In the first half of the twentieth century, many thousands of Americans heard the sounds of three electronic musical instruments: the Telharmonium, theremin, and Hammond organ. Inventors, manufacturers, and sellers imagined large public markets for each of the instruments, although only the Hammond achieved lasting commercial success. Despite contrasting market performances, together the instruments constituted a major portion of early electronic musical practices in the U.S. The reception histories of those practices reveal much about how listeners evaluated and understood new electronic musical sounds. New York City audiences in 1906 and 1907 heard the timbre of the Telharmonium, a massive early synthesizer, as particularly "pure" and expressive. Over two decades later, when RCA briefly sold the theremin, the instrument astounded audiences with its "touch-less" method of playing even as composers and music critics derided its sound as overly sentimental. When the Hammond debuted in 1935, its widespread adoption in homes, radio, film, and churches attracted the enmity of a community of pipe organ builders and players who decried the new instrument's timbre as "dead" and "monotonous.";In this dissertation, I engage with studies of material culture, science and technology, sound, and performance, to examine how negotiations among performers, manufacturers, instruments, and listeners shaped the ways in which the sonorities of new electronic instruments acquired meaning and value. Bringing together advertisements, reviews, and archival materials, I trace moments of controversy and change in the histories of the Telharmonium, theremin, and Hammond as the instruments and their sounds circulated through concert halls, homes, and even a Federal Trade Commission hearing. Discussions and (sometimes contentious) debates over "proper" use of these new technologies reveal how physical interactions between the instruments and bodies that were raced, classed, and gendered impacted how listeners evaluated electronic musical timbres. Although these instrumental traditions have merited only scattered notice from musicologists, their histories can teach us much about electronic sound's place in American culture. Mainstream electronic music histories focus primarily on a narrow canon of composers; I offer an alternative narrative that contributes to interdisciplinary conversations about gender, race, and technology, sound, and the agency of objects.
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