October 2018

1907 in Film

That Fatal Sneeze The Red Spectre Tunneling the Channel The Policemen’s Little Run The Golden Beetle The Dancing Pig The Eclipse, or the Courtship of the Sun and Moon The Race For The Sausage Ride through Victoria and Vancouver, Canada Laughing Gas Premier Prix de violoncelle / First Prize for Cello The Lion Hunt Ben-Hur

Centuries of Sound on Cambridge 105 Radio – Episode 1 (1853-1885)

Centuries of Sound’s radio show on Cambridge 105 is now available for listening at your convenience. Rather than simply present a mix of sounds from the year, here I discuss their recording and the world they were made in with my co-host Sean. This is our first ever show (sort of) so thanks for your …

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Georges Mendel’s ‘La Marseillaise’

Not even close to being the first sound film, and not particularly advanced technologically (being simply a mime to a pre-recorded disc), it’s still something of a marvel to see this performance 20 years before ‘The Jazz Singer’ and a few years before even silent shorts started coming out of Hollywood. Three minutes of your …

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Kenneth Grahame – The Wind in the Willows

An odd book, but not one I’m particularly fond of, The Wind in The Willows is a mix of Edwardian rapture at frolicking in the splendors of nature, the high-church volksgeist mysticism that was in vogue at the time and classic anthropomorphic children’s moral tales. It does sort of hang together, and there are many …

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Leoncavallo’s “I Pagliacci” – The first album?

I’ve always used the terms “album” and “LP” interchangeably, so it came as a surprise to find out that the former predates the latter quite considerably. We started talking about albums in the sense of ‘photo album’ or ‘stamp album’ as early as the 1850s, and the first ‘music albums’ were along these lines – …

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Elsewhere in 1907

January 6 — The first Montessori school and daycare center for working class children opens in Rome March – The 1907 Romanian Peasants’ Revolt results in possibly as many as 11,000 deaths April 17 — The first Minas Geraes-class battleship is laid down for Brazil, by Armstrong Whitworth on the River Tyne, in England, triggering …

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