MP3 direct download | Itunes | Mixcloud | Feedburner (RSS) | MP3 pack Is this a new century? Difficult to get agreement on this one, but it’s certainly a new decade, and changes are very much in the air; changes that haven’t quite filtered through entirely to the mix you’re about to hear, but which …
MP3 direct download | Itunes | Mixcloud | Feedburner (RSS) | MP3 pack “There probably has never been a sweeter, more naturally musical baritone voice than his… …Arthur Collins managed invariably to get into the wax the impression of a warm, lovable personality. The unctuous sound of his chuckles in dialect work is unfailingly charming. …
MP3 direct download | Itunes | Mixcloud | Feedburner (RSS) | MP3 pack “The country is awakening to the real harm these “coon songs” and “rag-time” are doing… It is an evil music that has crept into the homes and hearts of our American people regardless of race, and must be wiped out as other …
MP3 direct download | Itunes | Mixcloud | Feedburner (RSS) | MP3 pack “He told them he wanted a certain cylinder containing a particularly obscene song. He claims in his affidavit, on which the warrant was issued, that Hunting sold this cylinder to him and then in his presence made him another equally objectionable record, …
MP3 direct download | Itunes | Mixcloud | Feedburner (RSS) | MP3 pack In a tiny, bare-walled back room a man sings into a huge metal horn. The sound causes vibrations in the air, which travel down the horn, compressing into a smaller point, causing a diaphragm to vibrate. The diaphragm pushes a metal stylus, …
“Music is so helpful to the human mind that it is naturally a source of satisfaction to me that I have helped in some way to make the very finest music available to millions who could not afford to pay the price and take the time necessary to hear the greatest artists sing and play.” …
The classic minstrel show is refracted through just about every aspect of American entertainment since. As a ritual, the minstrel show was as formalized as an exorcism. Each of its set parts has its own afterlife, appears peeking through a different window in American culture like a leering, priapic idiot glimpsed through a heavily barred …
When looking back into the past, it’s important (but difficult) to remember that for everyone concerned it was just the present, especially at times like these when technology was making the world strikingly different. For Americans born into the civil war era, the gilded age of the 1880s and 1890s must have been a …
What was recorded sound for; historical record? dictation of memos? the arts? At this point nobody is really making the case for any one purpose. The phonograph is out there in the homes of the wealthy trend-setters, recording studios are being set up in major cities, and popular entertainers are being sought out to …
One of the main problems with making this Centuries of Sound thing is representation. The 1890s are the birthplace of ragtime and the blues, Buddy Bolden was playing proto-Jazz down in New Orleans, and over in Europe figures like Dvo?ák, Mahler, Richard Strauss, Puccini, Sibelius, Grieg, Saint-Saëns, and Rachmaninoff were leading classical music’s last …
