history of recorded sound

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 …

Georges Mendel’s ‘La Marseillaise’ Read More »

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 – …

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

A 1902 recording session in Tbilisi

From Excavated Shellac, the story of one of the first adventures to record the music of the rest of the world.   Likely the music was baffling to these engineers from America. Up to that time, the normal recording repertoire for the Gramophone Company was what one might expect. It primarily consisted of Western classical …

A 1902 recording session in Tbilisi Read More »

Scroll to Top
%d bloggers like this: