{"id":1036,"date":"2022-02-24T18:37:03","date_gmt":"2022-02-24T17:37:03","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.mdw.ac.at\/mdwpress\/wordpress\/?p=1036"},"modified":"2025-08-13T11:15:27","modified_gmt":"2025-08-13T09:15:27","slug":"entrepreneurial-tapists","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.mdw.ac.at\/mdwpress\/en\/entrepreneurial-tapists\/","title":{"rendered":"Entrepreneurial Tapists"},"content":{"rendered":"

Underground Music Reproduction and Distribution in the US and USSR, 1960s and 1970s<\/h2>\n

Marsha Siefert<\/em><\/h3>\n

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Abstract:<\/b> This chapter takes a participatory approach to the reproduction of live music performance by looking at the history of \u201cbootleg\u201d sound recordings in two formations during the 1960s and 1970s. The first builds on the history of how opera lovers, mostly in concert and sometimes in conflict with formal opera institutions and commercial recording companies, created their own community for reproduced live opera performances through surreptitious live recording, record producing, distributing, cataloging, trading, and collecting. I will relate these activities to the world of magnitizdat, the live music recordings in the USSR that were also reproduced and circulated through trusted networks. The aim of looking at both of these twentieth\u2010century forms of music reproduction is to ask questions about how music listeners responded to perceived limitations of formal music industries by creating participatory networks that identified, reproduced, and circulated recorded music that corresponded to their preferences and ideas about authenticity, aesthetics, and direct experience before the internet age.<\/i><\/p>\n

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Siefert, Marsha. 2021. \u201cEntrepreneurial Tapists: Underground Music Reproduction and Distribution in the US and USSR, 1960s and 1970s.\u201d In Music and Democracy. Participatory Approaches<\/i>, edited by Marko K\u00f6lbl and Fritz Tr\u00fcmpi. mdwPress \/ transcript Verlag. https:\/\/doi.org\/10.14361\/9783839456576-002. Cite<\/a> <\/div>\n<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t<\/div>\n\n\n<\/p><\/div><\/div><\/div>\n
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<\/span>About the author<\/span><\/h4>

<\/span>About the author<\/span><\/h4>

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Marsha Siefert<\/b>1<\/sup><\/a><\/span> is Associate Professor of History at Central European University, Vienna. Her research and teaching focuses on cultural and communications history, particularly media industries and public diplomacy, from the nineteenth century to the present. Recent published work on Cold War culture appears in <\/span>Socialist Internationalism in the Cold War<\/i><\/span> and <\/span>Cold War Crossings<\/i><\/span>; her most recent edited book is <\/span>Labor in State-Socialist Europe, 1945\u20131989: Contributions to a History of Work<\/i>.
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<\/span>Outline<\/span><\/h4>

<\/span>Outline<\/span><\/h4>

\nBootleg Opera Recordings<\/a>
\nBootleg Opera and the Authorities<\/a>
\nBootleg Music under Communism<\/a>
\nSome Closing Thoughts: Participatory Music Culture in the Era of Magnetic Tape<\/a>
\nReferences<\/a><\/p>\n<\/p><\/div><\/div><\/div>

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As a historian, reading about contemporary discussions of the digital revolution in music, especially the new modes of reproduction and distribution, I could not help but reflect upon these issues in the pre\u2010internet world. Like the stimulating scholarly \u201crewinding of the phonographic regime,\u201d2<\/sup><\/a><\/span> I, too, fastened onto the role of magnetic tape in revolutionizing post-World War II music and musicking. In music school, I learned about the role of tape technology in music composition and later studied how tape aided song dubbing and soundtrack production in Hollywood film.<\/span>3<\/sup><\/a><\/span> In life, I encountered innovative uses of magnetic tape for music reproduction and distribution in two otherwise seemingly unrelated practices\u2014American \u201cprivate\u201d opera recordings and the circulation of Soviet bard song on tape.<\/span><\/p>\n

One might argue that these two forms from two contrasting, in fact oppositional, political systems of those years are not comparable, or that comparing them must begin from the high politics of capitalism and communism. But I propose to view the phenomena from the point of view of participatory music culture, as was the invitation for the first iteration of this text. Both practices engage people who do not find the established music industry that selects, produces, and distributes sound recordings to be sufficient or inclusive regarding music genre, performers, styles, or aesthetics. Those whom I have called \u201centrepreneurial tapists\u201d adopted practices from the state or commercial recording industries to create their own sometimes parallel\u2014and even complementary\u2014versions of reproduced musical performances they deemed worthy.<\/p>\n

The title of this chapter is emblematic of terms used in the discussion of both of these musical phenomena and practices. Talking about \u201ctapists\u201d builds on the nominative forms in English like artist and vocalist and helps to identify the link between technology and its human agency; paraphrasing Walter Benjamin, the mechanical reproduction of music requires someone to produce the \u201cmaster\u201d copy.<\/span>4<\/sup><\/a><\/span> Further, as Katz has rightly identified, Benjamin was \u201cwrong\u201d about how recording emancipated music from ritual. As explored here, \u201creproductions, no longer bound to the circumstances of their creation, generate new experiences, traditions, and indeed rituals, wherever they happen to be.\u201d<\/span>5<\/sup><\/a><\/span><\/p>\n

Recording a music performance for personal use is an allowed form of participation in both societies, but reproducing it for trade is a \u201cgray\u201d area and selling it to consumers accounts for its \u201centrepreneurial\u201d nature. The appellation of \u201cbootleg\u201d to this genre of reproduced LPs or tapes is also common, although strictly speaking, they are not \u201cbootlegs,\u201d since they are not reproducing music that has been \u201clegitimately\u201d issued by official recording entities; quite the contrary. The term \u201cbootleg\u201d came to be used in the commercial recording industry outside of the USSR with reference to unreleased studio recordings, rehearsals, outtakes, alternate versions, and amateur live recordings that are reproduced and sold \u201cillegally\u201d; now in contemporary music it can even be used to sell these versions of a popular artist.<\/span>6<\/sup><\/a><\/span> Nonetheless, \u201cbootleg\u201d has come to be applied to the reproduction of these recordings for sale or, in the Soviet case, especially in the reproduction of smuggled rock music.<\/span>7<\/sup><\/a><\/span> Arguably, the term bootleg can be extended to the world of state\u2010sponsored sound recording if private\/amateur sound recordings are reproduced and distributed outside the state music recording industry.<\/span>8<\/sup><\/a><\/span><\/p>\n

And how is it best to refer to and compare the circumstances of their circulation and perhaps even the \u201critual\u201d of their communal exchange and listening experience? In the Soviet case, even during Stalinism, the networks among musicians and performers were discussed in terms of official\u2014meaning belonging to the musicians union\u2014and unofficial, for music practices, from composition to performance to reproduction, that took place outside the union\u2019s imprimatur.<\/span>9<\/sup><\/a><\/span> For the commercial recording industry, colorful catchphrases like \u201cpiracy on the high Cs\u201d appear regularly along with \u201cthe musical underground.\u201d<\/span>10<\/sup><\/a><\/span> Given the culturally overlapping play on words from Dostoevsky\u2019s \u201cNotes from Underground,\u201d I have chosen to use that term in describing the cultural milieu for both. <\/span><\/p>\n

The comparison might at first seem spurious\u2014should we not compare forms of popular music, or similar genres at least? In this case, while seemingly far apart, both forms of recorded singing shared values in live performance, relied on an amenity to a taped version, and featured sung performances that, for reasons of content or performance style, would not be appropriate for or appropriated by the official music industry.<\/p>\n

Choosing these two forms of underground circulated live vocal performances also helps to give agency, whether in a \u201cdemocratic\u201d society or \u201clate Soviet socialism,\u201d to those who expressed dissatisfaction with the prevailing music industry choices. Their activities in taping live performances and developing appropriate modes for duplication, distribution, listening, and curating illuminate the formation of \u201ctrusted\u201d networks of listeners. Admittedly, opera bootleggers and Soviet guitar poets are located in very different formal musical communities, much less political entities. However, by looking for the gray areas and paying attention to practices by these entrepreneurial tapists, we can ask whether there is a similarity in the fluidity and complexity of social relations. By looking at participation in these communities, the goal is to show some \u201ccomplicity\u201d or at least toleration\/cooperation in the formal and informal systems of musical reproduction.<\/p>\n

Another reason for choosing these two phenomena\u2014bootleg opera and guitar poetry\u2014is that the choice excludes rock music, which has dominated the analysis of underground music in this period. Not surprisingly, <\/span>the Soviet and state\u2010socialist rock scene attracted a great deal of attention from the late 1980s and early 1990s until today, as <\/span>perestroika<\/i><\/span> opened the USSR to on\u2010site research.<\/span>11<\/sup><\/a><\/span> The scholarly focus on rock, especially smuggled recordings of the Beatles and the Rolling Stones, has played into the post-Cold War narrative about \u201chow the Beatles rocked the Kremlin,\u201d the name of a widely circulated documentary film,<\/span>12<\/sup><\/a><\/span> and emphasized music imported from the West. Perhaps the juxtaposition of pirated opera recordings with Soviet\u2010produced \u201cguitar poetry\u201d can reveal participants\u2019 motivations and musical desires beyond the Cold War political frame.<\/span>13<\/sup><\/a><\/span><\/p>\n

This comparison has some other advantages. It allows us to look at the way in which recording technology was used in creative ways to mirror the formal system of record production, distribution, and critique. The materiality of the recordings, whether they are LPs reproduced from tape or reel\u2010to-reel copies, demonstrates how enterprising tapists establish their tapes or LPs as \u201cauthentic,\u201d documenting the performance, the tapist\/producer, and later curated collections.<\/p>\n

Of course, the response of the formal recording industry to these informal endeavors varies in each country but, as I will try to show, a certain leniency in both recorded music cultures operated within limits, depending upon who produced and who shared what with whom. In both cases the perceived audience was sufficiently niche that it was not deemed worth pursuing by the authorities except under certain circumstances that will be noted below. Often these same audiences also bought sound recordings marketed through record shops and formal organizations, so the authorities tacitly at least recognized a potential synergy for consumers, buyers, and collectors.<\/p>\n

Nonetheless, before proceeding, the stark differences between the music industries\u2014indeed, the political systems and social conditions\u2014of the two Cold War superpowers must be acknowledged. The USSR was a one\u2010party state and cultural industries were state controlled; in the postwar world, the Soviet efforts to improve social conditions and provide desired consumer goods were put to the test in various exchanges. These conditions help to make the \u201cWest\u201d\u2014even \u201cimagined\u201d\u2014as desirable to many in Soviet society.<\/span>14<\/sup><\/a><\/span> Decades of research on the cultural Cold War, embracing metaphors like a \u201ccultural contest\u201d and a \u201cnylon curtain,\u201d<\/span>15<\/sup><\/a><\/span> have emphasized relations conditioned by political systems. Here, focusing on bottom\u2010up, participatory practices does not dismiss these very real differences. However, this essay attempts to look at everyday life as experienced within very real constraints and how active music listeners found ways to create their own cultural practices using the available technologies and creative energies. The perceived power of high politics can sometimes overshadow the vitality and even similarity of bottom\u2010up practices. <\/span><\/p>\n

The impulse to compare or contextualize the practices is not mine alone. In the introduction to a project on French, Italian, and Soviet \u201ccultures of dissent,\u201d the organizers name it a \u201cdifficult comparison.\u201d<\/span>16<\/sup><\/a><\/span> In one of the most stimulating analyses of the circulation of <\/span>magnitizdat<\/i><\/span>, literally tape publishing, in the USSR, the phenomenon is described in terms of its Soviet and post-Soviet existence, as well as in comparison to its paper counterpart: <\/span>samizdat<\/i><\/span>.<\/span>17<\/sup><\/a><\/span> Of the manifestation that I will discuss in this article\u2014\u201cguitar poetry\u201d\u2014another scrupulous commentator recognizes the transnational limits of the genre. By comparing Soviet \u201cguitar poetry\u201d to other examples as a progressive or socialist transnational form, he finds complementary genres in milieus on both sides of the Iron Curtain during the Cold War; however, the songs themselves did not travel due to the linguistic embeddedness of the lyrics.<\/span>18<\/sup><\/a><\/span> Still, the similarity of the phenomena warrants notice.<\/span>19<\/sup><\/a><\/span> Live opera recordings, on the other hand, derived from one of the earliest transnational music phenomena when the language issue had already been debated and resolved in a variety of ways over the 400 years of opera performance. What will emerge as significant in both cases, as will be discussed, is the authenticity of the performance, whether marred by the risk\u2010taking of live performance or the lack of a conventionally \u201cbeautiful voice.\u201d <\/span><\/p>\n

The desire to compare is embodied in the question asked by the editors of the two\u2010volume <\/span>Encyclopedia of Informality<\/i><\/span>: Is Russia a special case? This essay in the encyclopedia, which includes entries on <\/span>magnitizdat<\/i><\/span> as well as other forms of \u201cunderground\u201d text and music circulation worldwide, including guerilla radio and bootleg recording, examines the embeddedness of informality and the way in which informality is associated with formal rules. It concludes that bending the rules may be more about social circle and context than about geography or one particular country and that seeking the area between \u201cno but yes\u201d is a way to examine both ambivalence and complexity.<\/span>20<\/sup><\/a><\/span><\/p>\n

In the discussion that follows, I will describe each genre of bootleg recording in terms of its history and technology, its starred practitioners, its producers and distributors, and its relation to the authorities. The goal will be to see how viewing both practices as participatory can elaborate the concept in music cultures from below\u2014and before digitization.<\/p>\n

