A Century of Recorded Music

A Century of Recorded Music PDF Author: Timothy Day
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 9780300094015
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 340

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Book Description
Looks at the history of recording technology and its effect on music, including artistic performance, listening habits, and audience participation.

A Century of Recorded Music

A Century of Recorded Music PDF Author: Timothy Day
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 9780300094015
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 340

Get Book Here

Book Description
Looks at the history of recording technology and its effect on music, including artistic performance, listening habits, and audience participation.

Perfecting Sound Forever

Perfecting Sound Forever PDF Author: Greg Milner
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
ISBN: 1429957158
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 566

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Book Description
In 1915, Thomas Edison proclaimed that he could record a live performance and reproduce it perfectly, shocking audiences who found themselves unable to tell whether what they were hearing was an Edison Diamond Disc or a flesh-and-blood musician. Today, the equation is reversed. Whereas Edison proposed that a real performance could be rebuilt with absolute perfection, Pro Tools and digital samplers now allow musicians and engineers to create the illusion of performances that never were. In between lies a century of sonic exploration into the balance between the real and the represented. Tracing the contours of this history, Greg Milner takes us through the major breakthroughs and glorious failures in the art and science of recording. An American soldier monitoring Nazi radio transmissions stumbles onto the open yet revolutionary secret of magnetic tape. Japanese and Dutch researchers build a first-generation digital audio format and watch as their "compact disc" is marketed by the music industry as the second coming of Edison yet derided as heretical by analog loyalists. The music world becomes addicted to volume in the nineties and fights a self-defeating "loudness war" to get its fix. From Les Paul to Phil Spector to King Tubby, from vinyl to pirated CDs to iPods, Milner's Perfecting Sound Forever pulls apart musical history to answer a crucial question: Should a recording document reality as faithfully as possible, or should it improve upon or somehow transcend the music it records? The answers he uncovers will change the very way we think about music.

Recorded Music in American Life

Recorded Music in American Life PDF Author: William Howland Kenney
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0198026048
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 279

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Book Description
Have records, compact discs, and other sound reproduction equipment merely provided American listeners with pleasant diversions, or have more important historical and cultural influences flowed through them? Do recording machines simply capture what's already out there, or is the music somehow transformed in the dual process of documentation and dissemination? How would our lives be different without these machines? Such are the questions that arise when we stop taking for granted the phenomenon of recorded music and the phonograph itself. Now comes an in-depth cultural history of the phonograph in the United States from 1890 to 1945. William Howland Kenney offers a full account of what he calls "the 78 r.p.m. era"--from the formative early decades in which the giants of the record industry reigned supreme in the absence of radio, to the postwar proliferation of independent labels, disk jockeys, and changes in popular taste and opinion. By examining the interplay between recorded music and the key social, political, and economic forces in America during the phonograph's rise and fall as the dominant medium of popular recorded sound, he addresses such vital issues as the place of multiculturalism in the phonograph's history, the roles of women as record-player listeners and performers, the belated commercial legitimacy of rhythm-and-blues recordings, the "hit record" phenomenon in the wake of the Great Depression, the origins of the rock-and-roll revolution, and the shifting place of popular recorded music in America's personal and cultural memories. Throughout the book, Kenney argues that the phonograph and the recording industry served neither to impose a preference for high culture nor a degraded popular taste, but rather expressed a diverse set of sensibilities in which various sorts of people found a new kind of pleasure. To this end, Recorded Music in American Life effectively illustrates how recorded music provided the focus for active recorded sound cultures, in which listeners shared what they heard, and expressed crucial dimensions of their private lives, by way of their involvement with records and record-players. Students and scholars of American music, culture, commerce, and history--as well as fans and collectors interested in this phase of our rich artistic past--will find a great deal of thorough research and fresh scholarship to enjoy in these pages.

The Cambridge Companion to Recorded Music

The Cambridge Companion to Recorded Music PDF Author: Nicholas Cook
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 0521865824
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 381

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Book Description
Featuring fascinating accounts from practitioners, this Companion examines how developments in recording have transformed musical culture.

Recording History

Recording History PDF Author: Christopher Silver
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781503630567
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 304

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Book Description
A new history of twentieth-century North Africa, that gives voice to the musicians who defined an era and the vibrant recording industry that carried their popular sounds from the colonial period through decolonization. If twentieth-century stories of Jews and Muslims in North Africa are usually told separately, Recording History demonstrates that we have not been listening to what brought these communities together: Arab music. For decades, thousands of phonograph records flowed across North African borders. The sounds embedded in their grooves were shaped in large part by Jewish musicians, who gave voice to a changing world around them. Their popular songs broadcast on radio, performed in concert, and circulated on disc carried with them the power to delight audiences, stir national sentiments, and frustrate French colonial authorities. With this book, Christopher Silver provides the first history of the music scene and recording industry across Morocco, Algeria, and Tunisia, and offers striking insights into Jewish-Muslim relations through the rhythms that animated them. He traces the path of hit-makers and their hit records, illuminating regional and transnational connections. In asking what North Africa once sounded like, Silver recovers a world of many voices--of pioneering impresarios, daring female stars, cantors turned composers, witnesses and survivors of war, and national and nationalist icons--whose music still resonates well into our present.

