A Century of Recorded Music: Listening to Musical History (review)

A Century of Recorded Music: Listening to Musical History. By Timothy Day. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2000. Pp. x+306. $30.

"Good music," Mark Twain once quipped, "is a lot better than it sounds." In that spirit, music historian Timothy Day suggests that a thorough appreciation of Western classical music requires attention not only to composition and performance but also to the larger economic, social, and technological contexts in which music is created, disseminated, and heard. Day's book suggests a new approach to the history of classical music, one that moves beyond an almost exclusive attention to written scores and live concerts to acknowledge the considerable impact that recording technology and recordings have had on composers, conductors, performers, and listeners. Building on such works as Roland Gelatt's The Fabulous Phonograph and Michael Channan's Repeated Takes, Day argues that the development of sound recording not only made classical music more widely available, it substantially remade the Western musical canon. A Century of Recorded Music reasonably asks that we reconceptualize the creation and reception of works of music in an age of mechanical and electronic reproduction.

Although Day begins by chronicling changes in recording technology, he devotes most of his attention to the effects of technological change on musical culture. He considers in turn the effect of recording technology on the sheer amount of music available to listeners, on performance styles, and on listeners' responses to recorded classical music. Early recording technology allowed only for brief, tinny recordings; consequently, many composers and musicians developed a disdain for "mechanical" or "canned" music, which they insisted could never capture the artistry and authenticity of a live concert. Improvements in recording technology, especially the invention of the microphone in the 1920s and the development of audiotape and the long-playing record in the 1940s, expanded and even fundamentally altered the Western musical canon by making lesser-known composers and pieces available to musicians and a mass audience. Recorded music, played on phonographs and the radio, became an important leisure-time activity in Europe and the United States.

The creation of a mass listenership for classical music in turn made new styles of composing and performance more popular, so that this music was created not solely by individual genius but through a complicated interplay among composers, conductors, performers, critics, listeners, recording engineers, record companies, and technological innovators. Finally, Day argues, now that technology has made music more accessible, even ubiquitous, musicologists' formalist analysis of musical scores and conductors' and musicians' interpretation of these scores should be replaced by a multifaceted history that encompasses the experience and response of millions of listeners. He suggests that historians of music, like historians of the visual arts, should trade their focus on composers' individual genius, precisely jotted on the original score, for an approach that situates the creation and meaning of music in its broader social context and even admits that listeners now play an important role in shaping music's history.

This book will prove especially informative for readers familiar with the genres, composers, and vocabulary of Western classical music. Readers unable to distinguish rubato from portamento will find themselves frequently scurrying for the dictionary. Day's evidence is overwhelmingly British, although he occasionally cites examples concerning the status of classical music on the European continent and in the United States. While he is well aware of the importance of other genres of music and their relationship to recording technology, he confines his attention to the comparatively small market for classical music. As curator of Western classical music at the British Museum, Day supplies more detail concerning the difficulties peculiar to cataloging and archiving records than most historians will care to read. Perhaps most important, his book does not fully attempt to gauge listeners' response to classical music. More attention to the buying habits of consumers, to music appreciation clubs, to musical education, and to other aspects of popular response to...