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<\/a>Bootleg Opera Recordings<\/a><\/h4>\n
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<\/a>History and Technology<\/a><\/h6>\n

Record piracy is coexistent with the development of the recording industry in the opening years of the twentieth century.<\/span>21<\/sup><\/a><\/span> Fledgling sound recording companies dubbed records for distribution under another label and at least one opera fan bootlegged opera performances on cylinders from his prompter\u2019s box at the Metropolitan Opera between 1901 and 1904.<\/span>22<\/sup><\/a><\/span> Edison\u2019s cylinder machine was capable of both recording and playback, but lost to the Victor Company\u2019s convenience and marketing of playback\u2010only vinyl records.<\/span>23<\/sup><\/a><\/span> Vocal records dominated due to their acoustic superiority and opera arias, while a small portion of the production, lent legitimacy to the recording industry.<\/span><\/p>\n

The coming of radio and electric sound recording in the mid-1920s created a new situation for the recording industries and hence for recorded opera as well. \u201cElectric recordings\u201d relied on a microphone for amplifying the vibrations of the singer’s voice but were still recorded \u201clive.\u201d Radio had an immediate impact in presenting to the public the singing voice \u201camplified\u201d by the microphone, thereby bringing new\u2010style singers like crooners into the recording limelight. Opera gained its regular, though limited, place on the radio primarily through the \u201clive broadcasts from the Met,\u201d which began in 1931. Importantly for pirate records, broadcasts of most radio programs through the 1940s, including the Met Opera broadcasts, were recorded on discs as \u201csoundchecks\u201d and often stored in the corner of a station or network. These soundchecks became a foundation of the opera live recording industry.<\/p>\n

Enter magnetic tape in the late 1940s. Originally used for recording film soundtracks, magnetic recording made possible the mixing of tracks from several sound sources.<\/span>24<\/sup><\/a><\/span> The arrival of magnetic recording meant several things for those who were to become the opera pirates. First, and most obviously, the availability of consumer reel\u2010to-reel tape recorders meant that for the first time since cylinders, recording live performances <\/span>in situ<\/i><\/span> was practical, even if awkward. Stories of how a reel\u2010to-reel tape recorder could be smuggled into the theater in a briefcase, with the microphone up the raincoat sleeve began in this era. <\/span><\/p>\n

Ironically, the arrival of magnetic tape in the recording studio gave the new opera pirates a reason for being. Magnetic tape allowed for the manipulation of recording through editing techniques. Rather than \u201cdubbing\u201d an original performance, now a single track could be dubbed, or several performances could be \u201cedited together\u201d to achieve a perfection not always available in nature. One of the most famous studio tinkerings was when Elizabeth Schwarzkopf supplied Kirsten Flagstad\u2019s high Cs in her recording of Isolde in the Wagner opera.<\/span>25<\/sup><\/a><\/span> Opera afficionados felt they could no longer trust what appeared on disc as a \u201crecord\u201d of a performance.<\/span>26<\/sup><\/a><\/span><\/p>\n

The possibility of \u201cover\u2010engineering\u201d also meant that some values, like spontaneity, risk, \u201cpresence\u201d (a sound engineering term similar to Benjamin\u2019s term \u201caura\u201d), and operatic vocal excess were devalued in favor of accuracy, consistency, and blend achieved, according to opera pirates, through technological tricks. In contrast, the bootleg recordings were valued for being \u201clive.\u201d Live performance is \u201cauthentic, with all its flaws, where a studio recording is note\u2010perfect but sterile.\u201d<\/span>27<\/sup><\/a><\/span> In live performance, the stakes are higher than if mistakes can be corrected by tape. The flaws, the tempo, the high note held longer, the difficult passage taken faster\u2014these \u201cfeats\u201d of live performance become part of the thrill of listening. <\/span><\/p>\n

Live recordings also circumvented the \u201clegal\u201d limitations of the recording industry: singers often had exclusive contracts with individual record companies\u2014RCA, Columbia, etc.\u2014and could not record together even if they sang together onstage. Ideal casts and occasional pairings onstage offered the potential for something new, something extraordinary to emerge on a \u201chot night,\u201d a performance known to opera fans for having superseded the ordinary to a peak experience.<\/span>28<\/sup><\/a><\/span> Even around 1980, when the record companies began to notice the market for live performances, they patched together various rehearsals and performances, sound\u2010engineered into a whole.<\/span>29<\/sup><\/a><\/span><\/p>\n

Finally, the pirate tapes of live performance allow for literally \u201ccollected memory.\u201d Being there\u2014\u201cI heard Callas in Dallas in \u201956\u201d\u2014is a memory that can be collected and re\u2010collected in its retelling. The recording represents an equally important artifactual memory. It becomes part of the collection, and its very specific musical content is incorporated into the knowledge base that opera lovers share and debate. The act of collecting and the comparison of performances are considered an active, participatory way to be part of opera performance.<\/p>\n

Therefore, not only did the bootleg tapes of live performances come to stand, for many of the operagoers of the time, as \u201creal opera,\u201d but also the radio broadcasts, both contemporary and the airchecks of the past, took on added value as an \u201cauthentic\u201d operatic experience. For a few enterprising men, these tapes became the foundation of a small distribution network that bound together singers, record producers, vocal record collectors, and listeners.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n
<\/a>The Singers and their Songs<\/a><\/h6>\n

Tapes of complete live performances of operas were the norm. Some operas were rarely performed, others were obscure. Some were performed with famous conductors, performed with a distinctive cast, featured star singers, or were performed at a major opera house. Some were taped broadcast recordings, so common on the radio from the 1930s.<\/span>30<\/sup><\/a><\/span> Wagner\u2019s \u201cRing Cycle\u201d was a particular favorite, especially since it was less frequently recorded than Verdi or Mozart.<\/span>31<\/sup><\/a><\/span> With all this in mind, however, the pirates became known particularly for their multiple recordings of the divas\u2014the star sopranos\u2014especially those who were less available on commercial recordings and who had voices that emphasized their performances as singing actresses. <\/span><\/p>\n

The one singer who crossed the boundary between the formal opera world of stardom and the pirate kingdom was Maria Callas.<\/span>32<\/sup><\/a><\/span> At last count, there are at least sixty\u2010five live performances with Callas. While now available on YouTube and remastered CDs, her high E-flat in the triumphal scene of Verdi\u2019s <\/span>Aida<\/i><\/span> is one of the frequently shared moments.<\/span>33<\/sup><\/a><\/span> Other \u201cmust\u2010haves\u201d are her bel canto performances in Donizetti\u2019s operas.<\/span>34<\/sup><\/a><\/span> While Callas also formally recorded many operas in the studio, the discussion of her weight and her interpretations backed the large sales of these live pirated recordings. Her voice in particular attracted comment: it was heard as \u201ctortured,\u201d or \u201cshrill,\u201d or \u201cjust plain ugly.\u201d<\/span>35<\/sup><\/a><\/span> The scholarship on Maria Callas and pirate tapes is extensive,<\/span>36<\/sup><\/a><\/span> but one example may illustrate. The recording company EMI had planned to record Verdi\u2019s <\/span>La Traviata<\/i><\/span> in the 1950s; however, they could not include their star, Maria Callas, in one of her most famous roles because she had already recorded it with the Italian label Cetra and was prohibited from recording it with another company for five years. Amidst complicated dealings among companies and agents, it still had not materialized as late as 1968. Into the gap came several pirated recordings that were hunted \u201cwith a vengeance,\u201d with three pirate labels issuing a live 1955 performance from La Scala, another of a 1952 Mexico City performance, and yet another of a 1958 Covent Garden performance; by the end of 1974 at least four different complete performances had been issued on \u201cprivate labels.\u201d<\/span>37<\/sup><\/a><\/span><\/p>\n

Magda Olivero, popular in Italy, was a second favorite, her singing available in at least seventy live performances. After dissatisfaction with professional life and the coming of World War II, she retired, but then returned to sing onstage ten years later in 1951. In the United States, she was known by the mid-1960s through her pirate recordings. According to one description, Olivero was willing to \u201cmold, shove, and mangle\u201d her voice \u201cinto countless colors and emotions in order to serve the music.\u201d She had to find ways to \u201cmake her voice beautiful,\u201d as her art was often extreme and brutal.<\/span>38<\/sup><\/a><\/span> Due to these qualities and her rarified repertoire, commercial companies were not willing to make the investment.<\/span>39<\/sup><\/a><\/span> However, in 1975, at the age of sixty\u2010five, she was invited to sing three performances of Tosca at the Met: \u201cHer prodigious technique and breath control spoke of a bygone era.\u201d<\/span>40<\/sup><\/a><\/span><\/p>\n

During the 1950s and 1960s, the Turkish soprano Leyla Gencer came to be known as \u201cQueen of the Pirates.\u201d She was recorded in pirated live performances in over twenty different operas\u2014some in \u201ctwo salable versions by two rival pirates!\u201d<\/span>41<\/sup><\/a><\/span> She sang nineteen roles at La Scala between 1957 and 1983 but was often compared unfavorably as \u201cthe poor man\u2019s Callas\u201d and so was \u201cshamefully neglected by the recording companies.\u201d<\/span>42<\/sup><\/a><\/span> When asked, Gencer was delighted that the pirate recordings exist and \u201ckeeps quite a collection [herself], supplied by [her] friends,\u201d even though she realizes that the \u201crisk of a bad performance might end up on records.\u201d<\/span>43<\/sup><\/a><\/span> According to the pirates, Gencer was perfect because her \u201cuninhibited dramaticism was, aurally, extremely satisfying.\u201d<\/span>44<\/sup><\/a><\/span> They loved her as \u201cone who prowls a stage like a wild thing confined behind bars.\u201d Hurling \u201cimprecations like no one in the business,\u201d she was perfect to wear the crown for those who valued singing over the top.<\/span>45<\/sup><\/a><\/span><\/p>\n

As illustrated by the record catalogs created by the \u201clive opera\u201d record companies, however, the range of taste and popularity extended beyond these soprano divas. To take an example from one undated 1950s newsletter:<\/p>\n

\n

The September release will feature two complete operas and a solo record. First of the operas is Rossini\u2019s Zelmira<\/i>, initially produced in 1822 [\u2026]. The singers, headed by Virginia Zeani,46<\/sup><\/a><\/span> are excellent [\u2026]. Second opera is the most famous production by the Brazilian composer, Antonio Carlos Gomes, Il Guarany<\/i>, first produced at Milano in 1870 [\u2026] this can also be recommended without qualm. [\u2026] Had Kirsten Flagstad lived she would have been 70 in July. To commemorate her birthday [\u2026].47<\/sup><\/a><\/span><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Or, to take a later example:<\/p>\n

\n

\u201cAn Event of Unparalleled Importance!!\u201d For the first time on records, absolutely complete and in very good sound, the famous 1954 La Scala production of Spontini\u2019s La Vestale<\/i> [\u2026.] Maria Callas was at the height of her musical powers, while her dramatic talents burned more ferociously with each new performance [\u2026.] La Callas smolders with dramatic conviction.48<\/sup><\/a><\/span><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Whatever the performance, whomever the singer, one unwritten rule is that a tapist cannot use a tape \u201cto ridicule an artist or to harm a reputation.\u201d<\/span>49<\/sup><\/a><\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n
<\/a>Recording, Production, and Distribution Networks<\/a><\/h6>\n

Contextualizing operatic bootleg records in the 1960s and 1970s, especially for the United States, requires a market reality check. In 1974 figures, the proportion of the market allotted to classical music was four percent, with opera a very small subset of these sales.<\/span>50<\/sup><\/a><\/span> The American center of this bootlegging and dubbing activity was the environs of New York City, with its Metropolitan Opera among its premiere recording sites. But the network of tapists was worldwide. Enterprising producers of \u201cprivate\u201d opera recordings received tapes of live performances at major opera houses throughout Europe and beyond. Performances were taped in house or from radio broadcasts, and then acquired by the pirates for their special, limited issues. Many tapists who tape for private listening come from the professions, from teachers and doctors to other professions.<\/span>51<\/sup><\/a><\/span><\/p>\n

Among the first to capitalize this venture was Edward J. (\u201cEddie\u201d) Smith (1931\u20131984). EJS records copied the practices of a commercial company, including a catalog complete with numbers, different labels, and a newsletter with reviews of new releases. He created several labels, such as \u201cThe Golden Age of Opera,\u201d (1956\u201371; 566 releases!),<\/span>52<\/sup><\/a><\/span> Unique Opera Records Corporation (1972\u201377), A.N.N.A. Record Company (1978\u201382) and the Special Label issues (1954\u201381). Each of his labels were printed with a catalog number, e.g., EJS-122D, along with a notice at the bottom: \u201cPrivate Record Not for Sale.\u201d He reissued historic recordings, including Toscanini\u2019s earliest Wagner recording with the New York Philharmonic in 1932 (EJS-444A, \u201cThe Golden Age of Wagner\u201d) and on the other side of the LP included selected opera house recordings from Covent Garden, the Vienna Staatsoper, and the Chicago Opera Company in 1930 (EJS-444B). <\/span><\/p>\n

His sources were sometimes studio performances or rare broadcast tapes from the interwar period. Many of the singers loaned their own private unissued and broadcast recordings and some set up private concerts in apartments that were recorded in the singers\u2019 homes.<\/span>53<\/sup><\/a><\/span> Smith sold his records in brown paper sleeves with the center cut out to reveal the label. Just as the major record companies like RCA Victor and Columbia, the pirates were able to request small\u2010run custom pressings at various record producing plants, which further muddled relations between the labels and record companies.<\/span>54<\/sup><\/a><\/span><\/p>\n

