2. SOUSA
• “These talking machines are going to ruin the artistic
development of music in this country. When I was a
boy, in front of every house in the summer evenings
you would find young people together singing…
Today you hear these infernal machines going night
and day. We will not have a vocal cord left”
4. BUT!
• Hardly any of it will be the immediate result of
physical work by hands or voices
• Fewer people know how to play instruments or read
music
• Fewer people sing properly
• Music is now passive (isolating), rather than active
(binding society together)
5. GOOD OR BAD?
• Technology has liberated music, bringing it to the
masses
• You want Beethoven, how will you get it?
• How did I get it?
• What did Bach do? For example: walking 250 miles
over 10 days to hear Buxtehude play the organ
6. EDISON’S PHONOGRAPH
• This was invented in 1877
• It recorded and played back sound using a cylinder
• Meant to record speech and do away with printing
7. VICTROLA: 1906
Aimed at the piano as the music
piece of furniture in salons, pubs and
living rooms
8. CARUSO: THE FIRST RECORDING STAR
• Listen to this recording, taken from 1904. Imagine
the power of suddenly having this in your living
room
9. TAPE, MICROPHONES, BING, CROON
• The use of tape to reduce hiss and microphones to
amplify meant that you could sing quietly and be
heard
• Listen to Bing: crooning became the new style of
singing
10. OTHER FEATURES OF TAPE
• Correcting errors
• Splicing together different recordings. The Beatles
copied composers like Stockhausen. Listen to both
• Speeding up, slowing down, backwards
11. ADVANCES IN TECHNOLOGY
• From cylinder to vinyl, tape, cd, mp3; from mono to
stereo, living presence, hifi , quadrophonic, surround
sound: things just keep getting more realistic. CD
advertised as perfect sound forever. Remastered?
Compare 2 Beatles songs
• Or each device is inferior to the old: artificial,
inauthentic, soulless. Faults add warmth and
atmosphere. Listen to Furtwängler
12. DISCUSS!
• Bob Dylan recorded 15 albums in 90 days. Sgt.
Pepper took 129 days to record
• Is back-to-basics more authentic?
13. DIGITAL
• Compression?
• “listening to a CD is like looking at the world through
a screen”
• Each advance is more fictional – autotune
• Interfering with live: overdubbing, patching, pitch
and rhythm correction
• The canon
• Music can break boundaries and crossover – blues,
rock and roll, hip hop
• Online libraries
14. ESSAY PLAN
• It’s not an essay, it’s an article!
• Intro – interesting quotation. Outline the issues
• Either – describe the innovations and the positive
and negative effects
• Or – describe the arguments for and against
recorded music
• Conclusion – summarise the effects recording music
has had on music and society. End with an
interesting quotation
• Illustrate all points with musical examples
• Bibliography, discography, web sources
