A Century of Recorded Music

"Good music," Mark Twain once quipped, "is a lot better than it sounds." In that spirit, music historian Timothy Day suggests that a thorough appreciation of Western classical music requires attention not only to composition and performance but also to the larger economic, social, and technological contexts in which music is created, disseminated, and heard. Day's book suggests a new approach to the history of classical music, one that moves beyond an almost exclusive attention to written scores and live concerts to acknowledge the considerable impact that recording technology and recordings have had on composers, conductors, performers, and listeners. Building on such works as Roland Gelatt's The Fabulous Phonograph and Michael Channan's Repeated Takes, Day argues that the development of sound recording not only made classical music more widely available, it substantially remade the Western musical canon. A Century of Recorded Music reasonably asks that we reconceptualize the creation and reception of works of music in an age of mechanical and electronic reproduction

Acoustics · Active listening · Art · Classical music · History of music · Literature · Music education · Music history · Musical · Musical composition · Phonograph · Popular music · Sociology · Visual arts · Communication · History · Music · Music History and Culture · Music Technology and Sound Studies · Musicology and Musical Analysis