At the production site of Ralph Ferrandina, nicknamed \u201cMr. Tape,\u201d a popular New York City producer, the process of copying tapes was impressive. Twenty\u2010six reel\u2010to-reel tape recorders and later twelve double cassette recorders were operating at the same time. Limansky states that all copies were made double\u2010time and of multiple operas. He got used to hearing <\/span>Aida <\/i><\/span>in one ear and <\/span>Tosca<\/i><\/span> in the other, while hustling to fulfill the customers\u2019 orders. He was also in charge of mounting the masters, checking the quality, and keeping the tape machines in working order.<\/span>55<\/sup><\/a><\/span><\/p>\n

Other labels soon joined in the 1970s. Ed Rosen\u2019s label (ERR) belonged to a new generation of pirates. Some were hopeful singers who also befriended opera stars; Rosen\u2019s collection, for example, began in friendship with the tenor Richard Tucker. Rosen also used mailings, but added more professional packaging, libretti, and photographs.<\/span>56<\/sup><\/a><\/span> New distributors arose carrying many \u201cprivate labels\u201d and other collectors, like Charles Handelman, advertised \u201con demand taping\u201d from their private collections.<\/span>57<\/sup><\/a><\/span><\/p>\n

The private record producers created an informal distribution system with different notions of quantity\/profit, different stars, and a different aesthetic for a community that not only purchased but also shared their knowledge and recordings. Information about pirate recordings sometimes surfaced in the press but during the 1960s and 1970s, it was often encoded in otherwise regular catalogs of record and tape sales, ephemeral newsletters, or classified ads. As in other \u201cunderground networks,\u201d members learned from each other how to recognize traces of this underground distribution system and, indeed, to use the Soviet expression, \u201cread between the lines\u201d in stories about opera stars to find evidence of desirable and available material.<\/p>\n

For example, in the late 1970s during the opera season, a one\u2010page weekly newsletter called \u201cDiva\u201d circulated gossip about the Metropolitan Opera and predicted the performances to see (and eventually to tape). An occasional magazine, Opera Fanatic<\/i>, was born from the conjunction of an opera radio show on the Columbia University station, a circulating catalog, and an enterprising disc jockey.<\/p>\n

Many members of the musical community made use of these pirate tapes. One tapist recounted that he \u201ctapes on demand,\u201d often for performers who are studying roles.<\/span>58<\/sup><\/a><\/span> But the largest audience\u2014and customers\u2014for the bootleg opera recordings are opera fans and collectors of vocal art, many of whom intersect the official music community as performers, critics, music journalists, radio show hosts, university lecturers, and sound engineers.<\/span>59<\/sup><\/a><\/span> They are often collectors of tapes and through their detailed description of individual performances\u2014from the interpretation of a given phrase by a given singer to anecdotes of performance disaster\u2014may \u201cleak\u201d information that suggests the existence of a tape, which then adds to its value. Through their program notes and curation, the opera pirates saw themselves as patrons of the arts and as catering to collectors\u2019 legitimate demands.<\/span>60<\/sup><\/a><\/span><\/p>\n

Important communities of listeners<\/span>61<\/sup><\/a><\/span> are represented by vocal record collectors. Early in the 1960s, several clubs were formed in New York City that brought together collectors and experts of vocal art, with opera and art song recordings as their primary object. Some focused on the singing itself, such as the Vocal Record Collectors Society,<\/span>62<\/sup><\/a><\/span> which publishes an annual recording of selections from members\u2019 collections. Other collecting communities focus on sound engineering, especially remastering older recordings, with reports published in the ARSC (Association for Recording Sound Collectors) journal. These groups overlap, with recording engineers participating in collectors\u2019 meetings and remastering\/reissuing collections for institutions like the Lincoln Center Library for the Performing Arts or the Sound Archive at the British Library. These groups also represent the curators of the recordings, especially from the collectors\u2019 communities.<\/span>63<\/sup><\/a><\/span> While the role of collectors is beyond the scope of this chapter, it is worth noting here that the goals of collecting\u2014such as the accumulation of knowledge, systematic classification, as well as \u201crecords\u201d of experience\u2014may duplicate the functions that Benjamin feared would be extinguished by mechanical reproduction.<\/span>64<\/sup><\/a><\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

\n

<\/a>Bootleg Opera and the Authorities<\/a><\/h4>\n

Of course, such taping is illegal. \u201cBootlegging\u201d (taping a live performance) and \u201ccopying\u201d (dubbing tapes for distribution) were explicitly prohibited in the US 1976 copyright law revision and were highly suspect before then.65<\/sup><\/a><\/span> For the most part, however, theater ushers and opera singers regarded the tapists as harmless collectors of private memorabilia. But it is not coincidental that, in the cult French film Diva<\/i> (dir. Jean-Jacques Beneix, 1981), in which a young Parisian opera fan is taping the live stage performance of an opera singer who refuses to record, the two persons sitting behind him are record company executives.66<\/sup><\/a><\/span> Seeking the potential star, enforcing copyright, contracts, and artist royalties all affected into how bootleg opera recordings were tolerated or persecuted at any given time.<\/p>\n

The extended network of institutions involved in the production of opera and its recordings have vested interests in the performances recorded, their distribution, and their interpretation. What the pirates record, how they distribute, and how the fans interpret sometimes challenges the hegemony of the opera institutions in controlling these aspects. Everyone from ushers to record executives knew that taping was going on, but the story goes that most in the opera world turned a blind eye toward the practice as long as the trade was in audio tapes and LPs.67<\/sup><\/a><\/span> A couple of circumstances brought about a showdown. First, the arrival of opera videos raised the financial stakes of circulating illegal tapes. Second, in the early 1980s, the Metropolitan Opera Guild, the Metropolitan Opera\u2019s official organization of large donors, began to offer selected live broadcasts from their own vault of recordings as premiums for contributions and also began to sell videos of Met performances. They sued to prevent the sale of these recordings in pirated versions. Although the case settled out of court,68<\/sup><\/a><\/span> it scared many underground distributors from advertising their Met Opera recordings.69<\/sup><\/a><\/span> The Met also addressed the problem in an oblique fashion by establishing an archive for taped performances at the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts at Lincoln Center. Citing union contracts and royalties as reasons for the institutional costs of circulating<\/i> these tapes, they made the tapes available for study but not for collection.<\/i> The Metropolitan Opera now has an official \u201ccollective memory\u201d but not one capable of being collected. The FBI closed down \u201cMr. Tape\u201d in 1986, ostensibly because he was marketing \u201cLive from the Met,\u201d \u201cDance in America,\u201d and American Ballet Theater performance videos,70<\/sup><\/a><\/span> another of the Lincoln Center performing arts groups.<\/p>\n

But a crack in the legal scaffolding appeared abroad. In mid-1970s Italy, copyright bans were lifted from any performances over twenty years old.71<\/sup><\/a><\/span> This ruling is thought to have been tailored to release the live performances of Maria Callas, which could then be marketed in the US without restriction.72<\/sup><\/a><\/span> However, some Italian companies included among their CD collections Metropolitan Opera performances as well, marked in catalogues \u201cnot available in the US\u201d73<\/sup><\/a><\/span><\/p>\n

According to one tape owner, there is some degree of guilt at the illegality of the pirate tapes, which encourages them to also purchase commercial recordings. And there is evidence from record store owners and even critics that opera fans are in fact the most knowledgeable buyers of these commercial recordings.74<\/sup><\/a><\/span> Other fans stress that they are performing a service by preserving important performances that would otherwise be lost, an important \u201ccollective\u201d and \u201ccollected\u201d memory of live performance and, importantly, of the star and less performed repertoire.75<\/sup><\/a><\/span> According to a curator of the EJS collection after enumerating the numerous taped performances still in the vaults of radio stations and opera companies, he affirmed that \u201cthere is an unchallengeable right of afficionados to have access to the great performances of the past.\u201d76<\/sup><\/a><\/span> The tapists, producers, and purchasers of live opera recordings in effect were in dialogue with the official, commercial field of opera performance and recording, active participants in creating a community that respected and preserved the performances they valued.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

<\/a>Bootleg Music under Communism<\/a><\/h4>\n
\n
<\/a>History and Technology<\/a><\/h6>\n

Sound recording began in imperial Russia with record producers from the Victor Company arriving to record Russian singers in the first decade of the twentieth century. Before the October Revolution, Russian bass Feodor Chaliapin had joined Caruso as a \u201cbestseller\u201d for the international Victor Company<\/span>77<\/sup><\/a><\/span> and three record pressing plants were established in and near Moscow.<\/span>78<\/sup><\/a><\/span> Concurrently, gramophone records, especially from the international Gramophone Company, were illegally duplicated and distributed, inaugurating a history of musical piracy in Russia.<\/span>79<\/sup><\/a><\/span> Despite (or perhaps because of) an emphasis on agitational recordings, the Soviet recording industry failed to thrive until the mid-1930s, when the state began production in earnest and increased record production exponentially in the areas of classical music, opera, folksongs, and mass song.<\/span>80<\/sup><\/a><\/span> Imports from the west, notably jazz, were smuggled to aficionados, some even in the Soviet nomenklatura, through routes later amenable to rock music.<\/span>81<\/sup><\/a><\/span><\/p>\n

In the late 1940s, intrepid record producers distributed popular music etched on used x\u2010ray films. Hospitals were willing to give them away, because due to their flammability\u2014and several hospital fires\u2014x\u2010ray films had to be destroyed at the end of each year. These record producers built their own recording machines by rigging a gramophone to a second one with a recording stylus. They worked in secret, making records one at a time. These \u201cbone records\u201d or Roentgenizdat<\/i>, could then be played back on a gramophone.<\/p>\n

From the late 1940s, \u201cdistributors\u201d of bone records stood outside of the department store GUM or under the Kuznetsky Bridge in Leningrad. Due to the flexibility of the x\u2010ray plates, they could fit twenty\u2010five in each sleeve of their coat! While colloquially called the \u201cribs of rock,\u201d most of the songs recorded featured tangos and popular songs, with a couple of jazz standards.<\/span>82<\/sup><\/a><\/span> The few Elvis Presley tunes (like \u201cHeartbreak Hotel\u201d) represented his vocal balladry not the rhythmic thrust.<\/span>83<\/sup><\/a><\/span><\/p>\n

X-ray records were linked to \u201chooliganism\u201d and made illegal in 1958, while some record producers were sent to prison.<\/span>84<\/sup><\/a><\/span> The ruling may have also been a fallout from the World Festival of Youth and Students, held in Moscow during late summer of 1957, when for the first time live and recorded music of all sorts from all over the world was played and replayed in Moscow. The world\u2019s youth was perhaps less impressed with Soviet musical achievements than had been hoped by the authorities and the Soviet youth were perhaps less resistant to the charms of popular western music than decades of Soviet education would have preferred.<\/span>85<\/sup><\/a><\/span><\/p>\n

The early 1960s saw changes, both organizational and technological, to the Soviet music recording industry. In 1964, the state enterprise Melodiya replaced the All-Union Firm and Studio of Gramophone Recording, uniting under its auspices the sound recording studios located in Moscow, Leningrad, Tallinn, Riga, Tashkent, Vilnius, and Tbilisi, and the manufacturing plants located in the first four cities. Melodiya also controlled the 30,000 retail outlets, wholesaling branches, and arrangements with external recording companies from the west, such as EMI\/Angel and Le Chante du Monde.<\/span>86<\/sup><\/a><\/span> According to one estimate for the late 1960s, fifty\u2010five percent of all record releases (about 1,200) were from the classical repertoire, although they accounted for only fifteen percent of sales. The rest were about evenly divided between <\/span>estrada<\/i><\/span> and folk music.<\/span>87<\/sup><\/a><\/span> According to various estimates, by the late 1960s, between 170.5 and 200 million discs were produced per year.<\/span>88<\/sup><\/a><\/span><\/p>\n

What changed\u2014and challenged this state monopoly on recorded sound\u2014was the affordability and ubiquity of tape recorders in the USSR The first viable home tape recorders became available\u2014and legal!\u2014in the early 1960s. By 1965, almost half a million tape recorders were produced per year and by 1970, they numbered more than a million annually.<\/span>89<\/sup><\/a><\/span> Reel\u2010to-reel tape recorders remained the norm, long after tape cassettes became the standard in North America, Europe, and Asia. The reason for this absence is that Melodiya feared that consumers might purchase classical recordings on cassette and then erase them to record what they wished. Even as late as 1984, blank cassette tapes were rare and very expensive.<\/span>90<\/sup><\/a><\/span><\/p>\n

Magnitizdat<\/i><\/span>, from a combination of the Russian words for \u201ctape recorder\u201d (<\/span>magnitofon<\/i><\/span>) and \u201cpublish (<\/span>izda(va)t<\/i><\/span>),\u201d describes a form of copying and self\u2010distributing of tape recordings. The term covers a wide range of music\u2010related practices in the USSR, from copies of rock albums from the west, music that was considered illegal in the Soviet Union, to home\u2010grown music by Soviet musicians and sanctioned for distribution by the performers but not produced by Melodiya. In fact, according to Troitsky, who wrote about Soviet rock in the late 1980s, some <\/span>magnitizdat<\/i><\/span> recordings were sold right outside the Melodiya offices, as well as at train stations and other locations.<\/span>91<\/sup><\/a><\/span> While ribs of rock were distributed in the tens of thousands, <\/span>magnitizdat<\/i><\/span> tapes numbered in the millions.<\/span>92<\/sup><\/a><\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n
<\/a>The Singers and their Songs<\/a><\/h6>\n

