Cultural Hierarchy In America

The public looked to Victor and Columbia as a cultural authority in the field of music and sound recordings. Lawrence Levine in Highbrow Lowbrow: The Emergence of Cultural Hierarchy in America, agues that this led to “the desire of promoters of the new high culture to convert audiences into a collective of people reacting individually rather than collectively, was increasingly realized by the twentieth century.” Karl Hagstrom Miller in Segregating Sound: Inventing Folk and Pop Music in the Age of Jim Crow notes, “Levine is quick to point out that the emergent cultural hierarchy was propelled by racial — as well as class — ideology…Opera and orchestral music may have come to signify white cultural supremacy in an era characterized by the

on Saturday, June 12, 1915, Starr Piano Company’s board of directors called a special meeting to order. Henry Gennett’s three sons and wife, Alice Lumsden Gennett, introduced an amendment to the company’s charter and articles of incorporation. The board unanimously agreed to expand into the phonograph industry. “The object of its foundation is the manufacture, purchase, sale, lease, and use of all and every instruments, machines, devices, processes, and materials necessary and suitable in and about the production, preservation, use, and control of sound-vibrations for musical, commercial, and other economic purposes, including all accessories and parts, and to buy and sell and generally deal in merchandise of kinds similar or incident to aforesaid objects and purposes.” The company’s board secretary, Fred Gennett, affixed his signature to the minutes and the Starr Piano Company entered into the sound recording industry. Fred Gennett stated this amendment provided Starr Piano with the ability “to keep pace with the progress in inventions and appliances, which it is constantly necessary to use in order to meet competition on an equal footing at home and abroad. Among innovations immediately planned to be introduced by the Starr Piano Company will be a complete line of phonographs of a quality worthy of their name.” Additionally, the Starr Piano Company announced its plan to release sound

However, they faced an uphill battle as they were unable to use the patented lateral technology on their releases, but the less popular vertical or “hill and dale” discs. Fred Gennett, who was elevated to the head of the recording division at Starr Piano, spotted an opening to challenge Victor and Columbia’s duopolistic hold on the lateral patent. On December 10, 1918, one of the two lateral patents expired and Fred Gennett believed the remaining one held by Victor was duplicitous and not valid. Fred Gennett intended to challenge this remaining patent claim for the lateral process created by Eldridge Johnson and held by the Victor Talking Machine Company. Starting in 1919, Starr Piano’s newly christened Gennett Records announced in a full page ad in Talking Machine World, that their records were now available in both vertical and lateral