Building musical culture in Nineteenth-century Amsterdam

Building musical culture in Nineteenth-century Amsterdam PDF Author: Darryl Cressman
Publisher: Amsterdam University Press
ISBN: 9048528461
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 177

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Book Description
When people attend classical music concerts today, they sit and listen in silence, offering no audible reactions to what they're hearing. We think of that as normal-but, as Darryl Cressman shows in this book, it's the product of a long history of interrelationships between music, social norms, and technology. Using the example of Amsterdam's Concertgebouw in the nineteenth century, Cressman shows how its design was in part intended to help discipline and educate concert audiences to listen attentively - and analysis of its creation and use offers rich insights into sound studies, media history, science and technology studies, classical music, and much more.

The Cambridge Companion to Recorded Music

The Cambridge Companion to Recorded Music PDF Author: Nicholas Cook
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1139827960
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 381

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Book Description
From the cylinder to the download, the practice of music has been radically transformed by the development of recording and playback technologies. This Companion provides a detailed overview of the transformation, encompassing both classical and popular music. Topics covered include the history of recording technology and the businesses built on it; the impact of recording on performance styles; studio practices, viewed from the perspectives of performer, producer and engineer; and approaches to the study of recordings. The main chapters are interspersed by 'short takes' - short contributions by different practitioners, ranging from classical or pop producers and performers to record collectors. Combining basic information with a variety of perspectives on records and recordings, this book will appeal not only to students in a range of subjects from music to the media, but also to general readers interested in a fundamental yet insufficiently understood dimension of musical culture.

Exploring Virtuosities. Heinrich Wilhelm Ernst, Nineteenth-Century Musical Practices and Beyond

Exploring Virtuosities. Heinrich Wilhelm Ernst, Nineteenth-Century Musical Practices and Beyond PDF Author: Christine Hoppe
Publisher: Georg Olms Verlag
ISBN: 3487156628
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 414

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Book Description
Over the last decade, musicological interest in both the composing virtuoso of the nineteenth century and the phenomenon of virtuosity has increased. Moving beyond approaches to music solely in terms of works allowed for a range of perspectives on concepts of virtuosity to emerge. Such cultural theory-based approaches crucially put the traditional musicological image of the virtuoso into a broader context. Recent advances in performance studies, furthermore, emphasise the need to include factors such as staging, the audience, sound and space, and musical practices, in our understanding of the complex phenomenon of virtuosity. The present volume tries to meet the challenges raised by these multi-layered perspectives by varying the foci on virtuosity – from specific attention to individual virtuosi and considerations of virtuosity’s historical and social context to broader questions regarding innovations in the current landscape and future virtuoso phenomena. The broad range of topics centres on the composer and virtuoso Heinrich Wilhelm Ernst and his immediate sphere of influence. The contributions in the present volume not only reveal the complexity of the research field of virtuosity but also liberate Heinrich Wilhelm Ernst from the shadow of fixed, mainly non-musical, discourses on virtuosity around Paganini. The enclosed CD with recordings by Guillaume Tardif, Philippe Borer, Clive Brown and Friederike Spangenberg enriches these texts by including the dimension of sound.

Analyzing Recorded Music

Analyzing Recorded Music PDF Author: William Moylan
Publisher: CRC Press
ISBN: 1000819663
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 491

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Book Description
Analyzing Recorded Music: Collected Perspectives on Popular Music Tracks is a collection of essays dedicated to the study of recorded popular music, with the aim of exploring "how the record shapes the song" (Moylan, Recording Analysis, 2020) from a variety of perspectives. Introduced with a Foreword by Paul Théberge, the distinguished editorial team has brought together a group of reputable international contributors to write about a rich collection of recordings. Examining a diverse set of songs from a range of genres and points in history (spanning the years 1936–2020), the authors herein illuminate unique attributes of the selected tracks and reveal how the recording develops the expressive content of song performance. Analyzing Recorded Music will interest all those who study popular music, cultural studies, and the musicology of record production, as well as popular music listeners.

Off the Record

Off the Record PDF Author: Neal Peres da Costa
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0199977208
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 396

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Book Description
Off the Record is a revealing exploration of piano performing practices of the high Romantic era. Author and well-known keyboard player Neal Peres Da Costa bases his investigation on a range of early sound recordings (acoustic, piano roll and electric) that capture a generation of highly-esteemed pianists trained as far back as the mid-nineteenth-century. Placing general practices of late nineteenth-century piano performance alongside evidence of the stylistic idiosyncrasies of legendary pianists such as Carl Reinecke (1824-1910), Theodor Leschetizky (1830-1915), Camille Saint-Sa?ns (1838-1921) and Johannes Brahms (1833-1897), he examines prevalent techniques of the time--dislocation, unnotated arpeggiation, rhythmic alteration, tempo fluctuation--and unfolds the background and lineage of significant performer/pedagogues. Throughout, Peres Da Costa demonstrates that these early recordings do not simply capture the idiosyncrasies of aging musicians as has been commonly asserted, but in fact represent a range of established expressive practices of a lost age. An extensive collection of these fascinating and sometimes rare professional recordings of the Romantic age masters are available on a companion web site, and in addition, Peres Da Costa, himself a renowned period keyboardist, illustrates points made throughout the book with his own playing. Of essential value to student and professional pianists, historical musicologists of 19th and early 20th century performance practice, and also to the general music aficionado audience, Off the Record is an indispensable resource for scholarly research, performance inspiration, and listening enjoyment.