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Accidental hooks
Popular records often include accidents, indicating something about the flexibility of musical practices and the limits of theories. Musical hooks provide useful test-cases because they are normally...
View ArticleLeonard Chess takes over
Leonard Chess is widely known as the co-founder of Chess Records and as a producer who was tremendously influential in the development of popular music; fewer people know that for one recording...
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Harry Smith’s grand collage
The power of Harry Smith’s Anthology of American folk music, which turns 65 this year, lies squarely in its use of collage. Smith’s decisions in sequencing and juxtaposing the 84 songs encouraged a...
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Elgar and the gramophone
For 20 years Edward Elgar worked for The Gramophone Company as both an advocate of his music and an advocate of the gramophone. During this period, recording technology changed from the cramped...
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Granados’s performance practices
Enrique Granados’s Duo-Art piano-roll performance of his Danza española no. 5 (Andaluza), made some 20 years after the piece was published, illuminates much about late-Romantic piano performance...
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The Smithsonian Institution’s Object of the Day, September 25, 2019:...
Voyager Golden Record: Through Struggle to the Stars An intergalactic message in a bottle, the Voyager Golden Record was launched into space late in the summer of 1977. Conceived as a sort of advance...
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The Apollo 11 mixtape
According to NASA, during the Apollo 11 moon voyage the astronauts Buzz Aldrin, Neil Armstrong, and Michael Collins listened to a special cassette mixtape. This cassette tape was not an 8-track; the...
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The Bristol sessions
In the summer of 1927 a group of musicians gathered for a recording session in Bristol, on the Tennessee-Virginia border, including musicians who would become some of the most influential names in...
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Lost and found Balinese music
In August 1928 representatives from the German record companies Odeon and Beka were sent to Bali; their efforts resulted in 98 recordings of a wide variety of examples of Balinese music on 78 rpm...
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Jenő Jandó, prolific pianist and Naxos Records founder
The British newspaper The Independent once described Jenő Jandó as “the most prolific recording pianist alive”. Born in Pécs, southern Hungary in 1952, he founded the Naxos record label in 1987 and...
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