Here I focus on one form of magnitizdat<\/i> that epitomized the intimate connection between the vocalist, the performance, and its reproduction: \u201cguitar poetry.\u201d In Russian it is called avtorskaya pesnya<\/i> (\u201cauthor\u2019s song,\u201d \u201cauthored song,\u201d or \u201csongwriters\u2019 song\u201d). As a genre it is distinguished from other forms of non\u2010classical music like Soviet mass song, composed for individual or chorus, in service of the state;93<\/sup><\/a><\/span> from estrada<\/i>, stage or variety songs; and from folk music.94<\/sup><\/a><\/span> Guitar poetry is also distinguished from blatnaya pesnya<\/i>, songs from the criminal underworld, with which it shares some roots.95<\/sup><\/a><\/span> Importantly, guitar poetry is also distinguished from rock music, especially imported from the west, that also circulated in magnitizdat<\/i>, starting from the late 1960s.96<\/sup><\/a><\/span> The audiences for these forms did not necessarily overlap. As anecdotal evidence suggests, rock music tapes overtook bard song for many young people by the early 1970s.97<\/sup><\/a><\/span> In fact, the \u201ctextual meaningfulness\u201d of guitar poetry was outright dismissed by one of the major subcultures listening to rock magnitizdat<\/i>\u2014the Soviet hippies.98<\/sup><\/a><\/span> The circulation of guitar poetry represents a particular network of taping, reproduction, and circulation that relied on live vocal performance for its sustenance and participatory community.<\/p>\n

The practice of guitar poetry started in Leningrad in the late 1950s when the oldest of the Russian bards, Bulat Okudzhava, began performing his poetry to a seven\u2010string guitar in private apartments. Gerald Stanton Smith, who provides a central and early account, first heard Okudzhava\u2019s voice in 1963 when a \u201cfanatical jazz fan\u201d in Leningrad played him an amateur tape. The fan\u2019s tape recorder, made in the GDR, was \u201cwithout a cover; it needed endless cajoling and makeshift repairs.\u201d99<\/sup><\/a><\/span> Okudzhava had moved to Moscow, after his parents were \u201crehabilitated\u201d in 1956, and he joined the Soviet Writer\u2019s Union in 1961. His songs were personal and, as a war veteran, anti\u2010war, but not necessarily anti-Soviet, with cryptic references to the Soviet terror in which his father had perished. According to Stites, his performance style was simple and modest and his lyrics always authentic, whether in verses about the Arbat or an old jacket.100<\/sup><\/a><\/span><\/p>\n

However memorable the lyrics, they were received as music, the singing and guitar\u2010playing central to their taped resonance and replication.101<\/sup><\/a><\/span> The acoustic guitar is central to its performance and symbolism. After Stalin\u2019s death, the seven\u2010string guitar gained a reputation as a \u201cdemocratic\u201d instrument among youth.102<\/sup><\/a><\/span> It was also inexpensive, available, portable, and relatively easy to learn to play. 103<\/sup><\/a><\/span> For the bards, the seven\u2010string guitar \u201cwas the absolute object of the poet\u2019s devotion as well as the symbol of his artistic freedom and autonomy.\u201d104<\/sup><\/a><\/span> The bards themselves immortalized it in song as the \u201csilver strings,\u201d105<\/sup><\/a><\/span> or as a \u201cfaithful companion.\u201d106<\/sup><\/a><\/span><\/p>\n

It is also decidedly vocal\u2014and sung. Recited and declaimed public poetry readings mattered then, as did those that briefly flourished in Moscow\u2019s Mayakovsky Square in the late 1950s.107<\/sup><\/a><\/span> But the singing voice itself became a marker, an identifier, as well as a dramatic gesture. Platonov describes it as \u201cbad singing,\u201d relying on simple melodies, inexpert guitar playing and \u201cuntrained, often highly idiosyncratic voices.\u201d108<\/sup><\/a><\/span> And yet, it circulated as \u201csung\u201d and could arguably invoke and evoke older singing traditions that were able to blend oral traditions of performance with aural traditions of song genres that gave magnitizdat<\/i> a longevity as song.<\/p>\n

Vladimir Frumkin, a musicologist and Shostakovich scholar, gave shape and legitimacy to guitar poetry as music. His manifesto, \u201cMusic and Word,\u201d109<\/sup><\/a><\/span> read at the May 1967 all-Union seminar on the problems of amateur (author\u2019s) song, held near the Petushki (Vladimir region), predicted that future historians would turn to guitar poetry as one of the most sensitive indicators of the emancipation of the individual, of the spirit of the inhabitants of Russia, and he urged the many bards present to spread guitar song beyond the cities of Moscow and St. Petersburg. His 1980 publication of Okudzhava\u2019s songs offered his appraisal of Okudzhava\u2019s significance:<\/p>\n

\n

Before Okudzhava, the Soviet song industry had virtually no competition from within the country [\u2026]. The state monopoly on songs seemed unshakable. Suddenly it was discovered that one person could compose a song and make it famous, without the Union of Soviet Composers, with its creative sections and department of propaganda, without help of popular singers, choirs and orchestra, without publishing houses, radio and television, film and record companies, editors and censors.110<\/sup><\/a><\/span><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

A second singer who anchored the genre is Vladimir Vysotsky, \u201cthe unofficial bard of the official word.\u201d111<\/sup><\/a><\/span> Vysotsky\u2019s career is emblematic of the gray area between a formal and informal relation to the official culture. He is characterized variously not as anti-Soviet but \u201cdangerously un-Soviet,\u201d arousing \u201cbureaucratic suspicions\u201d whenever he was formally engaged\u2014as a theater actor, as well as on film and television. Remarkably, before his death he acted in twenty\u2010six television or cinematic films,112<\/sup><\/a><\/span> but it was his guitar poetry that helped propel him to a peculiar kind of celebrity, able to comment on everyday Soviet life in realistic terms\u2014and get away with it!113<\/sup><\/a><\/span> He was acquainted with Okudzhava and mentioned him many times in his performances, sometimes dedicating songs to him.114<\/sup><\/a><\/span> He was allowed to record a couple of \u201csafe songs\u201d in the state studio, to be distributed through Melodiya, but his formal albums of guitar poetry were recorded abroad.115<\/sup><\/a><\/span><\/p>\n

The quality of his lyrics is often skeptically evaluated,116<\/sup><\/a><\/span> but as a singer and performer, Vysotsky\u2019s influence was considerable. He managed his notoriety by organizing hundreds of unannounced\u2014and unauthorized (!)\u2014\u201cconcerts\u201d scheduled in smaller towns to avoid the attention of authorities. His audience arrived with tape recorders in hand. To give one idea of the extent of these live performances, an online database lists 245 live recordings of his song, \u201cIa ne lyublyu<\/i>\u201d\u2014with a high variability; the tapes also include his spoken introduction to a song (avtometaparatekst<\/i>).117<\/sup><\/a><\/span> These spoken introductions not only created dialogue with the participating audience but also established the particulars of the performance situation, time, and place. These introductions added value to the individual performances and also allowed fans and collectors to develop expertise on the evolution of the singer and his songs. Toward the end of his life, Vysotsky recorded songs \u201cfor posterity on quality recording equipment in the homes of Mikhail Shemiakin and Konstantin Mustafidi,\u201d118<\/sup><\/a><\/span> but they did not diminish the value of the live performances for fans and collectors; the ambiance of the \u201cbad recording\u201d was also part of the genre.<\/p>\n

Vysotsky\u2019s earliest songs were related to the \u201ccamps,\u201d as gulag prisoners were beginning to share their stories upon their return to Moscow. He also leaned heavily on the genre of \u201ccriminal\u201d songs, sometimes crude, and later added dramatic genres to his repertoire, accumulating an oeuvre of 500 to 600 songs.119<\/sup><\/a><\/span> The guitar was central to his composition. According to his mother, he picked up his guitar, immediately played, and never studied, a claim celebrated in the fan lore.120<\/sup><\/a><\/span> Vysotsky believed that writing the verses \u201cwith guitar in hand\u201d created more dynamic and effective lyrics, with music emerging \u201cas a final step in the creative process.\u201d121<\/sup><\/a><\/span><\/p>\n

Of the major bards, Alexandr Galich\u2019s guitar poetry fits best its interpretation as a genre of dissent. Like Okudzhava he was a member of the Soviet Writers Union and like Vysotsky he was involved in filmmaking, being formally trained as an actor but making his living as a screenwriter and member of the Union of Cinematographers. He had traveled to France in the late 1950s to co\u2010write the screenplay for a French-Soviet co\u2010produced film, Nights of Farewell<\/i> (Tretya molodost\u2019<\/i>, dir. Jean Dr\u00e9ville and Isaak Menaker, 1965) on the life of French\u2010born Russian choreographer Marius Petipa, a sign of privilege in Soviet cultural life. But this was not to last. Galich\u2019s first and last public concert was at the March 1968 national festival, sanctioned by the regime\u2014the All-Russia Bard Concert with almost thirty performers. It lasted for three days and attracted 2,000 people, even though it was held far away from the center in the Siberian town of Akademgorodok in the Novosibirsk region.122<\/sup><\/a><\/span> Among other songs like \u201cClouds\u201d and \u201cBallad on Surplus Value,\u201d Galich sang \u201cIn Memory of B.L. Pasternak,\u201d which \u201ccastigated the hypocrisy of the literary establishment that let the great poet\u2019s death pass almost unremarked.\u201d123<\/sup><\/a><\/span> He was \u201cvirtually banned\u201d from singing again in public.124<\/sup><\/a><\/span><\/p>\n

Compared to Okudzhava and Vysotsky, Galich\u2019s lyrics to his guitar poetry were more explicitly political. Two of his songs\u2014\u201cNight Watch\u201d and \u201cStalin\u201d\u2014targeted the latter: \u201ca bastard not a father.\u201d While in 1962 Stalin had been discredited, such direct criticism implied criticism of the communist system. His lyrics have also attracted much more analysis and elevation to poetry.125<\/sup><\/a><\/span> According to Garey, \u201cthe underground mechanisms that allowed Galich to dodge censors rendered the historical record of performative importance spotty.\u201d126<\/sup><\/a><\/span> As Platonov writes of guitar poetry overall,127<\/sup><\/a><\/span> Garey sees Galich\u2019s songs as a \u201cdialogue\u201d and emphasizes the communal aspect of the orality and evolution of his sung performance. While other guitar poets, such as Yuri Visbor, Alexander Gorodnitsky, and Yuli Kim, also performed guitar poetry during these years\u2014and were represented in the tape repertoire\u2014Okudzhava, Vysotsky, and Galich remain the most prominent in the genre.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n
<\/a>Recording, Production, and Distribution Networks<\/a><\/h6>\n

Even though tape recorders had become available, their quality was not always the highest and increased re\u2010tapings diminished the sound quality significantly.<\/span>128<\/sup><\/a><\/span> The circumstances of recording and rerecording add to the sonic component of the genre. In Smith\u2019s eloquent description: <\/span><\/p>\n

\n

There is usually considerable surface noise and distortion of sound, and quite wide variations in tape speed\u2014repeated copying on different machines may render a voice quite unrecognizable, converting a baritone into a gabbling contralto; there is range of assorted clunks and pops as the microphone is shifted or bumped; and there is persistent background noise\u2014some of it extraneous, like vehicles passing in the street outside, or the footsteps and voices of neighbors; and some that forms an integral part of the genre ambience\u2014the creak of furniture, the chink of bottle against glass, the coughs and muttered comments, and, most of all, the semi\u2010conspiratorial audience participation: requests, repartee with the singer, warm or bitter laughter, pregnant silence at the conclusion of a particular telling song followed by a bustle of relieved tension\u2010breaking movement and murmuring.129<\/sup><\/a><\/span><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

The Leningrad scene<\/span>130<\/sup><\/a><\/span> is described by Vladimir Kovner, one of the most proficient and prolific tapists. He bought a tape recorder on his first payday in mid-1959 and installed it in his family\u2019s room in their communal apartment; he recorded Conover\u2019s VOA jazz programs and borrowed old records, taping romances and \u201cgypsy songs\u201d for his collection. In the fall, his friend brought him an Okudzhava recording made at a Leningrad party: \u201cthe tape recorder had been under the table and the recording was creepy,\u201d but \u201cfrom that moment his songs became an integral part\u201d of his life. In the early 1960s, Kovner\u2019s tapes were played on the radio at lunchtime at the Karl Marx factory where he worked until the party leadership happened to listen. He was also involved in the organization of Okudzhava\u2019s first \u201csemi\u2010official\u201d concert in Leningrad arranged by two trade union activists at the Pulkovo Observatory. While it was not the success of later concerts, by the beginning of 1962, Okudzhava\u2019s growing popularity was indicated by the strength of the Komsomol newspapers\u2019 condemnation of his \u201cpermitted\u201d concerts. Therefore, many future recordings were made live in apartments \u201cwith a couple of dozen attentive, understanding, loving listeners and, as usual, with a pair of tape recorders.\u201d Kovner speaks fondly of borrowing the Grundig tape recorder of his friend, the collector Mikhail \u201cMisha\u201d Kryzhanovsky, as they aimed for quality copies.<\/span>131<\/sup><\/a><\/span><\/p>\n

Throughout the 1960s and early 1970s, the bards performed their concerts in private apartments and were taped with their permission. Friends were offered the possibility of copying the tapes for their own use for free, usually supplying their own tape. Or tapes could be traded as part of the elaborate system of <\/span>blat<\/i><\/span>, or informal exchange, that operated in Soviet society.<\/span>132<\/sup><\/a><\/span> Or tapists would become \u201cpublishers,\u201d distributing tapes hand\u2010to-hand to someone they knew.<\/span>133<\/sup><\/a><\/span> Sometimes an unannounced concert proved an opportunity for multiple tapings by several audience members, multiplying \u201cmaster copies\u201d for potential reproduction.<\/span><\/p>\n

