Dear Reader,
I’ve been thinking about John Philip Sousa’s 1906 essay “The Menace of Mechanical Music” a lot lately.
This is, admittedly, a little niche.
But if you’ll indulge me for a few lines—in the essay, Sousa rails against recent developments in music technology, particularly the phonograph and the player piano, believing that they reduce “human skill, intelligence, and soul … to a mathematical system of megaphones, wheels, cogs, disks, cylinders, and all manner of revolving things,” and that these technologies will, over time, deaden the art of amateur musicking, threaten the life and livelihood of professional musicians, and reduce music to nothing more than a commodity to be reproduced by those who own the technology for their own profit. The musical artist or composer would have little to no ownership over what they create, and indeed, little incentive to widely share what they create. “Do they not realize,” Sousa writes at the close of his essay, “that if the accredited composers, who have come into vogue by reason of merit and labor, are refused a just reward for their efforts, a condition is almost sure to arise where all incentive to further creative work is lacking, and compositions will no longer flow from their pens; or where they will be compelled to refrain from publishing their compositions at all, and control them in manuscript? What, then, of the playing and talking machines?” They would have nothing new to devour, and yet they would be all that was left.
You may, perhaps, have an inkling of why this essay has been on my mind.
Sousa’s essay strikes me as resonant of some of these same tensions between art and developing technologies. In my daily life, I see young writers in my classes already used to off-loading writing tasks to machines or who are discouraged by the labor of creation because there’s a technology that can do it faster, can do it ‘better’; I know a number of hobby writers who worry about sharing their work online because it’s been fed to the machines, or inevitably will be, even when they request otherwise. This says nothing about my fellow professional writers, scholars, and editors who must navigate these same issues and anxieties, magnified by technologies that threaten their already often-precarious livelihoods.
Much more could be done with Sousa’s essay and the art of writing, but in the interest of turning back to the business of introducing this issue of Literary Matters, I’ll leave it at this: there will always be literature and the human creation of it, just as there will always be music, despite Sousa’s fears. But I begin here thinking about Sousa’s essay because his anxieties about the integrity of creators and the way art is curated and shared seem not out of place when editing a journal like Literary Matters, the prolonged existence of which is only possible though contributors who take the risk of sharing their labor and readers who take the time to engage with what our contributors offer.
And what offerings they are: essays about the natural world, about reframing our understandings of literary history; poetry that probes at questions of identity and self, of religion and myth; reviews and interviews that speak to the lively, beating heart of creation and creative processes; and translations that seek to expand the scope of the literature and introduce poets and texts to new readers. I hope you take your time reading and that you enjoy the experience of reveling in human-wrought creation that, to borrow from Sousa again, “teaches all that is beautiful in this world … [unhampered by] a machine that tells the story day by day, without variation, without soul, barren of the joy, the passion, the ardor that is the inheritance of man alone.” Many thanks to you all, and to my fellow editors, for making this issue, replete with joy and passion and ardor, come to life.
Emily Grace