Several hundred thousand people will pass the Petrillo Music Shell in Grant Park this summer without knowing that the man whose name it bears confronted a question America is now arguing about — and, at first, got badly wrong.
James C. Petrillo led Chicago’s musicians union before becoming president of the American Federation of Musicians in 1940. During the transition from silent films to “talkies,” organized musicians spent heavily trying to stop recorded sound from replacing live performers in movie houses. Some of the union’s advertisements featured robots.
James C. Petrillo wields a baton in 1936. The Petrillo Music Shell in Grant Park is named after the musician and union leader. (Chicago Tribune archive)
The musicians were right about what was coming. They were wrong about how to answer it.
Thousands of cinema musicians lost their jobs as theaters installed sound equipment. By the end of the 1920s, major theater chains were dispensing with the organists and pit orchestras that had accompanied silent films. Those jobs did not return.
In 1931, Joseph Weber, then president of the American Federation of Musicians, predicted that “the only living thing around a motion picture house will be the person who sells you your ticket.” He was right about the musicians. He was wrong about the movie theaters.
What survived was not the work that could be reproduced by a machine. Recorded sound was cheaper, consistent and available everywhere at once. A recording did not get sick, take a night off or require a place on a theater’s payroll. Musicians could not win by arguing that a recording should not do what it plainly could do.
What recording could not do was be in the room.
A century later, I make my living conducting orchestras before audiences in Tampere, Finland. Those audiences can hear superb recordings at home, often at little or no cost. Yet they still come. They come because a live performance is not merely the delivery of notes. It is an event shared by performers and listeners at one particular time, in one particular place.
Skill was not the protection. Presence was.
But Petrillo eventually found a more consequential answer to technological displacement. In 1942, he did not try to abolish records or prevent people from listening to them. He used the union’s leverage to insist that the companies profiting from recorded music contribute to the musical life they were transforming.
On Aug. 1, 1942, the American Federation of Musicians barred its members from making commercial recordings. The ban lasted 27 months, from August 1942 through November 1944, despite pressure from the National War Labor Board and a personal appeal from President Franklin Roosevelt. Record label Decca settled with the union in 1943; RCA Victor and Columbia followed in November 1944.
The settlements required record companies to make payments into a union-controlled fund intended to create work for live musicians. In 1948, that arrangement took enduring form as the Music Performance Trust Fund, which has since financed free public performances by union musicians across the United States and Canada. For decades, it has supported work for musicians and brought live music to communities that otherwise might not have had it.
Petrillo did not stop the machine. He made it pay rent.
That is the part of this history worth remembering as courts, legislatures and technology companies struggle with artificial intelligence and copyright. Much of the present argument is framed around permission: Did an AI company have the right to use a writer’s, artist’s or musician’s work for training? Should it be required to ask first? Those are necessary questions. They are not sufficient ones.
Permission alone does not answer what happens when a technology captures the value created by human work while reducing the demand for the humans who made it. Nor does it answer who should benefit when companies build profitable systems on immense stores of creative labor.
Petrillo’s answer was direct: The companies that profited from the technology should help sustain the people whose work made that technology valuable. The answers had to be concrete: Who pays? Into what fund? And who governs it?
Chicago is better placed than most American cities to remember that model. The shell that bears Petrillo’s name still stands in Grant Park. So does the underlying principle: Technological change may be inevitable, but the distribution of its rewards is a policy choice.
Art will survive artificial intelligence, just as movies survived recorded sound. Concert halls will still fill with people. Books, images and songs will still be made.
But survival of the art form is not the same thing as survival for the people who make it. That distinction is what policy is for — and what the AI copyright debate still too often misses.
David Woodard is an American conductor living in Tampere, Finland.
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