The tapists involved in early commercial operation\u2014to distribute tapes for money\u2014used the sound recording kiosks located in most cities that were established ostensibly to tape legitimate Melodiya records or authorized recordings from Eastern Europe. According to Kan, they were not regulated for a very long time.<\/span>134<\/sup><\/a><\/span> Homemade tapes of the bards began circulating on a large scale in the major cities, especially among university students, the intelligentsia, and academic elites. As compared to other forms of popular music in circulation, <\/span>magnitizdat<\/i><\/span> recordings of guitar poetry began as essentially an urban phenomenon.<\/span>135<\/sup><\/a><\/span> Its audience was, in Daughtry\u2019s words, \u201cbroader and more ideologically diverse,\u201d however and extended to music enthusiasts who might not otherwise be involved in <\/span>magnitizdat<\/i><\/span> circles.<\/span>136<\/sup><\/a><\/span><\/p>\n

The tapes were listened to in private apartments, dorm rooms, and commuter trains. The songs themselves were added to the performance of \u201ctourist songs\u201d on the outdoor student campouts and long hikes that had begun in the late 1950s; admiring amateurs might perform the bard songs live, with guitar, helping to spread the songs, which could then be re\u2010experienced on <\/span>magnitizdat<\/i><\/span>.<\/span>137<\/sup><\/a><\/span> Many audience members brought handwritten songbooks to live performances or shared the lyrics in communal settings. In defending the importance of these songs for community participation, Garey remarked that \u201chundreds of people didn\u2019t get together in the woods and sing Beatles songs.\u201d<\/span>138<\/sup><\/a><\/span><\/p>\n

Overall, guitar poetry \u201cevolved not just as a song genre but as a sociocultural phenomenon [that] formed communities that were never entirely within, yet also never outside of the Soviet <\/span>kollektiv<\/i><\/span>.\u201d<\/span>139<\/sup><\/a><\/span> Skirmishes with the authorities, whether in terms of unauthorized concerts or tape distribution, as well as the perceived (and sometimes real) threat of censorship or punishment, may have added cohesion to that community of tapists, their listeners, their collectors, and their imitators. As the official Soviet composer Ivan Dzerzhinsky wrote in 1965, the bards \u201care armed with magnetic tape. This presents [\u2026] a certain danger since distribution becomes so easy.\u201d<\/span>140<\/sup><\/a><\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n
<\/a>The Bards, Magnitizdat, and the Authorities<\/a><\/h6>\n

In 1974, when Vladimir Frumkin and his wife left the USSR, he brought among other things a selection of reel\u2010to-reel tape recordings of Okudzhava\u2019s performances.<\/span>141<\/sup><\/a><\/span> He had submitted his tapes to Soviet customs officials who, after several hours returned them with the assurance that they were approved for export. Upon arrival he discovered that the tapes had been de\u2010magnetized and Okudzhava\u2019s voice erased, he assumed during their \u201cstay\u201d in customs.<\/span>142<\/sup><\/a><\/span> This story is repeated by the protagonist as well as others to illustrate various aspects of <\/span>magnitizdat<\/i><\/span>. While undoubtedly a personal loss, Frumkin was not prohibited from leaving, demonstrating the relative tolerance of <\/span>magnitizdat<\/i><\/span> compared to its print progenitor, <\/span>samizdat<\/i><\/span>. Like <\/span>magnitizdat<\/i><\/span>, <\/span>samizdat<\/i><\/span> also used an improvised production process and underground distribution system. However, as numerous commentators point out, <\/span>samizdat<\/i><\/span> was most often intensely political and was viewed by its makers and readers in that way.<\/span>143<\/sup><\/a><\/span> The songs of m<\/span>agnitizdat<\/i><\/span>, with the exception of some of Galich\u2019s songs, were not apolitical so much as they were un\u2010political, indifferent, or even disinterested. Various trials marked distributors of Soviet <\/span>samizdat<\/i><\/span>, both physical and literal, while as Kovner remarked, \u201cThey didn\u2019t arrest you for distributing bard songs.\u201d<\/span>144<\/sup><\/a><\/span><\/p>\n

It is not that the leadership liked these songs. But their children \u201cbelted out these songs at home and at their dachas with all the power their tape recorders could muster. The leaders themselves listened to them on their own, saying to themselves: \u2018He’s really laying it on thick, the bastard! But that\u2019s the truth he\u2019s gabbling! Only what’s the point? You can\u2019t do anything about it anyway.\u2019\u201d<\/span>145<\/sup><\/a><\/span><\/p>\n

But neither was the practice without risk. Kovner relates a 1965 search of his apartment; while they seemed primarily to be looking for printed <\/span>samizdat<\/i><\/span>, his bard tapes were \u201cfor the first, but not the last time\u201d in the hands of the KGB. He was then interrogated and summoned two months later for an \u201cinstructive\u201d conversation. He received his tapes back, signed on the back \u201cseized during a search.\u201d He was kicked out of his job as a teacher, though allowed to continue working at his factory.<\/span>146<\/sup><\/a><\/span><\/p>\n

By the early 1970s, the bards themselves were targeted. Phone calls by the authorities to Okudzhava\u2019s workplace at <\/span>Literaturnaya gazeta<\/i><\/span> expressed \u201csurprise to have a guitar player working in the poetry section.\u201d<\/span>147<\/sup><\/a><\/span> He was expelled from the Party in 1972 and a book of his verse plus music was withdrawn from a planned publication, so he stopped performing until the late 1970s. Vysotsky was also critiqued for \u201cprofiteering\u201d and urged to stop this \u201cillegal entrepreneurial activity\u201d by the influential <\/span>Sovetskaya kultura<\/i><\/span>.<\/span>148<\/sup><\/a><\/span> It is probably not coincidental that in 1970 a \u201cSongs Commission\u201d was created within the Writers\u2019 Union\u2019s Poetry section.<\/span>149<\/sup><\/a><\/span><\/p>\n

Galich\u2019s fate illustrates the price for being openly political. A bootleg copy of his songs was published in Frankfurt in 1969, which he did not disavow; this presumably was the excuse to expel him from the Writers Union in December of 1971 and from the Cinematographers Union the next year; he was forced to emigrate in 1974.<\/span>150<\/sup><\/a><\/span> In the words of Soviet poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko, writing in 1988, \u201cAs soon as Galich began to sing, that is, as soon as he allowed himself to be himself, he turned from a successful dramatist quite acceptable to the bureaucracy to an unwanted person.\u201d<\/span>151<\/sup><\/a><\/span><\/p>\n

Was it, at least in this case, all about politics? In a telling 2008 dialogue between two Soviet \u00e9migr\u00e9s, Vladimir Frumkin and mathematician\/poet Boris Kushner, Kushner describes his response to the bards: \u201cthe main source of the guitar poetry was not protest at all, but the natural, inherent impulse of creativity in a person [\u2026] <\/span>Express yourself<\/i><\/span>.\u201d Kushner in the early years did not feel the opposition that Frumkin perceived: \u201cThere were good, talented songs, there were mediocre ones. And when I sat down to the piano, my favorite melodies arose under my fingers. [\u2026] whether the author was a member of the Composers\u2019 Union or not\u2014what did I care.\u201d<\/span>152<\/sup><\/a><\/span><\/p>\n

Yevtushenko also recounts an impromptu concert in his home when Galich and Okudzhava met with the famous Belgian singer Jacques Brel. All sang for each other\u2014and none sang their own songs. \u201cGalich sang old romances, Okudzhava sang carriage songs, and Jacques Brel sang Flemish folk songs.\u201d<\/span>153<\/sup><\/a><\/span> No tape exists, to Yevtushenko\u2019s regret, but their choice of repertoire suggests that it was the singing and the songs, the participatory experience, and the \u201cromance\u201d not of the forbidden but of the melody that invigorated these guitar poets of <\/span>magnitizdat<\/i><\/span>.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

\n

<\/a>Some Closing Thoughts:
\nParticipatory Music Culture in the Era of Magnetic Tape <\/a><\/h4>\n

In writing about twenty\u2010first-century hybrid economies of cultural production, Lessig sees western hybrid artistic economies as combining the commercial and the participatory<\/span>154<\/sup><\/a><\/span>; here we expand these categories to \u201cofficial\u201d recording, whether commercial or state, to \u201cunofficial recording\u201d and participatory music reproduction and circulation. In both cases there is an economic component: tape recorders and tapes had to be purchased, these tapes, whether reproduced in like form or vinyl, had to be marketed, and some type of economic exchange initiated to maintain the informal system. The personal and participatory nature of both the opera and bardic communities of listeners, enhanced by the entrepreneurial activities of the tapists and distributors, linked the communal value of the live performance to the shared community of listeners to its reproduction. <\/span><\/p>\n

The aesthetics in both forms stressed its \u201cliveness,\u201d its humanness (including frailties and variations), over recording studio perfections. Even sotto voce comments or introductions were part of the dialogue with the audience and by extension the listeners to the recordings. Those valuing live recordings \u201clisten through\u201d the technological flaws to hear the singers and possibly listen more closely as well. Applause on both types of recordings helps to register affect and emotion, even if it breaks the musical spell. The live performance of opera can be listened to as a series of \u201csongs,\u201d with applause coming at the end of familiar arias, the composer providing the interludes and recitatives. The curation of both forms\u2014in terms of linking performances to variation in lyric or tone, routine or \u201cover the top\u201d\u2014builds the collector and analyst into the larger community of value surrounding these forms.<\/span>155<\/sup><\/a><\/span><\/p>\n

The remastering\u2014and redistribution\u2014of these live performances through commercial record companies in the immediate post-Cold War environment built upon the practice in both countries of recording radio broadcasts and reissues in \u201cimproved sound\u201d of famous performances. These reissues became a marketing boon with the introduction of remastered and inexpensively produced CDs.<\/span>156<\/sup><\/a><\/span> With new technologies of streaming and online communities of fans, the materiality of the vinyl and tape again becomes the property of and important to collectors, who also are curators of the heritage and producers of expert knowledge of the genres. The shaded area of legality of earlier material forms can be supported by the tapists as archivists and historians, supplementing as well as critiquing official recordings. In retrospect, the authorities, too, came to find value in these past performances, reissuing them when the heyday of their stars and performance styles had passed. <\/span><\/p>\n

In 1990, Okhudzhava restated that the guitar poetry was \u201cnot just a song, but also rather a means of communication, a means of dialogue.\u201d<\/span>157<\/sup><\/a><\/span> By recreating \u201clive\u201d performance, the entrepreneurial tapists were able to reconstitute the social relations of production, reproduction, and participation in a parallel recording enterprise. The communities were built through interpersonal rituals of listening together as well as listening separately but with a sense of audience. The trusted networks of distribution, the \u201cromance of the forbidden,\u201d the \u201cpeer\u2010to-peer\u201d sharing whether at clubs or on campouts, enhanced the participatory quality of both genres. <\/span><\/p>\n

Ending where I began\u2014with the narrative of Cold War\u2014how much has the \u201crule of law\u201d discourse, incorporated into the rhetoric of democratization, been once again challenged to allow forms of participatory cultural creation in our current day. Let us leave with an overlapping of these phenomena. Like the timing of Galich\u2019s censure, in early 1971 the opera soprano Galina Vishnevskaya received the Order of Lenin and a few months later, her name and voice disappeared from the media. In 1974, she left the USSR with her husband, the cellist Mstislav Rostropovich, after being \u201chounded by the Soviet authorities for their liberal political views.\u201d<\/span>158<\/sup><\/a><\/span> On November 18, 1993, she came to the Opera Club of Philadelphia and appeared onstage at the Academy of Vocal Arts to present her translated autobiography.<\/span>159<\/sup><\/a><\/span> During the interview, much was made of her survival and triumph as well as the politicization of her singing abroad. Interspersed in the conversation, held in Italian, some of her recordings were played by the host, the opera critic Robert Baxter. After the hushed audience listened to an aria recorded at La Scala, she exclaimed, \u201cI have never heard that performance. <\/span>Un Pirata<\/i><\/span>?\u201d The host nodded. Galina smiled.<\/span>160<\/sup><\/a><\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

 <\/p>\n

References<\/h4>\n

1 <\/a>I would like to thank Joe Pearce, the late Ed Wolfe, and Seth Winner of the Vocal Record Collectors Society, who have taught me so much about the glories of the singing voice. I would also like to thank Yassen Zassoursky for the Melodiya albums from a wide variety of Russian music, which opened my sonic world. I am indebted to Victor Taki and Alexander Semyonov for helping me obtain recordings at Moscow\u2019s Gorbushka Market, to Karl Hall for an elusive copy of Lysenko\u2019s Ukrainian opera, and to Svetlana Kolesnik for a tape recording of Schnittke in the days before the explosion of online music. My musical pursuits were facilitated by my friends Elena Androunas in Moscow and in Philadelphia, the late Joe Pote. This chapter would not have been realized without Fritz Tr\u00fcmpi, who encouraged me to return to writing on music history. Finally, I would like to thank the two anonymous reviewers for their erudition and careful reading of an earlier version of this essay.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

2 <\/a>Andrea F. Bohlman and Peter McMurray, \u201cTape: Or, Rewinding the Phonographic Regime,\u201d Twentieth-Century Music<\/i> 14, no. 1 (2017): 3\u201324.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

3 <\/a>Marsha Siefert, “Image\/Music\/Voice: Song Dubbing in Hollywood Musicals,” Journal of Communication <\/i>45, no. 2 (Spring 1995): 44\u201364.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

