Musical Labor in the Home and in the Factory

This seminar will explore the relationship between domestic music making, technological innovation, and labor in early electronic musical instruments. Discourses of electronic music, instruments, and media often promoted the view that new technologies eliminated the economic value of musical labor, yet in the first half of the century we also see instruments and media come to signify musical production. Focusing on a case study of the RCA Theremin, the first electronic musical instrument to be commercially marketed, Clara Latham contextualizes the rhetoric surrounding electronic musical instruments within more comprehensive changes to the domestic sphere, where new appliances promised to assist housewives in middle class American homes, which involved changes in audio culture as well. Many forms of musical listening were moving from a public to a domestic sphere via the introduction of the phonograph and radio. The phonograph afforded housewives the convenience of playing popular classics in their parlors without the labor of practicing the piano, just as the electric light saved them the effort of attending to oil lamps. Clara Latham argues that electronic music participated in a gendered power difference in this era, which aligns with a separation of the domestic from the public spheres. 

Clara Latham's research and creative practice focus on the relationship between sound, technology, sexuality, and the body. She has published articles in Sound Studies, Women & Music, Contemporary Modern European History, the Opera Quarterly, and in the edited volume Sound, Music, Affect: Theorizing Sonic Experience. Her opera-drama about the birth of psychoanalysis, Bertha the Mom, was supported by the American Composers Forum and premiered at Roulette Intermedium in 2018. She fronts the psychedelic prog rock bands Starring and New Pope, and is currently working on a monograph about gender and sound reproduction in electronic music, titled The RCA Theremin: Gendered Labor and the Electronic Musical Imaginary.