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

A Century of Recorded Music: Listening to Musical History. By Timothy Day. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000. [x, 306 p. ISBN 0-300-08442-0. $35.]

The literature on sound recording is as old as the technology itself. Yet despite the enormous variety of writings on the subject since the late nineteenth century, one assumption underlies most of the literature--that recording simply records. Only recently have scholars begun to question that assumption, exploring the possibility that recording has in fact had a profound influence on the musical world it documents. Timothy Day, a curator at the National Sound Archive in London, offers the latest contribution to this new scholarship. As he states from the outset of A Century of Recorded Music, "recording has changed the way we listen to music and the way music is performed" (p. ix). The scope of the book is somewhat narrower than the title suggests, as Day focuses on the creation and reception of recorded classical music in Britain and, to a lesser extent, the United States. This is a not a weakness of the book (just of the title), for the author's circumscription allows him to "illustrate particular historical points in considerable detail in order to suggest the rich possibilities that the study of recordings offers" (p. x). Day proceeds to do exactly this in the book's four chapters.

For the bulk of chapter 1, "Making Recordings," Day considers the recording process from the view of the performer, explaining the changing demands of the technology and documenting performers' experiences with, and attitudes toward, recording. Among many crucial points Day drives home is that for decades, the process of making recordings was "shaped by technical shortcomings" (p. 24), whether due to the insensitivity of acoustic recording horns, the distortions wrought by early microphones, or the "tape hiss" of magnetic recording. Performers (as well as engineers and producers) had to compensate for these limitations, shaping the way music was performed in the studio and, consequently, heard by listeners. While otherwise compelling here, Day repeats a common and unsubstantiated claim--that in the 78-rpm era performers had to "modify speeds [i.e., play faster] because of the time limitation of the . . . disc" (p. 33). But rather than rushing through a piece, recording musicians were more inclined to accommodate the time limitation by cutting music. Indeed, when listening to 78s, one can hear many leisurely performances of drastically cut pieces. Later in the chapter (pp. 34- 46), Day shifts his focus from performers to producers, profiling such influential figures as Fred Gaisberg, Walter Legge, and John Culshaw. Here, Day rightly emphasizes how those on the other side of the microphones have shaped the way we hear music to an extent that few appreciate.

The second chapter, "The Repertory Recorded," chronicles the enormous expansion in the amount of classical music recorded over the course of the twentieth century. Day focuses on the impact of important record releases--from the National Gramophonic Society, in HMV's History of Music in Sound series, on Deutsche Grammophon's Archiv Produktion label, and many, many others. Day's thoroughness, however, becomes a liability with page after page of lists: of the contents of various anthologies, of the classical works broadcast by the BBC, of the discs reviewed in selected issues of Gramophone, and so on. While the author's encyclopedic knowledge is impressive, the sheer amount of raw data may well discourage readers. Perhaps Day intended these lists to be consulted rather than read straight through; nevertheless, there is often a lack of accompanying synthesis and perspective. For example, at several points in the chapter (pp. 58, 76, 128), Day makes or cites the claim that recording led to a mass audience for classical music in Britain. The implication is that the expanded audience was a function of the increased production of classical recordings, such as those he surveys in the chapter. But did the proportion of classical music...