4 <\/a>Elaborations of Walter Benjamin\u2019s 1935 essay abound in research on sound recording. For an authoritative recent account, see Timothy D. Taylor, \u201cThe Commodification of Music at the Dawn of the Era of \u2018Mechanical Music,\u2019\u201d chapter 3 in his Music in the World<\/i> (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017), 50\u201373. <\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

5 <\/a>Mark Katz, Capturing Sound: How Technology Has Changed Music<\/i>, rev. ed. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010), 17\u201318.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

6 <\/a>See, e.g., Bob Dylan: The Bootleg Series<\/i> (Columbia Legacy, 1991\u20132021), 16 vols. <\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

7 <\/a>The clearest definition, derived from American popular music, is offered by Lee Marshall, \u201cFor and Against the Record Industry: An Introduction to Bootleg Collectors and Tape Traders,\u201d Popular Music<\/i> 22, no. 1 (2003): 58; for the economics of tape reproduction, see Anna Kan, \u201cLiving in the Material World: Money in the Soviet Rock Underground,\u201d in Dropping Out of Socialism: The Creation of Alternative Spheres in the Soviet Bloc<\/i>, ed. Juliane F\u00fcrst and Josie McLellan (Lanham, MD: Lexington, 2016), 267, 271, 273. <\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

8 <\/a>Andrea Bohlman uses the term to describe compact cassette tapes that were circulated in late socialist Poland prior to the Solidarity movement. She suggests that they were precursors to the \u201cbootleg\u201d economy of Solidarity itself. \u201cMaking Tapes in Poland: The Compact Cassette at Home,\u201d Twentieth-Century Music<\/i> 14, no. 1 (2017): 130.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

9 <\/a>For a useful discussion of these networks see Kiril Tomoff, \u201c\u2018Most Respected Comrade …\u2019: Patrons, Clients, Brokers and Unofficial Networks in the Stalinist Music World,\u201d Contemporary European History<\/i> 11, no. 1 (2002): 33\u201334.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

10 <\/a>Peter Davis uses both terms in his articles: \u201cPiracy on the High Cs,\u201d Music and Musicians<\/i> (May 1973): 38\u201340, and installments of \u201cThe Musical Underground: A Brief Look at the Tape Scene,\u201d Musical Newsletter<\/i> 6, no. 1 (1976): 17\u201318.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

11 <\/a>See <\/span>Timothy W. Ryback, <\/span>Rock around the Bloc: A History of Rock Music in Eastern Europe and Soviet Union<\/i><\/span> (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990); <\/span>Irina Orlova, \u201cNotes from the Underground: The Emergence of Rock Culture,\u201d in Mass Culture and Perestroika in the Soviet Union<\/i>, ed. Marsha Siefert (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), 66\u201371; Sabrina P. Ramet, <\/span>Rocking the State: Rock Music and Politics in Eastern Europe and Russia<\/i><\/span> (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1994); <\/span>Thomas Cushman,<\/span> Notes from Underground: Rock Music Counterculture in Russia<\/i><\/span>. (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1995); William Jay Risch, ed., <\/span>Youth and Rock in the Soviet Bloc: Youth Cultures, Music, and the State in Russia and Eastern Europe<\/i><\/span> (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2015).<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

12 <\/a>How the Beatles Rocked the Kremlin<\/i> (dir. Leslie Woodhead, 2009). <\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

13 <\/a>For an elaboration, see Ewa Mazierska, \u201cIntroduction\u201d in Popular Music in Eastern Europe: Breaking the Cold War Paradigm<\/i>, ed. Ewa Mazierska (London: Springer, 2016), 1\u201327 .<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

14 <\/a>See, for example, the discussion of the \u201cimagined West\u201d in Gyorgy P\u00e9teri, ed., Imagining the West in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union<\/i>. (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2010).<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

15 <\/a>Amidst the extensive bibliography on Cold War culture, for \u201ccontest,\u201d see David Caute, The Dancer Defects: The Struggle for Cultural Supremacy during the Cold War<\/i> (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003); for variations on the \u201ciron curtain,\u201d see Gy\u00f6rgy P\u00e9teri, \u201cNylon Curtain\u2014Transnational and Transsystemic Tendencies in the Cultural Life of State-Socialist Russia and East-Central Europe,\u201d Slavonica<\/i> 10, no. 2 (2004): 113\u201323.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

16 <\/a>Teresa Spignoli and Claudia Pieralli, \u201cForme culturali del dissenso alle due sponde della cortina di ferro (1956\u20131991): Problemi, temi e metodi di una difficile comparazione,\u201d Between<\/i> 10, no. 19 (2020): i\u2013xxxiv. <\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

17 <\/a>J. Martin Daughtry, \u201c\u2018Sonic Samizdat\u2019: Situating Unofficial Recording in the Post-Stalinist Soviet Union,\u201d Poetics Today<\/i> 30, no. 1 (2009): 27\u201365.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

18 <\/a>Rossen Djagalov, \u201cGuitar Poetry, Democratic Socialism, and the Limits of 1960s Internationalism,\u201d <\/span>The Socialist Sixties: Crossing Borders in the Second World, <\/i><\/span>ed. Anne E. Gorsuch and Diane P. Koenker <\/span>(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2013), 148\u201366.<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

19 <\/a>A comparison that might yield more similarities would look at the \u201crecordings\u201d of international socialism, such as the fifteen\u2010year run of the US record label Paredon, which between 1970 and 1985 produced fifty albums of protest songs and speeches derived from one founder\u2019s friendship with Pete Seeger and Paul Robeson. The label was also produced in New York City, funded \u201con a shoestring,\u201d and obtained some of its material anonymously in \u201cclandestine\u201d ways through an intermediary. A difference with the current phenomenon is that it used a local pressing plant, was funded and distributed openly (although the founders had FBI files), and was not genre specific but political. The inventory was purchased by Folkways Records in 1991. <\/span>Barbara Dane, \u201cParedon Records: Reflecting on 50 Years of Paredon\u201d (2020), <\/span>https:\/\/folkways.si.edu\/paredon\/reflecting<\/a>.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

20 <\/a> Svetlana Barsukova and Alena Ledeneva, \u201cConcluding Remarks to Volume 2: Are Some Countries More Informal than Others: The Case of Russia,\u201d in The Global Encyclopaedia of Informality<\/i> (London: UCL Press, 2018), 2:487\u201392. <\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

21 <\/a>For more on the so\u2010called Mapleson cylinders see Robert Angus, \u201cPirates, Prima Donnas, and Plain White Wrappers. The Record Underground from Mapleson to the Seventies,\u201d High Fidelity<\/i> 26 (December 1976): 77\u201378.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

22 <\/a>Nicholas E. Limansky, Early 20<\/i>th<\/i><\/span> Century Opera Singers<\/i> (New York: YBK Publishers, 2016), \u201cIntroduction.\u201d<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

23 <\/a>Marsha Siefert, \u201cThe Home Audience. Sound Recording and the Marketing of Musical Taste in Early 20th Century America,\u201d in Audiencemaking<\/i>, ed. James S. Ettema and D. Charles Whitney (Beverly Hills, CA: Sage, 1994), 186\u2013214; Marsha Siefert, \u201cHow the Talking Machine Became a Musical Instrument: Technology, Aesthetics, and the Capitalization of Culture,\u201d Science in Context<\/i>, Special Issue: \u201cTechnology: Culture, Politics, Aesthetics,\u201d ed. Alfred J. Rieber and Marsha Siefert (Summer 1995): 417\u201350.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

24 <\/a>Steve Jones, \u201cThe Cassette Underground,\u201d Popular Music and Society<\/i> 14, no. 1 (1990): 75\u201384.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

25 <\/a>Will Crutchfield, \u201cIn Opera, \u2018Live\u2019 Is Livelier, but Also Riskier,\u201d New York Times,<\/i> July 15, 1990, 44.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

26 <\/a>The record industry also made use of voice substitution in more popular genres. See Marsha Siefert, \u201cImage\/Music\/Voice,\u201d 44\u201364.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

27 <\/a>Alan G. Ampolsk, \u201cPiracy on the High C\u2019s,\u201d New York<\/i> (January 29, 1979): 95\u201396.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

28 <\/a>Crutchfield, \u201cIn Opera,\u201d 1.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

29 <\/a>Nicholas E. Limansky, Pirates of the High Cs: Opera Bootlegging in the 20<\/i>th<\/i><\/span> Century<\/i> (New York: YBK Publishers, 2020), 71. In Jan Neckers\u2019s review of this book, he adds European details to Limansky\u2019s New York\u2010centered descriptions. As he notes, \u201cThis is a book for us; avid collectors of pirated recordings from the mid\u2010sixties to the end of the century.\u201d http:\/\/www.operanostalgia.be\/html\/Limansky\u2010pirates.html<\/a>.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

30 <\/a>For the role of the Metropolitan Opera in the hierarchy of performance venues as well as an important source of both commercial and private recordings, see Marsha Siefert, \u201cThe Metropolitan Opera and the American Century: Opera Singers, Europe and Cultural Politics,\u201d Journal for Arts Management, Law and Society<\/i> 33, no. 4 (Winter 2004): 298\u2013315.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

31 <\/a>Crutchfield, \u201cIn Opera,\u201d 23. <\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

32 <\/a>On the complexity of the stardom of Maria Callas in the American context, see Siefert, \u201cThe Metropolitan Opera and the American Century,\u201d 307\u201310.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

33 <\/a>Maria Callas, Act 2 Finale (\u201cGloria all’Egitto\u201d) from Aida<\/i> by Giuseppe Verdi, Mexico, 1951, BJR LP 151, https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=xTjUi_tSzjk<\/a>.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

34 <\/a>Crutchfield, \u201cIn Opera,\u201d 23.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

35 <\/a>These adjectives and more are cited in Nina Sun Eidsheim, \u201cMaria Callas\u2019s Waistline and the Organology of Voice,\u201d The Opera Quarterly<\/i> 33, nos. 3\u20134 (January 2018): 251.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

36 <\/a>David Hamilton, “Who Speaks for Callas?” High Fidelity<\/i> 29 (January 1979); Anthony Tommasini, \u201cCritic\u2019s Notebook: Giving Those Callas Bootleg Tapes a Road Test,\u201d New York Times<\/i>, January 9, 2003; Wayne Koestenbaum, \u201cMaria Callas and Her Fans,\u201d Yale Review<\/i> 79, no. 1 (1989).<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

37 <\/a>This story along with subsequent versions, including the 1980 EMI Lisbon Traviata<\/i>, are told by Real La Rochelle, \u201cMaria Callas and La Traviata: The Phantom of EMI,\u201d ASRC Journal<\/i> 19, nos. 2\u20133 (February 1989): 54\u201361.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

38 <\/a>Limansky, Pirates<\/i>, 103.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

39 <\/a>Limansky, Pirates<\/i>, 100\u201310.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

40 <\/a>Ira Siff, \u201cMagda Olivero, 104, the Last Great Verismo Soprano, Has Died,\u201d Opera News<\/i> (September 8, 2014).<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

41 <\/a>Susan Gould, \u201cLeyla Gencer, Queen of Pirate Recordings,\u201d High Fidelity <\/i>26 (September 1976): 75. By 2020, over seventy\u2010five of her performances have been reproduced on pirate CDs; Limansky, Pirates<\/i>, 113.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

42 <\/a>Nicholas E. Limansky, \u201cVincenzo Bellini: Norma,\u201d Opera Quarterly<\/i> 21, no. 3 (2005): 551\u201355.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

43 <\/a>Gould, \u201cLeyla Gencer,\u201d 75.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

44 <\/a>Limansky, \u201cVincenzo Bellini,\u201d 552. Limansky considered Gencer to be a sort of \u201cbel canto Magda Olivero,\u201d 554.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

45 <\/a>Limansky, Pirates<\/i>, 112. <\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

46 <\/a>Almost all of Zeani\u2019s recordings in sixty\u2010nine major roles were pirates; a commercial recording of selections (\u201cOperatic Recital\u201d) from the 1950s was finally commercially issued (Decca 480 8187) over 60 years later in 2015 and reviewed by Scott Barnes in Opera News<\/i> (March 2015).<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

47 <\/a>One\u2010page postal announcement for \u201cThe Golden Age of Opera.\u201d These announcements were obtained from the R&H Clippings Collection of the Lincoln Center for Performing Arts Library, New York City.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

48 <\/a>One\u2010page postal announcement for ERR Recordings, \u201cAvailable on September 15, 1974, limited amount of sets.\u201d <\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

49 <\/a>Ampolsk, \u201cPiracy,\u201d 95.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

50 <\/a>David Bicknell and Robert Philip, \u201cGramophone,\u201d in The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians<\/i>, ed. Stanley Sadie (London: Macmillan, 1980), 7:625. For Great Britain, the figure is ten percent and for Germany, fourteen percent.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

51 <\/a>One source describes a tapist in the \u201cEuropean underground\u201d who is a judge: \u201che\u2019s a real sneak, but his tapes are unbeatable.\u201d Ampolsk, \u201cPiracy,\u201d 95.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

52 <\/a>William Shaman, Edward Joseph Smith, William J. Collins, and Calvin M. Goodwin, EJS, Discography of the Edward J. Smith Recordings: The Golden Age of Opera, 1956\u20131971<\/i> (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1994). This first of two volumes of curated descriptions of EJS recordings is 795 pages long, with an introduction illuminating in detail the history of both pirate records and recording enthusiasts. <\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

53 <\/a>Shaman, et al., <\/span>EJS<\/i><\/span>, xxix.<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

54 <\/a>Raymond R. Wile, \u201cRecord Piracy: The Attempts of the Sound Recording Industry to Protect Itself Against Unauthorized Copying 1890\u20131978,\u201d ARSC Journal <\/i>17, nos. 1\u20133 (January 1987): 32.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

