2018

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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1906 in Art

Pablo Picasso – Self-Portrait with Palette Henri Matisse – Self-Portrait in a Striped T-shirt Paula Modersohn-Becker – Self-Portrait on the sixth wedding anniversary Edvard Munch – Self-portrait with a bottle André Derain – Charing Cross Bridge Claude Monet — Water Lilies Jean Metzinger – La dance (Bacchante) Robert Delaunay — L’homme à la tulipe Mikhail …

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The best laid plans

The visibility of stagnant and trenchant attitudes in the “progressive era” mean that reference to it in 2018 almost requires the use of those scare quotes. There really was a lot of progress happening in some areas, however, and this conservatism was in large part a reaction to genuine radicalism being pushed into mainstream consciousness …

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