It was on this day ...
Nov. 21st, 2007 07:05 amInteresting tidbit from the Writers' Almanac:
Life has changed so much, but I think of how nice it would have been to have the sort of family evening gathered around music you saw in Jane Austen's time--there are scenes in the movies Emma and Sense and Sensibility depicting this. Ah well, I guess I will have to make do with the Minn-stf music circles. Which, come to think of it, is hardly "making due" at all, but instead a great pleasure.
It was on this day in 1877 that Thomas Edison announced that he had invented a new device for recording and playing back sound, which he called the phonograph. His hope was that it would replace stenographers in business offices, and that it would allow people to preserve the voices of family members who had died. He wrote, "It will annihilate time and space, and bottle up for posterity the mere utterance of man."I do have some sympathy for Sousa's point of view, much as I love recorded music. I took piano for three years, but abandoned it for ballet (which was eventually abandoned, too.) I really wish I could play Gaelic fiddle, and if my household ever gets enough money, I think I would like to take lessons. I do wish I could play a musical instrument. My mother, as I have mentioned before, has played cello for over 65 years.
But most people who saw the early demonstrations of the phonograph found it spooky, as though it were playing back the voice of a ghost. Edison demonstrated it for the editors of Scientific American magazine, and the magazine later wrote, "No matter how familiar a person may be with the modern machinery, or how clear in his mind the principles underlying this strange device may be. It is impossible to listen to this mechanical speech without experiencing the idea that his senses are deceiving him."
For the first 10 years or so, most people remained uneasy with the phonograph. In order to help American customers feel more comfortable with the idea of playing back sound, the Columbia Phonograph Company commissioned a recording of marching music by John Philip Sousa's U.S. Marine Band. The idea was that Americans couldn't be spooked out by patriotic music, and those recordings became some of the first successful musical recordings ever sold.
But John Philip Sousa did not like the phonograph. He said, "The time is coming when no one will be ready to submit himself to the ennobling discipline of learning music. Everyone will have their ready made or ready pirated music in their cupboards."
Sousa was right. In 1900, most American homes had at least one musical instrument, and instead of buying records, people bought sheet music. But by the 1950s, almost all of the music being made in this country was being made by professional musicians, and few families gathered around pianos any more. Recording devices preserved the American folk music that by then had begun to die out, but it might never have died out at all if it hadn't been for recording devices.
Life has changed so much, but I think of how nice it would have been to have the sort of family evening gathered around music you saw in Jane Austen's time--there are scenes in the movies Emma and Sense and Sensibility depicting this. Ah well, I guess I will have to make do with the Minn-stf music circles. Which, come to think of it, is hardly "making due" at all, but instead a great pleasure.