55 <\/a>Limansky, Pirates<\/i>, 47\u201349.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

56 <\/a>For more on Ed Rosen and his recordings, see Opera Lounge, http:\/\/operalounge.de\/history\/opernfanatiker<\/a>.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

57 <\/a>In requesting tapes of a performer for a birthday present from one of the distributors, I received a printout from an early dot\u2010matrix computer, illustrating the record distributors\u2019 adaptation to technologies for maintaining their collection as well as their business.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

58 <\/a>Ampolsk, \u201cPiracy,\u201d 96.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

59 <\/a>Peter Davis, \u201cLive Performance Opera\u2014Legal and Otherwise,\u201d New York Times<\/i>, June 10, 1979, 23ff.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

60 <\/a>Angus, \u201cPirates, Prima Donnas, and Plain White Wrappers,\u201d 77.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

61 <\/a>One community of opera fans that gained attention in the late 1980s and early 1990s was represented by the \u201copera queens,\u201d gay men who attended the opera together and traded in opera knowledge as a form of banter. This opera community was portrayed in the plays of Terence McNally, notably The Lisbon Traviata<\/i>, which chronicled a legendary performance that was rumored only to exist on a pirate tape; see Don Shewey, ed., Out Front: Contemporary Gay & Lesbian Plays<\/i> (New York: Grove, 1988). Soon after the play premiered the tape was discovered and reproduced. Of the books on this fan community most prominent was Wayne Koestenbaum, The Queen\u2019s Throat: Opera, Homosexuality, and the Mystery of Desire<\/i> (New York: Poseidon Press, 1992).<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

62 <\/a>Joe Pearce, \u201cThe Ramblings of a Once Young Record Collector\u2014New World Version,\u201d Record Collector<\/i> 63, no. 3 (September 2018): 199\u2013214. Record Collector<\/i> is a London\u2010based magazine begun in 1979.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

63 <\/a>For a taste of the immense expertise of these \u201cvocal historians,\u201d see the assessment of the performances of Wagnerian opera in Stockholm according to the Wagnerite perspective, the pure performance perspective, the general opera lover perspective and the vocal historian\/collector perspective in Joe Pearce, \u201cWagner in Stockholm: Great Wagnerians of the Royal Swedish Opera Recordings, 1899\u20131970.\u201d The Opera Quarterly<\/i> 20, no. 3 (2004): 472\u2013505.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

64 <\/a>The standard work on record collecting is Roy Shuker, Wax Trash and Vinyl Treasures: Record Collecting as a Social Practice<\/i> (Oxon: Routledge, 2017), although it is based primarily on collectors of popular music. An insightful study of collecting more generally is Susan Stewart, On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection<\/i> (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1993), see especially chapter 5: \u201cObjects of Desire.\u201d<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

65 <\/a>Edwin McDowell, \u201cRecord Pirates: Industry Sings the Blues,\u201d New York Times<\/i>, June 30, 1978, D 1, 12.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

66 <\/a>Interestingly, an ethnographic study of people who make and collect bootleg tapes of popular music in the US, from Bruce Springsteen to the Grateful Dead, opens with a detailed description of this same scene in Diva<\/i>, noting only that the singer is American but not that she is singing opera. Memorably, they comment that Diva<\/i> is an \u201callegory of devotion in an age of technological reproduction.\u201d Mark Neumann and Timothy A. Simpson, \u201cSmuggled Sound: Bootleg Recording and the Pursuit of Popular Memory,\u201d Symbolic Interaction<\/i> 20, no. 4 (1997): 320.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

67 <\/a>Harvey Phillips, \u201cPsss! I Have Bootlegged \u2018Norma\u2019 for Only\u2026,\u201d New York Times<\/i>, September 12, 1971, HF 1.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

68 <\/a>Crutchfield, \u201cIn Opera,\u201d 23. He also mentioned that one singer\u2014Jessye Norman\u2014initiated proceedings against a \u201cpirate.\u201d<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

69 <\/a>A chronological catalog beginning in 1933 of \u201cThe Metropolitan Opera on Pirate CD\u201d compiled by Frank Hamilton in 2011 runs to 139 pages. Internet Archive, website captured on 13 September 2019., https:\/\/web.archive.org\/web\/20190913000208\/http:\/\/frankhamilton.org\/metro\/index.html<\/a>.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

70 <\/a>Limansky, Pirates<\/i>, 68\u201370. Mr. Tape\u2019s arrest was announced in Opera News<\/i>, January 17, 1987, 6; officials seized 6,833 alleged master videocassette tapes. <\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

71 <\/a>Sam H. Shirakawa, \u201c\u2018Backroom\u2019 Reissues of Rare Recordings,\u201d New York Times<\/i>, October 21, 1979.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

72 <\/a>Crutchfield, \u201cIn Opera,\u201d 1.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

73 <\/a>But of course, they were: In the 1980s I was able to purchase one in a local record store and I was able to borrow a full pirate opera vinyl recording of Donizetti\u2019s Poliuto<\/i> (MRF-31), with Callas and Franco Corelli, from the local Philadelphia \u201cFree Library.\u201d This opera otherwise had not been commercially recorded.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

74 <\/a>Crutchfield, \u201cIn Opera,\u201d 1.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

75 <\/a>Limansky, Pirates<\/i>, 67.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

76 <\/a>Bill Collins, \u201cMining the Musical Underground: Should buried treasures be left exclusively for the pirates?\u201d High Fidelity<\/i> 21 (November 1971): 76.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

77 <\/a>F.W. Gaisberg, The Music Goes Round<\/i> (New York: Macmillan, 1942), 26\u201334, 69\u201376.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

78 <\/a>Alexander Tikhonov, \u201cMoll, Kybarth, and Company,\u201d ARSC Journal <\/i>22, no. 2 (Fall 1991), 191\u201399. The Aprelevka plant, established in 1910, became the foundation of the Soviet enterprise.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

79 <\/a>Alexander Tikhonov, “Neizvestnaya \u2018stoletnyaya voyna\u2019: Iz istorii muzykal’nogo piratstva v Rossii\u201d [The Unknown \u201cHundred Years War\u201d: From the history of musical piracy in Russia], Zvukorezhisser<\/i> [Sound Engineer], nos. 3, 4 & 5 (2002), https:\/\/www.russian\u2010records.com\/details.php?image_id=62731<\/a>.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

80 <\/a>A.I. Archinov, \u201cA Brief History of the Recording Industry in the Soviet Union,\u201d Journal of Audio Engineering Society<\/i> 18, no. 1 (February 1970): 20\u201322. <\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

81 <\/a>S. Frederick Starr, <\/span>Red and Hot: The Fate of Jazz in the Soviet Union 1917\u20131991<\/i><\/span> (New York: Limelight Editions, 1985\/1994).<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

82 <\/a>Boris Taigin, \u201c<\/span>Rastsvet i krakh podpol’noy studii gramzapisi \u2018Zolotaya Sobaka\u2019\u201d [The rise and fall of the underground recording studio \u201cGolden Dog\u201d (1946\u20131961)], <\/span>Pchela<\/i><\/span> 20 (May\/June 1999), <\/span>https:\/\/cont.ws\/<\/a>@dachnik\/430816.<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

83 <\/a>Anton Spice, \u201cX-Ray Audio: The Documentary,\u201d filmed by P. Heartfield, written by S. Coates and A. Spice, 2016, <\/span>https:\/\/thevinylfactory.com\/films\/x\u2010ray-audio\u2010soviet-bootleg\u2010records-documentary\/<\/a>.<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

84 <\/a>Ryback, Rock around the Bloc<\/i>, 32\u201333. <\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

85 <\/a>On music at the 1957 festival, see Pia Koivunen, \u201cFriends, \u2018Potential Friends,\u2019 and Enemies: Reimagining Soviet Relations to the First, Second, and Third Worlds at the Moscow 1957 Youth Festival,\u201d in Socialist Internationalism in the Cold War<\/i> (Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), 219\u201347; Eleonory Gilburd, To See Paris and Die: The Soviet Lives of Western Culture<\/i> (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2018), chapter 2. On the importance of educating music listeners to the Soviet modernization efforts, see Elina Viljanen, \u201cEducating the New Listener\u201d in Philosophical and Cultural Interpretations of Russian Modernisation<\/i>, ed. Katja Lehtisaari and Arto Mustajoki (Oxon: Routledge, 2016), 118\u201335.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

86 <\/a>John R. Bennett, Foreword to Melodiya: A Soviet Russian LP Discography<\/i> (Westport, CT: Greenwood 1981); Melodia: Celebrating 25 Years of Dedicated Service to the World of Music, 1964\u20131990<\/i>; https:\/\/melody.su\/melody\/history\/<\/a>. In 1969, 170.5 to 200 million records were produced per year. Archinov, \u201cA Brief History,\u201d 20\u201322.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

87 <\/a>Pekka Gronow, \u201cEthnic Music and Soviet Record Industry,\u201d Ethnomusicology<\/i> 19, no. 1 (1975): 92\u201393.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

88 <\/a>Gronow, \u201cEthnic Music and Soviet Record Industry\u201d; Archinov, \u201cA Brief History,\u201d 20\u201322. <\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

89 <\/a>Ryback, Rock around the Bloc<\/i>, 44; Brian A. Horne, \u201cThe Bards of Magnitizdat: An Aesthetic Political History of Russian Underground Recordings,\u201d in <\/span>Samizdat, Tamizdat, and Beyond: Transnational Media During and After Socialism<\/i><\/span>, ed. Friederike Kind-Kov\u00e1cs and Jessie Labov (New York: Berghahn Books, 2013), 175\u201389.<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

90 <\/a>Harlow Robinson, \u201cThe Recording Behemoth of Tverskoy Boulevard (On the Soviet Recording Company Melodiya),\u201d High Fidelity<\/i> 36, no. 6 (June 1986): 64\u201365.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

91 <\/a>Artemy Troitsky, <\/span>Back in the USSR: The True Story of Rock in Russia<\/i><\/span> (Boston: Faber and Faber, 1987).<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

92 <\/a>Yevgeny Yevtushenko, \u201cMagnitofonnaia glasnost\u2019,\u201d Nedelia<\/i><\/span> 18 (1988): 16, http:\/\/bard.ru.com\/article\/8\/print_art.php?id=8.14<\/a>.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

93 <\/a>Gerald Stanton Smith, Songs to Seven Strings: Russian Guitar Poetry and Soviet “Mass Song” <\/i>(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984), chapter 1: \u201cSong in State Service.\u201d<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

94 <\/a>See, e.g., David MacFadyen, Red Stars: Personality and the Soviet Popular Song, 1955\u20131991<\/i> (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2001), chapter 1: \u201cSoviet Song after Stalin.\u201d For a helpful disambiguation of \u201cpopular\u201d song in the Soviet context, see Zbigniew Wojnowski, \u201cThe Pop Industry from Stagnation to Perestroika: How Music Professionals Embraced the Economic Reform That Broke East European Cultural Networks,\u201d Journal of Modern History<\/i> 92, no. 2 (2020): fn. 3.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

95 <\/a>Uli Hufen tells the authoritative story of \u201ccriminal\u201d or \u201cunderworld\u201d song from its origins in Odessa, with a focus on its most famous practitioner, Arkady Severnyi, but he does not discuss or include guitar poetry. Das Regime und die Dandys. Russische Gaunerchansons von Lenin bis Putin <\/i>(Berlin: Rogner & Berhand, 2010). In his review of the book, Smith argues that blatnaya pesnya<\/i> interpenetrates guitar poetry in both function and music. Gerald Stanton Smith, Slavonic and East European Review <\/i>89, no. 4 (2011): 731.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

96 <\/a>The bard Bulat Okudzhava persistently distinguishes this genre from the pop song (estradnaya pesnya<\/i>, literally \u201cstage song\u201d), which he uses in 1988 to describe the domestic Russian rock music that emerged. Gerald Stanton Smith, \u201cOkudzhava Marches On,\u201d Slavonic and East European Review<\/i> 66, no. 4 (Oct. 1988): 557\u201358.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

97 <\/a>Zhuk recounts that in Dniepropetrovsk, from the late 1950s, people could pay to record their favorite melodies as holiday greetings in recording salons (muzykal\u2019naya studya<\/i>) on a vinyl disc; by 1965, these recordings included the guitar poets. By 1970, however, ninety percent of the requests were for the Beatles and the Rolling Stones. The record store owner participated in the magnitizdat<\/i> black market. Sergei I. Zhuk, Rock and Roll in the Rocket City: The West, Identity, and Ideology in Soviet Dniepropetrovsk, 1960\u20131985<\/i> (Washington, DC: Woodrow Wilson Center Press, 2010), 82\u201384.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

98 <\/a>Juliane F\u00fcrst, Flowers Through Concrete: Explorations in Soviet Hippieland<\/i> (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021), 243.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

99 <\/a>Smith, Songs to Seven Strings<\/i>, 1.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

100 <\/a>Richard Stites, Russian Popular Culture: Entertainment and Society since 1900 <\/i>(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 134.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

101 <\/a>Smith, \u201cOkudzhava Marches On,\u201d 553.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

102 <\/a>Danijela Lugari\u0107 Vukas, \u201cLiving <\/span>vnye<\/i><\/span>: The Example of Bulat Okudzhava\u2019s and Vladimir Vysotskii\u2019s <\/span>avtorskaia pesnia<\/i><\/span>,\u201d <\/span>Euxeinos. Culture and Governance in the Black Sea Region<\/i><\/span> 8, no. 25\u201326 (2018): fn. 7, 21\u201322.<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

