the conversation said they wanted to hear me play. I obliged, propping the telephone a couple of feet from the piano, and playing something for the chat line denizens.

I played for 20 or 30 seconds when a shrill and noisy voice broke into the call. A woman announced “Sorry, folks, there’s no music allowed here,” her voice so much louder than the others’ that it was like she yelled through a megaphone. The phone was only about 2 feet away but I could have heard her loud voice from much farther. I picked up the phone and heard this woman (who identified herself as the “owner” of the line) barking at me to stop playing, and telling the others that music was not allowed. I heard groans of dismay from the other callers, the voices saying “Aw, man, c’mon, let him play.” The woman told me to “Say good night, Mark.” The last thing I heard before getting disconnected was Lisa saying “I really want to meet you.”

I tried calling the line again the next night but my number was blocked.

Being telephonically coldcocked like that seemed a little harsh at the time, and as I remember the incident now the action seems too petty and stupid to merit any concern. I was wasting money on those chat lines anyway, but I would have been happy to share some music down the wire like they did back in 1891.

Link: Worthy of Comment. Music by Telephone. Etude Magazine, December, 1891.

“The Etude Magazine“, by the way, is another of my other web projects, one which has occupied a big chunk of my time the last few weeks. For years I collected copies of those old magazines, piling them on my shelves for some future project of unknown direction. Eventually I got to work, investing in an oversize scanner and some OCR software which allowed me to scan the pages and convert the stories to fully searchable text. It’s been good fun, and a lot of good content has risen from those pages. As a classical pianist with a degree in musicology I have always maintained a special interest in those old music magazines, and the task of making the content available to all is one I am glad to pursue. I am also glad to have finally made the Etude Magazine Cover Image Gallery available.