103 <\/a>The acoustic guitar was inexpensive in part because the USSR had hoped to encourage its use instead of electric guitars, which were produced in the GDR and Poland and hard to obtain. Engineering students set up a black market of \u201cunofficial manufacturers\u201d in the tens of thousands. See Starr, Red and Hot<\/i>, 195.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

104 <\/a>Lugari\u0107 Vukas, “Living <\/span>vnye<\/i><\/span>,\u201d fn. 7, 21\u201322.<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

105 <\/a>The title of a Vysotsky song (\u201cSerebryanyye struny\u201d).<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

106 <\/a>Okudzhava, cited in Vladimir Kovner, \u201cZolotoy vek magnitizdata\u201d [The golden age of magnitizdat<\/i>, part 1], Vestnik online<\/i><\/span> 7, no. 345 (March 31, 2004), http:\/\/www.vestnik.com\/issues\/2004\/0331\/win\/kovner.htm<\/a>.<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

107 <\/a>These informal readings, by poets such as Yevtushenko and Voznesensky, are also important to the personal voice emerging in magnitizdat<\/i>. For more on this poetry, see Donald Loewen, \u201cBlurred Boundaries: Russian Poetry and Soviet Politics during the Thaw,\u201d Russian Literature<\/i> 87\u201389 (January\u2013April 2017): 201\u201324.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

108 <\/a>Rachel Platonov, \u201cBad singing: \u2018Avtorskaia Pesnia\u2019 and the Aesthetics of Metacommunication,\u201d Ulbandus Review<\/i> 9, The 60s (2005\/6): 88\u201389.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

109 <\/a>Vladimir Frumkin, \u201cMuzyka i slovo\u201d [Music and Word], report on a seminar in May 1967, Petushki, Vladimir Region (uploaded December 22, 1997), http:\/\/www.ksp\u2010msk.ru\/page_42.html<\/a>. <\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

110 <\/a>Vladimir Frumkin, Bulat Okudzahva: 65 Songs<\/i> (Ann Arbor, MI: Ardis, 1980), 15, cited in Ryback, Rock around the Bloc, <\/i>44.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

111 <\/a>Smith, Songs to Seven Strings<\/i>, 173. <\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

112 <\/a>Christopher Lazarski, \u201cVladimir Vysotsky and His Cult,\u201d Russian Review<\/i> 51 (1992), 60.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

113 <\/a>It is his commentary on everyday Soviet life, using the terms provided by Soviet ideology, that attracts contemporary commentators in reference to the key work on late Soviet socialism: Alexei Yurchak\u2019s <\/span>Everything Was Forever, Until It Was No More: The Last Soviet Generation<\/i> (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006). See also Lugari\u0107 Vukas, \u201cLiving <\/span>vnye<\/i><\/span>.\u201d<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

114 <\/a>For a curation of this relationship, based on comments Vysotsky made at his performances, see A.E. Krylov, \u201cBulat Okudzhava i Vladimir Vysotsky: Istoriya znakomstva\u201d [Bulat Okudzhava and Vladimir Vysotsky: the history of an acquaintance], Russian Literature<\/i> 77, no. 2 (2015): 197\u2013222.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

115 <\/a>The albums he recorded were recorded and published outside the USSR: in Sofia (1975), at RCA in Toronto (1976), and two in Paris (1977); Lida Cope, Natalie Kononenko, Anthony Qualin, and Mark Yoffe,<\/span> \u201cSound Recordings in the Archival Setting: Issues of Collecting, Documenting, Categorizing, and Copyright,\u201d<\/span> Slavic & East European Information Resources<\/i><\/span> 20, nos. 3\u20134 (2019):<\/span> 100, fn. 4. <\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

116 <\/a>For one summary of the critique, see Lazarski, \u201cVladimir Vysotsky,\u201d 70.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

117 <\/a>Cope, et al., \u201cSound Recordings,\u201d 88\u201391.<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

118 <\/a>Cope, et al., \u201cSound Recordings,\u201d 100, fn. 4. <\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

119 <\/a>Smith\u2019s account of the sung antecedents of guitar poetry, range from the eighteenth\u2010century Russian \u201cgypsy\u201d romance, also sung to the seven\u2010string guitar, to the \u201ccruel romance,\u201d as well as the criminal song. Smith, Songs to Seven Strings<\/i>, chapter 4.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

120 <\/a>Lazarski, \u201cVladimir Vysotsky,\u201d 60, fn. 13.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

121 <\/a>Lazarski, \u201cVladimir Vysotsky,\u201d 62.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

122 <\/a>Paul R. Josephson, New Atlantis Revisited: Akademgorodok, the Siberian City of Science<\/i> (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997), 299\u2013300.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

123 <\/a>Seventeen Moments in Soviet History: An on\u2010line Archive of Primary Sources. Accessed 5 June 2021. http:\/\/soviethistory.msu.edu\/1956-2\/literary\u2010life-at\u2010a-crossroads\/in\u2010memory-of\u2010pasternak-1968\/;<\/a> for a translation of the \u201cOde,\u201d see Josephson, New Atlantis Revisited<\/i>, 300\u20131.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

124 <\/a>Daughtry, \u201cSonic Samizdat,\u201d 40.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

125 <\/a>See, e.g., Smith\u2019s introduction to Songs & Poems by Alexander Galich<\/i>, ed. and trans. Gerald Stanton Smith (Ann Arbor, MI.: Ardis, 1983).<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

126 <\/a>Amy Garey, \u201cAleksandr Galich: Performance and the Politics of the Everyday,\u201d Lumina: A Journal of Historical and Cultural Studies<\/i> 17 (2011).<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

127 <\/a>Rachel Platonov, Singing the Self. Guitar Poetry, Community, and Identity in the Post-Stalin Period<\/i><\/span> (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2012).<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

128 <\/a>Soviet sailors and occasional travelers smuggled in preferred Japanese and Western machines that were then resold or traded. Aleksei Yurchak, \u201cGagarin and the Rave Kids,\u201d in Consuming Russia: Popular Culture, Sex, and Society Since Gorbachev, <\/i>ed. Adele Barker (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1999), 83.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

129 <\/a>Gerry Smith, \u201cWhispered Cry: The Songs of Alexander Galich,\u201d Index on Censorship<\/i> 3, no. 3 (1974): 11.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

130 <\/a>The Leningrad tapists, collectors, and distributors (Frumkin, Kushner, and Kovner) are known through their writings and memoirs published online after their emigration to the US. For more on the Moscow tapists, see Giulia De Florio, \u201cMagnitizdat,\u201d in Alle due sponde della cortina di ferro. Le culture del dissenso e la definizione dell\u2019identit\u00e0 europea nel secondo Novecento tra Italia, Francia e URSS <\/i>(1956\u20131991), ed. Claudia Pieralli, Teresa Spignoli, Federico Iocca, Giuseppina Larocca, and Giovanna Lo Monaco (Florence: goWare, 2019), 335\u201344, https:\/\/www.culturedeldissenso.com<\/a>.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

131 <\/a>Kovner, \u201cZolotoy vek magnitizdata.\u201d<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

132 <\/a>Although she does not refer specifically to magnitizdat<\/i>, Ledeneva\u2019s study of Soviet networking through material objects is the classic exposition: Alena V. Ledeneva, Russia\u2019s Economy of Favours: Blat, Networking and Informal Exchange<\/i> (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998).<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

133 <\/a>Vladimir Kovner, \u201cZolotoy vek magnitizdata\u201d [The golden age of magnitizdat<\/i>, part 2], Vestnik online<\/i><\/span>, 8, no. 344 (April 14, 2004), section 6, http:\/\/www.vestnik.com\/issues\/2004\/0414\/win\/kovner.htm<\/a>.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

134 <\/a>Kan, \u201cLiving in the Material World,\u201d 267. She also describes a well\u2010developed Moscow system of tape duplication in which an apartment might utilize up to ten tape recorders for rock albums, but it is not clear whether such independent duplicating facilities were operating during the heyday of guitar poetry (271).<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

135 <\/a>Laura J. Olson, Performing Russia: Folk Revival and Russian Identity<\/i> (London: Routledge, 2004), 71\u201372. <\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

136 <\/a>Daughtry, \u201cSonic Samizdat,\u201d 31. <\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

137 <\/a>Christian Noack, \u201cSongs from the Wood, Love from the Fields: The Soviet Tourist Song Movement,\u201d in The Socialist Sixties: Crossing Borders in the Second World<\/i>, ed. Anne E. Gorsuch and Diane P. Koenker (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2013), 167\u201392.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

138 <\/a>Garey, \u201cAleksandr Galich,\u201d 13.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

139 <\/a>Platonov, <\/span>Singing the Self, <\/i><\/span>4.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

140 <\/a>Cited in Yurchak, \u201cGagarin,\u201d 83.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

141 <\/a>Kryzhanovsky and Kovner prepared these tapes for him. Kovner, \u201cZolotoy,\u201d part 2, section 7.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

142 <\/a>Kovner reports making another set of tapes in 1978 to send abroad, which also disappeared. Later he learned that someone in the American embassy had sent a full set of bard recordings to New York. Vladimir Kovner, \u201cZolotoy vek magnitizdata\u201d [The golden age of magnitizdat<\/i>, part 3], Vestnik online<\/i><\/span> 9, no. 346 (April 28, 2004), section 8, http:\/\/www.vestnik.com\/issues\/2004\/0428\/win\/kovner.htm<\/a>. In a further irony, he learned that twenty years later, after he himself had emigrated to the US Melodiya Records used Kryzhanovsky\u2019s collection of guitar poetry to issue official recordings of the bards\u2019 guitar poetry; Kovner, \u201cZolotoy,\u201d part 2, section 7. <\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

143 <\/a>On samizdat<\/i>, see Peter Steiner, \u201cIntroduction: On Samizdat, Tamizdat, Magnitizdat, and Other Strange Words That Are Difficult to Pronounce,\u201d Poetics Today<\/i> 29, no. 4 (2008): 613\u201328; and Daughtry, \u201c\u2018Sonic Samizdat,\u2019\u201d 49\u201354, among others. <\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

144 <\/a>Kovner, \u201cZolotoy,\u201d part 2, section 6. <\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

145 <\/a>Smith, Songs to Seven Strings<\/i>, 98.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

146 <\/a>Three months later, in February 1966, the trial of Sinyavsky and Daniel for publishing their writings abroad (tamizdat<\/i>) began, marking the end of the more tolerant Thaw period. Members of the youth group Kolokol were also prosecuted for samizdat<\/i> distribution; see Sofia Lopatina, \u201cFrom Komsomol Activists to Underground Reformists: The Leningrad Group Kolokol, 1954\u20131965\u201d (Master’s thesis, Central European University, 2017). <\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

147 <\/a>Cited in Lugari\u0107 <\/span>Vukas, \u201cLiving <\/span>vnye<\/i><\/span>,\u201d 22.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

148 <\/a>Ryback, Rock around the Bloc<\/i>, 47\u201348.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

149 <\/a>Smith, \u201cWhispered Cry,\u201d 12.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

150 <\/a>In Paris, Galich joined Radio Free Europe as an announcer and was found dead in 1977; various theories of his death by electrocution\u2014was he plugging in new electronic equipment?\u2014still circulate.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

151 <\/a>Yevtushenko, \u201cMagnitofonnaya glasnost\u2019,\u201d 16.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

152 <\/a>\u201cVladimir Frumkin\u2014Boris Kushner: A Dialogue,\u201d Zametki po yevreyskoy istorii<\/i> [Notes on Jewish History] 5, no. 96 (May 2008) and 7, no. 98 (July 2008), https:\/\/berkovich\u2010zametki.com\/2008\/Zametki\/Nomer5\/Frumkin1.php<\/a>.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

153 <\/a>\u201cVladimir Frumkin\u2014Boris Kushner: A Dialogue.\u201d<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

154 <\/a>Lawrence Lessig, Remix: Making Art and Commerce Thrive in the Hybrid Economy<\/i> (London: Penguin, 2008).<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

155 <\/a>The way in which individual arias (\u201csongs\u201d) aided Pavarotti\u2019s rise to fame is chronicled in Marsha Siefert, \u201cThe Dynamics of Evaluation: A Case Study of Performance Reviews,\u201d Poetics Today <\/i>5, no. 1 (Winter 1984): 111\u201328.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

156 <\/a>For a discussion of the post-Cold War surge in live recordings of famous Soviet musicians, Marsha Siefert, \u201cRe-Mastering the Past: Musical Heritage, Sound Recording, and the Nation in Hungary and Russia,\u201d in National Heritage\u2014National Canon<\/i>, ed. Mih\u00e1ly Szegedy-Masz\u00e1k (Budapest: Collegium Budapest, 2002): 251\u201380. Leo Records, begun by an \u201centhusiastic amateur\u201d in 1979 in Newton Abbot, UK, began issuing live performances of Russian free jazz and experimental music already in 1979. They produce \u201cmusic that refuses to be submitted to the market forces.\u201d See http:\/\/www.leorecords.com<\/a>.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

157 <\/a>Video recording of a concert and talk at Middlebury College (Summer 1990), cited in Anatoly Vishevsky, \u201cTimur Shaov and the Death of the Russian Bard Song,\u201d Przegl\u0105d Rusycystyczny<\/i> 4 (2007): 67.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

158 <\/a>Jonathan Kandell, \u201cGalina Vishnevskaya, Soprano and Dissident, Dies at 86,\u201d New York Times<\/i>, December 11, 2012.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

159 <\/a>Galina Vishnevakaya, Galina: A Russian Story<\/i> (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1984).<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

160 <\/a>The source is my notes from the evening, preserved inside my autographed copy of the autobiography.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

 <\/p>\n

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